 Now, let's take homeopathy as an alternative health claim. It's based on the idea that like cures like or the law of similars. Now, it sounds faintly plausible, right? It's kind of like a vaccine where you get a diminished form of the virus and that provokes your immune system. But the idea behind like cures like is the assumption that the thing that caused the ailment can actually cure it. So a diluted form of poison ivy can stop a skin rash. A diluted form of coffee can stop hyperactivity. Red onions can stop your eyes from watering, right? But it gets even stranger. Homeopaths claim that the more you dilute a substance, an active ingredient, the more powerful it becomes. So most homeopathic remedies are labeled 30C, which means one part active ingredient to 100 to the power 30 parts water. Now, that's all of the atoms in the entire solar system. Take another example. I mean, a 12C dilution, never mind a 30C one. The analogy there is a pinch of salt in the entire north and south Atlantic oceans, right? There is no active ingredient in homeopathic remedies. It's just water. That's exactly right. This idea of like cures like I think is really interesting. There's a bunch of this. You see this all over the place. The things that people eat, right? So a lot of people eat fish or pig brains to make them smarter. They eat eyeballs to make them see better. They eat testicles or penis to improve their sexual performance. Or rhino horns to make them horny. That's right. So I mean, this idea of you are what you eat is taken literally, in a sense. Now, Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rosen did some really nice work here. They gave people information about these fictitious tribes. So participants were told about this tribe, the Eight Wild Boar, right? And then they rated the personality characteristics of this tribe. And the tribe that ate wild boar were judged to be harrier, have beards, and more aggressive than another tribe who ate sea turtles. Now this tribe that ate sea turtles were judged to be better swimmers. Yeah, that's the you are what you eat sort of idea, which is related to another similar claim that natural is better. So many people have the intuition that the things that we eat, if they're natural, they're better for you. They're better for the environment. They're safer. But if you think about it for a second, there are a lot of unnatural things that aren't good for you. I mean, jellyfish, poisons, snake venom, arsenic. They're all perfectly natural, but they're not good for you at all. Some perfectly unnatural things are automobiles, indoor plumbing, eyeglasses. These are all unnatural, but they're really, really useful. So I had a chance to talk to Jimmy Battella about this idea, this intuition that we have of natural being better. And here's what he had to say.