It is Thursday the 15th of January, 26, and you are listening to Skeptics with a K,

the podcast for science, reason, and critical thinking.

Skeptics with a K is produced by Skeptic Media in association with the Merseyside

Skeptic Society, a non-profit organization for the promotion of scientific skepticism on Merseyside around the UK

and internationally. I'm your host, Mike Hall, with me today. It's Marsh and Alice.

Hello. And this is the first episode we're recording in the new year. Obviously,

we put an episode out last week. Yes. We did your psychic prediction episodes, which when it came out, I had forgotten about completely because we recorded it so fucking long ago. We did record it a while. We did. Marsh had forgotten that we were taking a break as well. And so messaged me on, was it like the second or whatever it was of January that it would have gone out otherwise and said,

has Mike forgotten to put the show out?

I was like, no, we were definitely taking a break.

Well, I knew we had a show in the bag and everything gets fuzzy around that time.

Yeah.

No one knows what the time is or what the date is in that kind of interglacial period between Christmas and New Year.

It would have been...

On New Year's day, Marsha's first thought was, has the show gone out? It wasn't my first thought. It was one of my thoughts. It was Happy New Year. It was A thought. Has the show gone out? I had a thought. I didn't message you about it, Mike. And it's not... I was already messaging Alice about something else. I just message Alice that is my shit.

I think that was, yeah, but I do that all the time.

Before I... about it, Mike. And it's not, I was already messaging Alice and had something else. You just message Alice, is Mike shit? I think that was, yeah, but I do that all the time. Before accusing me of being shit, you had to check. Double check first. Validates whether Mike was shit or not. I do that all the time. The number of times that I would have called you shit had I not checked it with Alice's course. As listeners will know, one of the talks that I routinely give is one on cancer.

Although I haven't given it for a very long time.

I think it is now probably.

It's like fizzled out into a retired talk, largely because shit happens in cancer all the time.

So it's probably quite out of date now.

Yeah.

Well, I think the basic function, the basic mechanism of cancer is probably still the same. I don't think that's changed significantly. But the talk that I give is in three parts. It is what is cancer. That bit largely doesn't change very much, or at least the basics don't. Then there's the how do we treat it with real science and medicine, which I like to talk about some of the exciting novel updates because that's what I think is cool about science, is when something like Zika virus pops up and the first thing researchers are doing is how can we use this to kill cancer? Yeah, okay. But Zika virus was now like, what, eight years ago? Yeah, that was a while ago. You haven't even got nothing on the MRNA stuff. I bet that's got some cancer elements. There's nothing in there on the MRNA stuff, no, and there is cancer vaccination work that is being done and yet nothing in there on that. So I would have to do some significant updating to that section. Yeah. And then the third section is, why do people believe in alternative cancer treatments that

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