The Skeptics Guide #1076 - Feb 21 2026

News Items: Banana Resistance to Fungal Disease, Drug Advertising, AI Powered Prosthetics, Laser Written Glass Storage, UFO Balloons; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Mental Illness and Culpability; Name That Logical Fallacy; Science or Fiction

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today's Thursday, February 19th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:46Bob Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:51Speaker 05

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  So, Bob, your predictions about the quint, we didn't really make a prediction, but Ilya Malinin crashed and burned, man. That was painful.

• 1:02Bob Novella?

  No. I don't want to talk about it.

• 1:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, I don't know anything that you just said. You just said a bunch of words that mean nothing.

• 1:08Speaker 05

  Was this from last week? Maybe Cara wasn't privy to the news.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  So, this is about the Olympics. I don't know if you're watching the Winter Olympics. But Bob's piece was about whether Ilya Malinin, who was the lead American male figure skater, was going to do a quint. He's the quad god, so he's the only guy, he's the only one in competition who's doing quad axels, which is like a four and a half.

• 1:29Bob Novella?

  Yeah, nobody on the planet can do it, except him.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  And he's, he's claimed to have done a quint, a quintuple in?

• 1:36Speaker 05

  Practice.

• 1:37Bob Novella?

  In practice, like five, five rotations.

• 1:40Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:41Cara Santa Maria?

  I see.

• 1:42Bob Novella?

  It was possible. It was possible for him to actually do it and make history. And I'm watching it so excited, and it was, it was just horrible. He fell apart, didn't recover. It was so sad. I felt so bad for him, like a holy crap.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  He came in eighth. He didn't even medal. It was shocking. Everyone was stunned.

• 2:02Bob Novella?

  Cara, he was, basically, he was a shoo-in for the gold. He really just, almost just had to show up, and he would, and not fall, and he would have gotten the gold. That's how much of a shoo-in he was. Nothing is guaranteed. But it was everyone, I would have bet, damn, I would have bet a lot of money that he would have at least medaled, but he couldn't even do that because it just, one of those sad things.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  I have to say, that was the first time, that was the first time I've seen him skate. I'm like, alright, let me see this quad got in action. Yeah, let's see what Bob talked about. And it was, it was just a terrible performance. So my sense, I, cause I don't know this guy, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but just my sense of what was on the screen, was that he was pretty cocky. He came off as cocky, and, which of course, you know, if anyone could be cock, deserves to be cocky, he does, but he was very humbled afterwards, I think he was very sportsmanlike afterwards.

• 2:50Bob Novella?

  He was. He shook the winner's hand, yep.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, very, very.

• 2:53Bob Novella?

  That guy.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  No, no, but he, um, I just think that the whole Olympic thing got to his head. It's just my, my theory, it's possible.

• 3:03Cara Santa Maria?

  I also think that sometimes the most elite athletes have, they have the farthest to fall.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:08Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, you know, small errors can really screw up their game.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  I know, it's a very unforgiving sport.

• 3:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  He had a great short program.

• 3:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah, and he brought his, he brought his team to a, to a medal in the short program.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  You have a short program and a long program, and it's very unforgiving. One mistake and you, basically you're out of medal contention most of the time. It's not like he had multiple tries or mulligans or whatever, no, that's it, you, you have a bad night, you're out.

• 3:34Cara Santa Maria?

  So much pressure, you know, so much pressure. And you, you get off your game, it, it probably just infects the whole routine at this point.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  I also, I kinda don't like the way the media hypes up individual players. I mean, I know they're doing it for the drama and for, and for viewers or whatever, but they kinda set people up to fail like this, and...

• 3:55Cara Santa Maria?

  They do, I agree.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  I mean, he's like a twenty, twenty year old kid and he's getting all this attention and all this pressure and, you know...

• 4:03Cara Santa Maria?

  And once you do well, like, there's, there's a, a female athlete, oh gosh, and I, I reposted it on Instagram, she was being interviewed, and she, she silvered. But the interviewer was like, you know, do you feel like this was a, was the silver a gain or was it really a loss of gold? And she was like, you know what?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Ouch.

• 4:22Cara Santa Maria?

  That is the most ludicrous question I've ever heard. She was like, I have medaled five times in the Olympics. Do you know how hard that is? I am, you know, considered the best, you know, female athlete in the sport, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Every single time I win a medal. It's a massive game. Like, who are you to ask me if that was a loss?

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:41Cara Santa Maria?

  To come in second in the world? Are you kidding me?

• 4:44Speaker 02

  In the world, I know.

• 4:45Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like, it's just crazy. Yeah. She was like, the, the amount of pressure, yeah, that you put on these athletes. Because she's like, for me, every time I show up to compete, it's equally hard. But for you guys, you just expect more and more and more.

• 5:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:00Bob Novella?

  Right. I mean, just going to the Olympics, just going, to me, it would be a major, major win. That's, I wouldn't even need to do anything else, not even come close to medaling, come in last place. I was at the Olympics.

• 5:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, it'd be amazing.

• 5:14Bob Novella?

  I was good enough to go to the Olympics and that's.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  And in many of these sports, these are people who are training eight hours a day for years. I mean, this is.

• 5:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  The dedication to get to that level of competition is just absolutely amazing.

• 5:26Cara Santa Maria?

  When you, um, when you did mention to Bob, this, um, you know, Ilya, what's his last name?

• 5:32Bob Novella?

  Malinin.

• 5:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Malinin. Um, the first thing that came into my head was Ilya Rosenoff and anybody else who's listening to the show who was obsessed with heated rivalry like I am. Um, that's probably their first thought too. They're like, oh, Ilya Rosenoff. You guys might not know what that means, but you should watch the show and check back in.

• 5:50Speaker 05

  Heated rival?

• 5:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Heated rivalry. I'm fanning myself off right now.

• 5:54Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 5:56Speaker 05

  Okay, then.

• 5:56Cara Santa Maria?

  It's just a very, it's a very steamy gay love story on HBO right now. And it's, it's based on a book, but it, you know, people just fell in love with it. And, and it's just one of those shows where. Thank goodness the writers and directors and everybody chose to take it the way that they took it because I would put it maybe on the shelf with like Schitt's Creek and um, Ted Lasso, not because it's as funny, but it's just one of those shows where you're like, I needed that. That was just good.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:27Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, like I needed something that just was good and made my heart swell. So yeah, I loved it.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  This is the first Winter Olympics that I'm really into curling. Have you guys been watching curling at all?

• 6:38Speaker 05

  A little bit.

• 6:39Bob Novella?

  Controversies and curling. Those damn fingers, man.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  They look like a fistfight.

• 6:44Bob Novella?

  What the hell is going on? Is that cheating? I mean. It absolutely is against the rules.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Well, it is, but.

• 6:52Bob Novella?

  But they don't get called out for it, right?

• 6:53Speaker 02

  They don't get called out for it. I mean, what was amazing was that they, the teams actually had words with each other and they fought over it. But I've seen other times when something happened, like somebody was in the women's curling with the American team and the Japanese, the, the, one of the American players, you know, they have to sweep in front of the, in front of the stone. And the sweeper got stuck and she actually changed the course of the stone with.

• 7:19Bob Novella?

  Oh, what? Oh, my God.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Only seen that happen that one time. Obviously, it's, you can't do that. It's, well, they, the two teams just talked politely with each other, you know, about what to do about it. So the other team has the ultimate right to decide what to do.

• 7:35Bob Novella?

  Right, right.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  But it was like the most polite discussion about, okay, yeah, she's like, oh yeah, it might be, it happens, you know, it was not like she was hiding it or there was accusations or it clearly wasn't deliberate. So you just sort it out and they said, all right, we'll just put this stone back to where it was over here.

• 7:49Bob Novella?

  I like that.

• 7:49Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm gonna say that's because this is a quintessentially Canadian sport.

• 7:57Cara Santa Maria?

  We could learn a lot from our neighbors.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  But it is very, um, it's very, very tactical, you know, it's almost like chess on ice. It really is. Once you learn what they're doing, you know, why they're doing it, it's really fascinating.

• 8:08Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Sometimes they thread that needle like, oh my God, you made that between those two stones? Wow.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Well, the Olympics, the skill level is very high, but because it's so high, it's not like you win because the other person missed. You know what I mean? Like it's, the winning team wins because strategically they placed their, their stone, you know, where it needed to be in order to set up, you know, a situation that they needed, et cetera.

• 8:31Jay Novella?

  Did you see anything like interesting happen, Steve?

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Well, there was the broom incident and the boop, you know, those were the where the guy touched the stone after he released it. And he like walked out of an interview that that guy he was he was a Canadian, actually. And he was, he was nasty about it.

• 8:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, that's not bad.

• 8:48Speaker 05

  I call him Touchstone now.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  But he said, listen, you know, he basically his attitude was, no one does it. It happens. No one does it intentionally. It's not cheating. It just happens. Just for just why you why you keep asking me about this, you know?

• 9:01Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Again, they're under a lot of pressure. And again, imagine getting 20 interviews and everyone's like, what about the boop? You know, what about you touching the stone? Please, can you ask me something else?

• 9:13Speaker 05

  What do your teammates think about the boop?

• 9:17Bob Novella?

  To be a little fair, I don't know that much about it. But I did hear other teams saying like, they do it all the time.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:23Bob Novella?

  And finally, we're like, come on. Yeah, that's, that's all. That's what I heard. I haven't done a deep dive on this.

• 9:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, I've heard this.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  I heard that interview too.

• 9:31Jay Novella?

  But is it allowed or not?

• 9:32Speaker 05

  They've been doing it.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  The thing is, it is illegal, but the but the refs don't do anything. I don't, you know what I mean? Like, they don't, they didn't do anything about it.

• 9:38Speaker 05

  It's not enforced.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, they don't really enforce that that level of thing.

• 9:42Speaker 05

  Okay, well, if you're not going to enforce it, then do it. And then maybe other teams should do it.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  But guys, there is a place in Connecticut where you can do curling. And I think we're gonna go give it a try.

• 9:53Jay Novella?

  When you say we, who are you talking about?

• 9:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Well, my wife and I are going. You guys are invited.

• 9:58Speaker 05

  Oh, who's sweeping? Who's curling?

• 10:01Bob Novella?

  Is it like a same type of stone and all in court, if they call it?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:05Bob Novella?

  Nice.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  That's why now that I've watched so much, I just want to see what it's like. I'm sure it's so freaking hard compared to what we're seeing.

• 10:11Cara Santa Maria?

  How comfortable are you guys on the ice?

• 10:12Bob Novella?

  How are you gonna?

• 10:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, can you?

• 10:13Speaker 02

  I was skating.

• 10:14Bob Novella?

  You have to bend down like that? You gotta be flexible.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  We're Connecticutians. We were comfortable on the ice.

• 10:18Cara Santa Maria?

  I am not like I never was exposed to ice skating as a kid. It's so foreign to me.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, you gotta get your sea legs, definitely.

• 10:26Bob Novella?

  Steve, my question is, how are those like those sweeper dudes? How are they so nimble without, they're not on skates, they're just like wearing sneakers.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  They have special shoes, yeah, so that they-

• 10:36Bob Novella?

  I figure they must have had special shoes.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, because they have to, they have to have grip on some parts and slide on other parts, you know, so they, I think in some people, it looked like they were wearing two different shoes on each foot. Um, I don't know the details, but they definitely are special shoes so that they can scamper and slide over the ice as they're sweeping. And different people have different styles, like there's this one American curler on the women's team who does this hop, like she does the two leg footed hop as she does it, it's kind of funny to watch. Rather than more of the scamper that other people are doing.

• 11:06Speaker 05

  When rabbits do it, it's hair curling.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Hi, oh. Alright.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Jay, tell us about efforts to save the banana.

• 11:18Jay Novella?

  My god, Steve, when I found this, I'm like, Steve is gonna do a backflip because this is actually some, some good news. It's not all the way there, but let me tell you like the ups and downs of what is going on here. So first of all, as most of the listeners out there know, we are banana fans here on the SGU. Steve's nickname is actually the Big Banana. Yeah, it just occurred to me, it just occurred to me how that could be easily misinterpreted. Anyway, alright, so we go back to the Cavendish, what's the Cavendish? It's the top banana, Jay, the top banana. The top banana? So, alright, so the Cavendish banana dominates the global markets, meaning that this is the most common banana that you're gonna find out there. This is the one that you're likely to be purchasing.

• 12:03Jay Novella?

  You know, if you have easy access to other kinds of bananas, you're super lucky, send me a sample of each one of them, thank you. But unfortunately, uh, most banana varieties have this horrible weakness. And if nothing is done to save the bananas, uh, we'll be, we'll see a steady global decline in availability, prices will go up. Um, it's just not a good situation for both, you know, both economically and agriculturally, it's pretty damn serious. Particularly for countries that depend on, that depend on banana export. Or you know, really need bananas as a staple food. This isn't an extinction level scenario for the species, but it would be very bad. So what is actually the problem? There's a soil fungus called Fusarium.

• 12:47Jay Novella?

  It's got a long scientific name, but I'm just going to call it that. It's also known as Panama disease. And one of the strains of this fungus called subtropical race four. Uh, it infects the banana plants through the roots and it moves into the plant's vascular tissue. And then, you know, the, all this internal plumbing that transports water and nutrients. You know, the fungus basically, it just clogs up that system. And once a plant has it, you know, their leaves begin to yellow, it wilts, the plant collapses. And of course, the, uh, all fruit production stops, it's bad.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Should I clarify a couple of things?

• 13:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Cause you know, I'm all over this story.

• 13:26Jay Novella?

  Well, of course you are.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  So just, just for historical purposes, you know, the Gros Michel, that was like the good banana that got wiped out before the Cavendish.

• 13:35Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  That was wiped out by, by race one.

• 13:39Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that was a bad one.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, now we're up to race four, but you said subtropical race four. The disease that's actually harrowing the Cavendish is tropical race four. But the subtropical race four that the study is on is a related disease. Just to clarify that.

• 13:57Jay Novella?

  Uh huh.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  And it, it, if it made the subtropical race four affects mainly an area of Australia, which is where this research was done. Whereas tropical race four is more worldwide.

• 14:08Jay Novella?

  So it's even worse than we thought.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Well, I knew how bad it was.

• 14:12Jay Novella?

  So, all right, so once these symptoms are visible, the plant's basically dead. The plant's dead.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Your plant's dead.

• 14:21Jay Novella?

  You know, it's, it's infected.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Called Sylvia Bran.

• 14:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah, right. They die, these plants die within weeks to a few months. There's virtually no cure. They, they cannot find anything to mitigate the fungus because, you know, the fungus is down in the soil. And that fungus, once it, once it infests the soil, it could be there for decades. Like, you know, there just isn't anything that can wipe it out and. And fix this problem. Commercial production depends heavily on the genetically uniform varieties. Uniformity simplifies the large scale farming, but it creates a vulnerability, right? So as Steve said many times, all the bananas that we eat, they're all essentially clones of each other. And this means that the virtually every banana that's a Cavendish out there is genetically the same.

• 15:08Jay Novella?

  And they're all 100% vulnerable. And like we said, you know, the Panama disease, you know, already earlier version of it wiped out the grow Michelle banana. We know none of us have ever even gotten a chance to try it. We hear they're fantastic. Let's say that the Cavendish goes, you know, the next banana is probably not going to be as good. So we want to hold on to the Cavendish. So let me get to the study now, because this is where some good news happens. So this study addresses this threat and it's looking at things on a DNA level. So the study was led by Andrew Chen and his colleagues at the University of Queensland. And they identified a genetic region that's linked to resistance in wild banana relatives known as the Calcutta four.

• 15:51Jay Novella?

  So this cousin of the Cavendish has a resistance to the fungus. And, you know, unlike all these commercial bananas, or at least most of them, this wild plant shows a really strong natural resistance to tropical race four. And the question here is, you know, what is the, what in the genome specifically provides the protection? And this is where their work started, right? They have to figure out what DNA is involved in this fungus resistance. So the team crossed the resistant wild plant with a susceptible banana line. So they had a, you know, they had a hybrid there. It's a hybrid. The offspring showed DNA variations, of course.

• 16:32Jay Novella?

  Some of the children plants resisted the infection, others didn't, you know, they died. And the resistant variations are the actual entry point for genetic mapping. And this is where all the magic happens. So they compared the DNA of the resistant plants with that of the susceptible ones. And researchers can now look for a specific DNA region or regions that are only in the plants that survived, right? This narrows it way down to just a few places where they think that the actual DNA that is coding for the resistance could be. So now, of course, they want to find it. They want to get down to the exact thing. So they use genome sequencing and they identified a specific region on one chromosome linked to resistance.

• 17:15Jay Novella?

  And the study, they didn't yet isolate the, a single confirmed region or the actual snippet that is it.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  To clarify, they got it down to a five to 10 megabyte region of the short arm of chromosome five. Now, I know a lot of the reporting said that they identified the quote unquote gene, but they have not identified the gene. They got it down to that region, but there's probably a few genes in that region. So now they need to get it down to the specific gene level.

• 17:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah. And the breeders that are doing this, they can screen seedlings for the specific DNA markers that are associated with this resistance before actual disease testing. So this approach, it's known as a marker assisted selection. This dramatically accelerates the development of more resilient varieties. And the study, you know, significantly improves their chances of developing resistant banana varieties. And that's exactly what we need right now. In the end, they have more work to do, but they seem to be on the right path. I mean, the awesome thing is that there was a variety out there that just was resistant. And, you know, their job now is to narrow it down, figure out what it is, and then

• 18:25Jay Novella?

  they can, you know, use, I guess they'd use CRISPR, Steve, to, to do this?

• 18:29Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. This is all breeding.

• 18:31Jay Novella?

  It's all just done through breeding?

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. So let me just tell you again, back up a little bit. There's actually, there's multiple, multiple programs out there trying to develop these race resistant bananas, right? And there's, they're mainly using three different. Methods. Actually, there's already a GMO Cavendish banana that is resistant to tropical race four. So they're planting it everywhere, right? Well, no, but it it does have regulatory approval in Australia, so it can be commercially cultivated and can be consumed in Australia. And this was approved, I think, in 2024. So just about a year ago. Really?

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, yeah, this is GMO race, you know, four resistant, uh, you know, Cavendish banana. There, but they're keeping this in this on the sidelines as kind of a, a backup safety. It's a safety net, as they're calling it, in case this really becomes a problem. There are two other programs, so the CRISPR is sort of the newest one. They're starting to use CRISPR. Again, the, and the reason to do that is because, not only because CRISPR is an awesome research tool, but if you're modifying existing genes without, you know, introducing new genes and it's, yeah, in most countries now, it's technically not GMO. It's just genetically engineered, not genetically modified.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  And then, so it's, the regulations are, are easier, you know, they're not as draconian. But also there's breeding programs, right? And that's what this is, this, this research is part of the attempts at breeding using hybrids in order to create resistant, uh, resistant bananas. So they're, this is not like on the track to GMOs. They've already done that. We've got the GMO resistant bananas. This is just trying to do it through breeding. Now, another sort of layer here is that the, there's, first of all, there's multiple resistant wild bananas. This is not the only one, but they're completely inedible, right? So they're, they're diploid, which means they have seeds, but it also means they flower and produce seeds and you could breed them, right? You can hybrid them.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Commercial bananas are triploid. They don't have seeds, but they also can't reproduce. That's why they're all clones of each other. You take cuttings from them and then replant them, which is actually easy to do. I've done it myself. It's actually not that hard, uh, but they're all, that's why. They're all such a monoculture of clones because that's how they, that's how you propagate them, right? You don't breed them, you don't hybrid them because they don't have seeds. Because they're, they're made, they were made triploid basically so that they would be seedless. So the, what they want to do is, is continue to make these hybrids to either get the, the race resistance into a commercial banana,

• 21:23Speaker 02

  or to make a resistant banana into a commercial banana, you know what I mean? So by some breeding, you know, some, you know, hybridization program, breeding cultivation program, they want to get a resistant, commercializable banana. This could still take years, maybe even decades to do that with, with a breeding program. But this will accelerate it, this information, like knowing, because otherwise you have to wait 12 months before you could test a banana plant to see if it's resistant. This way they could check the markers right away. And so it just sort of accelerates the process. So hopefully this will, this will proceed. But the thing that I find a little annoying is that they've already freaking done it.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  You know, we already have a resistant banana. The whole purpose of this is to do one that isn't GMO for the anti-GMO idiots, right?

• 22:16Bob Novella?

  Really? We're accommodating them?

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 22:19Bob Novella?

  That's what this is?

• 22:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's basically what this is.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  Oh my gosh.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  I mean, it's good to have options, right? It's good to do it in different ways, everyone, take your, you know, do it. We have, you know, again, I'm all in favor of spreading out your chips, you know what I mean? So that's fine, but I don't know why they're keeping the GMO one as a backup rather than just planting it already because it's, it freaking works.

• 22:43Bob Novella?

  But Steve, I want another option. I want a commercial, easily available grow Michelle.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. They're working on that too.

• 22:50Speaker 05

  Where's that?

• 22:50Speaker 02

  I've heard about that years ago. They've done that too.

• 22:54Bob Novella?

  So did I. Heard nothing since.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:56Speaker 05

  Yeah. And how many of you consumed, Bob? Zero.

• 22:59Bob Novella?

  Zero. None.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  But the thing is that I don't know how that one did in field testing. The GMO Cavendish that's resistant has gotten through the field testing with flying colors. They're like 98% resistant to the race four, the tropical race four. So anyway, the thing is, the other way to look at this also, guys, like we will never win. We are in an endless fight here. And so we are going to continuously need to do cultivation programs and genetic engineering and modification to keep one step ahead of these fungi, right? This arms race is never going to end, not with, you know, existing, any projection of existing technology.

• 23:42Bob Novella?

  It'll end. It'll end when we have the power of illusion like those Talos four or Talos five aliens from Star Trek, when we could eat dirt and have it taste like Gros Michel bananas. So that's what I'm waiting for.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  A nourishing protein complex?

• 24:00Speaker 02

  I just saw that episode.

• 24:02Bob Novella?

  Oh, okay. That's how you knew it. Four, five, whatever.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Jay. Kara?

• 24:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes?

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Do you think that drug advertising is a good thing or a bad thing?

• 24:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's a tough question. I think if you had asked me that question while I was like distracted and not really listening and hadn't done a deep dive, I might be like, bad. Advertisement's bad. And I still think that there's a part of me that has that gut reaction and that can actually defend, ooh, this would be such a good debate, Steve.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. It would be. It could be.

• 24:39Speaker 05

  Defend?

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Because you're right.

• 24:41Speaker 05

  You have to defend.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  It cuts both ways.

• 24:43Cara Santa Maria?

  It cuts both ways. And so I want to really get into that. But I think that one of the best ways to do that is to ask the guys who maybe haven't done a deep dive, like you or I have, Steve, what are some reasons that maybe advertising pharmaceuticals like we do here in the United States and also like they do in New Zealand is? A bad thing. What are the risks of advertising pharmaceuticals direct to consumer? So like in television ads and magazine print ads and things like that?

• 25:16Speaker 05

  Risks.

• 25:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Bob Novella?

  Well, I mean, the advertisement itself, I know my mom sees some ads and she reads the fine print. She's like, I'm not taking that drug. You know, it's like, wait.

• 25:25Speaker 05

  Oh, because they spend a lot of time on the side effects and.

• 25:29Cara Santa Maria?

  How interesting. So you're, you're worried about the ad maybe turning off the person from using the drug, which I do not think is what the drug company thinks is happening. I don't think they'd be paying billions of dollars in advertising fees. They do that because that is a regulation and they're required to do that.

• 25:45Bob Novella?

  Of course, but my mom still freaks out. What? Some people died on this? Well, yeah, I'm not taking that. Why would I take that?

• 25:51Cara Santa Maria?

  What are some other reasons that maybe, for example, the AMA, which opposes direct to consumer advertising and has a policy statement on it? Why do you think they oppose direct to consumer advertising?

• 26:02Speaker 05

  Getting people anxious, nervous, stress.

• 26:06Cara Santa Maria?

  This is fascinating that, that you guys are like having to dig for answers here.

• 26:11Speaker 05

  Is there an obvious one?

• 26:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I think a lot of people would say it's not good for a consumer to be making decisions about the drugs they need. Right? Like if we.

• 26:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, but it's not like they can go get it.

• 26:22Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but they do go ask for it.

• 26:24Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they ask for it. I mean, they have to have a level of trust in their doctor. If the doctor says, yes, this is a good drug, but it's not for you. I assume that they would trust their doctor to be okay.

• 26:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. And that's.

• 26:35Speaker 05

  And I think the commercials reinforce that idea.

• 26:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's what we all hope that a functional system would do. But I think there's a lot of fear that anybody can find a doctor who will write them a prescription for anything. Like we've, I mean, just look back at the Sackler fiasco.

• 26:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 26:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Right?

• 26:52Speaker 05

  Sure. Yeah.

• 26:53Cara Santa Maria?

  And so I think that a lot of the concern around direct to consumer advertising is putting way too much, I don't want to say power, but way too much choice in the hands of not as educated consumers. And what a lot of studies have shown, and this is, these are some other critiques, are that very often, why do you think a pharmaceutical company is advertising a drug? Like which drugs do you see ads for? That may be a better way to frame that question. What do you guys think?

• 27:26Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, they're not, not opiates.

• 27:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, do you see ads for generic amoxicillin?

• 27:31Bob Novella?

  No.

• 27:32Cara Santa Maria?

  No, you see ads for brand name formulary new drugs.

• 27:36Speaker 05

  And then in parentheses is the technical term for it that no one can pronounce.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  But it's it's on patent.

• 27:42Cara Santa Maria?

  It's on patent.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  Expensive drugs.

• 27:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. There is no generic form.

• 27:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, so they have to.

• 27:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 27:48Speaker 05

  Recouping their.

• 27:49Bob Novella?

  So it's pushing people away from cheaper generics.

• 27:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, but the interesting.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  That's the concern.

• 27:53Cara Santa Maria?

  That's the concern. But the interesting thing is that the research actually shows that advertising brand name drugs actually can result in more people taking generic drugs for the same condition. So there is.

• 28:09Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 28:10Cara Santa Maria?

  It kind of can cut both ways. Yes, there is a concern, and I think it's a legitimate concern because we know that this happens in drug manufacturing. In order for a drug to remain kind of financially viable for a pharmaceutical company, once something kind of lives its life, they lose the patent, there's now competition in the marketplace, there are cheap generic alternatives, there will be some sort of formulary change, some sort of update to the drug. Well, now we do it in an easier to swallow pill, or now we've added this secondary drug so that, you know, it satisfies.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Extended release is the big thing.

• 28:44Cara Santa Maria?

  That's a huge one, right? And sometimes that is.

• 28:46Speaker 05

  OXR.

• 28:47Cara Santa Maria?

  A legitimate benefit to the patient. And sometimes, and actually, a lot of studies have shown that when there's a sampling of which drugs are being advertised indirect to consumer marketing, that the, a large proportion, we should say, of the drugs being advertised are no better than their previous or generic iterations. So they don't confer any like demonstrable benefit to the consumer. And, you know, right there, I think that there's a concern just about fairness. There's a concern about consumer safety. If people are seeking out.

• 29:29Cara Santa Maria?

  A new fancy shiny drug and actually end up choosing it over another form and and are, you know, paying so much money for this drug when something else would have been just as beneficial to them. So I think that's also a concern. There's also a concern that there, even though it is required that drug companies, based on legislation, it's required that drug companies, if they're going to do a direct to consumer advertisement, do disclose serious risks. Very often, drug companies will use loopholes where they won't list them all, or they'll, they'll direct somebody to a website, or they'll do it very fast and in fine print, so people can't even read them. And so there is some concern about sort of

• 30:12Cara Santa Maria?

  false advertising in these direct to consumer drugs, because maybe the real risk benefit is not laid out in an appropriate way. I mean, and we've all seen this. I, it blows my mind when I'm watching TV and I see drugs that I know my patients take that are for metastatic cancer that is like resistant to certain other types of treatment. And they'll show the people in the ads like riding roller coasters and like running through fields. And I'm like, that, that patient does not have, has not had metastatic cancer for five years.

• 30:50Speaker 05

  They're misleading. That's a misleading.

• 30:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like it's, sometimes they're just really kind of airbrushed. Yeah. Like, are you in, you know, are you in heart failure? Well, this drug is going to help you, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, that patient is not in heart failure.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 31:06Cara Santa Maria?

  The patient in this advertisement.

• 31:07Speaker 05

  Riding horses and.

• 31:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so there is a concern there about, about misleading. Also, just like the sheer amount of money that these pharmaceutical industries are, are spending in order to try and convince you, persuade you to buy this drug over that drug. I think for, for a lot of people, and I think that's where my sort of knee jerk reaction comes in, is I just don't like advertising. I don't like the culture of, you know, constantly trying to sell everybody next big thing. And everything is based on what are we buying? And if you're not buying this, you're not going to be happy and you're not going to be healthy and you're not going to live a long life. That concerns me as well. What do you think some of the benefits of advertising drugs are?

• 31:51Speaker 05

  Well, just awareness that the drug actually does exist in case somebody-

• 31:57Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they could go to the doctor-

• 31:58Speaker 05

  At any access to-

• 31:59Bob Novella?

  They might assume that, well, what I have is not really fixable, but they see a drug that specifically addresses it, then they could seek it out, and otherwise they might not have.

• 32:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest arguments for why direct-to-consumer advertising continues to exist. And there are a lot of studies that show that in places where there are more direct-to-consumer advertisements, people go to the doctor more, and people get treatment for certain conditions more often.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  And have better drug adherence.

• 32:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And now, we know that they're targeted. We've seen bumps in the kind of utilization, or actually, we've seen bumps in, first of all, just the amount, the quantity of direct-to-consumer advertisements at different times. We saw a bump, obviously, when historical prohibitions were repealed, and I think that was back in like 19, like the late 1990s. We saw another bump when Medicare Part D came on the scene. Medicare Part D, if you don't know all the different parts of Medicare, that's the part that covers prescription drugs, like pharmacy prescription drugs. And so, we did see that once Part D came onto the scene,

• 33:15Cara Santa Maria?

  there was a huge boom in drug advertisements, and that specifically targets older adults. We also see that in markets where there are more older adults living, there are more pharmaceutical drug ads. And so, obviously, there is, you know, obviously, they're using advertising science here. But I think it's really interesting when you start to dig into the literature, and things get a lot more complicated, that direct-to-consumer advertising can have a huge, and actually does seem to have a huge effect on physician prescribing. It also can, at the same time, avert underuse, but it can also promote overuse.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Yep, both of which are about an equal problem.

• 33:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. And so, it's like- Is the answer to this removing them altogether like both the Trump administration has begun to push a little more firmly? And, you know, to be honest, this has historically, I think, been a sometimes bipartisan, but definitely a more left-leaning policy agenda. And so like Bernie Sanders put a bill, put in a bill recently, but also it's a bipartisan bill. So the question is, if we were to just ban it outright, which is actually what the American Medical Association calls for, they support a ban on direct-to-consumer advertising, and then they say, until or unless a ban is in place, we oppose any sort of ads that

• 34:41Cara Santa Maria?

  don't do all of, and they have a laundry list of things that they think ads should do to, to be as safe and, and yeah, consumer-friendly as possible, which is, you know, of course, have a good balance between benefit and risk. Don't, uh, don't show the, you know, a person doing something that they couldn't do on this drug. Be clear about warnings and adverse effects. Don't make claims about the product or compare it to other products when it doesn't confer a significant benefit to that other product. Don't say it can do things it can't do, which is a problem.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if they were more aggressively regulated and like really dialed in, they wouldn't be that bad, you know? And the upside may be greater than the downside. The other option, what I sort of have recommended, is that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise, hey, if you have asthma, there's new treatments available for asthma. You should go to your doctor and ask them about them. And just to raise the number of people who are seeking treatment for diseases for which they have drugs. Now, it wouldn't give them as much bang for the buck, but it's sort of a halfway compromise. They would still, it would still send money to, into their coffers, but maybe, again, maybe not as much, but without any really of the downside, right?

• 35:58Speaker 02

  You get the increased awareness of the disease, getting people off their, you know, to the doctor, increased adherence, decreased stigma of the disease itself. All those things that we want to get out of advertising, but without the pushing the latest expensive drug, even if it's no better than older, cheaper drugs.

• 36:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. And there's a large body of evidence and there are a lot of op-eds online talking about that very thing. Instead of advertising a specific drug, why don't we do PSA style, and they can still be glossy, consumer education ads about, hey, if you have, we all remember when restless legs, that there was like a whole, it became the butt of a lot of jokes, right?

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 36:41Cara Santa Maria?

  It was like, do you have, are your legs restless? You need this drug. And people were like, what? A pharma will push anything. Well, I'm sorry, but that's a legitimate, you know, syndrome and it can cause massive lifestyle problems for a lot of people.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was a lot of misinformation at the time that the diagnosis was invented by the pharmaceutical industry, which is not true.

• 37:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  That it was, that they did it to repurpose drugs that were failed for other reasons, which is not true. And when I wrote about it on my blog, I actually looked through my textbooks. I found references to restless leg syndrome by name from the 1940s.

• 37:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  This diagnosis has been around for decades.

• 37:23Cara Santa Maria?

  And if you've known anybody who struggles with this, it's debilitating for them. It really, really disrupts their sleep. It's, they're miserable at night. And, you know, I think there were probably a lot of people for whom, because somebody said the word out loud, they were like, oh my God, I think that's what's happening to me. I actually maybe should talk to somebody about this. That can be a life-changing thing for individuals who are struggling. So I agree, Steve. I would like to see a transition from advertising specific drugs, especially, we see this all the time in US advertisements. Ask your doctor if Blablabla Quil is right for you. No description of what disease it cures.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:07Cara Santa Maria?

  No description of why. It's just like, look, look how happy you'll be with this drug.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:12Cara Santa Maria?

  And, and that's, I think that that's shady personally. But it is really interesting when you dig into the literature that there do seem to be big benefits and, and You know, big problems with the way that we advertise drugs now, right now. One of the issues, Steve, is that even though, you know, we can be a little bit, um, I guess Pollyanna about it and say, hey, why not just do this? And/or even, you know, Sanders et al., who put to get, who put forward this bill is like, well, let's just ban it and, and, you know, we can kind of talk about alternatives. A lot of the literature that I'm reading says, well, Citizens United is probably going to be the reason that they can't pass that bill.

• 38:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Or even if they do pass that bill, you know, somebody's going to sue. One of the pharmaceutical companies are going to sue and they have a good chance of winning. Because Citizens United said that this is, you know, corporations have free speech.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  Oh, that's true.

• 39:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm. And so long as they are not saying anything that's not true, which, you know, I can't think of a single drug advertisement that I've ever seen that just straight up lied. I think it's more that they don't always tell you everything.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  It's spin. It's spin. It's not lying.

• 39:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly. So a lot of, a lot of the things that I'm reading are like, good luck, because I think you're in for a fight. Yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 05

  Isn't all of advertising somehow spin in a way?

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Oh, of course.

• 39:37Speaker 05

  It's the nature of the beast.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 39:39Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's different when we're talking about public health, right?

• 39:41Speaker 05

  Of course, yes. Health is most important.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  I think that that's the thing, the public health angle may, may trump the free speech angle.

• 39:49Cara Santa Maria?

  No pun intended.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Not a word anymore. I know.

• 39:52Cara Santa Maria?

  It's the RFK influence on sort of mainstream medicine and the pharmophobia.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  Well, I think one way to look at it, yeah, he has definite pharmophobia, but one way to look at it is that the net effect, you know, looking through the literature, the net effect of drug advertising is that it increases the effectiveness and the cost of medical, of medicine, right?

• 40:13Speaker 05

  Of overall healthcare.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's not harming people, but it is increasing the cost of healthcare.

• 40:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Which does harm people.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Which does harm people directly. So it depends on, you know, what you, how you think. Yeah, well, yeah, what your goals are and how that you think that all comes out in the wash. There's not necessarily any right or wrong answer there. But yeah, we should just, I wish we could just get the best of both worlds, you know?

• 40:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, let's hope. And you could say the same thing when you look at the literature that shows that it does actually increase.

• 40:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Doctors' visits and as you said, adherence to treatment and it increases prescribing even generic medications, but with that also comes sometimes over prescribing medications.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Which, which is a problem in and of itself.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 40:59Cara Santa Maria?

  So, you know, I, I just wish that there, that we, I think this is part of a scattered managed care system, but I wish that there was some way that individual consumers had access to clean and easy information about if I have this diagnosis, these are all of the treatments that are available. And, and the hope is that that's what your physician is supposed to do.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 41:24Cara Santa Maria?

  But it would be nice if there were some sort of federal program or some sort of community effort where individuals could go and they could say, oh, okay, I have type one narcolepsy. These are all the treatments that have ever been used. These are the risks. These are their benefits.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  But you know, that involves a lot of talking to patients, which insurance companies don't like to pay for.

• 41:43Cara Santa Maria?

  It's true. You're absolutely right. They don't.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  I see.

• 41:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And there are gatekeepers here. We have to remember that just because somebody reads or sees an advertisement says, I want that drug, doesn't mean they're going to get it.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Because the insurance company could prevent them from getting it and the doctor could say, I'm not prescribing it. The problem is, we know that, you know, there have been historically pill mills. We know that there are people who doctor shop and we know that there are, you know, the healthcare system is overburdened and there are times when somebody says, I want to try this and a physician might say, okay.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:16Speaker 05

  Just to check the box and move along.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Well, that's one of the, one of the, the points that the AMA has is that it causes tension between the patient and the doctor because they don't want them fighting over. But I saw this and I've been there. I've had patients come in and ask for drugs by name and I have to like go over again, all the options. But sometimes like they're, they are fixed, man. They want what they want and that becomes, does become a problem.

• 42:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay. Interesting nuanced question. I love those.

• 42:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  All right, guys, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about prosthetics, you know, robotic brain-machine interface-controlled prosthetics, right? So I've been following this for 20 years. I've been talking about it a lot on the show. In the last few years, the introduction of the latest crop of artificial intelligence technology has really changed the landscape here. So now we have a basically AI-powered prosthetics, with or without a brain-machine interface, right? Because just AI, we're getting better at training the AI to control robots, and that includes prosthetics, right? Because that's basically like if you have a robotic prosthetic arm, it's a robotic arm, right?

• 43:29Bob Novella?

  Yep.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  So what I was not really aware of until I saw this recent study that I want to talk about, there's there's an interesting downside to the AI control. So the AI control can produce a lot more exquisite, precise movement. Like if you're talking about a robotic hand, the ability to grab a glass, you know, without breaking it or dropping it, right? Like there's, you need that specific amount of pressure, and to be able to use it dexterously, you know, to either brush your teeth or bring it to your lips or whatever. So AI helps with that a lot, right? Because it's just really good at that level of control. What do you think the downside is, though?

• 44:05Bob Novella?

  Well, probably the weird feeling, you're like, what? Hey, is this thing, is this even mine now anymore?

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Exactly. It creates a quote-unquote weird feeling. It breaks the illusion of ownership and agency and control, right? So you want to feel, we want people to feel as if an artificial limb, especially one that's under their control, that it's part of them, right? They own it and they control it. They have agency over it. So those are sort of the three parts that we want them. And that's all things that your brain does that you're not aware of, right? Your brain has circuits that make you feel that you're inside your body, that you own your body parts, they're part of you, and that you control them. And when those-

• 44:48Bob Novella?

  It's part of your homunculus.

• 44:49Speaker 05

  Thank goodness.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Right, Steve? Yeah, when those circuits are disrupted, you feel like you're disconnected from your- Body, right? Or that this body part does not belong to me. It's like attached to me, but it isn't me. Or you could have what's called alien hand syndrome, right? Where you feel as if your hand is doing things on its own, not under your control.

• 45:12Jay Novella?

  Steve, what about if it's AI controlled? I mean, is it happening just in the device or is it connected to the internet?

• 45:19Speaker 02

  I think it's just in a device.

• 45:21Jay Novella?

  Because there's a bad circumstance there. No Bluetooth connection.

• 45:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you don't want your prosthetic limb to be hacked.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  To be hackable, yeah.

• 45:29Jay Novella?

  Oh, gosh.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  But there is a, it can learn is the thing, right? So especially if you're controlling it, then you learn to control the limb and the limb learns what you want to do. And with AI, that training period has gone from months to days. It's made a dramatic difference in the ability to like really nicely control an arm. All right. The downside is though, the degree to which the AI is controlling the limb sort of breaks the illusion of control, right? Because now it's doing stuff on its own, literally. And so people don't like it. So what the study was looking at was just one aspect of that was the effect of the speed

• 46:13Speaker 02

  at which AI controlled prosthetic limbs move and how that influenced people's acceptance of it, like their sense of ownership and agency. And what they found, not surprising, but it's

• 46:26Jay Novella?

  Sweet spot, I'm sure.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  There's a sweet spot. There's a Goldilocks zone, right? Where it's not too fast, it's not too slow, it's just right, right? And the farther away you get from the Goldilocks zone, the more people feel weird and don't like it. But the closer you get to that sweet spot of like a moderate sort of speed, then the more people felt comfortable with it and it didn't break their illusion of ownership or control. But we say illusion, but keep in mind, your sense of ownership and control is also an illusion in the exact same way. It's the same, it's the same circuitry, right? It's not, we, we tend to have this unstated assumption, most people I think just don't think about it.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  But I think if you ask, it's like, well, yeah, I feel like I control my hand cause I do, you know? Or, yeah, this is part, it's my hand, it's part of me, that's what it feels like. But that's not. It's got my name on it. It's not a passive effect of the reality. It's an active neurological constructed experience. That's the key thing you have to understand. The good news. Which can break. Which can break, but also can be hacked. It could also be created. That's the point. That's the upside of that is that we can give you that same illusion with prosthetic limb. So this is just now, now that we, we created a problem by introducing AI. And now we're looking to get, to get the benefits of AI control, you know, improved control of these limbs without this downside.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  And so that's what this study was getting. I guess one study is looking at one aspect of it. But it's nice to know that we could really reduce that problem, that downside, just by fine tuning the, um, you know, the, the rate at which the limb moves. The other angle here that I want to talk about, just because I'm a neurologist, right? Is that our brains are very finely attuned to how people move. Right? Visually speaking. Oh yeah, man.

• 48:24Speaker 05

  Which is why uncanny valley videos upset us.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's partly what. Or even. The, the, the uncanny movement is part of the uncanny valley. It's also just, you know, how they look physically, but like the, it's got dead eyes, like doll's eyes, but.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  But even someone's gait, just the way they walk. Exactly. So distinctive, you could ride, we've all had this experience where you recognize somebody from behind, just by the way they're walking. It's also true that there are movement disorders that could be diagnosed at a glance because of the way people move. Yeah, the so-called across the room diagnosis, probably the most obvious one is Parkinson's disease. If people are even slightly hypokinetic or hyperkinetic, your brain immediately registers something is wrong. This is not within normal parameters, right? Even though you, you don't, you're not. Maybe consciously aware that you know what those parameters are. So it's not surprising that like the your limb moving a little bit too fast.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Is like your brain immediately registers like that's that's not normal. That's not biological. There's something uncanny about that. So yeah, you have to get it just within that sweet spot that our brains are so sensitive to in order for it to to be optimal. So cool. One little incremental, you know, progress on this very interesting technology.

• 49:46Speaker 05

  They'll they'll get this one. They'll eventually figure this one out, it sounds like, and get it right.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  It's progressing wonderfully and it's again, it's 10 to 20 years further along than I thought it would be because of AI.

• 49:58Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 49:58Bob Novella?

  I love when that happens. Doesn't happen often enough.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  All right, Bob, tell us about this glass storage. Know what I thought of when you when you sent me this news item was the original Superman with Christopher Reeve.

• 50:10Bob Novella?

  Yes, yeah, with the crystals.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, with the crystal storage. There's something that there's something about like storing data on crystals that resonates. You know what I mean? That feels right. So tell us about this.

• 50:21Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so this was this is from a Microsoft research project and they've essentially completed this research and this project is called silica. Its goal was to use a glass like material to archive to archive like insane amounts of digital information at high density that also needs basically no maintenance and can also just, you know, last for 10,000 plus years. So this is what they've been working on for, I think, six to eight years. They've been working on this. There's a paper in Nature on it called Laser Writing in Glass for Dense, Fast, and Efficient Archival Data Storage. This silica project can be seen as an attempt to deal with a couple of problems.

• 51:04Bob Novella?

  And one of them is the data explosion that we are currently living in that I that is, I think, is massively underappreciated. Global data increases at 23% per year, which is a lot, right? 23% a year is pretty damn huge and but storage density increases at only 7% a year. So the disparity between those two numbers, that gap actually has a name. It's called the storage cliff. And this is, this is going to be actually a huge infrastructural problem for computers in the next 10 to 15 years. You're going to be hearing more and more about this, I would say. So now I looked, I tried to look up some interesting numbers that's related to this.

• 51:48Bob Novella?

  One of this, one of them was the total data that's archived. This is archived data globally and that's, that's been pegged at say 10 to 15 zettabytes. Zettabytes, a zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So it's huge. It's fragging huge. So it's 10 to 15, but the number gets bigger when you consider the total data sphere. And this is data that just created and stored just for a little while, briefly. It's not meant to be archived at all. It could, it could exist for moments even. But it's, but it is created and it is captured, it is consumed, it's stored. And that number is 200 zettabytes in 2025.

• 52:31Bob Novella?

  I think for 2026, one estimate I came across is 226 zettabytes, something like that they're projecting. So yeah, so this is a lot, a huge, a ridiculously huge amount of information. And the other part of this problem is the, the current storage limitations that we, that we all experience with, just with our, our personal computers, but these limitations are hurting this storage cliff problem. And that's conventional storage. I'm talking magnetic based media like hard disk drives and magnetic tape. And then there's charge based storage. It's flash, write, solid state drives, USB drives, SD cards. They're all charge based and there's also optical storage, CDs and DVDs.

• 53:12Bob Novella?

  And there's many more types. That's only like maybe a third of the types I came across that, that actually exist. The problem with them is that their lifetimes are just not, they're not, they're not meant for archival storage. Bottom line, they're designed to last and function well from anywhere from a year to maybe 20 or 30 years. I think, I think magnetic tape, if it's stored perfectly, can last about 30 years. But that's only with perfect storage. So they don't, they're not meant to last a long time and, and work reliably. Aren't there CDs that are rated at 100 years? There might be some specialty CDs, conventional ones, CDs and DVDs, optical storage, no. Regular, regular CDs are not great.

• 53:55Bob Novella?

  I mean, I didn't get those numbers specifically, but my memory is telling me 10 years. I mean, if you have something on a CD, you, you can't put it on the shelf and forget about it for, for a generation or whatever, 10, 15 years necessarily. There's bit rod and stuff. Discs there. Yeah, there's definitely, definitely not, not ideal, but there, there's other types that may be more optimized for some type of longer term storage, but conventional stuff that we use every day is just not meant for, for the long term. So what happens with these devices is that the physical thing that represents the bit, like the magnetic orientation or the trapped electric charge, the problem with that happens when it drifts or it leaks or it chemically breaks down, it gets damaged by heat or mechanical wear and on and on.

• 54:40Bob Novella?

  There's so many ways that they, that they, so many things that, that impact their lifetime. Eventually the ones and zeros just can't be read well, well enough, not reliably enough. So they just don't last long is the bottom line here. So this new technique uses a material, not just regular glass, it's borosilicate glass. And I, I basically guarantee most of you are, have used it and have it in your kitchen right now. This is a type of glass that has silica and boron trioxide in it. It's hardier than regular gas, especially in glass, especially in high temperature. You may know it as Pyrex or even your, the, um, the glass doors in your oven is made of this stuff.

• 55:21Bob Novella?

  So it's, it's cheap, it's easily available, which is also one of the, the benefits of this material is that it's not something that's a special element that only certain countries even have access to. Um, this is, this stuff is easily created and, and cheap. So now the idea is, the question here is, okay, how do we write to this borosilicate glass? How do we write to it and how do we read from it? Those are the key questions and this is what they've been working on. So to write to it, they use femtosecond lasers, right? Quadrillionth of a second bursts of laser light. femtosecond lasers and they use essentially one of the improvements they made is they use one pulse it's just one pulse for essentially one storage element in in the glass and what

• 56:05Bob Novella?

  the what the laser does is it creates these 3D patterns in the glass and it's it's based on the polarization of the light itself the laser light and and these these 3D structures written into the glass are called voxels and they actually another benefit that they another advance that they recently made is they can take this one laser beam and they could create four independent modulated beams from the one beam and they so they can get a throughput of approximately maybe 66 megabits per second which is not super fast but it's not super slow either it's you know it's it's it's what it is it's not it's not bad and the glass that they're using you they they can use even regular I mean this is like this is not thick glass but

• 56:47Bob Novella?

  there's hundreds of layers that they that they could then put these voxels inside these different layers and so what they end up with with their research is they 4.8 terabytes in a 120 millimeter square two millimeter thick piece of glass so 120 millimeter square piece of glass with 4.8 terabytes that's pretty good that's about 2 million books or it could be 1 million of our first SGU book plus 1 million of our second book skeptics guide to the future but that's kind of silly why would you have so many why would you have so many of the same book but you could if you wanted or it could have 5000 4k movies in this 120 millimeter square piece

• 57:29Bob Novella?

  of piece of glass essentially that's very high density and that that's pretty impressive now reading it this is what it takes to read about it and I'm not even going to go in any detail because it was complicated they're essentially are using for most of these reads they're doing it's an automated microscope that reads each layer they can go to each layer each of the how 100 and how many layers did I say or 100 layers or something it goes to each layer and can read the voxels in each layer and the software then decodes that image that it sees in the glass and it can turn it into into the You know, the the bits that it can then translate. So but it's it's so complicated. It's really and and I'll come back to that that actually because reading it is not something

• 58:14Bob Novella?

  that's not easy, which is kind of an interesting for software that's being archived. But then then they they talked about testing it as well in the paper and they they essentially did accelerated aging tests and they they put it through their paces and they determined, you know, they extrapolated because you can't wait thousands of years to see how long it how stable it is. But their tests show that it should be stable for 10,000 plus years at room to at room temperature and it can survive some nasty environments.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  Didn't it say 10,000 years at 290 degrees Celsius, which means probably a lot longer at room temperature?

• 58:47Bob Novella?

  I read a couple of different things. It was a little confusing, actually, what what they meant. What what Microsoft said on their website was that they were throwing out numbers. They were saying 10,000 to 100,000 years. So let's just let's just go with 10,000 plus years.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  All right, 10,000 plus.

• 59:04Bob Novella?

  Even in, you know, nasty environments. But that's the good point, Steve, is that they also show that this glass is chemically and thermally stable. It's not bothered by by moisture or electromagnetic interference the way lots of conventional media can be. So that's that's a huge, huge bonus here. I mean, this is something. What did they say? A lot of the companies that they interviewed, they said, what kind of storage media do you want? And basically, it's it's characterized by two words benign neglect. They want to be able to put their media on the shelf and just kind of ignore it for for a decade or or more with there's there's no maintenance costs. All of that are just the huge, huge bonuses for this kind of storage. But clearly, though, right, is it? It's obvious. This is archival

• 59:49Bob Novella?

  storage. This is for things like cultural records. I mean, and and that could be almost anything. Movies and when I think cultural records, I'm thinking movies and TV shows, put them all on there.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  The Library of Congress, yeah.

• 1:00:01Bob Novella?

  Library of Congress, scientific data sets, legal archives, so much stuff can go on there.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Wikipedia.

• 1:00:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. This is not something that's going to be for everyday computing, if it even if it even takes off. So you're not going to be seeing this on your desk really at all because it's just like you have you have a femtosecond laser to write this out or do you have these specialized microscopes to to read it? I don't think so.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  But Bob, that could be a good service. Imagine like, hey, you could upload terabytes of data and we will archive it on this crystal, you know, so it'll last for 10,000 years.

• 1:00:35Bob Novella?

  That'd be great. I mean, you could, and the other that and that points to another benefit, Steve, is that once this is, this is like a worm media, write once, read many. Nobody can change that data. Nobody can hack that data. So this is static and this is, that's another benefit of that's what and which is perfect, of course, for archival storage. So one thing, though, is that that was disappointing a little bit to me was that this is, this is not meant for far future civilization to get this and read and learn our culture based on all of this densely stored information. It's good and it's bad. So the good thing is that a future civilization could see these voxels because all it is is really it's advanced, but it's fundamental optics. This is

• 1:01:18Bob Novella?

  rediscoverable if there's like an apocalypse. Eventually, you know, if if human civilization survives, it could rediscover these fundamental laws of optics and they could be able to see these voxels if they find this material. But the bad thing is the other side of that coin is that interpreting those voxels to do that would take, oh my God, it might be impossible. You would need to know things like the the symbol alphabet, the symbol to bit mapping, the error correction methods that are that are being used. So for them to be able to divine or determine how to interpret what those voxels mean would probably be, you know, would require a major endeavor

• 1:02:00Bob Novella?

  beyond anything we would be willing to, I mean, it could take generations to actually understand what they're seeing if if it's even possible.

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  Would it be possible, I wonder, to develop like a sort of key that would make it like designed to make it as easy as possible to then learn the code?

• 1:02:16Bob Novella?

  That's what they would need. They would need some sort of like self describing Rosetta Layer, right? So they could have things like pictograms, they could have math, they could have With instructions and the encoding conventions that that were being used.

• 1:02:29Jay Novella?

  Better than captcha.

• 1:02:30Bob Novella?

  They could also, yeah, they could also have multiple encodings, right? They could have one encoding they can put on there would be simple to decode, but it would be low-density archival, right? And then they could also have another encoding that's high-density, but but very difficult to decode. So they could do that as well. But I love the idea of this this self-describing Rosetta layer. I don't know if anyone would do that, because it's not really designed for for something that would be far future, but it would be something that shouldn't be that hard to include. And also, from what I read, this was interesting. Microsoft said that this research phase for this technology is complete. They're done. They're essentially, it seemed to me, wiping their hands of this. And what they're going to do now is not really develop it further, because, you know, in their opinion, the research is done.

• 1:03:15Bob Novella?

  They want to encourage other organizations to explore turning this research into a practical product. So let's see if anybody takes it up. I think if if there's not much interest now, I think there will be interest in five or 10 years, considering this cliff we're on of, you know, of of data that we're that we're creating so fast and not having anywhere to put it, it's, you know, it could become increasingly important over over the next five or 10 years. So we'll see what happens. But interesting tech either way.

• 1:03:45Jay Novella?

  All right. Thanks, Bob.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  Well, everyone, we're taking a quick break from our show to talk about our ad this week, Aura Frames.

• 1:03:51Jay Novella?

  Guys, Aura Frames, we've been talking about it a lot. It's because we love it. This is a fantastic digital picture frame. It's an amazing present, because who doesn't actually want to see the pictures that they take on their iPhone? And they get locked in there, and you really don't get to see ones from last year, or five years ago, or 10 years ago. It's so easy. I have, I got one for myself. I have it at my desk. And, you know, I just pick all my favorite images, load it up, and now I'm seeing pictures of me and my wife in Italy.

• 1:04:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I love that. It's such a great gift for yourself or for someone you love, partially because you can add a message before it even gets there. It comes in a really lovely gift box. And you can even preload those photos before it ships, so that the gift recipient doesn't have to do any work.

• 1:04:36Speaker 05

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• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, I understand there's been some UFO shenanigans going on.

• 1:05:04Speaker 05

  Well, a little bit, enough to scramble some fighter jets to go up there and take a look at what's going on. Just a few days ago, February 15th, NORAD, which is the North American Aerospace Defense Command, scrambled two F-16 fighter jets from an air base in California after radar detected unidentified objects over Nevada and Northern California. Air traffic controllers in the Oakland Center region had picked up unusual radar tracks. And at least one civilian cargo pilot reported seeing a strange object described as glowing and dimming in the vicinity. The tracks were slow moving and at high altitude.

• 1:05:48Speaker 05

  And because the objects could not immediately be identified, NORAD launches fighters to visually inspect them. They later confirmed that the objects were not extraterrestrial or unknown craft, but were weather balloons. Wait, weather balloons or party balloons? Good question, Bob, but these happen to be weather balloons. That's the news. But I have a couple of questions, and I want to pose a few things to all of you. Who here has heard of AARO? That's A A R O. Sounds very familiar. It does sound familiar. We may have touched on this before. AARO stands for All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, A A R O, which is an official office within the US

• 1:06:33Speaker 05

  Department of Defense, the Pentagon. And it was recently established in 2022 to specifically investigate unidentified anomalous phenomena, UAPs. That's our country's central hub for analyzing UAP sightings by military personnel and provide reports to Congress on such activity. But here's a question, and let's see how close you can get to the answer. And this data comes from A A R O, AARO. 98.

• 1:07:04Speaker 05

  In a, in a 13 month span, basically from May 2023 through June 2024, how many individual UAP reports were logged? In other words, in other words, these are instances that were not duplicated. These were individual instances.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Okay, so if 100 people reported the same thing, it's one event.

• 1:07:26Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. And this is over what, how long is that period of time?

• 1:07:29Speaker 05

  Roughly 13 months, May 23 through part of June 2024.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  You know, I'll stick with my original answer.

• 1:07:37Speaker 05

  You said 98? Anyone else want to venture a guess?

• 1:07:39Cara Santa Maria?

  200?

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  Higher. 99. Higher.

• 1:07:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Higher than 200?

• 1:07:43Speaker 05

  Higher.

• 1:07:43Cara Santa Maria?

  500.

• 1:07:44Speaker 05

  Higher.

• 1:07:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:07:46Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:07:46Cara Santa Maria?

  900.

• 1:07:47Speaker 05

  Not quite. 757.

• 1:07:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Geez, that's crazy.

• 1:07:50Speaker 05

  Roughly two every day for just over a full year. All right, part two of those 757 reports, which were all deemed to have been investigated, how many turned out to be something other than a mundane sighting or object? Other than mundane, how many of those 757?

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  But does that include things they could not identify?

• 1:08:14Speaker 05

  Right, that's the question. Yes, that includes things they could not identify.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  Probably 20.

• 1:08:19Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Zero.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  Zero.

• 1:08:22Speaker 05

  They identified them all. Here's the breakdown. Here's the breakdown. I'm going to give it to you in reverse percentage order from lowest to highest. Of those 757 reports, 2% of them fell under the category of commercial aircraft. 4% fell under the category of satellites, you know, misidentifying satellites as

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:42Speaker 05

  UAPs. 8% birds, 16% drones, and that leaves 70% balloons.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  Balloons.

• 1:08:53Speaker 05

  Balloons are 70% of these things.

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:08:58Speaker 05

  I looked up what CBS had to say about this CBS News.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  Party balloons?

• 1:09:02Speaker 05

  Uh, no, very, there are lots of different kinds of balloons. There's the weather balloons. There are party balloons.

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  Mylar balloons we are, because they look, they look weird. Yeah, because they're like metal.

• 1:09:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna get to that in the kind of the second part of what I'm gonna bring up as far as being able to detect these things. But as of late 2024, Arrow has found zero evidence of extraterrestrial activity or breakthrough technologies in any of their resolved cases. Absolutely no surprise there whatsoever. Now, they're still, they're apparently still crunching the 2025 data, but I'm gonna guess that outcome will be the same. So, they have these kinds of data sets at their disposal. Why can't the military figure out if a UAP is a balloon before having to do things like scramble jets or use any other costly sorts

• 1:09:52Speaker 05

  of assets? Well, it turns out, they actually do. They, they are trying to figure it out ahead of time. But it's not easy. It's not as easy as it seems. Some of the reasons why is that there is, there are inherent limitations in radar technology. There are also limitations in the way they censor the filtering, and they do it intentionally, and I'll explain why in a second. And Steve, as you brought up or suggested, the physical characteristics of balloons make them challenging for our systems to detect. NORAD uses GATES, G-A-T-E-S, to filter out slow-moving or small objects like birds, weather events, and balloons to

• 1:10:36Speaker 05

  avoid overwhelming operators with clutter. That way, they can focus on high-speed threats, missiles, jets, you know, real things that are, that are a problem. The high-altitude balloons are inherently stealthy because they lack those sharp metal edges and engines, resulting in engine signatures, and therefore you get a tiny radar cross-section that with almost no infrared signature. So the physical characteristics of balloons just make them hard for our radars to detect. And then we limit it again because you can't have the clutter for stationary and slow-moving objects that appear to be moving at high speeds when viewed from fast-moving

• 1:11:20Speaker 05

  fighter jets, that leads to misidentification as well. So those are environmental factors. But the other aspect of this is that military sensors are designed for combat missions. They're not optimized for identifying non-traditional aircraft. And when you have these things come up, it necessitates sending a pilot up for visual confirmation. It's the most reliable way of doing it. And I think we can thank maybe the Chinese, in a sense, for our recent spate of scrambling jets to go up to find balloons, right? In 2023, the Chinese spy

• 1:12:00Speaker 05

  balloon incident or incidents. And NORAD therefore adjusted their radar parameters to detect smaller, slower objects, and that leads to an increase in sightings and subsequent scrambles. We had to broaden the framework in which we're detecting these things. And there's definitely a point right there where, boom, the graph goes up, and there are going to be more of these going forward. So thank you, Chinese government. But my question, why can't the Pentagon or NORAD develop a ground-based system that looks for balloons? I thought perhaps that could be simpler or less expensive, less intrusive. But apparently, after doing some number crunching and some research on that, that's not necessarily

• 1:12:44Speaker 05

  the truth here. But at the same time, they are trying to develop better systems that can look for things which would include identifying balloons. But again, it's not without a certain cost. Large-scale space-based as well, satellites, right? Why can't we point our satellites down and try to help with this as well? Well, this is also something that they are working on, but that is also obviously very expensive. But here's the math as far as what it is to, when you compare scrambling jets versus building a system that will detect balloons. You have to go back to 2022. This was before the Chinese balloon intrusions.

• 1:13:24Speaker 05

  The Pentagon received 247 UAP reports and 50% of those were attributed to balloons. If the military scrambled jets for 10% of those cases, okay, 25 times, the annual cost would be about $12.5 million. That assumes a maximum of 500,000 permission. It's, it's usually 300 between, between 300,000 and 500 permission, but call it 500,000 permission. Over 20 years, that's $250 million. But a dedicated radar network for just the US, this isn't even NORAD, which is all of North America, just the United States, to develop it to detect these balloons and other things similar

• 1:14:07Speaker 05

  would cost up to 50 million annually for operations and maintenance. Over 20 years, you're at a billion dollars. So it's, it's about four times as expensive to develop a system that was going to detect those, those balloons. Now NORAD is still doing it and they're, they have incentives. The army is, is involved as well with projects like launching ground-based tethered balloons at strategic points around the United States, Alaska as well to, as an early warning detection system. They're, they're working on that, but it still is an expensive proposition. And until then, until you get something that's going to be more cost effective, right now, the cost effective way is in fact to scramble the jets to go up and see what the balloons are doing. So that's where we are.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  Interesting, but they still haven't found any alien spacecraft.

• 1:14:56Speaker 05

  They have found none.

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  And this makes a zero difference to the true believers because they're like, oh, right, weather balloon. We've heard that one since Roswell, right? I mean, that's almost a cliche. That's because there's a lot of weather balloons up there and they're easy to misidentify.

• 1:15:12Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Evan.

• 1:15:14Speaker 05

  You're welcome.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  Jay, get us up to date on who's that noisy?

• 1:15:17Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, last week I played this noisy.

• 1:15:36Jay Novella?

  Do you guys have any ideas?

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  Well, it had that pattern where it gets increasingly frequent.

• 1:15:42Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  Which suggests some kind of like stone skipping kind of phenomenon, you know what I mean?

• 1:15:48Jay Novella?

  Yes. Yep. You're on something there, Steve.

• 1:15:50Speaker 05

  On water or on ice?

• 1:15:52Jay Novella?

  That's a good question.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  It'd sound like ice if I had to guess.

• 1:15:55Speaker 05

  Oh, maybe it's the skater who fell and tried the quid. Oh, sorry, Bob.

• 1:16:00Jay Novella?

  Okay. Well, a listener named Bradford West wrote in and said, "Chao, Jay. Maybe I have skating on the brain. Thanks to everyone talking about the Olympics, but in this week's Noisy, I hear what may be skates breaking. The other element is the pinging sound similar to a thunder sheet or a long cable being whacked, which I believe is the sound of ice fixing to break. So skating outdoors and maybe on ice. Okay, moving on to the next one. This is from Josh. "I hear wind noise on a mic and metal wire wiping, increasing in frequency. I'm going to go with a power line whipping in the wind." That is incorrect. I will continue here with Evil Eye. You guys may have heard of him.

• 1:16:42Jay Novella?

  He says, "I imagine the sound of curling happening, but recorded from the perspective of the ice." He says, "You hear the sweeping and the stone." That's an interesting guess, but not correct, but there are some elements to all of these that are near it. We have Bart in Ireland, and Bart says, "I'm often sure and equally often wrong, but this time I really think I got it. A stone skinned on frozen ice as the hops get shorter, the sound gets closer, and ice reverberates amazingly, giving the otherworldly sound." So this was your guess, Steve.

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  Basically, yeah.

• 1:17:14Jay Novella?

  Incorrect, but really close. So I do have a winner for this week. The winner's name is Emily. Emily says, "Hey, Jay. First time writer and listener for years. My guess for this week is a golf ball bouncing on a frozen lake." And this indeed is a golf ball, which has been hit by a golf club going out onto the frozen ice and then bouncing and bouncing and bouncing and bouncing and doing that thing that probably, there has to be a scientific term for that.

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:40Jay Novella?

  That increase in speed as the, you know, the space gets smaller and smaller. Let me play it for you again.

• 1:18:02Jay Novella?

  I think that has a, like, the sound of a golf ball and the sound of ice, to me, are very present in there. But, good job, everyone. I got tons of guesses this week. Thank you all for sending me those guesses in. Alright, guys, I have a new noisy for you this week. It was sent in by a listener named Claire. Alright, guys, I have a huge, annoying sound warning for this week. It's a little shrill, so prepare yourself. I warned you, you asked me to warn you, I'm warning you, but it's still fun, so let's listen to it.

• 1:18:46Jay Novella?

  Alright, guys, if you've heard something cool this week, or you want to email me a guess, email me at [email protected]. Steve, I got tons of things to talk about, but I'm gonna do it very quickly. Alright, first, if you like the work that we do and you want to support us, you could become a patron of the SGU. You can go to patreon.com/skepticsguide. Let's face it, the world needs help. The SGU has been here for 20 years. We intend to educate as many people on critical thinking as we can, and you could be a part of that effort, so please consider supporting us. Our new podcast called Political Reality Podcast, hosted by Steve Novella and Andrea Jones Roy. We have launched, we have many

• 1:19:26Jay Novella?

  podcasts out now. This is a video podcast and an audio podcast, whatever you prefer. And then we have lots of tickets for sale. May 29th, we have the Secret SGU Meetup. This is a very low-number, high-exposure event, where you'll have plenty of time to talk to all of us here at the SGU. May 29th, this is happening in Madison, Wisconsin. You can get tickets on our website. We also have an extravaganza that we're doing on May 30th, also in Madison, Wisconsin. Tickets are available on our website. And we will have a Private Show Plus, which will be happening on May 30th. Three shows, all happening in Madison, Wisconsin. Just go to theskepticsguide.org for more details.

• 1:20:08Jay Novella?

  Guys, we are going to be at two conferences in July of this year. One of them is going to be in Sydney, Australia. That's going to be Natacon 2026, also co-hosted by the Australian Skeptics. You can go to skepticon.org.au or nataconcon.com for more information and all the tickets and everything. It's going to be a ton of fun. Dr. Carl will be there. You guys know who he is, right?

• 1:20:38Speaker 05

  Yes. Love Dr. Carl.

• 1:20:41Jay Novella?

  Yeah, he is actually pretty awesome. I really do like him a lot. He's going to be joining us for all of the stuff that we do at Natacon. If you've been to one, you know what I'm talking about. He's going to be onstage doing almost everything with us, if not everything. So please consider joining us there. We're going to be at Saicon 2026. This is June 11th to 14th in Buffalo, New York. And we're also going to be in New Zealand. Go to conference.skeptics.nz. This conference is going to be at the end of July. All the details are on the website. We will be doing a couple of different things at this conference. Basically, the Saturday of that conference, we are going to be delivering all the content. And we will also be there for the Friday night dinner. Just go to the website, see everything, and we hope to see you guys at

• 1:21:26Jay Novella?

  one or all of these events.

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Jay. All right, guys. We have an interesting question. I was going to do this last week, but I wanted Kara to be here for this. This comes from Derek, and he writes, "Hey, y'all. Since there is both a neurologist and a psychologist on the show, I figured you'd be a good place to ask this. If you didn't see the entertainment news, Kanye West recently put out an open letter apologizing for his past behavior and explaining it is a manifestation of untreated bipolar disorder. This opened up a chain of comments on Reddit dismissing it by saying bigotry is learned. It's not a side effect of mental illness. Others have tried to explain that they witnessed people in their own lives slip into destructive chains of thought due to mental illnesses like bipolar disorder. A similar thing happens when it comes

• 1:22:11Speaker 02

  to dementia or drug alcohol intoxication. People say things like alcohol only reveals a person's true thoughts, as if it's..." Some kind of truth serum. People with dementia can suffer dramatic personality changes, including developing bigoted views they never held before, at least openly. I feel like this idea is misguided. My understanding of modern neuropsychology is that we are all awash with intrusive thoughts or flashes of ideas that go against our values. But those with a healthy mind and psyche are able to quash them before they take root, sometimes before we're even aware of them. And yes, while disinhibition can sometimes reveal thoughts we hold true but seek to suppress, I feel like there's a point where it's just plain delusion and not an automatic representation of who we are or what we stand for.

• 1:22:56Speaker 02

  What are your thoughts on this? I imagine the full explanation is complex and situational, and I'd love to hear more. Derek. Kara, you want to get started?

• 1:23:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Sure. And I think I appreciate the thoroughness of Derek's email because I think in some ways he's answering his own questions with some of his examples.

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's why I read the whole thing. I usually don't read that much.

• 1:23:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's, yeah, usually we wouldn't, right, get into all of it. But it is complex and situational. And there is a difference between, let's say, I think Tourette's is a very good example of what he's talking about, where it's an impulse control issue. And there are these kind of unconscious or subconscious tics, right? These, these words, sometimes when people's Tourette's are dominated by tics, sometimes people will say inappropriate things or they'll curse. When people have frontal lobe disorder or frontal lobe damage, very often there's a disinhibition and there will be inappropriate sexual advances or there will be very inappropriate things that are said in conversation.

• 1:23:57Cara Santa Maria?

  And, you know, I think it's really unfair and actually not representative of what we understand about neuroscience or neurobiology or neuropsychology to say, oh, it's that person's true thoughts and feelings.

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's nonsense.

• 1:24:11Cara Santa Maria?

  We are all awash with all sorts of, you know, just things happening in our head. And part of frontal lobe, you know, executive function is suppressing some of them and allowing others to come out. That said, I think that it's much more complex when we talk about somebody who has struggled for many years with bipolar disorder, but has publicly held, you know, overt, let's say racist or sexist or politically expedient, you know, views.

• 1:24:40Cara Santa Maria?

  And after the fact says, well, I was undiagnosed and that's why I, you know, had this kind of consistent thread. I think that's really the telltale sign there is that, yes, there probably were, we could probably point to specific examples in Kanye's behavior that said, that was happening during a manic episode, or that was clearly, probably, directly linked to an experience that had a psychotic experience, maybe that he was having, if he has bipolar one with psychotic features. I don't know his diagnosis. But the consistent thread of specific ideologies and views, I think, does require a little

• 1:25:23Cara Santa Maria?

  bit more investigation because it's somewhere in the middle, right? You can't just say, because I have a mental illness, everything I ever say and do is not actually me.

• 1:25:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:25:37Cara Santa Maria?

  That's completely unfair.

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So I think there's a couple of things we could say about this. So we, it's easy to talk about, I think, and this is super complicated, but relatively easy to talk about disease states, right? Because we know, and what's interesting is that disease states don't just exacerbate your baseline. That's only one type of thing that can happen. We often talk, I don't know if you ever use this term in psychology, but in neurology, we'll ask, we'll talk about the pre-morbid personality.

• 1:26:05Cara Santa Maria?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. What was that person's pre-morbid personality? Because that's our baseline. And then we, then we see how it changed and that gives us insight into what kind of process is going on. And sometimes it completely flips. I'll never forget this one patient, I just, it's a little anecdote. This old guy who was apparently, you know, normal, nice guy. And then he became demented, a certain type of dementia. And he became, in a word, evil. Like, he looked at you like he wanted to rip your head off. Like, with so much drip, you could feel it. It was palpable. It was really interesting. That was all the morbidity. That was not his pre-morbid personality at all.

• 1:26:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, Phineas Gage famously, he had a railroad spike go through his head and all of a sudden he was a jerk.

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Remember? Like, that's like how people were like, ooh, what happened to this guy?

• 1:26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, Kara, he had lots of different things changed. Like, he became super infatuated, or he had an affinity with nature.

• 1:27:02Jay Novella?

  All these different behaviors came out from that.

• 1:27:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because he had a massive brain injury and it changed his personality.

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  But the question is, in the non-pathological people, you know, at the other end of the spectrum, like, how much are people really responsible for their neurology, right? We all have, we're born with personalities, we're born with our, we're given our brain. We don't, you know, create our brain. And there, we've had people on the show and there is definitely a movement, the naturalism movement, that says that we are not at all responsible for our behavior from the perspective that we don't really have free will, you know, that we are just playing out the brain we were born with, you know, cause and effect.

• 1:27:46Cara Santa Maria?

  That's such an extreme view.

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  I, as I said, that is the extreme view. I do not take that view. I think even if you have a kind of a philosophical point to make, I get it, but it, we still have to act as if we make decisions and we have to be held responsible to those decisions.

• 1:28:03Cara Santa Maria?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  And so.

• 1:28:04Cara Santa Maria?

  And the other, and I think there's, there's an extreme on the other side of that argument too, which I don't like, which is that, so you've got, on the one hand, there's this kind of core personality, what we would say in psychology is a, is a trait versus a state. But I also do believe that those things are, I don't think they're fixed, first of all, but even beyond what, how fixed they are, they are heavily influenced by all sorts of structural and cultural and experiential things in life. I think that we can, we can have both things be true at the same time. We are products of our environments and we also are responsible for our actions.

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

  Exactly. And, and the degree to which our personality, our behavior, our thoughts, whatever, our cultural versus we've, to some extent, taken control of our own parenting, of our own development and just a slave to our neurology or whatever, it's a continuum. And it's a multifaceted continuum. You have multiple layers interacting in complicated ways. And so, yeah, I get, I don't think you could make one blanket statement about everybody. And I know you agree with that, that you have to sort of individually look at people. If you're within, you know, just to use a phrase, like if you're within two standard deviations of a typical, like neurotypical person, you basically have to be held responsible for the decisions that you make, even if you have more challenges than somebody else.

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  You may have a little bit less inhibition, or a little bit more anger, or whatever it is, you're still held-

• 1:29:37Cara Santa Maria?

  But don't get me wrong, like severe bipolar disorder, you may be two standard deviations-

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And even though it may seem like racism is something that is learned, and it's just, you know what I mean, it absolutely can be a neurological disorder. You know, people can become paranoid and have feelings of persecution, which absolutely could play into racist narratives.

• 1:30:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, bipolar has, for some people who have bipolar one disorder, some people have psychotic features. I mean, that's a diagnosable portion of the disorder.

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  And that's a continuum too, right? I mean, you could have, so what if you're just a little psychotic? I mean, at what point, at what point are you like not responsible for your actions? So, and, you know, philosophically, medically, we could talk about this and all the nuance of it. Legally, is interesting. I think, you know, my understanding is that legally, you, they sort of recognize the continuum. It's like-

• 1:30:37Cara Santa Maria?

  They do. And it's a capacity question, right?

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there's mitigating factors. There's sort of the reasonable person standard, and then there were their mitigating factors. Is this the kind of situation where, oh, well, okay, you were struggling with bipolar disorder? That's a mitigating factor. Does it completely absolve you of responsibility? No. But we'll consider it in sentencing, or whatever, you know?

• 1:30:58Cara Santa Maria?

  And here's the thing that a lot of people don't recognize about capacity, because capacity is something I deal with a lot at the hospital, because I'm a psychologist at a hospital. Capacity is not fixed. Capacity can change day to day, and hour to hour.

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  You could have a bad day.

• 1:31:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you could have, you know, you could be experiencing acute psychosis. You could be having a moment, you could be having whatever. And so the thing is, when we talk about, and I know that the question was specific about Kanye, but like, you know, we can apply it to general things. My view, very often with mental illness, is to take a longer view and say, well, how long was there consistent behavior occurring?

• 1:31:40Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:41Cara Santa Maria?

  How much fluctuation in that behavior occurred? And how many opportunities did this individual have to seek treatment?

• 1:31:48Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Now, there is a feature of bipolar for some individuals, where when you are manic, you by definition don't want treatment.

• 1:31:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Because you feel really, really good. And it's like, one of the diagnoses where it's kind of harder sometimes to help people.

• 1:32:04Speaker 02

  Subvert some treatment.

• 1:32:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly. But that said, we're not talking about a, a single acute event or a handful of things that he did. We're talking about something that was consistent over, I mean, was it years?

• 1:32:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Again, I'm not willing, I don't like to diagnose celebrities long distance.

• 1:32:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, you don't know.

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  I know you're not doing that. Yeah. So we have to emphasize, we don't know. There's so many details of, there's so many questions I would want to ask and to know to really have a judgment about this individual. It's why I would want to just keep our comments broad, just in general. This is like, in theory, the bottom line is, I think, it's complicated, it applies to everybody, we're all on multiple spectrums, and you have to individualize decisions. Copability, like responsibility, is a complicated question.

• 1:32:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  Philosophically, ethically, legally, neurologically, psychologically, it's complicated. Don't, but don't just resist any kind of moralizing, simplistic, judgmental opinion, like, people are, should be responsible and it's no excuse, you know, it's not that simple.

• 1:33:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Or like, because that person was drunk, everything they, they said was what they really felt.

• 1:33:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't, yeah, don't think anything simplistic like that.

• 1:33:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Disinhibition doesn't mean, you know, excavating true feeling.

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:16Cara Santa Maria?

  It can mean that, but I wouldn't assume that that's what it means. There are a lot of things that happen in all of our brains that we would not want to allow other people to access.

• 1:33:27Speaker 02

  Right. Right.

• 1:33:28Cara Santa Maria?

  And

• 1:33:28Speaker 02

  That is true.

• 1:33:29Cara Santa Maria?

  And the responsibility comes in that inhibit, in, you know, the inhibiting portion. And those of us have, I think, various level of skill in that area.

• 1:33:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's not, and it's not all just, oh, that was there and it was inhibited and now it's disinhibited. Like, again, I had another patient who had a psychiatric illness, I think it was bipolar disorder. When she was manic, she became hypersexual, like she was

• 1:33:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's not like it was latent.

• 1:33:54Speaker 02

  Reducing all the resonance, like, you know, yeah, like,

• 1:33:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, that doesn't mean she was, it was latent, that she was always that way and it was inhibited.

• 1:34:00Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I mean, she was disinhibited in that moment, but the thing that she was not inhibiting was not something that's always in the background.

• 1:34:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. But it was also that, it was that hypersexuality was being positively created by the disease, not just disinhibited.

• 1:34:15Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's, that's something that we always take into consideration during diagnostics. It's, you know, part of the DSM is actually, is there a physiologic or a, even a, you know, syndrome that's harder to tease out that we know is causal of certain types of behavior?

• 1:34:30Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 1:34:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:32Speaker 02

  All right, we could talk about this for hours, obviously, but it's

• 1:34:34Cara Santa Maria?

  That's fascinating.

• 1:34:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting. A quick name out logical fallacy, really gonna make this quick. This also comes, is a question, this comes from Hendrick, who writes, "I was playing a game of cribbage with my sister and a situation arose where the rules were unclear and a discussion broke out about whether or not I had legally scored two points. The details are unimportant, but the discussion took an interesting turn and I'm wondering about which particular fallacy was at play." He says, "I laid out my arguments, then my sister laid out hers, then several bystanders contributed opinions. The crux of the discussion came when my mother declared that if roles were reversed, I would be arguing for the other side. I admitted that, yes, I was indeed playing lawyer. Because of my admission, the jury declared that my reasoning invalid and ruled in my sister's favor."

• 1:35:18Speaker 02

  So he wants to know if there's any logical fallacy at play there. What do you guys think?

• 1:35:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, this is a tough one because I, I think yes, but I also think that he is committing a fallacy fallacy.

• 1:35:30Speaker 02

  Well, I think that's the fallacy.

• 1:35:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay. All right, we're on the same page there. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, you hit it. I think that's what, that's what the whole thing is. It's because you were engaged in motivated reasoning, your argument is incorrect. But that is not true. You, you, you could be motivated to have the correct opinion about something, right? So both sides, I mean, we assume in this case that both people were defending, were playing lawyer and defending their position. Again, the, the, these particular details are not important for the, for the illustration. But well, you know, it's possible that neither of them were correct. There's no objective answer, or one was right and the other was wrong. Whatever, that's determined by the specific details of the case, not the motivations of the person making the point.

• 1:36:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And just because you commit an informal logical fallacy, that doesn't mean that you have flawed logic. And I think we have to remember that too.

• 1:36:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:26Cara Santa Maria?

  They're informal for that reason.

• 1:36:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's critical there.

• 1:36:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. Somebody else sent us an email saying that their professor or somebody had made the case that you shouldn't even teach the informal logical fallacy because they, fallacies because they do more harm than good. I disagree, obviously.

• 1:36:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I disagree with that too.

• 1:36:42Speaker 02

  But it was because of the fallacy fallacy, right? It's because that's too many people use them as the fallacy fallacy, which basically means dismissing an argument because you can frame it as a fallacy.

• 1:36:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, it just leaves out all the gray air. It's like, I think the most common thing I say in therapy with my patients is, you know, a behavior is helpful until it's not. A thing is good until it's not. And I think you could say the same thing about discussing informal logical fallacies. Like, it can be really helpful to, to really dig deep into the logic of your arguments.

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:12Cara Santa Maria?

  But once you become so obsessed with only having logical arguments and you leave, I don't know, empathy and, you know, like, all of these other features out of the conversation, that's not healthy anymore.

• 1:37:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, and not only that, and that what, the way I approach the fallacy fallacy problem is to recommend, listen, you should be using your understanding of the informal logical fallacies to police your own thinking and your own arguments.

• 1:37:36Speaker 05

  Not as a cudgel against someone else.

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  Right, not as a weapon against somebody else. Because as soon as it becomes a weapon, then you're committing a fallacy, basically.

• 1:37:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, agree.

• 1:37:43Speaker 05

  It's not what it's for. Hendrick, if you're listening, the next time you're playing cribbage. I happen to be a passionate cribbage player. Just ask me what about the rule. I'll help you decide whether there was a legal two points or not.

• 1:37:58Speaker 02

  That's right. Appeal to authority. You could substitute the appeal to authority for the.

• 1:38:04Speaker 02

  All right, let's move on with science or fiction.

• 1:38:09Speaker 07

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:38:19Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics, tell me which one is the fake. It's a sort of a theme. These are all just regular news items, but they're kind of all within the biological realm, if you will. You guys ready?

• 1:38:36Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:38:38Speaker 02

  All right, here we go. Item number one, a new study finds that living at high altitude significantly reduces the risk for diabetes. All right, number two, researchers demonstrate that mouse derived brain organoids are able to learn and remember tasks often used to train AI using reinforcement learning. And item number three, a recent review of research finds that animal behavior such as vigilance and foraging has a variable response to interaction with humans with fear driven behavior increasing, changing little or even decreasing. That's obviously in different situations, right? Jay, go first.

• 1:39:20Jay Novella?

  All right.

• 1:39:21Speaker 02

  Have you guys noticed, by the way, that I'm doing a strict rotation this year?

• 1:39:25Jay Novella?

  No, I haven't.

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

  I haven't actually. Interesting.

• 1:39:27Speaker 05

  Thank you, Steve.

• 1:39:29Jay Novella?

  Steve, the first one about the living at high altitude will reduce the risk for diabetes. You know, at first blush, you know, I mean, yeah, if you've ever been to high altitude, I mean, what are you talking like Colorado, like 4,000, 5,000 feet?

• 1:39:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty high.

• 1:39:45Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's pretty high. Yeah, I mean, there are physiological changes without a doubt. Um, you know, most of them, your body can get used to and everything. So I'm trying to think like, what would be the mechanism here to affect diabetes, which essentially is blood sugar management? What would be that? What would that pressure do or lack of pressure do? God, that's cool though. I mean, it's intriguing. I don't know. I just don't know about that one. Let me switch to the other two, see if I have any strong opinions. All right. So the second one about the researchers that demonstrate the mouse-derived brain organoids. They're able to learn and remember tasks often used to train AI. So Steve, how are they training these organoids?

• 1:40:28Speaker 02

  With reinforcement learning.

• 1:40:29Jay Novella?

  But I mean, clarify what an organoid is, right? It's a mouse-derived brain organoid. It's just a piece of brain?

• 1:40:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not a piece. Well, it's not really a piece of brain. They're not, they're not taking a piece out of a mouse brain. They're using derived stem cells from a mouse, turning them into neurons and then growing some brain cells with it to create not a brain, but like a clump of cells that have some properties of a brain, right?

• 1:40:58Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:40:59Speaker 02

  As, as we've talked about this before on the show, it's kind of a way, as another, as a research tool. So you could study how not just a not, it's somewhere between a single neuron and a brain, right? It's a clump of neurons interacting with each other. So we could ask questions about those interactions. And this is one, like, can that actually function? Can it process information and learn to do stuff, right?

• 1:41:22Jay Novella?

  So in your professional opinion, Steve, is this the beginning of like, you know, these brains taking over the world or not?

• 1:41:29Speaker 02

  We'll talk about it after you give me your answer to the science fiction.

• 1:41:32Jay Novella?

  All right. I think this one is science. You know, I mean, brain cells, you know, neurons are incredibly refined cells that do, that do incredible lift as far as I'm concerned. They're amazing. I would not put this past any kind of mammalian brain cells. So that one is definitely science to me. The third one is a recent review of research about animal behavior. And you're saying vigilance and foraging has a variable response to interactions with humans with fear-driven behavior increasing, changing little, or even decreasing. Okay.

• 1:42:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so again, to clarify, because there's a lot of information to put into one sentence, but this is a review of 30 years of research. And they were looking at lots of different types of interactions with humans. And in some situations, animals were more fearful and some that didn't see much of a difference. And in other situations, they were even less fearful.

• 1:42:27Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so like, you know, for example, if a human has a piece of steak in their hands that they're willing to give up, I would imagine that a lot of animals would be pretty damn psyched about that. I know my dog is, you know?

• 1:42:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is wild animals.

• 1:42:42Jay Novella?

  Even more, they, to them, it's even better, you know? Okay, I mean, it's between the first one, you know, about the, you know, about the diabetes and altitude and this one. This one just seems like there's just so many variables in here that it, you know, it's hard to summarize it in one sentence and really get my head wrapped around it enough to, to talk about it. But I would think, sure, there's variability. Of course, there would be variability. Therefore, the first one about the diabetes and altitude has to be the fiction.

• 1:43:13Speaker 02

  Okay, Evan?

• 1:43:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm having a hard time figuring out why high altitude would significantly reduce the risk of diabetes, unless significantly is the key word here. Statistically significant, I imagine, is what we're talking about here. Some measure that is other than noise. But I don't know why. I can't figure out why that would be the case. Altitude has an impact on the blood somehow? Is that right? Yeah, doesn't it? I don't know. All right, next one. The, uh, the brainish thing, the organoids able to learn and remember tasks. Oh, gosh, I don't, I don't, mouse derived.

• 1:43:59Speaker 05

  I don't know. I don't know. Can they get it to do this? A clump of cells turn it into something that is... Able, then you can train AI on it. I don't know, maybe it's just a training tool. Boy, that could be the case because it's just kind of like a training pathway and in effect, just a blueprint, as it were, maybe.

• 1:44:24Speaker 02

  Yes, to clarify, they weren't using this to train AI.

• 1:44:28Speaker 05

  Right, right, right.

• 1:44:29Speaker 02

  They were using similar methods that are used to train AI. They basically treated the organoid as an AI to see if it actually could also, had the reinforcement learning would also work on the organoid.

• 1:44:40Speaker 05

  I don't know. That's, that's a, that seems far fetched. I'm having a hard time. I'm having a hard time with that one. I think of the three. The last one about, yeah, there's a lot of words here and about the animal behavior, beer driven behavior, increasing, changing little or even decreasing. There is a variable response. That's the point. Well, yeah, I'm having, I'm not having as big a problem with this one. It's the, it's the brain organoids one that I'm having the trouble with. And it's probably, I admit, it's my own limit, limits in understanding exactly how an organoid like this could really does function.

• 1:45:23Speaker 05

  Hmm. But I'm just having a feeling that this one's going to be the fiction. Having a very hard time wrapping my own organoid around it. So I'll say, I'll just say it's the fiction.

• 1:45:32Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara.

• 1:45:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, this one's tough because I feel like they could all be science. Like that's, it's, there's not one thing where I'm like, that doesn't seem real. They all just seem like, sure, why not? So I don't really understand the mechanism with the diabetes risk, but obviously it's going to have something to do with either insulin production or blood sugar. And high altitude, you know, lower is lower oxygen, but that would affect a lot in your blood. So I could see there's some weird relationship with blood sugar there. But I can't for the life of me like hypothesize what that what that kind of connection is, except that you're saying it reduces the risk of diabetes. So somehow

• 1:46:13Cara Santa Maria?

  low oxygen environments maybe reduce blood sugar or increase insulin, which downstream would reduce blood sugar. Let's see. And then the mouse derived brain organoids, like this one, I think, requires more. I feel like this one is the vaguest of them, and that's why it's also bothering me. Like, they are able to learn and remember tasks. Well, an organoid can't really do anything. It's just processing information like you're Exactly. There has to be some sort of output that is being measured, that's like hooked into it. They're using it as if it was a circuit, you know, as if it were. Yeah. And that makes sense, right? So if the organoid is fed information, and then

• 1:46:55Cara Santa Maria?

  there's some sort of output that is measured, like we used to do MEA research, and we would have these little cell, like monolayer cell cultures, and we could literally just read the electrical activity of them. So we add a drug, or we change the environment, and the electrical activity changes. And then we could draw inferences on what was happening based on, you know, are they firing more frequently? Are they firing? Are they firing in unison? And so I could see doing something like that and actually using enforcement learning. It doesn't seem far fetched at all to me. It's the whole, like, using the same training model as an AI. I don't even see why that matters. It's like, okay, just

• 1:47:39Cara Santa Maria?

  do enforcement learning. Like, you don't need AI for that. And also, organoid research is still pretty new. Like, a lot of what we've looked at with organoids historically has been like, I think, like self-assembly stuff. Like, what do they naturally do? I'm not sure how much we can use them as circuits yet, or we can use them as sort of like, like detectors on chips, for example. And then the last one is this animal behavior, such as vigilance and foraging. Okay, so either like perking up their ears and being like, ugh, don't come at me, or I'm comfortable enough to eat, or to pick berries. Yeah. So that has a variable response, with fear-driven behavior increasing, changing little, or even

• 1:48:21Cara Santa Maria?

  decreasing. Yeah, of course, because it's going to be variable to how the people are, like Jay said. If you're shooting at them, I think they're gonna be afraid. But like, we, we manage to domesticate dogs. Like, I don't see why a study wouldn't show that raccoons and bears are not as afraid of people, or coyotes, for example, than animals that we hunt and kill. So that one seems reasonable to me, too. So I think, honestly, they could all be science, but the one I just don't, I feel like something's missing, is the organoid one as well. So I'll go with them, Evan. But this one's tough, Steve.

• 1:48:59Speaker 02

  Okay, and Bob?

• 1:49:00Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's tough. And I, as everyone else, I can't see the connection between the altitude and risk of debt for diabetes as well. I can barely even speculate on what that could be. I'm thinking maybe you want us to, push us in that direction, potentially. Who the hell knows, though? The, the organoid one, the problem I have with that is that, I mean, a mouse can learn and remember tasks. So you're saying that this organoid can do some of the most sophisticated behavior that rats already do? That makes me a little bit skeptical. And then the, the third one. Steve, was this, um, the interactions change with the same animal with different people

• 1:49:44Bob Novella?

  or different animals?

• 1:49:46Speaker 02

  No, if you're looking at how-

• 1:49:47Bob Novella?

  With the same person.

• 1:49:48Speaker 02

  How are animals in this area behaving? And what kind of interactions do they have with humans? Right? That's basically the kind of question they're asking.

• 1:49:57Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, that, that's not bothering me nearly as much as the organoid one. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with, is it just me and Kara then?

• 1:50:04Speaker 02

  And Evan.

• 1:50:05Bob Novella?

  Evan's an organoid. And Evan, yes, the three of us, yeah. I'm gonna have to go with them and say that that's fiction. That one's rubbing me the wrong way, a little bit. I mean, still wouldn't surprise me either way, but that's my best shot there here.

• 1:50:16Speaker 02

  All right, so you guys all agree on the third one, so we'll start there. A recent review of research finds that animal behavior, such as vigilance and foraging, has a variable response to interaction with humans, with fear-driven behavior increasing, changing little, or even decreasing. So the question was- Is, you know, humans are basically considered the top super predator of

• 1:50:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Apex predator. Yeah, we are threatening.

• 1:50:39Speaker 02

  We are threatening and generally wildlife likes to keep a wide berth away from humanity. So the researchers were interested to review the past 30 years of research to see what is the actual data say about wild animal behavior and specific behaviors like vigilance and foraging, like as exactly you said, are they like constantly worried and looking over their shoulder and perking up? Or do they feel comfortable enough that they could feed? Because those two things do have like an inverse relationship. And that's the downside of hyper vigilance in animals that they have less time to forage, right? Adaptively, evolutionary pressures would want them to have exactly as much vigilance as they need, but no more.

• 1:51:24Speaker 02

  Right? Does that make sense? Because there's a cost.

• 1:51:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 1:51:26Speaker 02

  There's a cost to that vigilance. All right. So what they found was that the effect of interactions with humans was highly variable. This one is science. Yeah. So the, and Carrie, you actually, you were very good. You hit upon it. If in areas where there's hunting, their fear driven behavior goes way up.

• 1:51:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course. Smart. Gunshots, dead animals.

• 1:51:52Speaker 02

  In other areas where there wasn't direct hunting going on, they didn't detect any, significant change. But in some locations, there, wild animals felt more comfortable as a result of their overlap with humans. And why do you think that is?

• 1:52:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, they're like, we change a lot.

• 1:52:12Bob Novella?

  Experience, like getting food and stuff?

• 1:52:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we think it's probably either like food being nearby or like the, the way that we changed the landscape affected them positively.

• 1:52:23Speaker 02

  So the way that we changed the landscape is one, because like we clear areas that then become good for foraging, right? It's like near roads, for example.

• 1:52:33Bob Novella?

  And they tie that to people?

• 1:52:35Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, like we

• 1:52:37Cara Santa Maria?

  We're the ones clearing those areas.

• 1:52:38Speaker 02

  We clear, we clear those areas and then animals in those. But so that, so like being near roads is considered interactions with humans. It's more, they counted that as passive, as a passive interaction.

• 1:52:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Animals will take paths in a national park. They will take a footpath that was made by humans because it's Easier to walk along a footpath.

• 1:52:58Speaker 02

  Why we need more of those animal bridges and tunnels.

• 1:53:01Cara Santa Maria?

  A wildlife crossing.

• 1:53:01Speaker 02

  But here's a big one. A big one is where there are humans, there are far fewer predators. And so.

• 1:53:08Cara Santa Maria?

  That makes sense.

• 1:53:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. We scare away the bad things. The predators away.

• 1:53:13Cara Santa Maria?

  And yeah.

• 1:53:13Speaker 02

  So they like hanging out in human areas because they could, they could forage and be comfortable. They don't have to worry about as many predators. So that was interesting. I guess we'll take the, we'll keep going backwards. Uh, number two researchers demonstrate that mouse derived brain organoids are able to learn and remember tasks often used to train AI. Using reinforcement learning, uh, Evan, Kara and Bob, you think this one is the fiction? Jay, you think this one is science? I give you a little bit more detail before I do the reveal. Cause if there was a study, obviously the title of the study is goal directed learning in cortical organoids. And the specific task that they used was the cart pole task. So basically the cart pole, imagine you have a cart like on a rail.

• 1:53:58Speaker 02

  And there's a pole, you're balancing a pole in the middle and you have to move the cart back and forth to keep the pole balanced. That's it. That's the task and, and programmers use that to, to, as to train AI with reinforcement learning. So they just said, all right, let's just do the same thing, but with this clump of cells and see if it works. And it was able to learn the task, but it couldn't remember the task. So this is the fiction. Oh, I couldn't remember. Oh, and remember is the key here. Remember was the key here.

• 1:54:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Think about that.

• 1:54:29Speaker 02

  Oh, I missed, I missed remember. It does work as a circuit, but it has no mechanism by which it could remember. You know, so after 45 minutes, whatever training it did completely fades away. There's no long-term memory. Uh, yeah, that was the key in this one. I almost flipped two and three in terms of which one was the fiction, but I thought that would be work. All right. And then that means that a new study finds that living at high altitude significantly reduces the risk for diabetes is science. And this study was, was not the first one to show this. This has actually been known for a long time. It did, um, Support that conclusion. It was, but this study was trying to ask why it reduces the risk for diabetes. You guys all

• 1:55:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Good, because that's what we all want to know.

• 1:55:14Speaker 02

  They all keyed in on that. Yeah. Which of course is like, it doesn't, there's no intuitive answer to that. They did find an answer. And I'll tell you, Kara, you came the closest. Obviously, you're the biologist in the group, so you know how to think about these sorts of things. It does have to do with oxygen.

• 1:55:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, okay.

• 1:55:32Speaker 02

  And it has

• 1:55:32Cara Santa Maria?

  It has to do with blood sugar?

• 1:55:33Speaker 02

  And it has to do with blood sugar.

• 1:55:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay. How though?

• 1:55:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, how? So what they found

• 1:55:38Bob Novella?

  That's the question.

• 1:55:39Speaker 02

  What they found is that in low oxygen environments, that red blood cells absorb blood sugar because it helps them deliver oxygen more efficiently.

• 1:55:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:55:52Speaker 02

  And so it becomes a significant glucose sink when otherwise they are not a significant glucose sink. So it lowers blood sugar, which reduces the risk, you know, the strain on insulin and insulin resistance, and it reduces the risk of diabetes. So

• 1:56:08Cara Santa Maria?

  But it doesn't negatively affect the red blood cells, them carrying that excess sugar around?

• 1:56:12Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:56:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's really cool. Yeah, I guess because you poop out your red blood cells a lot, don't you?

• 1:56:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, they only live for like, whatever, 120 days or something anyway.

• 1:56:19Cara Santa Maria?

  That makes sense.

• 1:56:20Bob Novella?

  They don't even have a damn nucleus.

• 1:56:22Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:56:23Cara Santa Maria?

  But they're good at carrying sugar. That's cool. They're still cells?

• 1:56:26Speaker 02

  The people were really puzzled by this. Like, where's the, what's happening here? That why is, why is altitude doing this? They just had no idea that red cells could become a significant glucose sink. And just happens, it's just a side effect. They're doing it for the oxygen delivery. It's just a side effect that it lowers blood sugar.

• 1:56:42Cara Santa Maria?

  I wonder if that could be like, a treatment for diabetes? Yeah, how significant is this?

• 1:56:47Bob Novella?

  Who knows? Go live on a mountain.

• 1:56:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Or not just that, just, just some sort of like oxygen reduction.

• 1:56:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's clinically significant. I mean, how else you want to characterize it? It could be a treatment, anything that would lower blood sugar to this degree, you know, could

• 1:57:01Cara Santa Maria?

  That's cool.

• 1:57:02Speaker 02

  Could be another option. I don't know. Yeah, but I don't think you'd want to make people hypoxic to do it.

• 1:57:08Cara Santa Maria?

  No, you'd want, yeah, it would need to be mildly.

• 1:57:11Speaker 02

  But if you could find a way to leverage this mechanism without the hypoxia, maybe that there's a drug target in there or something. I don't know. It's interesting to think about. Yeah, I thought that was really fascinating.

• 1:57:22Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that is cool.

• 1:57:23Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:57:26Speaker 05

  Astrology is a disease, not a science.

• 1:57:29Speaker 02

  Cat.

• 1:57:30Speaker 05

  It is a tree under the shadow of which all sorts of superstitions thrive. Only fools and charlatans lend value to it. And that was written by Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon Maimonides, who was born in 1138, died in 1204. So 12th century philosopher, jurist and physician of the Middle Ages, who also authored 10 influential medical works covering topics like asthma, diabetes and hygiene. He was considered a practitioner of the natural sciences, who championed empirical observation over blind reliance on ancient authority. Wow, he must have been a standout in his time.

• 1:58:15Bob Novella?

  What did he say about diabetes and living it out?

• 1:58:19Speaker 05

  Right, yeah, no kidding. How about that? I didn't even know Steve was gonna come up with a diabetes topic tonight.

• 1:58:25Speaker 02

  But it is always fascinating to read bits of wisdom from people from a thousand, 2,000 years ago. It's like, wow, that's relevant today. Yeah. The thing is, the ancient philosophers did sort out most of the basic stuff. You know what I mean? Like, everything worth thinking about, they pretty much did that thousand. They knew what atoms were.

• 1:58:45Cara Santa Maria?

  They just didn't know the mechanisms.

• 1:58:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:58:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, the roots of most of what we might consider modern enlightened ideas, whatever our philosophy, goes way back to basically the first time people started thinking about things systematically, you know?

• 1:59:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:59:03Speaker 02

  All right, well, thank you guys for joining me this week.

• 1:59:06Bob Novella?

  Sure, man.

• 1:59:07Speaker 05

  Thank you, Steve.

• 1:59:08Speaker 02

  You're welcome. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 1:59:16Speaker 02

  Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to [email protected]. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/skepticsguide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

• 1:59:54Speaker 08

  What's that?

• 1:59:55Speaker 00

  My fresh detector.

• 1:59:56Speaker 08

  Uh, your what?

• 1:59:57Speaker 00

  There it is.

• 1:59:58Speaker 08

  What is it detecting?

• 2:00:00Speaker 00

  Fresh produce, fresh meat.

• 2:00:03Speaker 08

  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 2:00:08Speaker 00

  Apparently, we celebrate.

• 2:00:10Speaker 09

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices. When your fresh detector is going off, head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.