The Skeptics Guide #1064 - Nov 29 2025

Quickie with Bob: Helion Fusion Update; News Items: CRISPR Wheat Sources Nitrogen, LLMs and Collective Intelligence, Origins of Theia, Holiday Scams, Hypervelocity White Dwarves; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Cellulose Correction; 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

  Your joints help you keep doing what you love. Give them daily support with Ancient Nutrition Multi-Collagen Protein. Two scoops deliver 20 grams of collagen from 10 types, including clinically studied eggshell membrane. Plus, vitamin C and probiotics to support skin, hair, nails, and joint health. Visit ancientnutrition.com/protein and use code PROTEIN for $15 off. That's ancientnutrition.com code PROTEIN.

• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Jay Novella?

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Tuesday, November 25th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Jay Novella.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  Hey, guys.

• 0:49Jay Novella?

  Evan Bernstein.

• 0:50Speaker 04

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:51Jay Novella?

  And we have a guest, Andrea Jones-Roy. Andrea, welcome back.

• 0:55Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me back. Always love hanging out with you guys.

• 0:58Jay Novella?

  So, how's it going?

• 0:59Speaker 04

  Oh, you know, everything in the United States and the world is totally fine. So, nothing interesting to report, yeah. This is fine. Yeah, I'm hanging in there despite. I'm making an apple pumpkin bread as we speak, so, once a year. I don't cook, but once a year, I'm seized with the desire to do so. And today was a magical day for that, so.

• 1:21Jay Novella?

  Do you happen to have a good recipe?

• 1:23Speaker 04

  No, I just found something online. I was gonna just make a pumpkin bread, but I had two apples that were gonna go bad. And so, I was like, we're having apple pumpkin bread. Yeah, if it's any good, I'll give you the recipe. And if it's not, I'll keep it to myself.

• 1:35Jay Novella?

  You had me at bread, so I'm intrigued. At least take a picture of it and send it to me.

• 1:40Speaker 04

  I will. All right, excellent. How are you all doing?

• 1:43Jay Novella?

  Good. So, Andrea, we are four episodes in. We recorded four episodes of our political reality podcast.

• 1:49Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, four episodes and some intro material.

• 1:53Jay Novella?

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55Jay Novella?

  Hey, what's funny is, like, you know, because we couldn't record the last two weeks because Steve was in Dubai. And it's really good that nothing, like, impactful or interesting or noteworthy has happened in the United States over the last two weeks. I'm glad we don't, we're not behind the eight ball on anything that we should be talking about. Very slow news cycle, yeah.

• 2:13Speaker 04

  The administration had the courtesy of not doing anything. Yeah, my god.

• 2:19Jay Novella?

  Are you guys gonna release those four? Are they just like hopelessly out of date at this point?

• 2:23Speaker 04

  It's a good question, Bob.

• 2:24Jay Novella?

  No, the podcast is largely evergreen.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not news. It's not like, you know, it's, although sometimes we reflect what's going on in the news, but the topics are more, yeah, they're more evergreen.

• 2:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, the hope is that they're evergreen. I suppose if we undergo a massive political change, things will stop being evergreen. But if the world continues, then it's evergreen. Evergreen enough. But it is something that we, you know, we've all been talking about is like, to what extent do we need to tether to the news? And I think to do anything political that's current, it all but has to be a daily show, I think.

• 2:58Jay Novella?

  Definitely, yeah.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  Because things just change too fast.

• 3:01Jay Novella?

  The point of this show is, you know, in the, it could be in the context of things that are happening on a weekly basis, you know, because there is so many different things happening that that it would bring up a lot of different topics. Like, for example, with the Epstein votes going through the House and the Senate, you know, that that would be a great episode to discuss just how, you know, a bill is created and how, you know, what's its pathway to being approved or denied.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Didn't we see that on Schoolhouse Rock already?

• 3:29Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, at least you let me sing a song, Jay.

• 3:31Speaker 05

  A little dated, you know?

• 3:33Jay Novella?

  But you get the idea. The point is, like, we can't be sitting on top of the news like as it comes out, because that would mean that we're YouTubers that like are recording, you know, six hours a day. And that's not the point here.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, and some of the topics, you know, we're choosing them with an eye to what's relevant. So one of the, I don't know if we're allowed to reveal what we've done.

• 3:51Jay Novella?

  Of course you can, sure.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. So one of the episodes is about voting systems and, you know, where does ranked choice voting fit in the other types of systems out there? What are the pros and cons of them? And ranked choice voting is something that has been in the news because New York City uses it locally. It's been used in different elections around the US. It certainly has legs overseas as well. And so it's something that's both in the news, but also not like the most cutting edge news ever in the world. But I am reading that Democrats are thinking about using ranked choice voting for more elections in the future in the US.

• 4:22Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  So it's, yeah, yeah. Well, Steve and I disagree about ranked choice voting, but it would be better than what we have, I can tell.

• 4:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah, be not necessarily the best possible option, but a lot better than what we have.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 4:34Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  I'd love to see it at the presidential level at national elections.

• 4:39Speaker 05

  Oh geez.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is I've only participated in it in very local elections. And apart from the mayoral race in New York City, there were a lot of races where I didn't know who any of the candidates were, never mind knew how to rank them. And so for something like president, or senate, or governor, it's it's a little more fun. I think because you know more about the candidate, you can really, you know, think through third party candidates and other things like that.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  So you didn't agonize over your fifth choice for comptroller?

• 5:09Speaker 04

  I did, because I'm a dedicated citizen, but one one might not. I did actually sit in the booth forever, because the service was terrible, and I was Googling all the comptroller choices. I couldn't tell you the name of a single, I couldn't even tell you who I ranked first. But I'm sure they're doing a great job. Nope, they haven't even been sworn in. Yeah, I'm not sure.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  Well, then they are doing a good job.

• 5:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I just can't believe they spell controller wrong all the time. It's embarrassing.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  All right, well, let's get to some science news. Bob, give us an update on the Helion Fusion. Is it Helion or Helion? Probably Helion.

• 5:52Bob Novella?

  Yeah, probably.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  I'm guessing.

• 5:54Bob Novella?

  Thank you, Steve. This is your Quickie with Bob. Back in episode 932, I talked about the company Helion Energy, which was working with Microsoft to commercialize fusion energy. And their design was interesting. It was a hybrid technology. Jay, say it.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  It's a hybrid.

• 6:11Bob Novella?

  They call it magnetoinertial fusion, which is a hybrid of magnetic and inertial confinement, which we've talked about on the show.

• 6:18Speaker 05

  Also a marvel.

• 6:18Bob Novella?

  You know, many times. It basically borrows the ideas of magnetic confinement, like iders, or is it eater? It's eater, right? Eaters, Takamak, and inertial compression, like the laser implosions at Lawrence Livermore that actually had some notoriety. God, that was a bunch of years ago, not a few years ago, where they hit ignition. But in their process, which is interesting, electromagnetic fields smashed deuterium and helium-3 plasma together to Few some of it, right? So you got some fusion going on. And then the then the motion of the expanding fusion plasma pushes on these surrounding magnetic fields. And they're taking that energy that's inherent in the magnetic field when it's being pushed. They take that and convert it directly into electricity.

• 7:04Bob Novella?

  And it's it's this direct conversion into electricity. That's one of the more interesting attributes of their technology. This cuts out the inherent inefficiencies that come along with using heat to make steam. And then to run turbines and then using that to generate electricity. So it cuts out a couple of the middlemen. In the middle there and just goes kind of directly into electricity, which is really interesting. So all of this ties into their general strategy. They want energy production to be so efficient that they don't need to chase ignition like every other everyone else is doing. And ignition is the the point where you've got basically a self sustaining fusion reaction going on. And also there's other little attributes as well, but that's the main thrust of ignition. So they think they don't need to really chase that.

• 7:47Bob Novella?

  So back then, they were, I talked about, hey, they're working on, they have their sixth generation fusion generator. And it reached 100 million degrees Celsius. And rah rah rah, wasn't that awesome? And they were talking about that they will create their seventh generation fusion generator. Called Polaris and it should be ready by 2024. And they said with this first prototype, they wanted to demonstrate electricity produced directly from fusion. Potentially even net electric. Okay, so that's what they were, that's what was happening a few years ago in 2023. So now we're seeing Helion back in the news and they they have in fact created their Polaris fusion generator.

• 8:25Bob Novella?

  And it's a doozy. It's a they have monster, they have a monster capacitor farm delivering 100 gigawatts into the machine. So think about that, 100 gigawatts, that's like grid scale power, right? In one building. Of course, it's only for microseconds, but it's still quite impressive. Their CEO says it runs at 100 million degrees. I thought that's what Toronto was doing. So that didn't really increase at all, it seems, if these numbers are right, but that's fine. 10 times the sun's core temperature. That seems like enough enough right there, isn't it? And they also mentioned that their coaxial cables can carry these pulses. Those coaxial cables are 720 miles long if you put them all to get laid them end to end. So that's a lot of cables, a lot of coax. This is now, this is one thing that was that was kind of discouraging.

• 9:10Bob Novella?

  The details of their progress are only kind of minimally and cautiously available, right? Because they and they that's because ostensibly because they had Chinese competitors steal bits of their intellectual property in the past. So that that theft, of course, is totally believable believable, right? We read about that in the news all the time. But it does make it hard for the scientific community to properly assess their chances of success. And it's also seems like, oh, really? You can't give us a lot of information. That's just it's it's a it's a definitely a red flag. But I understand if it truly is because of that, you know, Chinese competitors stealing their intellectual property, then I would understand why they would be, you know, so reticent.

• 9:53Bob Novella?

  Let's see also in the also in the news, they're still aiming for this idea of minimal fusion, which actually wasn't very, I don't think it was they clearly discussed that a few years ago because that really that wasn't in my notes when I looked at them from a few years ago. They were just pushing for fusion. It didn't seem like they I didn't hear the term or the phrase chasing ignition that they're not chasing ignition. So if they didn't make it clear a few years ago, they're definitely making it clear now that this is that they're going to rely on these efficiencies. So here's a quote from Helion CEO and co-founder David Kurtley. He said, "We can recover electricity at high efficiency. We require a lot less fusion. Fusion is the hard part. My goal ironically is to do the minimum amount of fusion that we can deliver a product

• 10:37Bob Novella?

  to the customer and generate electricity." So very interesting. Of course, the question remains, you know, is it is that going to be enough? Is a little is a little fusion enough? So Helion has also broken ground and started work on their Orion plant. They did they mentioned that a few years ago that they were going to do that. So they they're on track for that. The Orion plant has been worked on and this is going to be their first commercial plant. The technology, the idea is that the technology that they develop in Polaris, which has been running. For most of 2025, I believe, that technology will be ported into Orion. At Orion, it's going to be, the plan is to have a 50-megawatt class plant online. They predict by 2028, so that's when they, a few years ago, they were saying 2028 as well. So it's kind of, I don't know what to make of that.

• 11:22Bob Novella?

  I'm encouraged that they're not saying, well, it's going to be 2030 or 2032 now, which is what we would expect, right? Steve, you'd expect these initial dates that are a few years old to be pushed back. So they're still saying 2028. And when it's done, it's going to be under a power purchase agreement with Microsoft, so they can feed their hungry data centers. But Helion's competitors are, of course, skeptical that their competitors are going to hit the 2028 goal. I got one quote from Ben Levitt. He's head of R and D at Zapp's Energy. He said, Ben said, "I don't see a commercial application in the next few years happening. There's a lot of complicated science and engineering still to be discovered and be applied."

• 12:07Bob Novella?

  He says he doesn't see it happening in the next few years. Does that mean it could potentially happen in five years? Or is he thinking more 10 years or more? I don't know. I couldn't find any of the quotes around that. Other people are worrying that if Helion screws up badly, it could embarrass and taint the whole industry. So yeah, that's a concern as well. I mean, that's something that, we seem to be making such cool progress in the past decade. I'd hate to have a, you know, what was that called? The AI winter where, you know, resources dry up.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  Bob, let me ask you a couple of questions really quick. So I'm reading that they have not achieved net energy production.

• 12:41Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I didn't see, like I said, I didn't see too much information about what the status is. And because they're saying that because they, you know, they're trying to...

• 12:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, but just even saying, like, that's not information. That's not technical information that could be stolen. Just saying, "We have achieved net energy," or "This is how close we are to net energy." That's sort of the bottom line here. That's like a big thing.

• 13:02Bob Novella?

  It is, and I am just...

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Suspicious that they're not saying, yeah.

• 13:06Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's definitely, that's definitely, you know, a red flag right there. And they've been running this thing, apparently, from what I could tell, Polaris. They've been running this thing, like, all year, like, every day, they say, every day.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Here's another thing, so the question I have. So this is producing electricity directly, right? It's not going to heat, steam, and turn a turbine like every other reactor. The fusion will create a...

• 13:33Speaker 03

  You know, magnetic field that can induce current directly in, you know, their coils.

• 13:39Bob Novella?

  Right, as a plasma is expanding, because the plasma is going to be energized by the fusion that's happening inside, right? So the fusion is going to be happening within the plasma, and that's going to expand the plasma field, and the magnetic field around it is going to kind of try to hold it in. It's going to be, you know, expanding, so the energy that the plasma is putting into the magnetic field to expand it is what they tap into and convert directly into electricity. So that's one of their big things.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Has that worked? Is that just a theory, or has that actually happened? They ever prove a concept there?

• 14:11Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I think they proved that with Generation Six, I think, but how efficient it is is another question. I'm pretty sure that that's actually happening, and that's one of the key interesting aspects of their technology. But I don't know how well it's happening, you know what I mean? So, yeah. But like I said, I'm fascinated by their approach of not chasing ignition, but will it be good enough? Is that going to be enough, not having ignition? Just because your whole entire process is super efficient, so you're kind of like making the maximum use of what little fusion is actually happening. I will say I'm optimistically skeptical about this, you know?

• 14:56Bob Novella?

  I've even burned too many times. Some of this looks really interesting, but I'd like to have some other people, some other real scientists looking at this, because we had some, I remember a few years ago, some scientists were skeptical, so check out that episode for some of their quotes. So, yeah, so they were skeptical a few years ago. I haven't come across too much of that right now, but it's still kind of, you know, it's still kind of early in terms of this Polaris. I mean, it's been running for a while, but I haven't read too much about it. But if this works, this would be a hell of a coup, and they could actually say, you know, our fusion is on your power bill. There will actually be power bills going out that might list fusion as one of the sources, which would be really cool.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  All right, thanks, Bob. Jay, we have another sort of cutting-edge science news item. You're going to tell us about using CRISPR to make GMO wheat.

• 15:44Jay Novella?

  Yeah, this is really cool. So wheat draws almost everything it needs from, of course, the soil, right? Its roots take up minerals like, what would it be, Steve? Do you have any idea of what wheat would need from the soil?

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Nitrogen, phosphorus.

• 16:01Jay Novella?

  That's pretty good. Anybody, yeah, potassium, zinc, iron, right? Uh, so, so the soil microbes and the fungi, you guys like fungi or fungi? Fungi. I don't know, man. I go back and forth.

• 16:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, it depends on the time of day. What about evenings, Evan? Evening. Oh, definitely fungi. Yeah, that's right.

• 16:22Jay Novella?

  So you have the soil microbes and you have the fungi and they help unlock these nutrients that the wheat roots, you know, either physically can't reach on their own or can't use in the form that's present in the soil, in the soil, right? And water acts as this delivery system that moves those nutrients, you know, into the roots as, as, you know, the, you know, the water's moving around in the soil, or if someone is watering, um, you know, that helps distribute these nutrients around the roots. Now, the atmosphere contributes carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, right? But there is one critical nutrient we cannot access directly from the air, even though it surrounds the plant. Now, I will ask you again, do you guys know what nutrient that is? Talking about nitrogen? Steve, you're so smart. I'm so proud of you.

• 17:10Jay Novella?

  It is nitrogen. So nitrogen is the main ingredient wheat uses to build the proteins in health, in, in the healthy leaves. Now, protein, uh, as you may know, is, is present in, in wheat. And gluten is a protein, but gluten doesn't improve the flavor, it only improves the chew. And, uh, and there's other reasons why bakers want it. But that's, that's a side note. We can't use atmospheric nitrogen because it's locked up as N2. And this is why modern agriculture has to rely heavily on nitrogen fertilizers, right? And there's a ton of money in that. The problem is that wheat is not an efficient user of it. Meaning that, you know, wheat, um, your typical wheat field takes up to about 30 to 50% of

• 17:55Jay Novella?

  the nitrogen that is fertilized to it, right, or that's applied to it. And the rest goes into... Well, the problem is, Bob, that there's downstream effects, literally, like runoff into waterways. Nitrogen runoff, okay, yeah, yeah. It's a terrible problem. It really is a big problem.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  Do other plants have a more efficient use of the nitrogen?

• 18:14Jay Novella?

  I did not check all 3,292. Uh, no. I'm sure, I'm sure some do, Ev. But, you know, wheat being a massive crop, like, this is like a worldwide unbelievably necessary crop. It's used for so much. Yeah, it's, it's one of our most important crops. And in fact, it was one of the crops that let humans not be, um, you know, not have to be nomadic and let them stay and, you know, and grow wheat. Agriculture, yeah, man. And then, you know, there's a, yeah, without a doubt. There's a couple of other things that happen. It converts into nitrous oxide, which is a greenhouse gas, and there is a, a process called volatilization, which means that the nitrogen goes into the air as ammonia.

• 18:58Jay Novella?

  So there's lots of different things, lots of chemistry happening here. And of course, there, a real monetary downside here is that farmers lose money because they're buying a lot more nitrogen than, that is actually being applied to the, the thing that they're trying to fix. And like I said, waterways will get polluted, atmosphere picks up more nitrous oxide, just a lot of nasty things happening with all that fertilizer. The good news here is that, like Steve said, these researchers at UC Davis found a way to push wheat into, working with soil bacteria that can convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form that the plant can actually use. So this is not a full replacement for fertilizer, but it changes how the plant interacts with the microbial world around its roots. And this is really interesting, so let me get into some of these details here.

• 19:43Jay Novella?

  Their work is built around a pretty simple idea. Instead of trying to convert the wheat into something, it's not like a bean that grows nitrogen fixing nodules, right? You know, they, you know, sure, they could, they could borrow some programming from a bean and try to, you know, push it into the DNA of the wheat and all that, but that's a big deal and it's really difficult and, you know, it's expensive, time consuming, and there's no guarantee that it's gonna work. So they decided to make a small change in the wheat that influences the soil microbes. And they decided that if they could pull this off, that bacteria would do most of the work here. And that's what the study actually tested. The researchers started by first testing thousands of natural plant chemicals to see

• 20:27Jay Novella?

  which ones could influence the bacteria that live in the soil. And this was, of course, like a very time-consuming process, but they scroll through all of these different chemicals. Only a few of the chemicals actually panned out, and one in particular called apeninjan, apenin, apigenin. It's apigenin. It's apigenin. Yeah. Not an easy word to pronounce for people like me. This one stood out as the best. And apigenin is a natural compound that many plants make, and it belongs to a family of chemicals called flavones, right? And flavones are substances plants use for communication. It's kind of like their pheromones. And they also use it for defense and dealing with stress.

• 21:09Jay Novella?

  In the soil, these chemicals can act, they can act like messages that guide or influence nearby microbes. When wheat roots release apigenin into the soil, certain nitrogen-fixing bacteria respond very strongly to it. So the bacteria that responds, it actually draws them towards the roots and encourages this bacteria to form a protective biofilm. And this is crucial to this whole thing. The biofilm gives the bacteria the low oxygen conditions that they need to convert nitrogen that's in the air into a form that the plant can use. So the team used CRISPR gene editing, and what they did was they increased the amount of apigenin that wheat produces in its roots. And it's, you know, it actually worked.

• 21:53Jay Novella?

  It was brilliant how they figured this out. The roots will then release extra apigenin into the surrounding soil. It's apigenin. Apigenin, they know what I mean. Under these nitrogen limited conditions, though, the edited wheat performed actually better than regular, you know, quote unquote, "normal wheat." It had higher nitrogen content in its leaves and the roots. It had stronger photosynthetic activity and better grain yield, which is fantastic.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:23Jay Novella?

  The soil, right? I mean, I was really surprised to read about that, that it didn't just equal and solve a problem.

• 22:29Speaker 05

  We need better yields, I mean, all across the board with everything. We need it.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  And to clarify, that's under what they called limited nitrogen fertilization conditions. So that's with less fertilizer than you would normally give.

• 22:40Jay Novella?

  So the soil around the engineered plants, it also showed increased nitrogen conversion activity when they measured it using standard isotopes and biochemical tests. The pattern actually held across all their experiments and more apigenin in the root zone.

• 22:57Speaker 05

  Apigenin.

• 22:58Jay Novella?

  Apigenin. There's more of it in the root zone, it allowed more bacterial nitrogen fixation, which leads to healthier plants. When, you know, it's, let's say fertilization is scarce, so the farmer can't, you know, afford it, or whatever the problem is, the plants can survive, more likely to survive with a lot less fertilizer. And there is, of course, a practical angle here. So the wheat plant that can supplement part of its nitrogen requirements through this, you know, co-op bacteria, this is a really big deal. It doesn't eliminate the need for fertilizer, but it really does reduce how much it needs. And of course, the downstream effect, like I said, all of that decreases when you use less fertilizer. So the Crispr wheat stayed productive.

• 23:38Jay Novella?

  When they cut the nitrogen to half or even to 30% of the normal application, it continued to function perfectly fine. And under those low fertilizer conditions, it still outperforms conventional wheat by a wide margin. Of course, you know, we have to be cautious here. You know, these are controlled experiments, they're useful, but, you know, putting, you know, trying this in the real world, it's a lot more complicated. Yeah, they, yeah, these field trials, there's a lot more variables in the soil, there's unpredictable weather, you know, there's complex microbial communities that are, that are all working with each other and, and maybe even sometimes competing with each other. You have soil ecosystem shift, you know, not just from, uh, you know, global warming,

• 24:20Jay Novella?

  but like just as you go, you know, throughout a region, the, the, uh, the ecosystems that are different from here to there, it could be even 50 miles away, you have a totally different scenario going on. And of course, these bacteria might not behave consistently from season to season. But, but, you know, again, you know, this is the beginning, like they, they found something, it works, it's, you know, it's, it's a definite thing, the mechanisms work, you know, it's, it's one of those things that I, it seems likely to pan out. I know that they're going to have to make modifications and it's going to take some time, but this is a real win here.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  So just to clarify a couple of things, um, that you said, but I just wanted to emphasize them a little bit. So there are crops that fix their own nitrogen. They all do it through these bacteria, right? They're, the plants aren't doing it, but it's always bacteria. Like the legumes, you mentioned the nodules, what the nodules do is they create the low oxygen environment for the bacteria to thrive and fix their nitrogen. There, there are programs to try to identify the set of genes necessary to make that happen so that we could then make fully nitrogen fixing crops like out of the ones that aren't, right? Uh, like including wheat. This is like a, all right, they found an easy way to do a

• 25:36Speaker 03

  partial fix where, yeah, again, it's rather than these complicated nodules, it's going to create the biofilm to, to, to create the lower oxygen environment. And we'll see, it remains to be seen how much they'd be able to whack back fertilizer, but even like reducing nitrogen fertilizer by 10% could save a billion dollars a year.

• 25:56Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and also, you know, this is the beginning of this study. It doesn't mean that they couldn't even make it more productive, you know, with a lot more experiment and everything. But, you know, and this is, the reason why I picked this news item is, you know, we talk a lot about these types of things, like, hey, there's a cool thing that happened, you know, it's in play, they're studying it. But I think it's important for us to recognize here that, like CRISPR, which is a platform, you know, when you think about what it takes to create a platform like CRISPR, and how many years and years and decades it takes to, you know, just get scientists to start using it. So CRISPR was discovered essentially in 1987.

• 26:38Jay Novella?

  I think it took until, like, you know, we're going like 2010 plus before it started to kind of hit the science scene and people were really using it to do stuff. And then, of course, since then, we've made tons of advancements on it. It's incredibly powerful, it's incredibly useful, and we need scientific funding to let scientists just experiment and try different things and see what we can do with it. Now, particularly in a situation where we have global warming, which is, which is going to change so many things about, you know, where arid land even is on the planet, let alone how productive it's going to be, we do need advancements to help us continue to feed the 8 billion-plus people that we have, you know, and more as the decades go by.

• 27:20Jay Novella?

  So I think it's an important reminder that we, we show some respect to the scientists who created this and who are working with it now, and, you know, realize that it is important that money is leveraged this way to find these discoveries. Andrea, I noticed that you're quiet here, and I'll take that as disrespect. Do you not like CRISPR?

• 27:38Speaker 04

  No, I like, some of my best friends are CRISPR, Jay. No. I literally was like, oh, I have two questions, but both of them might be things you've already covered on the podcast. So one is a really simple one, which is, is there such a thing as wild wheat? Or have we domesticated all of it? You know how, like, there's no more wild cows? And then my other one is, what sorts of things happening with CRISPR are you all covering on the show that, like, that you're super excited about? Because this seems awesome. And I remember being super excited about CRISPR when it came to malaria and when it came to a couple of other sorts of like infectious disease related things. And this

• 28:20Speaker 04

  is, I'm not familiar with it in agriculture. So I was just kind of curious what else, what else I should be excited about.

• 28:26Jay Novella?

  Well, there is wild wheat and it's still out there.

• 28:29Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 28:29Jay Novella?

  Um, and it's one of the ancestors of domesticated wheat. Um, you probably can't.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  Einkorn wheat is.

• 28:39Jay Novella?

  Yeah, then take a look at it to see what the, see what the, uh, you know, to see what the head of it looks like, to see if there's actually anything there that you can, you can turn.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  It is.

• 28:46Speaker 04

  I only thought of it when you were talking about, you know, the importance of the agricultural revolution. I was like, oh yeah, did we just find it and make it into something? And then I was like, very dumb question.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  You know, way, way more, you know, nutritious and, and.

• 28:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  And higher yield.

• 29:01Jay Novella?

  And just like a lot of other things that we eat today, guys, like it can't survive. All the, all the wheat that we rely on, right?

• 29:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:07Jay Novella?

  It will not.

• 29:08Speaker 04

  And corn and soy, probably.

• 29:09Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it won't continue to exist if, if people don't grow it, you know, like it has to be grown, it has to be fertilized, it has to be taken care of. It's not the type of thing that, you know, just keep going on its own if we didn't tend to it. Like it really does need us now. We have a, we have a codependent relationship.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  I mean, I also was, was thinking about the, the various uproars from the non-GMO side of things. And Jay, you raise a good point, which is we've been modifying these things forever.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, for thousands of years.

• 29:38Speaker 05

  Thousands of years, right?

• 29:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  There's almost nothing that you eat that's not massively altered from it.

• 29:44Speaker 05

  Carl Sagan said, just look around you. Everything you see is artificially enhanced.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:49Jay Novella?

  All right. Andrea, this is interesting. You're going to talk to us about our LLMs, large language models. Are they changing how we think as a group or think in groups?

• 30:01Speaker 05

  Let me look that up real quick and see.

• 30:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. So it's, Evan, are you going to look up the answer?

• 30:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. I'm going to chat GPT that one.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, perfect, perfect. That's great. Yeah, I'll, um, just read that out loud in my voice and we'll call that good. Yes, Steve, so I have come to the show and every now and again, I managed to muster some research that is not squarely political science. This is social science and I'm gonna talk about political science briefly, but it's not exclusively political science by any stretch. So there's a paper that came out in late August that I'm super into. Full disclosure, the author is my PhD advisor, Scott Page at the University of Michigan, and I'm a big fan of his and he and I work together. And so a lot of this research is stuff that I work on with him. And so big, big bias alarm bells going off, but it also means that it's something that that I think is super interesting and wish more people

• 30:52Speaker 04

  knew about. So, okay, so he, he published a paper the end of the summer called Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once: LLMs and the New Physics of Collective Intelligence. And if you didn't get excited at the movie reference, I hope you got excited by the phrase physics of collective intelligence, because that's just the coolest phrase I've heard in 2025. Except for that word that Jay mispronounced 200 times. I'm not even gonna try to say it. So, so there's that. All right. So, so this is a paper about how we can use large language models to change the physics of collective intelligence. I'm going to come back to the physics part, but first I want to ask you all, do you, are you familiar with the term collective intelligence? Is it a term, or

• 31:37Speaker 04

  do you have a guess as to what it might mean?

• 31:40Speaker 03

  I mean, I've seen it referenced to just trying to accomplish things in groups, basically. Like the crowd is smarter than the individual.

• 31:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 31:49Bob Novella?

  Right. In sci-fi, it's like a, kind of like a hive mind, which is a collection of multiple, many minds.

• 31:54Speaker 04

  That's right. Are you all watching Pluribus, by the way?

• 31:57Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God, yes.

• 31:59Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 32:00Bob Novella?

  No spoilers.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  All right. Small, small aside, but that is exactly the hive mind piece. So, so yeah, so that's exactly the idea. So it's, it's this idea of the wisdom of crowds. And how can we make it such that groups of people working together become smarter than, say, the sum of those people, or ideally, You know, smarter than and, you know, not just more knowledge, but more innovative, more adaptive, more creative, all kinds of interesting things that an individual could never come up with. Sort of the idea of like, you're all sitting in a room and you're brainstorming and you all come up with really great ideas because you've been bouncing those ideas off of one another, as opposed to if the five of us all sat in a separate room and thought of things by ourselves.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  That said, you may also be thinking about every single time that the crowd is maybe not so wise, right? You know, we think about herd mentality and we think about people all rushing to false information, or to political views, or religious views, or whatever, or homeopathy, or whatever it is, that we would consider not so intelligent, but it's definitely part of that group think. So this is a whole area of research, basically, that crosses a number of social sciences, that says, what can we do to make it so that when we put a bunch of people in a space together and they have some kind of common problem to solve, that they do it intelligently as opposed to not so intelligently? And so this is where I'm going to crowbar a teeny tiny bit of political science.

• 33:25Speaker 04

  And so if you're thinking about collective intelligence in economics, you're probably thinking about how do you design a market so that people can trade things and exchange value and innovate and all that stuff? In political science, and Steve, you and I talked about this on the Political Reality podcast already, the idea of how do we get a group to make a good decision or come to some kind of agreement is pretty much what's happening every time we think about what does an election system look like? How do jury deliberations work? What are the ways that Congress, you know, deliberates with one another before they have a vote? And so all that stuff in politics is also collective intelligence. And there's all kinds of other ways that, you know, a community might come to some kind of agreement as a group. I spent a lot of time with Scott working in the space of companies. So companies are very interested in collective intelligence.

• 34:10Speaker 04

  So if I'm going to put together a team to solve some problem, you know, a tech problem, or a CRISPR problem, or whatever it is, it's not enough to just get a whole bunch of smart people and put them in the room and hope for the best, which is what most of us tend to do. What you want to do is be thoughtful about how those people interact, and what are the processes by which they bring different bits of information, deliberate over those pieces of information, and then select the best one. And immediately, you should be thinking, and I don't know, maybe anyone listening who's ever been in a work meeting, I can certainly speak to faculty meetings at NYU and pretty much everywhere. I don't feel like a lot of those meetings lead to collective intelligence. Usually what happens is someone comes in with a strong opinion.

• 34:54Speaker 04

  That person, if they're also the loudest person, will dominate the conversation for a while. Perish forbid they're also the most senior person in the room and so no one really feels comfortable pushing back. A couple people might ask a few questions and then everyone nods and then we just do the thing that the guy who called the meeting wanted you to do. Or you try to introduce new ideas and say, "Well, actually you brought me in because I have a different perspective and I think there's X, Y, and Z problem." And then the rest of the room says, "What? No, that's silly," and shuts it down. And so again, it's like, "Why even bring this outside expert into the room?" And so, all of that is to say, is that there's lots of things that we can do, and this can be in our own work, in our own lives, in our own communities, to make our groups smarter.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  This article is about how we can use LLMs in a way that I at least, I'm curious if you all have seen this, but in a way that I don't normally see people talk about the use of LLMs. So the idea here is, picture a meeting that you're going into. "We gotta solve this problem, we gotta go through, you know, whatever decision-making process that we have to go through. How are we gonna get to collective intelligence?" Well, there's three steps. One, we wanna have as many independent inputs as possible, so if we're all sitting around trying to solve a problem, we need to hear from Bob and Evan and Jay and Steve and me and we all need to talk it through and get that information out there. We then need to also be able to consider all the options and then we need to choose over those options.

• 36:19Speaker 04

  The problem is that those three things take forever. If we were all sitting down to say, you know, in a meeting today, "This is why we do it before the podcast," and said, "Well, what should we talk about on the podcast tonight?" And it's like, Evan will say his ideas for 10 minutes and then Jay will say his ideas for 10 minutes and I'll say my ideas for 10 minutes, and before we know it, an hour has gone by and we haven't even gotten to the deliberation. So the idea in this paper is what if, before the meeting, before anyone gets to the room where we're gonna talk about whatever it is... Each person talks to an, you can type it, you can talk it, talks to an LLM about what their ideas are. So, you know, maybe it's us brainstorming for the political reality podcast. So I'll say 10 minutes into my phone, I think we should do this, da-da-da-da-da. Meanwhile, Steve is somewhere else doing that into his phone, Jay's doing it, and we're

• 37:04Speaker 04

  doing it. And then while we're walking to the meeting and while we're sitting down and saying, "Hey, everyone, how are you? Get some coffee, blah, blah, blah," and LLM is summarizing all the key pieces. And so then by the time we start the meeting, we start from step two, which is let's deliberate over what the different ideas were. And there's a bunch of benefits to that. One is obviously you're saving a ton of time of having to sit there and listen to everybody. The trade-off is you don't hear all the nuances. You hope that the LLM summary is correct. And so obviously, depending on the importance of the conversation, or the level of nuance and privacy, you wouldn't want to use it for everything. But for pretty standard stuff, this could get you pretty far. And the other great thing is that one of the best ways to generate collective intelligence is to

• 37:46Speaker 04

  have these independent inputs that are truly independent. It doesn't work, and we've all seen these psychology studies where you sit in a room, and you know, and you show a participant a circle on the wall, and everyone else in the room says, "Ah, it's a square," and then the person who's the subject like kind of doubts themselves, this is, "Yeah, I guess it's a square even though it's a circle." Like, we are so quick to say, "Oh, yeah, I agree with what this person said," or "You all have been podcasting longer than I have, so let's do what you say," or just to agree with the majority, that these independent inputs that we submit before I hear anyone else's ideas and I just say it to an LLM, that's going to get much richer information from me and take more advantage of each of our individual perspectives as well. So it's just a teeny tiny paper. Oh, and the reason

• 38:30Speaker 04

  it's about the physics of collective intelligence is because if we think about physics, we think about the constraints on groups working together, and those constraints are often around space and time. We all have to get to the same place to have the conversation, and we all have to be free at 4:00 PM. In this case, we we saw during COVID and we've seen ever since that the constraints of space have really gone away, not completely, but largely, right? We can, we can do podcasts from Beirut and we can do podcasts from Tokyo and we can do podcasts from Connecticut. But the time issue has been a problem. And so this, this idea that we could use LLMs to speak simultaneously, to have meetings,

• 39:12Speaker 04

  not at the same time, but then have a separate meeting where we actually talk about, you basically get to start meetings halfway through, but have the full amount of time you always had. So I just thought it was a super cool idea. It's not, you know, a heavy duty, experimental research paper in that sense. It's more of a, a thought piece that says like, we, we've been thinking about LLMs as, you know, more of an individual tool, you know, I sit and it's my sidekick and it helps me, but we could actually really get group minds working a lot better and faster and more creatively if we, we start to think about them at the group level as well.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  But you're basically laundering your ideas through a chatbot.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, but so, yeah, I would be interested in how that might distort. Correct. You know, the, everyone's ideas, you know?

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Well, what you would want to do, and this is where you would, you would hopefully, you know, work with a, an LLM that is either tailored to your organization or, you know, if, if it's a bunch of doctors in the room, you know, you, I wouldn't just use mass available chat GPT or something like that. But yeah, you would also, and especially early on, you would also want to go through and make sure that the, the summaries of what you've said are correct. There's certainly issues where if someone speaks with an accent or speaks in a slightly different style, that their, their input would not be measured exactly the same way. And I certainly wouldn't use it for big decisions around like. Should we fire somebody or promote somebody? But I don't know about you, but a lot of meetings that we go to are really not that high stakes.

• 40:47Speaker 04

  And so, you know, I have one tomorrow morning where it's like, yeah, rather than each of us recap, what if we did the recap separately and then read a bullet point and summary right before we started? And then over the course of the meeting, you can then say, oh, is this what you meant? And go back and dig in. But it's certainly not perfect and certainly not for every conversation. And there's also plenty of conversations where the murky middle of like saying a bunch of stuff and then saying, well, actually, maybe I disagree with myself or let me restate that, that might spark an interesting idea and you would lose some of that. But, you know, think of your average insufferable corporate meeting. There are some ways to improve them, I think.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, just, you know, someone I know not too long ago had a meeting where they had to like approve bylaws or something, right? And they have to have a public comment, period. So literally they had a meeting where 100 faculty members all could, every one of them, if they choose, could state their opinions about that. And it took forever. They had to actually have a separate meeting because it took twice as long as they were planning on it taking. And it was just interminable. So I think that's the kind of thing where anything is better than that, you know?

• 42:00Speaker 04

  I mean, think about voting, right? In the United States, voting is largely simultaneous. Yes, we have early voting and mail-in voting, but for the most part, within a very contained bit of time, we all show up and we turn in our ballots. And if we did it sequentially, which is how most meetings and most public hearings are done, we would still be going through our first election. You know, like, okay, you can't go until Steve is done. Like, okay, it might be.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Can't happen that way.

• 42:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. So it's like, so what are the sorts of things? And I think it's a great question is like, what sorts of meetings or gatherings or what types of collective intelligence are we trying to capture here? If what we really want to do is just get a sense of what everyone's perspectives are, it could work well. If we're trying to sit down and say like, let's talk through our ideas for a new title, maybe we want to be in the room and hear all of the ideas, not just the shiny one we got to at the end.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  I don't think this is strange at all. I think, you know, this is us interfacing with our latest and greatest technology. I mean, this is what we're supposed to be doing. Like, you know, it's worth even trying just to see if it works for your group or under what circumstances or whatever, but.

• 43:06Jay Novella?

  You know, efficiencies are gonna be found only if we look for them.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  And I think too, Jay, that that maybe one thing that is is potential real upside for this is is again, thinking in the corporate world, it's like there's so many meetings where or there's so much research that shows that women are more likely to be interrupted. Someone who's a racial minority is more likely to be dismissed if their idea doesn't align with the ideas of the group. And I'm not trying to to rattle, you know, woke slogans or anything like that. This is like actual research that typically, you know, people from different backgrounds, different preferences, introvert, extrovert, different, different levels of comfort speaking up in a meeting. We're missing a lot of people's perspectives because the dynamics of the meeting are such that someone's interrupted or someone's talked over or someone doesn't feel comfortable speaking up in the first place.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Or like I said, you feel afraid to disagree with the majority. But if you all have to say your thing ahead of time, like, I think this is a great idea. I think this is a terrible idea. I think we're missing X, Y, and Z. You're gonna get everyone's information equally as opposed to just hearing from the loudest or more confident person in the room. So I think that is potentially really powerful. That said, the opposite could be the case. It could be if we're if we use the wrong aggregator or we use the wrong type of tool, we could be replicating those biases. But I think sort of like you said, Jay, it's worth it's worth giving it a shot to see if we could actually make meetings more inclusive this way.

• 44:31Jay Novella?

  I think it's worth mentioning that, you know, there is a lot of information out there about how, you know, working with L L Ms is is bad, right? There's a lot of, you know, we get a lot of emails from people and I've been having discussions with people. I think we should mention that, you know?

• 44:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:47Jay Novella?

  They do consume a ton of energy.

• 44:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:49Jay Novella?

  We don't know from a big brother perspective, like how much of our information is private and everything. So I mean, I think it's fine for us, of course, to talk about this stuff.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  I think those are legitimate concerns. You know, we were facing a genuine dilemma. We have a useful tool that has some serious downsides. You know, one of the biggest being its energy use, which is, you know, we've had to revise all of our projections about energy and climate and everything to account for the A I factor.

• 45:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  There's no way around that.

• 45:20Bob Novella?

  And not by a little either.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  But the thing is, I mean, it's a good point because if it produces only like marginal advantages, it may not be worth it. But that's not typically how people think. I think if it's even slightly more efficient or people like doing it, a lot of people are going to do it, you know, regardless.

• 45:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, Steve, I similarly, usually when I think about LLMs and how I see people using it, or how various outlets on the internet recommend, like streamline your workflow with Gemini's, whatever, whatever, you're like, okay. And it doesn't really, I'm like, is it really worth it? Like, the risks with the climate and the energy consumption to summarize my emails for me? Like, this is shaving 30 seconds off my life, maybe, but not really. It's mostly just bothering me and I'm going to go read the emails either way. This one was one of the few instances of using LLMs that I was like, oh, this is a genuine change in how we do things. And if it's possible that this generates more collective intelligence, it could be

• 46:23Speaker 04

  that it is the sort of thing that helps get us more quickly to more innovative solutions, like the cool CRISPR stuff that Jay was just talking about and even what Bob was talking about is, you know, like, greater collective intelligence could really get us there. But, you know, I'm more excited about this than I am about like, oh, we're going to summarize, you know, emails. But, um, but yeah, no, it's a huge concern. If I could put it back in the bag, I would strongly consider it.

• 46:48Speaker 05

  Is this a current concern? In other words, it will likely become more energy efficient in the future. So, I mean, kind of like, are we worrying about something now in 2025, but by 2035 it will be 90% more energy efficient, for example?

• 47:02Speaker 03

  We hope so, but they've been working on it for a long time.

• 47:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  So, it's one of the things that's hard to say. But like, a lot of things, if they do get efficient, they use that to make it more powerful. So, we never actually get the savings. It's like, as electricity gets cheaper, we get more electricity, we get more light, and just you use up...

• 47:21Speaker 04

  As we get more devices to clean our house, our house has to be cleaned.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, like multi-terabyte hard drives. We just, no matter how big they get, we fill them up. My other concern here, though, is that, as you say, like, yeah, you should proofread the summary. No one's going to do that. Everyone, most people are going to do a lazy route and just...

• 47:38Speaker 05

  Read your terms and conditions, yeah, right.

• 47:39Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 47:41Speaker 05

  Right.

• 47:41Jay Novella?

  That's just, yeah. That's, we seek our lowest energy, right? We're not going to spend energy that we don't have to.

• 47:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:48Bob Novella?

  You can ask ChatGPT to summarize it for you.

• 47:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right. Give me the 15 second terms and conditions.

• 47:54Bob Novella?

  I've done that.

• 47:56Jay Novella?

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

• 48:00Bob Novella?

  Guys, we've all been there, right? The holiday season, you gotta buy a million gifts for a million people. You run out of ideas. What can you get that's really good, but also has a personal feel to it? That, the answer to that conundrum is Aura Frames.

• 48:14Jay Novella?

  Yeah, this year I'm going to get Aura Frames for two of my friends and I'm going to load up a bunch of pictures on there of basically everything I have, which goes back, I don't know, 30 years at this point. It's, it's a really awesome thing to do because you're going to give them a bunch of pictures that they don't have and you're going to give them really awesome access to it. And to do that, you just download the Aura app, connect to wifi, and then you can upload an unlimited number of photos or video that your friends will instantly see.

• 48:40Speaker 05

  For a limited time, save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carver Matte Frames, named number one by Wirecutter, by using promo code SKEPTICS at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-frames.com promo code SKEPTICS. This deal is exclusive to listeners and frames sell out fast, so order yours now to get it in time for the holidays. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply.

• 49:09Jay Novella?

  All right, everyone, let's get back to the show. All right, let's go on. Do you guys remember Thea?

• 49:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 49:17Bob Novella?

  Sure.

• 49:17Speaker 05

  I don't.

• 49:18Jay Novella?

  That's the.

• 49:19Bob Novella?

  I, I don't, I don't remember. I wasn't there at the time, but I read about it.

• 49:23Jay Novella?

  The Mars-sized planet that crashed into the Proto-Earth.

• 49:28Speaker 05

  Oh, no, is it okay?

• 49:29Jay Novella?

  Creating, four and a half billion years ago, creating.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  Our current Earth and Moon system.

• 49:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:35Speaker 05

  Ah.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  So scientists.

• 49:37Bob Novella?

  That's the leading theory.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  Scientists have a question, and the question is, where did thea come from? Specifically, what part of the solar system did it come from?

• 49:46Speaker 05

  Over thea.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  So how could they answer this question? So what, so do you guys know, like, just generally, how do scientists know where something in the solar

• 49:59Speaker 05

  Mineral composition.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Yes, and what specifically.

• 50:01Bob Novella?

  The ratio balance of minerals would be.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  What specifically? You're, you're right up to it. Isotopes. Isotopes, it's the isotope ratios, exactly.

• 50:11Bob Novella?

  Yep, that's right.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, so apparently, the isotope ratios tell you, like, so much about the history of.

• 50:19Bob Novella?

  So much.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  So much of stuff in the solar system, including where, like, how close to the sun did it form? Because there's different isotope ratios in different locations in the solar system. So, there's a recent study trying to address this question of where did thea come from by looking at isotope ratios.

• 50:40Speaker 05

  Smart.

• 50:41Speaker 03

  But there's a problem.

• 50:42Bob Novella?

  Oh. Where do you look?

• 50:44Speaker 03

  Where do you look?

• 50:45Bob Novella?

  You have to look at Earth and Moon.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Because when, it, it's, it is believed that the Moon is made mostly of thea, right?

• 50:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  But the Earth is just a complete mishmash of Earth and thea, right, mixed together.

• 50:59Speaker 05

  And four billion years later, you know, all kind of, you know, where do, yeah, where do you find something that happened?

• 51:03Speaker 04

  Are we all made of thea?

• 51:05Speaker 03

  There's, there's a little bit of thea in each of us.

• 51:07Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  Andrew. They, so what they did was, they looked at a lot of mineral samples from different strata, and they also looked at samples from, from, of Moon rocks.

• 51:18Bob Novella?

  Sure.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  So, the Earth and the Moon pretty much look the same, in terms of isotope ratios.

• 51:26Bob Novella?

  But.

• 51:27Speaker 03

  By doing, you know, an extensive survey, there, because you can't look at a piece of rock, because they, this piece of rock is thea, right? I mean, you just can't do that. But what they, what they could do is, they said, okay. If Thea came from the outer solar system, what would we expect, you know, a random survey of earth rocks to look like?

• 51:50Speaker 05

  And we do have samples of those, right?

• 51:52Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, we have, yeah, it's earth rockets all over the place.

• 51:55Speaker 05

  No, no, but samples of, of, of non-solar system material. Sure.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  Not non-solar system material, non-earth material. So we have, as a reference, as a reference, we have samples of meteorites from all different places in the solar system.

• 52:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we have a catalog.

• 52:12Speaker 03

  We do. We know what an outer solar system rock looks like in terms of its isotopic ratios. We know what an inner solar system rock looks like, et cetera, et cetera. So we, so the earth and the moon obviously look like inner solar system rocks. They look pretty much the same with each other. So they, they sort of addressed this question by saying, what if Thea came from different places in the solar system? What would, you know, a survey of earth rocks look like in terms of its ratios? And they concluded, what do you think they concluded? Where do you think Thea came from?

• 52:45Speaker 05

  It's a local boy.

• 52:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm with.

• 52:47Speaker 05

  Inner, I would say, yeah, it would, it would make sense, inner solar system, like all the other rocky.

• 52:51Speaker 03

  Yes, inner solar, it did not come screaming in from the outer solar system. It was probably our neighbor. They think, and this is a little speculative, this is like a statistical kind of thing. They think it was probably a little closer to the sun than the earth. So you can imagine these two planets in very close orbits, but eventually they crossed, you know, and then, and Thea smacked into the earth, or earth smacked into Thea, depending on your.

• 53:18Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  Your perspective.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  Does Thea would have had to be much smaller than the earth? I know, right? Can you imagine? Would, would Thea have had to be smaller than the earth? And that's why the earth hung on and?

• 53:30Speaker 03

  I mean, it was, it was like Mars sized.

• 53:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  Again, I think Bob's correct. In reality, the best way to think about it, these two planets hit each other and merged and spit out the moon, basically. Changed the orbit of the Earth, changed obviously the mass of the Earth. Gave us our satellite.

• 53:48Bob Novella?

  What's really poignant, though, is that, I mean, it's possible. We know, we know how early life arose on the Earth. It's basically, as soon as, you know, the magma wasn't in a place, then life kind of started. It's really, we push it back every, you know, millions of years, all the time. So, Earth, Mark I, right, the Earth that was destroyed could have had life on it. And then it was utterly destroyed and like, "Let's try this again, shall we?"

• 54:14Speaker 03

  Reset.

• 54:15Bob Novella?

  Yeah, just hit a reset. Imagine that.

• 54:18Speaker 04

  Was there life on Thea? Could there have been?

• 54:20Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 54:21Bob Novella?

  Uh, sure, but we'll never know.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, but we'll never know.

• 54:25Bob Novella?

  Oof, didn't think of that one. That's interesting.

• 54:27Speaker 04

  And how long ago did all this?

• 54:29Speaker 03

  Four and a half billion.

• 54:30Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Speaker 05

  Give or take.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  Give or take. Long time ago. In the before time.

• 54:35Bob Novella?

  I'd love to go back, I'd love to go back right after the Earth, the moon formed, to see a moon.

• 54:39Speaker 05

  Oh, and see it's 16 times the size in the sky.

• 54:42Bob Novella?

  Yeah, 15, 16 times. Imagine a moon gargantuan. Just don't be near the water.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  The shoreline.

• 54:48Bob Novella?

  The tides, the tides. Were as big as a mountain, mountainous tides. Which actually, and I keep, I probably said this on the show four separate times over the years, but it's actually probably a good thing that happened because those immense tides, you know, went hundreds of miles into, onto land and just scoured everything and brought it back into the ocean. And there's your, your, your classic, you know.

• 55:10Speaker 03

  Primordial soup.

• 55:11Bob Novella?

  Primordial soup. That's probably a good thing.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  All right. All right, Evan, tell us about some upcoming holiday scams.

• 55:23Speaker 05

  'Tis the season to.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  Well, Chris is coming in, oh.

• 55:25Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. And every year around this time of year, the holiday season, as it were, cybersecurity researchers publish their annual warnings about holiday scams.

• 55:38Speaker 05

  And they say that 2025's holiday season is shaping up to be one of the worst yet. Of course, you're gonna say that because they'll always say that in the current year. But in any case, the company Malwarebytes, they are famous in a way for many things, but also every year they release a report on how cyber criminals adapt to our habits from year to year. And basically, it's not so much about the fancy hacking or anything that kind of goes on. It's just about how to take advantage of human weaknesses, you know, kind of the weaknesses of our brains that they exploit predictable, measurable human behavior.

• 56:18Speaker 05

  Their report this year has very common shopping habits that they point out that make people the ideal targets. For example, one of the strongest risk factors is being a last-minute shopper. Those are the people who wait until the final days before the holidays are nearly, are very close, and they're, those people are nearly twice as likely to click on a fraudulent tracking link or fall for a fake delivery problem notification. You guys have received those, right? I mean, you know, emails.

• 56:50Speaker 04

  As a very last-minute shopper, I didn't know I was in such a high-risk category.

• 56:56Speaker 05

  If you are, because when the merchandise, you know, it's either supposed to be on its way and you're tracking it, there is this urgency or an anxiety spike, and that's when people's decision-making is, becomes perhaps less than ideal, and they'll let their guard down sometimes. And the scammers definitely know this, and their phishing campaigns coincide with peak shipping windows. So that's why we see these fake emails and texts claiming, hey, the package can't be delivered, or you need to update your payment information, that's a big one. And then they're designed to look like, well, the big shippers, you know, Amazon, UPS, FedEx, United States Postal Service even. And these imitation pages, they're using what? AI-generated layouts?

• 57:38Speaker 05

  Yep, so these things are becoming much harder to just detect upon glance. The wording is becoming neater, crisper, right? You can't find the typos or the bad verbiage that's going on in these things. They're cleaning it up and they're using AI to do it. So yeah, here's another major risk factor. Impulse shopping from social media ads. So instant buy traps, they call it. Look, look out for things like limited editions and, you know, phrases like that that will get you to, hey, click on this because, you know, it's going to be, you know, better, easier for you and just more alluring. So you see a list, you click it and you enter it and then what?

• 58:20Speaker 05

  The store really never existed or you get some kind of knockoff of what you were going to be buying, kind of a bait and switch in that sense. And FOMO, right? Fear of missing out? They definitely rely on that fear of losing a potential bargain is sometimes more motivating than the desire to avoid a possible scam. So you have to be able to, you know, kind of check yourself in those, in those instances. This year, the criminals are also exploiting a behavior that didn't use to be risky, they say. Price comparing across multiple tabs or apps. Jay? Yeah. I know that from our conversations, you have done price comparing shopping before. Extensively, yeah. Yeah, right. I mean, you know, I thought of you immediately, this, not that you would fall for it

• 59:05Speaker 05

  because you're a good skeptic and you have defenses against this. But this is where, this is another weakness where they, where the scammers come in. You know, you're flipping back and forth between what? Amazon, Walmart, Target, TikTok, Timu and whatever, looking for the lowest price, right? Nothing, nothing wrong with that. But in that rapid fire mode, they say that the consumer will become much more likely to mistake a fake storefront for a real one and then boop, fall right into that trap. Scammers are also capitalizing on this by cloning legitimate storefronts almost perfectly. Same fonts, same product listings, same color schemes. It's becoming much more difficult to identify. The only thing that changes is the URL.

• 59:47Speaker 05

  But how many people really look at the URL to make sure that they're going where they're supposed to be going? I have gotten myself into that habit, especially when it comes to things like banking, among other things. You know, I never, I have trained myself to get in the habit of looking at the URL to make sure. And to use the built-in security features that are in a URL. You know, if you cite information and those kinds of things, they're right there. You know, you just need to just go and click on them, take the extra second to protect yourself. Tracking, they're talking about package tracking updates. That is where they're really apparently making good inroads because people are getting more tracking notifications more than ever. And again, given it's the season, that gives people, you know, just more activity in that area.

• 1:00:32Speaker 05

  And it becomes an easy target for the scammers to exploit. So they also make some suggestions as to what you can do, how to prevent this, some easy habits to get into, or easy, easy steps you can take to minimize this kind of damage. First, they say, "Slow down even by two or three seconds." Because studies have shown that when subjects deliberately pause before clicking a link, the rate of falling for a scam plummets. And that micro pause interrupts the automatic emotional response scammers depend on. We have a friend, I won't name her, but we all, Andrea, you don't know her, but the four of us do know her.

• 1:01:10Speaker 04

  I was like, "I'm right here, Evan, geez."

• 1:01:12Speaker 05

  And she, it's not you. And she, and I've seen it, I've seen her do this in real, in real time. She will absolutely go nuts ordering stuff while she, while she's on her phone. And, you know, definitely not take those pauses. Is that, that's her habit. I've seen her do it many, many times. So, you know, people, there, this does happen, this does happen a lot. Another tip, don't trust links in the tracking messages. Instead, go directly to the retailer or carrier website through your own bookmark or app. And if there's really a problem, you'll see it there. They're also suggesting do not buy directly from social media ads, especially the ones that

• 1:01:52Speaker 05

  promise, you know, rare items, scarcity, items, exclusivity, or, you know, big discounts, 70, 80% off electronics. Find it through a standard Google search, not, or on a known retailer site, but not directly from social media ads. They also give a tip about re-entering payment information on an email notification. Retailers will not ask for that through email or text. So if a message that claims your payment failed, you know, if you get that, you have to really log into the retailer's website independently to verify it. Do not ever click the embedded link. And that's something we've been talking about, I think,

• 1:02:34Speaker 05

  for years on all kinds of scams that they use through our electronic devices, smartphones and whatnot. So they're saying, they're pointing out this year that the biggest vulnerabilities are, are not technical so much as they are behavioral, right? They're using our brains against us. And our brains make us an easy target to exploit sometimes in certain situations, and this happens to be one of them.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's just so much noise now, like, especially like with the SGU, like, between Jay and I, we're ordering a lot of stuff for the studio, and sometimes he does it. And so I get, I'm getting constant notifications, like two or three notifications per item that's ordered, you know? And so that creates the background noise that it'd be, you know, hard to detect the scam one thrown in there. That's why I just don't click anything. I don't click anything in any email, ever. It's just you have to have universal precautions. It's the only way.

• 1:03:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, especially if it's a number you don't know, or, you know, like, like Evan said, like, usually if it's a tracking update, the, the store itself will send it, as well as the, you know, the text. So I just do the store one. But I just really, you know, I mean, this is something we've probably been talking about with, related to scams forever, but people who... Are not particularly tech savvy or don't really realize that AI can replicate entire websites. Like I just, I could really see, despite the fact Evan that you said that this happens, you know, every year claims to be the worst year, I could see these really being a problem. For, I'm just thinking of people in my own life who wouldn't know to

• 1:04:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  Double check the URL.

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:04:09Speaker 05

  Definitely. Yes, yes. And as always, the old, you know, the older population is always the most vulnerable of the population when it comes to techno- technology-related scams, definitely. So we gotta watch out for our, for our friends, our family members, you know, our parents, our grandparents, help keep an eye on them, always.

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  Thanks Evan. Bob, tell us about hypervelocity white dwarfs.

• 1:04:32Bob Novella?

  Zombie bullet stars in the news.

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  I'm already with you.

• 1:04:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  I'm already with you.

• 1:04:39Speaker 05

  I heartily endorse this.

• 1:04:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:42Bob Novella?

  Yep, that's what I do. Try to suck you in and then

• 1:04:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm in.

• 1:04:45Bob Novella?

  Okay, you're in. Let's see if I can sustain this.

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  That's good clickbait, Bob.

• 1:04:49Bob Novella?

  Probably not, yeah. So a recent study and simulation offers what some consider the most compelling answer yet to what would cause hypervelocity white dwarf stars traveling at 2,000 kilometers per second, which is fast enough to leave the galaxy. What would cause that? And if it verified, if this, this theory is verified, this would all happen because a heavier companion white dwarf blows up twice. So this was published recently in the journal Nature Astronomy. Now, we all know about white dwarf stars, right? Stars around the mass of our sun eventually will slough off their outer layers, right? Leaving behind a massive but earth-sized core, but with a stellar mass. So this thing is quite a beefy dude.

• 1:05:31Bob Novella?

  And if it's, if it's solitary, just hanging out, it's gonna cool very slowly over potentially trillions of years. But then in 2018, the Gaia Space Observatory discovered a handful of these white dwarf stars traveling at insane speeds. The very fastest that they detected were traveling at 2,000 kilometers per second. That would get from the earth to the moon in about three minutes. That's a what, 239, 249,000, 1,000 miles?

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  That's how long it takes me to microwave my burrito.

• 1:06:06Bob Novella?

  Right? Remember when we went to the moon, it was like four, it was like three days, so 4,300 minutes compared to three minutes. So this thing is booking. Now, some of these white dwarfs, they weren't even just speedy. They also were very unusually hot and puffy, kind of like these puffed up surfaces. And some of them also had heavy elements, which kind of shouldn't have been there. So, three mysteries here, like what did this? And no theory could explain all three of those unusual attributes, until these researchers ran their simulations. So, in the simulation, they had, what they had, they created two binary white dwarfs. And these were helium, carbon, oxygen white dwarfs.

• 1:06:48Bob Novella?

  And they're, those are white dwarfs that can, that can be together in orbit around each other for a very long time, and kind of evolving together. So that's why they selected these helium, carbon, oxygen white dwarfs. Well, so what they are is essentially a helium skin over a carbon core, is a good way to think about them. The primary, the biggest one in their simulation, was about, right around, just under 0.7 of a sun mass. So, so 70% of our sun's mass. The secondary white dwarf was a little bit smaller. That was just a little bit more than 60% of our sun's mass. So, so definitely similar to our sun, little smaller. So this is what the simulation described when they, when they ran it.

• 1:07:30Bob Novella?

  Imagine you've got these two white dwarf stars in orbit around each other, getting, you know, maybe getting closer and closer. Some of the helium from the surface of the smaller white dwarf is transferred to the larger white dwarf. So that's number one, that's the first big step there. The smaller one is losing mass. This extra helium is building up on the bigger, on the bigger white dwarf. So what happens is that causes a supersonic fusion detonation that races around the white dwarf, meeting at the other side. So the surface essentially explodes. So this is the first explosion. Then, those shock waves, remember those shock waves that met on the other side from where, where the fusion started?

• 1:08:10Bob Novella?

  They can, that converges, those shock waves converge at the core of this larger, of, remember, this is the larger white dwarf that's been siphoning off helium from the smaller one. So- That detonation converges on the far side of the white dwarf and it goes down to the core. And so what you're essentially having is a deeper carbon detonation in the core of the larger one, and that annihilates the entire white dwarf. So that's the second explosion. So the first explosion is the helium skin igniting, and the second explosion is the rest of the carbon in the core of the white dwarf exploding the white dwarf. It's basically like no longer there, okay?

• 1:08:53Bob Novella?

  So this is what the simulation said is happening. So this is then the trigger. This is the trigger to turn the remaining core, remember the smaller white dwarf, into this zombie bullet. It's the trigger. The forces that are created in this explosion of the larger one are on the scale of all the energy the sun releases in its entire existence. So we're talking about a tremendous amount of energy. I have to assume that these white dwarf cores are pretty hardy because in this simulation it actually survives. The smaller dwarf survives the detonation of the nearby larger dwarf star that just blew up. And this is what flings it at these ridiculous velocities, sometimes over 2,000 kilometers

• 1:09:38Bob Novella?

  a second. Okay, but as that is happening, now imagine you've got this large white dwarf that explodes, that flings the smaller one away. As it explodes, it's impacting the smaller white dwarf. So it's stripping away some of its outer layers, but it's also heating the core, the surface of the core that's exposed. And so that explains why we're seeing a very hot, puffy, outer atmosphere to these hypervelocity white dwarfs. That explains that. And the third, the final mystery seems to be solved because what's happening, you have a lot of fusion taking place on the larger white dwarf. You've got the outer skin, the helium skin that detonated, you know, in fusion fire, but

• 1:10:22Bob Novella?

  you also have the interior that also had some fusion taking place. So you've got lots of fusion taking place. So it makes sense then that the simulation would put this freshly Forged heavy elements into the into the mix of the outer layers of the of this smaller white dwarf. And so that explains all three anomalies like like no other theory has. This isn't a home run, of course, this is just one, this is just a simulation that they ran. But it's the single best explanation for these three big anomalies, the extreme speeds, the puffed up heated state of these hypervelocity white dwarfs and the odd compositions that all the other earlier models struggled to fit all of these at once, and none of them did. But this this theory does fit all of these anomalies at once. So I thought that was very, very interesting.

• 1:11:07Bob Novella?

  Pretty cool stuff. In the future, these researchers are going to use wide field surveys like the Verossi-Rubin Observatory to help put these theories to the test. A best case scenario, I'm not even sure how achievable it is, but a best case scenario would be to actually observe this happening in real time, which would be a hell of a coup. They'd be, that'd be a hell, what, that'd be what, what, three twenties in a row rolled? Andrea?

• 1:11:29Speaker 04

  I think that's right, yes.

• 1:11:31Bob Novella?

  Okay. But in a sense, this whole talk has been a preamble, I think, to answer the question that a lot of you are thinking. I I hope some of you are thinking about it. What would happen to the Earth if it was hit by such a hypervelocity white dwarf? So I have, of course, I had to go down that rabbit hole. So the question itself is actually technically wrong, because a billiard ball-like impact would not happen. It would not be like billiard balls hitting. If a white dwarf hit the Earth at this velocity, or even even smaller velocities, just the fact that a white dwarf would be heading towards us, we would probably be spaghettified. But I'm, I think, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself here. So as the as the white dwarf enters the solar system, our orbit would would drastically change.

• 1:12:14Bob Novella?

  It would become more either more eccentric, we could be, the Earth could be ejected. We could spiral right towards the the white dwarfs. A lot of different things could happen. Lots of different variables going on here. We would not only have huge ocean tides, but they, we would also have crustal tides. We'd have, the crust of the Earth would form tides, like it does right now, but they're super tiny. You can't even notice them, but it does happen. Well, we would have huge crust tides. It reminded me of the movie 2012 and what happens. You know, we'd have incredible volcanism, we'd have quakes. Yeah, it would be a very, very bad day on the Earth when, as we were approaching. That was a bad day. As, yeah, as we were approaching each other. And then we would hit the infamous Roche limit.

• 1:12:56Bob Novella?

  This is the limit, the distance from a larger celestial object where a smaller object's own gravity no longer holds together. So, once we approached the Roche limit of this white dwarf heading towards us, the Earth could not hold, could no longer hold itself together. Our gravity would kind of be like, "I'm sorry, doing the best I can here, but I'm done." And the Earth would just kind of start falling apart. And this is all at about a million kilometers from a typical white dwarf. Depending on the size, it could be, it could be a hat, you know, it could be a few hundred thousand kilometers, it could be a million kilometers. But when we were still at a solid distance, comparable to the Earth-Moon distance, the Earth would just start falling apart, couldn't, could no longer hold itself together.

• 1:13:40Bob Novella?

  And this is all because of the tidal disruption that's happening, right? It's all about the tides. Tidal disruptions are, can be so powerful. And so, what's happening is the near side and far side of the Earth would be, would feel dramatically different gravitational forces. And that's, that's the, basically, the essence of tidal disruption. The far side, because it's farther away, would be feeling significantly less gravity. And because the gravity is so huge to begin with, it's a dramatic difference, and that would basically tear the Earth apart. And this is where the spaghetification starts happening. It breaks apart into these glowing chunks. And in short order, all of those glowing chunks would then become plasma and intense radiation like X-rays and ultraviolet.

• 1:14:21Bob Novella?

  The plasma could form a disk around the white dwarf and kind of slowly fall into it, or it could, it could form a stream directly spiraling right into it. You know, I'm not sure which one would happen. But luckily, luckily, this is ridiculously unlikely. But it's, it's a macabre and scientifically interesting at the same time, which of course appeals to me. It's a fun combination, so.

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  There's a lot of stuff slamming into Earth on this episode.

• 1:14:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, right?

• 1:14:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but it's so interesting to think of what would happen. But man, imagine scientists are like, "Yeah, we see a hypervelocity white dwarf heading towards the Earth area." So basically, you've got about, I don't know how long, weeks or months before it's so close that it's just gonna rip the Earth apart. So have fun while you can, you know?

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  Even if it didn't get that close, it probably would fling us out of the solar system or into the sun or something.

• 1:15:10Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. It would be bad. The outskirts of the solar system.

• 1:15:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:15:13Bob Novella?

  Yep. Depending on where we were, you know, in our orbit around the sun and compared to our proximity to the white dwarf. Yeah, it could just fling us out of the entire solar system or send us right into its maw like the, like the Star Trek episode, the, what you wanna call it? The Doomsday Machine. Nasty stuff. So luckily, hopefully, we'll never see that.

• 1:15:32Speaker 05

  Uh, Star Trek, the original series, by the way.

• 1:15:35Speaker 04

  Would we live if Earth got flung out of the solar system? Like, if we got flung into the sun, I feel like it's over instantly. But like, for minutes.

• 1:15:42Speaker 05

  I think it would be pretty instant, right?

• 1:15:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44Bob Novella?

  It would, yeah, it would be bad. I recommend the short story called "The Pale of Air." Essentially, our atmosphere would rain down as snow at different, at different times because different gases in the atmosphere have different freezing, you know, freezing points. Then we would become a rogue planet, right, Steve? We'd have a rogue planet and, uh...

• 1:16:02Speaker 05

  Oh, well, that's not bad.

• 1:16:03Bob Novella?

  And hopefully, uh, yeah, we'd probably, if you lived near a nuclear, an underground nuclear facility, you could probably last, um, the freezing. But, yeah, things would be bad on the surface.

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, being a rogue planet sounds a lot more fun than it actually is.

• 1:16:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:17Speaker 05

  I'm free to do what I want. Oh, no.

• 1:16:20Speaker 03

  All right, thanks, Bob. Jay, it's Who's That Noisy Time? All right, guys, last week I played this noisy.

• 1:16:46Jay Novella?

  Pretty weird, huh? Yeah. Any guesses about what's going on here?

• 1:16:51Speaker 05

  I have a guess.

• 1:16:51Jay Novella?

  It's just three people talking. Isn't that obvious? Go ahead, Ev.

• 1:16:55Speaker 05

  It's George Robb trying out new voices for his geologic podcast, which is

• 1:17:00Jay Novella?

  That is so close, it's awesome. That's right. That would not be a strange, but, you know, correct answer. I like that. I'll have to talk to George about that. Andrew, I know you know what this is.

• 1:17:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know exactly what it is. It's the background actors from Twin Peaks working out their lines.

• 1:17:19Speaker 05

  Oh, I like that. That's good, too.

• 1:17:23Jay Novella?

  All right, let's dig into this one. Of course, you know, I love this one because it's so strange. Okay, so we got a listener named Matthew Cutler, and he said, "I think this week's noisy is AI slop." I love this answer. Specifically, I think it's one of those audio generating AIs that has been prompted to make up a scene from a comedy TV show.

• 1:17:45Jay Novella?

  We live in a world, guys, where that is an excellent answer. That's a solid guess. Absolutely.

• 1:17:50Speaker 04

  That's a very good answer.

• 1:17:51Jay Novella?

  Not correct, but much appreciated. Another listener named Matt Soskins, he said, "It's Vladimir Putin's duck." And, yeah, it's a joke. I get it. But there was a little bit of a step in the right direction there, so we'll keep going here. Another email from Visto Tuti. Visto says, "I could say a bird, like I always do, but the language is definitely Slavic, so the parrot would freeze in the winter. I am convinced it is an animal talking, so what animal can talk and survive the snow and ice? A walrus."

• 1:18:22Speaker 04

  Walruses can talk?

• 1:18:23Jay Novella?

  I think it was a sea lion that I had a recording of where he could mimic his handler. And it sounded like a human voice, definitely. I don't know. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if walruses can vocalize. If somebody has a sample of that, send it to me.

• 1:18:38Speaker 04

  Here's a sample of it. Jay, ready?

• 1:18:39Jay Novella?

  Go ahead.

• 1:18:40Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:18:40Jay Novella?

  Okay. So, I got an incredible number of correct guesses. Now, every once in a while, someone, well, people send me in things all the time that are recent, you know what I mean? That have been in a lot of people's news feeds and stuff. This was one of But it was so good, I had to play it anyway. So I know a lot of people had recently seen this one. Uh, but the first person who guessed correctly, this is absolutely the first person and only a couple of people admitted that they saw it recently. But I do know because it was out recent that a lot of people saw it, but I do believe this person guessed it. Uh, this is Dennis S. And Dennis says, hello, Jay, I'll skip the whole long time listener, first time caller spiel because I'm too excited.

• 1:19:23Jay Novella?

  I actually recognize this one, um, as I'm sure all of your Russian speaking listeners did too. It's Karlusha the Raven who got super famous about two years ago. I hope I guessed it before thousands of other Russians did, and thank you so much for your work and for the bestest podcast ever. That is Dennis Seget. Dennis, thanks so much for that. Yeah, I did get a ton of emails from people that can speak Russian. I'm sure a lot of them are in Russia. Yeah, this is exactly what Dennis said. This is a raven that apparently was raised by people in Russia. And they taught it a bunch of different words and everything, and they're kind of having a conversation with it and it's definitely entertaining them.

• 1:20:04Jay Novella?

  But it's really cool. You should look up the video to watch this because seeing a raven talk is pretty weird. It's and and and ravens are very big birds.

• 1:20:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. Did the ravens seem unusually large?

• 1:20:17Jay Novella?

  It's a big raven. Yes.

• 1:20:19Speaker 05

  I mean, is that within the normal?

• 1:20:21Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:20:21Speaker 05

  But is that within the normal range?

• 1:20:23Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:23Speaker 05

  Okay. Cause I wasn't sure if it was some.

• 1:20:25Jay Novella?

  Ravens are bigger than crows. They're big. They're very big birds. So I think it's more compelling because it's in a foreign language.

• 1:20:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:33Jay Novella?

  Right? So like there's the, we wouldn't pick up on the nuances. We're missing. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like perfectly good Russian to us. So it sounds even more uncanny. But to a native speaker, they could tell that something's a little off. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, absolutely, Steve. I agree. I thought of that on my own as well. And listen to it again. It's the male voice.

• 1:20:52Speaker 07

  [Russian]

• 1:20:54Speaker 08

  [Russian] [Russian]

• 1:20:59Speaker 08

  [Russian]

• 1:21:12Speaker 05

  It even interrupts, like, the flow is very human-like.

• 1:21:15Speaker 04

  Definitely just kinda sounds like a kinda grumpy old guy.

• 1:21:18Jay Novella?

  It totally does, yeah. I don't know if there's much difference between a drunk Russian and a raven.

• 1:21:26Jay Novella?

  I'm just kidding, come on. Alright guys, I have a new noisy this week. Uh, this was sent in by a listener named Aaron. And I'll warn you that this has some, uh, very high pitched noises in it that may bother some listeners. So this is your chance to turn down a little bit. And here we go.

• 1:22:17Speaker 05

  That is Han Solo trying to get the Millennium Falcon. Warp drive in episode 5.

• 1:22:23Jay Novella?

  It goes on a lot longer than that. I mean, I...

• 1:22:26Bob Novella?

  That's extended as hell, man.

• 1:22:27Speaker 04

  That is a lot.

• 1:22:28Jay Novella?

  I thought it had such a cool series of noises, all sorts of different things going on. So anyway, anyway, calm down. I know you're excited. But if you think you know this week's noisy or you heard something cool, you gotta email me at [email protected]. Steve, as we speak, um, the tickets for, uh, the Seattle show and the Wisconsin show, or shows I should say, are up. Now, we have, uh, three shows in both of these venues, right? So Seattle and then Wisconsin. In Seattle, we have three shows. Friday night, we're gonna have a, a, uh, very low number, very high-profile meet and greet. It's, it's gonna be a, uh, small number of people hanging out with the SGU. I think we're gonna have like 20 tickets for it.

• 1:23:13Jay Novella?

  Um, we're trying this out because we've gotten a ton of emails from people that, uh, just wanted something exactly like this. So we thought we'd give it a shot for a couple of different show weekends that we're doing. So if you're interested, go to the website, theskepticsguy.org. You can see this Friday night show. I have to formally name it. I came up with something fun two weeks ago. I can't remember. I'll look it up. But anyway, it's the Friday night hangout. Then we have Saturday, starting sometime between 11 and 12 a.m. We're going to be doing an SDU Private Show Plus. That's a three hour show. This includes George Robb, of course. And it's a live recording of the SDU. And then we have fun with the audience for about an hour. It's different every time. You gotta come check it out to know what

• 1:23:56Jay Novella?

  it's all about. And then Saturday night, which is that night, we're going to have a VIP, which is available if you're interested in buying tickets. This is for the Extravaganza. And then there's the Extravaganza itself. So honestly, there's four different things that we're doing in those two days. The Extravaganza starts at 8 p.m. All the details are on the ticketing sites, which are, links are found on SDU's website. Please come. We'd love to see you. I'm getting tons of emails from people saying they missed it last time and they're coming this time. We have a great series of shows for you guys. So please join us. And then again, repeat everything in Wisconsin. The dates are up there. And then as a future mention, we're going to be doing all of this in New Haven

• 1:24:38Jay Novella?

  at some point. Hopefully, maybe March or April. We'll let you know when details come.

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  All right. Thank you, brother. Just one quick correction. Last week's show, I said that cellulose was a protein. I blame the jet lag on this. It was just a brain fart. I was thinking collagen. I was like, in my mind, I was thinking collagen, which is a different, that's more for, you know, animal structural protein. Cellulose is a polysaccharide, right? It's a ribbon shaped polymer of glucose molecules. It is, you know, the most common, I think it's the most common structural molecule in plants, whereas collagen is in animal cells.

• 1:25:16Jay Novella?

  Sounds right.

• 1:25:17Speaker 03

  So I just got the wires crossed. I'm still massively jet lagged, by the way.

• 1:25:21Jay Novella?

  Still, right?

• 1:25:22Speaker 03

  You guys can tell. They do clever editing. I kind of hide it as much as possible.

• 1:25:26Speaker 05

  You'd think there'd be a fix for that, you know, or a routine, something they've figured out people can do, a hack of some kind that will help people. I think it's drugs. After all this time, they... Yeah.

• 1:25:37Speaker 04

  End time.

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  You know, melatonin may help a little bit, but it's not, it's just, it's not so much my, when I'm sleeping, sleeping at night, it's just that I just haven't. Yeah, I just can't consolidate my sleep, I can't get enough sleep at once, I'm waking up at two in the morning, you know.

• 1:25:51Speaker 05

  Thinking of things, I'm sure.

• 1:25:52Speaker 03

  Right, and then now, I'm also, I have a colonoscopy tomorrow, so I'm prepping for that.

• 1:25:57Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:25:58Speaker 03

  And prepping means you're drinking valve, you know, you're basically drinking motor oil. That begins right after I get off the show.

• 1:26:05Bob Novella?

  Steve, you went with the, uh...

• 1:26:06Speaker 04

  Go use Bob's toilet.

• 1:26:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:10Speaker 03

  I'll be over there, Bob, right after the show, I'm coming over there.

• 1:26:12Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:26:13Speaker 03

  Got my bowel prep and my iPad.

• 1:26:16Bob Novella?

  Are you going, which prep did you go with?

• 1:26:18Speaker 03

  The small liquid.

• 1:26:19Bob Novella?

  All right.

• 1:26:20Speaker 03

  Not the big liquid, there's a big liquid, there's a small liquid, and there's the pills.

• 1:26:23Speaker 04

  Is this a once a year thing?

• 1:26:25Speaker 03

  It's every...

• 1:26:26Bob Novella?

  Typically, once every five years.

• 1:26:27Speaker 03

  It's 10 years if it's good, five years if they want to follow up stuff.

• 1:26:31Bob Novella?

  For me, it was three years.

• 1:26:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it depends on what they found the last time, they say, that's a little suspicious, come back in three years, but if it's totally clean, I think you can go 10 years between.

• 1:26:41Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that was a kid.

• 1:26:41Speaker 04

  So Bob rolled a one.

• 1:26:42Speaker 03

  Bob rolled, yeah, no, one would have been...

• 1:26:44Speaker 04

  Roll a three.

• 1:26:45Speaker 05

  One would have been, yeah, the worst.

• 1:26:47Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:26:47Bob Novella?

  It turns out the smaller liquid didn't work, didn't clean me up as much.

• 1:26:50Speaker 03

  You gotta, you gotta chase it with a ton of clear liquids, that's the thing, you can't just drink that, I think you're done, you have to, anyway.

• 1:26:58Bob Novella?

  It was a goddamn fire hose.

• 1:26:59Speaker 03

  That's the night I have in store for me. But in the meantime, let's...

• 1:27:03Bob Novella?

  Thanks for sharing.

• 1:27:04Speaker 03

  Let's go on with science or fiction.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction.

• 1:27:18Speaker 03

  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. We have a theme this week, the theme is scientific fraud, scientific fraud. Okay, you guys, ready for this?

• 1:27:34Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:27:35Speaker 03

  Here we go. Item number one, the famous experiment in subliminal advertising in a movie theater to increase sales of Coke and popcorn, never happened and was entirely fabricated.

• 1:27:47Speaker 03

  All right, number two, a recent analysis finds the number of fake publications in biomedicine was at least 5.8%, with 15% being suspicious, amounting to over 100,000 fake papers published every year. And all right, number three, researchers find that 40% of published peer-reviewed papers show signs of AI co-authorship, with 10% being fully authored by AI. Jay, go first.

• 1:28:16Jay Novella?

  Okay, the first one here, the famous experiment in subliminal advertising in a movie theater to increase sales of Coke and popcorn never happened, it was entirely fabricated. I mean, that seems so likely that that sentence is true. You know, it's an urban legend, I could see someone making that up. I could see it both ways, but I think that one is science. The second one here is a recent analysis finds the number of fake publications in biomedicine was at least 5.8%, with 15% being suspicious, amounting to over 100,000 fake papers published every year. Okay, so this is, it's a recent analysis, and, I mean, it's hard to know what the numbers

• 1:28:55Jay Novella?

  would be, but I absolutely believe that there are increasing number of fake papers going out. You know, biomedicine definitely is a category I would expect a ton to be in, you know, over 100,000 fake papers published. If anything, I would say that number is a lot more if this one isn't correct. The last one here, researchers find that 40% of published peer-reviewed papers show signs of AI co-authorship with 10% being fully authored by AI. Oh my God. That one has got to be science. Oh, man. Wow, Steve. I will say that the last one is the one about the researchers find that 40% of published peer-reviewed papers show signs of AI co-authorship.

• 1:29:39Jay Novella?

  I'll say that one is false.

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  Okay, Evan?

• 1:29:42Speaker 05

  The one about advertising in a movie theater increasing sales of Coke and popcorn, that is classic urban legend, like urban myth kind of stuff, right there, and that it was entirely fabricated. I believe that is science. Boy, I bet you there are even other examples of things like this. We know the culture just gloms on to things, whether it's true or not. And if it has legs long enough, lasting throughout, you know, a generation or decades or whatever. Yeah, stuff like that. This would be a classic case of that, I think. So that one is science. The second one about the number of fake publications in biomedicine was at least 5.8% with 15% being suspicious,

• 1:30:24Speaker 05

  amounting to over 100,000 fake papers published every year. Holy moly, so there's more than a million biomedicine papers published every year?

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  So that, yeah, that 100,000 is based on the 5.8%. So that's the low end.

• 1:30:39Speaker 05

  Oh, that's the five?

• 1:30:39Speaker 03

  That's the low end of the range.

• 1:30:40Speaker 05

  Millions of biomedicine. Oh, my gosh. Well, I guess, you know, it's happening all over the world, so then publishing all. But that's a lot, all that information. Oh, my gosh. It's this last one, though, that I think is going to wind up being the fiction. 40% of published peer reviewed papers showing signs of AI co-authorship.

• 1:31:01Speaker 05

  And 10% being fully authored. How could you have a peer reviewed process that would allow for that? That is just, why have it at all? I mean, right, if you're not gatekeeping for things like that in 2025, what are you doing? Right? So I imagine they are really doing everything within their power to, to stop this or detect it as best as possible. And I don't think 40% of this stuff is getting through. I say that one's fiction.

• 1:31:25Bob Novella?

  Okay, Bob. I agree with you guys. You're, I think you're pretty much spot on to what, to what I'm thinking as well. Subliminal, yeah, I've heard about it for literally decades. It wouldn't surprise me that it's fake, but also wouldn't surprise me if Steve, you know, if you're whatever. I'm trying, trying not to metagame too much this time. I think the bottom line for me is that the, the biomedicine seems reasonable. 5.8, 15% sounds reasonable. For this third one with peer reviewed, 40% is just, I don't want to believe it. That would just, it's such a dramatic number.

• 1:32:05Bob Novella?

  10% fully authored, even 1 in 10, sounds a little bit too dramatic at this point in 2025. You know, geez, I hope I'm right here. So I'm going to say this one, the 40% published peer reviewed, showing signs of co-authorship. I'll say that one is fiction and that puts me with Jay at this point, I think, right? And Evan?

• 1:32:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, you guys were all together. Yep, we're in, so far, we're in the same boat. All right. Okay, and Andrea, you get to go last.

• 1:32:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna go against the, the group here. In the spirit of collective intelligence, someone's gonna be wrong, so it might as well be me. Touche. So I'm gonna go with, so I think the, the 5%, 5.8% biomedicine publications being fake. I think that's science. If anything, I agree with others who said it's, it's probably higher, you know, and 15% are suspicious. I'm gonna say that the researchers find that 40% of published peer reviewed papers show signs of AI co-authorship. I'm curious about what timeframe, is that 2025 thus far? Is that the last year?

• 1:33:15Speaker 03

  It's just recent, this is all very recent.

• 1:33:16Speaker 04

  Just recent, okay. I'm gonna say that that is science because I have less confidence in the peer review process, perhaps. Having been a part of it myself, you know, it's, it's truly often a peer. And if you're working, you know, AI co, the 40% is just AI co-authorship. So that could mean, you know, very small segments are AI and faculty who are, they should be reviewing for these things, but I don't believe that they are necessarily. And I also, this is across all fields, I bet there's some fields just pumping out some wild stuff. So I'm persuaded that that number is real, which leaves, very controversial, and I'm a bit torn on this. But I'm gonna say that the experiment about popcorn and Coke being

• 1:34:04Speaker 04

  Fabricated, I'm gonna say that that is the fiction and I'm largely basing that on one thing, which is I've never heard of this experiment. And so I'm not really like, oh, of course it's false because I don't know what the study actually was. I could see a version of it, it does seem unlikely that we're in a world of subliminal advertising and that's not fiction. But I'm gonna say that maybe the, the claim itself is that it never happened and was entirely fabricated. I bet some version of it happened and it got way blown out of proportion. So I'm gonna say that's the fiction.

• 1:34:34Speaker 03

  Okay, so you guys all agree on number two, so we'll start there. A recent analysis finds the number of fake publications of biomedicine was at least 5.8%, with 15% being suspicious, amounting to over 100,000 fake papers published every year. You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. Great.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:59Speaker 04

  I mean, or not great. There's a lot of fake papers.

• 1:35:01Speaker 03

  Oh no, this is a huge problem and this number is growing fast.

• 1:35:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:05Speaker 03

  So, one, one thing you have to change about how you may be thinking about, you know, fake scientific papers, it's not just individual bad actors anymore. There are, there are actually now systems of people, basically like organized crime, syndicates, you know. Like mills. Yeah, they're paper mills, you know, cranking these things out. They hook up researchers who are trying to buy, you know, to pad out their CV by reputation with journals that will publish the article with people who will write the fake papers. And, yeah, the numbers are increasing significantly and the, the journals don't have a sufficient mechanism to, to really prevent this, you know.

• 1:35:49Speaker 03

  Think about that, one in 20 pa- one in 20 papers, at least, it could be, you know, more like three in 20, you know, are fabricated or just completely fake, you know, not that they, they tweak the numbers or something. It's a, it's a paper mill. Part of the reason for this, too, is that there are so many pay to play journals that are of very low quality. Which also impacts the third one, too. You guys got to keep in mind how many low quality. They may be technically peer reviewed, but it doesn't mean that there's somebody doing a good job there. They're just trying to publish as much as they can because they get paid per paper. Some are straight up predatory, but other ones just have really low standards.

• 1:36:32Speaker 05

  Well, their industry is going to collapse if that's the case. I mean, right?

• 1:36:35Speaker 03

  Oh, totally. People lose faith in the published science and, you know, if it's just you're buried with fake papers, it's just they can't, it's not sustainable.

• 1:36:42Speaker 04

  Well, and the cost to generate papers is basically zero on an individual level. So you can just keep pumping all, like that was the big barrier was like, oh, at least a paper takes a while to write.

• 1:36:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:52Speaker 04

  But that's not the case anymore.

• 1:36:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, let's go to the number three then, since these are closely related. Researchers find that 40% of published peer reviewed papers show signs of AI co-authorship with 10% being fully authored by AI. The boys think this one is a fiction. Andrea, you think this one is science.

• 1:37:08Speaker 04

  The gender.

• 1:37:09Speaker 03

  And again, it's the same kind of thing. It's like, you know, are those numbers reasonable? If you're thinking of there's a ton of poor quality, you know, journals out there, this is another way to just pad out your CV. Just have AI write a paper, publish it and some pay to play rag and there you go.

• 1:37:26Speaker 05

  I hope nobody looks too closely.

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, and if they do, you retract it and move on, which is what they do. So this one is.

• 1:37:36Speaker 05

  Well.

• 1:37:37Speaker 03

  This is the fiction. You guys are correct.

• 1:37:39Bob Novella?

  All right.

• 1:37:41Speaker 03

  The numbers are, the numbers are.

• 1:37:44Bob Novella?

  Andrea, nice try. I mean, I could absolutely agree with your, with your angle as well, Andrea.

• 1:37:48Speaker 03

  But we may get there.

• 1:37:49Speaker 04

  Well, it was a wrong angle, so don't agree too hard.

• 1:37:52Speaker 03

  So 10% are co-authored. That's the upper, there's no, they didn't even give.

• 1:37:58Speaker 05

  Not fully authored.

• 1:37:58Speaker 03

  Didn't even give a number for fully co-authored, fully authored by AI. It's just, they found that recent studies show that 10% of published peer reviewed papers are, show signs of being co-authored by AI. Um, yes, this is greatly exaggerating those numbers.

• 1:38:12Speaker 05

  Does AI have a role in these, in papers?

• 1:38:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:18Speaker 05

  Right, so but but not but not in the terms of

• 1:38:21Speaker 03

  But it shouldn't be authoring it, no. Editing, analyzing, whatever. This means that the famous experiment in subliminal advertising in a movie theater to increase sales of Coke and popcorn never happened and was entirely fabricated is science. So, yeah, this wasn't really an urban legend so much as this an ad man, James Vickery, made it up and said it was real and sold it was. But then he later said, "I was all just a quote unquote publicity stunt," which means he lied and got caught, right? But but the thing is that it kicked off a whole generation of people believing in subliminal advertising.

• 1:39:00Speaker 05

  Yeah. I've heard this since I was a boy.

• 1:39:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've heard that many times, yeah. And and that's where the urban legends then take over, right? And then embellish it. But the science never showed that it that it was true. And then eventually people did do actual research on it and it just was a complete bust. It doesn't work.

• 1:39:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. I was gonna say, is there any evidence? I would be shocked, yeah.

• 1:39:22Speaker 03

  There is priming, right? You can you can't prime people and you could prime people very subtly, but the idea of subliminal is that it's imperceptible consciously, but it's still affecting you and there's no evidence for that.

• 1:39:35Speaker 04

  Right. One of my favorite priming studies, stop me if I've already said it, was a study where they had people come into little cubicles in an office and like draw a picture or solve a crossword puzzle and then they gave them like a little cookie or or snack. And the treatment and control, they told them the treatment and control were something with like the puzzles, but the treatment and control were whether or not they were pumping a lemon scent into the room where they were doing the study. And the the rooms that got a lemon scent, the people were more likely to pick up the wrapper from their little snack and throw it away than the ones that didn't have a lemon scent.

• 1:40:07Speaker 05

  Oh, because they wanted to maintain the perceived cleanliness?

• 1:40:11Speaker 04

  There's like, yeah, something about the smell like primes us to think about cleanliness or order or, oh, there's someone in here cleaning up. But I don't know exactly what the the mechanism was.

• 1:40:19Speaker 03

  Why the lemon scent all those cleaners?

• 1:40:22Speaker 05

  Right, yeah, because that's what I think about when I go, you know.

• 1:40:25Speaker 04

  Or that's why everyone did it is because

• 1:40:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're already programmed.

• 1:40:28Speaker 04

  And so we now associate it, yeah. But, I mean, yeah, that's not subliminal, but it's pretty clever. And it's and you are perceiving it, you just don't really know the effect it's having on you. I just thought it was super cool.

• 1:40:39Speaker 05

  Fascinating.

• 1:40:39Speaker 03

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:40:40Speaker 05

  This week's quote was submitted by a listener, Terry from American Canyon, California. Thank you, Terry. It is easy to get international agreement in science. Scientists have all the same standards. They are set not by beliefs, but by what works best. Of necessity, there is therefore universal unity, and unity makes for goodwill. And that was said by Bernd Heinrich, who is a professor emeritus of the Biology Department at the University of Vermont, and an author of a number of books about nature and biology. He has also made major contributions to the study of insect physiology and behavior, as well as bird behavior, including talking ravens.

• 1:41:24Speaker 03

  Thanks. All right, well Andrea, thanks for joining us.

• 1:41:27Speaker 04

  Of course, thanks for having me. Always great to join you.

• 1:41:30Speaker 05

  We love having you, Andrea.

• 1:41:31Speaker 03

  You're always awesome, Andrea.

• 1:41:32Speaker 05

  You're so great.

• 1:41:33Speaker 04

  Oh, you're always awesome. This was super fun.

• 1:41:35Speaker 05

  So great.

• 1:41:36Speaker 04

  I'm always happy to be here.

• 1:41:37Speaker 03

  And I'll be seeing you next week. We'll be recording the next two episodes of the Political Reality Podcast.

• 1:41:42Speaker 04

  And one day, people besides us can listen to it.

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  They'll actually be out there. We're getting ahead, you know, we're developing-

• 1:41:48Speaker 04

  It's more of a personal podcast.

• 1:41:49Speaker 03

  A backlog while we do the, you know, we're having discussions with the editor, and we're sorting all that stuff out. But once they hit, they'll be every week.

• 1:41:57Speaker 04

  Yep, yep. That's very exciting, and it's been a lot of fun, so I'll see you then.

• 1:42:01Speaker 05

  And then you're committed.

• 1:42:02Speaker 03

  Then we're committed. That's it.

• 1:42:04Speaker 05

  That's it. Andrea, we haven't missed an episode in 20 effing years, so-

• 1:42:09Speaker 04

  That's very impressive.

• 1:42:10Speaker 05

  So your dance card is going to be filled for a long time.

• 1:42:12Speaker 04

  Wow, not a single episode?

• 1:42:14Speaker 03

  Not a single week in 20 years.

• 1:42:16Speaker 04

  No. I'm impressed.

• 1:42:18Speaker 03

  And we're not stressed out at all. Yeah, and it doesn't-

• 1:42:20Speaker 04

  It's not taking a toll on anyone's health.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  But now, it's like, we don't want to break our, break our record, so we gotta do it now.

• 1:42:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:42:29Speaker 04

  If you ever miss a week, we'll all know that everyone died.

• 1:42:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, something bad happened.

• 1:42:32Speaker 05

  Or a white dwarf collided with us. If we miss a week, at least two of us are dead.

• 1:42:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. Or we're about to get launched out of the solar system as a plane.

• 1:42:40Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 1:42:41Speaker 03

  That's my prediction.

• 1:42:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. Steve, if we get approached by a hypervelocity white dwarf, I am not recording the show.

• 1:42:48Speaker 03

  Noted, all right.

• 1:42:49Speaker 04

  This is the ultimate show to record, Bob. You gotta do at least a short one. Quickie with Bob.

• 1:42:54Speaker 03

  Quickie with Bob.

• 1:42:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:56Speaker 03

  More quick than that. All right, well, thanks again for joining me this week, everyone.

• 1:42:59Speaker 05

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:43:00Speaker 03

  Happy Thanksgiving to all. Happy Thanksgiving.

• 1:43:04Speaker 04

  Happy Thanksgiving.

• 1:43:05Speaker 03

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

• 1:43:11Speaker 03

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

• 1:43:48Speaker 07

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.