With the hype of season 8, episode 1 airing for Game of Thrones, this episode is dedicated to the series so far. Personal and fan theories, predictions, complaints, and tropes are all discussed. It includes Ed Sheeran's cameo, the crypts of Winterfell, Bran is the Night King, and the role of Iron in the endgame.

There's a whole underbelly of the internet community that exists to leak spoilers and episodes.

There's claims of it turning into "fan fiction" as well and characters becoming caricatures of themselves. There's a lot of fans that are also way more knowledgeable on the lore than the show writers are.

We talk about George RR Martin and his "genius", his role in the tv series, and the difference between the books and the show. There's so many nog smoggers surrounding GoT, and it's a unique experience that millions are discussing and waiting on bated breath for what's to unfold in this final season.

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Links:

• The Rains of Castamere (Instrumental) - YouTube — Used For Intro
• George RR Martin on Why He Kills Characters - YouTube — Video of George RR Martin, there's a bunch on Youtube

The word liar is used to label people and to signal to others that someone is not to be trusted and this word is thrown around at the drop of a hat. It is hard for someone to get back into good graces when they have been deemed to be a liar and it is even harder if they have been deemed to be a pathological liar. However, what even is a pathological liar and what causes someone to partake in this antisocial behavior?

Generally, pathological lying is the symptom of some other condition which causes a person's perceptions or reality to be so warped that they do not have the same understanding of the world around them that a cognitively normal person would have. This causes them to speak about memories and current events in ways that are demonstrably false as if it is the truth. It is very rare for a person to just be lying for the fun of it, however, those are the people who are most often portrayed by popular culture. In fact, many times these characters are portrayed as the anti-hero protagonist of the story.

We also draw parallels to the now widely circulated new story involving Jussie Smollett. This case has drawn a lot of criticism as a cut and dry story involving a famous pathological liar.

It causes us to visit our human nature to hold others to levels of morality that we would never hold ourselves to and discuss some examples of studies that show our mind and lie detection methods are possibly trusted more than they should be as accurate representations of the facts or how easy they are to decipher from superficial data.

As always, all of this is interspersed with stories of our own run-ins with liars and some of our favorite examples of liars.

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Links:

• How Honest Are You? : Coronet Instructional Films — Intro Clip
• Pseudologia Fantastica in the Emergency Department: A Case Report and Review of the Literature
• Fiddler of the Truth | Psychology Today

In 2008 Mike Merrill decided to portion ownership of himself into 100,000 shares and sell off ownership of some of those shares.

The initial shares of his "stock" were mostly purchased by friends and family with few strangers deciding to partake. Mike decided to maintain the

majority of his stocks for himself but pledged them to be non-voting. From this point on he began running all major life decisions by his investors and

hung his hat on the hope that these people would make decisions which best suited him in order to see their investment grow.

What came next, from the outside, was a series of decisions that would lead to Mike having a lower quality of life in order to be more productive for his investors.

His investors voted to have him stop sleeping at night and would have got him a vasectomy without the involvement of his now ex-girlfriend.

Although shares are not as valuable as they once were, Mike has enjoyed a level of celebrity he otherwise would have been unlikely to achieve.

With his newfound fame it appears his stock has attracted others who might have the end goals of making his life harder in an effort to troll him.

In this episode we discuss whether or not this is a fun experience or if this is just the beginning of a bleak future where people are selling control of themselves for money.

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Links:

• Working Dollars : Sutherland (John) Productions, Inc.. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive — archive footage on stocks
• Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share | WIRED
• Mike Merrill's Website
• Mike Merrill | minimums
• Pot Dads – Mike's Site (courtesy of his investors)
• The man who sold shares of himself for $1 apiece
• One Man Turned Himself Into a Publicly Owned Company - The Atlantic
• Buy A Share Of Mike- Montag Article

The Satanic Panic, as it is known today, centered around the tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons which was released in 1974. The fear and rumors surrounding the evil nature of the game were fanned by the masses of youth that seemed unnaturally enticed by the mystical nature of the stories and lore.

The timing was almost too good to be true which lent itself to a clashing of ideals between the youth trying to make their own mark on the world and the adults who were trying to reel in a world which they saw as changing for the worst. The rise of metal music, the Satanic Church, televangelists, and sham psychology caused a clash between between two worlds trying to set the future on a more desirable course.

One half of the Grogtalk Podcast hosts join us in the form of James who shares with us his personal experiences with the phenomenon. Between having to balance his own understanding of what was going on and living in a world where everything he enjoyed was seemingly tainted by satanic influence, according to the media, James had some interesting insight into the situation.

This episode also breaks our longstanding streak of talking about Hitler and Nazi's, however, we do get sidetracked so we still have that going for us.

What do you think the current Satanic Panic of our time is?

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It is a popular past time in today's society to downplay the positive nature of social media. We are constantly bombarded with idiots made famous, irrelevant stories made popular, and tales of woe regarding social media's impact on our fragile minds. However, social media has resulted in some very talented displays of creativity.

One such example is the twitter page, The Sun Vanished. With over 500k followers, this page tells the harrowing story of one person stuck in a world parallel to ours where the sun has vanished. This account has been posting for almost a year and has managed to create a story which draws you in without relying on a large budget production. In this episode Brandon breaks down the story following the chronological twitter posts and allowing you to connect the dots on what you think is happening.

For information and the full body of work check out @TheSunVanished on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesunvanished?lang=en

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Of course, the first symbol that comes to everyone's mind is the Swastika. Although this design is in wide use by people of the Indian peninsula for thousands of years, the entire meaning of the symbol was changed to fit the mistaken beliefs of Hitler and his Nazi party.

However, this is far from the only symbol to be reused or even misinterpreted. The Ichthys was used to hide Christians from open persecution and is now worn as a badge of honor, similar to the Cross. The sign of Asclepius may have been confused with the sign of Caduceus. The All Seeing Eye was a symbol for the power of God and his omnipresence and now is used as a warning of groups which wield power for evil intents.

The power symbols hold over us take us into territory covering the innate nature of humans to seek ways to control events we know we cannot. This manifests itself in numerology and superstition, among other quirks.

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Links:

• How to distinguish Swastika from a Nazi Symbol? - YouTube — Clip From Intro
• Do you know what this is? |Staff of Hermes - YouTube
• The History of the Swastika | The Holocaust Encyclopedia
• Jain symbols - Wikipedia
• How Nazis twisted the swastika, a symbol of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, into an emblem of hate — Quartz India
• The Man Who Brought the Swastika to Germany, and How the Nazis Stole It | History | Smithsonian
• How the world loved the swastika - until Hitler stole it - BBC News
• 1938–39 German expedition to Tibet - Wikipedia
• Nazi Germany’s Fascination With Ancient India: The Case Of Heinrich Himmler
• Hitler and the Himalayas: The SS Mission to Tibet 1938-39 - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
• Caduceus as a symbol of medicine - Wikipedia
• Rod of Asclepius - Wikipedia
• Hermes - Wikipedia
• Caduceus - Wikipedia
• Rod of Asclepius & Caduceus Symbols Meaning
• Barber Pole History - Uppercut Deluxe
• Mathematics of MICHAEL JORDAN:The numbers 3 6 and 9 that follow him REVEALED! - YouTube — Lol- you're welcome

It may be hard to understand with hindsight, but for most of human history if we couldn't see something with our eyes it didn't exist. In the early 1840's, in Vienna, this worldview was put to the test when people began to notice that mortality rates during deliveries with doctors were significantly higher than with midwives in the same hospital.

One doctor at this hospital, Ignaz Semmelweis, observed that the infection which had killed one of his friends after an injury was similar to the infection that most women suffered from that died as a result of childbirth in the doctor's ward. He surmised that the only way to eliminate the unseen contaminate was to remove the smell that accompanied working on dead bodies. To achieve this he required all doctors to begin washing their hands in a chlorine solution after handling dead bodies.

Meanwhile, in other parts of Europe, Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister were also contributing to their own discoveries in the microscopic world of germs which would revolutionize the field of medicine. This leads to a discussion on the nature of discoveries and whether or not we should expect true revelations in fields anymore or if all advancement is incremental.

As with all great discoveries we also talk about the detractors. In this case, the biggest criminal is our own human faults. Why is it that despite over 100 years of research on the matter it is still so hard to get doctors to wash their hands?

As always, no episode of Smog on the Nog would be complete without a dose of meandering conversation about the scale of time, was Thanos wrong, and how many Scientologists know about Xenu.

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Links:

• [Misc TV Commercials - Ivory Soap] — Intro Clip Source
• Ignaz Semmelweis - Wikipedia
• The Doctor Who Championed Hand-Washing And Briefly Saved Lives : Shots - Health News : NPR
• The Dirty History of Doctors’ Hands | Method
• I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year, and it's awesome: a personal experiment / Boing Boing — Lol

In 1920 Carl Brigham adapted the Army's mental test to aid the admissions process for his Alma Mater, Princeton. In the nearly 100 years since the implementation of the SAT, it has faced criticism for being unfairly biased and increasingly outdated as a methodology for testing mental ability.

Carl Brigham was a noteworthy American psychologist who used his illegitimate findings to publish a book in 1924 which called for strict immigration laws and asked Americans to stop spending money to educate those who he deemed "morons and imbeciles". In 1930 Brigham retracted his statements regarding these races and admitted his findings were obtained through flawed means. However, at this point, the damage had already been done to the psyche of the global public.

Despite the controversy surrounding this figure, colleges continue to accept the SAT as a legitimate benchmark for college admissions. Proponents of the test claim that the biases inherent to the initial test and creator are no longer represented and that the test remains one of the most accurate methods of testing a student's acuity.

Opponents of the test argue that current trends in wealth distribution and success on the test indicate that the test is continuing to work as originally intended. In addition, recent controversies with the grading and distribution procedures have added fuel to this growing resentment of standardized college admissions testing.

The discourse on this topic also led us to a conversation about nature vs nurture, the history of Nazi eugenics, and the dangers of cognitive bias.

Send us an email with feedback or nog smoggers to [email protected]

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Support Smog On The Nog

Links:

• Getting Acquainted with Engineering : Iowa State College, Film Production Unit — Clip Used For Intro
• What Does The SAT Really Test? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios - YouTube
• Carl Brigham - Wikipedia
• Intelligent intelligence testing

Send us an email with feedback or nog smoggers to [email protected]

Available on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Youtube, Pocketcasts, Overcast, & Castro

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Links:

• Life in Hollywood : Murray (Martin) Productions — Intro Clip (Worth watching, skip the songs)
• The Big Secret of Celebrity Wealth (Is That No One Knows Anything) - The New York Times
• How Google eats a business whole | The Outline — Article on Brian Warner and celebritynetworth.com and its relationship with Google.
• Google’s featured snippets are worse than fake news — Hilarious?
• Google's "One True Answer" problem - when featured snippets go bad - Search Engine Land — Hilarious Pt. 2?
• Google’s featured snippets credit a scam artist with inventing email
• Celebrity Net Worth - Richest Rappers, Celebrity Houses and Salary — The site in question
• Seven questions with the CEO who gets paid to know what every celebrity is worth — Quartz — Interview with Brian Warner of CelebrityNetWorth.com
• Celebrities - The Probate Lawyer Blog
• How to Calculate Net Worth - The Simple Dollar — If you actually care about net worth...

Send us an email with feedback or nog smoggers to [email protected]

Available on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Youtube, Pocketcasts, Overcast, & Castro

Leave us a review and we'll give a shoutout!

Follow us on Instagram or Twitter: smogonthenog

Support Smog On The Nog

Links:

• HIGH COURT BARS POLISH‐JOKE CASE - The New York Times
• Bob Einstein - Official Website — Donations can be made in Mr. Einstein’s memory to the Leukemia Lymphoma Society Bob Einstein Memorial
• Carl Brigham - Wikipedia
• Polish jokes - Jackie Mason - YouTube
• What is the origin of the stereotype that Polish people lack intelligence? - History Stack Exchange
• FCC fairness doctrine - Wikipedia
• Equal-time rule - Wikipedia
• Zapple doctrine - Wikipedia
• Mayflower doctrine