The Skeptics Guide #890 - Jul 30 2022
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Who recorded the new Skeptics Guide audiobook and what was the studio experience like?
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You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Tuesday, July 26th, 2022, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Cara Santamaria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein. Good evening, folks. Carrie, you're back full-time this week.
She's back. Full-time.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's see if I don't fall asleep in the middle. I'm going to work real hard at it.
Yeah. So I didn't have a chance to mention last week, but last Tuesday, actually, a week ago before we were recording this, I rapped the audio version of our next book, The Skeptic's Guide to the Future.
Awesome, man. What did you rap in it?
I did it in half the scheduled time. What?
Half?
He spoke twice as fast as he normally does. They got to reset their expectations, man.
Yeah, totally.
Steve was set to times two.
Actually, you have to speak slowly when you're recording this audiobooks. You have to slow it way down. You flubbed fewer times. That's it. I mean, we chatted a lot about it. I had the producer and then the audio recorder, the audio producer. So there's the two guys. They're both listening in. One guy's listening for diction and pacing and enunciation and acting. The other guy's just listening for noise. He's like, oh, your stomach made a noise. Say that again. He's just listening to the audio quality itself, the room noise and everything. But, you know, we took a few breaks throughout just from that sitting for five hours in a row. So we were chatting about it. They said interesting things to say, you know, most people.
So there's basically two kinds of people doing audio books today. You're a celebrity, right, doing a fiction book.
Right. Like you're the voice actor.
Yeah, you're the voice actor.
Yeah.
Yeah. Or if it's a nonfiction book, the industry expectation now is that the author will read the nonfiction book.
Really? Yeah.
Wow. So you have a lot of authors that have no idea how to read because they're authors. They're writers. They have knowledge. don't necessarily have any experience with podcasts or speaking or whatever. And so some of them are just, you know, the sort of average of that group is just really slow. I mean, they just need constant correction and diction. There was one guy, there was one guy that was so bad. We basically just said, just read everything twice. Just everything, just read it twice. Couldn't get through anything on the first try.
When, when, the, the, cat, cat.
And then celebrities have a completely different problem in that they generally do not take direction well. And like they're saying. Prima donnas. They said they're all prima donnas. Like they're all terrible. But they said not all of them. Some of them are fine.
Yeah, that's surprising for actors. Like that's their job. Right.
They're used to being directed.
Sometimes it's actors. Like he said, he did William Shatner for one book. He said he was the worst. He was a total prima donna. I was going to bring that up. Did you hear the audio of William Shatner? So he does a read. This was probably back in like the 70s. Yeah.
I heard him read Rocketman once.
Yeah, right? That was something else. So he does a read, and it was like a 30-second spot. And then the quote-unquote director, the person in the booth, was like, all right, could you do that again, but could you do it like this? And he's like, William Shatner, through conversational judo, had this guy apologizing to him.
Yeah.
Because he said, oh, well, he goes, if you want me to read it and say it the way that you want me to say it, then read it the way you want me to say it and I'll copy how you do it.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Who recorded the new Skeptics Guide audiobook and what was the studio experience like?
0:00–35:16
2
What does 'cladistics' mean and how did the term originate?
35:16–56:12
3
How serious is the 2022 US monkeypox outbreak and what are its risks?
56:12–58:35
4
What are monkeypox symptoms, treatments, vaccines and containment strategies?
58:35–1:06:16
5
How was Toto’s “Africa” transformed into a piano MIDI and why does it sound like a voice?
1:06:16–1:22:46
6
What’s the right balance between self-advocacy and following medical advice in patient care?
1:22:46–1:59:29