You're listening to the skeptics guide to the universe. Your escape to reality.

Hello and welcome to the skeptics guide to the universe. Today is Tuesday November 4th, 2014, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody, Rebecca Watson.

Hello everyone.

Hey guys, Evan Bernstein. Good evening folks. And we have a special guest road this evening. All the way from Hong Kong, David Young. David, welcome back to the skeptics guide.

Thank you very much. It's really good to be here.

So David, you are active in the skeptical movement in Hong Kong. How is what's going on there?

Well, this is the epicenter for skepticism or a lack of skepticism. Actually, we have everything here. Reflexology is really big. Herbology is huge with traditional Chinese medicine.

We've got to acupuncture, obviously a big deal. One of the things that people like to say about Hong Kong is that it's actually more Chinese than China.

And that's because during the cultural revolution, a lot of the things that we still do here in Hong Kong were either banned or discouraged in China.

And so now you can still buy Feng Shui books and Feng Shui predictions here that you can't get in China. So there's a lot of stuff going on here.

In terms of what my group is actually doing about four years ago, I was listening to 20-year podcasts in which you guys described how to start a skeptical group.

I remember you just said, just meet, get together, and if all you do for the first little while is have a few drinks, that's fine.

And then after you have enough people coming, you can try lectures. About 18 months ago, we started doing lectures on a monthly basis.

And we've done about 14 in the last two years, and they work out really well. We have about 30-40 people show up there.

That's good. That's awesome. How many people live in Hong Kong?

About 7.2 million is the official number, but with... It's really... It's about the density of the population.

It's an extraordinarily small place. I think it's about 500 square kilometers in total. So you know, think about that 10 by 50, very, very small place.

And people are coming here more and more all the time. We also have about 10 million visitors a year. It's industry here.

The finance industry is a really big deal here. So people are constantly visiting. So at any one time, the population could be anywhere between 7 and 8 million.

But the real extraordinary thing about the population is not who lives here in Hong Kong. It's who's right across the border.

From where I'm sitting right now, if I was to get in a car and start driving north within two hours, I would pass 40 million people.

Holy cow, my boy. That's incredible. Yeah, it is amazing. Right across the border is a city called Shenzhen, which is about 11 million people.

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