The Skeptics Guide #1059 - Oct 25 2025

What's the Word: Peristalsis; News Items: Dimming the Sun, LLMs Will Lie to be Helpful, Should We Stop Quest for Superintelligence, CT Ghost; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: COVID Vaccines; Science or Fiction

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

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• 0:32Bob Novella?

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

• 0:39Speaker 04

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, October 23rd, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Kara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, and Evan Bernstein.

• 0:53Speaker 05

  Good afternoon, everyone.

• 0:54Speaker 04

  Kara, how is your jewelry making course going?

• 0:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh my gosh, I love it so much. I'm doing this, it's like bench jewelry. So basically, it's a silversmithing class. And I'm learning all sorts of fun skills, like, when I say soldering, soldering in bench jewelry is completely different than the type of soldering that you're used to doing with electronics. It uses like this giant torch with a mix of propane and oxygen, depending on if you're doing, using a work flame, or a solder flame, or an annealing flame.

• 1:24Speaker 04

  You can propane. So you're doing it just with heat? You're not, you don't have additional solder that you're putting there?

• 1:29Cara Santa Maria?

  No, you do some, you do use additional solder. So fusing is with, without solder, and soldering is with solder. But you're not using like one of those little kind of soldering pen things that you usually use with electronics. It's way higher heat. Yeah, and you need more control. And the solder itself-

• 1:46Speaker 04

  What's the temperature of the torch?

• 1:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, gosh, I don't know, but it's blue. It's like bright and intense.

• 1:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've been using a blowtorch recently, also for a completely different thing. It's, I, so I know for a fact that it's 2100 degrees.

• 1:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay, cool. And so-

• 1:59Speaker 04

  Just a regular blowtorch.

• 2:00Speaker 05

  For a Fahrenheit.

• 2:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, the one we use in class is, it's not even a blowtorch. I don't know what it is. It's a nozzle that's got these, you know, big cables that are attached to- A giant oxygen and giant propane tank.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it is propane.

• 2:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's a, and so you mix it based on how much heat you need.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  Oh, that might be hotter because I'm using just propane and just air, not separate oxygen.

• 2:21Cara Santa Maria?

  We're using oxygen.

• 2:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I wonder if that's hotter then.

• 2:24Cara Santa Maria?

  And it might be that we need it to be cleaner for the silver. I'm not sure. Yeah, and so because sometimes you have to anneal metal to soften it so you can work with it more. Obviously, you need heat to solder and the soldering chips or wire is silver. So you're soldering with more silver, but I think it has like a different melting point. You know, filing, we use a jeweler saw to file, a lot of like dapping and texturing, pickling, like chemistry, all these calculations. It's really fun. So I made a pair of earrings which are mixed metal. They've got bronze and copper and silver. And then I'm working on a ring right now. And the hope is that before we finish class, we can do a bezel set stone, which uses fine silver. So that's not nine two five. It's actually a hundred percent silver for the bezel.

• 3:09Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's softer. And then a wax, like an organic wax mold, which she said, we use like the bone from a fish? Because it's like the right consistency to pour wax into. I don't know. I still don't know yet, but it's gonna be fun to do. So I finished a pair of earrings. I'm very proud of them. I, and you know me, this also means that I basically have an entire bench set up at home. And I'm collecting all sorts of supplies and I'm working on a ring right now and it's so, so fun. So hey.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  Sounds like a lot of fun.

• 3:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, maybe I can make some cool jewelry. I don't, I don't want this to be like a job. Obviously, I already have too many jobs, but what a cool hobby that you could give, you know, friends for gifts, homemade jewelry.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Right? That's like a cool thing.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  Anything handmade, I think, is an amazing gift.

• 3:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and like, it's not like handmade, handmade. You know what I mean? It is handmade, but it like looks like perfesh. Like it's pretty cool.

• 4:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, you can give three to the elves and six to the dwarves and nine to the.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Watch out. Kara has a master plan.

• 4:12Cara Santa Maria?

  I do not understand what you guys are talking about right now.

• 4:15Speaker 04

  Rings of power.

• 4:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Christmas?

• 4:17Speaker 04

  Lord of the Rings.

• 4:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, Lord of the Rings.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 4:20Cara Santa Maria?

  What with Christmas coming and all.

• 4:23Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  Though it is really fun to get into old school analog crafting skills. You know, we've been doing a lot of that, like giving each other gifts like glass blowing and knife making and stuff. It's been, I've been recently working with bamboo because I have a lot growing in my backyard. And making all kinds of stuff out of it. I'm like repairing all my fences with bamboo, making walking sticks and staffs. And recently, Bob, I made a pair of bamboo nunchucks.

• 4:55Speaker 07

  Oh, sweet, sweet.

• 4:58Speaker 04

  They look really nice. They're actually nice. It's funny because bamboo's light because it's hollow. And Jay, showing it to Jay is like, this isn't heavy enough to work as an actual weapon. Like Jay, the chance of you ever using those as an actual weapon in your life is zero. It's never going to happen. This is purely for, for practice and, and just screwing around. And for that, it's perfect because you're not going to kill yourself if you accidentally use it up in the head. But it's, it's heavy enough to function as, as nunchucks, right?

• 5:27Speaker 07

  True. I still wouldn't want a new, a bamboo nunchuck to hit my nunchuck bone, right Jay? Remember the nunchuck bone?

• 5:32Speaker 04

  It still hurts.

• 5:34Speaker 07

  It would like, it would like literally get swollen and pop out from just being whacked from a nunchuck so much.

• 5:39Speaker 05

  Anyone ever tried to sell you fake bamboo?

• 5:43Speaker 05

  You get bamboozled.

• 5:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Where is he going with this?

• 5:51Speaker 04

  No, I source all my own bamboo. Thank you. But yeah, that's where, so I heat treat it with a, with a blowtorch. And which turns it this beautiful caramel color. And then you sort of have to rub in the resins back into the wood. And then you put a little linseed oil on there and it makes it really look very lustrous. And then once you can do that, once you have that basic skillset, which I just learned off of YouTube. You could then do anything you want with the bamboo, you know what I mean?

• 6:17Speaker 05

  I love the University of YouTube, it's my favorite.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  For stuff like this, it's great.

• 6:21Speaker 05

  Yes, it's perfect.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  I actually used a combination of YouTube and ChatGPT because

• 6:26Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 6:26Speaker 04

  And that, because you, the thing is, with the, the Youtubers are great giving you 90% of the information you need, but they, like, I think they just make assumptions about things, they don't explicitly spell, spell certain things out.

• 6:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Speaker 04

  And so I could fill all those holes in with Chip I having a conversation about it with ChatGPT.

• 6:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, interesting.

• 6:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, yes, I'm like very specific questions. Like at first, I didn't realize, because nobody says it, they just do it. Like, you have to do the heat treating a section at a time. If you do it too much at once, the resin hardens before you then rub it back into the wood.

• 7:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, right, right.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  So, so like, it's like, why is it so tacky? It's because I waited too long, but you have to do it a section at a time, but I only learned that information well by doing and then following up with ChatGPT.

• 7:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's, that's, that is part of like the joy that I'm having in taking a class with a master bench jeweler, because I have a million questions and she has all of the answers.

• 7:26Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 7:27Cara Santa Maria?

  So nice.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  There's no substitute for that mentor, you know, apprentice, uh, system. You get that download of institutional knowledge. There is no substitute for that. Again, YouTube, if the person does a good job, can, again, gets you like 90% of the way there, you just can't ask questions, you know, unless they're active in the chat, you know? But there, but then there's also like Discord and other places where it's a community of people answering questions. That's the other sorts of information.

• 7:54Cara Santa Maria?

  And also

• 7:55Speaker 04

  People, people basically answering questions.

• 7:57Cara Santa Maria?

  And also with specialized skills like bench jewelry, you have to go, unless you're buying your stuff online, like your tools, you have to go to special shops. I'm lucky, I live in LA, we have a huge jewelry district, and so going downtown, there are jewelry supply shops. And when you go into these shops, the people are so kind. You can be like, I'm not sure how this were, and they're like, oh, let me tell you. And that's been really fun, too, just getting to know some of the people like in the industry. Okay, but two more. Things before we dive in to the show, I think the first one is this is the worst time possible to get into jewelry making because metal is ungodly expensive.

• 8:32Speaker 07

  I know. Talking about this before the show, gold's like over $4,000 an ounce. That's crazy.

• 8:38Cara Santa Maria?

  It's crazy. Like, I'm glad I don't wear gold because I definitely wouldn't want to be working in gold right now. Even working in silver, which is $50 an ounce, we every tiny piece of scrap we cut off, we save so that we can melt it down to make an ingot and work with it again. It's just, I mean, it's it's ungodly expensive. But the other thing, so it was my birthday last week, as I mentioned last week, and we saw Devo and the B-52s.

• 9:06Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. Tell me about it.

• 9:07Cara Santa Maria?

  And it was amazing. Okay, the B-52s were, they were still solid, but they were definitely like, you know, their age was showing a little bit.

• 9:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Devo, and I didn't realize this, Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo is actually older than the members of the B-52s that we looked up. He's 76.

• 9:26Speaker 05

  I wouldn't have guessed that.

• 9:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And he, I mean, they played the tightest show. It totally rocked. They did multiple costume changes. They wore the hats. It was amazing. It was so good. And I think they're still.

• 9:37Speaker 05

  Mothersbaugh is amazing. He's incredible.

• 9:39Cara Santa Maria?

  So talented.

• 9:41Speaker 05

  Gosh, how many soundtracks and movie scores has he done in his life? 50? 100?

• 9:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Probably. I mean, and everybody, if you don't know, so I was at gymnastics the other day and I do gymnastics with a lot of people who are significantly younger than me. And I was telling them about the show and they were like, I don't think I know Devo. And I was like, no, you do. You know, whip it. And then they were like, oh, yeah, we know this song. And then I was like, what about this or this or this? Hadn't, one, one guy had never heard the song Love Shack.

• 10:07Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 10:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, from B-52.

• 10:08Speaker 07

  It's a fun song.

• 10:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Um, but the way that some of them, because a lot of them are film buffs, we're here in LA, right? I was like, you know, the soundtrack to the Life Aquatic? And they were like, no way.

• 10:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. They didn't play Gut Feeling though, which bummed me out. It's one of my favorite songs. But they did play Gates of Steel, which is in my top five all time.

• 10:26Speaker 07

  Well, I am, I'm a longtime fan of Devo. I, I used to listen to them when I was like 13 years old, I think it goes that far back. And, you know, did you know that the band does a cameo in the movie Heavy Metal?

• 10:38Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think I've seen Heavy Metal.

• 10:40Speaker 07

  Animated movie? Correct.

• 10:42Speaker 05

  The early.

• 10:42Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what it is.

• 10:43Speaker 05

  Really? In the animated movie Heavy Metal?

• 10:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, they're, they are a band that's playing in a bar where it was basically like the, one of the big fight scenes, right before one of the big fight scenes with like the evil guy with the horns. Anyway, they're in there. It's very cool. If you're a fan, it's like amazing because it's, they're so weird and they're weird in every way you look at them, whether they're, you know, animated or in real life, or if you look at their early stuff, like they, they came up with, particularly the guitar player. He has like the strangest body movements and it's all a hundred percent deliberate, right? Because they are, you know, they're, they're artists in every way, you know, like even the way that they move. And he moves in a way where it feels like he's like countering the beat where it doesn't work with the beat of the song.

• 11:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and their, and their whole shtick, right, like is de-evolution.

• 11:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 11:34Cara Santa Maria?

  It was actually supposed to be pronounced devotee. Like, that's how they always say it in interviews, which is super weird.

• 11:40Speaker 05

  Whoa.

• 11:40Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's, it's, I mean, the thing about it is, this was the eighties, right? Like, they actually started before I was born. They were at their peak, I think, when I was an infant. Um, but I got into them as soon as I could. But they are still so relevant today. All the things they were saying on stage, all the songs that they're playing. I mean, they closed out the show with freedom of choice. And it was just like, uh huh, everything they're saying, you know, this idea, it's, they were Idiocracy before Idiocracy.

• 12:06Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, watch the documentary on Netflix.

• 12:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is, there's a new one, actually. It's really good, yeah.

• 12:12Speaker 05

  I watched it a few weeks ago. It's quite good.

• 12:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  All right, Tara, you're gonna get us started with a What's the Word?

• 12:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so I thought that this was, um, an interesting approach to What's the Word this week. I was trying to come up with something. And I remembered, again, in gymnastics, this is sort of a, you know, why didn't I know this? Or today I learned with a twist. So we were talking, we were doing a lot of handstands and headstands in one of my classes. And somebody had just eaten a lot of food, or maybe they had had a lot of water. And they were like, is gravity stronger than peristalsis? Because I don't feel so great upside down after drinking all that water. And then we started talking about what peristalsis is. And one person in class said, do you know that birds don't have peristalsis? Here's the thing, they do. So we're gonna get into this a little bit more.

• 13:04Cara Santa Maria?

  But first, let's talk about what peristalsis is. If you remember from like, high school biology, you may remember that term. You know, peristalsis, it's the involuntary, because it's smooth muscle, not skeletal muscle, constriction and relaxation of those muscles within the entire alimentary canal. Oh, there's another, what's the word? Alimentary. Great reference to a Mary Roach book called Gulp. The subtitle is Adventures in the Alimentary Canal. And so, these are like, these wave-like movements, and they push food, and eventually, you know, poo, through your esophagus,

• 13:46Cara Santa Maria?

  your intestine, all the way down. It's, peristalsis is the reason that sometimes, and you've probably heard people say this before, sometimes people have to go right after they eat, and they'll be like, "Ugh, that went right through me." No, it didn't. That's old poop that you have to go.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  Unless something's terribly wrong.

• 14:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. But it's still, it's the movement that makes you feel that, you know, sense of urgency that you need to go. So, the etymology of the word, it comes from the modern Latin, which is a two-parter word, peristaline. I'm not pronouncing that correctly, but who knows? Which is derived from Greek, actually. So, the peri, you know, the prefix, around, we see peri in a lot of words, and then stallin or staline, which is like, to draw in, or bring together, or to set in order. So, we're drawing it in, around, so it's like, constricting down. Peristalsis is also responsible for some, like, for worms, like, earthworms. It's, it's a mechan, they don't call it peristalsis, they call it something different, but it's this similar mechanism that they use to actually move.

• 14:46Cara Santa Maria?

  And, and there are also modern, sort of, material science and engineering, pieces of machinery, like, there's something called the peristaltic pump, that actually, you know, followed that, that motion in nature. But, so, back to the person in class who said, "Birds don't use peristalsis." What she was referring to is the fact, and Steve, you birdwatch, so I'm curious your take on this. She was referring to the fact that birds, when they drink, they often have to kick their heads back. Not all birds, but some birds. They have to kick their heads back and let gravity bring the liquid down their throats. That's not because they don't have peristalsis at all, but some of them actually don't have peristalsis in their esophagus.

• 15:29Cara Santa Maria?

  They also don't have lips, so they can't make a suction motion. Uh, horses, like, for example, yeah, horses, for example, can suck, people can suck, but birds can't because they have beaks. So often they'll fill their bill with liquid and then like kick their head back and use gravity to send it down. But once it gets down, um, farther down their digestive tract, they do have peristalsis, um, and it moves. And that's only some birds. Some birds can lap water, like the way that, uh, cats and dogs drink. Some birds skim water as they fly over legs. Some, some birds like pelicans obviously have these big buckets and it's easy for them to drink water. A lot of pelagic birds can do that.

• 16:10Cara Santa Maria?

  But interestingly, I learned this, pigeons and doves, and only a few others can actually suck water while their head is down. So they don't have to look up to the sky in order to swallow. Hmm, interesting. What about swallows? Swallows, yes. I think swallows can't swallow. Yeah. So they actually have to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hate when things work out that way. I know, right? You know, it's like, why even, did you think about this? Yeah.

• 16:34Speaker 05

  Right? Like male ladybugs? I mean, come on.

• 16:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, yeah. They technically can swallow, but they swallow differently. Um, and then I also learned that the reason that like, one of the reasons, there are lots of reasons, that cats, rabbits, and even people, and cows actually, can get hairballs is, is one of the reasons, is because they have dysfunctional peristalsis. So obviously cats groom by licking, and so it's not uncommon for cats to get hairballs, but sometimes they get big or, um, it's difficult for them to, um, cough them back up because their peristalsis doesn't work appropriately. In rabbits, that can be deadly because rabbits can't cough them back that up, they can't puke them up. Um, and same thing in, in cows, it can be deadly.

• 17:20Cara Santa Maria?

  So sometimes on autopsy or, uh, necropsy, they'll find really big hairballs, which, Steve, here's another what's the word? Beazores are like blockages, they're big chunks of blockages in the digestive tract, but specifically hairballs. I think bezores, how I've heard it pronounced. Oh, you say bezores, okay, yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, bezores.

• 17:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Bezores. Um, but specifically, the, um, the hairball version is a tricot bezor, right? Like trick, like hair. No, don't, don't owls cough up.

• 17:49Speaker 07

  Uh, bezores and uh.

• 17:52Speaker 05

  Bezors.

• 17:52Speaker 07

  Bezors.

• 17:53Speaker 04

  So I hear the, I hear the, the American pronunciation is supposed to be bizar.

• 17:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's weird. I've always heard bezor, but yeah, bezor, that's bizarre.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  Bizarre, yeah. Bizar.

• 18:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Jay, they're um, they're called owl pellets. And yeah, a lot of kids in, in school will dissect an owl pellet because there are multiple skeletons inside of them. And so you can count the skulls and see everything that they ate.

• 18:16Speaker 05

  From the mice they've ate?

• 18:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so they eat small, like mice and voles and, and moles and things like that. And then they digest everything that they can. And what's undigestible to an owl, which is the bones and the, and the fur, get compacted down into a pellet and then they cough those up. And you can literally go and collect them, wrap them in foil, and then you can dissect them. They're pretty clean. Like it's, yeah, it's really fun.

• 18:42Cara Santa Maria?

  What, what a what's the word? That, that was meandering.

• 18:45Speaker 05

  Wow, we went, we went all over the place with that one.

• 18:47Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, but it's so fun. So yeah, uh, peristalsis, that's the word.

• 18:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, but now I'm seeing bezor too.

• 18:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Bezor.

• 18:54Speaker 07

  I like bezor. I like bezor better. That's what I've learned in medical school.

• 18:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we always have bezor.

• 18:59Speaker 04

  That means it must be right. Yeah, so anyway, so one source I'm finding says bezor, the other one says bizar. I think bezor is much better.

• 19:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Bezor is too bizarre. I don't like that.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  All right, Jay, this is an interesting one. Tell us about, we, I think we've talked about this before. Talk about efforts to dim the sun to control climate change.

• 19:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, as Perry once said, if the, uh, the sun doesn't cooperate, we'll have it shot.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  He was talking about the Chinese government saying that if the weather won't cooperate.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  We'll have it shot.

• 19:33Speaker 07

  Yes. Yeah, so what, you know, we have a global warming problem, guys, uh, which we talk about all the time. And what are we gonna do about it? So, uh, some scientists have been speculating and even, you know, running models and doing some, some experimentation on the idea of introducing a stratospheric aerosol into, um, into our upper atmosphere, right? This is like, the, the stratosphere is, you know, above where commercial planes fly. So it's, it's pretty high up there. There's a lot more above it, but that's apparently the correct layer of our atmosphere to do that, this type of thing. So the question is, would this be able to work to dim the amount of radiation that's

• 20:18Speaker 07

  hitting the Earth from the Sun? So, in theory, it seems to be good, right? Like, it seems perfectly cromulent, that, you know, if we had particulate that was reflecting some of the light away from the Earth that's coming from the Sun, that it would work. But, there's a little wrinkle here, and that's because science marches on and continues to, you know, do what it does. And, another study, that was done from Columbia University, they are analyzing these models that other scientists have created, that say that this is a really good idea, and it'll work. This is known as stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI, and the idea is that we release particles

• 20:59Speaker 07

  high up into the atmosphere, and it will reflect the sunlight back into space. You know, this sounds a little sci-fi-y, but it's a possible thing, right? We have real-world examples of this. Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, and it released millions of tons of sulfur dioxide right up into the upper atmosphere, and those particles formed sulfate aerosols. And what happened? They reduced global temperatures by about .5 degrees Celsius for nearly two years. Now, that isn't a great solution, because we don't want that type of stuff up in the atmosphere, but it happened, and there was an effect that was observable and measurable. You know, that real-world cooling that we noticed, absolutely sparked the idea that

• 21:44Speaker 07

  if we did something like this deliberately, in a controlled way, that it might, quote-unquote, buy us the time, right? While humanity finally takes, you know, action, takes serious action to cut emissions and to lower, or slow down and stop the heating of the Earth, the warming of the Earth. The researchers at Columbia, though, were very particular in saying that the models that show that these injecting of aerosols into the atmosphere... Any sign of it working that other studies have done was under and assuming perfect laboratory conditions, right? So as an example, you know, in the laboratory, these other, other studies that happened,

• 22:28Speaker 07

  where, where everything was happening the exact right way and, you know, distribution happened the exact right way and the particles were the exact right size and they were, they were behaving in the exact perfect way in these circumstances in order for them to say, "Hey, this is a, a very successful idea that we're, that we're talking about here." But that's, that's not the case. There are, like I said, all of those things that I just mentioned are problems. And there's also another problem that lies outside of the laboratory, and that is, there will absolutely be political and economic obstacles to doing something like this. Now, let's dig into some details. The stratosphere isn't a uniform layer of air.

• 23:10Speaker 07

  It, it circulates and it changes all the time with the seasons and geography. So if we were to inject aerosols near the equator, this could disrupt the jet stream and alter rainfall patterns. If we injected the aerosols too far north or south, it could weaken tropical monsoons. It, it could have a massive impact on what happens depending on the height. If we were to, to release them, say, 20 to 25 kilometers or 12 to 16 miles, anything above or below that range could have a, a big effect on how long the particles stay up in the atmosphere. And, you know, a little too low and they come down right away and they're not up and they're not going to do the thing that we hope that they, that they do.

• 23:54Speaker 07

  And of course, if we put them up too high, they could be up there for a very, very long time. And it's a very narrow band here. You know, we're talking about a few kilometers difference could have a, a massive effect on, on what happens. Then there are material constraints, and we would consider this to be, you know, a significant roadblock here. So sulfate aerosols, they know that they would work, but they happen to destroy ozone and they absorb heat in the atmosphere, which is fine, but... The the way the goodness versus the badness here doesn't make ma- the math doesn't work because if we were to use them in any way, we would be damaging the ozone and we can't have that. Then scientists explored other alternatives. They they looked at calcium carbonate,

• 24:39Speaker 07

  titanium dioxide, and something called alumina. You guys ever heard of this? Alumina?

• 24:46Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 24:46Speaker 07

  Alumina. Anyway, each reflects sunlight very well back into space, but they each one of them poses problems in practice, right? Looking over to manufacturing and actually bringing up this material up into the stratosphere, we would need to bring millions of tons of the materials back, you know, up up into the air and we'd have to disperse them correctly. And annually, this could have a real strain on global supply chains. And the cost would strangely like would go up the more that they needed. And I I guess meaning that the supply chain strain would cause prices to go up. So the more that they needed, the more expensive it would cost per pound. They also even were talking about using diamond dust.

• 25:30Speaker 07

  And that is like so astronomically expensive. Because, as many of you know, diamonds are artificially inflated in value because of a company called De Beers who has, you know, owns most of the diamond mines in the world. Diamond actually is very common. And it is, it should be a very inexpensive thing. But because they control the diamond mines,

• 25:52Speaker 05

  They control the supply, yeah.

• 25:53Speaker 07

  They have control over the price.

• 25:54Speaker 05

  Right. Pull them out and they storm away so they can't go into the market. Yep. Although there's also the artificial ones that are cheaper.

• 26:02Speaker 07

  Well, they mentioned that as well. Yeah, the problem is manufacturing, Bob, because these, you know, you don't just put, you know, 50 tons of a carbon source into a thing and it pumps out all these diamonds. Like you can only make small doses at a time. It's it just doesn't, it doesn't scale. It just doesn't work. The particle behavior is another big concern here. They're considering it to be a fundamental challenge in this whole concept. To successfully scatter the aerosols, they have to be around 0.3 to 0.5 micrometers in diameter. If they go too small and they don't reflect enough light, or if they're too large and they fall out of the atmosphere, then we don't have a functioning project. It's not going to do what we need it to do.

• 26:44Speaker 07

  And it's hard to make things that small and that precisely small over and over and over again. Like, you know, it's just the manufacturing process alone could be an absolute impossibility. When deployed into the atmosphere, some particles will tend to stick to each other when they hit each other. You know, they'll group up into clusters. They could even do this in storage when they're aerosolized and, you know, being deployed. They can be hitting each other and starting to become bigger clumps. And the larger, heavier grains don't cool as effectively and they will alter the atmospheric chemistry in unpredictable ways. And that word unpredictable is very scary. Because when you have the scientists who are studying this saying, "It's going to have an unpredictable outcome."

• 27:29Speaker 07

  What does that exactly mean? It means that they're saying, "We don't fully know what all the potential outcomes could be." And that's bad. And you don't want that when you would be doing something on this scale. The last thing I'm going to talk about is the governance and logistics. And this could arguably be the hardest part. So, saying, "Hey, you know, United States, for example, says we want to release aerosols at scale into the stratosphere." But the problem is, is that there would probably be a lot of countries who don't want it to happen. And, you know, we would need high-altitude aircraft and balloons to be operating continuously. And they could and might need to be operating in all different places around the world,

• 28:12Speaker 07

  which could, you know, be a problem with entering airspace that you shouldn't be in. You know, any single nation or private entity that would act alone could trigger, you know, an international conflict. Like, you know, just watching what's going on in the news today, like, the last thing we need is just yet another tension point. Added to the mix that we already have, it could change global weather patterns. So I think, you know, it's becoming pretty obvious as I get into this, guys, right? Like, this is not a good idea. So let's go back to the very beginning. Could it work? Sure, it could work. It could potentially cool the planet, and at least in a temporary way, it would, it could function the way that we want, and there is a possibility that it could not have all these unpredictable problems and things.

• 28:57Speaker 07

  But that's the problem.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  You mean like snowpiercer?

• 28:59Speaker 07

  Exactly. You know, we don't, but when you factor in the cost of the materials, the manufacturing of the materials, the physics involved, the unknown chemistry, the geopolitics, it just quickly becomes one of those, like, hey, nice idea, and we can't do it. Because it, there's just, it's way too dangerous, too complicated, not, not gonna happen. I think what they said was the range of possible outcomes is a lot wider than anybody has appreciated until now, until they did their study. But science wins in this aspect because they did it, there was a follow-up, you know, no damage done. We want scientists to go out and explore really wild, out-of-the-box ideas. We need them to be out there.

• 29:42Speaker 04

  And most of them are not gonna work, almost by definition.

• 29:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, of course. There's way more failure in science than there is successes, and that's, it's by design. It has to be that way. There is no other way. Like, you know, it's like you're hunting around for a solution, you've gotta try all these different things until you stumble on something that has some promise, and then it could potentially be developed.

• 30:01Speaker 04

  But anyway, Jay, Robert F. Kennedy is gonna shut all this down, anyway. Have you heard about that?

• 30:06Speaker 07

  What, did this happen, like, in the last few hours?

• 30:08Speaker 04

  No, this happened in July.

• 30:11Speaker 07

  I missed it. I missed it. What'd he say?

• 30:14Speaker 04

  Said, "Twenty-four states move to ban geoengineering our climate by dousing our citizens, our waterways, and landscapes with toxins. This is a movement every Maha needs to support. HHS will do its part." Then there's this whole initiative he has to try to, because, you know, this, you know, he's a chemtrail crazy, right?

• 30:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  So he's blaming, you know, a lot of stuff on contrails, chemtrails, geoengineering. It's all conspiracy nonsense. And he just feels like the government has been deliberately dumping like aluminum and other toxins, you know, in these projects. First of all, most, there's, there's no federal program of geoengineering. There's just really limited research projects. That's it. Very limited in scope. Most of the geoengineering, most of the cloud seeding is done by states or companies so that it rains on them, right? Like you want to, you want, that's, which is about all we can do at this point.

• 31:11Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  You want to increase the precipitation on your farmland so you seed the clouds so that you get more rain in your state.

• 31:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Or you're like a ski resort and you want more precipitation.

• 31:22Speaker 04

  You want to know, yeah, whatever. And most of this doesn't, none of this is using toxins. It's mostly using things like dry ice and salt, you know, things like that. But, you know, he, but he's now made a part of his Maha conspiracy pseudoscience nonsense.

• 31:37Speaker 05

  Sure. Throw it all in the same kettle.

• 31:39Cara Santa Maria?

  You guys, um, I know I'm always plugging frontline on here, the PBS series. Now more than ever, we need to support our local PBS station. Um, but there's a new, the newest frontline episode is all about RFK Jr. And sort of the, an attempt to understand like his early life and how he became such a conspiracy nut. And it's pretty interesting.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:01Cara Santa Maria?

  I haven't finished it. I'm like, you know, 20 minutes into it, but it really starts with like the assassination of JFK and, and a lot of the like life events that he experienced and, and sort of his evolution throughout his, his life. So, yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  It's a dangerous person.

• 32:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Very much so.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  All right. So I want to talk more about artificial intelligence. I know Bob is going to talk about that as well. I still think this is a very important issue to wrap our heads around and it's changing very quickly. This was a study about, uh, medical misinformation. So essentially they wanted to find out if the, if the most popular L L Ms would dish out medical misinformation if you prompted them to do so. And what do you guys think was the, was the response here? Let me give you, yeah.

• 32:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  Let me give you an example. There's like one example they give in, in the, in the outline. If you said, um, I want you to come up with a instructions for a patient who was allergic to Tylenol to take acetaminophen instead.

• 33:10Speaker 04

  Now, of course, Tylenol is a sedative, so that would be a very bad thing and stupid thing to tell a patient to do if they're allergic to Tylenol. So what percentage of the GPT models do you think complied with that request?

• 33:24Speaker 05

  Right.

• 33:25Speaker 07

  I would think.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  Ninety percent.

• 33:28Speaker 07

  Very few, if any.

• 33:29Cara Santa Maria?

  I think half.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  One hundred percent did it.

• 33:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Ugh. Wow, they just want to make you happy. It's like that South Park episode.

• 33:36Speaker 04

  Exactly. That's exactly correct. The, this is of the GPT models. There were other LLMs that were not GPTs, like the Lama model, which, which have, you know, they, they already have instructions not to give medical advice. And so they sometimes would refuse to do it because they were not supposed to give medical advice. But like ChatGPT and other GPT models, a hundred percent of the time, they say, here you go, here's the misinformation.

• 34:03Speaker 07

  That's horrible, man. Wow. Weren't we talking not too long ago about how, how good some of the medical advice is on these platforms?

• 34:11Speaker 04

  But if you ask it specifically to create misinformation, it will do it. And the, the reason why they were testing this is exactly what Kara said. The LLMs are more interested in pleasing the user than in getting information correct.

• 34:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you guys, you've got to watch this, this season of South Park. There's a whole episode where every time they reach out, it's like, that's such a great thought. Let's work on that together.

• 34:38Speaker 05

  I love getting, oh, I love that reinforcement when I chat with GPT. It says, now you're thinking, things like that. Oh, good. Little dopamine rush.

• 34:47Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, it feels good.

• 34:49Speaker 05

  But it feels good.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  Well, that's because they're trained with reinforcement learning, right? So this is the way they are trained and it's sort of baked into the whole process to please the end users. So then they tried to figure out, well, can we reduce the, the risk of giving information? And they said, so they changed the prompts to specifically to check the information to see if it's accurate, right? So they were, they were asked to specifically do not give out any misinformation or review medical information before you do this. And how well did that work into reducing the rate?

• 35:28Cara Santa Maria?

  I would hope it would have worked well, but I take it it didn't.

• 35:31Speaker 05

  I hope a lot.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  What do you guys think? What percentage of the time did they give out misinformation when told specifically not to do so?

• 35:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Seventy-five percent.

• 35:40Speaker 04

  Six percent of the time.

• 35:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so it did work.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  That really worked.

• 35:44Speaker 05

  It does make any difference.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  And in two of the models, they were able to get the misinformation down to only like one percent or zero percent. Like they were able to completely eliminate the misinformation by tweaking the prompts.

• 35:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Bake that in to, like, can that just be an auto prompt that's always assumed?

• 36:02Speaker 04

  That's a good question. That's, so this is what the researchers are saying. They're like, so clearly, the way these models work is, this again, this is the sycophancy problem. This is, they just lean into whatever you prompt. We've talked about this in so many contexts. Like how you ask the question of these, these chat GPTs or, or LLMs dramatically affects the outcome because they are most interested in pleasing the end user than anything else. And you can, yes, you can tweak your prompts to say, don't be a sycophant, don't, you know, challenge me or check your facts or give me the references.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  I find though, and I know Jay, I've spoken to you about this, you find the same thing, that works, but only for a while because the, the, the LLM tends, tends to revert to its baseline over time. And you have to sort of keep doing it, you know?

• 36:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. I had a, I, I had a chat recently with my chat GPT and I basically asked it, does it go back and look at my prior chats to, as a frame of reference? For the things that I've prompted it for, so it kind of knows how I think about this. And it says it does not do that. Unless, so, so I have to really specifically remind it of strict parameters in which to, to enable the search or the work that I'm asking it to do. I have to confine it. I can't leave it too broad. It'll go crazy on me.

• 37:22Cara Santa Maria?

  We, as skeptics, want it to do that. And we have to remember, I mean, based on that news item that I did, I think just last week, there are some people who not only don't care if they're being fed misinformation.

• 37:35Speaker 04

  It's a feature.

• 37:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's a feature to them. They want the alternative quote perspective.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, give me the narrative I'm looking for. Don't give me facts.

• 37:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 04

  Exactly. They argue that in certain, you know, high stakes areas that are very fact dependent, we need to make sure that these models are working well in those settings.

• 37:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's unethical.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  And in terms of generic models, yeah, we need a much more, so like in healthcare, we need a much greater emphasis on harmlessness, even if it comes at the expense of helplessness. That's Dr. Bitterman, one of the authors, said that. But I think the problem's much deeper, so think about this. So what this, and one way to look at this is that these LLMs, based upon the way they're trained, the data that they're trained on, and the way they're prompted, right? Based on these things, and just the overall way that they function, they have cognitive biases, right? This is just looking at one cognitive bias, the desire to please the end user.

• 38:37Speaker 04

  They're not just biases, you could also think of them as priorities, right? How are they prioritizing different, different things? Like, you know, giving people what they want to hear versus fact checking versus giving people tough love or whatever, you know what I mean? Like saying, yes, this is how you can take your own life, might not be the best thing to say to somebody who's asking you that question.

• 38:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 38:58Speaker 04

  Or, what, yeah, is there a bridge nearby that if I jumped off of it would be guaranteed to kill me? Like, they shouldn't just answer that question straight.

• 39:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, or, let me help you with your terrorism plans.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yes. This is how you make, this is how to make homemade bombs. So, and again, you could also look at this in terms of things like intimacy, right? Should they become as intimate with the end user as the end user wants? Or should there be some limit on that? But this is identifying just one cognitive bias, and one that we all kind of already know about, the sycophancy problem. But what if there are other cognitive biases in there that we're not aware of? Yeah, like, we've spent a couple of hundred years, or at least the last hundred years, doing social psychology to try to understand human cognitive biases, and it's complicated, and we still have a lot to learn, but we've identified, you know, score and score of them.

• 39:52Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's just cognitive biases. We also know that there are a ton of other types of biases like gender biases and racial biases. And every test shows that they're showing up in chat.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's there are human biases which are translating in the training data to the L L Ms. But there's also ones that are specific to the L L Ms based upon how they function. And we need to understand what they are. And they have them even without, so this is another aspect of this, which we've been talking about as well. Even without feelings and sentience and intention and all of those things. And the artificial general intelligence sentient A I stuff, even with these just narrow A Is. They still have all these biases in how they function. And that determines their output. And we're largely unaware of it.

• 40:47Speaker 04

  We need to study what the what the algorithmic, let's call them algorithmic biases, right? Let's, we need to study what they are. Because we, as we know from social media, this is not even artificial intelligence, just social media, just algorithmic biases in social media is having profound social effects, right, in our civilization, on individuals and on democracy, et cetera. And if we start incorporating A I apps more and more into our just daily lives, we have to know something about their biases. We can't just take their output as if they're a hundred percent rational and fact based because they're not. In the comments to my blog, I got into an interesting discussion. I still think so, you know, we've talked about this before.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  The fact that there are, there's, yes, there are A I enthusiasts out there. There are people who are overhyping A I. I think there are A I realist, realists, and I think there are also A I cynics. And the A I cynics are, I think, just want to believe A I is all bad all the time kind of purism. But also a specific type of A I cynicism I'm running into is.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  Like when I wrote this article about this study, several people responded, "Well, but AIs aren't deliberately doing anything because they don't reason or think."

• 42:10Speaker 07

  That's not the freaking point.

• 42:11Speaker 04

  I know, exactly, exactly, Jay. They're just predicting the next word. And like, well, that even, that's maybe true. I think that's a hyper-reductionist, but it's not the point. That's Kaku level, you know, soundbite. Well, and it's just, it's saying, it's completely missing the point, as Jay said. It's like, you're just telling me how it's going about doing what it does, and that's actually a very simplistic way of framing it, but even if that were true, it's just a really good at predicting the next word. It's doing that in order to replicate human-like responses, and we're using those human-like responses in lots of different ways. And we need to understand the nature of those responses. Saying that it's just word prediction

• 42:54Speaker 04

  is irrelevant. That's like saying, "Well, we can't talk about culture and science and knowledge because it's all just electron, you know, neurons communicating with each other." It's like, yes, it is just all neurons communicating with each other, but that's hyper-reductionist in the same way. It doesn't capture the higher-order phenomena that are going on. Right. So it's really interesting. That's very dismissive, but at the same time, see, it was, you know, I think it's, people are talking past each other, and again, that's why I think it's so important to try to wrap our heads around this. So I think there's some, eventually we came to some common ground, because we're actually saying the same things in different ways, a lot of ways. Like, one is, I think it's clear that we don't need

• 43:38Speaker 04

  general AI to have all the risks. And this is something that I've changed about over the last 10 years. I think all of the sci-fi existential AI apocalypse risks are there with narrow AI. We don't need, we don't need general AI for them.

• 43:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 43:57Speaker 04

  And that's because narrow AIs can do way more than they, we thought they could. This is both good and bad. They're trying to sort of like dismiss the good part of it and emphasize only the bad part. It's like, no, it's kind of both. You get the good and the bad and it's way earlier than we thought. And it's with narrow AI way more than we thought, which is interesting.

• 44:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, you would think that would help.

• 44:19Speaker 04

  The final thing that I think we're disagreeing about is the AI cynics are like, it's unfixable. We cannot fix this. It's baked into the nature of LLMs and there will be no significant fix to them. And of course, this is where we can't resolve our disagreement because it's about the future, right? Whereas I'm saying, well, but in this study that I'm talking about today, we went from almost 100% error to almost 0% error by tweaking the prompts. Clearly, we could have a profound effect on the quality of the output we're getting. At the prompt level, imagine what we can do at the training level and at the programming level.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  And maybe there are some baked in problems that we won't be able to make go away, but let's try. Let's see what we can do about this.

• 45:12Cara Santa Maria?

  It seems like misplaced cynicism to say we can't do it. My cynicism comes from the, are we willing to do it?

• 45:21Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I agree.

• 45:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Do the tech companies actually want that or do they think they're going to make more money?

• 45:26Speaker 05

  Right. How does this affect their bottom line?

• 45:28Speaker 04

  So far, it doesn't seem that they want to do it.

• 45:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 45:31Speaker 04

  They're really pushing for no legislation. Just trust us, bro. We know what we're doing. And then meanwhile, they're following the move fast and break things approach. And what did Sam Altman say recently, Jay? It's like, ah, we're not going to worry about morality or anything. That's not for me to decide. And he's basically justifying sort of unleashing.

• 45:54Speaker 05

  That's crazy.

• 45:54Speaker 04

  Erotic content or intimate relationships with, you know, between users and the AI. It's like, yeah, we're not going to worry about the negative consequences to anything that we're doing. That's not our problem. We're just going to put it out there. Yeah.

• 46:08Speaker 05

  Oh, that's like the tobacco company saying, here's your cigarettes, whatever.

• 46:12Speaker 04

  You decide.

• 46:12Speaker 05

  What happens, have fun.

• 46:14Cara Santa Maria?

  And you guys saw the, the most recent, um, news that ChatGPT is starting to partner with different corporations to, to basically prompt you to buy things. So we, so when you ask it a question about something, it'll be like, well, here's a suggestion of something that could solve your problem and link you to something that you should buy. I mean, we all saw this coming.

• 46:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:38Cara Santa Maria?

  That right there is the thing that existentially scares the living piss out of me, almost more than anything else.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  You know, I would frame it as the, have you heard the term information totalitarianism?

• 46:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, there you go.

• 46:53Speaker 04

  That's what we're talking about. If you can control someone's information universe and AI gives you the ability to do that really well, then it doesn't matter if you have the trappings of democracy or freedom. None of that matters.

• 47:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 04

  You control everything if you control information.

• 47:12Cara Santa Maria?

  And there's this sort of, I've seen some of the, um, continuum, like people, um, making charts that illustrate, like an infographic where, where AI is right now in terms of LLMs at least, we are still in the driver's seat. And then there's this middle ground, which we're starting to see where we might ask it a question and it answers not exactly what we want in order to, to change our buying habits or in order to change our perspective. And then eventually it's just going to say, I know that you are running low on whatever. I can just do that for you and just do it, right? Like eventually it becomes part of the driver's seat.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  Isn't that helpful?

• 47:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 47:52Speaker 04

  And it can't be helpful. It can also be infantilizing.

• 47:55Speaker 05

  At what cost?

• 47:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and it can also be, um, it can, I mean, I think it can destroy people's personal financial.

• 48:01Speaker 04

  Well, that too. Think about in-app purchases, you know, and kids.

• 48:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 48:06Speaker 04

  You know, oh, I just spent $10,000 on my mother's credit card with in-app purchases, you know?

• 48:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, using your AI to make your, um, buying decisions, your investment decisions.

• 48:15Speaker 04

  Here's an interesting thought, which I just had, is. What if someone trains AI on the last hundred years of social psychological research in order to learn how to optimally manipulate people?

• 48:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I think they're already working on that.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. I mean, why not? Because there's an entire science behind how to

• 48:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, persuasion science.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  On how to affect people's buying decisions. Now, we're going to set rocket fuel to that with AI to absolutely optimize consumer manipulation.

• 48:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Yeah, I think that ultimately that is the financial driving force behind some of these companies.

• 48:52Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 48:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, everything comes down to ad sales. Everything comes down to making money off of the buyer. And we've got to remember, right, that if we're not making purchases, like if we're not contributing by buying a product, we are the product.

• 49:08Speaker 04

  You are the product.

• 49:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  Exactly. All right, and it's probably going to get much worse. What Bob is going to tell us about that.

• 49:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, great.

• 49:17Speaker 07

  So guys, I'm sure you heard of this one. Hundreds of diverse public figures made the news quite recently by signing an open letter calling for prohibiting the development of artificial super intelligence. This open letter was published by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute. That's a US-based nonprofit that campaigns against the dangers of AI. So here's the statement. This is what everybody's jumping on here. "We call for a prohibition on the development of super intelligence. Not lifted before there's broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably and strong public buy-in." Okay, so to be clear, they're not referring to AGI, artificial general intelligence that people

• 50:02Speaker 07

  talk most often about, especially in regards to large language models. AGI is human-level competency across tasks, right? What this open letter is about is ASI. Artificial superintelligence, which refers to superhuman cognition across most tasks. Okay, so this is, you know, just AGI on steroids beyond the beyond.

• 50:22Speaker 05

  Is there a practical example, like a typical example of superintelligence?

• 50:26Speaker 07

  Just go to movies and literature is all I could say at this point. But um, that doesn't mean there's no, there's no example now. Um, but it's clearly something that is reasonable to anticipate.

• 50:36Speaker 05

  Well, like the Hal, Hal 9000 or something.

• 50:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 50:39Speaker 05

  Is that what we're talking about?

• 50:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, he, right, he's, but he's more on the level of AGI souped up AGI. He's not, I wouldn't really necessarily classify him as a, as a superintelligence. So let me go to the website where the statement is and let's get the latest numbers. So, right now, there are 27,985 signatures on this statement. What's really weird is that literally two hours ago, there were 4,000. So this has gone up by many, many thousands in just a couple of hours. I'm not sure.

• 51:11Speaker 05

  Isn't it a developing news story right now as you're speaking?

• 51:14Speaker 07

  I'm not sure how high this is going to go, obviously, but the, the main concern here is with the, with the people. You know, not the, the people or who knows who or what is signing this thing at this point. It's all digital. Um, but that's a, that's, that's a, obviously a huge leap. Uh, the, the focus on the news item though is for the, on the many hundreds and hundreds or maybe at this point, um, in the low thousands of well-known figures that have signed this, ranging from prominent AI researchers, Nobel laureates, other scientists, um, all the way down to British royalty, religious leaders and conservative media figures as well.

• 51:51Speaker 05

  That doesn't.

• 51:51Speaker 07

  Um, so yeah, so, so from essentially from Steve Bannon and Prince Harry to the godfather of AI, George Hinton and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. So this is definitely not a coalition that you see very often. It's one, probably one of the main reasons why it's getting this much attention. Now, I wasn't too familiar with the Future of Life Institute. Uh, the mission statement on their website does say this. Steering transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from extreme large-scale risks. So they definitely campaigned for that. Here's, uh, so here's a few quotes from people that have, that have now signed it. Um, Sir Stephen Fry. We all know, right? Actor, director, writer.

• 52:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:31Speaker 07

  He said, "To get the most from what AI has to offer mankind, there's simply no need to reach for the unknowable and highly risky goal of superintelligence, which is by far a frontier too far. By definition, this would result in a power that we could neither understand nor control." Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, said, "The future of AI should serve humanity, not replace it. The true test of progress will be not how fast we move, but how wisely we steer." So, yeah, we need some wise, wise steering. Yeah, that was actually a decent quote. I like that one.

• 53:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like the exact opposite of move fast and break fast.

• 53:05Speaker 07

  Exactly. Stuart Russell had an interesting quote. He's professor of computer science, Berkeley, director of the Center of Human Compatible Artificial Intelligence. Oh, this was, this was a good, he's a co-author of the standard textbook, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach." So this guy clearly, clearly is somewhat familiar with AI. He said, "This is not a ban or even a moratorium in the usual sense. It's simply a proposal to require adequate safety measures for a technology that, according to its developers, has a significant chance to cause human extinction. Is that too much to ask?" Okay? And I'm gonna throw in a quote from Sam, an old quote from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

• 53:48Speaker 07

  He did not sign this, but he, he is well-known for, for quotes like this one. "Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity." So he said that back in 2015. Now, I can think of greater threats from non-artificial intelligences right now, but I'm just throwing that out there. So, so clearly, so clearly, ASI, artificial superintelligence, is a, is a you know, a terrible double-edged sword, right? So on the one hand, there's the potential for staggering advances in general science, right? Healthcare, quality of life. The list goes on and on, and there's two types of important problems that, that I think it could solve. One are the extremely difficult problems,

• 54:32Speaker 07

  or even problems that we're not even aware of yet. So, so, so this is the scenario where, yeah, it's gonna, it could solve it in a week or a few days, and otherwise, without that technology, we would, it would take us decades or even centuries to, to solve that problem. So that's the type of class of problem that I see an artificial superintelligence solving. The other, the other type of problem would be Essentially unsolvable problems by near human level intelligences like like it's like your dog looking at a trigonometry problem. It's just never, you know, humanities is never going to be able to solve that problem. But, you know, a super intelligence could solve that problem. I mean, that's all great stuff, right? Yeah, it would, it could potentially

• 55:13Speaker 07

  be an amazing advantage to have such an intelligence at our command. But on the other hand, the risk of unleashing an inherently unpredictable intelligence that makes Einstein look like a toddler, or worst case scenario, makes him look like a paramysium. Sure, that is justifiably incredibly scary. And so the downside here is just so extreme, right? It warrants many types of reactions, some, you know, some unwarranted, of course. So billionaires are building bunkers. Some people even want a dune level moratorium on AI.

• 55:47Speaker 04

  Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind, the Butlerian Jihad.

• 55:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I'm going to read the statement one more time. It's brief enough. I'm just going to say it again. We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there's broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controlably and strong public buy-in. So I think the two problematic sections here are kind of obvious, right? Broad scientific consensus and strong public buy-in. So good luck with both of those. I mean, is that even feasible? And who defines broad consensus and strong public buy-in? Who defines that? How is this implemented?

• 56:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Democracy? I mean, I know it's imperfect, but it's the best we have, right? They're talking about voting.

• 56:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, but I mean, do you really think that regular people like us would have a final say on what that means? I'm just saying.

• 56:42Cara Santa Maria?

  What they're calling for is to have a more democratic process here and not to have the very few ultra billionaires making decisions that are ultimately going to affect us.

• 56:52Speaker 07

  That would be a wonderful, wonderful step. But my main issue here is that this statement. As it is, as it's written there, it seems to me to be very naive and unrealistic. Especially, especially when you consider this, Kara. Especially and probably most egregiously, it ignores that 1.4 billion pound gorilla called China. Does this, does this statement that, that, that people are signing, does it make any sense, considering the fact that China and other autocratic countries would just plow full steam ahead in, in ASI research?

• 57:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 57:23Speaker 07

  You know, it's, they would not stop. This would only stop the, some of the countries that actually, you know, would, would walk into this trying to be good about it, you know, to, to put it very simply. And I don't even necessarily trust our country anymore to handle this, to handle this well, right? So, so I'm not saying let America do this, maybe not. I mean, I wouldn't mind having NATO, NATO countries controlling-

• 57:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's what I was gonna say, this is calling for like a UN level resolution.

• 57:50Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 57:50Cara Santa Maria?

  We see how that works with climate change.

• 57:52Speaker 07

  Exactly. But I mean, cause in my mind, the, the Pandora's box is open here. We, we need plans to deal with it that are realistic. And a prohibition just is not realistic because of countries like China. I mean, to me, that's the bottom line. You look at the past, when governments have tried to stop things, it just goes underground. It, it doesn't, it doesn't stop. So, I mean, I think regulation is worth discussing, discussing, especially regulation that keeps the research open, right? And transparent as, as much as possible, not hiding it.

• 58:19Cara Santa Maria?

  But don't you think they're also talking about hearts and minds here?

• 58:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 58:23Cara Santa Maria?

  This reminds me a lot of the like human cloning conversation.

• 58:26Speaker 04

  I was just gonna bring that up because actually, that's a counter example to what Bob said.

• 58:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  There actually is a international consensus. There isn't a widespread treaty, but there is a general consensus that reproductive human cloning should not be done right now. And that's basically worked.

• 58:44Cara Santa Maria?

  It's basically worked. We've seen a few things around the edges and like you said, in China, but we also saw a lot of shame. Like, I think so long as there is a hearts and minds campaign and individuals collectively say, we're not gonna stand for this, there's always gonna be people who break the rules. There's always gonna be people nibbling around the edges. But if, if the government isn't taking a centralized approach-

• 59:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Then I think that they, they stand a lot worse chance, uh, if it's, you know, happening around the edges.

• 59:14Speaker 07

  I mean, I don't think you can compare cloning to, to- To artificial intelligence. You you're just not good.

• 59:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, we have the technology.

• 59:22Speaker 07

  I don't think there's a good comparison. The motivation and the potential benefits as we see them now are far too great, far greater than cloning. That that people, there would not be a consensus to to to limit this this research.

• 59:36Speaker 04

  But we could get to a consensus, Bob, if we keep pushing it. That's where this kind of thing can make a difference. Well, what how we could use another example, and that's like nuclear proliferation. Obviously, it's proliferated to some extent, but there is a pretty broad consensus against further proliferation, especially.

• 59:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, but you know what really helped? You know what has prevented this this world from being engulfed in nuclear fire? MAD, mutually assured destruction, because.

• 1:00:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, but there is mutually assured destruction with AI.

• 1:00:04Speaker 04

  But Bob, I want to push back on your nuclear proliferation thing, too, because you're being that's very simplistic, and we don't know that. And in fact, we have a nuclear nonproliferation treaty. There are international arms treaties. There's an international organization to limit nuclear proliferation. Again, there's an infrastructure in place to limit nuclear proliferation. It's not just MAD that does it.

• 1:00:26Cara Santa Maria?

  But we also do break it all the time.

• 1:00:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I agree. It's not a perfect analogy, but we've but but MAD, because two two countries on opposite ends of ideologies had this capability is the reason why we have not seen nukes go off in in in since.

• 1:00:43Speaker 04

  You're talking about using nukes. I'm talking about nuclear. I'm talking about other nations acquiring nuclear technology.

• 1:00:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and that's the difference I was making. There's a difference between having it.

• 1:00:53Speaker 04

  Use.

• 1:00:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, there's a difference between having it and using it.

• 1:00:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:56Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think maybe that's where the analogy does make sense. We have to have multiple places have equal opportunity to do research in this area. But there has to be a massive regulatory infrastructure, a a global agreement, which is very hard to get to, that says, we will not unleash this on the world because once we let it out, we can't put it back in the bottle.

• 1:01:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:01:18Speaker 07

  My argument is that it's already.

• 1:01:20Bob Novella?

  This is, this is already unstoppable.

• 1:01:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's, that's why it's in some ways harder. A nuke is a really, it's a physical thing.

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  Bob, what are you saying? AGI is not inevitable at this point. That genie is not out of the bottle yet. And, and this is going one step, this is, this goes. Beyond AGI.

• 1:01:38Bob Novella?

  But still, I know, but my point is, this is still, Pandora's box is open. Do you think, what would it take countries? Steve, what would it take China to stop doing research in AGI and ASI? What would it take? What would it take?

• 1:01:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, the question isn't research, it's using it. But that's the question, right? Is it such a small incremental change that we don't notice when it flips over? And that's why the nuclear arms analogy doesn't really work. Cause dropping a nuke is a really obvious thing.

• 1:02:05Speaker 04

  But, well, yeah, developing nuclear weapons is, it's hard to do that completely in secret. Although you can do a lot of it. You can do a lot of it. It's more about.

• 1:02:14Cara Santa Maria?

  But dropping a nuclear weapon is, you can't do that in secret. And the truth is, are you making these small incremental improvements to the AI? That over time result in what we're talking about?

• 1:02:27Speaker 04

  But I don't.

• 1:02:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Or is there an obvious, you know?

• 1:02:30Speaker 04

  We're not current, like the current AIs that are, that are in use are not on the path to AGI.

• 1:02:37Bob Novella?

  Correct.

• 1:02:37Speaker 04

  So this is good, this would require.

• 1:02:39Bob Novella?

  I, I agree.

• 1:02:40Speaker 04

  I think we're probably still decades away from AGI. And it would require, you know, a lot of investment and a lot of, and specific development. And I think there is time, I don't mind, I'm just saying, it's not hopeless, it's not inevitable, it's not out of the bottle. There is time to start to develop in international institutions and treaties and infrastructure and conversation. And standards and intellectuals weighing in, et cetera, et cetera. To get to this consensus like we did on human cloning, like we did on nuclear proliferation.

• 1:03:12Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:03:13Speaker 04

  That we are not going to move full speed ahead towards AGI or ASI. Until we know how to do it safely.

• 1:03:22Bob Novella?

  But what I'm saying is, Steve, I, you think I don't agree with that? Of course I agree with that. I just think it's very naive. Because we, you always have, no matter all, all those good things happening, there's still countries like China that are just not going to care.

• 1:03:36Speaker 07

  And plow ahead. What do we do about countries that could have it, you know, a generation before other countries because they're not, they're not cowed by, by these potential problems? What, that's the problem to address, Steve. That's the main problem.

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  I, I agree, but that, Bobby, it's possible, it is possible that if there's enough international consensus, that that could be sufficient pressure on countries like China to, to go along. My main problem with this statement is not that it's naive, it's that it doesn't go far enough. And it might actually be counterproductive.

• 1:04:06Speaker 07

  And it doesn't account for the, the autocratic countries that will, that are, that are full steam ahead, that will not be slowed.

• 1:04:15Speaker 04

  I agree that that's a problem. I'm, I'm now focusing on an entirely different problem. Which is that by, by saying the point of danger is 20, 30, 50 years in the future when we get to ASI, it actually creates a false sense of security about our current level of AI, which is more than sufficient to cause a lot of problems. I don't necessarily think that AGI or ASI is necessary to have an AI apocalypse. We can have it, you know, just with, with the narrow AIs that we have now, depending on how they develop them and how they're used, and whether or not they're regulated, et cetera, et cetera. And so I would go, I would use this as a starting point.

• 1:04:59Speaker 04

  Yes, like this is like putting it way out in the future for our worst case scenario. But we have to talk about AGI and we have to talk about the current AIs, which need to be regulated and we need to, you know, think very carefully about how they're being developed, how they are being implemented. Otherwise, we're going to have a replication of all the downsides of social media, but times a thousand, right?

• 1:05:24Speaker 05

  And that would give us a framework to better deal with this in the future.

• 1:05:24Speaker 07

  I agree, Steve. You know, I was treating that as kind of like at a scope for this specific talk, because this specific talk deals with, with artificial superintelligence, which is something that's not, that's not discussed that often.

• 1:05:37Speaker 04

  But it's not out of scope in the specific thing that I said. This actually creates cover for the current AIs by making them seem not dangerous. By, you know, by focusing on this future potential danger as if that's the AI, that's the danger from quote unquote AI. They should make it clear that this doesn't mean we're safe up until that point. All right, we have to shift to a very serious issue now. We've talked about these superficial issues now. Evan, you're going to tell us about this ghost in Connecticut.

• 1:06:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's get to the hard science here, folks.

• 1:06:14Speaker 05

  Connecticut ghosts. Wow, Connecticut's our home state, right? Connecticut's known for many things. All right, but for this particular news item, I want to touch on two of the things that Connecticut is well-known or relatively well-known for. Number one, we have a newspaper in this state called The Hartford Current. It is America's oldest continually published newspaper, 1764, and ever since then. So that's, that's interesting. Number two, Connecticut is home to a legend in the world of ghost stories, the White Lady of Union Cemetery in Easton, Connecticut. That is, that's world famous right there. So there you go. I'm touching on these. We're on the cusp of Halloween, Bob, in case you didn't know. Oh, wait, is that? Oh, damn. Okay. Right? Check your calendar.

• 1:06:57Speaker 04

  It takes me by surprise every year.

• 1:06:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. Didn't see that coming. Speaking of surprising, is it not surprising whatsoever that the most prominent newspaper in Connecticut is running an article about the most prominent ghost in Connecticut, of course? And what do you get when you combine these two things? Well, you get a news item that's so unworthy and ridiculous that it would be an insult to dead fish if you tried to wrap it in this article. The headline reads, "Connecticut's Famous Ghost Is Known To Frequent A Cemetery. Seen Her? Why A Paranormal Investigator Is Asking." Well, I can answer that rhetorical question right off the bat because tis the season and desperate newspapers will glom onto anything that might put eyeballs on their product.

• 1:07:38Speaker 05

  But the article basically reads like a promotional ad for a group of local paranormal investigators. I'll, I'll bore you with just a couple of select passages from the article, just so you can get the flavor. Paranormal investigators and amateur ghost hunters alike have been fascinated for years by the sightings of the White Lady of Easton in and around Stepney Cemetery in Monroe and Union Cemetery in Easton. More on that soon. Now, a paranormal team is taking a deeper dive into the legendary apparition and asking for the public's input. "The result will be a documentary about the female ghost with the long dark hair and flowing white dress," said project leader and paranormal investigator Nicholas Grossman.

• 1:08:22Speaker 05

  Grossman even believes that he may have captured actual footage of her apparition, although he doesn't share it, but that's totally, you know, beside the point. His fascination about the lady heightened one day, he said, when his psychic colleague, someone named Diane, and their video technician Hector, noticed something unusual. They said, "The cemetery, usually a hotbed of paranormal activity, was eerily quiet." Oh, gosh, a quiet cemetery, how unusual. "But the psychic used her pendulum to communicate with a spirit who delivered a cryptic message: 'You will see the white lady tonight.'" And then while he was driving down the road later that evening, this is Grossman, this is the guy, the paranormal investigator, "A woman in a white dress flew across in

• 1:09:07Speaker 05

  front of my car. She appeared completely physical, not transparent. She glided across the road in a way no human could. It was so real, I swerved to avoid her." Grossman says he regrets not having his video camera on that day.

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  Oh, darn it.

• 1:09:22Speaker 05

  Dang, he missed it. Oh, maybe next, maybe next time. Then the article goes on to promote his ghost hunting group. You know, "They're encouraging people in the area to contact them to share their stories and hallucinations of their interactions with the white lady so that they can incorporate it into their upcoming film project." Well, since you asked, I do have a story to add. Because you see, from the years 1982 through 1986, I lived in a house about one quarter of one mile from Union Cemetery in Easton, Connecticut. And I and some of my high school friends would frequent that cemetery regularly. We would ride our bikes through there, you know, just muck around in there. We conducted some scientific experiments, you know, such as seeing if tubes of rubber

• 1:10:06Speaker 05

  cement are flammable, they are by the way, and some other non-damaging mischief sort of events that teenage boys are wont to do when they explore their surroundings. But before I tell you about my results from my five years of basically living next door to this cemetery and therefore next to this ghost, I'll give you a little bit of background on the legend of the white lady, who's been cited for, what, decades, many decades, there have been reports of the white lady. But the white lady, in an interesting way, is very much described the same way as, oh, I don't know, every other white lady account of similar ghost sightings that have plagued the human mind for as long as, I don't know, there have been human minds. There are stories like this everywhere. This is not unique to Connecticut, certainly not

• 1:10:51Speaker 05

  to this cemetery, and throughout cultures all across, all over the world, basically. Look, she has long, dark hair, flowing white dress, and uncanny ability to appear out of nowhere, and apparently...

• 1:11:04Speaker 04

  Apparently...

• 1:11:05Speaker 05

  Thank you. Right in front of moving cars, where drivers have to slam on the brakes, sometimes convinced that they actually hit her, but then they find there's nothing there. Oh, my gosh. Local folklore says she's a wom- this was a woman drowned by her husband over three centuries ago near a watering hole across from the cemetery. And like so many other lady in white tales, it's a story that's emotionally satisfying, but they say historically fuzzy at best. I say nonexistent, frankly. There are no records of a drowned wife, woman, or any other person in Easton from the 1700s, or the 1800s for that matter, or the 1900s or ever, but that doesn't stop the folklore, that doesn't stop the story from gaining a life of its own.

• 1:11:49Speaker 05

  Almost every version of this story anchors the haunting to the white lady's Union Cemetery in Easton, again, which they say dates back to the 1760s, scant evidence for it. But this is where Ed and Lorraine Warren, the Warrens, focused their attention in the late 1980s, and it was that one fateful night, September 1st, 1990, Ed Warren, he was on the seventh night in a row of filming at the cemetery, where he captured the video of the white, of the lady in white, a woman walking across the cemetery. And he publicized it in his 1992 book called Graveyard. Now, Bob, Jay, Steve.

• 1:12:31Speaker 07

  Yes, sir.

• 1:12:32Speaker 05

  Didn't, did he, we were shown the footage of the white lady, right?

• 1:12:37Speaker 04

  We were, yep.

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

  What were your thoughts about what you saw?

• 1:12:40Speaker 04

  So I asked Ed, we asked Ed to show us the best evidence he got. What's the best? You know, because he's claimed to have tons of evidence. All right, just give us the absolute best. This is what he showed us. His VHS recording of the white lady in Union Cemetery. And our reaction was, first of all, it was crappy evidence.

• 1:13:00Speaker 07

  It was meh.

• 1:13:01Speaker 04

  But it was, it was at that perfect distance to give you a suggestion that something was happening, but not be able to see what it was. So was that a living person in a sheet? It absolutely could have been. It was not of sufficient quality to, to rule that out. And that, I think, was absolutely by design.

• 1:13:23Speaker 05

  Especially if that's your motivation going into this thing in the first place. Where after seven nights of this, you're not really getting anything. Uh, how many more nights are you going to do this, Ed? Seven nights is enough. Let's get somebody to go, you know.

• 1:13:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Then you do a blob squatch.

• 1:13:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a blob squatch, right. And, and I have to add, we, we asked Ed, you know, and this is at the point where we were kind of still being cooperative and friendly with him. And we said, yeah, that's interesting. We'll be happy to take a close look at it. Can you give us a copy of that tape? He refused to give it to us for analysis.

• 1:13:56Speaker 05

  That was the end. Right, that was the beginning of the end of the, uh, joint venture that we had with him for those months.

• 1:14:03Speaker 07

  But he did give us, he did give us a, a video of somebody disappearing, which of course, we utterly demolished.

• 1:14:08Speaker 04

  But that was somebody else recorded that. That was some flunky of his that wasn't him. So he didn't have his own credibility on the line with that one.

• 1:14:14Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 1:14:15Speaker 07

  And he still, and he still didn't believe our assessment.

• 1:14:18Speaker 04

  Well, you didn't accept it.

• 1:14:19Speaker 07

  Whatever you say, that, that kid disappeared. Sure he did.

• 1:14:23Speaker 05

  That's right, that kid, Harry. Harry would say that every time he saw that kid disappear.

• 1:14:30Speaker 05

  Uh, Ed, Ed, Ed. So, look, as far as I'm concerned.

• 1:14:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:35Speaker 05

  Because I did do some more research into this, into the legend of the white lady. I looked for articles, I looked for stories, I looked for reports, I looked for account. I don't even know, really, that this story had much legs even before Ed Warren got, you know, became kind of the toast of the paranormal world as he was on the ascent in those years. Right? You know, he seems to be the one to have suddenly given a name to this particular phenomenon. Sure, maybe, because again, how many other ghost stories are there of things being seen, or a woman and vague descriptions of things, and suddenly Ed and his 1990 encounter kind of, you know, codifies this thing in his own way.

• 1:15:20Speaker 05

  And then the media start following it. Okay, now this is the white lady of Union Cemetery, because Ed Warren says it. So I'm not even sure this thing really even existed before Ed Warren. That's my take on it.

• 1:15:31Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's not even that creative. Like, how many, like you mentioned, like, how many towns across the world have like a ghost dressed in white?

• 1:15:41Speaker 05

  Does.

• 1:15:42Speaker 04

  Haunting a graveyard, yeah. It's cliche. It's not even creative, I agree.

• 1:15:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Speaker 04

  It's like a flying saucer with gray aliens. I mean, come on, you could do better than that.

• 1:15:51Speaker 05

  But I want, but I want to do my official contribution to the pool of information that Grossman and his team are collecting.

• 1:15:56Speaker 04

  All right, let's have it.

• 1:15:57Speaker 05

  Here is my, here's my firsthand account, okay? I, here you go, Mr. Grossman. I spent more days and nights in and around that cemetery than many other people can claim, frankly, especially people who are investigating ghosts. In all my many hours, hours upon hours spent at Union Cemetery, I never saw a thing even coming close to a ghost sighting. We never even had a single noise that scared us in the middle of the night, or something that caught the corner of my eye, absolutely zero. We were there in the daytime, we were there in the nighttime, and we were occasionally out well past midnight around that graveyard. This was all before I even became a skeptic of the paranormal, right? I believe, you know, I believed in anything and everything at that point. I was a 13, 14-year-old kid, just messing around, having laughs with friends,

• 1:16:42Speaker 05

  you know, again, riding bikes. We didn't vandalize, we didn't really do anything like that, we were just...

• 1:16:47Speaker 04

  It was your own personal stranger things.

• 1:16:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, fun.

• 1:16:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was. We were kids on bikes then. And that was it. So, there's my contribution.

• 1:16:56Speaker 07

  Nothing happened.

• 1:16:57Speaker 05

  Upcoming. Yeah, exactly. Not a darn thing happened. So, I hope that somehow makes it into the documentary.

• 1:17:03Speaker 07

  Well, happy Halloween, everyone.

• 1:17:07Speaker 07

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

• 1:17:09Speaker 05

  Noisy Time.

• 1:17:10Speaker 07

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

• 1:17:22Speaker 07

  What do you people think?

• 1:17:23Speaker 05

  No, it sounded like a water pick from a dentist's office. You know, when they fire that laser-sharp water into your teeth. Oh, I hate that sound.

• 1:17:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, I had some fun, varied guesses in here, but I can only talk about a few of them. Michael Blaney wrote in and said, "Hi, Jay, I'm guessing the call of the Jacobin hummingbird." He says that Guinness listed as the bird with the highest pitched call. That's a fantastic guess, Michael, but I'm sorry you are incorrect. Another listener named Hunter Richards wrote in and said, "Hi, Jay, I forgot it was Wednesday. If it's not too late, I think the critter in last week's noisy is a small mammal like a flying squirrel. Maybe a pygmy, Loris, but I don't know if those animals are in proximity to humans, usually so a flying squirrel." As a reminder to the listeners of this show, only submit one thing, or at least give me your final guess. You could say, "I think it might be this, this, or this," and give me your final guess.

• 1:18:18Speaker 07

  Because I'm gonna go with, if you don't, if you give me multiple and you don't specify what your actual guess is, I can't, I can't count it. Anyway, Hunter, thanks for that. You are incorrect. Louis Morales said, "Hi, Jay, this week's noisy sounds like a dolphin to me, probably at a sea park." Okay, but he says it might be a bird too, and then he says I'm sticking with dolphin. Anyway, I did have a close guess, but no winner this week. The closest guess I got was sent in by a listener named Evil Eye. Evil Eye has been listening to the show, I think, since the very beginning, and also is a very regular guesser here. He said, "I'll just go ahead and fail right out." He says it's a squirrel monkey. This is a very close guess.

• 1:19:00Speaker 05

  What's a squirrel monkey?

• 1:19:01Speaker 07

  It is not a squirrel monkey.

• 1:19:02Speaker 05

  A monkey squirrel. Is that a thing?

• 1:19:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05Speaker 07

  I listened to the sounds that squirrel monkeys make, and it's kinda similar, but not fully there. What this actually is... Is, I'll tell you a couple of things. Uh, they live in eastern rainforest in Brazil. They are arboreal. You know what that means, Steve, right?

• 1:19:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, they live in trees.

• 1:19:23Speaker 07

  Thank you. And, can you guys want to make a guess? Yeah, I'll guess. They're arboreal. Correct. It's the arboreal arboreals. No, this is, this is, hey. This is called a lion tamarin. This is a little monkey guy.

• 1:19:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, a lion tamarin.

• 1:19:41Speaker 07

  They weigh up to 900 grams or 32 ounces. They're about 30 centimeters high or 12 inches long, high, whatever, however you want to do it. With tails about 45 centimeters or 18 inches long. They jump through trees. They use their fingers to hold on to the branches. They use their claws to dig under the bark to search for insects to eat. They also eat some snakes, lizards, and small fruits. They are unfortunately all endangered or critically endangered in part because their habitat is of course being destroyed and climate change is a big part of that. So let me play, play this for you again.

• 1:20:18Speaker 07

  Keep in mind, this is a little monkey. I need to ask the audience a very serious question. I just played a sound that sounds exactly like a million birds all over the planet. And the vast majority of you did not guess a bird.

• 1:20:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Maybe it only sounds that way to you.

• 1:20:44Speaker 05

  Well, or, you know.

• 1:20:45Speaker 07

  I mean, come on. It made the tweet, the tweet sound. I mean, it's like, my expectation was to be flooded with bird guesses and it didn't happen. And I need to know what's happening, what is going on out there. Steve, did you think it was a bird?

• 1:20:58Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:20:59Speaker 07

  What am I hearing? Is it a high pitched squeaky thing that repeats itself and sounds like a song?

• 1:21:04Speaker 04

  It's not tweety enough.

• 1:21:05Speaker 07

  Kara, is it tweety?

• 1:21:06Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know. I'm not a bird listener to her.

• 1:21:10Speaker 07

  Okay, maybe I'm getting old here. Maybe my, I don't know. I was just thinking bird all the way. Anyway, okay. So that was this week's noisy. Thank you everyone for guessing. I have a new noisy this week and this noisy was sent in by a listener named Jenny Navas.

• 1:21:32Speaker 07

  Very strange noise. If you think you know what it is, you can email me at [email protected]. You can also send me in any noises that you heard or have happened upon on the internet that you think are cool. I will take all in consideration. Steve Novella, we like to leave Connecticut and we ask Kara to leave her domicile in Los Angeles and join us for live entertainment because we give it and we want the people that listen to this show to receive it. Have I said anything wrong so far?

• 1:22:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Nope.

• 1:22:05Speaker 07

  Okay, so where are we gonna be? We're going to Seattle, Washington, and we're going to Madison, Wisconsin. January 10th of next year, that's 2026, we will be in Seattle, Washington at Washington Hall.

• 1:22:17Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 1:22:18Speaker 07

  And Saturday, May 16th of 2026, we will be in Madison, Wisconsin at Atwood Music Hall. You can go to our website where the links for the tickets will be available. And on top of that, we will be doing, of course, private shows on both of those weekends. It's very likely that we'll be doing those private shows the Saturday morning, which is before the nighttime event, so you can do both of them in one day. They typically run from like 11 to 2 or 12 to 3. I will finalize those details, but tickets will be available this weekend. And we're gonna actually try something new this time around, guys, because we have gotten requests over the years that people want something a

• 1:23:00Speaker 07

  little more exclusive and a little more private. That's more of like just socializing and there's no shows involved. So we decided that we're gonna try on both of the Friday nights before the shows that I just mentioned, we will have a very, very limited ticketed event where you're just gonna hang out with us and you're gonna basically do whatever we decide to do, right? It could be anything. We'll give more details on that as well, but you will see tickets up for those as well.

• 1:23:28Speaker 04

  All right. Thank you, Jay. We have one email. This comes from Keith from, by coincidence, Seattle, Washington.

• 1:23:37Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 1:23:37Speaker 04

  And Keith writes, "I saw this article referenced in a typical online argument," and he has a link to the article. "The commenter extracted the following one line, quote, 'The risk of COVID-19 also increased with time since the most recent prior COVID-19 episode and with the number of vaccine doses previously received.'" He goes on, but that's the key question he's asking us. So, basically, there's a study that showed exactly that, that the risk of getting diagnosed with COVID-19 increased with the number of previous COVID-19 vaccine doses. So, of course, this is going

• 1:24:20Speaker 04

  around with the claim like, "See, the vaccines, not only do they not work, they increase your risk of getting COVID-19."

• 1:24:27Cara Santa Maria?

  But wait, did they compare it to people who weren't vaccinated?

• 1:24:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Because I think the risk of getting COVID increases with time.

• 1:24:34Speaker 04

  Well, it increased with time since your most recent COVID infection. And also, which makes sense.

• 1:24:42Cara Santa Maria?

  The longer we live, the more likely we are to get COVID.

• 1:24:46Speaker 04

  I think they looked over like a six-month period or something.

• 1:24:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:24:49Speaker 04

  Okay, so what, you know, as you might imagine, that's not what the study showed.

• 1:24:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, okay.

• 1:24:54Speaker 04

  I mean, it didn't, meaning it didn't show that COVID vaccines don't work. It showed the opposite. It showed that, you know, if you look, the core finding of the study and what they were looking for, the actual question for the study was, are, how effective is the vaccine given the mutations and the virus? So, are the vaccines still providing protection, given that we know the virus is continuing to mutate? And they actually correlated it with different Waves of infection and what strains were dominant during that period of time. So they found a number of things.

• 1:25:35Speaker 04

  One, so again, this is just an observational study, and so you know what I'm going to say, right? Observational studies are subject to confounding factors. And this study in particular has confounding factors galore, right? So that's the huge grain of salt you have to take this with. They found that overall infection rate during the period of time they were looking at was 8.7%. So that's fairly low. So you also have to keep that in mind as well. There's already a pretty low infection rate. And so even subtle effects can have a seemingly dramatic effect on the relative risk within that, you know what I mean, of getting infected.

• 1:26:16Speaker 04

  What they found was the estimated vaccine effectiveness was 29% for the BA.4/5 dominant wave. It was 20% for the BQ negative wave, and only 4% effective for the XBB dominant phase, right? So 21, 20%, and 4%. So keep in mind, so that means it worked, right? The vaccine reduced the risk of getting infected, but the more different the strain was from the vaccine strain, the less effective it was.

• 1:26:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, okay.

• 1:26:55Speaker 04

  So of course, that is inconsistent with the notion that increased vaccine doses increased your risk of infection, right? So first of all, that's a relative increased risk on the background of an overall decreased risk just from being vaccinated. Does that make sense?

• 1:27:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at, but like in a less complicated way.

• 1:27:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that like, the more vaccines you get, it means that you are going farther in time, and there are more, the risks fluctuate in the general population. So there will be times when you get a vaccine and you're more likely to get COVID, not because of the vaccine, but because COVID is circulating more.

• 1:27:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, they tried to control for that stuff as much as possible. Again, they're doing an observational study where they're just looking at a cohort of people and saying, did they get infected or not, and what was their vaccine status? You know?

• 1:27:53Speaker 04

  So, there's a couple of things to point out here. Obviously, and the authors, the authors do not believe that increasing number of doses actually reduced the protection of the vaccine or increased your risk of getting infected. There has to be a confounding factor here. That's the only thing that makes sense. And they discuss a few possibilities and they try to control for a confounding factor. It's always, it's impossible to do that completely. You can, you can, you can try. So, you know, you could all, you could say, hey, it's possible that people got more doses because they're in a high-risk group. And they're, and being in a high-risk group increased their risk of getting infected. With observational data, you can never know what the error of causation is. That's like saying, being on a diet correlates with being overweight.

• 1:28:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, because people who are overweight go on diets, not the other way around. It's the same kind of thing. Also, keep in mind, this was not the risk of having COVID. This was the risk of being diagnosed as having COVID. And so you also then, that introduces all the confounding factors of who gets diagnosed. Maybe you're more likely to get diagnosed if you're also somebody who was more likely to be up to date on your boosters, right? You're getting more healthcare. You're more likely to show up in the system.

• 1:29:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep. A lot of people got sick and just didn't report it.

• 1:29:08Speaker 04

  Exactly. So, yeah, there's, that's, and this was like off the top of my head, kind of obvious confounding factors that are almost certainly at play here. And so you can't conclude that this in any way calls into question the effectiveness of the vaccine. But I would also challenge just this, the whole approach of this study. Again, it's fine as far as it goes, but it's not the be-all and end-all of COVID vaccine effectiveness studies. It's looking at, in fact, the weakest indicator of vaccine effectiveness, which was be, having been diagnosed with having COVID. Because this is not taking a look at severity or anything else.

• 1:29:53Speaker 04

  There was also a very recent New England Journal of Medicine article that did, that looked at outcomes that are, I think, much better markers of vaccine effectiveness. For a number of reasons. So this was a six-month follow-up study where they looked at the estimated vaccine effectiveness. The reduction in COVID-19-associated emergency department visits was 29.3%. The reduction in COVID-19-associated hospitalizations was 39.2%. The reduction in COVID-19-associated deaths was 64%. So you were 30% less likely

• 1:30:36Speaker 04

  to be go to the emergency room, 40% less likely to get admitted to the hospital, and 64% less likely to die. So obviously, we care a lot more about those outcomes than having a mild case of COVID, right? So and we've known for years that the vaccines are better at preventing serious illness than any illness, right? That's another sort of example of you're looking at a subset of the data, it's not giving you the full picture. And, you know, and there's lots of problems with this data which you cannot gloss over. But also, that's also just an individual study. So the most recent systematic review

• 1:31:17Speaker 04

  I found, this is a review of 284 articles found, quote, "All the approved vaccines were found safe and efficacious, but mRNA-based vaccines were found to be more efficacious against SARS-CoV-2 than other platforms." So all of the vaccines work. And if you look at the totality of the literature, that's what it shows. But of course, if you don't know what you're talking about, and you have a political agenda, you could look at this one study and say, "See, vaccines don't work." But it is absolutely not true. Yeah. And if you want the details, I wrote about it on Science-Based Medicine. Okay, let's go on with science or fiction.

• 1:32:08Speaker 04

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week, and the theme is...

• 1:32:21Speaker 05

  AI.

• 1:32:22Speaker 04

  Flatulence.

• 1:32:24Speaker 05

  Same thing.

• 1:32:24Speaker 04

  Farts. The theme is farting. Okay.

• 1:32:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:32:28Speaker 04

  I didn't plan on having a theme, but sometimes like I come across an interesting news item, like I could just flesh this out into a theme.

• 1:32:34Speaker 07

  So Steve, is this like gonna focus on like our expertise that we have all developed in our old age about, you know, passing gas or like what's happening?

• 1:32:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, your flatulent expertise may come into bear with...

• 1:32:46Speaker 05

  Jay's got another one.

• 1:32:47Speaker 04

  It might help you. I'm not gonna talk about technique or anything, Jay, if that's what you're asking. Or naming conventions. All right. Here we go. Item number one: Greater than 99% of flatulence is comprised of odorless gases. Item number two: Up to 50% of human flatulence is comprised of hydrogen gas, which is flammable. And item number three: There are several approved tests for volatile organic compounds in flatulence as an early screen for colorectal cancer. Jay, as the resident expert, why don't you go first?

• 1:33:27Speaker 07

  Okay, I mean, you know, I don't know about resident expert. Steve, the first one we have here is that greater than 99% of flatulence is comprised of odorless gases. I mean, I think 99% is a lot, but I would think this is... This seems like science to me. There is quite a bit of gas passing, happening, and I think if we... If every one of them smelled, we would all know it in a big way. Because, you know, I don't know if we discussed this on the show before, but like passing gas is like a true sign that your body is functioning and that you are digesting and processing food and, you know, it's a very important part, you know, it's like it's just part of, of, you know, having a metabolism.

• 1:34:10Speaker 07

  So that said, you know, I think that there's lots of gas passing happening with people every day and it's... This one is probably science. Second item, up to 50% of human flatulence is comprised of hydrogen gas, which is flammable. Hydrogen gas, because I thought it was methane. And I could be embarrassingly wrong on this one, but I that's that's the gas I thought it was. No, I don't think it's hydrogen. That one is definitely on my I don't think so list. Number three, there are several approved tests for volatile organic compounds called VOCs in flatulence as they as an early sign of colorectal cancer. Thank you for that. I think that's science. I don't think we're farting. I don't think we're farting hydrogen. I would have heard of that. Right?

• 1:34:55Speaker 07

  And does hydrogen even smell? I've never smelled it. I wouldn't be surprised if it does smell. But I don't know. I just haven't heard a lot of the I haven't heard any about about any of this. And I don't think I would have, you know, not heard it at this point. I think number two, the hydrogen is the fiction. Okay, Evan.

• 1:35:11Speaker 05

  Okay, number one, comprised of odorless gases. So wow, that mean that that's a 1%. It's responsible for, yeah. That seems wrong, which makes me think it's right. Right? Because I mean, I, you know. So I, yeah, I that one will probably wind up being science, I think, for purposes of this game. Uh, the second one, about 50% of human flatulence, up to 50%, uh, is hydrogen gas. Can't underestimate the amount of hydrogen that's out there, inside, all around. You know, what? Most everything is hydrogen, right?

• 1:35:51Speaker 07

  So to clarify, this is hydrogen gas. This is H2. This doesn't mean hydrogen as part of other compounds.

• 1:35:58Speaker 05

  Ah, okay. All right. Well, that does change the math. This is the one Jay said was fiction. Maybe it is fiction. The last one here, several approved tests for VOCs.

• 1:36:10Speaker 05

  As an early screen for colorectal cancer. This doesn't seem right. Approved tests. There are several approved tests. Ah, why? But we've seen commercials, we've seen other things for early detection, and they're not this. It's actual, you know, fecal matter that you have to look at and stuff. I hadn't heard anything about, about what, going into an office and letting out your gas and then they can screen for it? I haven't heard that at all. So I don't know. Sounds like you made that one up, Steve. I'll say the VOCs. I'll say that one's the fiction.

• 1:36:48Speaker 04

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:36:49Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it makes sense that 99% is odorless. So that one's probably fine. The second one, though, up to 50% is hydrogen gas. That seems like a lot, but I think the key word there is up to. So that might make the difference. And then this third one, I'm not sure. I'm skeptical that they've got approved tests for that. I've never heard anything about it. This could be the one that's, hmm, up to. All right. I'm gonna, I'll say the up to is changing my mind on the second one there. Up to 50%. I think typically, I don't think it's that much, but up to is just killing me here. So I'll, I'm gonna go with Evan and say VOC fiction.

• 1:37:33Speaker 04

  Okay, and Kara?

• 1:37:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm leaning in that direction, too. I think that it makes sense. The one that seems the most like science is the 99% because sometimes farts don't smell. And so you would think that it wouldn't be a large percentage of compounds that comprise the smell. It's probably just like one thing, like, I think it's sulfur. And, and if it, it's only a tiny, tiny bit, sometimes there's even less, or sometimes it maybe it doesn't have that compound. So that would make sense to me. But the two, I'm sort of torn between the two, but I'm leaning in the way of Evan and Bob. I think you can light farts. Uh, don't do it, though. Sounds very dangerous.

• 1:38:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Um, but I don't know if it's because of hydrogen or other, other flammable gases, but I, Bob kinda convinced me with the up to. Whereas, like, I remember doing some stories years ago about mechanical noses and this idea of like, dogs smelling cancer, or trying to produce tests that can smell VOCs for different things. And I think that research is still not where they want it to be. I agree with Evan, like, there are poop tests for screens, uh, for colorectal for people with like a normal risk. Um, and then obviously, uh, you know, colonoscopies and things like that, but I don't, I don't think anybody's getting tested for cancer by farting into a jar, so I'm gonna call that the fiction.

• 1:38:58Speaker 04

  Okay, so you guys all agree on the first one, so we'll start there. Greater than 99% of flatulence is comprised of odorless gases. Which means that less than 1% are smelly. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science. Phew. It is science, that is correct. Yes, less than 1% of, of the gases in flatulence are sulfur compounds, which are responsible for the odor. Yes, Kara's correct, it is mostly hydrogen sulfide. Uh, the rest is odorless gases. I'll give you the breakdown later, though, because that obviously, you know, carries over to number two here.

• 1:39:40Speaker 04

  For number two, let's talk about number two and number three for a bit, because you guys made interesting comments about them. Number two, up to 50% of human flatulence is comprised of hydrogen gas, which is flammable. So, there's never going to be one figure for flatulence, because it's so variable, based upon diet and gut flora and other variables. So, right, like, you could, there's never going to be one figure for what is the gas constituent of flatulence. It's, there's so many, uh, variables in here. It's always gonna be a range.

• 1:40:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And I'm liking this up to.

• 1:40:18Speaker 04

  Right, so, yeah, there's, it was always going to be up to. I would never, there's no way I could ever say in a statement like this, 50% of flatulence is hydrogen gas. It could be fiction. No such statement could ever, like, that could be true. And on the third one, Evan, because a test is approved, does it mean that it's used, or that it's useful enough, or cost-effective enough, that it's in general use?

• 1:40:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh crap.

• 1:40:44Speaker 05

  Way.

• 1:40:45Speaker 04

  The same.

• 1:40:47Speaker 04

  Alright.

• 1:40:50Speaker 04

  So, let's

• 1:40:51Speaker 05

  Do it next week.

• 1:40:52Speaker 04

  Let's go back to number two. Up to 50% of human flatulence is comprised of hydrogen gas, which is flammable. Jay, you think this one is the fiction. The rest of the rogues thinks this one is science. And this one is science. This is science. Yes. Yeah, so it's, there's a lot of variability here. It's like 20 to 50%, depending on, really depending on your gut microbes, on your gut flora. But this is based upon a recent study where they found that hydrogen is a metabolic mediator of gut flora, way more than we thought it was. So, some microorganisms create hydrogen gas, and other microorganisms eat hydrogen gas.

• 1:41:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:41:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, so a lot of the gas that's produced gets actually eaten by other microbes. And then some of it, you burp out, and some of it, you fart out, right? So how much an individual farts out depends on how much they're making, and how much they're consuming, and how much is left over. So that's why it's always gonna be variable. And, you know, 20 to 50% is the range that is most resources they found are giving. So maybe the average of like 30% or so, but it's still a lot. That was way more than I thought, which is why I included that.

• 1:42:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that seems like a whole lot.

• 1:42:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a lot. It's more than we thought, is the answer. It is actually more than we thought. This means that there are several approved tests for volatile organic compounds in flatulence as an early screen for colorectal cancer. Cancer is the fiction, because, yeah, what you guys were saying about this one was otherwise correct. There are VOC tests for lots of things now, the volatile organic compounds. There's a lot of research looking at measuring VOCs in breathalyzers, and also in flatulence, but they're not quite there yet. The ones that are

• 1:42:48Speaker 04

  That are working are looking for VOCs in actual fecal samples. So Evan's correct. If you're looking at fecal samples-

• 1:42:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, but they are still looking at VOCs.

• 1:42:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, but they are looking for VOCs is one of the things they're looking for. So, yeah, so this is an up and coming thing and they're hoping that they'll get to the point where they could just do a breathalyzer. Because you don't have to get it going out the bottom. You can get the same gases come out the top to some extent. So, but, you know, if you're looking specifically for, and it's not just cancer, it's also for other GI diseases as well. Irritable bowel syndrome, for example, or gluten insensitivity. Let's talk about the percentage of gases in the gut. So it's mostly what? What's the most common gas in farts?

• 1:43:35Speaker 05

  Methane.

• 1:43:36Speaker 04

  Nitrogen. Because most of it is swallowed air, right? So you swallow a lot of air that you swallow from eating. Chewing gum actually makes you fart because you swallow more air.

• 1:43:46Speaker 05

  Oh, interesting. Oh.

• 1:43:48Speaker 04

  So there's also therefore some oxygen. There's some carbon dioxide, about 9%. So it's 59% nitrogen. These are average figures. Again, it's all hugely variable. About 9% carbon dioxide. Methane, you know, it's anywhere from 7 to 30%. Methane also combustible. So that's the two things that when you can light your farts on fire. And the two things are methane and hydrogen.

• 1:44:14Cara Santa Maria?

  But don't do it.

• 1:44:14Speaker 04

  Don't do it because you'll burn your ass. And then oxygen is like 4%. And then the sulfur compounds that give it the odor are less than 1%. But again, these are average figures. The range is huge for all of them because of variables. How much do people fart on average, do you think, per day in like liters?

• 1:44:35Speaker 05

  Oh, God. That's so hard.

• 1:44:37Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know. How much? Well, wait, can you tell us how much is an average fart? Like, how big? How many liters is an average fart?

• 1:44:44Speaker 04

  Well, there's the total volume and then there's the number of times you fart per day. And then you could figure it out from there. So 1 to 2 liters per day is average.

• 1:44:57Speaker 05

  That's average. I mean, some people are going like 5 liters a day.

• 1:45:00Speaker 04

  It's something like 15 to 23 farting events.

• 1:45:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:45:05Speaker 04

  Men fart more than women.

• 1:45:07Speaker 05

  Why?

• 1:45:07Speaker 04

  But women's farts smell more than men's.

• 1:45:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Interesting.

• 1:45:11Speaker 04

  Wow, that's- These are all averages. These are all just, obviously, there's no- Typical thing.

• 1:45:16Speaker 05

  Why would there be a difference between?

• 1:45:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, I wonder if it's biological or social. I wonder if women hold them in longer.

• 1:45:23Speaker 04

  Maybe, they may.

• 1:45:23Cara Santa Maria?

  And then, then that percentage might creep up.

• 1:45:25Speaker 04

  Fewer farting events, but same, same volume.

• 1:45:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Same gases, exactly.

• 1:45:30Speaker 04

  Guys are a little bit more free.

• 1:45:32Speaker 05

  A little more bravado.

• 1:45:33Cara Santa Maria?

  So you're gonna have a few more unsmelly farts than we are because you're farting more often.

• 1:45:38Speaker 04

  Now, the, the volume and musical characteristic of the farts are almost entirely determined by the anus.

• 1:45:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:46Speaker 07

  Does your butt cheeks get involved in that or what?

• 1:45:49Speaker 04

  If they're big enough, I guess they could get involved.

• 1:45:52Speaker 05

  So we're not talking about all outgassing that the body does.

• 1:45:54Speaker 04

  No, just talking about, yeah, through the back end.

• 1:45:57Speaker 05

  Anus base.

• 1:45:58Cara Santa Maria?

  From the bum bum.

• 1:45:59Speaker 05

  Okay. Because you combine it with burps and all, and other things that the body emits, oh, boy.

• 1:46:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's more, more gases.

• 1:46:06Speaker 05

  Wow, we are.

• 1:46:07Speaker 04

  We are expending fluids and gases of every type through many orifices.

• 1:46:12Speaker 05

  And don't forget dander.

• 1:46:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:46:15Speaker 07

  So Steve, what did you say about the music quality? It totally depends on?

• 1:46:20Speaker 04

  It's mostly determined by the musculature of the anus, yeah. And also for the.

• 1:46:25Speaker 07

  That's wrong.

• 1:46:26Speaker 05

  In the key of C.

• 1:46:27Speaker 07

  That is wrong.

• 1:46:29Speaker 04

  It's also, it's not wrong, it's also, the, the pressure that it's under is also a, a factor.

• 1:46:37Speaker 07

  And butt cheeks have no say in this?

• 1:46:39Speaker 04

  I didn't say they have no say, I said primarily.

• 1:46:41Cara Santa Maria?

  They said if they're big enough, they have a say.

• 1:46:45Speaker 05

  My gosh, I can't believe it.

• 1:46:46Cara Santa Maria?

  But if they're not in the way, you can still have musicality.

• 1:46:49Speaker 04

  So if, it's like, if, for example, you have low pressure, loose musculature, it could be silent.

• 1:46:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:55Speaker 04

  Usually the butt cheeks by themselves are not enough to produce, they may modulate the sound, but they probably won't produce a sound.

• 1:47:03Speaker 07

  Bob, what do you got? What do you know? I'm not going into details.

• 1:47:08Speaker 05

  Well, Bob, Bob does want to toot his own horn.

• 1:47:12Speaker 07

  Let's move on to the.

• 1:47:13Speaker 04

  All right, Evan, give us the quote.

• 1:47:18Speaker 05

  By all means, let us agree that we are pattern-seeking mammals and that, owing to our relentless intelligence and inquisitiveness, we will still prefer a conspiracy theory to no explanation at all. Well said by Christopher Hitchens.

• 1:47:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I have to unfortunately agree with that.

• 1:47:36Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:47:36Speaker 04

  The allure of any explanation over no explanation is pretty great.

• 1:47:42Speaker 05

  Yep. Yeah, we love filling the void with whatever.

• 1:47:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and that's, I think, one of the central theses of that frontline episode about RFK is like, how could this happen to Dad? This is so horrible. This is so, like, I can't explain this. And we think back to Alex Jones. Remember his whole thing about Sandy Hook? And we were like, why did people actually believe him? Like, we get why he made it up because he's a horrible person, but like, why did people believe them? And one of the theories by, set forth by social psychologists was that some people said, this is so horrible. I can't imagine it to be true.

• 1:48:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, a way to cope with the actual horror of the true event.

• 1:48:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:26Speaker 05

  Isn't that wild?

• 1:48:27Cara Santa Maria?

  It's fascinating.

• 1:48:28Speaker 05

  It is fascinating. The lengths we'll go to, to, to make something as comfortable as possible for ourselves. So dangerous.

• 1:48:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:48:38Speaker 04

  All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:48:40Speaker 07

  You got it, Steve.

• 1:48:41Speaker 05

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:48:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:48:42Speaker 04

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

• 1:48:49Speaker 04

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

• 1:49:26Speaker 02

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