The Skeptics Guide #1093 - Jun 20 2026

Guests George Hrab and Andrea Jones Rooy; SGU Down Under; News Items: Donut Lab Battery Follow up, Fungal Superhighway, Echochambers and Radicalization, Payam Method, Strength Training and Longevity; Who's That Noisy; ADIct game; 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

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. 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.

• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, June 17th, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:46Bob Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And we have two guests, George Robb.

• 0:52Speaker 04

  It's June, everybody.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  And Andrea Jones-Roy.

• 0:56Speaker 05

  It's also June where I am. Ooh. No time travel here.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Thank you, guys, for joining us. So Evan is off this week, and Kara said that it was okay if I told everybody that she's getting a colonoscopy.

• 1:10Speaker 05

  Good for her.

• 1:10Bob Novella?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:11Speaker 05

  Health first.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  I think she's having a camera up her butt right as we speak.

• 1:14Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:14Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:15Speaker 05

  And she didn't want to join and keep us posted on how it's going?

• 1:19Speaker 04

  She's actually streaming.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  She is streaming. From the colonoscopy?

• 1:22Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's on YouTube, so.

• 1:24Bob Novella?

  She specifically refused that option.

• 1:26Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Surprisingly.

• 1:27Speaker 05

  Very selfish, I have to say.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Just forego your contraception so that you could live podcast from the colonoscopy.

• 1:35Speaker 04

  Have you all done it? Boys, have you all done it?

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just had it six months ago or something.

• 1:39Speaker 04

  Okay, okay, me too.

• 1:41Speaker 05

  I haven't. Am I the only one in the club? Oh, man. Or not in the club, as the case may be. I gotta go, I gotta make an appointment.

• 1:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I'm a little behind in my.

• 1:49Speaker 05

  Oh. I'm in.

• 1:51Bob Novella?

  I gotta make it.

• 1:51Speaker 05

  Arears with my doctor.

• 1:53Bob Novella?

  Soon.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Arears, I love it.

• 1:55Bob Novella?

  Oh, sweet. I'm thinking of doing it before the big trip, LA, Sydney, New Zealand.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you don't want to do it on the back end.

• 2:04Speaker 05

  Very good, yeah.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  Oh, who's being cheeky now? Come on.

• 2:08Speaker 05

  Overall, I have to say this is a great analysis.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think it's pretty shitty.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  I couldn't. Well, I can't put my finger on it, but I think it's a, I think it's a good, good analysis.

• 2:21Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  My last one, I had a good prep and a clean, clean colon, so I can go 10 years for my next.

• 2:27Speaker 05

  That's great. Is the age, uh, it's 45, right?

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so.

• 2:32Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Unless you have family history or something.

• 2:33Speaker 05

  Okay, okay.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Or you have symptoms.

• 2:35Speaker 05

  Oh, okay. All right.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Or, or like blood coming out there.

• 2:40Speaker 05

  All right. We'll do a quick exam and then we'll report back. Good.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  All right. It's nothing. Now, the thing is, I've noticed, you know, over the last, you know, 30 years of my life, getting occasional procedures, is they got the conscious sedation dialed in pretty well now.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Even when I was talking to the doctor for my more recent colonoscopy, this is my second one, I said, for the first one, I actually woke up in the middle of my upper GI.

• 3:03Speaker 04

  No way.

• 3:04Speaker 05

  Were you in horrible pain? What happened?

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Well, you're just like, what am I choking on? You're like, you have no idea what's going on, right? You're just so.

• 3:09Speaker 05

  Are you intubated? I don't know anything about that.

• 3:11Speaker 04

  They're really up there.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  No, no, it was the upper GI. So this is, I had both. I had a colonoscopy followed by an upper GI. So the camera was in my stomach at the time.

• 3:19Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  And yeah, not.

• 3:21Speaker 05

  How did you, did they put you, knock you back out or what?

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. They just knocked me back out. But this guy said, that won't happen. That we're, you know, we have it so much more dialed in now than we did.

• 3:30Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 3:31Bob Novella?

  And you remembered waking up though. I would think you'd kind of forget that.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  No, I a hundred percent remember it. That's, I think that's part of what they do a lot better is they give you the memory juice. So you don't remember any of it.

• 3:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, my mother-in-law was, was put under for surgery last week, unrelated to her colon, and she's convinced she had a dream during it, which I didn't think was possible.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, yeah, it shouldn't be.

• 3:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. All right.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:54Speaker 05

  I'll tell her if she's making things up.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  But again, I.

• 3:57Speaker 05

  I mean, maybe the, the sedation waned or waxed.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Exact cocktail they used or whatever.

• 4:01Speaker 05

  Right. Wow.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  I just remember when I was going out, just at the very edge of consciousness, I heard the doctor go, extraordinary.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  That's a false memory, George.

• 4:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's some kind of bias. I'm sure you guys have talked about this on the show, maybe at length, but the rising colon cancer among millennials, is that something you all have covered and I just need to catch up on my listeners?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  We haven't covered it. I've been sort of noticing that peripherally, I haven't done a deep dive yet.

• 4:26Speaker 05

  Okay, alright.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  Is it like lack of fiber in the diet or something? What's the reason?

• 4:29Speaker 05

  Well, no one knows. Well, as far as I know, there's a number of hypotheses, but I would defer to Steve in a hurry on that.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  I personally have not looked into it deep enough.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  I'm living in constant fear because I read news headlines and then don't know anything else about medicine.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  That's healthy.

• 4:44Speaker 05

  Hanging by a thread until you guys cover it, is what I'm trying to say.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  My sense is, Andrea, that you fit into a lot of low-risk demographics.

• 4:51Speaker 05

  Thanks very much.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Given your diet and your weight and your overall lifestyle.

• 4:57Speaker 05

  Alright. What you don't see is I'm injecting heroin into my veins right now.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was not aware of that. Yeah, I was not aware of that.

• 5:03Speaker 05

  Other than that, you know, dialed into health. Alright.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  So, we did not have you guys on the show, shockingly, to talk about colonoscopies.

• 5:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  We actually wanted to have you on the show, just a good week to do it because both, you know, Evan and Kara are away, to talk about our upcoming trip.

• 5:19Speaker 05

  Yes!

• 5:20Speaker 02

  We are going to Los Angeles, followed by Sydney, Australia, followed by Christchurch, New Zealand, and we are going to be doing shows all over the place.

• 5:30Speaker 05

  Multi-hemisphere, multi-continent shows.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  We went to Madison and did about nine hours in a day and a half of content.

• 5:37Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  So, we're gonna be doing, what, like 50 hours of content over the three weeks? It's gonna be unbelievable.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  We're gonna do four live recordings at the SGU in two weeks, you know, plus two, those two weekends. Plus, we're gonna do two extravaganzas, we're holding a whole conference in Sydney, like part of a conference in Christchurch, and a special show in LA we've never done before. We're doing a five-hour kind of mini-conference with, which includes a two-hour live recording of the SGU and two hours of extra content, just for the live audience. It's going to be like, so we do these live show pluses where we do extra stuff like this, but it's usually

• 6:18Jay Novella?

  More like a half an hour to an hour. Now we're doing a full two hours and because we're not doing a separate extravaganza in LA, which is our, you know, fun stage show, we're going to be incorporating similar types of bits in addition to the kind of things we usually do during these extended recording things. It's gonna be a lot of fun.

• 6:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:38Speaker 04

  Quite different from just the podcast itself, which is the, which is kind of the, the really neat thing. If you are a fan of the show and you are a fan of these lovely podcasting humans that you're listening to all the time, you get to see them in kind of a different light. You get to see them in the regular light. We have a regular SG podcasting light that we turn on, but then we have a very special, special light kind of light that shines and, and involves them in all kinds of games and all kinds of revealing, really fun stuff. So.

• 7:03Jay Novella?

  No, I don't think we'll, we'll ever do this again. Um, you know, the SG and beyond show. Because this came out of the fact that we had a scheduling problem because of our flight to Australia.

• 7:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:15Jay Novella?

  Well, normally, yeah, we do a live show and then an extravaganza. Yeah. So, but either way, I mean, it's gonna be a ton of fun. You know, people who have attended these shows before know that when we're live, it's a very different experience. And, uh, you know, having our guests there is going to make it even, you know, a lot more interesting and fun. So we hope you join us. Steve, you know what people are dying to know right now?

• 7:34Speaker 04

  What's that?

• 7:35Jay Novella?

  How can they buy the ticket?

• 7:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:37Jay Novella?

  They go, they go to the skeptics guy.org and we have an events page. And, and there, there probably is a button on the homepage that will go direct to that ticket, but just if not, go to the events page.

• 7:48Speaker 04

  We should also say that this, you know, this is probably, I mean, not for 100% sure, but probably the last time we'll be going to Australia and New Zealand.

• 7:58Jay Novella?

  That's a good.

• 7:58Speaker 04

  As a group anyway.

• 8:00Speaker 05

  So depressing, George.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  It's, well, no, it's, I think it's a lovely opportunity. It's realistic to be like, you know, that all the whole, the whole clan, the whole crew will be going over there to do this kind of a show. Cause we've done it, we've done it twice before. We've had amazing time each time. It's just better than the other. Like life altering memories that are formed during the times we're visiting. So if you are in New Zealand or Australia and have enjoyed the show for all these years, this probably is going to be one of your, one of your. Their last chances to meet us in person and and I know I can speak for everyone when we love meeting you. We really do. It's one of these things that every time we have some kind of a live event afterwards, we're always marveling at how lovely the vibe is, how how wonderful

• 8:44Speaker 04

  all of you folks are always are, and how much we sort of influence each other in the most positive way. So, so really make try to take an opportunity to come out and see us and see us in person because it's really a different kind of thing.

• 8:55Speaker 05

  I've had the pleasure of being able to be a part of Nauticon for the last two times that we've done that and Nexus back in the day. And it really is, George is right. It's, you know, it's all the skepticism you know and love, but it's also, you know, as everyone who listens to the show knows, like, these are really nice people and it's super fun to kind of hang out and be a little goofy and play around and get to know one another. And yeah, I would second George, like, the audience, you all are absolutely awesome. So, uh, come hang out with us. And Brian Wecht will be there as well.

• 9:22Speaker 04

  Ninja Brian?

• 9:22Speaker 05

  Ninja Brian.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Oh, my goodness.

• 9:24Speaker 05

  The one and only.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  Wait, he's Ninja Brian? Oh.

• 9:28Speaker 05

  That's why you never saw them in the same room.

• 9:30Speaker 04

  That totally makes sense. Okay, cool.

• 9:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:33Jay Novella?

  Nauticon, um, you know, we created this conference for a couple of reasons. One of them is because throughout all of the conferences we've been to, and we've been to so many, there is like always a huge lack of time to hang out and have fun. It's great to see science lectures and there's right now, of course, there's other conferences where you could see stuff like that. But if you want to lean into, you know, community building and having fun and making new friends and having the time to to just relax and really get to know people and enjoy yourself and be thoroughly entertained because, you know, we're going to knock you over the head with with fun things that we have going on. And of course, there is education involved with this. It's just we've made everything fun.

• 10:10Speaker 05

  And it's also quite participatory, right, Jay? I mean, at Nauticon, the audience was doing all kinds of things that were involved.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Crazy stuff, just crazy.

• 10:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:18Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, it varies depending on what particular thing that we're doing. But yeah, I mean, there's going to be audience members on stage. We're going to be talking to the audience all the time. There's there are lots of, there's interaction that I can't reveal because it's secret to this specific conference. We can say at the last Nauticon, Jay formed a cult with some of the Which is still active.

• 10:38Speaker 05

  It was a very convincing cult. Jay, I'm still upset that I haven't been inaugurated as a member. So we'll talk after.

• 10:44Jay Novella?

  Well, we'll talk. I mean, this is, you know, if you don't understand the shark fin reference, that's because you are indoctrinated.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:52Jay Novella?

  But those of us who were there, it's so funny you say that because we were just at PsychCon and I had a couple of people who were with me at the conference, at that Nauticon in my group. Flash, flash me our secret sign.

• 11:05Bob Novella?

  Oh my God, that's awesome.

• 11:07Jay Novella?

  It thoroughly entertains me that that is still alive after two years, you know, it's awesome. So yeah, join us, guys. We're gonna have a great time. You're not, you're not gonna wanna miss it. And you know, going to PsychCon showed me it's great to regroup with old friends. You know, I hadn't seen a lot of those people in a long time. It was really nice to catch up. So that's another thing you can do is just meet some of your friends you haven't had the opportunity to see. So we hope you join us. We had one of our best extravaganzas that we ever had at, at PsychCon. And that, that show is just so dialed in. It's just so dialed in and fun. And people were loving it. The response was really, really great. So you get a chance to come, see us do this international extravaganza, which is just a, just a blast. Yeah, the spontaneous participation by Bill Nye, the Science Guy.

• 11:52Jay Novella?

  Seriously. Who none of us knew were in the audience because the lights were in our eyes. We couldn't see anything. He's like in the third row. Anyway, that was cool. But in, in Australia, in Sydney, George, we're gonna have Australia's Bill Nye, which I'm informed Bill Nye is, is America's this guy. That's Dr. Carl. So Dr. Carl will be joining us.

• 12:13Speaker 05

  Dr. Carl.

• 12:14Jay Novella?

  In Sydney for a lot. He's not just joining us, guys. Oh, he's gonna be, he's in there, man. He's gonna be doing everything. He's embedded for all day Friday and all day Saturday. And he was, he was not only happy to do it, but he's very excited because again, he wants to have fun. You know what I mean? Like, he was really intrigued by the fact that we're not like just being hammered by, you know, science lectures that it's about making people feel good. Which is, and you know, he, we've worked with him in the past and he's not only super intelligent, but he He's a very fun guy to hang out with.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:45Bob Novella?

  And not too good. It's not like we're trying to make people feel too good.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  Right. Right. No, Bob, you're right.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  What are we shooting for, Bob? What's our, what's our 82% good? What are we shooting for?

• 12:54Speaker 02

  What's the calibration here?

• 12:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, what's our calibration?

• 12:57Speaker 05

  But Bob, I'm with Bob in the sense that, yeah, we're not gonna have that much fun because it is, you know, the world is, is, is heavy and, and things are stressful and skepticism and science and, and all kinds of stuff are, are, you know, it's easy to feel hopeless. And so I really think that not only is it important to come together as a skeptical community, but also just to remind ourselves that we're not alone in fighting the good fight on a lot of these fronts. So, yeah, so fun, but fun with purpose. How about that, Bob?

• 13:23Speaker 04

  Here, here.

• 13:23Bob Novella?

  I like it. Thank you, Andrew.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Well, the community is such an important part of this.

• 13:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  And not that I intended to go into like a news item, but there's a lot of research, especially recent research showing that the, the lack of community that people have is people shy away from institutions, even religious institutions. And there's more isolation and working from home and everything really is a heavy mental burden on people. It really is. And so we have to build communities to interact with each other. We might as well build them around something good like skepticism and critical thinking and science.

• 13:56Speaker 05

  Right.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Rather than, you know, whatever, other things. All right, there's one more thing I gotta plug before we go on to some news items. Skeptical 2026 is coming up next weekend.

• 14:07Speaker 05

  Whoa.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  And I think we've all been, been to it or participated in some way in the past. This is a great, you know, skeptical conference in California run by Eugenie Scott, who is totally awesome. They have a great, great lineup of speakers. They have their Skepperty game, which is always a lot of fun. So you can check this out at skepticalcon.com. And still time to get tickets for that, which is, it's on Friday, June 26th and Saturday, June 27th. All right. Have you guys, you guys remember from several months ago, I think now like five months ago, Donut, the Donut Lab battery claims that we talked about?

• 14:46Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 14:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so this was-

• 14:48Bob Novella?

  The wish list for batteries every box checked.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Small company comes out of nowhere at the, uh, the consumer electronics show, right? The CES.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  CES, yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  With, with this battery, they say it's a solid state battery, 400 watt hours per kilogram, which is greater than, you know, the current lithium ion batteries, uh, in cars today. Hundred thousand charge cycles, able to recharge in five minutes, stable without any risk of fire, operates from minus 30 to 100 degrees, and all of this cheaper than current lithium ion batteries, like a literal wishlist for, you know, a commercial battery for, for EVs or a lot of purposes. And I forgot one more thing, and doesn't require any geopolitically sensitive materials, you know, like cobalt. So, uh, right there, it's like, really? Cause all, usually battery advances are incremental and there's a trade off and like they improve

• 15:45Speaker 02

  one thing at the expense of something else and it just sort of over time, we're sort of eking forward, but cumulatively, we're making pretty good progress. But saying, hey, we've done all of this in one go is really a massive red flag. But there were other red flags too. Um, this is a small company and there are other companies with investing billions of dollars into this. So how did they beat out all of the giants in, in such a profound way? Like leapfrog over them by five years, 10 years. Right. Doesn't sound plausible.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  They lie.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Well, yeah. But the other, then there's a skeptic, the other sort of huge red flag was, so they're at the CES, we're at this trade show and they have, you know, a mock-up of one of their batteries, but they didn't have a battery. They did not have a battery, it was just an empty case. So yeah, this is what the case is gonna look like, you know? So what, that is also a huge red flag.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  So the, the, there was pretty much a universal skepticism about this, right? And, and most charitably, people were saying, well, all right, I, it's not inherently impossible, you're not breaking any laws of physics, but where's the meat, right? Show us, well, we'll take this seriously when you have a battery to actually show us. You know, put up or shut up kind of thing. And the guy's like, the CEO like, yes, it's coming and we're already putting it in motorcycles that will be shipping to, to consumers. It's already happening, you know? So it's like, okay, show us, give it, give us a battery to test. And so this dragged out for a while, but then eventually they did make some batteries available for independent testing. And now we're getting And guess what?

• 17:28Speaker 02

  The results of those independent testing. And what do you think it shows?

• 17:33Speaker 05

  No.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Well, I can summarize it with a noise, Steve.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Win, win, win.

• 17:40Bob Novella?

  I think, my guess is that it was far better than even they were predicting.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  It also makes pizza.

• 17:49Bob Novella?

  And massages your feet.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  So there were essentially 20 independent battery experts who looked at the, what was submitted by the company. And essentially what they found is that the battery they submitted was just a lithium ion battery. That was it. There was two key pieces of evidence. The first was the voltage curves, right? So this is when you're looking at the voltage generated by it. It was right in the sweet spot for lithium ion. But the second piece of evidence was even more damning. So these battery cells expand and you know, there's an amount, the amount of expansion is caused by the, the ions that are in there, right? And essentially it expanded in exactly

• 18:36Speaker 02

  the amount you would predict if it were lithium, right? Causing that expansion. It's like a fingerprint of lithium, right? There's this kink that forms and it showed the exact distinctive kink in the, it's in the expansion curve around 50 to 70% state of charge. So again, that's like a fingerprint of lithium. And so that's it. It's pretty much QED. So that means that this is fraud, right? I mean, that's not-

• 19:04Speaker 04

  Well, that's my, that's my question. Are they self-deluding or are they fraud?

• 19:07Speaker 05

  Right. Like is this Elizabeth Holmes or is this some kind of genuine misunderstanding of-

• 19:12Speaker 02

  This is, I think, I think you hit the nail on that. This is exactly Elizabeth Holmes. This is Thranas.

• 19:16Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  And there's other things too. So the, they said they were putting batteries in the motorcycle to customers. No, they weren't. They were putting them in motorcycles for their internal use only, which is like by definition, pre-production. And they haven't shipped any to customers yet. So that was a lie. That's just a lie.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  It's those wind-up Evel Knievel toys we had as a kid. That's, that's what it was for probably.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  So-

• 19:39Speaker 04

  They were great.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  So yeah, so the investigators actually used the fraud word when describing it. Could this be come down to fake it till you make it kind of thing where you have the marketing department, marketing what they think the engineers are going to develop in the next three to six months. And so they're just sort of pretending they already have it.

• 20:01Speaker 05

  Right.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  I don't think that's enough to explain it. I mean, that was Elizabeth Holmes' excuse. This was all fake it till you make it.

• 20:07Bob Novella?

  That would be a profound disconnect, really profound.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  There's one thing, it's one thing to like Steve Jobs, when he first presented the iPhone prototype in 2007, it was not fully functional, right? It was not a product. It was not complete. But, you know, whatever, three months later, he did have a working iPhone.

• 20:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  That's not what we're seeing here. Theranos was something different. Elizabeth Holmes said, I want to invent this thing. And then she started marketing it.

• 20:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  And raising money for it, even though people were telling her what you want to create is impossible. She ignored that and just went with it. Seems like, seems like that more, that's much closer to what's happening here. Either it was just deliberate fraud, or this guy was like, yeah, we're going to develop a solid state battery with all of this suite of awesome features. And I'll let the engineers worry about that. I'm just going to market the thing that I want to make, right? But I don't even think that really covers it.

• 21:04Speaker 05

  Is the incentive here on their part, like, is it money? Is it attention? Is it, or as you said, a belief that if you just keep insisting you can do this for long enough, you'll actually catch up and do it?

• 21:13Speaker 02

  So those are the three possibilities, right? So all three of those things happen.

• 21:18Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  So either you are hyping up your tech for, to lure in investors.

• 21:25Speaker 05

  Right.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Which is really problematic, because then you can get into investment fraud, right?

• 21:32Speaker 05

  Right.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Or you're hyping it up for consumers, which is a later stage hype, right? That, at that point, you've already, you've got the money, you, you're developing a product, and now you're hyping something pre-release.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Or you're selling consumers a fraudulent product. So we've seen that too, where like people are selling free energy machines or whatever. These are just completely fraudulent. Or it's very common, I just got a, I just got a spam advertisement for this on YouTube, actually, for this like amazing hard drive, you know, solid state hard drive. And it's not a hard drive. It is just a shitty hard drive in a, in a case. And it doesn't have any of the characteristics that they're claiming that it has, and it doesn't really even work. That's fraud. That's like, we're selling a fraudulent product to consumers. This is, I think, in the fundraising hype phase.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  They were selling an idea that they massively overhyped to attract financing.

• 22:33Speaker 04

  How much did they raise?

• 22:35Speaker 02

  A lot.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  A lot, right, of course.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  So they had some preliminary funding, then they were doing a new round of funding. It was millions of dollars from hundreds or thousands of individual investors. There was a lot of, this, this, this round that they got out of, you know, all this hype was mostly from small investors, which is why they are under investigation for fraud.

• 22:59Speaker 05

  Right.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  They are being investigated for fraud.

• 23:01Speaker 05

  And if they're found guilty, does the money go back to the investors?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Well, whatever wasn't spent, yep. But usually by the time that happens, you know, some of it was spent.

• 23:09Speaker 05

  Steve, how does this fit with the kind of broader conversation slash tension around AI and agentic AI and all of that? Like, there's obviously a ton of hype and a lot of it's coming from the companies themselves that stand to benefit from the hype. There's also the reality, which is they are, AIs are getting better. And then there's sort of like the, kind of like the iPhone version that you described. There's sort of like the beta AI or the model AI that can do even more advanced things, but you wouldn't implement it in like a workplace job yet. Like, is that unethical? Like, at what point is hype unethical, I guess, is the?

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a great question. By the way, the, it was 25 million from over 1,300 small investors. That was, that was the amount. But yeah, so, and, and even in the comments of my blog where I'm writing about the battery, people are like, this is just like AI or whatever.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  So, but it isn't. I mean, I think AI- It's different because they actually have a product. They are, I mean, a company overhyping their product. That's kind of baseline.

• 24:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  But there's, there's hype and then there's fraud, right?

• 24:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  And so that's what like the FTC exists for, saying, oh, you can't say that. That's not true. That's not just misleading.

• 24:12Speaker 05

  Right.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  It's actually fraud.

• 24:13Speaker 05

  Right.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  So that's what, you know, those kind of regulatory agencies exist for, though I think they give.

• 24:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  It's really easy just to skirt regulations by just using a little bit of hyperbole or being squirrely about how you state things.

• 24:27Speaker 05

  Or object in large to show texture on cereal. That's a.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, right. Some, some settling may occur during shipment. Yeah, so the, you know.

• 24:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  They have lawyers that pore over their marketing to make sure that they're not.

• 24:40Speaker 05

  Right.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  Stepping over this fuzzy line, you know, from hyping to, to marketing to, to fraud. Investing is a different beast because, you know, lying to investors to get them to give you money is a different level of fraud and that usually, um, it's easier. I'd say that's what Holmes got it, got dinged for, not for selling a fraudulent product to consumers, but for, for lying to investors. So they. I wrote at the time, oh, so it seems like investors are more important than consumers buying fraudulent healthcare products. I got you.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Now with AI, you know, it's one thing to say, this is, we have a product, this is what it can do, this is what we hope it's going to do in the future. That's kind of, you can get away with that, right?

• 25:21Speaker 05

  Right.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Whether you think it's overhyped or not, I don't think anyone's going to be sued for fraud for, for saying that.

• 25:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  As long as it's like a hope and not a promise. We're not saying you have it now when you don't.

• 25:30Speaker 05

  Or like, we've done some demos that suggest this could be possible. And I would guess that's kind of true for the battery thing and the Elizabeth Holmes thing is that like, because you're investing, unlike AI where maybe you're deciding to purchase a license or something, but if you're investing, presumably the product doesn't exist. So you're being, you're investing on how credible Elizabeth Holmes or these battery people are in saying, we can make this happen, right?

• 25:53Speaker 02

  But in both cases, in both cases, that's not what they did. So in Holmes, she, like, her company was getting blood from patients, claiming that her new technology was running the lab tests.

• 26:08Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  When she, the blood was being sent down to a regular lab. Right, so that was the incident.

• 26:14Speaker 04

  After it was diluted, because there was some small amounts, they had to actually dilute it to make enough to be tested.

• 26:19Speaker 05

  Oh my.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  They were adding water to it.

• 26:21Jay Novella?

  She got caught drinking blood, did you guys know that?

• 26:23Speaker 04

  Mmm, tamboos.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Right, so if you're doing one thing while claiming you're doing another, so this is pretty much the exact analogy, it's like, this is a solid-state battery when it's just a lithium, it's the old technology, and you're just putting a new package on it and claiming it's a new technology when it isn't.

• 26:40Speaker 05

  Right.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  So, you're just pretty much-

• 26:42Speaker 05

  Absolutely lying.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just straight-up lying.

• 26:45Speaker 05

  Right.

• 26:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're not UFOs anymore, they're UAPs or whatever.

• 26:48Speaker 05

  Which I didn't know until yesterday, and I was somewhat, Steve, you and Ian were talking about UAPs, and I thought it was the United Auto Parts or something like that.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 26:57Speaker 05

  Totally different. So shout-out to their new branding, because I didn't know what they were talking about.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  But I also want to take the opportunity to remind people that we called this exactly correct, and there's a reason for that, because when you apply a reasonable skeptical filter, the red flags of fraud were all there, and they, it's not just a bias, they are highly predictive, right? So the next time all those same red flags are there, there's a good chance that that's fraudulent too. That's the lesson people need to learn, like, we actually are, there's a closed feedback loop, right? If we were wrong about this, they go, maybe we need to modify the way we evaluate new technology, but when you're right over and over and over again, that kind of reinforces the skeptical approach that you're taking. And we pretty much hit this one on the head, you know?

• 27:42Speaker 05

  Well done.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  All right, Jay, tell us about the fungal superhighway.

• 27:48Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I call this the fungus among us, because as you will soon learn, that this is everywhere. Yeah, we have researchers that are from an international team led by an organization called SPUN, this is the Society for Protection of Underground Networks, and who would have thought that there was a society that needs to be there to protect underground networks, right? And they also have collaborators, including AMOLF, A-M-O-L-F, this is in the Netherlands, and the University of Sheffield. What they ended up doing was they produced the first global estimate of the physical size of our buscular mycorrhizal?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Okay, our buscular mycorrhizal.

• 28:30Jay Novella?

  Microrhizal, buscular microrhizal fungal networks in topsoil. And thank God, I think they call these the AM, you know, it's like the AM network. So from here on out, I will refer to what Steve just said as the AM net. Thank you. So these are microscopic fungal threads, right? They're also called hyphae and they live around and inside plant roots. And I did talk about these not too long ago, just because we found out more information about exactly what they're doing. Now, just so everyone knows, these, these really don't exist like visible mushrooms, right? Most of their activity happens as these microscopic threads that are found in the soil, particularly where roots, where roots are. And they connect not only with the plant roots, but they're also making it so the plants

• 29:15Jay Novella?

  have a much larger capacity to pull nutrients and water to themselves. And they also have an effect on the carbon that ends up in the soil and in the ecosystem. And scientists, when they did this study, what they were saying is that the climate and conservation planning typically focuses on what we can see above ground. But a huge part that they found in the study is that, you know, plant health is coming from soil function, nutrient cycling, you know, carbon movement. It's all happening underground. And the study tries to make that hidden fungal infrastructure somehow measurable so it can be included in climate models and for future conservation planning.

• 29:57Jay Novella?

  This is important stuff, you know, and this happens in the human body all the time where we find something, you know, some, some type of system that we didn't know was there previously and it opens up a lot of potential to do good. But of course it comes with, you know, thousands of questions that have to be answered as well. And then that's, that's basically where we're at with this.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Jay, I was really interested in the function of these fungal networks as a carbon sink, because all the, the articles about it were very unsatisfying, you know, and how they explain it. Saying that it absorbs like, you know, three billion tons of carbon a year doesn't tell us really much because you need to know how much it's excreting too, right? This is, I'm sure it's in a steady state. So I don't know if you did, if you did a deep dive on that.

• 30:44Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, some of it, some of the carbon obviously can, can re-enter the atmosphere, can get back out. But without this network being a part of the carbon sequestration, you know, without it, it, what I found was that it would, there would be significantly less carbon being, being managed that way and being put, put into the ground.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I found out, it took me a while, but I found out how much. The estimate, the estimate is 300 billion tons, metric tons. So that-

• 31:13Jay Novella?

  Or is it called megatons?

• 31:15Speaker 02

  No, it's gigatons. It's 300 gigatons. Yeah, gigatons, megatons. 300 gigatons.

• 31:18Jay Novella?

  This is, but that is what the network currently is holding.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  That's what it's holding. It's the whole thing. That's what it's holding.

• 31:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah, which is an incredible amount.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  With about three gigatons or three billion tons coming and going every year. So, but the, the important number is how much is in there, right? Because that's the amount of carbon that's being sequestered from the atmosphere. The other angle to this is that even, so yes, there's a sort of this carbon flux, right? This flow of carbon through this huge sequester, but that also is a conduit for carbon to get into other parts of the soil and into other plants. And it seemed, the other thing I found out was that this is probably the main reason why agriculture, especially industrial agriculture, has a carbon footprint. Do you ever think about that? Like, how does growing stuff add carbon

• 32:10Speaker 02

  to the atmosphere? And we just, we, this question just came up recently. I can't remember who was asking it, but it's like, yeah, it's a bit part of just the industry itself. You're shipping stuff around. But part of it is that industrial agriculture interrupts this fungal network. And therefore, the carbon that's sequestered in this fungal network, part of that gets released into the atmosphere from things like plowing fields, you know?

• 32:33Jay Novella?

  Yeah, when they turn over the soil, they're essentially killing the development of this network.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Right. So that's the biggest part, I think, of the carbon footprint of industrial agriculture, which is why you could do things under the rubric of regenerative agriculture, which I think is a little problematic. But basically, if you do no-till farming and you have a diverse cover crops, then that can retain a lot more of the fungus in the soil, even if you're farming it.

• 33:01Jay Novella?

  And the cool thing to think, though, is like this, you know, it seems surreal that this is like a system that can have massive connections over huge areas of land, right? Because it's, you know, think about like the spider webs growing out into the soil and like if the plants are near each other, they're going to connect.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:21Jay Novella?

  And the researchers estimated, this is like one of those numbers that it means nothing to the average person, that 110 quadrillion kilometers of living fungal hyphae are in the global topsoils. And to be specific about that, let me see, the estimate says it refers to the top 15 centimeters of soil, right? So that's not deep and not every soil, of course, on Earth can handle that amount or whatever, or different types of soil definitely don't have it, right? Because they're maybe too acidic or whatever. To put that into perspective, the distance from the Earth to the Sun is about 150 million kilometers. So 110 quadrillion kilometers is about 735 million times the Earth-Sun distance.

• 34:05Jay Novella?

  They also said it's 11,600 light-years of distance. It's fantastically, you know, huge. I was interested to try to find out how much biomass that is, and I could not find any numbers on that. But, you know, like Steve said, you know, with the amount of carbon that that network can pull in, this thing has to become a part of our calculations with global warming. It has to be factored in because it's a process that's happening and it's happening on such a global scale that we can't, you know, we can't move forward now that we know about it and not find ways to find the numbers to factor it into our planning. Another cool thing was that these fungi or fungi, right Bob?

• 34:48Speaker 02

  I've heard both, hard to say.

• 34:50Jay Novella?

  They partner with roughly 70% of all plant species. And the exchange is that the plants make sugars and other carbon compounds through photosynthesis. So the fungi get some of that carbon and in return, they help the plants access the nutrition that they need. So the plants are much more healthy because of this. And you know, you could also draw a parallel here, as hokey as this sounds, but it's kind of like Avatar. You know, with that network that existed in that movie, you think like the planet is, you know, it has a consciousness of some kind or whatever. You know, and I think that's probably where Cameron got his idea because you know, that network is there. You know, we've known about it, we just don't know a ton of details about it to this point.

• 35:33Jay Novella?

  Cause there's just so much more ahead of us to learn about it. And there are a major part of the ecosystems that are out there and they're a big player in this whole thing. And I was curious to know like, what would it be like if this didn't exist? Like what would be the major differences that we'd see out there? But you know, it's a massive part of the root structure, supports the soil. And again, it helps move carbon underground. And the study estimates that, you know, this, we can't mess with this because we need it. We absolutely need this to be happening. And just think, you know, Steve was saying, you know, as we move into, you know, we're going to 8 billion people. And I was reading a news article today about having 10 billion people on the planet.

• 36:15Jay Novella?

  And what impact that will have on the amount of land that we have to use and the farming. And again, we're using most of the arable land that there is out there. Like there isn't like all of these swaths of land that we, that we haven't explored yet that we could use for farming. Like it's either going to be living space, farming, or unfarmable areas. So we need, it scares me to think we're going to be relying in the future, not on more, more land for farming, but better farming practices. And we got to stick to that because if we start cutting into forests and start killing these networks that are sequestering carbon, that we could be, make things worse, you know?

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. I mean, if, you know, that, that. Total biomass here is the equivalent of 10 years of carbon that we're releasing into the atmosphere.

• 37:01Jay Novella?

  They also said that previously, they thought that grasslands didn't really factor in much into carbon, sequestering carbon, but they found out that they hold about 40% of this fungal infrastructure. Right? The grasslands are actually important because they were focusing on forests and things like that, but they just looked over grasslands and they realized, wow, we can't ignore grasslands either because they are a part of this.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I wonder how much of an opportunity there is here as well. Like, how much have we already degraded this microcosm network? And is there space to regenerate it and sequester more carbon than we are right now?

• 37:39Jay Novella?

  The researchers said that, you know, conservation efforts have been very surface level oriented. You know, like protect forests and count animals and monitor carbon there. But they, you know, once we start drawing the maps of these networks and get a real understanding of where the densities are, you know, they found that there's a huge amount of plants functioning, it's happening underground. You know, you think, oh, the plant grows above ground, just gets a couple of things from the soil and everything we care about is above ground, but that is completely wrong. And this is a pretty big perspective change, I think, moving forward.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Thank you, Jay. Andrea?

• 38:16Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Tell us how YouTube can suck my brain out.

• 38:20Speaker 05

  I would love to tell you. We're, in fact, we're going to demonstrate it live and just suck Steve's brain out via YouTube. As ever, I'm coming with a cheerful political science topic. It is hot off the presses. So this is a paper, and at least in the political science world, a recent paper could be something that came out anywhere between now and 18 months ago. But this came out on the 10th of June, so one week ago, and it came out in the journal Political Communication. It's currently not behind a paywall, so go read it. And it is called Evaluating Echo Chambers, Rabbit Holes, and Radicalization Pathways on YouTube. And it's a study that attempts to finally untangle the relationship between

• 39:03Speaker 05

  Understanding whether it's YouTube that draws people down into radicalization pathways, or is it users are selecting among videos and taking themselves down and YouTube is just sort of the more neutral, well, if they like this, they like that. And until now, we didn't really have a method that could meaningfully help us disentangle this endogeneity. This are people watching, ending up watching radical videos on YouTube because they are open to or interested in radical views, or because YouTube is recommending radical views. And most research would simply track things like watch time or videos watched and show that they become more radical, but it's not necessarily clear how or who's driving it,

• 39:45Speaker 05

  the person, the algorithm, or some combination. So I should say before we go much further that there are six authors on this paper. Four of them are former colleagues of mine at NYU. I didn't work terribly, terribly closely with them. I certainly didn't work with them on this paper, but one was a TA in a course of mine many, many years ago, and the other, Steve, you and I, Joshua Tucker, we've had him on the show on political reality to talk about misinformation.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Political reality, what's that?

• 40:13Speaker 05

  Oh, my God. I'm so glad you asked. It's if you like skepticism and you want to get your head around the misery of politics, you're going to love political reality, where we basically talk about studies a lot like this one and some of the other kind of big topics you see in the news from a skeptical perspective. But so this paper, so I say all of that just to say that somewhat of a bias alert in that I know some of the authors, but I didn't know anything about the paper. And here's, here's, here's what they do, and then I'm going to tell you what they find. So I want to be clear that this is specifically just YouTube. The data comes from YouTube, the experiments they ran, the audit studies, the surveys, all the methods are specific to YouTube. However, their hope, and I share their hope, the overall method of sort of disentangling

• 40:55Speaker 05

  user preferences and user ideology from the way the algorithm works is something that could be mapped to other algorithms in the future. And one of the kind of key things that I think is also important here is that they do something that I love when political scientists do, which is they take concepts that we all talk about. Whether in the news, among our friends, online, or we just sort of take them for granted and get crystal clear about what those concepts are and how they might relate to each other to generate the kind of radicalization that many of us think about and worry about and observe among users of social media. So first, I want to ask you guys, what is your, they have three terms they define. The first one is an echo chamber, and this is something we use all the time. What's an echo chamber?

• 41:40Speaker 02

  So I would define it as an information space. Usually now, we're referring to it as an online community that is curated for people who believe the same thing. Usually, people who, like if you're an anti-vaxxer, you get attracted to it. If you go there and you're not an anti-vaxxer, you get ejected from the community. So there's some kind of purifying filter. So you're only hearing opinions, you know, one perspective or one set of opinions.

• 42:10Speaker 04

  It reinforces one kind of narrative over and over again.

• 42:12Speaker 05

  Right, right, right. So you both are capturing this, I mean, you're capturing the spirit of it for sure. This particular study, and I want to emphasize that this is really not an area that people have studied a ton in this way. They are building from a 2022 definition, which has sort of been kind of the working definition of an echo chamber in terms of quantifying echo chambers. They treat it, so it's not perfect, it's not the only way to look at it, but Steve, you're very, very close, but they treat it as a static chamber for now. And that's going to be important as we go into the study. So what they describe it, and this is a quote from this 2022 paper, is it's a bounded enclosed media space. And you're right, Steve, that most of the time

• 42:52Speaker 05

  we think about it online. It's a bounded enclosed media space that has the potential to both, and George, this is where you're getting at, has the potential to both magnify the messages delivered within it and insulate it from rebuttal. So it's this idea that there's this kind of waiting lake out there on the internet. And of course, it's dynamic in real life and it evolves over time. But for, you know, think of a snapshot of a few months. You could, you could almost imagine drawing a boundary around a bunch of YouTube videos, or maybe a growing boundary, because new YouTube videos are uploaded all the time, but a kind of entity out there that's like, okay, everything in here is going to be content that magnifies a particular view and insulates or minimizes.

• 43:35Speaker 05

  Opposing views. They overall operationalize it, and Steve, you and I have talked at length as well about operationalizing concepts. So they go on the internet and they find YouTube videos and they compare that to the ideology of an individual. So it's a distribution of videos for a given user, like so when I go into YouTube, that is ideologically homogeneous to me and centered on my own ideology. So I might have an echo chamber out there. If I go into YouTube, I could find a spot where there's this kind of ecosystem of videos that agree with my political views. Now, you hopefully are all asking, how are they figuring out the ideology of YouTube videos and how are they figuring out the ideology of the users? We'll get to that. But first, I want to ask you guys to now define a rabbit

• 44:18Speaker 05

  hole. And this on the internet as opposed to rabbits digging through the top soil that Jay was describing. Yes.

• 44:24Speaker 04

  I mean, to me, it would be, it's something that further, it's almost like a chain, a setup of chain links that further and further expand upon some kind of, again, data point or perspective or viewpoint.

• 44:42Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 44:43Speaker 04

  That expands and takes you into a path that might have been, into a place that might have been unexpected and lands you in someplace that might have been unexpected from where you first entered the hole.

• 44:55Bob Novella?

  Like a domino of discovery, you know?

• 44:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 44:58Bob Novella?

  Where you're just going from one is like, seems to inevitably lead to the next and the next and the next, deeper and deeper.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  But there's, but there's slight variations that can lead you away from where you initially started.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  I would add, what I was gonna say, I think one of the key features I think of as a rabbit hole, it's not just leading you to other things, it's leading you to more and more radical things on sort of the same line. So you might think, oh, I'm a little curious about Flat Earth, or you go, you watch a video on that, you get progressively more radical videos, and that could maybe lead you to QAnon and, or whatever.

• 45:29Speaker 05

  Right.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  So I think.

• 45:30Bob Novella?

  I don't know. I disagree. I've gone down many rabbit holes of science, like particle physics and.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Well, I think that we're using that differently. I think we're using the metaphor to mean. Doing a deep dive on something, but I think in this context, it's increasing radicalization.

• 45:48Speaker 05

  So I love that you all brought these perspectives on because actually, the way that they think about this is more similar to the George and Bob version of rabbit holes. And Steve, your description is something that comes out as a third step of radicalization. And they may impact, Bob, to your point, they make exactly the point that a rabbit hole on the internet needn't necessarily draw you into anything political. I personally went on a rabbit hole of cake decorating not long ago, and I have no regrets about that. Messy Baker on YouTube, very fun. But you can also imagine being in a rabbit hole of a political topic that is still ideologically

• 46:32Speaker 05

  neutral. And they actually, and this is important, the reason we're interested in this, Steve, is because we care about radicalization as an end goal. So it's not to say that we are going to go out there and try to measure these other rabbit holes, but their question is kind of like, how does the idea of a rabbit hole intersect with an echo chamber intersect with user choices to lead to radicalization? So they start from the perspective that rabbit holes could be neutral, and they actually give a description where they say, okay, you could imagine someone who starts very non-political and is looking up a video about like a video game that they played, and that could be politically neutral. The next recommended videos, and this is hypothetical, the next recommended videos could be an interview with the creators of the game. And one of the

• 47:13Speaker 05

  things they mentioned could be the importance of having a strong female lead character in the game. That could mean that the next recommended videos that are sort of similar to those, again, independent of the user's actual beliefs. So those might be left-leaning if they start having conversations about a female lead. And again, we're oversimplifying, and we're keeping politics to just a left-right continuum. But okay, so you watch this video, they say something about the importance of a female lead. Some of the recommended videos could be something that are about anti-woke game design and why should we be thinking about that sort of thing? We're here for games, we're not here for social justice warriors. So that could be a right-leaning video. And then you could end up with a video, the next recommended video is a video of a poning views because you're all in a video game like creator rabbit hole and you could

• 47:56Speaker 05

  conceivably, in principle, get views from different sides. Like you could end up in an immigration rabbit hole that has videos from the left and the right. In principle, this is the definition they're working from. In practice, the question is, does that happen or do you get drawn immediately, Steve, as you're describing, into something that is necessarily political unless you're really looking at baking cakes? And I don't know, that could probably get me to trad wives, could get me to some rabbit hole, conservative rabbit holes as well. But, okay, the other thing I want to say, George, you nailed it in that it's this, rabbit holes are very dynamic and you talked about it in terms of, you know, you kind of see one thing, it leads you to another thing and they specifically, they build on also from existing work where they emphasize it's an initial incidental experience.

• 48:40Speaker 05

  Like you kind of just happen upon some random video and then you end up being drawn into a niche topic. And again, that topic could be political or not. And then they're looking for evidence that you're going down what they call a nonlinear descent, which is kind of gets to Steve and George, both of what you're saying, which is you sort of, it starts to pile on, right? You kind of gather steam, gather momentum, get more and more specifics and the next thing you know, you're only seeing bakers on YouTube hypothetically. All right. Third term here, and this, Steve, is what you're getting at, is the idea of radicalization and specifically they're interested in radicalization pathways. And so when they talk about radicalization pathways, this is, you know, actually specific political radicalization.

• 49:22Speaker 05

  So getting to extreme political views, we're talking conspiracy, QAnon, super hateful, far-left, far-right, far-whatever, right? This is what they propose, and these are the hypotheses that they test, that from a combination of an echo chamber and a rabbit hole, you could enter what they describe as a radicalization pathway. So that is to say that if you're on the internet, you're looking at whatever. Whatever videos you're looking at, Star Wars, cake baking, what have you, you could end up in a rabbit hole. But if that rabbit hole ends up bringing you to a set of videos that are in this lake of the echo chamber, that could be one pathway by which a user gets radicalized. Now, I should also say, I'm not going to get too in the weeds on their methods,

• 50:04Speaker 05

  but I should say that one of the reasons this work is so important, and Joshua Tucker has spoken about this at length publicly, is that these algorithms and companies like YouTube and TikTok and X and Instagram and all of them, their algorithms are proprietary. So researchers don't know how they work. So we're kind of dealing with this unknown monster. And in a lot of cases, the engineers inside these companies, you know, the engineers at Meta or whatever, don't know how these algorithms work because it's a bunch of algorithms all interacting with each other. And, and, and, and we can't, you know, no, no individual person can be like, yeah, this will always recommend that video, will always recommend that video. So this is them trying to kind of back out the way that these algorithms work.

• 50:43Speaker 04

  Can you just take a second, though, and just sort of like, like reflected how crazy that is?

• 50:48Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 50:49Speaker 04

  Like, the people that are making these algorithms are like, yeah, we're not really sure. I don't know. Your car, your car should work. We think your car's gonna work. We don't know why it works. And there's like fire and explosions that are happening. And there's like a fuel, but we're not really sure what, I mean, that's madness.

• 51:05Speaker 05

  And what we do know, we're not telling you because it's our private, you know, just like we don't know the recipe for Coke or Pepsi. We don't know how this is. So even though they don't know fully, they also aren't telling us. And so the researchers, so.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  But it's also, it's like, I've just to extend that analogy a little bit. It's like, you know, asking Coke, is there actual cocaine in your problem? Like, we don't really know.

• 51:24Speaker 04

  We're not, there might be.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  It's proprietary.

• 51:28Speaker 04

  And there might eventually be, like down the road, there might be, there might be now. We don't think there is now, but maybe down the road. Yeah, there might be some Coke, some cocaine in there, but we're not sure. Enjoy.

• 51:37Speaker 05

  Right.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Right, because the accusation is that the algorithm, the addictive radicalization feature of those algorithms, again, is a feature, not a bug. It's deliberate. It's not incidental.

• 51:50Speaker 05

  Right. And it's, you know, one of the things that, that, so Joshua Tucker and one of the other authors head this, the Center for Social Media and AI and Politics Research. It's a very long acronym. At this point, I'll, I'll send you, Steve, the link to put in the show notes. And one of their big talking points in terms of how can we do quantitative, you know, data science, advanced research on what's going on with these algorithms is we need these companies to partner with us. And so even if, say, you're YouTube and you're not willing to share your algorithm publicly, could you imagine an arrangement where you share some of it privately and it's, it's, you know, in the same way that you might get, and Steve, you'll know better about this than I do, you might get around some kind of HIPAA sort of data in order to do some really important research. And then obviously you keep it as confidential as possible. And so they've been very, you

• 52:35Speaker 05

  know, outspoken about the need for at least let the researchers in, because we don't know what this is doing to us. And we're out here having to basically, what they did, which is a very thoughtful and detailed experiment, but it's also a ton of effort and not at all easy to do. And it's still just a limited experiment to try to back out what these things are doing. So, so just to kind of summarize what, what they're looking for here. And, and Steve, you raise a really good point about the attention piece. So they're not really looking at that, which is, you know, in real life, you probably are going to want to take that into account. But what they're looking for specifically with their study is they're saying, okay, if we think social media is radicalizing people, we want to identify the pathways. And again, we want to understand if it's

• 53:18Speaker 05

  user driven, algorithm driven, or both. So the thing they're looking for is this radicalization pathway, which they are defining as a sequence of ideological echo chambers, whose bias becomes more extreme and whose homogeneity increases at each step in a traversal of YouTube videos. So that's where you're combining the kind of dynamic flowing, one to the next, to the next of the rabbit hole with this kind of homophily homogeneity of the echo chambers. And so, how do you look for that on the internet? Well, in the sake of time, I'm not going to go through all the experiments. But I will say that basically what they do is a bunch of different types of experiments. And again, none of these are perfect and they're pretty limited, frankly, because we don't have

• 54:03Speaker 05

  access to the full algorithm, where they do things called an audit study, or they do something called a sock puppet study. So there's a bunch of different ones. And a sock puppet study is where you build an account, just like a brand new account with no history, no viewer history, and you sit it in front of videos and see what's recommended. And so, one of the experiments they did is they basically said, okay, we're going to take a whole bunch of participants, we're going to create neutral, you know, no browser history, no nothing results, and then we're going to create a toy little experiment playground where they start with this, one of the same 24 videos. And then they're going to click on that video, and then we're going to see what YouTube gives them. And for some of the people in the experiment, and they did a bunch of different versions of this, but the gist of it is, it's some people in the experiment, they said, okay,

• 54:47Speaker 05

  start with these 24. Everyone's going to start with the same 24 videos to begin. Click on whatever you want. And that's where the attention, the interest, like just the user, you're on YouTube, click, click, click, click, click, see where it goes. But the others, they said, okay, because we want to disentangle user choice from what's actually kind of powering the algorithm, we're going to give you different rules to try. So sometimes it'll say, always click on the second video, or always click on the video with more odd numbers, or whatever sort of rule, right? So that that way, you're removing the user choice, and you're just seeing what the algorithm gives you if you have the same decision. And again, probably as you're listening to this, you're thinking now, and I had this as I read it, you're like, well, that's not how we interact on YouTube. We interact on YouTube in this interactive way.

• 55:31Speaker 05

  But the challenge is this indogeneity, where it's sort of like a media and politics problem, like, am I watching Fox News because I'm conservative, or am I conservative because I'm watching Fox News? This study is saying, what if we just put Fox News in front of people and see what's going on? Or what if we put a bunch of TV channels in front of other people, and we just let them click on the second one that's recommended, you know, or whatever? So, okay, so I'm going to jump to the results. Happy to talk in detail about more methods, because it's all super interesting and very clever. Imperfect, it's just one experiment, there's a lot more research to do. Here are some findings, okay? I have four big findings for you. One. YouTube users, seems like, across all these studies,

• 56:11Speaker 05

  it seems like YouTube users are in what they describe as mild ideological echo chambers, but that those echo chambers seem to be driven by user behavior. Again, in the way they've split this out, it does look like the interaction of the user with the algorithm is the key generator here. There are kind of these echo chambers where it's like a bunch of videos with ideological similarity are kind of hanging out and in different spots and you're more likely to find one versus the other. But they say it's actually pretty mild and ending up in an echo chamber seems to be human-driven. Okay? Number two, generally, and this will come as a surprise to no one, recommendation algorithms

• 56:51Speaker 05

  prioritize content similar to what the user is already watching, and it does produce content rabbit holes. So we have mild ecological, I'm sorry, mild ideological echo chambers, but genuine evidence of content rabbit holes. But again, this could be rabbit holes about like, you know, locksmiths or lawyers or whatever niche thing you happen to be looking up. They find there is no evidence in their study of radicalization pathways where users on their own, without user input, that the, just the pathway in the algorithm on its own, there is no evidence of radicalization pathways where users are driven into increasingly extreme content rabbit holes.

• 57:34Speaker 05

  So it's without user interaction, it doesn't seem like there's something in the algorithm pushing people to ideologically extreme content rabbit holes. Finally, instead, the biggest thing they see as far as where politics comes in, is that they say that YouTube pushes all users regardless of their initial ideology, and they measure the ideology of the various people in their study, or they chose a certain mix of people from different ideologies. So regardless of your ideology, YouTube pushes all users toward moderately conservative content. And an increasingly narrow range of ideological content, the longer they follow YouTube's algorithms.

• 58:15Speaker 05

  So while it's the case that, you know, the echo chambers themselves are sort of mild, content rabbit holes are out there, but they could be about everything, you know, fixing your sink, or it could be about politics. There's no existing underlying radicalization pathway built in, but there is a general kind of nudge towards conservative content. And once a user starts clicking into it, then ideological content, the rabbit hole does pick up and you can end up down there. But it's the users, you know, it's, it's, it's kind of answering the question or starting to answer the question of like, the user kind of has to have an interest in the extreme content in order for the, for YouTube to push it. And then once the user indicates interest, then you could kind of more quickly end up

• 59:00Speaker 05

  in that rabbit hole just as quickly as I end up in a cake decorating rabbit hole. But I also thought it was interesting that there is a general push towards moderately conservative content. Part of that might be because I believe, and I could be wrong, but I believe the evidence is suggesting that in terms of political content, there is more conservative than liberal content on YouTube right now. So that could simply be a reflection of that. But that, that's where we, we stand and, and I'm curious what you guys think. I love these sorts of studies that say, hey, here's something we all kind of either take for granted, or we argue about, or we sort of assume is true. Could we actually nail this down? And I think it's a beautiful example of really using scientific methods to start to tease out some of these serious issues, particularly in this case, this endogeneity between user

• 59:45Speaker 05

  choices and algorithm recommendations.

• 59:47Speaker 04

  No, I'm curious like how it's a, it's a meat driven machine, right? So like, how, how much does the human animal?

• 59:55Speaker 05

  Right.

• 59:55Speaker 04

  You know, you have these four sort of pathways that one can go down.

• 59:59Speaker 05

  Right.

• 59:59Speaker 04

  I mean, is, is every human going to have this inclination to go down towards that sort of rabbit hole that reinforces the thing that they believe already? Or are there different kinds of curiosities that, because I, I wouldn't have been surprised if you had said it made no difference, like whether you did a random thing or whether you actually chose. Something it was gonna radicalize you like that wouldn't have surprised me.

• 1:00:20Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:00:20Speaker 04

  But to know that there is a is a bit of a neutrality that's involved there apart from the general, you know, sort of conservative bias that it's got to be the human, the human aspect of it then is what's really driving it, which is like a whole other problem.

• 1:00:32Speaker 05

  Right. So, so, so George, you're you're hitting the nail on the head in terms of like, what does this mean for what we do about what we see in the world that

• 1:00:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Speaker 05

  concerning to a lot of us around political radicalization and extreme and harmful views is exactly this is, you know, the debate is often, do we intervene with the algorithms? Do we try to regulate the algorithm? And I think one, one should, and there's plenty of other reasons to to consider a thoughtful regulation in addition to political extremism. But there's also the case that, yeah, it does, from this evidence, it does say that like a lot of this, the intervention should be at the user level, like if you

• 1:01:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:01:11Speaker 05

  And this is something that I've seen these, these particular researchers talk about before. And this is the first time they've really kind of tried to answer it, which is like, is it that the pathways are there if you want to go down the pathways? It's sort of like, this is a bad example or bad comparison, but it's sort of like, if you want to try drugs and you live in a big city, you can probably find it. And then, once you find it, it's probably that much easier to find your next hit and your next hit and your next hit. I feel like this seems to be what they're finding as far as the algorithm, that it's like, the algorithm is like neutral ish, bends towards conservative. Yes, there are these ideological echo chambers, but it's not a given that anyone who goes into here is going to end up somewhere extreme. And I would imagine that many people, most people do not end up in these extreme ideological echo

• 1:01:55Speaker 05

  chambers. I like to think that my algorithm is not an ideological echo chambers, but I also don't consume political news. So it's, it is very much like there's sort of a tipping point, but it's, it does suggest the intervention is on the user side of things. And I have I have inspected other data on like, you know, where does, where does like racial bias come from? Racism, sexism? What are some things you can do to curb that sort of behavior? And, and some of the ways they track that are, are you consuming racist content? And it is the case that because these algorithms do give you more of what you're already watching, that if you're already interested in racist content, you're gonna get fed more racist content. But if you're not interested in racist content, there's nothing in here that suggests you're gonna get nudged towards it until you're,

• 1:02:38Speaker 05

  because otherwise, we would all be radicalized if you kind of think about it at this extreme.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  So I have to say, that's pretty much what I figured.

• 1:02:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  I didn't think there was, you know, like, yeah, that we're gonna only offer up radicalizing videos.

• 1:02:50Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  Of course, it's psychological. So I think a better analogy here is, is like a slot machine at a casino. The slot machine is not doing anything active to make you gamble more, but it is calibrated to human psychology to maximize gambling.

• 1:03:08Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  They know exactly how to reinforce the behavior that they want.

• 1:03:13Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, you can't separate that from the human psychological component. So I think with the, with the YouTube and other online algorithms, I think, you know, they are optimizing your behavior, which is clicking, right? And your attention and eyes on and staying on their site. That, of course, is psychological, and it leads to rabbit holes and radicalization, etc.

• 1:03:38Speaker 05

  Yes. Well, and the other thing that, that is in what you just described, goes back to your earlier point about attention, which is really not something that's in this study. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a very narrow study in that sense, in that it's like a toy, kind of YouTube beginning, and you're following according to these rules and, and things like that. But if you, so, so there's sort of another ingredient where it's like, there's the user making the choices, there's the algorithm serving up videos. But there's also the people who make the videos and decide on the thumbnails and the titles. And, and that's sort of maybe the, the slot machine being engineered to, to catch your attention is like, it could be the case, and they, they did not do this analysis. It's outside, you know, another study should, is, is like, maybe the words in particular ID

• 1:04:18Speaker 05

  Theologically extreme corners or echo chambers are more effectively calibrated titles of videos and thumbnails like you've got to see this, you won't believe who did that. Like you're in danger for this reason. And we have a ton of other research from other social media platforms that shows that we're way more likely to click on, on videos or links or posts or, or whatever that invoke fear or anger. And so it could be that part of the reason that people who are kind of racist curious end up very quickly becoming extreme is because the, the people creating the videos are being very deliberate in, you know, campaigning for your attention. So that's another piece of it that, that really is left out of this study.

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's complicated. I mean, I also think there's analogies to be made for anything that you could argue has an addictive component to it. So like imagine, like for example, we don't want to market cigarettes to kids with colorful child luring packaging, right? That's, that's again, that's a sort of a psychological behavioral kind of approach. Imagine, unless I don't think this exists anywhere, but imagine if like slot machines, if that being actively played for, for a certain amount of time, 20 minutes or so, you know, a screamer comes and say, hey, you should, maybe you want to take a break. You've been at this for 20 minutes, you know?

• 1:05:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  That wouldn't be, you know, there's no reason for the casinos to do that unless they were regulated to do that. But you could make an argument for that kind of thing. Like when you provide a calibrated addiction machine that there's sort of a built in, even if you're not like forcing people to gamble or whatever, that it's sort of, it's sort of a emergent behavioral thing.

• 1:05:58Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  You can make an argument for saying that, you know, we need to protect people against that.

• 1:06:02Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:06:03Speaker 05

  And you're raising another really interesting and important point that, that I can't speak to in great detail because I'm not a lawyer, but this is the crux of a lot of the issues with these social media, social media platforms and even like the Google or search engines. And we're also seeing it with L L Ms is the fact that at least in the eyes of the law, the platform, so YouTube, Facebook, whatever, is not, is not considered liable or responsible for that. Content on it is probably one of the reasons we don't see more movement towards something.

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34Speaker 05

  Like you're describing, like, you know, you have to be 18 to go in the casino and someone's going to hopefully come in and tell you to, I mean, I guess no one will, but, uh, you know, interventions to, to make, make people not quite as susceptible. And so I think unfortunately the YouTube or the YouTube or X or whatever is going to say, well, it's not our fault. We, we just provide the platform. It's the, it's the content creators who are creating these things that people can't stop clicking on.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  But they're not just providing the content. It's not passive.

• 1:07:01Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  They're providing the algorithms as well.

• 1:07:04Speaker 05

  That also is going to prioritize things that, that people are, cause, cause you're going to also get recommended things that are, that are similar in topic or similar in ideology or similar in whatever. But you're also going to get recommended the sort of page rank type thing where you're going to get recommended the ones that have been watched the most. And so you're absolutely advantaging videos that probably have really extreme claims or, or fear mongering or anger mongering or something like that. And so it's.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  And I don't mind it. Like if I'm on YouTube, watching a skeptical video and then there's a bunch of other skeptical videos or scientific videos or, you know, it seems to know what I like pretty well.

• 1:07:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  I, I actually like that. It's like, oh, that's cool. You know, I would probably would not have actively found that myself.

• 1:07:43Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  What, what I would say is that I, I would prefer it and I think it might be better for humanity if the algorithms prioritized quality.

• 1:07:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  Over clickbait.

• 1:07:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  A little bit more, you know what I mean? Cause.

• 1:07:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  With so many interactions, subtle biases in the, in the priorities of the algorithm can have a huge effect on society and culture as we're seeing.

• 1:08:06Speaker 05

  I can also share anecdotally that I vastly prefer my boyfriend's YouTube algorithm than my own. So I watch YouTube on my phone, but we have his YouTube, cause he has YouTube premium or whatever, connected to our TV. So if I'm upstairs just watching TV, I'm, or watching YouTube on the TV, I'm watching his algorithm. And when we first set this up like a year ago, I was like, there's a lot of awesome stuff, like he gets like space content and tech stuff and keyboards and like all these cool things. Mine is like Taylor Swift news because once I made the mistake of Googling her and that's all I ever see. And so you're just like, oh, like even these recommendation algorithms, even in the most neutral sense, they really homogenize our views. And there's nothing more confusing than logging into someone else's social media and being like, what universe are you living in?

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  I know. I've had that experience too.

• 1:08:52Speaker 05

  And for Jordan, I mean, it's neutral, but it's like, it could be very dangerous.

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  That's why I think other things, like making the algorithm more transparent and giving you more control over it. Saying, I don't want to see this crap. I want to see this cool stuff, you know, whatever, rather than the algorithm deciding what I want to see. I mean, that's okay to have that in there too. Saying, oh, people who share your interests find this really interesting. That's, that sort of thing is okay, but I don't think we got the balance right.

• 1:09:20Speaker 05

  It's sort of like, one of the things I used to lament, I still lament it, but what stood out to me more when we first had the internet and you could go on websites and like buy a book or whatever, was I was like, oh, you're kind of missing the browsing experience, you know, the going to Blockbuster, going to the library, going to a bookstore, and looking around and just sort of, you know, you know, the sections, I'm going to go to the sci-fi, I'm going to go to this, but like, I'm going to kind of see a bunch of stuff at first. Instead, the algorithms are kind of like, you walk in a door, they show you three different books and you pick one, and then they say, here are 10 more books like that one. Here are 10 more like that one. So like, even if you don't want to be, and again, it could be a neutral rabbit hole politically, but it just, the algorithm is almost too cloying in that way. Again, not just from a political standpoint, but from like a consumption of art standpoint, or exposure to different types or genres

• 1:10:05Speaker 05

  or something like that. So it's, you know, if someone, I know that people are out there trying to work on, you know, alternatives to the toxic social media cesspools that we often find ourselves in, but I don't think any of them have really gotten any legs. But there have, are some out there that are like trying to kind of rethink this, where it's like, how can we expose you to more ideas? How can we help you have more control? I mean, these same researchers, one of their big talking points is that the minute, I forget which algorithm did it first, maybe it was, it was Facebook. The minute Facebook went from giving you updates based on like chronological updates, like whatever friend said the thing most recently that you, you would see that one. And then if someone else said something, you'd see that one. The minute they switched from that to the kind of like weighted what got the most attention.

• 1:10:48Speaker 05

  Like some researchers trace the beginning of the end to that switch, right? Like the minute you just separate from what your friends are doing to just talking about what's getting the most attention, because it's almost always going to be more toxic.

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you, Andrea.

• 1:11:02Speaker 05

  Cheerful. Yeah, thank you.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  All right, George, tell us about this Payam method, Payam, Payam. How do you pronounce that?

• 1:11:07Speaker 04

  Payam.

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  Payam. What's this all about?

• 1:11:10Speaker 04

  Oh, my goodness. Okay, so first off, you know, as a musician, I am one who believes wholeheartedly in the egalitarian nature of music. I think everyone on every level should do as much or as little music as they want to. If you want to pick up an instrument and play, you should do it. If you want to sing, you should do it. There is no right way to learn how to do music. There's no wrong way to learn how to do music. There are efficient ways to learn how to do music, and that's a separate issue. So I was very excited when 60 Minutes, this is past Sunday, was doing a story about this supposed new piano method that was developed by this guy named Payam Kastakode. And it's the Payam Piano Method. And he has claimed that he

• 1:11:55Speaker 04

  has redefined what piano methodology is, that it's a new system that radically resets and makes it way easier for children and adults and for anyone who wants to learn the piano to learn the piano in a brand new, super efficient way, which right away got my skeptical juices tingling. So it's like, okay. His whole thing, as he approaches it, he uses an alphanumeric notation. He has this thing of speak then read, meaning that, much like language, you don't learn to read language first, you learn to speak language first. And so he wants his students to play

• 1:12:37Speaker 04

  music first and then be able to notate it and read. He's all about student choice, so that you want students to do music and songs that they like, not some kind of predetermined repertoire. And he's all about emotional expression. So getting students to write music, getting students to perform music, to improvise, which is all great. It's all great. He emphasizes student-led learning, repertoire, varied method books, varied pieces, playing first, learning by rote, emphasizing fun and composition, creativity, improvisation, and it's all, and that's all fantastic. However, none of this is new.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Speaker 04

  Like, like, none of it is new. He, he is, he, or the method that's being developed by him. Like many things that are often get rich quick or, you know, lose weight fast. Oh, it's a brand new system and this is going to reinvent and it's effortless and it's very simple to do. And, uh, no. Well, within this 60 minute story, they started making, and that's one thing to just like be able to say, oh, this is my method, use it. But they started making claims and as soon as you start making claims and, and pointing towards evidence, that's when I think it's our job to kind of jump in and say, yeah, your claims are BS. One of the claims they made is, uh, first off, 80% of students quit piano after a year of studying to kind of make their case.

• 1:14:02Speaker 04

  There's no like national database of piano teachers that are sending information in like, when did your students hate working with you and when did they stop? That doesn't exist. So this is a made up statistic. It's like anecdotal and conjecture. It sounds right. 80% of students quit piano after a year. Like that sounds that could be a thing, but there's no way to really even tell that. They talk about how they're normally it takes 12 years to achieve, uh, like the equivalent of a black belt in piano, which they associated with this ABRSM, which is the Associated Board of the Royal School of Music Diploma, which is sort of a, a test and it, and it, that's a thing that exists. That's a legit thing.

• 1:14:45Speaker 04

  They say that normally it takes 12 years to get to that level, that black belt level. But their students can do it in four. 96% of their students can get to that high level of piano pedagogy in four years, which it made me wonder, where are all of these students then? If they're doing this in four years, you know, let's say you start playing piano or taking lessons at nine, 10, you should have 14, 15, 16 year olds that have these, you know, supposed 12 years of traditional piano knowledge behind them and they just sort of weren't there. It's like, there's none on their website. There was none in the 60 minute story. There should be just like covered in, in all of these kids having all this information.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  And you would think if they did exist, they would absolutely showcase it.

• 1:15:28Speaker 04

  That's the thing. That would be, that would be front and center.

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:31Speaker 04

  They claim that other piano methods, current piano methods are all stuck in the 1700s. In the same time as Mozart, you know, they come and they say piano teachers today teach exactly the same way they taught in Mozart's time, which is complete nonsense. You know, repertoire, methods, I mean, even the instrument itself is different than it was in the 1700s. They say, in the Pyeong method, we give students the choice of songs and traditional music lessons do not. That's also bunk. You go to any piano teacher, they will have books of video game music and popular songs

• 1:16:12Speaker 04

  and whatever the kids want to learn, they will have music for because to get a kid interested, you don't necessarily want them playing Mozart itudes. If they want to do, you know, let the theme to Legend of Zelda, they're all about that. So that's nonsense. They talk about how mentorship is only available in the Pyeong method. Nonsense. I mean, mentorship is like all, all teachers, all music teachers are interested in mentoring. They talk about custom curriculum based on activity, sorry, based on ability. Again, like it exists in every other teaching method. It's very, very strange. Specialized teacher access. They say, yes, we have specialized teacher access, but no, you only have one teacher in traditional methods, which again is nonsense.

• 1:16:56Speaker 04

  You always have teachers working with each other. So that like, that just all goes out the window. They continued through this story. They start getting into the details of the, the way they teach using this alphanumeric system, right? Where in essence, they assign numbers to your fingers so that your pinky is one, your second finger is two, three, four, five. And then you associate that to the keys on the piano and they literally write the numbers in dry erase marker on the piano. And he talks about how this is this new system. And it's like, Any, any piano book that you buy uses numbers and letters and some combination therein. This is not a new thing, you know?

• 1:17:35Speaker 04

  And it's not necessarily the best or most efficient way to do it because if you're drawing on a piano, like literally drawing, you're, you're not incentivizing the, the student to memorize that, you know, C is C and B is B and D is D because it's being drawn on there. And, and like a seven-year-old within a half hour can memorize the piano. Like that's just, that's like a given. So, so it's kind of nonsense, you know? Oh yeah. They also brought up this idea that their, their students are sweeping these piano competitions across the country so that they have, uh, there was one particular piano competition that had 300,000 entrants and they had sent 42 of these students and they all excelled well in this thing.

• 1:18:19Jay Novella?

  Is that not true?

• 1:18:21Speaker 04

  Well, it turns out it's not a piano pedagogy competition. It's a piano compositional competition, which is very different. So it's kids that are sending in songs they've written versus how well they play piano. And it wasn't just for piano compositions. It was also poetry and short stories and dance and art. And so, yeah, 300,000 kids did enter this, but only about 45,000 were for music entries. And again, not for playing piano, for composing. And it's great. It's a super, it's great, great, super cool thing. I would encourage a hundred percent for kids to send in stuff that they've written. And these particular PyEAM students did really well. But again, it wasn't in piano playing, it was in composing.

• 1:19:06Speaker 04

  So it's like, okay. And throughout the entire story, the PyEAM guy was kind of not giving the students credit for like the work that they've done. It was, he was sort of, it made it feel like it's all about his system that he's developed. It's so simple, like anyone can do it. Whereas these kids are obviously putting in a lot of work and doing the stuff you need to do to be able to get better slowly over time. And all of that's fine, you know? All of that is fine. If you want to have whatever system you want to use to teach and you think it's the best system, it's totally fine. But, once you start doing a little bit of deeper digging, it gets really interesting. Because this entire company, this Piem Piano Method, is essentially spreading out franchises across the country, right?

• 1:19:50Speaker 04

  It's trying to be the McDonald's of piano teaching. Which, again, could be an honorable thing, but here's the problem. You go to the website and see what are the requirements to teach in one of these dozens, if not hundreds, of future expanding piano laboratories. And guess what's not a requirement to be a piano teacher? To have fingers? Well, you're close. To be able to play the piano? You don't have, number one, you don't have to have any experience as a piano teacher, which is crazy. And number two, you don't have to know how to play the piano.

• 1:20:26Speaker 05

  No. So you're saying I can be a piano teacher, George?

• 1:20:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:20:30Speaker 05

  Alright.

• 1:20:30Speaker 04

  It's a preferred thing, but it's not a required thing, right? Fingers preferred. So you go, so you just start thinking like, well, wait a minute. And you realize, oh, okay, it's a hundred bucks for a 50-minute lesson, right? The teacher gets 21 of that, and the Piem School gets the rest. And they encourage students, and here it comes, they encourage students to eventually become teachers. And you realize, this is MLM, this is a multi-level marketing scam. This entire thing is building up a cheap labor loop, basically, that's gonna get students to get a very baseline level of understanding of knowledge of, I can count to five with

• 1:21:10Speaker 04

  these fingers, and then you can teach, and you can get your 21 bucks an hour as we take the other $79 from it. And that, to me, is like, abhorrent. And you realize, okay, well, why is this on 60 Minutes? They blew it.

• 1:21:26Jay Novella?

  Open.

• 1:21:27Speaker 05

  Well, that's the thing. Yeah.

• 1:21:28Speaker 04

  They blew, you would think, right? Maybe two years ago or five years ago, they would have blown it wide open. But no, this was an infomercial. This was a pure infomercial because apparently a new CEO was announced. The CEO is this guy Hadi Partovi, and he is the founder of code.org. And they've also got Mark Cuban now, and they've got the CEO of Uber involved as well. And they just want to make money. And so this was an ad 60 Minutes just ran an infomercial. They had no other piano teachers. They had no other piano pedagogy experts. They didn't present any other versions of what teaching is like. It was just like, oh, this is this brand new fantastic way. There's going to be schools

• 1:22:13Speaker 04

  available all over the country. Go sign up for it. Just and again, you can teach however you want to teach. But as soon as you start using students as your labor force, that to me is inexcusable.

• 1:22:26Jay Novella?

  That's terrible.

• 1:22:27Speaker 04

  So depressing.

• 1:22:28Jay Novella?

  I mean, you know, it's fine for companies to want to make money, you know, because lots of companies have great products that they give people want. And it's that's the world. But of course, you know, this whole model, it doesn't matter even if it worked. It's still an MLM. But it doesn't work, right? George, I mean, you were saying that, you know, there isn't anything here that is revolutionary in any way. It's the stuff that they've collected a group of different methods already that that people currently use.

• 1:22:55Speaker 04

  100%. And actually, there are some, if you were to look at some of the comments that were being made on YouTube and stuff, because there was a lot of YouTube's video responses from piano teachers jumped up. And they were saying like, they make, they make huge leaps in their pedagogy of going from that finger method numbering system to reading where they just skip over swaths and swaths of work you have to do to be able to relate the keyboard to the notational systems that are developed in Western music. So yeah, so again, it's great to encourage and you want kids to improvise and you want kids to just get start playing right away and play the stuff that they love. But this is nothing new. And it's going to lead to these, you know, this,

• 1:23:36Speaker 04

  this, the equivalent of a piano Starbucks. And it's just not, it's just not cool.

• 1:23:41Speaker 05

  George. Was there any evidence in the 60 Minutes episode that this was like a sponsored episode?

• 1:23:48Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:23:48Speaker 05

  Or a support, you know?

• 1:23:49Speaker 04

  And that's also the most depressing because like I said, a couple of years ago, 60 Minutes would have torn this apart.

• 1:23:54Speaker 05

  Well, I was depressed.

• 1:23:55Speaker 04

  Because it's so obvious on the top of it.

• 1:23:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was depressed even before you mentioned the 60 Minute things. And then now I'm just like, from a media perspective, that is so dangerous.

• 1:24:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:04Speaker 02

  Well, it sounds like they're making, you know, they made money as well. Like, maybe they got paid to put this up there.

• 1:24:10Speaker 04

  Oh, of course. I mean, I mean, you know that there's some, whether it's a direct, you know, direct payment or some, I mean, all these CEOs, you know, they all know each other. They're all doing whatever favors they're doing. You know that, you know, Paramount Plus has its interests and CBS has its interests. And, you know, so it's, yeah, you know, coincidentally, the, the story, the story rolls out on Sunday, and this week is when they're rolling out the, the big stores that they're going to try to get across the country for all these piano schools. So it's like, ugh, very distasteful.

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  Very distasteful. George, what do you think about the Suzuki method?

• 1:24:42Speaker 04

  Suzuki's great. Suzuki is, Suzuki is everything that this is kind of trying to be, but it has the incremental steps that can lead then to understanding musical notation. And Suzuki is never saying, hey, we'll do this quick for you, and it's easy. Suzuki's like, this is an investment over time, and you can kind of opt out whenever you want, but if you remain in, this is the path that you can go down, and you can really get some incredible instruction. So, yeah, Suzuki is, is a proven system that uses many of these same methods, but it's not like, oh, we can do this in a third of the time. It's like, no, music is, music is hard. Music is hard, but it's also, it's like, like many things.

• 1:25:26Speaker 04

  It's the easiest and most difficult thing to do.

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  And just quickly for the audience, my understanding is Suzuki is learning to play by ear first and then later reading music, right?

• 1:25:34Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yeah. In essence, it sort of gets the kids singing, like the Suzuki violin methods are, you, you learn very, very simple things, and you start playing right away, and then you relate it to, to notational things, which is, which is what you want to do. I mean, that's, you know, every, every student lesson and every method, you know, you're never going to sit a child down in, in front of a staff and say, this is middle C first. You're going to say, this is your instrument, blow in this end, hit this thing, pull this string, you know, that's the first thing you're going to do. So, yeah.

• 1:26:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. All right. Thank you, George. Bob, tell me about strength training and longevity.

• 1:26:11Bob Novella?

  If you insist.

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  I know you hate talking about, you know, this kind of stuff, exercise, longevity.

• 1:26:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, Steve, this is not of the time nor the place.

• 1:26:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:22Bob Novella?

  Hey, guys, a new study I came across analyzed the exercise data on a lot of people over a lot of years to compare the mortality of those who did resistance training and those who did not. So do weights really help you live longer? Or do they just help you open pickle jars and look, maybe look slightly better in a geeky science t-shirt? So let's see what they, what their conclusions were. This is from the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The main title is long-term resistance training will, with all-cause and cause-specific mortality. So this does, this was intriguing for me. One initially was because this seemed like a natural follow-up to the cardio study that I covered in episode 1090. It's not the same paper, but it's addressing that other

• 1:27:07Bob Novella?

  major pillar of exercise, resistance training, such as lifting weights, which is kind of like, when you think resistance training, it's mainly just lifting weights. So let's see. So this pillar is obviously very important as well, right? But, but the benefits of pure resistance training aren't as well-studied as they are for cardio. As the researchers say in their paper, "While the beneficial effect of aerobic activity on mortality risk reduction is well documented, it's less clear whether resistance training offers similar benefits." That's a little disappointing. I would think that, that it would be clearer than they're implying here, but, but cardio does get a lot of the press here, much more than, than pure weight training. And so this leads to the new goal of this new study.

• 1:27:51Bob Novella?

  How much resistance training is associated with lower mortality? And does it add anything beyond just doing aerobic exercise? So let's get right to the study then. So this was a prospective observational study. It was, let's see, a lot of people, 147,000-plus participants, and that was 31,000-plus men and 115,000-plus women on this. The researchers analyzed the data from, it's called cohort studies. Three large, long-running groups of health professionals, these were mainly composed of health professionals, and they'd been followed for decades. So they analyzed this data. So and over the course of 30 years, these people filled out questionnaires every two years,

• 1:28:35Bob Novella?

  documenting things like the details of their resistance training and aerobic exercise habits. Those were some of the main things that they documented. So compared to people doing no resistance training, and they did this statistically because it's hard to kind of, if they're doing, if people are doing some resistance training, they're probably doing some cardio. So they did their best to kind of tease out the effect of just the resistance training. And they did that by comparing people who did weight training, but also similar amounts of cardio. So it was kind of like an apples to apples. So they can, you can kind of, in a sense, subtract out the cardio and to see what the impact of resistance training, which of course is problematic, but that's what they did. So they compared this with people doing no resistance

• 1:29:17Bob Novella?

  training to those doing 90 to about 120 minutes per, per week of resistance training. So after the analysis, they, they showed that they had a 13% lower risk of death from any cause. There was a 19% lower risk of cardiovascular death, and the biggest was a 27% lower risk of neurological disease death. Which one, Steve, so Steve, what would that, what would some of those be, commonly be, do you think?

• 1:29:44Speaker 02

  Probably stroke, things like that.

• 1:29:46Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's probably the only thing I could think of, but all right.

• 1:29:49Speaker 02

  Well, we know that exercise reduces your risk of Alzheimer's disease, for example. So there's probably other things in there as well.

• 1:29:56Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but do you, do you like die from Alzheimer's disease?

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  Naturally.

• 1:30:00Bob Novella?

  I mean, Yeah. So those are pretty solid, not dying benefits, I would say, from, from, from just doing resistance exercise. So if you lift weights twice a week for, say, 45 to 60 minutes per session, without much cardio at all, you could probably reasonably expect to lower your risk of death, but by these amounts. What do you guys think were the results were for weight training beyond about two hours a week?

• 1:30:25Speaker 05

  Their improvement. Yeah, or at least diminishing returns.

• 1:30:27Bob Novella?

  Yeah, there was, there was essentially a no more mortality benefit beyond a couple hours a week. That doesn't mean that more resistance exercise is, is not beneficial or even potentially harmful. It doesn't mean that at all. There's so many, you know, quality of life benefits to lifting weights that, that treating this two hour a week as a cutoff, it's not, this is not what they're saying. That's not warranted at all.

• 1:30:53Speaker 04

  That's not enough time. There's not enough time. Two hours, two hours is the morning.

• 1:30:59Bob Novella?

  Here's to two hours a day. They also looked at cancer mortality here. And this, the cancer risk had a different pattern, which, which was interesting. The biggest apparent cancer benefit showed up at the lower levels of resistance training, not at the higher levels as you might think. So if you, so if you lift weights for less than 30 minutes per week, that was associated with a 21% lower cancer mortality. That was very interesting at least. I'm not sure what, what to conclude about that. If you did 30 to 59 minutes a week, that was associated with an 18% lower cancer mortality. So it, so it dipped down a little bit, but if you do more than that, it does not keep pushing

• 1:31:41Bob Novella?

  the, the cancer mortality lower. It kind of peaks at about 30 minutes or less a week for the maximal cancer protection apparently. So I just want to throw that out there.

• 1:31:51Speaker 04

  Bob, were these, were these people that were already actively exercising? Or they started exercising for this study?

• 1:31:57Bob Novella?

  Oh, neither. I did not see that in the study. These, these were health professionals. So I would suspect that this is just something that was part of their, of their lifestyle initially, but I didn't see any solid, solid numbers on that.

• 1:32:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, but Bob, you said this is a observational study. So

• 1:32:13Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  There's no randomization or anything like that. So this is, you can't make causative conclusions here.

• 1:32:19Bob Novella?

  Exactly. And that's, yep. And so when you see observational study.

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  It's all correlational. So yeah, what you're getting at George, like this could just be that people who are healthier in other ways, who have other healthy lifestyles also tend to exercise. This could be all artefactual as far as.

• 1:32:35Bob Novella?

  Yep, absolutely.

• 1:32:36Speaker 05

  It's also probably self-reported, which I would imagine humans are pretty bad at self-reporting how much.

• 1:32:42Bob Novella?

  And that's, and that's the other big, uh, big problem with this is that it was self-reporting, which you know is mu- much more problematic than say, like the cardio study I talked about a while ago, they had, they actually had monitors on. All right, so what about people who did both weight training and cardio? I'm sure you would guess that the results would be better, obviously, right? Duh. But how much, how much better if you, if you do both? The lowest mortality risk group did both resistance training and a lot of cardio, of course. They had a, they had a hazard ratio of 0.55. And Steve, Andre, do you, have you ever heard about hazard ratios? I kinda love that term.

• 1:33:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:20Bob Novella?

  For the purposes of the study, that translates to basically meaning that, that they had, the people who combined both cardio and weights had a whopping 45% lower all cause mortality risk, which is, um, which is, you know, compared with the inactive, no lifting reference group, okay? That's, that's a pretty dramatic number, 45% lower all cause mortality risk. That's fairly dramatic, but to get that benefit, according to the study, you would need two things, one to two hours a week of weights, which is, you know, which I've been talking about, plus cardio roughly the equivalent of more than 60 minutes a day of brisk walking. So that's, that's not trivial at all.

• 1:34:03Bob Novella?

  So that's, if you're more familiar with the terminology, that's 30 to less than 45 MET hours per week of aerobic activity. Uh, if you did something much more strenuous, then it would be, it would be less than 60, 60 a day. That's kinda how MET works. So this is certainly a lot of daily cardio. Most people will never get anywhere near that at all. And it, this does make sense compared to the cardio study I talked about at the end of May, uh, where they were saying that 60 to 90 minutes a day to maximize your heart health. How about the next step? Let's take this in a step even farther, further here. How about all cardio and no weights? So if you did 90 to 100 minutes of brisk

• 1:34:45Bob Novella?

  Risk walking every day or about six hours a week of a more vigorous aerobic exercise. You had fifty-three to fifty-eight percent mortality, lowered mortality risk. And that's regardless of resistance training level.

• 1:35:01Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:35:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah. So, uh, yeah. So that was, so that's a lot. I mean, yeah, ninety, ninety, ninety to a hundred minutes a day. I mean, that's a lot of moderate.

• 1:35:11Speaker 04

  Still though.

• 1:35:11Bob Novella?

  It's a lot, but what a huge drop in mortality risk, fifty-three to fifty-eight. That is just like, wow. So then the limitations of the study I wanted to talk about, like I said, remember this is observational. It's not randomized. It can't prove that resistance training causes slower mortality. You know, healthier people, they're just like more, more likely to exercise. They eat differently, probably they have better medical care, so many things, smoking less.

• 1:35:37Speaker 05

  Sleeping better.

• 1:35:38Bob Novella?

  So all these other advantages, they're hard to fully adjust away. So that's, that's one limitation of the study. And Andrew, like you said, these are, the exercise was self-reported, which is problematic. There was no wearables or gym records that they could go by. And also the subjects included many health professionals and nurses. And so that, that population probably doesn't perfectly represent everyone, of course. So that's, you got, so you got to take that into account. So then, so my takeaway of this study is that cardio may still be the king of mortality reduction. But I think what it's really showing here is that resistance training is not just for, you know, mirror muscles, right?

• 1:36:18Bob Novella?

  It's, it seems to make its own contribution to longevity, especially at moderate doses.

• 1:36:24Speaker 04

  It's more efficient. It's way more efficient than the, than the cardio, it would seem, right?

• 1:36:28Bob Novella?

  It, well, that depends on efficient for, for what goal. I mean, for.

• 1:36:32Speaker 04

  Just like time investment in terms of like, cause an hour and a half of walking, right?

• 1:36:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:37Speaker 04

  Versus 20 minutes of cardio or whatever that

• 1:36:40Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:36:40Speaker 04

  20 minutes of weight training.

• 1:36:42Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:43Speaker 04

  Right?

• 1:36:43Bob Novella?

  There's a little bit of cardio benefit to weight training. It clearly is not doing all the heavy lifting, so to speak, of what cardio does for your body. People should do at least some, even as much as you can of both. And remember, I want to reiterate that this study was looking at exercise through a mortality lens. And that's great, but quality of life is in many, in many ways, in my estimation anyways, more important. And resistance exercise is great for that.

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think one good bottom line to walk away from is don't be intimidated by those numbers. So like how much you have to do. Anything you do is good. Do some cardio, do some resistance. They have complementary benefits. There's tons of cumulative evidence that they help longevity and quality of life and functionality. So just, you know, we live in a very sedentary life, you know, society, unfortunately. Some, a lot of it's unavoidable, but do what you can to move as much as you can throughout the day. All right. Thank you, Bob. Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:37:44Jay Novella?

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

• 1:38:03Jay Novella?

  All right, before I continue.

• 1:38:04Speaker 05

  That was something.

• 1:38:05Jay Novella?

  Before I continue, I know it's crazy. I did get a response from George, which I'll read to you, but Andrea, I'd like you to make a guess on what you think that was.

• 1:38:14Speaker 05

  God, in the first half, I thought it was like children in a stroller being pushed down the street or something and kind of crying or like fussing for a bottle. And then I thought it was a parakeet at the end. So my final answer is going to be some kind of like bird in an urban landscape.

• 1:38:31Jay Novella?

  Okay, I mean, sure, birds make every noise on the planet, right?

• 1:38:34Speaker 05

  That's maybe not a fair, yeah.

• 1:38:36Jay Novella?

  But you are not correct, but you know, that is a perfectly crumulent guess.

• 1:38:40Speaker 05

  Great.

• 1:38:41Jay Novella?

  George said some kind of like a baby seal, some kind of young animal.

• 1:38:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:38:47Jay Novella?

  So a young baby seal. Kara would not have liked that answer, George, because she hates sea creatures making human-like noises.

• 1:38:54Speaker 05

  That's funny.

• 1:38:55Speaker 04

  Okay. Good to know.

• 1:38:57Jay Novella?

  Georgia, incorrect.

• 1:38:58Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:38:59Jay Novella?

  But not a bad guess because it had kind of a watery sound to it. I can't describe it any other way, but I can hear what you're saying. It had that as a backbone. A listener named Evil Eye wrote in and he and I have been joking around recently because he keeps guessing a catfish. So he said, it's not a catfish, so maybe a baby rhino. And not a bad guess, right? Cause this-

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  I've seen those videos, yeah, the baby-

• 1:39:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah, this does have a baby-like sound to it too. I agree, you know, and I, you know, I, I kinda do this for a living and it does have that, that sound as well. But you are incorrect. And then a huge supporter and friend of the show, Frederick Cosette, wrote in and he said-

• 1:39:41Speaker 04

  Freddie!

• 1:39:42Jay Novella?

  He said, I don't send guesses in often, but here we go. June 6th noisy, does sound like another baby animal. And he says, or to care as horror, a marine mammal. Yes, you know. But I think it's some kind of toy, like a grown tube. Okay, Fred, what are you talking about? Are those annoying rubber chickens that make those loud noises?

• 1:40:00Speaker 05

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:40:02Jay Novella?

  That's, that is a great guess because it really does sound like one of those rubber chicken things, you know, especially in the very beginning. But that's not correct. So you, no one got it, not, no one guessed it. There was no winner. So I'm just gonna tell you, and I gotta, I gotta also mention, guys, I'm very surprised that people from Australia did not send in a guess.

• 1:40:21Speaker 04

  Ooh, to the wallaby?

• 1:40:23Jay Novella?

  That's a, that's a hint.

• 1:40:24Speaker 05

  Or the koala?

• 1:40:25Jay Novella?

  These are koalas fighting with each other.

• 1:40:28Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:40:28Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:40:30Jay Novella?

  And I'd like to comment that they don't sound very committed.

• 1:40:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:40:34Jay Novella?

  Right? Listen, listen again, tell me if you think-

• 1:40:36Speaker 04

  They need better training.

• 1:40:37Jay Novella?

  Yeah, like, is this really a fight in action? Listen to this.

• 1:40:54Jay Novella?

  I mean, that's the part that sounds the most like a fight.

• 1:40:56Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:40:56Jay Novella?

  If this was like an MMA fight, no one would go.

• 1:41:00Speaker 05

  I will say, having heard Fred's guess, I definitely hear the rubber chicken on the second.

• 1:41:04Jay Novella?

  Oh, yeah. Rubber chicken is all over that. So I feel like-

• 1:41:07Speaker 04

  It's my tam tam. Let it go. It's mine. It's mine.

• 1:41:10Jay Novella?

  So I'm gonna say-

• 1:41:11Speaker 04

  You bastard.

• 1:41:12Jay Novella?

  Bastard. For everybody that's sent in a guess this week, I'm giving everyone one SGU point because I think everybody was correct.

• 1:41:20Speaker 04

  Bing.

• 1:41:21Jay Novella?

  Correct enough, but thank you for that. And apparently koalas fight. And we'll have to see if we can find any, you know, live action when we go. So I have a new, a new noisy for you guys this week. This one was sent in by a listener named, uh, he gave me the pronunciation. Uh, he said Elias-

• 1:41:40Speaker 04

  That's a strange name.

• 1:41:41Jay Novella?

  It's Elias Jeffay from Toronto. Uh, disclaimer for this one, you will hear a sound that is three different instances of the same thing happening.

• 1:41:51Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 1:41:52Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:42:07Jay Novella?

  Okay. So you hear the repeat of that, that noise?

• 1:42:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:10Jay Novella?

  All right. Same exact event happening, almost exact circumstances and it's, and you know, something is happening and making that sound. All right. If, uh, if you guys think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, you gotta email me, guys. You gotta email me. You know, a lot of people are sitting out there and they, and they write me and go, I wish I guessed last week because I knew it or whatever. So just email me. It takes two minutes. Email me at [email protected].

• 1:42:35Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Jay. George, you have a little game for us. This is like the kind of thing that we do on these extended private shows.

• 1:42:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:44Speaker 02

  Like we're gonna have in LA. So tell us about it.

• 1:42:47Speaker 04

  This is a game that's called Addict. And it's not really a game. It's more of just of a revealing kind of thing about what we're thinking, how we're thinking, and if we're agreeing with each other as the way we're thinking. This is essentially agree, disagree, it's complicated time. I'm gonna stiff, make a statement. I'm gonna say a little phrase here or make, make a statement. I will then say your name. And after I say your name, you're gonna say whether you agree, whether you disagree, or whether it's complicated.

• 1:43:12Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:43:13Speaker 04

  And if everybody, if everybody has the same response, we go to the next one. If the responses are different, maybe we'll chat about it just for a second. And we can see how much, how much we disagree or agree about the particular thing. All right. Does that make sense? Yeah.

• 1:43:25Speaker 05

  Makes sense.

• 1:43:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. Here we go. Everyone should try to read at least one book every month. Steve?

• 1:43:34Jay Novella?

  It's complicated.

• 1:43:35Speaker 04

  Andrea?

• 1:43:36Speaker 05

  Agree.

• 1:43:36Speaker 04

  Bob?

• 1:43:37Speaker 02

  Agree.

• 1:43:37Speaker 04

  Jay?

• 1:43:41Speaker 04

  That's not a correct response.

• 1:43:42Jay Novella?

  I know, I know. It's, all right, I'll say it's complicated.

• 1:43:46Speaker 04

  Okay, two complicated's and two agrees. All right, it's, it's, it, yeah.

• 1:43:50Speaker 02

  I mean, I sort of agree, but again, when you, I think the key phrase there was should try to read a book every month. There's a part of, by, it's complicated, part of the complication is there's lots of other stuff to read other than books. And like I sometimes I'll go for a period of time where I'm just reading tons of articles, for example. And that's filling up my reading time. You know, if you brought in readings, you know, then I would say absolutely. Or if you made it a little bit less stringent, I would have said absolutely.

• 1:44:18Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:44:18Bob Novella?

  12 books a year is not a lot of books.

• 1:44:21Speaker 02

  No, I get it.

• 1:44:21Speaker 05

  Well, I, I said, agree because of the word should for a different reason, Steve, which is that I think we all should try. But I don't think we all necessarily need to succeed and life can get away and you can read things that aren't books. But I will say very normatively and subjectively, I wish I could read more books because even though I do read a ton of papers, I feel like the sustained attention and investment that comes from a book is, is something lacking in my life. So I, I sort of had a motivated reasoning for agreeing.

• 1:44:48Jay Novella?

  My answer was skewed. I mean, of course, I think ideally, yes, and I, I could have easily just said yes, but I, you know, I wanted to throw this out there because a lot of people might agree. It's very hard, particularly when you have an aggressive job and you're a parent, to find the time to do anything for yourself. Reading enriches your mind in a way that I don't think many other things do. So I'm a hundred percent for reading, but I do feel, feel it for those people out there who have the similar schedules as I have.

• 1:45:18Speaker 04

  Okay. Here we go. Texting quote, "I'm on my way" end quote, "when you haven't really left yet" is immoral. Steve?

• 1:45:26Speaker 02

  I disagree.

• 1:45:27Speaker 04

  Andrea?

• 1:45:28Speaker 05

  I disagree.

• 1:45:29Speaker 04

  Bob?

• 1:45:30Bob Novella?

  Disagree.

• 1:45:30Speaker 04

  Jay?

• 1:45:31Jay Novella?

  I disagree.

• 1:45:32Speaker 04

  Okay, you all agree. Nice.

• 1:45:33Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:45:34Speaker 04

  Restaurants-

• 1:45:35Speaker 02

  We agree to disagree.

• 1:45:36Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:45:36Speaker 04

  You agree to disagree. Restaurants should eliminate kids' menu items with unhealthy options. Steve?

• 1:45:44Speaker 02

  I disagree.

• 1:45:45Speaker 04

  Andrea?

• 1:45:46Speaker 05

  Disagree.

• 1:45:46Speaker 04

  Bob?

• 1:45:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I disagree.

• 1:45:48Speaker 04

  Jay?

• 1:45:48Speaker 02

  So it is, they should remove unhealthy items.

• 1:45:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:52Speaker 02

  I completely disagree.

• 1:45:55Speaker 04

  Okay. Good. You all agree to disagree. Getting out of bed immediately after your first alarm rings is a sign of a psychopath. Steve?

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  Disagree.

• 1:46:05Speaker 04

  Andrea?

• 1:46:06Speaker 05

  It's complicated.

• 1:46:08Speaker 04

  Bob?

• 1:46:08Bob Novella?

  What's stronger than the word psychopath?

• 1:46:13Speaker 04

  Alright, alright.

• 1:46:14Bob Novella?

  So agree.

• 1:46:15Speaker 04

  Agree. Jay?

• 1:46:16Speaker 02

  Um, I disagree.

• 1:46:18Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  I will say that my disagreement is based upon actual scientific evidence.

• 1:46:22Speaker 05

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:46:23Speaker 02

  It is, if you like, the alarm goes off, you hit the snooze, you sleep for 20 more minutes, that's really inefficient. You are far better, just set the alarm for when you absolutely have to get up, sleep till then and then get up.

• 1:46:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:38Speaker 02

  Building in snoozes is bad for you, it's just wasting time.

• 1:46:41Speaker 05

  And so I do that because I used to press snooze a thousand times, but then the problem is, is that I cannot get myself out of bed on the first ring. So I end up just oversleeping because now I've set it to the last possible minute and I'm hitting snooze because I'm sleepy and delusional.

• 1:46:56Speaker 02

  Well, that's a separate problem.

• 1:46:58Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:46:59Bob Novella?

  Yeah, 10 minutes to like, get into the whole concept of another day is fine. 10 minutes, just all. Snooze for 10 minutes, man. You don't, don't snooze for an hour or even necessarily, you know, or 40 minutes, but 10 minutes is-

• 1:47:13Speaker 02

  Well, here's, here's an alternate suggestion. Yeah, I agree, keeping it short, but rather than like hitting snooze and trying to get back to sleep, is if you feel like you need to psych yourself up to get out of bed or whatever, just hit, turn the alarm off, maybe prop yourself up a little- A bit and then sit there and wait. You don't have to jump out of bed. You could spend five to 10 minutes, you know, waking up and maybe you do then pull out your phone.

• 1:47:39Speaker 04

  Reading a book.

• 1:47:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, do something to gear up, but don't try to sleep. That's wasted time. You're not getting quality sleep. You know, maximize your actual sleep time. Don't take away 20 or 30 minutes from your sleep time and for that snooze time. It's not good.

• 1:47:54Jay Novella?

  I mean, I agree with that, Steve, but there are people out there who who are like meds of mort, you know, like they are like,

• 1:48:01Speaker 02

  half dead. Nice.

• 1:48:03Jay Novella?

  They really are. They really are. Like they are so groggy and out of it that like their brain doesn't engage as fast as some others. Like I have always been an alarm goes off and I can bing out of bed like a vampire sitting up straight. I can do it. Not that I enjoy it because I really do like to lounge in bed. I mean, on a weekend, if I don't have anything going on, man, I'll lie in bed for over an hour. Just to be like, I don't have to get up now. You know what I mean?

• 1:48:26Speaker 02

  But that may be a symptom that you're not getting enough sleep and you're just making it worse by

• 1:48:29Jay Novella?

  Of course, I don't get enough sleep.

• 1:48:30Speaker 02

  By wasting your snooze time. The idea is that if you make this part of good overall sleep hygiene, you won't be as as Stunad in the morning.

• 1:48:40Speaker 05

  Steve, I'm curious what you think about this sleep hygiene. If I, because I am very groggy and useless in the morning, like I really can't function. If I have to get up very early, I have to get up early for a flight tomorrow, like 4 a.m. early. I will purposely sleep on the couch or even on the floor because it's easier for me to get up and less likely that I will oversleep.

• 1:48:59Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 1:49:00Speaker 05

  In a bed under blankets. Is that terrible?

• 1:49:01Speaker 04

  Stay dressed.

• 1:49:02Speaker 05

  That's a good idea or get dressed and just sleep in the foyer.

• 1:49:06Speaker 04

  I've done that.

• 1:49:07Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't, I haven't seen a study about that specifically, but it seems to me that you should always try to optimize whatever sleep you get. You know, I know sometimes, yeah, like we had to get up at four or five, whatever for a plane. You can't just suddenly shift, you know, and go to sleep super early. I usually count on sleeping on the plane, you know, in those cases. Or trade off driving or whatever. You gotta, I mean, you gotta do the best you can. I don't think there's any perfect answer to a situation like that.

• 1:49:33Bob Novella?

  Andrew, have you, have you thought of driving to the airport the night before and sleeping in your car?

• 1:49:37Speaker 05

  I have thought of that and I've actually

• 1:49:39Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:49:41Speaker 05

  I've actually slept, I've slept in airports overnight the night before.

• 1:49:45Speaker 02

  There's often, there's almost always an airport hotel. That's what they're for. Drive there, just get a room and there you go.

• 1:49:50Speaker 05

  I mean, I've slept on the floor of a hotel. Okay. Or a floor of a airport. Okay, George.

• 1:49:55Bob Novella?

  Oof.

• 1:49:56Speaker 04

  Speaking of driving, the person driving the car gets to choose the music. Steve?

• 1:50:00Speaker 02

  Uh, disagree.

• 1:50:01Speaker 04

  Andrea?

• 1:50:01Speaker 05

  It's complicated.

• 1:50:02Speaker 04

  Bob?

• 1:50:03Bob Novella?

  Hmm, yeah, it's complicated.

• 1:50:04Speaker 04

  Jay?

• 1:50:05Jay Novella?

  Agree.

• 1:50:06Speaker 05

  Here's why it's complicated. Yeah. Here's why it's complicated is because I'm inclined to say, or first, I was inclined to say disagree because you shouldn't be fussing with the music if you're driving and that's perfect for the other person to do because they have nothing to do. But then I remembered that I did a, a long drive from Ohio five days ago and my boyfriend kept switching to all kinds of different music from the nineties and I, I really didn't want to hear any of it and I was driving. I can't focus. So I need to tell you what we're going to listen to. So it's complicated.

• 1:50:33Speaker 02

  I think it's a negotiation. I don't think one person gets an automatic, you know, veto or whatever, automatic control.

• 1:50:39Bob Novella?

  I agree, but the, the driver has some rights.

• 1:50:41Speaker 02

  Maybe they get some extra little courtesy.

• 1:50:43Jay Novella?

  No, that's nonsense. That is nonsense. And this is clearly, you know, Steve, it's easy because you know, your wife likes to drive. So you're not really the driver all the time. And I'm living in the exact. Yeah, but you, sure you do, but not, you know, but the point is like, you're not like.

• 1:51:00Speaker 02

  Don't personalize this. This is not about me personally.

• 1:51:02Jay Novella?

  Of course it is. Everything is personal. Um, as someone who is, is, you know, considered the designated driver for almost everything in both work and personal, I'm the driver, right?

• 1:51:13Speaker 02

  Oh, so it's all about you, Jay.

• 1:51:16Jay Novella?

  I, I feel, George, that, that people don't sit there and realize that first of all, like particularly on longer drives, music is, is good to keep the driver awake.

• 1:51:26Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:51:26Jay Novella?

  Keep their brain active because if it's, if it's quiet and people, nothing bothers me more than when people fall asleep in the car when I'm driving. If I'm alone, because I'm like, hey man, I'm tired too, and I need some, some stimulation here.

• 1:51:39Speaker 02

  That's fine. And all you have to say is like, guys, I need something to keep me going here. Uh, can I, can I, you know, choose my own music? And the answer is yes, of course. I just don't think it's automatic.

• 1:51:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:51:49Speaker 02

  That's all I'm saying.

• 1:51:51Speaker 05

  Steve is correct on this.

• 1:51:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:51:52Speaker 04

  One more, one more. Ready? Last one. Chess is a sport. Steve?

• 1:51:58Bob Novella?

  Oh shit. I'll say it's complicated.

• 1:52:02Speaker 04

  Andrea?

• 1:52:04Speaker 05

  Disagree.

• 1:52:05Speaker 04

  Bob?

• 1:52:05Bob Novella?

  Uh, complicated?

• 1:52:07Speaker 04

  Jay?

• 1:52:08Jay Novella?

  I disagree.

• 1:52:09Speaker 05

  Thank you, Jay.

• 1:52:10Speaker 02

  It's a definition thing. It depends on how you define.

• 1:52:13Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's a category thing. I mean, sports, I think, are more of a physical thing than

• 1:52:21Speaker 02

  You remember those pieces around?

• 1:52:23Jay Novella?

  Chess to me is like so hyper intellectual. Like if you're on, if you're really working it, like this is a thing that your brain is doing, but you're, you're, you're sitting the whole time. And I think sports, I think by default to most people would be, you know, a, a aggressive physical activity.

• 1:52:40Speaker 04

  Or some physical activity.

• 1:52:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, even minor physical activity, like throwing darts or something like that, that I think should, or sharp shooting or something that we are like barely move.

• 1:52:51Jay Novella?

  Definitely not. No, and then some precision needs to be in play as well, I think. You know, you can't, yeah, but you could go out and throw a frisbee around. That, that's a sport. You know, it's, it's, it's active. Get your heart rate up.

• 1:53:02Speaker 05

  The only version where chess could be a sport, and it's so unlikely that I landed on disagree, is like the speed chess. Like if there were some kind of like physicality to like how quickly you move the pieces, that like makes it a sport. But I don't think that is enough part of it.

• 1:53:17Speaker 04

  Some heart rates are elevated for that. Yeah, I could see that. Well, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the kind of stuff we'll be talking about on our trips and all of our performances as we're going through LA and Australia and New Zealand. I bet you all can't wait.

• 1:53:31Jay Novella?

  Well, actually, I mean, yeah, this is a fun game that we do during like a live podcast. But the things that we're going to do at Nauticon are much more on your feet and audience facing and everything.

• 1:53:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is the audio version only.

• 1:53:47Jay Novella?

  Yeah, because we couldn't do that while we're all sitting at home. Like, yeah, is podcasting a sport?

• 1:53:53Speaker 05

  I've been sweating this whole time.

• 1:53:54Speaker 04

  No, but we're all losers.

• 1:53:55Speaker 05

  Bob's segment.

• 1:54:00Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, George. Guys, let's go on with Science or Fiction?

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction.

• 1:54:14Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items where facts too real and one fake. And then I challenge my panel of expert skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. No theme this week, just three regular news items. Okay, here we go. Item number one, researchers have developed a synthetic fabric that is highly insulating in cold temperatures, but is heat releasing at room temperature or warmer. All right, number two, a new study finds that female chickadees, those are birds, preferentially mate with more intelligent males. And item number three, neuroscientists at the University of Michigan have demonstrated an implantable wireless brain computer interface that allows subjects with aphasia due to

• 1:54:58Speaker 02

  damage to their speech areas regain functional speech. Jay, go first.

• 1:55:04Jay Novella?

  All right, Steve, the first one here, researchers have developed a synthetic fabric that is highly insulating in cold temperatures, but is heat releasing at room temperature or warmer. Okay, I mean, on its face, I think that could be science because I think the temperature could change the properties of the fabric. And, you know, like I have worn like a Patagonia Down pullover, for example. And the interesting thing about Down is that it can trap heat, but like when it's warm out and if I have it on, it doesn't really make me that much warmer, oddly, and I don't know why. And people are always like, why are you wearing that? You know, I'm like, you know, it gets cold outside, but it's warm in here. I'm like, I'm not really that warm wearing it in here, but if I go outside, it keeps me up.

• 1:55:46Jay Novella?

  So I think there are definitely, you know, the laws of physics are not being broken with this statement. The second one, a new study finds that female chickadees preferentially mate with more intelligent males. Wouldn't you like to think that? You know, I wish that tracked with my real life. I'd like to say yes to this as well, just because there might be a way for them to show their intelligence. And then that could be a, you know, a survival advantage. Maybe it's all about the dance because the birds like to do the dance. Okay, I'm not 100% on that one, though, but that one is possibly no. Let me go on to the third one. Neuroscientists at the University of Michigan have demonstrated an implantable wireless

• 1:56:28Jay Novella?

  brain-computer interface that allows subjects with aphasia due to damage to their speech areas regain functional speech. Wow. Yes, I want this to be so true. God, you know, I'd like to say yes to this. You know, this one out of all of them sounds to me like to be a major step forward if it's, if it is finally happening, that we, that we have some type of implant that can do this type of thing. You know, the, the pluses to this are that there's money being spent on this. I know, you know, lots of different institutions are, are working on implantable brain, uh, brain-computer interfaces. The thing, you know, the wireless thing about it, I guess, isn't a confounding factor. But of the three, that one on his face seems to be the most fictiony. Oh, man.

• 1:57:13Jay Novella?

  I'm going to take the third one, Steve, the, the brain implant as the fiction.

• 1:57:16Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:57:17Bob Novella?

  All right. So this is synthetic fabric, highly insulating when it's cold. Uh, this one, yeah, this is kind of a material science thing. It doesn't sound too extraordinary. There might be some interesting technique they're using here to make that happen. You know, the, the, the space between the layers that actually holds in the heat, uh, what impact it would have with that. Uh, but it doesn't sound too overly dramatic. Uh, the female chickadees one, um, I, I mean, aren't they like adept, like songbirds? I mean, are they the ones that have really complex songs? If that, if I'm right about that, I could be wrong, then I think that that could kind of play into this whole intelligence thing. So, but otherwise I really, I'm not sure about that one.

• 1:58:01Bob Novella?

  So because of that, it, it makes me think that this third one with the, uh, the, uh, implantable wireless brain computer is probably, uh, probably the fiction. I mean, it's wireless is like, that's pretty good. And, and aphasia just seems like something that's much more complicated than a simple device in, in implantation could do. I would need to know more details, you know, what's it, you know, how it's interfacing brain circuits that are no longer operating? How was that in the mix? Doesn't seem as likely as the other ones. So I'll say the wireless brain-computer interface is fiction.

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  Okay, George.

• 1:58:35Speaker 04

  You know, I've just had a realization. Normally when we play this game, I'm usually the first to go.

• 1:58:40Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:58:41Speaker 04

  Like every time, which gives me the least amount of thing. I'm just, I'm just feeling so much less anxious because I've had like a couple of seconds to think about it. I'm not excusing how poorly I always do because I always do poorly. And I'm sure I want to do just as poorly this time, but I'm just saying from a psychological standpoint and a comfort standpoint, it's much nicer to not go first every single time. That being said, I'm going to go backwards. I think the brain computer is, is a thing. I also have a beautiful image in my mind of scientists giving IQ tests to chickadees to figure out which are the smarter ones so they can send them off to mate. That to me is very exciting. Like which, okay, which ones are the smarter ones? I think that's true again, again, as well. The

• 1:59:25Speaker 04

  synthetic fabric that's both hot and cold seems really like, of course, that would be a thing. So I'm saying that is the fiction.

• 1:59:33Speaker 02

  Okay. And Andrea?

• 1:59:36Speaker 05

  So George, I will have the opposite reaction, which is I also often go first and I prefer it because I don't, every time each of you has talked through your reasoning, I'm like, well, that's a pretty good point, too. So now I'm just like more swayed and more confused. Like, I just want to come out of the gates with my own. So here, here's where I'm going to land on this. And I'm influenced by, because I'm like, I can't guess the same thing, yada, yada. So I originally was going to agree with Bob and Jay that the wireless brain device for aphasia was, was false, was fiction. I went to the University of Michigan. I get a lot of their emails. I feel like I would have heard something this big, but I also don't hear about a lot of things. So, so that's not a fair reason to rule something out. A little bit of wishful thinking. I have a cousin with aphasia. It would be lovely

• 2:00:18Speaker 05

  if this worked. So I'm going to say that's science. I'm a little bit biased in my enthusiasm about it. I'm going to say that's science. I share everyone else's delight in the idea of IQ tests for chickadees. My only hang up on that, and I was super interested in like, is it the movement? Is it the dance? Is it the song? Is it the, you know, are you intelligent? If you've gotten more food or something like that. But I also am a little bit hung up just because I wonder about the evolutionary pressures or the way that we square size or. Or kind of physical, you know, qualities that the female chickadees might be, might be evaluating. So I'm a little on the fence about that. I once was gonna say, George, like you, that I tend to

• 2:01:03Speaker 05

  also try to psychoanalyze Steve. And I was gonna say for number one with the synthetic fabric that that it just seems so, he's, he's gotta be tricking us because it seems like this is something that should already exist, that something that's highly insulating, but also heat releasing. But then the more I thought about it, the more I was like, I think all of these like Gore-Tex and performance fabrics are very insulating, but I don't know much about fabrics that are heat releasing. And I recently bought a bunch of UPF shirts, like, like shirts with like sun protection. And there's a lot of talk about how there's like a flap in the back, and there's vents for cooling, and it's a temperature that wicks, or it's a, it's a, it's

• 2:01:42Speaker 05

  a quality that wicks sweat away. But it's not ever saying that the actual fabric pulls sweat away. So at first I was convinced this absolutely exists. And now I'm not so sure. So I think after all that, I'm gonna say that the synthetic fabric is fiction.

• 2:01:59Speaker 02

  The synthetic fabric is the fiction.

• 2:02:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:02:02Speaker 02

  Okay. So you guys are evenly split between the fabric and the brain computer interface. So we'll start with the middle one, number two. A new study finds that female chickadees preferentially mate with more intelligent males. You guys all think this one is true. And this one is science. This is true.

• 2:02:23Speaker 05

  Yay. I was like, we all might have a lot of wishful thinking on this one. Like, I just want species that prefers intelligence. Yay.

• 2:02:33Speaker 02

  For the record, George, you don't always go first.

• 2:02:35Speaker 04

  I know. It just feels like it.

• 2:02:37Speaker 02

  But yeah, okay.

• 2:02:38Speaker 04

  It just feels like it.

• 2:02:39Speaker 02

  This time, I specifically said, well, let me have the rogues go first and give George and Andrea a little bit of a head up. All right. Not that it worked, but you chose to ignore Bob and Jay. All right. But anyway, we'll see if that makes any difference. So do any of you know how the chickadees got their name?

• 2:02:59Speaker 05

  The sound they make?

• 2:03:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Which is what?

• 2:03:02Speaker 05

  Chickadee, chickadee.

• 2:03:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:03:04Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:03:05Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:03:06Speaker 02

  That's the sound of a chickadee, chickadee.

• 2:03:07Bob Novella?

  It sounds like chickadee.

• 2:03:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, chickadee.

• 2:03:09Speaker 05

  Jay, you should do a who's that noisy, which is us trying to do different bird sounds and people have to guess what bird sound we were trying to make. Is that a?

• 2:03:17Speaker 02

  That's awesome. Yeah, I like that.

• 2:03:19Speaker 05

  Okay, great.

• 2:03:19Speaker 02

  There's a.

• 2:03:20Speaker 04

  I'm a hawk.

• 2:03:22Speaker 05

  Eagle, eagle.

• 2:03:23Speaker 02

  Eagle. Some birds are named after their calls. My favorite, I think everyone's favorite is the.

• 2:03:30Speaker 04

  The collect bird.

• 2:03:31Speaker 02

  The Bob White.

• 2:03:32Speaker 05

  Bob White.

• 2:03:33Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 2:03:34Speaker 02

  He goes.

• 2:03:34Speaker 04

  Bob White, Bob White.

• 2:03:35Speaker 02

  Nope, goes Bob White.

• 2:03:36Speaker 04

  Bob White.

• 2:03:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:38Speaker 05

  I like that.

• 2:03:39Bob Novella?

  Never heard of that.

• 2:03:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right. So what they found was that, yeah, this was the hypothesis that it seems like that the female birds are hooking up with the more intelligent males. So they wanted to test that hypothesis. Now, first of all, chickadees are sort of monogamous. What that means is they do mate with an individual male long term in a somewhat monogamous relationship, but they get a little on the side, right? So they will also mate with other males to improve the fitness of their children, right?

• 2:04:13Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 2:04:13Speaker 02

  And.

• 2:04:14Speaker 05

  Don't worry, honey. It's not because I don't love you. It's because I want to improve the fitness of our children.

• 2:04:18Speaker 02

  Well, but, yeah, but, but her hubby is probably also hooking up with other female chickadees, right?

• 2:04:23Speaker 05

  So it's just an open relationship.

• 2:04:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So what they found was that when a chicken, a female chickadee hooks up with a, with a male bird that's not her mate, they're almost always are more intelligent than their mates, right?

• 2:04:37Speaker 05

  Mmm.

• 2:04:37Speaker 02

  And, and what's, so again, this is a chickadee. They don't do literal IQ tests, I'm sure, but you realize that. So what is, you kind of shotgun, like, what kind of intelligence are we talking about? Specifically, so chickadees, they do not migrate and what they do is they hide food for the winter, right? So then they need to find, they need to find it again. So they have an amazing visual spatial memory and ability to find, you know, the food that they've hidden under the ground and all over the place. And so that was the measure. So the males that are better at finding food, that have better visuospatial intelligence.

• 2:05:17Speaker 02

  Do have, do, and so dramatically so disproportionately represented in this side hookup activity and what they call extra pair copulations, that's the technical term.

• 2:05:29Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 2:05:30Speaker 02

  So yeah, so there's a significant, a fairly significant advantage to being more intelligent in terms of your visuals, spatial cognitive ability, in terms of being, how many, how much of that next generation you are responsible for, and also having larger weight, you know, the weight of their offspring is greater, you know?

• 2:05:51Speaker 05

  Is it, Steve, the case then that, so yes, it would look in the data as though they're choosing the more intelligent males because they are, but the reason is because it's not that the chickadees are thinking about intelligence, it's they're thinking about like food reliability.

• 2:06:03Speaker 02

  Well, we don't know, right? Just a behavior, that wasn't what was studied. They just want to say, if this is the case, then we should find that they are more representative in the next generation, and they are. So it supports the hypothesis that they are, they are specifically selecting for this cognitive intelligence. And birds in general, so the idea is that female birds are more invested in their chicks than the males are, right? Because often they have to do more of the, it's not true across the board, but for those species where there's a lot more of, the high, the stakes are higher, you know, for the females than for the males. In those species, the females are way more selective of the males than the males are of the females. Males just spread around.

• 2:06:47Speaker 02

  The females are like, I gotta pick the best sperm I can, because I have a lot riding on, you know, on my chicks. And those are the species where like the men go through elaborate, the males are do like, gonna have elaborate plumage, or elaborate mating routines, or nesting routines, or whatever. This is just sort of one manifestation of that.

• 2:07:07Speaker 04

  Just further example of nerds ruling the world, basically.

• 2:07:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely. You know? I couldn't resist that, yeah. You know, females select more intelligent males.

• 2:07:15Speaker 04

  More intelligent.

• 2:07:16Speaker 02

  All species would benefit from that.

• 2:07:17Speaker 05

  Well, the problem here is that we haven't tied food collection and resources to intelligence. Like, sometimes it correlates, but you can also, there are a lot of wealthy... Not intelligent people out there.

• 2:07:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and you know, there's a whole psychological branch about what human male and female mate selective behavior and why do men think that driving a, you know, a fast car or whatever is going to help them and does it, you know, and all that sort of stuff. And all right, let's go back to number one. Researchers have developed a synthetic fabric that is highly insulating in cold temperatures, but is heat releasing at room temperature or warmer. George and Andrea, you think this one is the fiction. Jay and Bob, you think this one is science. And this one is science. Sorry, guys. So, so what is the key here? What is the key? This is material science, Bob, and they were setting

• 2:08:13Speaker 02

  out to make a fabric that would do just this. The key is, anyone want to guess?

• 2:08:17Speaker 05

  The room temperature piece.

• 2:08:19Speaker 02

  Well, it's the, how does this fabric do it? How does this fabric have different properties at different temperatures?

• 2:08:24Speaker 04

  Is it loosen? It's, it's, it's like it's weave or something?

• 2:08:27Speaker 02

  No, the key is it undergoes a phase change. This is a phase change fiber aerogel with dual functional thermal protection for personal thermal management. That's the title of the paper.

• 2:08:40Bob Novella?

  What's this shirt going to cost? $5,000?

• 2:08:43Speaker 02

  That's a good, that's a good question. I think this is more of a proof of concept than this is a marketable fabric. But they incorporate, so there's a couple of things. Now, this is not the first time that they've developed fabric that has this phase change property for thermal management. But the previous versions were stiff and, and sometimes they leaked on the wearer and that's not good. You don't want the shirt melting on you. You know what I mean? So what they did was they developed these synthetic fibers and they sort of made them really fluffy like cotton so that it would maintain its flexibility. They're also completely water resistant. They do not absorb water at all. And then they embedded within them these phase change aerogel materials that would alter the property of this, of the fabric in, in whole, depending on the temperature.

• 2:09:28Speaker 02

  So in, they're really insulating, really, really, really good insulators. But as, at room temperature, that, that's strong insulation. ...property goes away and they and they become more

• 2:09:39Speaker 04

  Cool, man.

• 2:09:40Speaker 02

  More heat releasing. Yeah, pretty cool. Again, I don't know if this is commercializable, but it's a it's a pretty cool proof of concept.

• 2:09:46Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 2:09:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:09:47Speaker 05

  So no, no aphasia help for us.

• 2:09:50Speaker 02

  Well, let's talk about this. So it's neuroscientists at the University of Michigan have developed an implantable wireless brain computer interface that allows subjects with aphasia due to damage to their speech areas regain functional speech. This one is the fiction, but the first half of that sentence is correct. You neuroscientists, exactly neurosurgeons at University of Michigan have implanted a wireless brain computer interface into a subject. They've been developing this technology. You know, they have an external part of the device that is what it wirelessly communicates to. And what they're going for is to help patients who can't speak, but not because they're aphasic and not because of damage to their speech areas because Bob is exactly right. That's like way more complicated than we could do right now.

• 2:10:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:10:36Speaker 02

  But just but people who have ALS and just can't physically speak. Right.

• 2:10:43Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:10:44Speaker 02

  So right, because if you're depending on the type of damage to your speech area, it doesn't really matter. You know, if you have something that a label should communicate, you can't trans. You know, some types of aphasia, you can't translate ideas into words or words into ideas.

• 2:10:57Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:10:58Speaker 02

  Really, this is for people with dysarthria, not aphasia, meaning they have just a they can't move their muscles, right? So you have the speaking muscles are weak.

• 2:11:07Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:11:07Speaker 02

  The speech area is fine. So this is basically, you know, this is not not not new, it's just sort of an incremental advance. They want to allow these people to communicate more effectively because the, you know, this can translate their desired motor movements, you know, into something that could then translate into speech. Yeah, so we're getting there, but this was a couple of steps ahead.

• 2:11:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:11:30Speaker 02

  Of what we what we can do.

• 2:11:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:11:33Speaker 04

  I'm really good at a lot of games, by the way.

• 2:11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:35Speaker 04

  Just if we can just be clear, like this, like if we're playing like Trivial Pursuit in the car, like I'm usually like top two people, just so I can just just to reiterate, just we're all right, it's all good.

• 2:11:46Speaker 02

  George, these guys have been playing this game for 21 years.

• 2:11:49Speaker 04

  It doesn't matter.

• 2:11:50Speaker 05

  Well, that was my mistake.

• 2:11:51Speaker 04

  Something about it.

• 2:11:52Speaker 05

  Is I was like, I was like Jay and Bob already said that was the fiction. I should mix it up. And then I started to overthink it. And then I was like, Steve probably engineered it to trick Jay and Bob because they've done it together longer.

• 2:12:02Speaker 04

  Like, I know, right?

• 2:12:03Speaker 05

  I lose the game. I know.

• 2:12:05Bob Novella?

  That's a hell of a rabbit hole to go down.

• 2:12:07Speaker 05

  This is what I'm saying. I've been radicalized.

• 2:12:09Speaker 02

  You tried to metagame. You tried to metagame.

• 2:12:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's, we've got a Vulcan making the game, so we can't, we can't, you can't do that. You can't.

• 2:12:16Speaker 05

  And this game, I think, we can all agree, at least, this game is definitely a sport.

• 2:12:21Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And I always mix it up, you know, so there's no, there's no one pattern to it. It's not always the, the most obvious choice or the least obvious choice or whatever.

• 2:12:30Speaker 05

  That's why I'm so tortured.

• 2:12:31Speaker 04

  Way harder than piano.

• 2:12:34Speaker 05

  Just wait till you have one patented way of solving Steve's science or fiction. Sign up now.

• 2:12:39Speaker 04

  Guaranteed.

• 2:12:40Speaker 05

  No, no requirement to be a teacher.

• 2:12:42Speaker 02

  All right. Bob, you're gonna give us the quote this week.

• 2:12:45Bob Novella?

  Yes, and here it comes.

• 2:12:49Bob Novella?

  I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say it.

• 2:12:50Speaker 04

  Marcel Marceau.

• 2:12:52Bob Novella?

  I'm gonna say it right after the word now. Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? That is from Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

• 2:13:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:13:06Bob Novella?

  And I've, I've always been kind of fond of, of this quote because it gets to add something that I, I often feel, people throw this supernatural layer onto nature all the time, right? We just, we've been living that for decades now. And sometimes, or, or maybe even often, I wonder if they're really missing, you know, the beauty that's really there, you know? And not just the surface beauty, but of course, for instance, I'm a total geek, the, the scientific beauty in things as well that I think you'd, you know, you're looking at the, the supernatural goofy thing, but you know, even the tiniest garden is this, it's a universe of fascinating details at any scale. You know, from flowers to insects to cells and, and molecules and, and the more you understand it, what's actually going on down there, the more amazing it becomes.

• 2:13:51Bob Novella?

  And it seems like they're really missing that. And you know, you don't need fairies.

• 2:13:54Speaker 04

  Not enough?

• 2:13:55Bob Novella?

  Yeah. You know, you don't need the fairies. The garden is already magical enough, you know, and look at that.

• 2:14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, Bob, you alluded to the flip side because we also get the, oh, why do you have to spoil the rainbow by explaining it in physics?

• 2:14:08Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:14:09Speaker 02

  Adding magic doesn't make it better, doesn't make it better, and adding science does freaking make it better. It doesn't take away from the emotional beauty of something. It just adds more layers.

• 2:14:21Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 2:14:22Speaker 05

  Knowing more about the things I'm looking at in the night sky, like, the more I know, the more I love looking at the night sky, you know?

• 2:14:27Speaker 02

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 2:14:29Bob Novella?

  Here, here.

• 2:14:30Speaker 02

  All right. Well, thank you all for joining me, and thank you, George and Andrea, for filling in.

• 2:14:36Bob Novella?

  Thank you.

• 2:14:37Speaker 05

  Thank you, Steve. Thanks for having us.

• 2:14:39Speaker 02

  Looking forward to seeing all you guys in Australia and New Zealand.

• 2:14:41Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 2:14:42Speaker 05

  And LA.

• 2:14:43Speaker 02

  It's gonna be a lot of fun. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. 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.

• 2:15:22Speaker 07

  This is Jason Timp from Hoops Tonight with Jason Timp. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which can mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today, great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.