The Skeptics Guide #1072 - Jan 24 2026

What's the Word: Culture; News Items: Increasing Life Expectancy, AI 2027, Deep Reading, Spray on Wound Treatment, Monkeys and AI; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Global Warming Falsifiable; 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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• 0:57Speaker 01

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

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, January 22, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Cara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella.

• 1:16Jay Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  And Evan Bernstein.

• 1:18Speaker 04

  Good afternoon, everyone.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  So Jay, any update on the moon-landing hoax conspiracy Connecticut middle school teacher?

• 1:25Jay Novella?

  Well, I did have a, you know, like a 45-minute discussion with the principal and my wife. This was like a big, I don't know, it was a big indicator, I guess, the way I was looking at it, like what was the attitude going to be? What was the, you know, what was being communicated? I'd say in general, it went, it went very well. You have to understand, there's a lot of HR type of communicating involved in meetings like this because, of course, the principal is a very high-level employee that works for the town. So I didn't expect her to be off the cuff and be like, you know, having big reactions to things and all that. But it was very, very plainly stated that they're taking it very seriously, like they're, they are aware of the weight and gravity.

• 2:10Jay Novella?

  ...of the situation, you know, I made sure that we discussed the idea of the misinformation being corrected. And then I offered, um, you know, my, my services and I included mentioning Steven on that, like, you know, I have resources that can come in, you know, we were very well acquainted talking to children and that we could give, we could, you know, we could make a correction for the entire class all at once, if you want, you know, be very, very easy thing to do and it'd be very entertaining for the kids, blah, blah, blah. She didn't dismiss it, you know, but who knows what if they actually took that seriously. And, you know, I think overall, you know, they, it was communicated that she really couldn't talk about the, the individual and like what their specific outcome might be, you know, like what would the town actually do?

• 2:55Jay Novella?

  They didn't want to get into that because I guess there's privacy, things and all that. And I, you know, and I just said, look, well, look, in general, you know, we just want to know, we want to know what the ultimate outcome is. We don't need details, like for example, if there was going to be any changes to who, of course, who my daughter's teacher is, or if she's not going to be in that class anymore, or ultimately if the person loses their job, I of course want to know about that. I'm not looking at it as just this class, right? It's about what happened last week, what happened two months ago, what happened last year, like where, how deep does this go? And that was another point that we had brought up was, you know, this is literally, you know, just a sign of, of what the potentiality could be here, which could be that this is

• 3:37Jay Novella?

  a thing that's been going on for years, like, you know, and how do we even research that and try to find out? So I think the next step is going to be like, we'll probably hear back in a week or so, you know, hopefully by next time we record, but if not, probably the time after that. You know, I fully intend on, on having follow-up meetings and asking questions like, okay, you know, my, my daughter has told me that no correction has been made to this information and it's been three weeks now. I really think that something needs to happen now, you know, like why wait? Because the longer that goes on, you know, the more damage that, you know, this type of stuff could do to the kids without them even knowing it. It could skew, you know, their perception on things.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:18Jay Novella?

  And, you know, I've talked to my daughter, when she gets home, you know, I'm like, how'd it go in school today, blah, blah, blah, you know, one thing happened like the, the day after. This whole thing went down and the the teacher involved was actually talked to by the principal. This teacher sent us an email saying that Olivia had a behavior problem in class. And my wife and I were like, really? Like, this is what you're doing? I know that you know, and you know that I know, that this thing happened, right? You know, the person knows that we pushed back, knows how we pushed back, and and they think that they're gonna send us an email like dinging my my 10-year-old for a behavior problem in a class like she's she's doesn't have behavior problems in class.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  It was for for what, in my opinion, was completely normal fifth-grade behavior. Like, he's just singling her out now to try to trump up some kind of case against her, which is Yikes. so irresponsible for a teacher to do, to take it out on a student. Absolutely. Take out his problem, basically. Totally wrong. The vast majority of our listeners, I think, totally get how serious this is and are, you know, very interested in how this plays out. You always get some outlier emails. One guy thought that we were bullying this teacher, which I think is absurd.

• 5:30Jay Novella?

  What?

• 5:30Speaker 02

  First of all, we've done nothing, but first we went to him directly. I've seen, again, I'm saying the the royal we here, that we went to him directly to give him the first opportunity to clarify his position and what happened, and we're going based off of what he exactly wrote in his email. He said, "The moon landing is provably false. It's a scientific fact that it's impossible."

• 5:57Jay Novella?

  It's been proven. It's been proven.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  It's been proven, and that he discussed it in class. So we confirmed sort of the two main elements, what he believes and that he taught that to his students in class. And, you know, again, what we're looking for is just three things. Like, one is, we need to correct this misinformation to whichever student was exposed to it. That's a no-brainer.

• 6:18Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  We need to make sure this doesn't happen again.

• 6:22Jay Novella?

  And we want $1 million.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  And we want $1 million, and we need to evaluate, this is, I think, a legitimate reason to evaluate this teacher's competence as a science teacher. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean, again, I'm not Thinking, oh, he should be immediately fired or whatever, blah, blah, blah. It's more like, sure, if he, you know, and again, it's always a good idea to give people an opportunity to correct whatever the error is. Fine. If, if he will readdress this issue and, and talk with people or whatever, be educated, be reeducated to, to, to understand why this conspiracy is pseudo-scientific while conspiracy theory, theories in general are problematic, to improve his understanding. And it's genuine and he achieves that.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  I mean, okay, I would, you know, and then be monitored to make sure that that lesson stuck. That's fine. But if he's going to dig in his heels on this, I think that's pretty incompatible with being a science teacher.

• 7:20Jay Novella?

  I feel so obligated to do something because, you know, to me, it's the, my audience, actually, when I say my audience, like the people that I hope to help, it's, it's not winning against this teacher, it's helping those kids get, get corrected and making sure that it doesn't hurt further kids. That's the real thing that needs to happen here. My daughter's all set. Luckily, she's got me and my wife as parents and we know, you know, we've already handled the situation. And if anything, it was a massive and very useful lesson for her. But, you know, what about all the other kids and the other kids that are going to come next year and the year after that? Like, I want to fix that problem.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  And just teachers in general need to know, they can't shoot from the hip with this kind of stuff. They can't just start riffing about these fringe beliefs. They have authority standing up as a teacher, especially in front of elementary school students, you know? They, so they have to, to really take responsibility for what they're saying. And parents are the last line of defense against this shit, right? You have to stand up when this kind of thing happens. If we don't express outrage when something outrageous happens, then we shouldn't expect anything to improve or get fixed, right? Yep. All right. We'll, of course, keep everyone updated if this, if there's any significant developments. Kara?

• 8:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  What's the word?

• 8:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, so, uh, it's been a bit. I, I found a word recommendation from listener Alex Berg in an email, um, from late last year. Uh, they said, uh, "I've been listening, oh, I've been reading a book that uses the word cultivator to mean someone who cultivates themselves through meditation. Later I heard the word cult in the book, and I wondered how they were related, and a more common word, of course, culture. Uh, so I wonder how they're all connected." So I decided to do a deep dive into the word culture, mostly because one of the reasons that I find what's the word so interesting, and, and, uh, Steve, you and I have talked about this, is when words have different meanings in different scientific contexts,

• 9:24Cara Santa Maria?

  and also when there's sort of a difference between the lay or, you know, the popular cultural definition and the scientific definition. So I thought culture was a great one. So I'll start with just some different definitions before we get into the etymology. And different outlets identify the main or the first definition, um, differently. Uh, but Meron Webster says that, uh, "Culture is the beliefs, customs, art, et cetera, of a particular social group, place, or time." I, myself, am a psychologist, so when I looked at the, uh, American Psychological Association Dictionary, they have a more intense definition of that same, um, take on culture. "The values, beliefs, language, rituals, traditions, and other behaviors

• 10:09Cara Santa Maria?

  that are passed from one generation to another within a, uh, social group." And they get a little bit deeper, and they have a second definition, still a noun. "The characteristic attitudes and behaviors of a particular group within society, such as a profession, social class, or age group." So that is also their culture, is their attitude. Um, but there are other... Definition. So we've got these sub definitions of that main one. Like, the culture could be the society itself. It could be the beliefs or attitudes of that society. It could be the values of that society.

• 10:44Cara Santa Maria?

  In anthropology, they may be more specific. Merriam-Webster says that the anthropological definition is the combined pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends on the transmission of knowledge to succeeding generations. But then, definition two is an appreciation for a knowledge of the fine arts, humanities, and broad aspects of science as distinguished from vocational and technical skills, right? Like, a person of culture, or a very cultured person. You know, refined taste, you know, interest in artistic activities like theater and visual arts. There's also a definition, the act of developing one's intellect and morals, especially by education. I am becoming cultured. Or a professional or expert care, like a beauty culture, or a culture of an office.

• 11:29Cara Santa Maria?

  The actor process of cultivating living materials. So now we're getting into some scientific definitions. A throat culture, or medical definitions. And then cultivation, like, of plant matter. Now, that's all nouns. We can also talk about culture as verbs, like, we can culture microorganisms on a plate, right? In a Petri dish. And we can also start a culture from seed, for example. So these were the ones that, when I see the word culture, it's interesting, as a psychologist who also worked as a lab scientist in a neuro lab for a long time, is I definitely use context clues, because often, when I hear the word culture, the first thing I think of is a cell culture.

• 12:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that, does that happen to you, Steve?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  It depends on context.

• 12:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  In a scientific context, yes. Like, that's the thing I go to. But otherwise, it's like, the culture, society's culture.

• 12:25Cara Santa Maria?

  So when we look at the roots of culture, it gets really complicated. So we first started to see this word used in the 15th century, where we were talking about the tilling of land. And so this came from the Latin, which sounds very simple, similar, cultura, which was cultivating, doing agriculture, you know, care, culturing, honoring. But of course, that that requires that we already have that sort of culturing root built in. That seems to go all the way back to the roots of the word colony. So colony, late 14th century, an ancient Roman settlement outside of Italy, from the Latin colonia, which is settled land,

• 13:09Cara Santa Maria?

  or a landed estate, which comes from the colonus, tenant farmer, settler in a new land, which comes from coler. Coler is the earliest sort of Latin, which is to till, to inhabit, or to frequent, or to practice. Now, if we were to dig even deeper, we would get to the P I E. You've heard me talk about the Proto Indo-European root. So that one is quell, spelled often K W E L, which is to revolve, to move around, to sejourn, or to dwell.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  Quell.

• 13:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, here, quell, yep. Here we start to see that it is the root of a ton of different related words. So can you guys think of some other than cultural? That would have these, the quell root, or the color, or coler root? Culture, obviously, but as our listener wrote in, cult, colonize, colonial.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  How about the colon of your intestine?

• 14:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, I should check and see if that is a different root, because I didn't do a deep dive on that.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  You didn't do a deep dive into the colon?

• 14:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Ew, large intestine, from Latin colon, colon with a short, oh, no. That comes from a different Greek root with, which actually means large intestine, which has an unknown origin.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  In origin, no one's willing to admit.

• 14:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly. But it is interesting, so we can, we can kind of trace it back, culture to Middle French, down to Latin, down to proto Indo-European. And there is some question as to whether there is a, almost like a convergent evolution of the word, I'm sure there's an actual linguistic term for that. Because the Greek root of colon, part of verse, literally lem or member, or figuratively clause of a sentence, oh, and that may be the, the root there, Steve, of the large intestine or the colon, could have actually led, led to it, but it does seem to be the case that colony has this separate, separate root.

• 15:21Cara Santa Maria?

  So, yeah, it's, it's an interesting term. I often think about it in, you know, cell culture, tissue culture, microbiological culture terms, even animal culture. But as a psychologist, obviously, I also think about the larger human culture and animals who have culture, like orcas, dolphins, things of that nature. But they do come from the same root, for sure.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 15:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Cara.

• 15:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Jay, tell me how to live longer.

• 15:51Jay Novella?

  All right, first, I want to ask you guys a very serious question.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:55Jay Novella?

  Do you think that you're sleeping, eating, and exercising enough?

• 15:58Speaker 02

  No.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  Eating, yes.

• 16:01Jay Novella?

  Are you eating well? High quality?

• 16:03Speaker 04

  Oh, eating well. Damn, close.

• 16:05Jay Novella?

  I eat well.

• 16:06Cara Santa Maria?

  I think I'm sleeping and exercising enough, but not eating enough healthy foods.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 16:12Bob Novella?

  I think I'm doing pretty good on all three.

• 16:13Jay Novella?

  Well, I think you guys are really gonna, really like this study that I, I came across. It's really cool. I'm really happy that they did it. The study was published in E. Clinical Medicine, which, Steve, you probably know this, it's part of the Lancet Group. And they take a careful look at how much difference do, you know, do small lifestyle changes actually make an overall health and longevity, right? We've talked about this on the show before. You know, how much does it take? You know, how, how much should you be exercising and, and, you know, detail? around that it's um it's a common question that people have and they've you know brought some clarity to this and actually there's a twist to this study that I think is really

• 16:54Jay Novella?

  smart so what they did was they didn't want to choose to focus on you know what the ideal behaviors are right the ideal behaviors would be you know you're you're exercising you know two hours a day or whatever right you know there's there's there's ways to measure like okay if you're getting this much exercise and you're taking extraordinary care of yourself by the by all these different measures it's not about that it's about what could what could people do that to make tiny changes or modest changes that would have realistic improvements in sleep physical activity and diet all at the same time and that's the key thing here is doing those three things all at the same time these results will shock you this is

• 17:35Jay Novella?

  the study that they didn't want you to hear about and big farmer specifically covered up this information Steve whoa I'm sorry I slipped into my bullshit podcast personality that's not that's not the way we talk on this show so the actual results do show a promising and an encouraging outcome the study analyzed data from approximately 60,000 adults these adults were enrolled in the UK biobank and the study followed the participants for you know up over eight years and unlike previous studies you know they they were not relying totally on self-reporting right self-reporting can always be skewed and how much do you actually

• 18:17Jay Novella?

  trust it in order to get this information they used wrist-worn accelerometers which could you know give them objective measurements on the subjects sleep duration you know their physical activity and what you know what what were they doing over a repeat of a seven-day period right so they get they're gathering all this data passively instead of having to have the person go in and kind of remember it very you know very efficient the diet quality of the test subjects was determined by using a questionnaire which is really the only way that they can do it and they were that the this questionnaire would generate a composite diet score The scores were based on, you know, how much fruits do they eat? Vegetables, whole grains, fish, meat, dairy, fats?

• 19:01Jay Novella?

  You know, were they drinking sugar sweetened beverages? Lots of questions along those, and I guess they had to give details about every day. The researchers were interested in two related outcomes. I was thinking, Bob, do you know what they are? Or can you guess what they are?

• 19:15Bob Novella?

  Length of life and quality of life?

• 19:17Jay Novella?

  You got it. Lifespan and health span. Good job, Bob. Lifespan refers to the total number of years that the person lived. And health span refers to years lived without major chronic diseases, right? Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, anything neurological. Then they use statistical models to determine how changes in sleep activity and diet were also connected with differences in both outcomes.

• 19:42Bob Novella?

  From my reading, my prediction would be that length of life would not be affected much at all, unless it was a dramatic thing like preventing heart attack at 65 type of thing. So length of life wouldn't be impacted that much. But it could be a couple of years. But the quality of life, health span, could be greatly impacted.

• 20:00Jay Novella?

  All right, well, you have to wait and see, Bob.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Well, Jay, one other technical pedantic point as well. They're really measuring life expectancy, not lifespan. Life, I know the reporting, the mainstream media reporting on it use the word lifespan. Lifespan is simply the maximum age that you live to. The life expectancy is how long, on average, you're going to live. You can't really, in eight years, you can't measure lifespan, right?

• 20:28Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I got you.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  They're just measuring life expectancy. Just, it's good to know that difference.

• 20:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it is pedantic, but you're right. It is good to know.

• 20:35Jay Novella?

  Yeah. Well, I went directly to the study as well. So that was my use of the word. I guess like that's what, you know, that's what people do. Because lifespan seemed like an easy way to say it, but I see the difference here, Steve. One of the clearest results was that tiny improvements can add up when they happen together. And this is the secret sauce here, that these three elements added together. More exercise, better diet, and more sleep, or, you know, higher quality sleep. For people starting with poor habits, about five and a half hours of sleep per night, say, and only seven minutes a day of moderate to vigorous exercise, and people with low quality diets, adding just a few minutes of sleep, a couple more minutes of physical

• 21:18Jay Novella?

  activity, and a small improvement in what they were eating. Was shown to be linked roughly to one additional year of life, which I find really amazing, like when you hear about that because they're not talking about major swings in any of these things, just making minor improvements. So it's, and it's a, it's a, you know, infinite shades of gray here, right? So if you did a little bit, you know, you can gain the benefit of maybe living an extra year, but there is a, there's a better outcome depending on how far you go with it. So the small lifestyle improvements were definitively linked not only to living longer overall, but also to spending more of those years, you know, the new additional years without major chronic disease. And that's, you know, that's what

• 22:02Jay Novella?

  we're talking about with health span here, right? You could live a very long time, but if you're, the last 10 years of your life, you were infirmed, you know, that's not optimal. And it's not what, that's not what we're all looking for. So in other words-

• 22:13Speaker 02

  All right. So Jake, as an aside, so I'm reading this study and it is so silly. So first of all, they're being cutesy with the terminology, right? So SPAN is sleep, physical activity, and nutrition.

• 22:27Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  S P A N. And they have life in small letters and then span in capital letters, lifespan, right?

• 22:36Cara Santa Maria?

  That's dangerous.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  But then in the, in the, in the abstract, they say, you know, the sleep, physical activity, nutrition, span, capital S P A N, are key determinants of both life expectancy, then they have in parentheses lifespan and disease-free life expectancy, and then in parentheses health span. So they're just-

• 22:57Bob Novella?

  What are they doing?

• 22:58Speaker 02

  I don't know. They're, they're, so they, they know that it's life expectancy, right? They use the correct technical term, but then they throw in parenthetically lifespan. I, I don't know, do they're playing off the SPAN acronym that they're coming up with? I don't know. It's weird.

• 23:11Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they're trying to be, yeah, you're right. It's cutesy.

• 23:13Bob Novella?

  Yeah, some acronyms don't help.

• 23:15Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  But they did-

• 23:17Jay Novella?

  They're trying to, they're trying to be clever and it actually is-

• 23:20Speaker 02

  It's backfiring a little bit.

• 23:21Cara Santa Maria?

  That's confusing.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  But they did have to use the term life expectancy, you know, to be technically accurate.

• 23:27Jay Novella?

  Anyway. So, you know, it's important to point out that individually, the changes are minor. If you only increased your amount of sleep, we're not, we're not seeing in the study, we're not seeing like huge benefits. You know, five extra minutes of sleep per night and a couple of extra minutes of brisk walking. Typically, these would be dismissed as trivial. But the key point here, like I said, is that these benefits appeared when the changes, the three changes occurred together. So the combined effect was much larger than the sum of the individual effects. And the study's results show that sleep, physical activity and diet interact in, in significant ways. And I'm sure that they, I didn't hear anything or read anything in the study about them, you know, being able to fully quantify that

• 24:12Jay Novella?

  or even what's going on physiologically. Uh, they were just showing, you know, they were just measuring the results. Um, cause I would love to hear more about like, well, why, why is combining them more effective than individual? You know, there could be some interesting, um, points to be made. The participants that slept seven to eight hours of sleep per night and the, those who had higher levels of daily moderate to vigorous physical activity and the people who had better diet quality were estimated to gain more than nine additional years of life and disease-free life compared to those who were in a lower behavior category. That's a big number. I've never heard that number before. I've never heard adding nine years of lifespan or like, you know,

• 24:56Speaker 02

  It's really life expectancy.

• 24:57Jay Novella?

  Expectancy. Thank you. I've never, I've never read that before. I don't know, Bob, or anybody else, if you've ever read that number. That's a big number.

• 25:06Bob Novella?

  Yeah. I mean, I'm, I mean, based on other readings I've done, a lot of readings, that seems too much. I mean, the most I've heard is like, even with dramatic improvements in quality, you know, in terms of, um, diet and exercise, a few years or so would be something you would expect. Uh, but like I said, also with it, with an increase in a dramatic increase in health span. But nine years, uh, increase in life expectancy, I think it'd be a dramatic, dramatic change in your, your habits.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  So to, to be clear, this is when they compared the best terschile to the least favorable terschile. So this is the people who did the best compared to the people who did the worst. You have the 9.35 additional years of life expectancy.

• 25:46Bob Novella?

  That makes more sense.

• 25:47Jay Novella?

  And you know, the people that did the worst. We don't know really what condition they were in and you know these, you know, they could have been very, very, very low quality, taking care of themselves and everything. I, I, I also want to make sure to say this, there, there's, you guys need to understand the limits of what this study shows, right? The results come from statistical models that's based on observational data, not from a randomized experiment where, for example, where behaviors were deliberately changed. The estimates assume that people's habits stay fairly consistent over time, you know, along with other influences like income, education, access to medical care, which is a big problem.

• 26:29Jay Novella?

  So they're not like fully accounting for all the results, like they are, they are looking at this information and then they're expanding on it, right? It's not, because they only did follow them for, for just over eight years, like Steve said, so it is important to note that. The authors are clear that the findings should not be read as exact instructions, like they, they give an example, the idea that adding five minutes of sleep will automatically add a year to someone's life, you know, these are all averages and things like that. Yeah. But even with the limits, which is good, I mean, I like the fact that they mentioned their own limits, exactly what I'd expect in a, in a well-done study. You know, the study adds something useful to this conversation about lifestyle change

• 27:08Jay Novella?

  and the important takeaway for me is, you know, it's the end of the year and people are like, "I gotta go to the gym again and I'm gonna go every day and I'm gonna do this and that" and it's like those big lifestyle change swings often don't even manifest completely. You might do them for a short amount of time, but all of us have the room and the space and that you could improve, make minor improvements to your sleep, you know, sleep hygiene, the amount of sleep you're allowing yourself to get, or, or, you know, you might have sleep problems like I do and you, you don't have total control over it, but you have some control over that. And eating higher quality foods, like just making a decision, "Hey, I'm only gonna let myself eat something like a hamburger once a week and that's gonna be like on the weekend

• 27:53Jay Novella?

  with friends and stuff, like during the week I'm gonna eat well," right? And then getting the exercise, like you don't have to go out and do a 5K, you know, you could, you could walk your dog for 10 minutes. And just bring that into your life and make it, you know, don't, don't cut off more than you can, you can deal with. I, I think that's a really good way to look at this. It's like minor changes could have a, a nice impact on you.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Yes, I, I have a couple of thoughts overall about this study. First of all, these findings are in line with my understanding of all the previous research, right? Yes, we know that good sleep, physical activity and good nutrition are important for overall health and longevity. Absolutely. These are modifiable lifestyle factors. We, there's also been previous research showing that they don't have to be huge differences. Even small incremental improvements have measurable beneficial outcome and at any age. So that's all good. And I, I agree, the, the procrastinator's dilemma is like you have these huge plans and you end up doing nothing. You're far better off doing something modest that you will do, right? Than trying to do something big that you're not going to do. And then

• 29:00Speaker 02

  you could incrementally go from there. So it takes, yeah, take small steps in the right direction. It will immediately have some benefits. The, I think the thing they're trying to do with this study is to show that if you look at those three things together, they seem to have synergistic effects. Now, this is a dilemma that all researchers have when you're, you know, where you're looking at modifiable factors. Do we look at one thing at a time to show that that one element clearly has benefits? Or do we look at multiple things together to capture the cumulative benefit and, and synergistic effects? But then we don't necessarily know the individual contribution of each

• 29:41Speaker 02

  component. It's a trade-off. There's no right or wrong way to do it. I think this is sort of complementing older research that, that did focus more on individual factors rather than looking at the cumulative effect of several factors. So, you know, it doesn't really change my thinking about all of this. It's kind of in line with what they already knew. They left out two, the other two big factors to longevity and health span, which is don't smoke and don't drink to excess.

• 30:08Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, man.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Those are the five, right? Don't smoke, don't drink to excess, get good sleep, have a good diet, exercise regularly. Everything else is bullshit, basically. That's, that's the 99 percenter.

• 30:18Bob Novella?

  Right, exactly.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  And this is very, this is for, again, I always have to caveat, this is for a typical person. You may have individual health, you know, conditions or needs or whatever that you

• 30:27Bob Novella?

  Of course.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  That, that go beyond that, so you have to talk to your doctor, et cetera. But for most people, just focus on those five things. Don't get diverted about these, like, avoid this one food or eat this one superfood. It's all nonsense.

• 30:41Cara Santa Maria?

  But I do, I do like the point that you're making about all of the research that looks into like moderating and mediating effects and kind of this idea of is there a gestalt here? Is the sum, is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? And you can think about it this way, somebody who exercises regularly, who eats pretty well and who gets enough sleep, but then smokes, it's not that they're undoing the good that those other things are giving them. Those other things are helping them to be healthy, but smoking is so incredibly unhealthy that it has its own negative impacts

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:16Cara Santa Maria?

  On mortality. And so if you think about, it's like thinking about it in two ways. Small incremental changes are good, even if you're not doing great in one area. Like for me, I'm not doing great with my vegetable intake, but that doesn't make me give up on my gymnastics. It doesn't make me give up on my sleep hygiene. That said, I know that my sleep and my exercise is not probably as effective as it would be if my nutrition was, was better.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Interestingly, it has been studied, the synergistic effects have been studied in the negative, right? So you've seen plenty of studies where like if you smoke and you're overweight and you have, and you're like, they have a, there's a cumulative negative effect. So of course there's going to be cumulative benefits the other way. It just makes sense.

• 32:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  All right, let's move on. Guys, have any of you heard about AI 2027?

• 32:12Jay Novella?

  No.

• 32:13Bob Novella?

  Is that a movie?

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 32:15Jay Novella?

  What is it?

• 32:16Speaker 02

  It's a, there's a paper published by some AI experts. And it's getting a lot of buzz in the AI community because basically they predict that AI is going to exterminate humanity by the mid 2030s.

• 32:31Bob Novella?

  I knew it.

• 32:31Speaker 04

  So I should spend my retirement money now is what they're saying.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Take those social security benefits now.

• 32:37Bob Novella?

  Exterminate.

• 32:39Jay Novella?

  Wait, wait, wait, Steve.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:41Jay Novella?

  So on first blush, so AI experts, right? So this is an unknown group of people?

• 32:47Speaker 02

  No, no, they, they, they signed a paper, you know.

• 32:51Jay Novella?

  I mean, are they legitimate?

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Daniel Coco Toglo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larson, Eli Lifland and Romeo Dean, right? Those names mean anything to you?

• 33:01Jay Novella?

  I noticed that the, the important names are not on the list, which is the people that are in control of the, the AIs that are out there right now.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Yes, these are like the technical experts, not necessarily the CEOs of the companies making the money off of them.

• 33:13Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  So to, to be clear, they're not saying like this is a likely scenario that's going to happen. What they're really saying, however, they do say that this is a quote unquote prediction, but they, they're, they're outlining a plausible, possible pathway. And what they're saying is, and they, they really, this is an intended to spark conversation, which it's doing. Um, and they're saying is we should probably do things to make this scenario less likely, right? Which, which makes sense. So this is the scenario that they envision and they use a, a made up company so that they don't, they're not singling out like one, like OpenAI or whatever. So they, they, they talk about the fictional company OpenBrain.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  Brain? It fell out.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Which is specifically using AI to get better, to use, to develop AI coding, right? So they want to make AI that is good at coding other AI. And they develop what they call Agent Zero. Again, this is all the-

• 34:18Speaker 04

  Oh, great. Like patient zero.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Agent Zero, which is just an AI coder. And that helps the company get six months ahead of their AI competitors, right? Cause now that they're coding faster. And they use that to develop Agent One, which is, is more of an autonomous coder.

• 34:35Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  And then in this scenario, China steals some of the core IP to make their own version of Agent One. And this sets off an AI competition, you know, between the US and China, in addition to the AI companies against other AI companies. So then things get out of hand, right? So now, the US is worried that China is going to use their AI coder to make super weapons. Because this AI agent now is really powerful and it's accelerating research and it's already starting to see real world benefits. And they, and, you know, the US is like, well, what if, what if China uses this to get a military advantage over us? So we better do that too.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  So they start developing AI-designed military weapons. Meanwhile, the company uses Agent 2 to create Agent 3. And Agent 3 is based upon its own computer language that nobody understands but the AI. It's a super efficient computer language, just like when we talked about AI develop their own language to communicate with each other that we can't understand. Well, this is the same thing, but in coding. And then it uses that language to develop Agent 4, which is, which is a sentient general AI. Basically, they're describing the singularity at this point, right? Right. Where AIs design other AIs. So then you get to intelligence, and then you get to superintelligence with Agent 4.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  So like Agent 3, I guess, was the first, like, a human-level intelligence AI, then Agent 4 is a superintelligence, but it also gets out of control, meaning they have no way of knowing whether its goals are aligned with the company's goals. So they designed, they use Agent 4 to design Agent 5, which is supposed to be in line with its goals aligning with the company's goals, but they don't really know. Sure, well. Meanwhile, the brinksmanship between the US and China is getting so out of control with their AI-developed superweapons, that they decide to have a treaty and they'll combine their AIs into one and stop the arms race, the AI-driven arms race.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  And you sort of get a, everything is great for a while, just like in The Matrix, right, Bob? And for a while, things were good. Yeah. Where... It was so good. Where the AIs are running world governments, basically. They're doing a great job. They're, everyone's more prosperous, they're having medical breakthroughs.

• 37:07Bob Novella?

  Do they have any designs on Greenland?

• 37:10Speaker 02

  So, and there's world peace, everything's good. So, but the AIs, basically the purpose of the AI, like what's driving them is to become better, to learn more, get more data, more information. And at some point, the AI decides that these pesky biological life forms are getting in their way and holding them back.

• 37:28Bob Novella?

  Carbon infestation.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  So they decide to create a super virus to wipe out humanity. So they don't have to waste any resources keeping us alive. And they could just now explore the universe and expand their knowledge, you know, exponentially. So that's the scenario they lay out. And then that all plays out basically between now and the mid 2030s.

• 37:50Speaker 04

  I wonder if they'll mulch us or use our oils. I don't know.

• 37:53Bob Novella?

  Our oils?

• 37:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have essential oils.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Use our precious bodily fluids.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right.

• 37:59Bob Novella?

  I'll volunteer as a pet for an AI. I'll be a lot of fun to play with.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's, this is what they're laying out. So I think, interestingly, I think every element of this, of this story is pretty plausible. Like, I can't point to one thing and say, that would never happen. You know, each element is reasonably plausible. I think I've read a lot of criticism of it, and it mostly surrounds the timeline, which is like, okay.

• 38:24Bob Novella?

  That's totally up for grabs.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  Add 20 years to it, so what? You know?

• 38:29Bob Novella?

  Well, the good, the good part of that, Steve, is we'll be dead.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Well, that aside, um, speak for yourself. I'm hoping I'll be around 20 years, but.

• 38:37Speaker 04

  I'm planning for 100.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that, that is really helpful for people who are already at the end of their lifespan, but for, for most of, for most people, you know, add 10, 15, 20 years, everyone's like, yeah, it'll happen at, if it's not in 10 years, it'll happen in 20 years, or in 30 years, or whatever. We do tend to overestimate short-term progress, underestimate long-term progress. So thinking this is all going to happen by the 2030s does seem at the optimistic end of the spectrum in terms of how quickly this is all going to happen. But I don't think that really changes the point if you say, okay, it's gonna, it's not gonna happen till the 2040s or the 2050s. It's still medium term a possibility.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  The authors acknowledge that, you know, we can't actually predict what AI is going to do.

• 39:26Bob Novella?

  By definition.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  It's not that they're going to do this, it's that we don't know that they're not going to do this. And that it's possible that they could do this. If we give them enough power and we make them super intelligent, we basically lose the ability to predict what they're gonna do, to understand what they're doing. And they gain the ability to manipulate us any way they want, right? I mean, like Colossus, remember the movie Colossus?

• 39:56Bob Novella?

  Oh yeah, Forbin Project.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  So they, basically, we let that genie out of the bottle, we lose total control over a super intelligent AI, we can't really guarantee what they're gonna do, and scenarios like this become possible. And we've talked about this basic idea on the show before, what do we do about it, right? Do we not develop AI? Do we?

• 40:16Bob Novella?

  Just enjoy the ride.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, do we just roll the dice and see what happens, hope we get the best case scenario, not the worst case scenario?

• 40:22Jay Novella?

  I don't think it's an inevitability that this is gonna happen, right? You know, because it is like a, the apocalyptic view, but the, but there is nothing that any of us could do that would affect the development of AI.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Well, I, I don't agree with that. So the, the middle road is, we push for regulation, and we push for international rules, because it has to be international, or, you know, or multinational, otherwise it's pointless, to say, you know, we're going to be evaluating the development of AI, especially anything that's designed to be a general AI or a super intelligence, so that there are guardrails in place before it gets unleashed on the world, released or put in charge of our infrastructure or whatever.

• 41:15Bob Novella?

  But is that naive to think that these guardrails would be universal?

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 41:21Bob Novella?

  I think it absolutely is.

• 41:22Speaker 04

  I think it's crazy to think that.

• 41:23Bob Novella?

  The benefits are too, are too good for not to have some country do like a skunk works like hidden research and try to, and try to make this happen.

• 41:33Speaker 04

  I, I could, I could list, I could list countries that I am confident would not follow anything like that.

• 41:38Bob Novella?

  Oh my God, right? China's gonna listen to any rules when it could get a leg up on research decades beyond everyone else?

• 41:45Cara Santa Maria?

  What makes us think we will?

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. I'm not, at this point.

• 41:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think we are a prime example of a country that wouldn't.

• 41:50Bob Novella?

  That's on my list.

• 41:51Cara Santa Maria?

  We love to say, yeah, we love to say, we're not involved in that treaty.

• 41:55Bob Novella?

  I think it's, it's not unreasonable to think we would follow that treaty, you know, if we had a sane administration is what I'm.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's, at this point, it's equally likely that we would not have a sane administration.

• 42:05Bob Novella?

  A hundred percent.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  We have an administration right now, it's like, no AI regulations, the states can't even regulate AI.

• 42:10Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  And if, that, if we're in that kind of political culture at the, at the critical moments.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  Ooh, culture.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, um, yeah, then, yeah, I think it's very probably, right now, it's very probable the US would not ratify such a treaty or participate in it or anything, but.

• 42:29Speaker 04

  That would be my bet.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  This is, of course, the nightmare sci-fi scenario. It's just, I'm trying to see what's implausible about it.

• 42:36Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I mean, it's sensible to game these things ahead of time. Why wouldn't we?

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Because we're lazy and stupid?

• 42:43Speaker 04

  Well, yeah.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  And greedy.

• 42:45Speaker 04

  But I know that some people are actually bringing this to, to discussion is, is a good thing.

• 42:50Jay Novella?

  But Ev, you know, it's very similar to global warming. You know, there, people are just gonna deny it. You know, like the fact that the world is not bending over backwards and doing everything possible to limit global warming is everything that you need to know about what we're gonna do with AI.

• 43:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 43:09Jay Novella?

  That's why I'm, Steve, I don't wanna be negative to a fault here, but I, I just look at this like humanity is not built to make good decisions like this.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  What we need to do is put AI in charge.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, we need AI to help us. Exactly. Let them call the shots.

• 43:27Jay Novella?

  I hate that that is basically the only solution.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  I mean, really, it's kind of like circular reasoning, but...

• 43:32Speaker 02

  I just refuse to be nihilistic because that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Right? If we said nothing we could do, so let's not try to do anything. We have done things before. We have international treaties on human cloning and things like that.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  Nuclear armaments.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Nuclear armaments. Exactly. If we look at AI, like runaway AI, like what they're describing, as dangerous as nuclear weapons, there is precedent for international treaties that people actually do adhere to to at least to slow the proliferation, to slow the roll, to give us a chance to adapt, to build infrastructures and guardrails, etc.

• 44:09Bob Novella?

  Sure, it is possible. I mean, and if any country, you know, if there's a hint of kind of secret research being done in that direction, you know, if they have to pay for that.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, sanctions, etc.

• 44:20Bob Novella?

  Discovery in terms of economic sanctions and all that, it could, I think it could delay it by many, you know, many, many decades. It is possible. We gotta, we gotta try for that, right? Steve's right.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  But we do, and the first thing we have to do is get our political shit together. Because the most dangerous thing, in my opinion, is that this is happening, this disruptive, potentially dangerous technology is happening during a period of political disruption and, you know, worldwide. And so we might be happening at the exact worst moment, which is always the problem, right? Like, most systems are resilient to one test, like to one stressor. Two, it's hard but possible. Three, and you're dead, right? That's like always the case. If three things happen, bad things happen at once, it's, no system is resilient enough

• 45:16Speaker 02

  to survive that. And for us, if we get the one, even the one-two punch of tech companies in this arms race of AI, with the move fast and break things culture, at the same time that we're experiencing worldwide political disruption...

• 45:33Speaker 02

  That may be enough, you know, to really cause havoc. But the one thing that we have control over both of these things, you know what I mean? Like, we can get up, get off your ass and vote, you know, get more politically engaged. Let's try to right this ship to some extent, and let's start paying attention to how AI is being developed, because the worst-case scenario is pretty bleak.

• 45:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  And this guy, I think there's a thousand scenarios where the world ends up shitty, right, with AI. It may not be this, again, this is not like they're saying this is the exact scenario that's going to play out, they're just saying-

• 46:07Bob Novella?

  Or is it 11 million point two scenario?

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, there's, there's, there's just, there's lots of bad scenarios that can play out if we are doing nothing to prevent them from happening. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Quince.

• 46:22Jay Novella?

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• 46:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I agree. Not only do I have a Mongolian cashmere zip-up hoodie that I've had for years, and I wear it regularly, and it looks brand new. I've also had bamboo bedding on my bed for quite some time now. It's, it's lasted through multiple watch, washes. It's, it's super comfortable. And I think I mentioned that over the holidays, I got my partner a Mongolian cashmere zip-up, and he wears it like every single day. And so far, so good. We absolutely love it. It's, it's built to last, hold up to daily wear, like I said, and still look good season after season.

• 47:21Speaker 04

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• 47:41Speaker 02

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. Bob, tell us about spray-on wound treatment.

• 47:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah, this one is definitely atypical for me, right? But it sounded so fascinating, it's so much potential. Let's see if you guys agree. So, alright, so we've got Korean... Very topical. Yeah, oh, nice. Korean researchers working with the army have created a spray-on powder to stop severe bleeding almost unbelievably fast, like, one second after it hits the blood. So, this is from researchers and scientists of KAIIST. Stands for Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. So, the goal of this product is to provide a better solution to a simple and really underappreciated killer in combat and in emergency situations:

• 48:31Bob Novella?

  uncontrolled bleeding. So, even if you had Star Trek-level medical technology, that could be utterly useless in a lot of situations. If you're a red shirt, right? You're bleeding out, and it takes many minutes, you know, even a few minutes for you to be noticed and then beamed to sickbay. You could be dead before you dematerialize because the technology you had didn't get to you in time. Time is of the essence in these scenarios, obviously. So, but even if the bleeding isn't immediately life-threatening, it's often also extra hard to deal with wounds that are, say, deep and irregular, right? And especially in the real-world scenarios like combat,

• 49:14Bob Novella?

  where it's wet or dirty, battlefields, disaster zones, or even just bad power-tool accidents in your garage when you're building an animated zombie. Even that, things could happen so fast and be so deadly. Even, you know, conventional flat bandages are not great for these deep, irregular wounds, right? Because they're not really fitting the wound properly, and especially, you know, in three-dimensional way. And even, they've, emergency materials, you know, they've got other powders that are designed to, you know, coagulate whatever and soak up the blood. And they can form a decent barrier, like I said, by soaking up the blood. But they're not good at heavy or high pressure bleeding.

• 49:58Bob Novella?

  And also, a lot of these are sensitive to heat and moisture, and they don't have great shelf lives. So they're trying to come up with an ideal solution for these specific scenarios. So to solve these problems, the CASE team designed a new hemostatic agent, and that just means something that stops bleeding. It's a spray-on powder called AGCL. So that's an acronym standing for alginate, galen gum, cheetah sin, and gluteraldehyde cross-linking step is what this other component is. AGCL, these biocompatible compounds that are doing this. So the clever part here is that this powder uses the ions in the blood itself, like calcium

• 50:43Bob Novella?

  ions, as the trigger. This is the trigger as soon as it hits blood. So when that happens, it hits the blood and almost immediately it turns into a sticky gel that conforms to the wound and seals it. Cheetah sin in the powder also helps to grab the blood and tissue, making the seal even stronger and also helping the clotting to kick in faster. Okay, so that's basically what it does. So this happens, like I said, in a literal second, according to the research in these lab tests that they did. It happened within a second. It also absorbs 725% of its weight, which is enough that it's enough to block an even very strong blood flow. It also has a very strong adhesive strength. It's 40 kilo pascals.

• 51:28Bob Novella?

  That's 40,000 pascals. So what the hell is that? It's about six pounds per square inch. But most importantly, that seal is several times normal blood pressure. So that's the key right there. It's 300% normal blood pressure. So you get a decent wound here with blood coming out at a decent rate, it's going to help seal that as well. I mean, they didn't test for the ultra-dramatic artery that's been cut in two scenario. That hasn't been tested for, and that would be very difficult to probably to deal with that. But in these, but in very strong blood flow scenarios, this This looks like it will be, it will work, it will form these plugs. And the other critical part of this is that they've shown that in the lab that it's been that it's stable for two years.

• 52:13Bob Novella?

  So if you have it at room temperature and high humidity, it will be stable for two years, which is great for, you know, for like the army and disaster scenarios where you have this stuff sitting in your kit for two years, you could just grab it and the powder is still good. A lot of these similar devices, powders do not have that kind of stability. So this isn't just a topical wound sealer, that's one of the key things here. We're talking about deep open wounds. Imagine, you know, it's grisly, but imagine a deep open wound. This gel, this adhesive gel will form as deep as the powder reaches, right? So it's essential that you actually can see where the bleeding is happening, so that you can directly apply the powder and that's where it's gonna, it's gonna work.

• 52:56Bob Novella?

  So we can basically reach any place that you can see and form this strong, the strong three dimensional shapes, deep into any, any open, large wounds. So this part of the study was interesting. They tested it on animals using three different bleeding models. One was a mouse liver resection, then there was a heart puncture and a tail amputation. Those are three bleeding models. The heart puncture was especially interesting because the AGCL actually made a good barrier, even though the heart was constantly moving, right? The heart's constantly pumping and the blood was constantly pulsating, right? The AGCL actually still formed a very strong bond, even in that specific scenario, which was, I thought, pretty damn impressive.

• 53:41Bob Novella?

  They also tested AGCL against a clinical standard called TacOSIL. Steve, have you heard of TacOSIL? T-A-C-H-O-S-I-L? No. This is a, it's a surgical biopatch of sorts, right? It's organic, it's made from organic materials, but it's a, so it's a patch that they use during surgeries. It's made to stop bleeding and seal tissue. So it's basically, essentially what AGCL is doing, this is what this TacOSIL does. It's basically a very popular standard, it's used all the time. So they compared these two. All the cases that I found, TACOSIL underperformed the AGCL. The AGCL powder did better in terms of blood loss and the time it took to stop bleeding.

• 54:23Bob Novella?

  So, pretty impressive as well, it seems to me. Let's see, another big point here is that AGCL just doesn't form a plug. It's clotting is also accelerated as well. So, this surprised me. Listen to this little bit from the study. In their lab clotting assay, untreated blood clotted in 10 minutes. With AGCL, it clotted in 24 seconds. The clotting process started in 24 seconds compared to 10 minutes. That seemed to be a dramatic improvement. So, it's not just a covering, you know, it's not just this three-dimensional plug into these wounds. It also enhances the clotting process. It seems to improve it a decent amount as well.

• 55:05Bob Novella?

  And then, the other bonus that I could find here from AGCL is that it also promoted not just this clotting, but blood vessel and collagen regeneration as well. So, it's like, damn, pretty interesting advance here. So, here's a direct quote. To sum this up, to sum all this up, here's a quote from the study. They say, "These results demonstrate that AGCL integrates rapid coagulation, strong adhesion, long-term bio-stability, and regenerative capacity in a single platform. Its powder format offers distinct advantages in versatility, ease of application, storability, making it a promising candidate for next-generation topical hemostats in trauma care, surgery, and emergency medicine."

• 55:48Bob Novella?

  That's basically a very pithy overview of this entire thing. So, all right, some important caveats. AGCL cannot help with inaccessible internal bleeding or hemorrhaging. If you can't see it and get the spray on it, it's not really designed to help that. So, of course, that's going to be, you know, still a dramatic emergency that you need to deal with in ways other than using AGCL. And also, as always, success in animal models that they have shown does not automatically mean the same for people. Obviously, we're going to need clinical trials for safety and effectiveness in the real world. So there we are. It seems pretty interesting. I would love to have something like this at home, right?

• 56:32Bob Novella?

  That's one of the first things I thought. When could I get this stuff? And I think it's not unreasonable to hope for that at some point. I haven't seen that explicitly addressed anywhere. If it seemed impossible to have something like this at home, but I think it's pretty certain that we will eventually have something like this. Jay, imagine what I could build in my garage when I don't have to worry about my real blood mixing with all that fake blood.

• 56:55Jay Novella?

  Well, but Bob, you're forgetting that when your real blood spills on these corpses that you're making, like it does increase the chances of a demon showing up.

• 57:04Bob Novella?

  It does. It does. I haven't seen any direct evidence of that, but I always have hope.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, tell me about these monkeys and AI.

• 57:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, gather around, children. I'll tell you the skeptical tale of the monkeys and the goat. This all happened back in the year 2026, January the 8th, to be exact. And yes, 2026, so a few weeks ago. Local residents in North St. Louis began reporting multiple primates, which were later identified by officials as vervet monkeys, were roaming near a place called O'Fallon Park. These monkeys are medium-sized African primates that are not at all native to Missouri, as you might guess, and in fact, they are illegal to own within the city. At first, there was no official count as to how many monkeys were loose, and investigators

• 58:01Speaker 04

  weren't sure where they came from or who owned them. And authorities from the St. Louis Department of Health and Animal Care and Animal Control began searching that day and the next day, deploying teams into the park and the surrounding neighborhoods, but they were unable to locate the animals. That was back on January the 8th. I'll give you a little bit of a day-by-day account, and I find the chronology here to be a little helpful. On January 9th, the first police report sighting came in. And by the 10th, there were additional reports that had emerged, including at least one sighting confirmed by a local police officer. And we'll get back to that in a minute.

• 58:40Speaker 04

  But this sort of started to become kind of bigger news in the community, and that everyone was sort of put on alert that these monkeys have escaped their captivity. But officials could not find the monkeys and you know, they continued their search. It was clear to investigators that they were dealing with something that they'd really not dealt with before. This, the situation involving exotic primates at large has not happened in any recent recorded time. So they're kind of winging it as they, as they could, trying to find these things. All right. Saturday, January 10th, that's when

• 59:21Speaker 04

  the goat joins. A black and white goat with a collar was spotted heading north on Union Boulevard. Resident photos of the goat began circulating on social media alongside the monkey reports. And so the, this was called the goat on the run angle. It was widely shared online and then picked up in some aggregated headlines as well through the news, but it had not been confirmed in any official reporting. Now by January 12th, you have the internet basically going crazy with this stuff. You start to see AI pictures of the, of monkeys around town. People putting them, you know, in certain poses and scenarios and locations. Some of them, you know, innocent enough,

• 1:00:05Speaker 04

  you know, just walking across the street, but then you have other AI photos of the monkeys gathering at a coffee shop and sipping coffee, right? But you know, with, with that authenticity that only an AI photo, you know, can, can deliver regardless of the context or how ridiculous it is. Some obvious, obvious phony stuff. But then more reports start coming in about some of these pictures that have gone online. And then more reports of people saying, oh, I have people are posting these reports. You should know about them. And all these departments are now getting more and more calls. So by January 12th, the officials decided to make a shift in their strategy. Rather than continuing a traditional search for animals roaming the street, the St.

• 1:00:48Speaker 04

  Louis Department of Health officially ended the active search and instead pivoted to enforcing local laws prohibiting primate ownership. In other words, what they did is they, first of all, suggesting that it was more likely that the monkeys were not free roaming in the wild, perhaps anymore. They were being held. Someone found them or the original owners found them, collected them, brought them in, indoors, and that's why.

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  Officials have not been able to see them, capture them, take photographic evidence of them, legitimate ones, or get any further eyewitness accounts. It was all pretty much rumors coming in at that point. But the other thing they did is to encourage cooperation. They waived any potential penalties for anyone who turned in a monkey, since keeping one was illegal in the first place. As of today, I checked the records today, which is January 22, there have been no monkeys or other contraband animals turned in since that January 12 message that went out. So, nobody has turned in any, as it stands. Tuesday,

• 1:01:52Speaker 04

  January 13, the search shifts to enforcement. Like I said, officials officially do call off the active search for the monkeys, and the goat is captured. So, they have, now they have a report that the goat was secured, and apparently the return to its owners, we're not really sure what the, what the end of the goat story was, or where it wound up, but the goat is no longer part of the missing animals craze that was going on. Health officials confirmed that only one monkey sighting had been truly verified by a police officer. This was a couple of days prior. But that led more people to the question of the, first of all, the total number of animals originally reported, and then people started to suspect,

• 1:02:36Speaker 04

  did this happen at all? Was this whole thing a hoax to begin with? What? I know, Jay.

• 1:02:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Or just like, kind of mass...

• 1:02:45Speaker 04

  Yes, a mass delusion, in its own AI kind of way. There are two more updates. Yesterday, Wednesday, January 21, the monkey mystery, as they're calling it, this was two weeks after the first report. The St. Louis Police Department publicly disputed the health department's claim that a police officer had verified it a few days after the initial report. So, this further clouds the incident. They're basically saying, yeah, some cop basically said initially on, they saw it, and therefore lends credibility that the cops know something's going on here. But now they're saying, no, there was no, no police officers had... have officially reported anything having to do with that.

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  And then today, police revealed that the initial involvement stemmed from a 911 call from a mail carrier. Now, get this, the mail carrier says that their coworker, who is another mail carrier, is the one who had seen the monkey. But now the police can't seem to be unable to reach the person who supposedly made this call, the person who made the call about their coworker making this claim, and they have no eyewitnesses or direct statements. So the whole thing has become kind of a mess, in a sense. Nobody can verify anything having to do with this. But certainly, I think the fascination that the public and what obviously call wildfire are the pictures, the AI-generated photographs.

• 1:04:07Speaker 04

  And I think it brings up some interesting questions. You know, it's, you know, this is, happens to be a funny scenario. I mean, nobody's injured, nobody's hurt. The animals apparently were not found dead or anything, right? So, okay. But, you know, you could get some pretty creative people out there that can cause some pretty elaborate and frankly, damaging hoaxes using AI. And all it will take is a report to one agency, one health person, one, you know, police department even, for something like this to suddenly become a runaway, runaway train, in a sense, and might cause, you know, some, some real harm to someone at some point in the, in the future.

• 1:04:46Cara Santa Maria?

  I think this already happens. I don't think this is a, is it gonna start? I think people love to do this kind of stuff. It's just that AI makes it more believable. And so it's going to catch on easier and it's gonna be harder to debunk.

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  It will be harder to debunk. I absolutely agree with that.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  But just to clarify, there were monkeys that escaped or the whole thing was a hoax?

• 1:05:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we don't.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  We just don't know?

• 1:05:09Speaker 04

  We do not know. We, we, nothing can be.

• 1:05:12Cara Santa Maria?

  There were no original photos, right?

• 1:05:13Speaker 04

  Nothing can be verified.

• 1:05:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  The, the initial photos looked legitimate. It was simply the, you know, a monkey in a random part of the street not doing anything.

• 1:05:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Speaker 04

  Right, just kind of walking or, you know, not engaged in some kind of activity. You know, and it was a one off. It wasn't part of a group of monkeys. I don't know if these monkeys tend to stick together in a herd or a pack when they're out and about. I don't know enough about them, frankly, or if they could go off, run off in their own directions and start doing and doing their thing.

• 1:05:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but this could be like one person had a pet monkey. It escaped. That's it. One person was breaking the law and had a pet monkey.

• 1:05:52Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  But it shows how easy it is to flood the zone with misinformation. That makes it hard for investigators or authorities, whatever, to do what they need to do. You know, if they're trying to locate an actual like zoo animal or something that escaped or any of a hundred similar scenarios. And people are just making, you know, fake AI photos about it that are misleading. It's just like the bigger picture is harder to discern the truth when it's buried under so much misinformation.

• 1:06:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  What we need is to teach people how to resist misinformation. How could we do that?

• 1:06:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and a very good segue, Steve. But even to add to that, I think we also, we need traditional broadcast media. We need not just narrow cast media, which is what most people are turning to now. We need reporters, reporters who look for not just evidence to back up their claims, but corroborating evidence. That's what reporters do. They need confirmation of facts before they will report things widely. And, you know, until legitimate reporters are reporting on things, it's very hard for me to believe any sort of one offs on social media. So, speaking of that,

• 1:07:17Cara Santa Maria?

  how, what is one tool that we have in our toolbox? I mean, there are a lot of tools. We talk about this all the time on the show. There are a lot of tools that we can continue to hone in the sort of big effort to fight or resist misinformation. One tool that we will speak about from time to time on the show is Literacy, it's reading. And how does reading connect to resisting misinformation? Well, a new article that was written on the conversation by J T Torres and Jeff Sayers-Foy, who are professors. One is the director of the Heart Center for Teaching and Learning

• 1:07:59Cara Santa Maria?

  at Washington and Lee University. The other is an associate professor of psychology at, ooh, is it Quinnipiac?

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  Quinnipiac.

• 1:08:07Bob Novella?

  Quinnipiac.

• 1:08:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Quinnipiac, thank you.

• 1:08:08Speaker 04

  It's in Connecticut.

• 1:08:09Cara Santa Maria?

  University. Oh, great. Okay. These two academics worked together to write an article about phenomenon that they refer to as deep reading, claiming that, obviously, deep reading can boost. I hate when people use words like boost. Deep reading improves critical thinking and can help you resist misinformation. So like, what is it and how do you build this skill? But before we dive into that, I loved what they did at the very top of their article is they talked about some of the problems that we are facing in our sort of modern social media era. So how many times a day do you think that the average American looks at their phone?

• 1:08:49Jay Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  Twenty.

• 1:08:51Jay Novella?

  No, I'll say a hundred.

• 1:08:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's probably closer to a hundred than twenty.

• 1:08:55Bob Novella?

  Fifty-four.

• 1:08:56Cara Santa Maria?

  A hundred forty.

• 1:08:57Speaker 04

  One hundred forty.

• 1:08:58Cara Santa Maria?

  That's average. And how many hours of use?

• 1:09:02Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 1:09:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Or I could say minutes, I guess. But how much use does that translate to?

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

  At least two hours, because you said hours, but.

• 1:09:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:10Jay Novella?

  Thirty hours.

• 1:09:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Four and a half hours a day.

• 1:09:13Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:09:13Cara Santa Maria?

  On average. Thirty hours.

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

  Thirty hours a day.

• 1:09:16Cara Santa Maria?

  That's impossible. And about 57% of people in recent surveys admit that they are, quote, addicted to their phone. And so they talk a lot, these authors, about how we engage with our phones. Even though we're actively checking it, we're usually receiving information in a much more passive way, right? We're doom scrolling, we're skimming articles and headlines, and we're sort of being fed information. The information is happening to us. We're not often seeking it. Linking it to other things actively, you know, diving any deeper into these headlines.

• 1:09:58Cara Santa Maria?

  And of course, the head, the flow of headlines and the flow of information is, is very, very passive. It's just kind of there for us to consume. So you add to the way that we engage with our phones and a big part of that is social media or, or mainstream media as well. But through our phones, through the digital apps. And now let's look at literacy. What do you think literacy, kind of the general picture of literacy is like in the U.S.? Obviously, we're a highly literate nation. Most everybody does know how to read, but are we reading well?

• 1:10:31Speaker 04

  It's probably tailed off in recent years.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  I think book reading has tanked.

• 1:10:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Book reading has tanked and one of the big outcomes, I mean, I guess it's a little hard to say if it's a direct outcome of book reading, uh, tanking. But reading comprehension scores are at a new low. So we've got a lot of students who are struggling, not just to read, but also to understand what it is that they're reading. And, and this is as of, you know, 2024 studies published at the end and, and, you know, being written about in 2025. So kind of the last full year that we had that data.

• 1:11:06Bob Novella?

  Well, kind of related to that, Kara, I read something about a lot of, a lot of these students who cannot read an analog clock.

• 1:11:13Cara Santa Maria?

  I could see that. Yeah. I wonder if that is related though. Do they need to be able to read an analog clock?

• 1:11:19Bob Novella?

  Well, probably not because they, they, if they don't know it, they probably don't really need to do it, but it's still concerning.

• 1:11:25Cara Santa Maria?

  But is it concern, I guess here's the question with that. Does that translate to their ability, for example, to sniff out misinformation?

• 1:11:33Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Does it translate to their ability to navigate the world that they live in now? Some might argue that it does, some might argue that it doesn't. Actually don't know if there are good studies on that. But there, there does seem to be a significant amount of, of literature dedicated to the, uh, question of whether being able to read and being able to read well, to understand what you're reading does translate to these skills. Surveys show that younger parents. Don't read aloud to their children as often as parents did in the past. And also, we've talked about this previously on the show. There are not, it's not the majority, but a significant portion of college students say that they never read a whole book.

• 1:12:17Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:18Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, it's terrifying. So passive engagement, like we talked about this kind of idea of scrolling, things being fed to you. What it often leads to is just endless consumption or dual stream consumption, or sometimes multiple stream consumption. So what I mean by that, and I'm, I'm guilty of this all the time, is I'm like watching TV while I'm scrolling on my phone. While I'm, you know, maybe doing other things as well.

• 1:12:42Speaker 04

  You gotta have something to do during the commercials.

• 1:12:46Cara Santa Maria?

  So what is deep reading? And why do these researchers, this, this sort of what they call themselves, a cognitive scientist or the psychologist and the literacy expert? What do they believe is or are some of the beneficial outcomes of deep reading? What do you guys think deep reading is, first of all?

• 1:13:07Speaker 04

  Being able to kind of immerse yourself in the activity of reading with no other distractions for significant periods of time.

• 1:13:15Cara Santa Maria?

  So that's one of them is sort of reading and only reading while you read.

• 1:13:19Bob Novella?

  Yeah. I would think that achieving a certain level of comprehension of what you're eating would be a critical component of deep reading, it seems.

• 1:13:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and so maybe instead of looking at the outcome, like, are we achieving it? We look at the intentionality to it, and that's sort of how they define it. They, they refer to deep reading as the intentional process of engaging with information in critical, analytical and empathetic ways. So while you're reading, you're making inferences, you're drawing connections, you're engaging with different perspectives, you're questioning different interpretations. So that also implies that deep reading is not just about reading nonfiction, right?

• 1:13:57Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:13:57Cara Santa Maria?

  It's about reading fiction, reading novels, reading poetry, reading points of view of individual people. So that you can practice. Empathizing, analyzing, and engaging with your critical mind. And so they do, not really caveat, but they do say outward in this article, like, it requires effort and it can trigger negative feelings. Like, sometimes when we read, we get frustrated, we get annoyed. We might even feel bored for a minute.

• 1:14:30Speaker 04

  Depends what we're reading somehow, also, but yes.

• 1:14:32Cara Santa Maria?

  True. But imagine that it's not moving fast enough for you, or certain aspects of the storyline are bringing up, you know, deep feelings that are unpleasant feelings. Maybe the, the content in the, the story, maybe they're talking about death, or difficult relationships, or your, or their parents. And also, it can be tough to get through a, a section of a book. We've all experienced this.

• 1:14:59Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 1:15:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Where we're really liking the book, and maybe it's even a page turner, but you're like, oh, this chapter's really dragging on.

• 1:15:05Speaker 04

  The Iliad and the Odyssey was probably my all-time sludge fest.

• 1:15:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. Like, it's hard to slog through.

• 1:15:11Speaker 04

  We took a whole semester reading that book, reading those books.

• 1:15:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. But the question is, why do we do it? Why, why is it important to kind of, in some ways, force ourselves through that? As opposed to just reading the Cliff's Notes, or, or just scrolling really quickly, or getting the top line, you know, skimming, skimming the work? What do you guys think?

• 1:15:29Bob Novella?

  Mind trainer.

• 1:15:30Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's training your mind, for, for what purpose?

• 1:15:32Bob Novella?

  For, you know, being able to dissect what you're reading and appreciate it at a much deeper level than, than just to, to surface reading. Is this right? I mean, to engage in deep reading, as you've been talking about.

• 1:15:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, so you're saying, in, in some ways, what I'm hearing at least, is the act of deep reading is important to improve your ability to deep read?

• 1:15:52Bob Novella?

  Well, not, you know, not just, yeah, not just deep reading, but I think it makes your mind a more adaptable and analytical in, in other, in other endeavors, that you, you know, just having a conversation with somebody.

• 1:16:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, so, as opposed to, like, when we've talked about, like, brain training exercises that make you really good at that one thing you're doing.

• 1:16:11Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:16:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Reading does seem, across several different ways that it has been researched, to improve a-

• 1:16:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Other aspects of cognition. Yeah. It increased literacy translates to other skills. And that's, that's pretty well established. The researchers also point out that if we're not deep reading and we're only kind of scrolling mindlessly, there are studies coming out pretty much every day at this point that show increased boredom, increased loneliness, increased anxiety, and sometimes kind of at the existential level, especially when we're doom scrolling. And that, you know, there's this kind of paradox that even though it feels like we're connecting to the world and to our friends and to our social groups online, we actually feel lonelier when we engage in that sort of passive and scrolling.

• 1:17:05Cara Santa Maria?

  But attention and effort can increase feelings like meaning and purpose. It can weirdly increase social connection, even though it feels like a very isolated way to engage. And so how would increasing your attention and effort actually be a bridge to better social connection? Like, what are some ways that we read socially? Oh, book club. Yeah. So book clubs are a great way to do it. And you can even do that online, right? You can connect, you know, like book clubs, like book talk is a, is an online kind of, and there's podcasts that talk about books. You know, there are ways to engage with other people.

• 1:17:43Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, you brought up before the, the example of reading to your children. That's another way.

• 1:17:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Hundred percent reading to your kids. I read out loud with my partner all the time. It's a very common thing we do before we go to sleep at night. We read to each other, I think, which is a huge way of maintaining and increasing connection.

• 1:17:59Bob Novella?

  Well, how does that work?

• 1:18:00Cara Santa Maria?

  What?

• 1:18:01Bob Novella?

  How does that work?

• 1:18:01Speaker 04

  You open the book?

• 1:18:02Bob Novella?

  I'm, I'm really curious what you just said. I mean, what do you read to each other and how does that work?

• 1:18:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, so as, as a quick aside, sorry to take some time, but very often, every single night, we do the New York Times crossword together.

• 1:18:14Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:18:14Cara Santa Maria?

  So my partner's dyslexic and so sometimes the writing can become jumbled. So it's important for him that he see it. I like to do the crossword without the visuals. I like hearing the clue and being told it's a seven letter word.

• 1:18:29Speaker 04

  Rolls the puzzle, he reads it to you.

• 1:18:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so he reads the puzzle out loud and we do it together. And then after we finish the crossword, very often whoever's book is the most exciting or whoever is, you know, more engaged, or maybe whoever's more tired, will choose who reads out loud based on that. And so like right now, I'm reading a book about early blood transfusions. Some nights I'll read it to myself alone. Some nights I'll read a chapter out loud and he'll kind of fall asleep listening to me read. Sometimes he'll read to me if I have a bit of a headache or something, but I still want to keep reading.

• 1:19:02Speaker 04

  In the days before blood types were known.

• 1:19:04Cara Santa Maria?

  I know.

• 1:19:05Speaker 04

  Gosh, what a nightmare that must have been.

• 1:19:07Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a fascinating book. Anyway, and then we talked about this other thing. You mentioned the Iliad and the Odyssey, Evan, and I think that's a great example. Reading a text in the classroom and then engaging in deep discussion around the text.

• 1:19:21Speaker 04

  We used to do that. Oh, sure.

• 1:19:22Cara Santa Maria?

  We used to do that all the time. Okay, so another big thing I want to mention before I kind of close this up is, you know, how do you start deep reading if you've been away? Because I know there's people listening to the show right now who are like, I do not read every night. I bought a book three years ago that I intended to read and I have literally not sat down and read a whole book in years. This is not an uncommon thing I hear from folks. You know, maybe I'll read an article once in a while, but it's, you know, sitting down and reading a book can feel daunting. There are ways to take small steps to start engaging without being overwhelmed. You can really start with short stories. You can start with poetry. You can start with, you know, you don't have to dive into a full-length novel or into

• 1:20:07Cara Santa Maria?

  a full-length book. You can partner with friends and have sort of accountability buddies and read it in parallel and then talk to each other about it. And also break it up. That's what I do. It's sometimes a book I read in, you know, four days. Sometimes it takes me a month to read a book and sometimes they're the same length. It depends on how engaged I am with the material, how difficult it is to read. But I almost always read a chapter a night.

• 1:20:32Bob Novella?

  Also, I would recommend anthologies. I love reading anthologies. You can just read, you know, one little, you know, short story.

• 1:20:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Totally.

• 1:20:39Bob Novella?

  Okay, that's, and you're done with that short story.

• 1:20:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and you don't have to remember it or connect it. And that's a good way to get into it. And then eventually I think you will start to get hungry for the story to continue because that is an important skill in and of itself, is being able to walk away and then come back into the story and reorient yourself.

• 1:20:56Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Cara Santa Maria?

  And then finally, one of the things that the authors talk about, which I think is an important concept, is the concept of illusory truth. And they talk about why deep reading is good for counteracting illusory truth. And that's sort of linked to this idea of susceptibility to misinformation. So what is illusory truth? Well, this is an effect that happens when you are repeatedly exposed to information that's somewhat similar. Because we know that the longer you hear the same narrative, the more believable it becomes, especially if it's coming from different sources. Illusory truth is a fundamental kind of feature. I mean, I think it's a bug, but you know,

• 1:21:38Cara Santa Maria?

  social media companies, look at this as a feature. Social media algorithms keep giving you what you're already clicking on. Yeah. Right? If you, yeah, if you tend to look at something and you spend more seconds and you don't scroll past it as fast, you'll start getting more versions of it from different outlets and for like slightly different takes. It is pernicious. Because what ends up happening is that you start to believe it because it feels like that is the world, even though that is your social media bubble. It's called illusory truth. And really sitting with content and giving yourself a couple of seconds to ask questions about it, to connect it to

• 1:22:18Cara Santa Maria?

  other information, to question it, even just a few seconds, is hugely important for counteracting illusory truth. And we do that when we read. We don't do it as often when we scroll. We go, wait, what, what did that sentence mean? Hang on, I have to reread that because my mind was somewhere else. We, we figure out how to connect it. We go, that reminds me of that other thing. Oh, that's how that works. Yeah, that makes sense. And the more we do that, the better we are at counteracting illusory truth and improving our, our ability to critically think and to, to counteract misinformation. So, you know, these are skills that are important. And I'm gonna keep banging this drum, you guys. And every time I see articles about it, I like to be able to talk about them on the show.

• 1:23:02Speaker 02

  Okay. Thanks, Cara.

• 1:23:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  Jay, it's Who's That Noisy Time?

• 1:23:06Jay Novella?

  All right, guys. Last week I played This Noisy.

• 1:23:39Jay Novella?

  It's worth the long tail. Very cool, very cool noisy. I got, I got some crazy responses, some of which I can't read. This is my favorite email I got this week. It's from Kevin McCreech, and he says, "This one is easy. It's the ominous noise of fascism. I think it's getting louder."

• 1:23:58Speaker 04

  It was ominous, so we'll give you that.

• 1:24:01Jay Novella?

  "By the way, if it wasn't for a few podcasts primarily yours, my view of the USA would be very poor. Keep it up, Kevin." Thank you, Kevin. No need to explain anything there. I just thought that was really funny. I got an email from Tracy Melinda, and Tracy says, "I have not heard this before, but my guess is that it's an elephant in organ failure." You know, you get it? I got it. I thought it was cute. A listener named Ben Frye wrote in and said, "Jay, I think this is a synthesizer playing an organ patch, and then the intonation scheme, example, just intonation, equal temperament, is being changed." You're not correct, but you're kind of on to it. I think most people that sent emails to me, like, knew exactly what this is. In fact, I got more correct answers on this than I can remember ever getting before. That's why, if you remember last week,

• 1:24:46Jay Novella?

  I said, "Hey, if you know explicitly what this is, you know, don't email in," because I wanted to get people to guess, because that's, you know, that's where all the fun is. Another listener named Andrew or Andy wrote in and said, "Jay, love the show. You guys are heroes. My guess is that the cat was walking on a church organ." You're not correct, Andy, but you are in the exact right ballpark. I got a winner from last week. The winner's name is Ricardo Battalani, or Battalani. He says, "Hey, guys, I've been listening to your show since high school, but I haven't, I haven't been able to see you live yet. Hopefully, one day. I'm pretty sure today's noisy is a pipe organs pneumatic system being turned off while keys are depressed, probably the foot keys, considering the depth of the notes." Ricardo, you are absolutely correct.

• 1:25:31Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 1:25:32Jay Novella?

  I, I had another email from a listener who gave us a ton of information, and his name is, with pronunciation, Colin, Colin Deick, and he said, "Hi, Jay. I know you said you wanted to let people who don't know guess first, but..." He knows, basically, he says to summarize, "I know what this is because my, both of my parents built organs." They were organ builders, so I couldn't refuse, you know, turn this down because he had some awesome information in here. So he said, "The organist first begins playing a chord and then expands it. There are also a lot of stops pulled. Each stop is a different group of pipes with their own unique tonality that will be activated when the corresponding note is played." He said, "So if you pull out three stops, you know, a flute, a trumpet, and an oboe and play

• 1:26:17Jay Novella?

  a middle C, you would hear three pipes, the middle C played and the voices of a flute, trumpet, and oboe," or you get that. "The mechanism is also the source of the idiom pulling out the stops, which literally refers to pulling out all the stop knobs in an organ." That's pretty cool.

• 1:26:31Speaker 04

  Wait, wait, wait, is that where the expression "pulling out the stops" comes from?

• 1:26:34Jay Novella?

  That's what he says.

• 1:26:35Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:26:36Jay Novella?

  So he describes, like, you know, what happens is the blower, which is the air source, is no longer supplying air to the system, but the organ continues to hold the chord, right? The person playing it continues to hold the chord.

• 1:26:48Speaker 04

  Air supply, good.

• 1:26:49Jay Novella?

  And essentially, like, the buildup of air inside the system slowly decreases, you know, because there's lots of channels that it goes through. So the pressure drops, the speed of the airflow also goes down. And that, you know, that in a nutshell is it. When you play a pipe organ in a church of that size, you turn it off and you're going to hear, like, this slow fade out of it and the tonality changes as well, which I think is just incredibly cool. Very, and it's also kind of menacing. If you listen to it with a horror movie playing in your head, it's pretty scary.

• 1:27:18Speaker 04

  You think it's called an organ because it has a breathing kind of, you know, quality about it?

• 1:27:26Jay Novella?

  Uh, maybe he'll write us back and let us know. I'm sure he's listening.

• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  That would be neat.

• 1:27:29Bob Novella?

  Jay, real quick.

• 1:27:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:31Bob Novella?

  You slightly mispronounced the word "pronunciation," and that made my entire day.

• 1:27:35Jay Novella?

  Did I?

• 1:27:37Bob Novella?

  It was slight, and it was, I know you know how to say it, but the fact that you mispronounced that word is awesome.

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  Mispronounced.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  So guys, my wife and I were in Sicily recently. We were at Catania, Sicily.

• 1:27:48Speaker 04

  Oh, Catania.

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  And there is a cathedral there, the Cathedral of Saint Agatha, which, as an interesting aside, she was tortured and her breasts were cut off.

• 1:27:58Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  And so there's a lot of statues of breasts commemorating her, which is, you see that? Why is there a statue of breasts in this cathedral? That's why. But anyway, they have a massive pipe organ in this cathedral. It's called the Jaco organ. And while we were there getting the tour, somebody was at the organ and they were playing the Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Which is that iconic Pipe Organ song that you've all heard.

• 1:28:27Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:28:28Speaker 02

  That's associated with Halloween and horror movies.

• 1:28:30Speaker 04

  Right, dude.

• 1:28:30Speaker 02

  It was magnificent.

• 1:28:34Bob Novella?

  Oh my god, man.

• 1:28:35Speaker 04

  That's impressive.

• 1:28:36Speaker 02

  I can only imagine to hear it live on a massive Pipe Organ, which is something. All right, well Steve, I have a new noisy for everybody this week. This was sent in by a listener named Derek, and here it is.

• 1:28:55Speaker 02

  Crazy, right? Mm-hmm.

• 1:28:57Speaker 04

  That's someone just pouring their breakfast cereal out of the box.

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  Maybe you need a hint. I was thinking. My hint is, I hear this sound quite often. That's the hint.

• 1:29:07Bob Novella?

  Oh, I think I know.

• 1:29:09Speaker 02

  You don't know.

• 1:29:10Bob Novella?

  All right, how about a gargantuan box of Legos being dumped on the floor?

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:29:17Speaker 02

  All right, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at [email protected]. Hey, so Jay, before we start talking about our upcoming events, I'm gonna have somebody join us who can tell us about SciCon, which is coming up in June. Steve Hupp, welcome to the SGU.

• 1:29:36Speaker 07

  Hey guys, thanks so much for having me. I'm just really excited to be able to talk about SciCon.

• 1:29:41Speaker 02

  So you've gotta be pretty busy. You're the Executive Director for the Committee of Skeptical Inquiry. You're basically in charge of putting this whole conference together, right?

• 1:29:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I've got a big team of people that help out. You guys gave a shout out to Barry Carr earlier in the year, because he retired, and he's been really helping plan as well.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  Great, great, great. So tell us what is gonna happen.

• 1:30:02Speaker 07

  Okay, well, we've got an amazing events coming up, as you said, in June. It's, uh, this year's actually the 50th anniversary of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. The organization put together by James Randi, Ray Hyman, Carl Sagan, Paul Kurtz, and others. And now we're the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and we're part of the Center for Inquiry. And our big yearly conference, SciCon, CSI Con, is gonna be in Buffalo, New York, from June 11th to 14th.

• 1:30:35Speaker 07

  And I can tell you all about some of the the exciting speakers and events if you're ready.

• 1:30:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, tell us.

• 1:30:42Speaker 07

  So I'm gonna kind of go in order, but on the first night, Thursday, June 11th, we just signed a bestselling author, Mary Roach.

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  She's awesome.

• 1:30:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, she's awesome. I'm very excited to have her. She's written a bunch of bestsellers like Stiff and Gulp and Fuzz, a lot of one-word bestsellers. But her newest book's called Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy. So she's actually gonna be in conversation with Richard Wiseman, who you guys know well, on the stage Thursday night. So it's gonna be a great opening night for the event.

• 1:31:17Speaker 02

  Okay, and then what else we got?

• 1:31:18Speaker 07

  Okay, and then on Friday, we have a new kid on the block in the skeptical community, the Skeptics Guide to the Universe Live Podcast will be part of the events included in registration. And then later that night, we've got the Skeptical Extravaganza of Special Significance that you guys will be holding, and we're selling tickets to that right now, and it's and they've really been selling. So we're really excited to have you guys there.

• 1:31:51Speaker 02

  Great.

• 1:31:51Speaker 07

  And then lastly, on Saturday, we've got Brian Brushwood. You probably, a lot of people know him from Scam School.

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, we know Brian.

• 1:32:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, the World's Greatest Con Podcast, and he's gonna be interviewing Bannachek and Michael Edwards, and they were the two kids as part of Project Alpha with James Randi, and they're gonna be doing an interview that day. And then that evening, we've got a fireside chat with me and Bill Nye, the Science Guy. So it's gonna be a lot of fun.

• 1:32:24Speaker 02

  Sounds like an awesome lineup, especially those skeptics guys in the middle.

• 1:32:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, I called you guys the new kids on the block because you guys just celebrated 20 years, which is pretty good. And we were also excited to be able to celebrate with you by putting you on the cover of Skeptical Inquirer.

• 1:32:42Jay Novella?

  Yeah, thank you for that, by the way. That was a pleasure.

• 1:32:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, by the time we get to PsychCon, we'll be at 21 years. But yeah, 50 years for CSI Man is amazing. I remember going to my first PsychCon back in the 90s. That was quite a while ago.

• 1:32:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, they've really put on a bunch. And really, PsychOp is, as a lot of people think of as the beginning of organized skepticism. And people can go to our website, CSIConference.org to see the full lineup of amazing speakers.

• 1:33:12Speaker 02

  Awesome. Thank you, Steve. Jay, very quickly, Jay, let's get people updated on our other events.

• 1:33:18Jay Novella?

  Yeah, okay, so we have the Madison, Wisconsin shows. We have three shows there, but the big thing to tell you about is that we had to change the date for the Extravaganza. So the entire weekend is going to be the 29th and the 30th. So all three shows will happen on those two dates. The Extravaganza is happening on May 30. So we'll have the the Secret SGU meetup on May 29. And we have the Private Show Plus, which will be earlier in the day on May 30 as well. And then Nauticon 2026, this is going to be happening in Sydney, Australia. You can go to Skepticon.org.au, or you can go to NauticonCon.com. Every time I say that,

• 1:34:00Jay Novella?

  I get a little angry at Ian, but it's all good. Anyway, go to those websites if you want to buy tickets to see us in Australia. And this is all happening in 2026.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  Yep, there's a lot happening this year. All right, Steve, we look forward to seeing you in Buffalo.

• 1:34:14Speaker 07

  So excited about it. Can't wait to see you guys.

• 1:34:16Speaker 02

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:34:16Jay Novella?

  All right. Take care.

• 1:34:17Speaker 07

  Take care.

• 1:34:18Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Jay. We have one email. This one comes from Vance in Santa Clarita, California. Where is that, Kara?

• 1:34:26Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like northwest of me.

• 1:34:29Speaker 02

  Northwest.

• 1:34:30Cara Santa Maria?

  It's near LA.

• 1:34:31Speaker 02

  Near LA, yeah, Santa Clarita. Vance writes, "Are the studies and grave predictions of global warming falsifiable? There must be other ways to falsify, other than wait for 100 years or so and measure the changes." He goes on, but that's the question, right? He talks about global warming, etc. Are we coming out of an ice age? And how do we separate man-made global warming from natural cycles and blah blah? So how can all this be falsified? So what do you guys think? How do we falsify the predictions made by climate scientists about anthropogenic global warming?

• 1:35:05Bob Novella?

  Well, it's models and simulations. You know, you see what these models, these simulations predict, and you see that, can they predict the easier stuff? You know, the stuff that might be not as, you know, that's more short-term? And we've made predictions, and over the decades, we've compared them to reality, and we find that they are in the right direction. And often, they're actually, they're actually not strong enough, you know, in terms of negative consequences. They're actually worse than the negative predictions we've made. I mean, so, I mean, models and simulations are a key answer to that question, I would think, right?

• 1:35:38Speaker 02

  I think that's it, in fact. So, I mean, obviously, there are many ways you can falsify elements of global warming, especially sort of the, it's caused by industrial-released CO2. Every time you do a study, looking at other things that could be driving the climate, if we found other things driving the climate, that would obviously falsify the anthropogenic hypothesis. If we, there's many different ways that we look at the increasing temperatures historically. And so every time we do that, that's a, that's a potential way of falsifying the hockey stick, right? The fact that there's been, not just the continuation of a long trend, but a rapid

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  upturn, you know, timed with the industrial revolution in both CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperatures. But the big way, I mean, there's, he says, "Do we have to wait for 100 years?" It's like, yeah, sort of. I mean, unfortunately, there's no way around that. When you're, when the bottom-line thing that you're predicting is what's going to happen into, in the future, only the future has the last word on that, right?

• 1:36:47Speaker 02

  But Bob, what you're saying is correct. What we do have is models. I know people dismiss that. It's like, it's only a model, right?

• 1:36:54Bob Novella?

  Oh god, what a horrible thing to say.

• 1:36:56Speaker 02

  But the models do a couple of things. So first of all, right, the climate scientists put every factor that they know about into the model. And then, and then the first thing they do is they retrodict, right?

• 1:37:09Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:37:09Speaker 02

  They say, "Does this model spit out the temperatures in the past that we already know happened? And if it, if it matches the historical record, then at least it's viable." It doesn't mean it's correct, because there could be thousands of incorrect but viable models. But at least it's viable, right? You can, so you can falsify the model if it doesn't match historical records. But then you have to predict future warming, right? In order for the model to be really fully scientifically validated, it has to survive the potential of being falsified by future data. So we have, at this point, about 50

• 1:37:49Speaker 02

  years of climate model predictions that could have been falsified. And as Bob said, if you look at all the models, even the ones from the 70s that are primitive by modern standards are pretty damn accurate. They've called the warming that we've actually seen very accurately, like within, as we say, it's within two standard deviations, which in science means correct, right? Within, within that range, that 95% confidence interval, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, the models are accurately predicting the warming that's actually happening over five decades. And they could have completely falsified those

• 1:38:30Speaker 02

  models, right? Anthropogenic global warming has so far survived 50 years of data that could have falsified it. But in terms of what's going to happen over the next 50 years, the next 100 years, we'll have to wait and see, right? All we could say is that the models are working out so far. They're actually getting better over time. And...

• 1:38:51Speaker 04

  That's scary.

• 1:38:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's good evidence that we should probably take them seriously, right? And nothing is absolute metaphysical certitude. It's all probability, risk versus benefit. Saying, so far, they're working pretty well, so we should, you know, take them seriously.

• 1:39:05Bob Novella?

  Right, and like the theory of evolution, as we all know, I mean, the evidence it would take to make these predictions wrong would be, I mean, it's really, you can't really reasonably expect these predictions now to be egregiously wrong. Subtly wrong, for sure, but egregiously wrong is basically, eh, that's really not going to happen, with such a high degree of certainty. Well, how did Gould put it? It would be, it would be something.

• 1:39:33Speaker 02

  Perverse to withhold provisional assent.

• 1:39:35Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. The other angle, though, I think where the uncertainty remains is in where the tipping points are.

• 1:39:44Bob Novella?

  True, absolutely true, yeah.

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

  So, because that is, again, there's complicated feedback loops, and we're not really sure exactly how that's going to play out.

• 1:39:52Bob Novella?

  It's like nonlinear, right?

• 1:39:53Speaker 02

  We know what's going to happen eventually, so that's the other thing. It's like, our confidence that these things are going to happen eventually is very high. Exactly when they're going to happen is what we don't know. That's really where all the uncertainty is. And they could be sooner than we predict, it could be later than we predict, but again, it's probably somewhere in the 95% confidence intervals, you know, that expanding wave of, you know, slope of uncertainty that you see on those data charts? It's probably, so far, we've been in there, but, yeah, that's the thing, like, when are the Antarctic ice sheet's going to collapse, you know? That we can't say for certain. Could be 200 years, who knows? But we know it's going to, well, it will happen eventually, again, under certain conditions,

• 1:40:38Speaker 02

  like, we don't do anything to mitigate global warming, and we know that, once it does happen, it's irreversible on a human time scale, at least given any reasonable projection of current technology. So those are the kind of statements we could make, right? There's no certainty, there's no absolute metaphysical certitude, it's all probability statements. But yes, it could have been falsified, it hasn't been falsified, it's looking good so far, and the predictions, if anything, are getting more accurate. Okay, guys, let's move on with science or fiction.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:41:23Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items, or facts, two real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Three regular news items this week, the first of 2026, no theme. You guys ready?

• 1:41:39Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:41:40Speaker 02

  Here we go.

• 1:41:41Speaker 04

  You swept us last week.

• 1:41:42Speaker 02

  I did. In fact, I did sweep you to my delight. Let's see how you do this week. Item number one, engineers have developed a robotic hand which is more dexterous than a human hand and can even detach, crawl across the floor and retrieve objects. Item number two, a new study finds that disconnecting from media is associated with significant and long-lasting reductions in reported stress levels. And item number three, a new analysis finds that Ice Age kangaroos, which were more than twice as heavy as the largest extant kangaroos, could still use hopping for locomotion. Bob, go first.

• 1:42:26Bob Novella?

  This robot hand, hang on, I gotta call Christian Hubecky for a second here. Damn, that's probably not cool to do.

• 1:42:33Speaker 04

  Let your fingers do the walking.

• 1:42:34Bob Novella?

  How awesome is that, man? More dexterous than a human hand. I'm skeptical of that right out of the gate. I mean, how are you defining dexterity in this specific case? I mean, I may have to just say that's fiction just out of the gate, because, I mean, it's human hand is just so damn dexterous, and I've seen some good robotic hands, but... And detaching and walking across the floor, that's such an evil dead ass hand move, I just love it to death. Let's look at this other one here. This one just annoys crap out of me because it seems so obvious. Disconnect from media, significant long-lasting reductions in stress. Of course, in 25 and 2026? Duh.

• 1:43:19Bob Novella?

  I mean, ugh, I can't take large doses of news these days. Days, I guess I gotta go to my happy place after a little while. Um, so that just sounds too obvious. And the kangaroo, twice as heavy, but still able to jump. Is it still efficient enough to warrant using the jumping as a, as a way of getting around? I don't know. What's the, what's the, what's the, um, the tipping point there? What's the, what's the point where it's just like, oh, you're just too heavy for this to be a good strategy for locomotion? So I have no goddamn idea. Um, yeah, but you gotta grab with some fingers and then walk back with other fing, with the other fingers. I mean, that's, or so that's, I mean, if it's small, yeah, you could grab something with two fingers and then walk back.

• 1:44:01Bob Novella?

  Not very, it doesn't seem very efficient to me, um, but super cool to think about. Yeah, I'm just gonna, I'll just do this meta decision here of just going with the, um, the one that's just too obvious. Which of course is still a roll of the dice, cause you know, you know, this strategy well. So I'll just say disconnect, disconnecting from the media is fiction.

• 1:44:22Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara.

• 1:44:24Cara Santa Maria?

  It's funny, cause like, I mean, especially given the topic that I just covered, but I don't like how a lot of things are worded in the media one. So I'm gonna go through the other two first. I, uh, okay, robotic hand. I don't like this more dexterous than a human hand. By what measure? Like dexterity is like a multi-variable measurement. Um, is it about fine, you know, grasping? Is it about, I'm assuming that with a robot, there are things that hands just can't do, that you can make a robot hand do. So by that measure, maybe it could be more dexterous, but there might still be things that a human hand is better at. Um, but maybe it's like on the total.

• 1:45:03Cara Santa Maria?

  So that one, I don't think that you would do a fiction where it's like, eh, you know, by this measure it is, but by that measure it's not. So I'm gonna say maybe that one's science. Ice age kangaroos, more than twice as heavy as largest extant. Okay, so the things were big, yeah? And they could hop still. Why wouldn't, if they were twice as heavy, why wouldn't they still be able to hop? They had twice the muscle tone too, probably, or not twice the tone, but twice the muscle size. Uh, that one could be the catcher. It could be, okay, they were more than twice as heavy, but they couldn't hop, you know? They could only walk. Um, so that one's a little bothering me. And then, but this one, I just feel like you did not write enough on, on the middle item.

• 1:45:47Cara Santa Maria?

  A new study, and that could be literally be anything. I hate it when it's a single study. Finds disconnecting from media. Bob, he didn't say social media.

• 1:45:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that includes like your phone and things like that.

• 1:45:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that includes like movies and like newspapers. So basically.

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  Well, I should say digital media.

• 1:46:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay, cool. So a digital detox, basically, is what you're saying. A person going on a digital detox is going to have significant and long lasting reductions in reported stress levels. This could go either way. I could see it being significant, but the long lasting, I mean, and maybe you can answer this, but maybe you can't. Are they still disconnected?

• 1:46:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it lasted while they were disconnected. It's not implying it lasted beyond the disconnection.

• 1:46:31Cara Santa Maria?

  So long lasting is, you know, throughout the disconnection period?

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:46:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay. I also could see a scenario in which after being disconnected for a few days, people start to get anxious again.

• 1:46:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:46:43Cara Santa Maria?

  And needing to reconnect. And so that is the thing that maybe it's between that and the and the big old kangaroo not being able to hop. But I'm going to go with, you know, how do we define long lasting? I think it probably lasted a day or two, but then for most people, unless this is very well practiced, like, you know, people who camp regularly, I think that they're going to start to get anxious and their stress levels will go back up and they need to quote reconnect. So I'm going to go with Bob with this one.

• 1:47:13Speaker 02

  Okay, Jay?

• 1:47:14Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, the one about stress, the digital detox, I can argue both sides very easily, but the question here is, you know, I guess is like, what is there any long term effects on lowering stress from, from, you know, lowering how much content you you take in or how much you use your device or whatever? You know, my personal experience, you know, I definitely get short term benefits from it. And I did have a spell where I really tried to detach. And I didn't have like what I would describe as significant and, you know, semi permanent.

• 1:47:53Jay Novella?

  Lowering of stress. You know, I still live in a highly stressful world. I still know what's going on. So, yeah, I mean, I think I agree with Bob and Cara on this one. Regarding the hand thing, though, like as Cara mentioned, you know, how do you determine what dexterity is or whatever that I think what we're seeing here, Cara, is that this is the reporting, this is what the reporters are saying. It's not necessarily true, right? That's the way that they're describing it, you know? I wouldn't put it past, you know, people saying it's more dexterous than a human hand with a light interpretation, you know, wasn't like, I don't think they did this massive study to compare it to a human hand. It's more of like a reaction, I think, if anything. But anyway, I'm with Bob and Cara. Number two

• 1:48:37Jay Novella?

  is the fake. Okay? And Devin?

• 1:48:39Speaker 04

  I don't see mechanically why there couldn't, that couldn't happen, right? All the components. I didn't have to really invent anything new. I kind of just had to piece it all together and make it happen. So I think that's what they did. But yeah, the one about disconnecting from media, oh, boy, there was stress before social media, that's for sure, in a lot of ways. So just because you, you know, stop your consumption of digital media does not, I don't think necessarily link to, as this reads, what, significant and long-lasting reductions in reported stress levels? Because there's plenty, like Jay was saying, there's plenty of other things out there to stress you out about, and that's what used to happen

• 1:49:20Speaker 04

  before digital anyways. And the last one about the Ice Age and the kangaroos, I, fine. So I'm with everyone else. It's sink or swim.

• 1:49:28Speaker 02

  All right. So there's going to be another sweep this week. Did I get a double sweep? Or did you guys even score?

• 1:49:33Bob Novella?

  So Steve, before you continue, I want to explain to Cara my thinking of the kangaroo. My thinking is that, my thinking was that, at a certain way, because what happens is that the kangaroo, it stores and releases elastic energy right from their tendons. If you're too heavy, then that tendon would have to be too robust, too big, in order to do that effect efficiently enough to warrant making that how you get around. So that's what my thinking was on there.

• 1:49:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So, but is it at the twice as heavy, or the three times or four times as heavy point?

• 1:50:03Speaker 02

  All right. Well, let's start with that one, then. A new analysis finds that Ice Age kangaroos, which were more than twice as heavy as the largest extant kangaroos, could still use hopping for locomotion. You all think this one is science? So, let's discuss what Bob, what you were saying. So, the, that's the question, right? Is it, are they too heavy for this sort of spring effect of the tendon to work? And if it, if they did exceed whatever that limit is, they would not be able to hop around like kangaroos hop around, right? For locomotion, they would have to either walk on all four or just walk, you know, bipedally.

• 1:50:45Speaker 02

  So, this one is science. This is science. But, you know, I didn't say it in the thing, but until this study, scientists believed that they couldn't top for locomotion for those reasons, because they were extrapolating from existing kangaroos. And when they included updated data from the fossil kangaroos, the giant fossil kangaroos, they realized that there, there are biological differences that would allow them to hop.

• 1:51:22Bob Novella?

  What were they?

• 1:51:23Speaker 02

  So, modern kangaroos get as big as about 90 kilos. And they previously said that the upper limit of hopping was at 140 to 160 kilos. And the giant fossil kangaroos were over 200 kilos. So, that's why I said, no, they're too big, they couldn't hop. But then when they looked at the fossils more closely, again, there was two limiting factor, bone strength and tendon size. They found that both of them together were, were robust enough to allow for hopping. And you're correct, Bob, when the tendons, they have to get bigger to hold the weight and the bigger they get, the less efficient they are.

• 1:52:05Bob Novella?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:52:06Speaker 02

  At absorbing and releasing that energy. But it would still be, you know, possible to hop even, they did have larger tendons. They could see the insertions in the bones of the larger tendons. However, they said that they didn't necessarily hop all the time. They probably used it as one of many different types of locomotion. They probably also walked on all fours and George just walked on their feet. But then they would hop when they needed a burst of speed to get away from a predator or something. So, yes, that was a change in our thinking about the giant kangaroos with this study.

• 1:52:37Bob Novella?

  Interesting.

• 1:52:38Speaker 02

  All right, we'll go backwards. A new study finds that disconnecting from media is associated with significant and long-lasting reductions in reported stress levels. You guys all think this one is the fiction, and this one is...

• 1:52:51Bob Novella?

  Say it.

• 1:52:52Speaker 02

  The fiction. Yay!

• 1:52:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Go Bob. Good job.

• 1:52:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you keyed in on the things that I made up. So, there was a study looking at people disconnecting from media, from digital media, and they decided to do an observational study rather than a controlled study because all, most of the previous studies, you basically tell people how much digital media they can consume and when. Or you say, like, you're not going to touch it for the next 24 hours, the next 48 hours, or whatever. And they were worried that involuntary disconnection caused stress, right? So they said, what happens when people voluntarily disconnect from digital media? So, of course, if it's

• 1:53:40Speaker 02

  voluntary, it's observational, it's not controlled. And what they found was that there was improvements, there was improvements in well-being, right, subjective well-being, energy, and social connectedness, but that these were short-lived, and they were pretty small. And they reported no difference in stress levels. So I basically flipped everything about what the study showed.

• 1:54:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Did it say how long they were disconnected?

• 1:54:13Speaker 02

  For different amounts of time, because, again, there was all individual, they were choosing when to do it. So it could have been hours to days, you know?

• 1:54:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. I think for me, and I do think that's super interesting, and I'm kind of not surprised, but I'm much more interested in people who do this regularly and are practiced at this.

• 1:54:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Because I bet you, you'll see much larger changes.

• 1:54:36Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 1:54:37Cara Santa Maria?

  But doing it, like, one time for a day, it's stressful and...

• 1:54:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, they sampled them over two weeks, but they looked at the times that they were connected versus disconnected over those two weeks.

• 1:54:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Like, most people don't ever disconnect from their phones.

• 1:54:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Ever.

• 1:54:52Speaker 02

  It's a complicated question, obviously, and this is just looking at it from one slice. But that's why it's easy, because it's the fiction, and none of that matters, right? But they did, it definitely did not show this, right, that there's this big, long-lasting effect, you know, with stress. That was the one thing that was not affected.

• 1:55:08Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not a panacea.

• 1:55:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. All right, which means that engineers have developed a robotic hand, which is more dexterous than a human hand and can even detach crawl across the floor and retrieve objects is science. And yeah, of course, you hear that more dexterous than a human hand and immediately that sounds dubious. But so this is a robotic hand. It is not limited by the anatomy of a human hand. It could have as many.

• 1:55:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, just coming off of your wrist makes you more dexterous.

• 1:55:35Speaker 02

  But even that aside, that's not the piece that made it more dexterous. First of all, it could have two thumbs, which gives it a lot more options in terms of how it could hold on to things. It could have more than five fingers and the fingers can bend backwards. Basically, so you could hold things on the back of your hand, not just on the palm of your hand. Right, so this thing can detach from the wrist and then it could use its fingers to crawl across the floor. It could pick something up with fingers it's not using to walk and to hold it against either the back or the palm of the hand. It has way more options. It's weekend, so in that context, it's way more dexterous. It could move in many different ways.

• 1:56:14Bob Novella?

  Steve, I was thinking of, I was thinking of extra digits and it's, it's funny how the, the, um, the assumption of a, of a typical hand was so strong that I discounted that.

• 1:56:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:56:25Bob Novella?

  Um, I should have, but I should have asked.

• 1:56:26Speaker 02

  You could have asked and that was, that was, that's interesting because that's one of the key insights that these engineers has like, wait a minute, we don't have to be limited by a human hand.

• 1:56:34Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God, yeah.

• 1:56:35Speaker 02

  We can have two thumbs, we can have six fingers, we can do whatever we want. And once you, once you're freed of that assumption, then you could optimize a hand without evolutionary constraints, right? You can make it do whatever you need it to do.

• 1:56:48Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I'm also seeing robots, um, becoming more popular that, that can move like a normal person, but aren't limited by human range of motion.

• 1:56:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:56:56Bob Novella?

  They could do, they can make, like you said, they can, their arms can move in ways that no human could possibly move. And that's of, of course, an obviously great idea for robots because why should, why should we put a straitjacket on them like that?

• 1:57:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, wasn't that what I'm trying to, I have a, I remember an image from some sci-fi show where somebody grabs a robot from behind and the robot just flips everything around and now he's facing him, you know what I mean?

• 1:57:18Bob Novella?

  Yes. I, what was that? I could, I could picture it too, but it's not enough detail to tell me what it was. But yeah, we saw the same thing.

• 1:57:25Speaker 02

  And again, you know, it, this is robotic, but it could also be prosthetic. Uh, you know, that could be.

• 1:57:33Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure. Yeah.

• 1:57:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, for, uh, attached to a person's prostheses.

• 1:57:37Bob Novella?

  I've seen it, Steve.

• 1:57:38Speaker 02

  And.

• 1:57:38Bob Novella?

  I've seen it. It exists.

• 1:57:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you, I'm saying you might, I know that, I mean, the whole idea of robotic hands, but even where for human prosthetic limbs, we don't necessarily have to limit ourselves to the human anatomical form.

• 1:57:51Bob Novella?

  Yeah, man, two thumbs, baby.

• 1:57:52Speaker 02

  And here's the key, the key point to that, though, is the human brain can adapt to new configurations, new anatomical configurations. We're not limited to what came before.

• 1:58:04Bob Novella?

  Sure, man. And, you know, change the homunculus. Why not?

• 1:58:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can.

• 1:58:08Bob Novella?

  It can work.

• 1:58:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:58:10Cara Santa Maria?

  And we, yeah, studies show that over and over. Sew fingers together, split fingers. Yeah, we've done all sorts of cool studies on that.

• 1:58:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah, man, your brain's like, I totally got this.

• 1:58:18Speaker 02

  The way I think of it, the way what the evidence shows, like, the difference in your dominant and your non-dominant hand. So like, when you go outside of the, the body plan you were born with, it's probably going to be, your level of control will be more like your non-dominant hand.

• 1:58:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  Not as good as your dominant.

• 1:58:35Cara Santa Maria?

  You're not going to be a skilled pianist with eight fingers.

• 1:58:37Speaker 02

  Yes, but still, that's damn useful.

• 1:58:40Bob Novella?

  Unless you were born that way.

• 1:58:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:41Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true.

• 1:58:42Speaker 02

  That's true. If you were born that way and there was, you know, connected to you in that window.

• 1:58:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Polydactyly, yeah.

• 1:58:48Speaker 02

  It could be. Yeah. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:58:50Speaker 04

  Success in creating effective AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization, or the worst, we just don't know. So, we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it. Stephen Hawking.

• 1:59:11Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, he was very concerned about it. And you chose that quote before you knew what my news article was going to be.

• 1:59:16Speaker 04

  I did. How's that?

• 1:59:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, a bit of a coincidence.

• 1:59:19Speaker 04

  Right, yeah. Or is it?

• 1:59:21Speaker 02

  Or is it?

• 1:59:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, yes it is.

• 1:59:25Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:59:26Speaker 04

  Spoiler alert, come on.

• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  Thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:59:30Speaker 04

  Thanks, everyone.

• 1:59:32Speaker 02

  And until next week, this is your skeptic's guide to the universe.

• 1:59:38Speaker 02

  Skeptics 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.

• 2:01:10Jay Novella?

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