The Skeptics Guide #1098 - Jul 25 2026

Live From Madison Wisconsin; Amending the Constitution; News Items: Believing in the Supernatural, Desalinating Water, Superheavy Cosmic Rays, AI Designed Bioweapons; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Cara Santa Maria?

  The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.

• 0:27Speaker 01

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

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Today is Saturday, May 30th, and we are live from Madison, Wisconsin.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Tara Santa Maria.

• 0:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  And George Ross.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  Oh, we're podcasting, yeah. Oh, yeah, we're podcasting.

• 1:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Steve, you didn't say the year. When we've been on for 21 years, you have to specify the year when you say that.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  It's May 30th, 2026.

• 1:17Cara Santa Maria?

  There you go.

• 1:20Cara Santa Maria?

  It's important for people who are going back through the whole catalog.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, you betcha.

• 1:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, no.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Should not have started that.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  I don't know what year it was there. I couldn't tell. What year?

• 1:30Speaker 02

  I was all disoriented.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  Confused, disoriented.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Then we got this execution-type deal right here.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  I assume that's your podcast in the wood chipper there?

• 1:39Speaker 02

  That was a great movie, by the way. Does anybody here talk like that?

• 1:43Cara Santa Maria?

  You don't think you do.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  No, we don't.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, and we don't talk like, hey, yeah, whatever, forget about it.

• 1:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, forget about it.

• 1:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Hi, y'all. Yeah, I don't talk like this at all. My family does, though.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:58Cara Santa Maria?

  And I can't hear it in my own family, which is interesting.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Really?

• 2:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  But they do anyway?

• 2:02Cara Santa Maria?

  All my friends, yeah, when they hear my parents talk, they're like, what?

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Do you revert?

• 2:05Cara Santa Maria?

  But I don't hear it.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Wow. You just hear your parents?

• 2:07Cara Santa Maria?

  I just hear my parents.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  Karen, do you revert when you're around it?

• 2:10Cara Santa Maria?

  I've never spoken like that.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 2:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Not even as a child, but my sister has a pretty thick accent.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Hot damn.

• 2:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Dallas, a Dallas accent. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  I've been accused of having a Boston accent, which makes no sense. Boss, no way. New York accent, a Danbury accent, a Connecticut accent.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  What's a Danbury accent?

• 2:29Speaker 02

  A Danbury accent.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Danbury.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Danbury.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Our cousins have that. Yeah. Bah. Yeah.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Like, they'll say the word pet, piat.

• 2:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Piat.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Piat.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  For a while, for a while, a friend of mine moved to Sao Paulo when I was in high school, and I would send him cassettes. It was actually like a precursor of podcasting. I would, I didn't want to write letters. I would just talk for 45 minutes and send him stuff. And I found some of these tapes a couple of years ago.

• 2:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Cool.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  And it's just like Jersey, like yesterday. I'm talking about yesterday, another day, and this thing. Yeah, we were at school in the class. I'm like, who is this person?

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Who is this 15-year-old?

• 3:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Did you say water?

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Maybe, yeah.

• 3:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Walk the dog?

• 3:06Speaker 03

  I couldn't believe yesterday. Yesterday was like, yesterday? Like, how backed up are you to have to say yesterday? Oh, my God.

• 3:14Cara Santa Maria?

  My partner is a Michigander, and he says milk. Do you guys say milk here?

• 3:20Speaker 02

  For what? Milk?

• 3:21Cara Santa Maria?

  No, that's, that's just a Michigan thing. Yeah, they say milk, like, like coffee with milk.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  I don't like that at all.

• 3:26Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, yeah.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 3:28Cara Santa Maria?

  There's one over there. I see, I see you.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Vitamin R.

• 3:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And he says pajamas, like that, pajamas, instead of pajamas.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Our grandfather, instead of saying oil, would say Earl.

• 3:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Earl, yeah.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Is that a?

• 3:41Cara Santa Maria?

  And my mom says ohl. That's like a Texas, like a deep South thing.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Wow, okay.

• 3:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Put some ohl in the car. Got to get the ohl changed.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  It's a miracle we can communicate at all.

• 3:51Bob Novella?

  Well, imagine in Italy, there's some dialects are mutually unintelligible. Can you imagine talking to somebody? Well, there are some cases where like some accents are so strong that it would be, it's difficult, but it's not.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  We're getting there. We're just watching the video of the Scottish guy on the roof. Yeah. Have you guys ever seen it? Love that video. And yeah, it's basically, it's almost unintelligible.

• 4:10Cara Santa Maria?

  When we were in Scotland, remember our bus driver stopped to ask for directions?

• 4:13Speaker 03

  That was the best.

• 4:14Bob Novella?

  That was hilarious.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're going to see like Robert the Bruce's grave or something like that. A Rob Roy's grave. It was like, she was great. She was awesome.

• 4:23Bob Novella?

  Amazing.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  She was the driver. She's like, would you want to go see a Rob Roy's, you know, grave? We're like, yeah, hell, you're great, sure. And, and so we're driving and she pulls alongside in this place, she's not sure where it is, rolls down the window and she says, excuse me, we're looking, is, is Roy's grave straight ahead? And this guy on the street goes.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  She's, all right, great, thank you. She rolls up the window and she says, I don't know what the fuck he said either.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  But do you remember what she said to him instead of thank you?

• 4:54Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 4:55Bob Novella?

  Magic.

• 4:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Magic.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Magic. Oh, that was great. This was the same person who because Steve's wife had sent.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  My wife's email.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  An email from University of.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Oregon.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Oregon. She assumed we were from Oregon. So as we got on the bus to do this tour, to go to the Highlands, she's like, um, would you like to hear some trivia about Oregon? We're like.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  No.

• 5:20Bob Novella?

  We don't care about Oregon.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  She had researched like all this stuff about like Oregon facts, you know?

• 5:25Cara Santa Maria?

  So sweet.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  And we're like, yeah, we're from Connecticut and Pennsylvania. And she's like, oh, well, would you still like to hear some fun?

• 5:32Bob Novella?

  And we're like, sure, sure. What I, what I loved is she's like, all right, which loch do you want to go see, right? And we're like, whatever's closest. And she's like, thank God you didn't say, bring me to the, to the Loch Ness, you know, the Loch.

• 5:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Ness.

• 5:45Bob Novella?

  With Loch Ness, because everybody wants to go there.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Every tourist wants to go to Loch Ness.

• 5:49Bob Novella?

  It's far away. It's a pain in the ass and it's not even as good as the Loch that's right over there. We'll just drive there.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Well, she said, she said, there's, there's just as many monsters in Lake Lourdes as there is in Lake, Lake North. We're like, okay, you were getting the biggest tip.

• 6:03Bob Novella?

  She was great.

• 6:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Loch Lomond, yeah. We went to Loch Lomond.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  And then she was the reason. She was the reason why some of us tried haggis. It was good.

• 6:12Bob Novella?

  But it was tourist.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  We suspect it was tourist haggis.

• 6:16Cara Santa Maria?

  No, no, no, that was like a proper haggis. Like we were, yeah, we were in Glencoe. We were in a tiny little pub in Glencoe. Like, that was just haggis. That was just pub haggis.

• 6:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah, we were, we were not in a tourist area. We were way, way up in the Highlands when we had that.

• 6:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we were in Glencoe. I mean, it is, everything is.

• 6:32Bob Novella?

  I expected them to bring out a stomach with weird nasty food in it, and none of that, none of that happened.

• 6:36Cara Santa Maria?

  That's just how they cook it. It's not how they serve it.

• 6:38Bob Novella?

  Well, that's what, that's what I was hoping to see.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  All right, have, have you guys seen the latest rocket launch from, uh, Blue Origin?

• 6:47Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Is that supposed to happen? So.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Now, who feels bad that they feel kinda good about it?

• 6:53Speaker 02

  What the live audience is watching here, podcast audience, is the Blue Origin rocket blowing up dramatically on the launch pad.

• 7:00Bob Novella?

  God.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  So, this, this was a, a static test, meaning it wasn't supposed to take off. They were just firing the new engines to make sure that they worked.

• 7:09Bob Novella?

  Guess what?

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Guess what?

• 7:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so this, this didn't have the satellites on it?

• 7:14Speaker 02

  No, there was nothing.

• 7:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  No people on it. There was, there was, it was a static test of new engines.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Just some kids at space camp, that's all.

• 7:22Jay Novella?

  Steve, do they?

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Too soon.

• 7:26Jay Novella?

  I don't know much about Blue Origin, like.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:29Jay Novella?

  Bottom line is, do they have like a lot of rockets lined up and like blowing it up and losing this one is not a big deal, or is that a big deal?

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Well, this is a test rocket anyway, right?

• 7:36Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it's always a big deal when a rocket blows up.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's never a good thing.

• 7:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Jay Novella?

  Yeah. I mean, but you know, SpaceX says, you know, it's part of their, like, it's okay if they, if it blows up because they're, they have so much data from it. It's not like this rocket has to be the one we're gonna use to go into space. It's more like we need test data. That's the most important thing, right?

• 7:55Bob Novella?

  Did they get it? I assume they got the test data before.

• 7:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Was this one of the dick rockets?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:01Cara Santa Maria?

  It was, right? All the rockets look like dicks.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  The penis rocket, yeah.

• 8:05Bob Novella?

  What do they, what do they call this explosive disassembly, or what's that term?

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Unscheduled rapid disassembly, yeah.

• 8:12Jay Novella?

  I bet you, uh, Bezos was not happy about that though, right?

• 8:16Speaker 02

  They don't lose their clue.

• 8:17Jay Novella?

  Yeah, 'cause they fire anyone that goes, "Holy shit!"

• 8:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:22Bob Novella?

  Humanity. Well, maybe they put them next to the experimental rockets.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  How much, how much money we're looking at when that thing blows up? What are we looking at?

• 8:30Bob Novella?

  Fifty bucks.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Couple hundred bucks, yeah, I don't know.

• 8:32Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, to Bezos?

• 8:34Speaker 03

  I'm saying, like, in real money.

• 8:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but that is...

• 8:36Speaker 03

  Tens of billions, hundreds of billions?

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Millions, I think it's...

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Not billion, millions?

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Tens of millions, probably.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Tens of millions.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  I would think, I would think...

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  If that was the real deal, a full rocket, I think it's worth more than tens of millions.

• 8:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but it wasn't. It was just a, just a engine test.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  They probably did some damage to the launch pad, I would imagine.

• 8:52Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm seeing about 150 million to construct. And let's remember that Bezos has 292 billion dollars.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:00Bob Novella?

  So this is like, you know...

• 9:01Speaker 02

  That's his milk money.

• 9:02Cara Santa Maria?

  No, no.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  His, I'm sorry, his Malk money.

• 9:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Malk. Malk, Malk.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Nice call back, George, you like that?

• 9:11Speaker 03

  I love it, baby.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  All right.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Makes me happy.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  I don't have a tag for it, though.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Nonsense.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  All right, so, we're gonna do, kind of a, we like to do on the live shows, rather than just, you know, we're gonna do some news items, but before we do that, we're gonna play a little game among the rows.

• 9:24Bob Novella?

  Another game?

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, this is a, you know, let's pretend kind of game. We're each going to say, if we had a magic wand and could get any amendment to the US Constitution that we want anything passed, right? You could say, "I want this amendment, this is what it says, it will pass." What would it be? Now, the one stipulation is, you can't cram 30, you know, clauses into this one amendment, right? It's gotta be one, basically one thing. You know, it can have a couple of aspects to it, but it's basically one thing. Who would like to start?

• 10:00Speaker 03

  I'll go first. Mine is very simple.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  All right.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Mine is to get rid of the Electoral College.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:05Speaker 03

  I would just say...

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Get rid of Electoral College, let it be, it's not needed, the purpose it was made is not needed anymore. And that would be very simple, line item.

• 10:15Cara Santa Maria?

  To be fair, the 13 original colonies, Delaware had 35,000 people and Virginia had 500,000. So it was only six times larger. That was the difference in the size of the 13 original colonies. What's the population of the smallest state now?

• 10:33Speaker 02

  It's like 500,000 to 80 million or something.

• 10:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a dramatically different proportion now.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, a couple of hundred times different. Yeah, so people in a small state, when it comes to voting for the president, have many, many, many times the representation. Their vote counts for more. So what you're saying is that why it would be difficult to get that passed, but that's not what we're talking about.

• 10:53Cara Santa Maria?

  We're talking about magic.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you could just pass it, I think the smaller states, what would they do? Are they going to leave the Union over it? I doubt it.

• 11:02Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  They'd eat it. They already have more representation by having two senators, the same as bigger states do. And that's something else that should be fixed as well.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  That's my second magic wand wish.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, the bigger states need to be broken up, basically, into smaller states.

• 11:19Cara Santa Maria?

  We have the technology to count every vote now. So we don't need representatives of the people voting on our behalf. And what if we make it so that voting's mandatory? But I'm not using my amendment on that. I have a different one.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I

• 11:32Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm pro mandatory voting.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't like the, I wouldn't necessarily support, you know, a mandatory, in a country that touts the idea of freedom being sort of a centralized thing.

• 11:44Cara Santa Maria?

  You're free to vote for nobody, but you have to submit a vote.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  Oh, you're free to vote for nobody. I mean, technologically, it should be a piece of cake nowadays.

• 11:51Cara Santa Maria?

  You should be able to just log on.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  You should be able to have an app on your phone. You could literally just do it, or whatever version, not to just limit it to people that have phones, because we don't want that either. But there should be a technological way to make all of that stuff so much simpler.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  But that's a separate issue to the Electoral College. So I don't like the fact that, like Connecticut, no one cares which way Connecticut votes, ever. So I'm completely disenfranchised when it comes to nominating and electing presidents, right? So, but I think my vote should count as much as any other citizen of the United States. And that's the only way to make that happen, is to get rid of the Electoral College. And it would force candidates to play to everybody, because every vote counts. So I'm with George on that one. But Bob, do you have something?

• 12:37Bob Novella?

  I mean safeguarding democracy is like clearly we need this enshrined in something that

• 12:41Speaker 02

  So what one thing would do that more than

• 12:42Bob Novella?

  I mean gerrymandering, just totally get rid of that, that would be, that would be big, but then there's also other things like

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Well, Steve said one.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  You gotta pick, it's a Sophie's Choice.

• 12:52Bob Novella?

  I pick

• 12:53Speaker 02

  So you would ban partisan gerrymandering?

• 12:56Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good one, that was mine.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  I mean, that's a no-brainer, I mean, everyone agrees it's bad, everyone agrees that we shouldn't do it, and they say, but we have to do it because the other side's doing it, it's like, okay, so then we all have to give it up at the same time.

• 13:11Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  That's like the only way to go, you can't do it state by state, even a lot of states that did ban it are like, well, we're gonna temporarily unban it now, because we basically have to, and it's hard to argue against that, so, and that would actually not require an amendment, you could do that with a vote, the Congress could pass that law tomorrow. So, but if you did make it an amendment, that would make it a lot harder to undo.

• 13:35Bob Novella?

  Let's do that, that's what I'm, yeah, that's what I'm talking about, let's do that.

• 13:38Jay Novella?

  I got a good one.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Alright, go ahead Jay.

• 13:40Jay Novella?

  I think that there needs to be a Department of Oversight that's part of the judicial branch, that cannot in any way, shape, or form be affected by the Congress or the presidency. The Oversight Committee would be extensive, and

• 13:58Speaker 02

  What would they do?

• 13:58Jay Novella?

  They would have teeth, so they would, they would run oversight on anything that needs it, right, if a new department comes up, they can, they can vote on it and say, we want to, we want to apply our oversight to that as well.

• 14:09Cara Santa Maria?

  And how, how do they get into power?

• 14:11Jay Novella?

  I thought, I was just thinking about that.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  What's the oversight on them?

• 14:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Because that's what we do with the judiciary, but

• 14:16Bob Novella?

  Is that another branch of government?

• 14:17Jay Novella?

  I don't know if, I don't know if we need another branch of government, because it fits nicely in the judicial branch, and I'll tell you why, give me a sec, let's talk about how it would become into being, but, it has to have actual teeth, none of this, like, that's not the way we do it, and like, our government has no teeth, at all, at all, like, you know, the fact that, you know, we're seeing zero justice being served to anybody that's doing all the crap that we're seeing now, there's literally no pathway to justice. So if the Oversight had enough power, and then they had a direct line into the judicial branch where they could then apply it, okay, you have breached, you know, the rules that we have for this thing right here, we, they determine the severity, and then they pass

• 14:59Jay Novella?

  it along to, to sentencing, or whatever, whatever it would be.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  I don't know how that could work. Because whatever system you put in place can be abused.

• 15:09Jay Novella?

  Of course it can.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's so you're saying we're gonna, that's why you have to have like, you know, three co-equal branches of government with each, you know, having different ways of checks and balances on the others. You can't put one above all.

• 15:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, there can't be the ultimate checker is just gonna be. Yeah.

• 15:24Jay Novella?

  What if all the federal judges presided over it? And they were able to vote.

• 15:28Cara Santa Maria?

  They're all appointed by presidents.

• 15:30Jay Novella?

  Well, but it's, and turtles all the way down.

• 15:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  It is turtles all the way down.

• 15:33Jay Novella?

  But, but, but the point is, we, we lack, first of all, like our oversight, what little we had is gone. So it can't ever be gone. It can never be gotten rid of. We need permanent oversight that has to have the ability to, to make change.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  I think you have to drill down deeper, though. You, just like creating this vague body that's going to.

• 15:52Jay Novella?

  Well, we're on a podcast and you just asked me the question.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Okay. This is why I previewed with it last night, so you could think.

• 15:59Jay Novella?

  I don't listen.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  All right.

• 16:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Postal voting in Australia went into effect in 1902.

• 16:05Jay Novella?

  What?

• 16:05Cara Santa Maria?

  And compulsory voting was passed in 1924. They've had a hundred years of postal compulsory voting in Australia, both. Yeah, postal and compulsory.

• 16:17Jay Novella?

  I agree with you.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  I, I know what you're saying, but I'm just saying that you have to say.

• 16:20Cara Santa Maria?

  I thought we were moving on, sorry.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Who is specifically, what specific problem are you going to be fixing? What would be the, the amendment actually say? I don't think we're, you've had the ideas formed well enough.

• 16:32Jay Novella?

  I can't remain politically neutral and answer that question.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  All right.

• 16:34Cara Santa Maria?

  I have one.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  All right, let's go to, let's go to Kara.

• 16:37Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm gonna repeal the Second Amendment.

• 16:39Jay Novella?

  Wait, nobody heard you.

• 16:41Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't want to get shot.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  You want to repeal the Second Amendment?

• 16:44Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm gonna repeal the Second Amendment.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Completely, just completely repeal it?

• 16:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes. I think then we can work out what we want to happen in its place. It can be state by state, or we can put, like, I just don't like this. It's in the constitution, therefore, we can't talk about it.

• 16:59Jay Novella?

  If we got rid of it, would everything click down so the Third Amendment would become the Second Amendment, or would it?

• 17:05Cara Santa Maria?

  It would just be, it would just be grayed out. Yeah.

• 17:07Jay Novella?

  I, I can't keep them straight now.

• 17:09Cara Santa Maria?

  It would be gray, you couldn't click it anymore.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  No, it's like prohibition. Basically, just you had prohibition, and then another gets rid of prohibition.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  It's just another amendment. This is, this amendment no longer, this supersedes that other.

• 17:17Jay Novella?

  No, what I mean is, like, would we ever say?

• 17:20Speaker 02

  No.

• 17:21Jay Novella?

  Like, not, three wouldn't become two.

• 17:22Cara Santa Maria?

  No, no, no, no, no. Because we've done this. We've, we've, so, and I wouldn't, I wouldn't just straight up ban guns. I think that we would have to have, you know. National conversations, state conversations, but we have models in other countries where like handguns, for example, aren't legal, or where certain police officers aren't armed, or where you only can have sporting licenses. They treat their guns with a lot more respect. And I think if there were states where they wanted to ban guns outright, they could do that. I think there would be different approaches by different, but this idea that it is constitutionally protected, and everybody reads it differently, but, but really, we've sort of all just kind of agreed to take the broadest interpretation possible.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Well, the Supreme Court did. It's not, I don't think we collectively agreed to do that. That was a very specific Supreme Court ruling. Heller case? Yeah, I think so. I think that's, that's the one. So, the question was, does the Second Amendment apply? How broadly does it apply? Because it kind of says, you know, that

• 18:22Cara Santa Maria?

  It doesn't.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  It refers specifically to a militia. You could argue that this is saying,

• 18:26Cara Santa Maria?

  A well, yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  A well-regulated militia being pouring to whatever the

• 18:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. But that's the part I'm talking about. Shall not be infringed. It has been infringed multiple times. So, we have seen different interpretations of this law.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  But, but you could have interpreted that as saying, as part, when you're part of a militia, you have a right to own a weapon, as opposed to everyone. But the Supreme Court chose to decide, no, that refers to everyone.

• 18:53Cara Santa Maria?

  The right of the people part was more, yeah, yeah.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  When did they do that? It's an individual right to own a weapon, right?

• 18:58Cara Santa Maria?

  The Heller decision was 2008.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  What?

• 19:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so there have been other, there have been other decisions.

• 19:04Jay Novella?

  Kara, that is, you know, it's very, it's very provocative.

• 19:07Cara Santa Maria?

  But it shouldn't be.

• 19:08Jay Novella?

  I know, but I, it would come with an incredible amount of drama, and I would love to see a TV show about what, like, one way that this would play out.

• 19:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  But there are other countries that don't have anything equivalent to a Second Amendment. They just pass laws about how to regulate guns.

• 19:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Are there any countries that do have anything equivalent to a Second Amendment?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 19:26Cara Santa Maria?

  I think we might be unique in that.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  We're, we're unusual. I don't know if we're completely unique.

• 19:31Jay Novella?

  And then you might need like an oversight committee to

• 19:37Speaker 02

  So you guys took mine, so, but I have a, I have a long list of ones that I would do.

• 19:41Jay Novella?

  Of course you do.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  So I do believe, I think the most important amendments now would be to make democracy function better. I do think that banning partisan gerrymandering is absolutely number one on my list of that.

• 19:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Number one, interesting, not term, or not a, a campaign finance reform.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  No, I think, I mean, that's.

• 19:59Cara Santa Maria?

  That's up there for me, yeah.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  That's definitely something else. I, I would reform the House more thoroughly. I would double to triple the number of representatives.

• 20:10Cara Santa Maria?

  He wants the zoo to be bigger.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when.

• 20:12Jay Novella?

  So how many would there be?

• 20:14Speaker 02

  So there was, so there was, now there's 435 representatives right now. When the, when the country started, there was one representative for every 30,000 constituents. Now it's one to 750,000. In the early 20th century, they just, when we got to, they kept increasing the House as the population increased. Then when they got to 435, they said, that's enough, we'll just stop right there. But that was just an arbitrary, again, it's not in the Constitution, just a decision by Congress. And we've sort of been stuck at that number since then. And meanwhile, the population has grown considerably. So we definitely need to double or triple the, the, the size of the House to, so that the representatives are closer to their constituents.

• 20:51Jay Novella?

  So how many would, would there be, if you want to modernize it, how many people?

• 20:55Speaker 02

  1,200, 1,300.

• 20:56Jay Novella?

  That's not incredibly high number.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  And at the same time, because you really do have to kind of link these things together, I would go to multi-representative districts. So, yeah, that means that, um, it's like a good example is if you have a state with 20 representatives, instead of having 20 districts with one representative each, you have two with 10 representatives each. That way, if you get 20% of the vote, you get two of the 10, you get 20% of the representatives. So that is proportional representation.

• 21:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Would you have two with 10, or would you have 10 with two each?

• 21:27Speaker 02

  No, well, whatever. You have some, you have, you have more than one representative per district and you decide exactly how many, depending on how many.

• 21:33Cara Santa Maria?

  So just larger districts.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, with multiple representatives that are then assigned proportionally to the vote.

• 21:39Jay Novella?

  It sounds very complicated.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Rather than winner take all, you got 51% and you got 100% of the representation and everyone else is disenfranchised.

• 21:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Right?

• 21:46Speaker 03

  Because then third parties have a better chance too to.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Third parties have a chance.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, have a chance.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Versus no chance.

• 21:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Can we add ranked choice voting?

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:53Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know if that, if that would have that on my shortlist of constitutional amendments.

• 21:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Really? Oh, I think that would dramatically change things.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Oh, I think, yeah, I'm in favor of ranked choice voting.

• 22:03Cara Santa Maria?

  I think ranked choice and campaign finance reform, but that's like a multi-headed dragon too.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:07Cara Santa Maria?

  There's a lot that goes into campaign finance.

• 22:09Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but they, even with campaign finance reform, how are you gonna, you know, we'd need like this oversight thing to make sure that they're following it.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Could there be, could there be?

• 22:17Jay Novella?

  Really? I'm right. Come on, guys.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  Some kind of constitutional amendment about like an official Taco Tuesday?

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  Like, I think that would be, if I really had to pick one, I think that would be a nationally mandated.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  So nobody brought up the equal rights amendment. What do you think about that?

• 22:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Adapting it, you mean?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, we actually passed it, right?

• 22:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, we've been working on that. That's not.

• 22:38Jay Novella?

  How about healthcare rights as well? I mean, there's a lot of, a lot of good stuff.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 22:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  What do you, what do you think out of what we said would have the biggest, fastest impact out of what we mentioned, the ones that we mentioned?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Banning gerrymandering.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Gerrymandering?

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Really? I think campaign finance reform would have a bigger impact.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  But the thing is, if you fix that, if you fix that, that, that, everything else could flow from that.

• 22:59Jay Novella?

  It's trickle down.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Because right now, there is absolutely no incentive for any representative to, to go to appeal to moderates, appeal to the middle, appeal, appeal across the aisle. They only have to cater to the most extreme end of their party.

• 23:13Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  That's it. Out of 435 seats, only 15 are considered competitive today. That's nothing.

• 23:20Jay Novella?

  So repeat that, Steve.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  15 out of 435. The, the House was, was supposed to be the, a rapid response barometer on the will of the voters, right? And like, oh, we're unhappy with the government, two years later, you know, you're going to get voted out, at least of the House. It's not that anymore. It is not that, that's the. Representatives choosing their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives.

• 23:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  And everything is broken because of that. If you fix that, at least then we have the ability to do all these other things, right? It's prerequisite kind of.

• 23:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Kind of, I mean, yeah.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  I mean, at least it's, no one piece would do it, but I think, I just think that's the biggest piece.

• 23:56Cara Santa Maria?

  It's fundamental. But I also, I also really.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  All right.

• 23:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I have to start.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Kara's gonna start. Kara, you gonna tell us about how our brains relate to whether or not we believe in ghosts, or something like that?

• 24:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Something like that, yeah. So, so I stumbled across an article in The Conversation. I'm always talking about how much I love The Conversation. This is an outlet for usually researchers to write, basically blog posts, by Dr. Melissa Mafia, who's a psychology professor from Wake Forest University. She recently wrote a book, kind of her version. It's called Science of the Supernatural, but it's, it's, it's her version, which has been written many times before of sort of why people believe in things like ghosts. And she talks about three different sort of factors for why an individual might walk into a place that they think or have been told is haunted and say that they experienced

• 24:49Cara Santa Maria?

  paranormal phenomena there. So the first one has to do with the place itself having environmental stimuli that feed back on the experience of being in a haunted area. And so there have been studies that show that there are correlations between things like weird smells and weird sounds and people's tendency to report that they're in a haunted area. She digs really deep into EMFs. I mean, all the studies kind of show that there's, we cannot detect that stuff. We can't, we may.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Electromagnetic frequency.

• 25:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, electromagnetic frequencies. There, there, there are some studies that show that there may be some, I guess, magnetic things out there, but not electromagnetic frequencies. And that usually the correlations between experiencing paranormal phenomena and reporting that you experienced a paranormal phenomena and not reporting that you experienced a paranormal phenomena when you're in a quote unquote haunted place is whether they told you in advance that that place is haunted or not. So expectation effects, obviously. But then she does talk about what's going on in the brains of individuals who have a tendency to claim that they've experienced something paranormal. And I wanted to look at some of the polling data, like the more recent polling data here

• 26:06Cara Santa Maria?

  in the United States. Yeah, how many people do you think believe in ghosts? What percentage of the population?

• 26:12Speaker 03

  Forty.

• 26:12Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I put it in the 40s.

• 26:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Thirty-eight say yes, but an additional 22 say not sure. So only 40% don't believe in ghosts. And then if you look a little bit deeper of the people who believe in ghosts, not of them, sorry, of the entire population, the sample that was taken of the population, how many people say that they've actually seen a ghost? It's a lower number.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Twenty, probably 28.

• 26:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Sixteen.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  Sixteen.

• 26:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's low. But 35% have felt a presence or an unknown energy. So a physical ghost. And actually, when you do ask the question a different way, you do see changes because a lot more people claim that they have seen or experienced the presence of a dead relative, which is just a ghost, right? But, but it's not like a ghost you see in the movies. That's grandma.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Have you seen a ghost?

• 27:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly. When you ask it that way. So yeah, a lot of people think that they're having these experiences. And so she digs deep, and we've talked about this before on the show. She digs kind of deep into some of the experiences that folks might have during hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations. So either when you're falling asleep or you're waking up, often when you're waking up, it can be really common, especially if you're waking up suddenly out of deep sleep, because you are paralyzed when you sleep. Why are you paralyzed when you're asleep? So you don't act out your dreams, right?

• 27:39Jay Novella?

  Sleep block.

• 27:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and some people actually have disorders that, that, you know, prevent them from being paralyzed. There are also some really interesting studies where for purposes of implanting a device, for example, to help with seizure activity or tremor, individuals will have different regions of their brain stimulated while they're awake as, as part of a brain surgery. And there do seem to, there does seem to be an interesting region around the temporoparietal junction where Different areas of stimulation may induce a feeling like you're not in your body, or your body is somehow separate from you. And there are a lot of really interesting neurological disorders. You know, Oliver Sacks has famously written about a lot of them. I think there

• 28:24Cara Santa Maria?

  was the guy with the cadaver leg. This might have been in The Man Who Mistook His Wife or Had It. It might have been in An Anthropologist on Mars, where every night, he would find himself on the ground. He was in a, I think, a ward, and they would ask him why he fell out of bed. And he'd say, "Oh, there's a dead leg in my bed." And he would throw it out. And that was really his own leg.

• 28:42Jay Novella?

  Wait, wait. He threw his own leg out of bed?

• 28:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm. And so he would fall with it. I mean, I guess if you're disembodied from your body, you're not going to resist that kind of feeling.

• 28:51Jay Novella?

  I know, but physically, he grabs his leg.

• 28:54Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. It's hard for us to understand because it's our leg.

• 28:56Jay Novella?

  And he pushes it, and he ends up flinging his body out of bed.

• 28:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but you've seen people who have paralysis, who will move their legs in their chair, their wheelchair, to do a transfer. It's similar, right? So if you fling your leg hard enough, your body's gonna go with it.

• 29:08Jay Novella?

  Oh, I thought, all right, I'm thinking he's picking it up with his arms, but he's wagging his leg really hard.

• 29:12Cara Santa Maria?

  No, no, no. He's picking it up with his arms.

• 29:14Jay Novella?

  I don't believe it.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  No, yeah, absolutely.

• 29:16Cara Santa Maria?

  But haven't you ever watched somebody do a wheelchair transfer?

• 29:18Jay Novella?

  I have, but I mean, let's think, you're lying in bed.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Jay, I've seen it. I've seen it.

• 29:23Jay Novella?

  All right, let me finish.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  It happens.

• 29:25Jay Novella?

  George, you following me?

• 29:26Speaker 03

  I think we need some kind of oversight for dream state and throwing one's legs out.

• 29:33Bob Novella?

  After the show, in the green room, demonstrate it for Jay, please.

• 29:36Jay Novella?

  Twenty-one years of training to be a skeptic, and I can't be skeptical right now? I'm telling you, as a neurologist, this is a thing that happens.

• 29:45Cara Santa Maria?

  So, but the idea here is disembodiment. And disembodiment can be achieved through drug use. It can be achieved through just having neurodivergence. It can be, you know, through seizure activity, through...

• 29:56Jay Novella?

  Transcranial magnetic stimulation.

• 29:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, you can induce it quickly. That's very, very cool. Yeah.

• 30:01Jay Novella?

  Hypoxia. Yeah, so pharmacologically, anoxia, you know, electromagnetically, you can induce it. But I would like to point out, the cool thing is that everything you experience about your own existence is a construct in your brain, right? You don't feel like you own and control your right arm simply because you do. Your brain has to actively create that sensation, that you own it, that you control it, that's a part of you, right? And that you occupy it.

• 30:27Bob Novella?

  And that can break.

• 30:28Jay Novella?

  And all those circuits can individually or collectively break. And really funky stuff happens when you do that. But what's interesting is...

• 30:36Speaker 02

  That is a typical brain, right? But there are lots of people with atypical brains.

• 30:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. And interestingly, we're seeing more and more, this is just an aside, but more and more research showing a connection between the regions in your brain where you have that sense of embodiment. You know, this arm is my arm and it is part of my body versus literal sense of self and identity. So, you know, there's kind of all along the chain, it can be broken or it can get wiggly. And so we see a lot of examples in my line of work with people with like borderline personality disorder, for example, who have a sort of difficult to pin down sense of self. And so it does seem that there's some relation between just the idea that I am me and who I am is permanent versus this is my arm, this is my leg and it's part of my physical body.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  Temporal lobe seizures, not surprising at all. This is pointing to the temporal lobe. One of the classic signs of a partial seizure in the temporal lobe is what we call depersonalization. You feel disconnected from yourself or derealization, where you feel disconnected from reality.

• 31:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  I've had patients describe it to me. It's like I'm looking through a big, deep fish tank and reality is on the other side, right? Like they're literally separated from reality or they're separated from themselves. So again, that tells you that's because that the sensation that you are in reality and that you are yourself and distinct from reality, because you could break that down too. Infants don't have that for a while. And then there are certain drugs like LSD that will break that down. Where you feel, I feel one with the universe. Yeah, because the separation between where you end and the universe begins is again, in your brain and that you can break that down as well.

• 32:22Cara Santa Maria?

  And boundary experiences, as we call them in existential theory, boundary experiences or even extreme trauma. So by the boundary experience, I mean something that kind of shunts you into thinking about your mortality a lot and takes you out of the everyday mode of being can also induce that sense of depersonalization or derealization. So a lot of cancer patients that I work with will report feeling that way from time to time.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Anxiety does. And in fact, anxiety and temporal obseures can look very much like each other. I've experienced both of those.

• 32:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, and it's really, it's existentially terrifying.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  You can get used to it, though. You can talk yourself into it.

• 32:59Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure. You can talk yourself into it and out of it.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you can deal with it.

• 33:05Cara Santa Maria?

  If you have tools. You have tools, yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  You just sing, "This arm is my arm."

• 33:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, a grounding exercise, not in the pseudoscientific way, but in the psychological way, a grounding exercise does that. Like, if you've ever done a 3-2-1 or 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise, name three things you can see, feel two things that you can feel, and describe them out loud, and then one thing you can hear. It brings you back into the present moment, and it helps you.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  It can bring you back.

• 33:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  It doesn't work for everyone in all cases.

• 33:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but there are a lot of different approaches to that. So, and then finally, she talks about, so the first thing that we talked about was the environment itself and the expectation effects and all of the experiences you're having in the environment. The second thing is what's going on in your brain. And then the third thing that she talks about are personality traits. And Steve, you mentioned that there used to be kind of a term for like a believing personality.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  There is, there still is, but the guy who was really the champion of it, Barry Bernstein, died. So this was the fantasy-prone personality. Anyone hear that?

• 34:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Fantasy-prone.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Thirty years ago, this was very common among skeptical circles, like, oh, that's a fantasy-prone personality.

• 34:10Bob Novella?

  We talked about that a lot.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then there's actually like a 30-question sort of scale that you ask people. Like, it includes things like, did you have imaginary friends when you were a child? Right? Things like that. The higher you score in it, the more, it correlated, predicted really well, things like belief in ghosts, belief in alien abductions, you know, a lot of paranormal things. So there really did seem to be like this, you know, people, subtype, you know, of people who were fantasy-prone, who were driving most reports of paranormal phenomena. Not only do they believe in it, they're the ones who are saying, "I saw a ghost."

• 34:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Right? Who actually believe that they physically saw a ghost. And, you know, we've been, back in the day, when we did a lot more investigations locally, there was always one person in every group who were like, that's the fantasy-prone person right there. And they were the ones that were driving all of the alleged phenomena.

• 35:05Bob Novella?

  And that's still valid, right, Steve?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 35:06Cara Santa Maria?

  It's just not a clinical term. So in the research literature... Very often in psychology, and she writes quite a bit about this. The term that we'll often use is schizotypy, which I guess is kind of confusing because people will mistake it for schizophrenia, which is not what I'm referring to. Schizotypy is a personality concept, you know, a continuum of traits.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  E are you saying?

• 35:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Type, typy, like T Y P Y, like typy.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Schizotypy.

• 35:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Like a schizotypal personality. Yeah, so there is something called schizotypal personality disorder. I'm not specifically referring to people who qualify for the disorder, but more the spectrum of individuals with schizotypal traits. They do tend to be like loners. They tend to be more, more susceptible to paranoia or, you know, more susceptible to psychosis if it were to happen. They tend to believe in fantastic things and just have a general kind of like weirdness about them. Like, you know, it's like a non-clinical weirdness, but sometimes you'll, you'll see that, you'll recognize that in these research literatures.

• 36:14Cara Santa Maria?

  And of course, in the clinical literature as well, once it becomes a clinical, like not, you know, diagnos- diagnosable.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Euphemistically, we sometimes refer to them as O D D. Odd.

• 36:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, I was like.

• 36:31Cara Santa Maria?

  I was like oppositional defiant disorder. That's what I think of when I think O D D. Yeah, odd, okay. And so, so she basically talks about how very often these three traits will form the trifecta. And when you have the trifecta, that's when you may hear about people describing paranormal events. I guess she, she went about it saying, why is it that I don't believe in ghosts? And so she kind of closes her article, which I think is a lovely little quote where she says, I, I've never noticed E M F. I've never experienced sleep paralysis. I'm pretty sure I don't have personality traits like schizotypy. I don't believe in the paranormal. I don't think I'll ever see a ghost. Yeah, probably not. Yeah.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:12Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think I'll ever see a ghost either.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  And there's so many overlapping traits, you know, like reality testing versus, you know, the sense of. Identity versus your, your, how you, you process your sensory information. All these things are happening at the same time. Your tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, your paranoia, all these different things. And, but yeah, you got enough of them, critical mass of these things. And you're like, yeah, you're the conspiracy theorist who believes every weird, wacky thing.

• 37:37Cara Santa Maria?

  I, I also feel like there's one layer that she sort of left out. I mean, granted, she might've talked about it in her book, but not in the short article, which is culture bound beliefs as well, right? Because if you come from a culture.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  They usually don't count. If you're psychologically evaluating somebody for a personality, you don't count that they believe in culturally appropriate things.

• 37:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but it may still account for why they believe in a ghost.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Because culturally, yeah, or, or within their family or their religion. Seeing ghosts might be a completely normal explanation for some of these phenomena.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  I used to work in a, in a, in a 200 plus year old music building. I, I worked at Merivian College and at night it was incredibly creepy, incredibly creepy. I used to have to lock the building up at night and do stuff. And I would force myself to walk slowly, like through the hallways in the dark, terrified, but trying to build up my rational muscle of like,

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  there are no ghosts. There's no ghosts, you know, like, like you're fine, but also ride that wave of like, this is really scary.

• 38:37Cara Santa Maria?

  That is exposure therapy. That is what you were doing. You were feeling the anxious feelings that come up. You were listening to your rational mind and you were realizing, I am safe. I am okay, I can get through this.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Every like, yeah. But fear of monsters in the dark is primal.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  That's baked in.

• 38:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Because there are monsters in the dark.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Evolutionarily speaking.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Sometimes I staged.

• 39:00Jay Novella?

  My wife and I, when we were looking for a house, we, realtor brought us into this house and me and my wife and the realtor all got creeped out by the house. Like it really, I swear to God, like, you know, I'm a skeptic. I was a skeptic back then. I'm experiencing myself, holy shit, this house has like some evil vibe to it.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Creepy vibe to it.

• 39:20Jay Novella?

  So what was it about the house?

• 39:22Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, but I invited you over to look at my house. I wanted you to see. I wanted you to see what it looked like, you know?

• 39:27Jay Novella?

  So the, it's interesting, like, I'm fully understanding in my brain, like, you know, this is not real, like, this isn't a, because there's a spirit here, it's because the sensory input is affecting all of us, you know what I mean? And it really had that, I am fascinated with that.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:43Jay Novella?

  You could create something that can, can instill that feeling in a, in a person who'd like, has programmed themselves to not fall for any of that nonsense.

• 39:51Cara Santa Maria?

  It's actually not that hard, like, she talks about places where there's varied lighting, varied temperature pockets, and just under the radar sounds. When you, when you combined all of those things, people will often say that it feels creepy and haunted.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  I wanted, just real quick, I wanted to have a, it's like skeptical eBay that sells real estate of murder homes.

• 40:12Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 40:13Speaker 03

  You know, stuff that like, like is sort of tainted.

• 40:14Jay Novella?

  Psychological damage.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  Psychological damage, so like, oh, here's a carving knife that like killed 15 people. You're not allowed to sell those things. No, but I'm saying like, yeah, yeah, but like, if there was, let's say a house that where a murder happened, and they're trying to resell it, like, you know that people that are maybe a little bit more rational thinking wouldn't be freaked out by it as much.

• 40:31Jay Novella?

  It's a good buy for a good deal.

• 40:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Very good buy, yeah.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Let's talk about water for a bit.

• 40:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Water.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Water.

• 40:36Jay Novella?

  Water.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  So what percentage of people in the world do you think do not have reliable access to fresh drinking water?

• 40:44Jay Novella?

  Uh, I'd say, I'd say 20 to 25%.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  20%, good, yeah, 20%.

• 40:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay. Yeah, I'd say 30. So 20?

• 40:51Speaker 02

  20%, yeah.

• 40:52Jay Novella?

  All right.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Um, depending on where you draw the cutoff of that, obviously you have to come up with some kind of way of cutting that up, but a lot, right? A lot of people do not have reliable access to fresh drinking water. What percentage of the water that people consume, fresh water that we consume, comes from desalination plants? Basically, desalinating salt water?

• 41:10Jay Novella?

  15%.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  No, like, almost nothing.

• 41:12Jay Novella?

  5%.

• 41:13Cara Santa Maria?

  It's gotta be low.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  It's gotta be low, crazy low.

• 41:15Jay Novella?

  5%.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  1%.

• 41:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  1%, but that's worldwide. What percentage of the water consumed in the Mideast, the Middle East, is from desalination?

• 41:24Cara Santa Maria?

  All of that 1%, yeah.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  It's like, it's half, it's half of that 1%.

• 41:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  So it's, it's over. Over ninety percent and some countries like Israel is ninety seven percent. Ninety seven percent of their water comes from desalination plants. So it's critical. California is actually pretty high as well.

• 41:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Interesting.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  So yeah, so if you live in a dry part of the world, that's your option, right? There's not enough water to go around and some places have way more people than they have water. Alright, so desalination is obviously a critical technology. And how you know how basically it works? How do we desalinate water?

• 42:00Jay Novella?

  Reverse osmosis?

• 42:01Cara Santa Maria?

  It just like settles to the bottom.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  No, it's dissolved, it's dissolved in it.

• 42:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, right, right.

• 42:06Jay Novella?

  Electrolysis kind of something?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  So.

• 42:09Cara Santa Maria?

  I thought it was like with temperature.

• 42:11Bob Novella?

  Some filter, some type of filter.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 42:13Cara Santa Maria?

  We all, none of us know.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  None of you know.

• 42:15Jay Novella?

  Oh, we don't know.

• 42:16Cara Santa Maria?

  You could have done a science or fiction.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  And not, not that those things wouldn't necessarily work like osmosis, whatever.

• 42:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Can't you just boil?

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, you don't have to boil it, you would just evaporate it, right? You have to evaporate the water away from the salt.

• 42:28Cara Santa Maria?

  I guess that's what I meant by.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  That is, that is the most scalable, cost-effective, energy-efficient way to do it, right? You don't want to use a highly energy-intensive thing. You just need to evaporate away the water and then you leave the salt behind. It's not just sodium chloride, there are other salts, magnesium salts, lithium salts.

• 42:43Cara Santa Maria?

  And you want a certain amount of mineral content in your water.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you could then do that later, right? You can reconstitute it, so it's not, you know, distilled water.

• 42:51Cara Santa Maria?

  It only has to have a lower osmolarity than your blood. Then you're okay. Higher osmolarity, bad, kill you.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  So the whole process is first you have to pre-treat the water, right? You can't just take raw ocean water. You have to like filter out all the macroscopic stuff. You have to chemically pre-treat it, make sure there's no bacteria and stuff in there.

• 43:12Cara Santa Maria?

  You can just do that with bleach, right?

• 43:13Speaker 03

  I'm just saying, is that bleach or is that?

• 43:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's a very common way to clean water.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  You could use various chemicals.

• 43:18Bob Novella?

  But wouldn't evaporating it take care of a lot of that?

• 43:21Cara Santa Maria?

  If you boiled it, but not.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  So they don't, yeah, they don't want to boil it because it's very energy-intensive. They just evaporate it. But what, what, one of the big problems with evaporation, there's two really big problems with it. One is that the salts that get left behind then coat the evaporation plate that you're using, right? So then you have to clean it, which makes, again, slows down the process.

• 43:42Bob Novella?

  And you gotta clean it with water.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. And what's the other thing? What's left behind is actually not dry salt. It's highly concentrated salt water, which they call brine, right? You know, brine is very, very salty water. So what do they do with that brine?

• 43:59Jay Novella?

  Make turkeys, yeah.

• 44:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Stick it back in the ocean.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  They stick it back in the ocean.

• 44:02Cara Santa Maria?

  So now the ocean gets saltier.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  So now, so then, which creates a local havoc, right? So dumping all this big, really concentrated brine back into the ocean is a problem. Um, it, it, because it's basically deadly to whatever's living in the part of the ocean that you're dumping it into.

• 44:17Jay Novella?

  Oh, I see where you're going with this. So therefore like this monster evolves in that brackish water.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  That's it, you got it, Jay. So there's rooms, a lot of room for improvement in this process. And the, the, the idea is that if we could make a more energy efficient, environmentally friendly, cost-effective, uh, method that did not leave behind this sludgy brine, then we could maybe cover that other 20% of people who don't have access to fresh water. And of course, this problem's only getting worse, right? Not better. Um, so, and this is where then obviously my news item comes in. So researchers have been looking at a, essentially an upgraded evaporation process. Uh, and they did a couple of things. So first of all, Bob, they use a femto laser. Nice, femto second laser, nice, nice. Very fast.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  To etch, to etch the evaporation panels. This is, this is, you know, solar heating, thermal, thermal solar, right? Is the, is the technique. It's not photovoltaic. It's solar because it's basically powered by the sun and it's just thermal because it's using the sun to heat the water up enough to evaporate it. But they etched it so that a couple of things happen. One, so that it just more efficiently evaporates the water away from the salt. But it also channels the salts and they had to make them exactly the right size for all the different salts that are in the seawater so that they migrate to the outer ring of the panel. They, they said it's similar to like a coffee ring effect, right? Why do you only, when coffee evaporates, you, it leaves a ring sometime?

• 45:46Speaker 02

  I know partly because it's the cup, but, um, that, that actually does happen just naturally where just the solute will move to the edge of. The area that's evaporating. So they just basically maximize that. So what does that do? That allows them to not clog up the evaporation surf, the active surface, right? So the active surface is left clean, the salts all go to the edge, and it more, it purifies those salts greater, to a greater degree. So-

• 46:14Jay Novella?

  But it still builds up and builds up.

• 46:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they would still have to remove it.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's not stopping it from working in the meantime, right? And then what do they do with those salts when they're done? They don't, it's not a brine.

• 46:24Jay Novella?

  They sell them.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  They sell them.

• 46:26Jay Novella?

  Of course.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Cause they've already cleaned the water, so the salt is clean.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  So they don't have to dump it back into the ocean. You end up with a commercial salt that you can sell for-

• 46:35Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and then they-

• 46:36Speaker 02

  Depending on the salt.

• 46:37Jay Novella?

  They put pink dye in it and they call it Himalayan body salts. And we're all paying like fifty dollars a jar.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  Right. So one of those salts, which actually I already threw this word out there, which one of the salts that is left behind is what?

• 46:49Jay Novella?

  It's photovoltaic.

• 46:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Magnesium something?

• 46:51Speaker 02

  No, not magnesium.

• 46:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Sodium chloride, magnesium chloride, what else?

• 46:56Speaker 02

  Lithium.

• 46:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Lithium.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Lithium.

• 46:59Jay Novella?

  That's what I was gonna say next.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  So hello, right, exactly. So this could be actually a commercially viable way to, cause there's a ton of lithium dissolved in the oceans. I, I've read a calcula-, so at current, current use of lithium, at our current annual use of lithium, there's enough lithium dissolved in the world's oceans to power our, our need for lithium for roughly a million years, right? So-

• 47:24Jay Novella?

  That should do.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's basically a bottomless pit of lithium in the world. The problem is it's not commercially viable to get at that lithium, not yet, right? So that's why we're mining it from places where it's concentrated. But if, if this could, as if, if it's just a byproduct of a process that we're using to make drinkable water, you know, potable fresh water, then it just becomes an extra, right? You're not, and so-

• 47:49Jay Novella?

  Is this at scale or this is just in a lab?

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Well, it's, they, they've done a proof of concept, right? But they said that they, they believe it's totally scalable, but we'll see, right? We always have to see.

• 47:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but there's nothing, yeah.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  About it that's not, like, there's no theoretical limit to how scalable it is.

• 48:03Cara Santa Maria?

  But how much lithium is dissolved- In the saltwater versus on the ocean floor.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  The figure I gave you is dissolved in seawater.

• 48:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's great. Yeah, because even just to mine lithium from the ocean floor, it wreaks like absolute havoc.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, we talked about that. For a while, I'm like, oh, man, these metallic modules on the bottom of the ocean floor, that's like the battery in a rock at the bottom of the ocean floor. But unfortunately, the more we study it, the more havoc that wreaks on the seafloor ecosystem. So we have to be really careful about that. And again, drawing a lot of water out of the ocean and putting it through this process is not environmentally neutral either. But it's a lot better than all other alternatives.

• 48:44Cara Santa Maria?

  And also, if people are already doing this, how can we make it more efficient? It's reducing the damage.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the idea is that we would also scale it up because we do have this deficit of fresh water that we have to make up. So again, is this going to turn into the thing that's going to solve these problems? Who knows? But it's a very compelling proof of concept. And it solves multiple problems at the same time, which really sounds great. It solves the brine problem, the inefficiency of clogging up the evaporator problem. Poisoning problem. And you get lithium and other salts out of it as a bonus.

• 49:17Speaker 03

  Who's developing this?

• 49:18Speaker 02

  It was a lab.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  It was a lab? Okay, so it's not like some government, like the Mideastern government?

• 49:23Speaker 02

  No.

• 49:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, but they may be funding that lab.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Maybe. At this point, it's a proof of concept in the lab. Yeah, so yeah, but we need a company to say, hey, we'll buy that, or whatever, or them to form a company, which happens sometimes. And then you get backers, you get venture capital, and then you mass produce the things, you know? Yeah, maybe, maybe. Too soon?

• 49:44Speaker 02

  All right, Bob.

• 49:45Bob Novella?

  Whoa.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  You know, I love gamma rays and cosmic rays. What's going on here?

• 49:49Bob Novella?

  Okay, so this was great. I loved researching this. What's that?

• 49:53Speaker 02

  All kinds of rays.

• 49:53Bob Novella?

  All kinds of rays. All right, guys, so Penn State scientists and Japanese researchers have peeled back some fascinating layers to the most energetic particles ever discovered that we've ever seen in the entire universe. And maybe, you know, maybe making them even a little bit less mysterious in the process, which is really important because these things are very mysterious. This was published in the Physical Review Letters. The name of the study was Ultra Heavy Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays. All right, so cosmic rays, let's briefly just go over that. I mean, what's not to love, right, Steve? We love cosmic rays, right? Everybody loves cosmic rays, right?

• 50:30Speaker 02

  Bob, what's a cosmic ray?

• 50:32Bob Novella?

  Okay, they're atom fragments that have been accelerated by fiendishly powerful processes in the universe, flung out as radiation, and they're made mostly of protons. It's usually just a proton, but it's also other bigger atomic nuclei can make them up. Electrons could be these cosmic rays. Even a tiny, tiny fraction of cosmic rays can be antimatter. How cool is that?

• 50:56Cara Santa Maria?

  But Bob, is all radiation that comes from out there not cosmic rays?

• 51:02Bob Novella?

  Right, gamma rays, gamma radiation.

• 51:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like all electromagnetic radiation that comes to us on Earth from the cosmos?

• 51:11Speaker 02

  No.

• 51:11Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  That's not the terminology.

• 51:13Cara Santa Maria?

  So that's what I'm wondering. How do you differentiate? What makes a cosmic ray a cosmic ray?

• 51:17Speaker 02

  As Bob was saying, it's a proton or other atom fragment accelerated to relativistic speeds as opposed to electromagnetic radiation like gamma rays, which is just part of the EM spectrum, right?

• 51:27Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Like X-rays, gamma rays.

• 51:28Bob Novella?

  That's basically it.

• 51:29Cara Santa Maria?

  So it always has to be nucleons?

• 51:32Speaker 02

  Protons, mostly protons.

• 51:33Bob Novella?

  It's mostly a proton. Primarily, when you're talking about cosmic rays, it's a proton accelerated to relativistic speeds.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  And the reason it's a proton and not a neutron, correct me if I'm wrong, Bob, is because protons have a charge, right? So therefore, a highly energetic magnetic field can squirt them out, whereas protons do not react to magnetic fields. I mean neutrons. Neutrons don't react to magnetic.

• 51:51Bob Novella?

  And don't forget, this is critically important. These are really have consequences because humans will not travel in deep space until they solve the problem of cosmic rays and other radiation, solar radiation, for example, basically slowly killing them. So this is huge. I mean, for AQ6, we talk about spaceships, and it's almost nonexistent where the spaceship takes into account shielding against this type of radiation.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  They just ignore it because it's... I have to say, I think I bring this up multiple times.

• 52:23Bob Novella?

  NASA interview we did?

• 52:24Speaker 02

  We interviewed a NASA scientist, right? And we're like, hey, what's your plan to deal with the cosmic ray problem?

• 52:29Bob Novella?

  Like going to Mars?

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Even just going to Mars, it's a problem. And their answer was, just got to get there fast. That's it, which means they have no solution.

• 52:38Bob Novella?

  Yeah, there's no solution, but not just get there fast, then deal with the problems that, the medical problems that arise from having all this radiation. So get there as fast as you can, not a great solution.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  And make people more resistant to the radiation.

• 52:50Bob Novella?

  Right, so cosmic rays are an important thing, but, so they're mysterious, as I said, they've been mysterious since they were discovered over six decades ago, you know, and don't forget, there's a broad range of cosmic rays. The ones that are most fascinating, of course, are the ultra energetic cosmic rays. They are incredibly, incredibly powerful, and we're not sure what accelerates them. Maybe it was a supernova, maybe it's a black hole, maybe it's neutron stars. We're not really positive exactly how they're getting all that energy, and, but also, and then how do they stay energetic? Because they're traveling for millions of light years, and they, these really powerful ones maintain that energy level without, without losing it, as they should.

• 53:33Jay Novella?

  How could one be more energetic than the other if they're, if they're all going to speed of light?

• 53:37Speaker 02

  They're not going to speed of light.

• 53:38Bob Novella?

  They're not, yeah, they're not. They're going, they're going very, very fast.

• 53:42Jay Novella?

  They're going close to the speed of light.

• 53:43Bob Novella?

  Ultra-relativistic, but they can never hit, right, they have mass, so they can't go at the speed of light.

• 53:47Jay Novella?

  So would one, would you describe an energetic one going a little bit faster than the other ones?

• 53:52Bob Novella?

  But it depends, it depends how big, are we talking about a bare proton, or are we talking about multiple nucleons, you know, a bigger, a bigger atom, which I will be, which I'm getting into right about now. So, then there was this recent mystery, it deepened recently, and a few years ago, Amaterasu, the Amaterasu Cosmic Ray, which is such a beautiful name, it's from the sun goddess in Japanese mythology, Amaterasu. This was among the most energetic cosmic rays ever discovered, 240 exa-electron volts. That number should impress you, which is quintillion electron volts. This is, you know, we, we've talked about the Large Hadron Collider, it accelerates protons with tremendous energies.

• 54:33Bob Novella?

  This one particle was 35 million times approximately larger than anything, any proton we've ever accelerated before. So this is amazingly fast. How fast is it? I found out how fast this was.

• 57:15Bob Novella?

  No.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Would make a ping sound?

• 57:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like if it hit right in the right place in your ear, I bet you'd hear it.

• 57:21Bob Novella?

  Hmm, I don't know.

• 57:23Cara Santa Maria?

  If you could see it, you could probably hear it if it got you just right.

• 57:27Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but I mean, your eyes can see, your retina can detect in ideal situations, like one photon of light. I don't think something, you know, so your eyes are super sensitive is what I'm saying compared to your hearing. But now, the Amaterasu, the big mystery was this, they, you can, you can detect a cosmic ray, it hits the atmosphere, it creates a shower of secondary particles that propagate down through the atmosphere, and if we detect those secondary particles, we could say, oh, it looked like a cosmic ray hit the atmosphere here. We can kind of see, it came from this direction, it had this energy, and you kind of can backtrack it, and you've got to consider though, it's not a straight line like a photon, that's not, you know, that's, you know, not hitting any gravitational fields, but it's

• 58:09Bob Novella?

  not a straight line. It's pinballing throughout the universe because of magnetic fields. It's charged, so it's going through magnetic fields, so you can't just say, it hit coming this direction, so it came from there. No, you've got to calculate what all the magnetic fields, you know, but you can, you know, you can get, it's very difficult, but you can get an estimate of approximately where it came from, to see what kind of process created this amazingly powerful cosmic ray. When they looked back at the Amaterasu, they're like, it's going to a void in space, there's nothing there. How come? What is, what's going on that we can't even remotely figure out where this thing came from? What's different about this particle? So, they did a study. They used computational simulations and models, and they essentially took all the different types of particles that a cosmic

• 58:54Bob Novella?

  ray could be, and in the simulation, put them traveling millions of light years in space, and to see what would happen. Physics, what's physics and astrophysics saying about what would happen to these particles? And their conclusion was that you, some of these, not all of them, but some, it seems that some of these super energetic cosmic rays could be heavier than iron, they could be kind of big atom fragments, like gold, platinum, osmium, selenium, it could be that type of atom fragment with no electrons, of course, because otherwise it wouldn't be charged. And that's what's being accelerated. So we're talking not a proton for these fast cosmic rays, but maybe 200 nucleons, right? Protons and neutrons.

• 59:37Bob Novella?

  So these are kind of big conglomerations of nucleons that are being accelerated potentially by the study. Not all of them, some of them potentially. Okay, so what kind of insights does this give us? So why is it so energetic? Why is this thing so energetic? It turns out that it's so energetic because it's not just a bare proton with a charge of one. It's a whole bunch. It's like 78 protons with a charge of 78. So a particle with 78 charged protons can be grabbed by the forces, electric forces, and flung out with a lot more energy because it has such a huge charge. That charge is what allows these forces to grab it and just fling it out at such amazing velocities

• 1:00:21Bob Novella?

  because it feels 78 times the electric force. So that's one of the reasons why it can get so much energy pumped into it. So why do they stay so energetic? Even by the time they get to the earth, why do they maintain that energy? Because that's a bit of a mystery.

• 1:00:34Speaker 02

  Well, why, if they don't interact with anything?

• 1:00:36Bob Novella?

  They do interact, though, Jay. The reason why it could last a long time through a lot of light years is that each nucleon has just a tiny piece of the energy, right? If you've got one proton, it's got all the energy. So the one particle has, like I said, all that energy. But if you've got 78 of these particles, each one has a tiny piece of that energy. And that's kind of armor. It kind of protects the particle so that it could last a lot longer than these bare protons. So that's why it could last so long.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  So what does that mean, though? Does that mean that individual particles are like breaking off? And taking, you know what I mean?

• 1:01:11Bob Novella?

  No. If it's a bare proton, it's interacting with other light and losing energy that is ejected as like pions from it. So it's getting less and less energy. So it's losing energy. Whereas the big particles, the big particles I'm talking about, they're more immune to that. They'll last longer before that happens. But they're not immune to being... Being torn apart a little bit as they go through space at such incredible velocities. It's called, the process is fascinating, it's called photo disintegration. So as this particle is traveling through space at like just under the speed of light, it's interacting with the cosmic microwave radiation because from its point of view,

• 1:01:52Bob Novella?

  that's some nasty light because they're going so fast that from its perspective, it interacts with the cosmic microwave background and sometimes it'll lose a nucleon, it'll eject another nucleon.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  That's what I was saying.

• 1:02:04Bob Novella?

  It's getting like, as it's traveling, it's getting like sand blasted in space by these cosmic microwave photons. And then another mystery, another mystery that this study potentially solves is why did Ahmad Rasu point to avoid? Can you guess why it seemed to be going to avoid? Based on what I've said? Probably not, so I'll tell you.

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  Whatever process accelerated that also cleared out the space around it.

• 1:02:29Bob Novella?

  No, it's the charge because you've got a greater charge, you're more impacted by magnetic fields. So as a regular particle is going through, it's deflected by magnetic fields, but these bigger particles with a bigger charge are really pinballing all over the place. So when you see it coming this way, it could have come from over there originally, but because it's been all over the place as you can see by these moving lines that they have over there. So that's another insight. So another potential thing that this solves, another mystery of cosmic rays. So I'll end with this. Who has gold or platinum on them? Gold or platinum? Somebody's got gold? Okay. So the gold atoms that are in your ring, they kind of represent a fork in the cosmic road.

• 1:03:14Bob Novella?

  Those atoms were probably created by colliding neutron stars and exploding supernova and it created forges the heavier elements, right? And it's not just supernovas that create these, the heaviest elements, gold, platinum and all that stuff. It's also colliding neutron stars is also a big contributor. So they're forged in this fire of this collision and with all these titanic forces and some of those gold atoms. Were kind of ejected away and eventually settled into a collapsing planet like the Earth. It was dug up and put in that ring for you. But the other side of that fork is not, is not one that became part of a planet, but it was accelerated and flung away through, through the universe, through the universe at just a whisper under the speed of light.

• 1:03:59Bob Novella?

  And it was kind of pinballing around the universe. It was photo disintegrating, right? So the, so the gold, the gold atom that was traveling is, is not, is not gold anymore. It's kind of just like a piece of a gold atom with only, instead of 198 nucleons, maybe it's only down to 120 or whatever. By the time it hits an alien planet, hits the atmosphere, secondary shower of particles and some aliens like, oh man, that was a powerful cosmic ray right there.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  And it goes into their ring?

• 1:04:25Bob Novella?

  It goes, no.

• 1:04:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Jay, you missed the whole point.

• 1:04:30Bob Novella?

  You can't reconfigure a secondary shower, shower of particles back into the original.

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  See, I didn't know that.

• 1:04:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Duh.

• 1:04:37Bob Novella?

  There you go. So that's all I got, people. Oh, man, that was. Thank you. Wow. Thank you.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  George, I think we have time for another game. Sure. But this should be quick. This is a quick one. Yeah. This basically, I'm gonna ask, I'm gonna make a statement. Yeah. And we're gonna go straight down the line. I will say your name. After I say your name, you're gonna say you agree, you disagree, or it's complicated. Okay.

• 1:05:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:05:03Speaker 03

  All right? And if there's a real disparity of votes, we'll maybe just chat about it for a second. Yeah. But, so I will, so don't, so don't vote until I say your name, all right? Meetings should always have a strict time limit. Jay? Disagree. Steve? Agree. Kara?

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  Agree.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  Bob?

• 1:05:21Jay Novella?

  Agree.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  Why'd you disagree? Why'd you disagree, Jay? Because you're relying on the person. I'm sorry, we're out of time.

• 1:05:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Saw that.

• 1:05:27Bob Novella?

  That was a good one. Good one, George.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  That was good.

• 1:05:31Bob Novella?

  So George was praying somebody disagreed with that one.

• 1:05:38Jay Novella?

  You know, this is very circumstantial because like people have other work that they have to do with everybody. If this is a pure like, hey, we need time, I'm calling time, I think we can cover this in an hour, right? And you get people together and they get together and they're talking. How is the person calling a meeting supposed to legitimately predict? How long it's gonna take to get to whatever finishing point that person had in mind?

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:05:57Cara Santa Maria?

  That's how jobs work.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  That's a fair point, but my experience, you know, if you give people an hour, they'll use the hour. They will fill the time. And if you have an open-ended, we've been in these meetings, Jay, where there's somebody running the meeting is like, god damn, this whole thing could have been 20 minutes. And it's a two-hour meeting. But if we said it's a hard out at one hour, it would have been an hour. But there's always exceptions, but I think the 95 percenter is, as a good default, meetings should be time limited.

• 1:06:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and everybody has shit to do. So you need more time, you call another meeting.

• 1:06:26Jay Novella?

  I'm not, you know, it makes a lot of sense because everyone's got, like you said, like they, you can't give someone an open-ended. You're gonna, we have to talk about this for, I don't know, it could be one hour, it could be three hours. I agree. But it is more of a maybe then, it, you know?

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  So you're maybe giving it, and it's complicated.

• 1:06:41Jay Novella?

  It's complicated.

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  Okay, okay. Friends should have veto power over who you date. Jay?

• 1:06:48Jay Novella?

  Agree.

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  Steve?

• 1:06:49Speaker 02

  Disagree.

• 1:06:50Speaker 03

  Kara?

• 1:06:51Cara Santa Maria?

  It's complicated.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  Bob?

• 1:06:52Bob Novella?

  Disagree.

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  All right, all right. Mixture, mixture?

• 1:06:56Jay Novella?

  I'm agreeing, I said agree because I'm just using my life as like the litmus test.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  That's the thing, I think if you've experienced it, you'd be like, why didn't you say anything?

• 1:07:04Jay Novella?

  I've had, I've had relationships where I'm like, why didn't you tell me that? You know, like you need your friends and family to keep it real.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  That's different though than veto power.

• 1:07:12Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I know, but he's in general, he's just saying.

• 1:07:14Bob Novella?

  The key word though is should, they should. That's what made me say the negative. If you said they can, then I would kind of, I might agree with that, but should is like, no, there's no should there.

• 1:07:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it's complicated depending on the person's level of insight. I think there are people in this world who require a lot more feedback. Than other people who have little insight.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  But if it's a friend of yours.

• 1:07:39Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I'm saying the person themselves who are dating the other person might require their friends to be like, remember when? You have a tendency to.

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Because they don't have a lot of personal insight.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  But when, when we have done that, it has had zero effect.

• 1:07:56Jay Novella?

  I know.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  Zero effect.

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  In the moment, it's very hard. Retroactively, it can be like, oh, God, yeah, of course.

• 1:08:01Cara Santa Maria?

  That's why it's complicated.

• 1:08:03Bob Novella?

  But plus, you can tell that you can give them advice, like, remember back then? You, you, you can give advice, but you can't say you need to break up with them now.

• 1:08:10Cara Santa Maria?

  But you can, but you can in situations where it is dangerous to stay with the person. And so I do think.

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  That's a different level.

• 1:08:17Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's why it's complicated.

• 1:08:18Jay Novella?

  But you're giving them information that they could use in the future when the romance comes down to more reality, that, then you've expressed these things. It's very, this is wicked complicated because you would get pissed off at anyone that's like, you know, I don't like Betty. You're like, what do you mean you don't like Betty? Then you're pissed off at your friend.

• 1:08:33Cara Santa Maria?

  This is why my entire profession is hard. As we always say, I wish I could just give people insight.

• 1:08:40Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:41Cara Santa Maria?

  But I have to help them get there on their own.

• 1:08:45Jay Novella?

  That's the magic.

• 1:08:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Which takes a lot longer.

• 1:08:46Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's, that's the hard part.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  Okay. A compliment from a stranger is more meaningful than a compliment from someone you know. Jay?

• 1:08:54Jay Novella?

  It's complicated.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  Steve?

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I'll say it's complicated.

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  Kara?

• 1:08:59Cara Santa Maria?

  It's complicated.

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  Bob?

• 1:09:00Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's complicated.

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  Okay, it's complicated. I would agree.

• 1:09:03Cara Santa Maria?

  I want to disagree.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, generally, if, again, it depends on the person you know, right? So there are people that I know that I really value their opinion.

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  And a sincere compliment from them will be more than anything else.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  There are people that I know I don't frankly care what they think about me.

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  Or, or sometimes they feel obliged, or it's about them, or like, oh, I should say something nice because that, oh, you look great, or, or whatever, or that was funny.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  And then with the stranger, it's like, so I think the thing you could say, like, if it's a spontaneous, out of nowhere compliment from a stranger, it's probably sincere.

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  Unless they turn around and say, now buy my product or whatever.

• 1:09:40Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  But.

• 1:09:42Bob Novella?

  That happened to me in Italy. The guy comes to me, he's like, I like your shoes. And I felt so good about that because I, I like my shoes too. And then he starts trying to sell me some shit. I'm like, damn it, that means nothing now.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  So if you're convinced it's sincere, but they don't really know you and their compliment could be based on something totally superficial observation.

• 1:09:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, more likely it. I think in practice, we should work on finding gratitude in the compliments we get from our friends more, because I think we tend to take those things for granted.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  Sure, sure, sure, sure. I always thought like the farther away the compliment was from the thing that they're complimenting time-wise, like the more valuable it was. Like if someone comes up to you a year later and be like, "Oh, that thing was great," or whatever. It's like, because it's sort of stuck, as opposed to the obligation of like, after a show, "Hey, that show was great." It's like, of course they're gonna say that, because they're being nice about it. Although we did, we did in college, we learned all the expressions you would use when someone would do a performance and it was crap, you'd be like, "Congratulations." Or like, "You worked really hard."

• 1:10:45Bob Novella?

  It looks like you had fun up there.

• 1:10:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that was the thing. "How did you feel? Did you feel good?" Which is always that key.

• 1:10:52Bob Novella?

  Wait, George, you say that to me all the time.

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Next one is, um, next question.

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:10:57Speaker 03

  Buying cheap things twice is smarter than buying an expensive thing once. Jay?

• 1:11:02Speaker 02

  Disagree.

• 1:11:03Speaker 03

  Steve? It's complicated. Kara?

• 1:11:06Bob Novella?

  Disagree.

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  Bob? Complicated. Yeah, I think it depends.

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  Nobody agrees with it.

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, nobody agrees with it.

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  I agree with it sometimes.

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  I think it depends on the financial situation.

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  I specifically do that sometimes.

• 1:11:15Bob Novella?

  I'll give it for instance.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  I'll give you a, for instance, this costs $2, my, I, prescription reading glasses, because I have a ton of them. I can keep them everywhere.

• 1:11:24Bob Novella?

  Me too.

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  I lose them, they break, they scratch.

• 1:11:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Because they're cheap.

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the thing is, I don't have to care about them. I just buy six of them every couple of months, and it costs me 12 bucks.

• 1:11:36Cara Santa Maria?

  So the answer to this depends on the externalized costs that you're talking about?

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's not that much.

• 1:11:42Cara Santa Maria?

  It depends on how you're valuing this. It's bad for the environment to buy lots of cheap crap.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  I, like, sure, of course, things like that, I know. And George brought this up deliberately because it's, it's interesting.

• 1:11:51Cara Santa Maria?

  All the examples, when it's more convenient, it's bad for the environment.

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  Right. That's true. But you know, I think everyone knows where I'm gonna go with this. You buy a frickin' $5,000 stove, and that

• 1:12:01Bob Novella?

  That goddamn thing better work really well and I have to, I don't want to think about stove anymore. I just want to use it.

• 1:12:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Bob Novella?

  But we don't live in that world anymore. So like, I think we should be, I think those goddamn glasses should be more expensive and be 10 times better than they are just because.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  But you could still lose them. Have you ever lost a $250 pair of sunglasses?

• 1:12:20Bob Novella?

  I've lost a $400 pair of eyeglasses.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  Or sat on them, right? Or whatever.

• 1:12:24Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it happens.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  Stuff happens.

• 1:12:26Bob Novella?

  Be more careful.

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  There is things that it's just strategically not worth investing a lot of money in.

• 1:12:30Bob Novella?

  Plus, also, I know myself, I will lose expensive glasses. Absolutely. Sunglasses, they eventually go away, sometimes really fast, sometimes they last, sometimes they last months, but they will go away. So I just gotta go cheap.

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  There's also the, there's the economics of it. Like, you know, as a starving musician, it was always like, well, I can't afford that better thing.

• 1:12:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, but that's different. If you physically can't make the choice, then, yeah.

• 1:12:54Bob Novella?

  So it is complicated.

• 1:12:56Cara Santa Maria?

  But there is, but there is something to be said about the fact that we live in a culture where we can just do that. And if you couldn't do that, you would value your shit more.

• 1:13:06Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 1:13:06Cara Santa Maria?

  You wouldn't sit on your glasses.

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, Kara, you and I have talked about this. The throwaway economy drives us nuts.

• 1:13:12Cara Santa Maria?

  It changes our behavior.

• 1:13:14Bob Novella?

  But I value these because if it breaks, I repair it. I've had the lens pop out countless times. I'll glue it back in there. I mean, I value this until it's, until I can't fix it anymore. Then it's like, I gotta go to the next one. And it's right there. It's easy to pick up. I'm ready to go.

• 1:13:30Speaker 03

  All right, just a few more. Under the age of five, a kid's birthday party is more for the parents than for the kid. Jay?

• 1:13:37Jay Novella?

  It's complicated.

• 1:13:39Bob Novella?

  Bah.

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  You could quibble about the cutoff, but I agree with the principle.

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  Okay, Kara?

• 1:13:44Cara Santa Maria?

  It's complicated.

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  And Bob?

• 1:13:46Bob Novella?

  Hard agree.

• 1:13:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Here's the thing. I think we often will say things like, but they won't remember it. But that doesn't mean they're not experiencing it.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true.

• 1:13:55Cara Santa Maria?

  And that experience is shaping the people they become.

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  Surrounded by love and surrounded by experience.

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  What you could do without involving a bunch of other people and making a party out of it.

• 1:14:07Cara Santa Maria?

  But he didn't. Say above a certain dollar amount. He just had a kid's birthday party, which could be a dinner.

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:13Cara Santa Maria?

  You know?

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:13Cara Santa Maria?

  And like really, when you do things with young children before they remember them, they are still.

• 1:14:19Speaker 02

  It's still.

• 1:14:21Jay Novella?

  It could still have a long term effect on them.

• 1:14:23Cara Santa Maria?

  It is affecting them.

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, but.

• 1:14:25Cara Santa Maria?

  They're still, they still have neuroplasticity at that point.

• 1:14:28Bob Novella?

  Right. It can be important to the kid. I think the point is it's more important for the parents at that young age. It's just a relative thing. I think the parents, it's more.

• 1:14:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Have you ever seen a four year old at their birthday party?

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:40Cara Santa Maria?

  They're so excited and then their parent is like, oh, Jesus Christ.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  Like I would say like a one year old, there's no point in having a birthday party for a one year old. Right? Two, yeah, probably not either. Three and four, if it's when you start to like, okay, they're probably experiencing this in some meaningful way. One, no.

• 1:14:59Jay Novella?

  How about 89?

• 1:15:00Speaker 02

  Well, then there's a, you're at the other end of the curve.

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  But I mean, I had a birthday party for my dog.

• 1:15:07Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm about.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  You know, he didn't know what was going on. He was like, okay, this is great. Cool people. Fine. Awesome. Yeah, no, that was just him, but yeah.

• 1:15:14Cara Santa Maria?

  My dog just turned 16 and we're trying to plan a sweet 16 for him because like, I don't know how many more they're gonna be. It's gonna be like Barbie dream car themed.

• 1:15:22Bob Novella?

  Killer, killer.

• 1:15:23Speaker 03

  I've got two mediocre ones and then we're gonna probably move on.

• 1:15:25Jay Novella?

  In general, it's good to celebrate life.

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:28Jay Novella?

  Right?

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:29Jay Novella?

  So let's not impede people, like, let's encourage people to celebrate.

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  Reading the book is not always better than seeing the movie. Jay?

• 1:15:37Jay Novella?

  Agree.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  Steve? Agree. Kara? Agree. Bob? Agree. Yeah.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Well, you stated it as always, you know, but so it's, I would say in my experience, I usually like the book better than the movie.

• 1:15:49Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but there are examples.

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  But there's a few movies where they took a book and they made it better as a movie. It was a better movie than it was.

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  There's also the time, time economy of it. Yeah, there are lots of people who just aren't good.

• 1:15:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Good readers. Yeah, so the movie's gonna be better for them.

• 1:16:02Bob Novella?

  Then they should listen to audio.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  Sort of on the same lines. Binge watching ruins the experience of a show. Jay?

• 1:16:10Jay Novella?

  Disagree.

• 1:16:10Speaker 03

  Steve?

• 1:16:11Bob Novella?

  Disagree.

• 1:16:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Hard disagree.

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  Bob?

• 1:16:13Bob Novella?

  Even harder.

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:16:16Jay Novella?

  I mean, the point is, binge watching is very interesting. Like, you know, it's a relatively recent phenomenon, right? Like, how long has it been around? 10 years or whatever? I don't know, I could be wrong. But the thing that's cool about it is you stay very mindful of that pretend universe that you're experiencing, right? And I think if you're, if you don't have to wait a long time in between, like, it's more like it's one big thing, which I appreciate that experience more than having to wait. And God forbid, like, I hate waiting between seasons because I just always forget. And like, then I'm completely detached. So I like it happening fast.

• 1:16:49Bob Novella?

  Yeah, especially with streaming where you gotta wait about, what, nine years in between seasons? It's so frustrating.

• 1:16:55Jay Novella?

  Yeah, for them to make four episodes.

• 1:16:56Bob Novella?

  But we're watching, Steve and I are watching Widows Bay, which is highly recommended, by the way. And it's like, oh, I gotta wait a week? I just watched one episode and I gotta wait a full week? That's just like, not good.

• 1:17:05Jay Novella?

  There is something about the anticipation. I do kinda like that, the weekly thing. Like, you're forcing me to space out my enjoyment of the show. But I love going back and binging shows, and you notice things you don't notice when you watch it spaced out. You see things that were lost on you. Yeah, the binging is often a different experience.

• 1:17:23Bob Novella?

  But how often do you go back and watch? Because I always feel like...

• 1:17:26Jay Novella?

  All the time.

• 1:17:27Bob Novella?

  You know, it's like, but I'm like, I'd rather see something that I haven't seen before. Right?

• 1:17:31Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but how fun is it to watch a show that you love with someone who's never seen it?

• 1:17:35Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:35Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so great.

• 1:17:36Jay Novella?

  And most importantly...

• 1:17:37Bob Novella?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:17:38Jay Novella?

  Binge watching eliminates the concept of you being, you know, no one's gonna ruin the show for you. You watched it.

• 1:17:44Bob Novella?

  But more important than that, we have to move on.

• 1:17:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:17:48Bob Novella?

  All right, Jay, tell us about AI designing bioweapons.

• 1:17:52Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I read an article in Nature I thought was really cool. It was not about one study. It was about several studies. And they just pitch a question like, you know, with the progress in AI today, scientists are using AI to help them develop new biological molecules. Obviously, right? These are like, you know... Drugs and things like that for varied medical applications and there's a lot of good uses. So I'll give you a quick idea. Like I said, drug discovery, protein engineering, vaccine design, which we all, you know, saw the benefit of that. Antibiotic and antimicrobial discovery. You know, I keep reading articles where they found yet again, another new antibiotic, which we need, the world needs a lot.

• 1:18:32Speaker 02

  What's amazing with that is that you can explore the possible space of potential antibiotics, like millions, billions of whatever possibilities in a weekend, you know, with AI.

• 1:18:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  Doing that. And so it just, you know, gives us the ability to do literally years of research in hours.

• 1:18:49Jay Novella?

  Cancer research, gene therapy, enzyme design, environmental cleanup, agriculture. It's like, you know, it spills out into a lot of different areas here. Very, very useful and it's going to just get better and better as they progress. But they also develop things like toxins, because toxins are precursors to discovering new medications. And toxins generally are bad, right?

• 1:19:10Speaker 02

  Well, again, the dose makes the poison, right?

• 1:19:13Jay Novella?

  Of course.

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  All drugs are toxins.

• 1:19:16Jay Novella?

  Things that are, things that are maybe a lot more toxic than, than.

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, usually, but.

• 1:19:21Jay Novella?

  The dose makes the poison.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  The best way to explain is, is there a therapeutic range? That's it. If there's a therapeutic range, meaning a range that in the proper context, you can get more benefit than risk, it's a drug.

• 1:19:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, look at chemotherapy.

• 1:19:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, look at chemotherapy. That is super toxic.

• 1:19:36Jay Novella?

  That's a great way to put it, yeah.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  But they're all toxins. All drugs are toxins.

• 1:19:38Jay Novella?

  Understood.

• 1:19:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39Jay Novella?

  I'm trying to hurry up here.

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  I hear you.

• 1:19:42Jay Novella?

  So, so you take that same exact AI program and you, you turn it to the red dial, which is the bad side, right? So yeah, you could lean into, let me, let me find, you know, new toxins. Let me modify known dangerous proteins, make them more dangerous. You know, let's, let's use AI to make things harder to detect, because I'm creating something that won't get picked up by current screening. Enhancement to pathogens, lowering expertise barrier, which means you don't have to be as smart as you used to to achieve, you know, like people are vibe coding today, right? They don't know how to code or they're very little about it, but they're coding. So what do we do about this? The question here is. Can we, is it even plausible to limit people's use of AI to do these types of things?

• 1:20:26Jay Novella?

  I think the answer to that is no, because there are people, you know, you can, you can get, you know, an entire LLM on a thumb drive that you could, you know, you could develop on your own, right? Which means, you know, we're not going to be able to keep that genie in the bottle. It's, it's out. So we can't limit, limit that. And the, the other side of the coin is, well, what can we limit? How can we make it more difficult for bad actors to produce bad things?

• 1:20:49Cara Santa Maria?

  I read an article recently where they were asking an ethical question. Look, so I'm a mandated reporter, and if somebody says to me, I am going to kill so-and-so, I have a duty to warn. I have to not only tell the police, but I also have to tell the person that they're at risk. An AI chatbot doesn't have that same duty right now, but should they? Right? Like, if an AI chatbot hears from somebody, I'm going to commit violence, should they be required then to report that to the authorities?

• 1:21:18Jay Novella?

  Of course, of course. But, but the problem is, Carol, like I just said, though, you know, like ChatGPT should have it on rails, and there should be some type of thing that helps people in, in the big picture when it's spying on us by, you know, listening to us on our conversations, which, you know, these things are happening.

• 1:21:33Cara Santa Maria?

  It has the capability to say, so-and-so is researching how to make a bioweapon.

• 1:21:37Jay Novella?

  I agree. But you can develop your own LLM. You can, you can get an LLM, you know, in North Korea, you know, if they want to do bad things, for example, right? They want to do any biological warfare or whatever, they could use an LLM that isn't on any rails, because they could just design one that isn't on rails.

• 1:21:54Cara Santa Maria?

  So you're saying the government can take it off rails?

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

  Well, but the, the threshold's getting lower and lower and lower. That's the point.

• 1:22:00Jay Novella?

  Let me put it to you this way.

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  Government, then a corporation, then a small corporation, then a private person, you know, could...

• 1:22:05Jay Novella?

  Like, like today's version of ChatGPT, which is, it's really getting powerful. You'll probably be able to have that functioning on your personal electronic device in five years or 10 years. Today's version is going to be like nothing.

• 1:22:19Cara Santa Maria?

  But isn't it going to break if it can't constantly update? And if it can constantly update, can it then report?

• 1:22:24Jay Novella?

  You're, you're, you're being too optimistic. There are going to be people who are going to have LLMs that are off the grid, that aren't being monitored, that there's no guide rails, they're doing it because they want to do bad things.

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  And if you're designing proteins, you don't need the latest update from the internet, right? You have that, that ability.

• 1:22:39Jay Novella?

  So we can't limit people from doing negative things with AI like biological research. But there are levers that we can pull and this, I think this is an interesting idea to put into your head that, you know, the governments around the world, institutions, organizations, they all need to now like develop the ways that we're going to be able to mitigate some of these bad uses. And again, it's not just, you know, medical uses. Like, so what we need to do is we could start at, um, like the companies that make these proteins or whatever. You could say, here's a protein, you know, here's the design of a protein I want you to make. And the company can produce it and give it to whoever wants to buy it from them.

• 1:23:20Jay Novella?

  So if these companies can be like a stopgap where they can say, okay, you know, just like YouTube, when you upload something, it's like, are you playing music that's somebody else's own? Are you doing this or that? They can, they can do that as well. And they can say, wait, this molecule that they want us to make is way too similar to these three molecules that are dangerous and a red flag should go up. So I'm sitting there as I'm researching this and I'm going, okay, yeah, that would work. That actually could be a very powerful way to slow it down or stop a lot of these bad actors.

• 1:23:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Why is that any different than what I said, though? A bad actor is just going to push past that?

• 1:23:53Jay Novella?

  Right. That's what I'm saying. So here's the, the push past is that it's no longer as expensive to buy the reagents and to put the lab together and do all that work to actually be able to manufacture your own molecules. And that's,

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  Are we at like the meth lab level at this point where like?

• 1:24:11Cara Santa Maria?

  We could be. Yeah. If, if the, if the LLM can give you a step-by-step recipe and then they can say, these are all of the different places where you can buy this on the black market. Yeah. You could have a meth lab.

• 1:24:22Jay Novella?

  But you could buy, well, the people that sell these items, I mean, the reagents and all the things that they need to be able to make these things, those companies could also get on board and go, hey, we're, we're not going to sell our stuff unless we really know who they are and if they're a trustworthy organization.

• 1:24:37Cara Santa Maria?

  The problem is you can make really bad stuff out of a bunch of not bad stuff.

• 1:24:41Jay Novella?

  That's exactly correct. And there's a lot of crossover here with the idea of cybersecurity, right? Modern cybersecurity does that, does pattern recognition, or it's programmed to find a specific, you know, whatever, a specific bug or something that somebody has created. But they're not good on the fly of just like, okay, here's, here's, you have all these files on your computer and there's a really bad one on there, but I, you know, it hasn't seen it before, it doesn't have the codex behind it to let it identify it. That's a big problem. So now we're going to have to use AI to counteract AI. Of course, we're going to have to do that. But in general, to summarize, I'm going to cut to the chase here. The, the problem is governments are not taking any of this seriously. The money's not being put into it.

• 1:25:24Jay Novella?

  We are, we are about to get in ourselves in a situation where it might be too hard to catch up if we really don't lean into this now. And we're going to be in an arms race with the bad guys who don't have to follow rules. And as, as everyone in here knows, when you, we watch this happening in real time right now in our lives, you, you get to a point where you can't fix all the problems and you can't catch up. So the message here is, you know, we have to, we have to vote for people who care about these things. As much as AI can be a big pain in the ass, or most people ignore it or whatever, there's, there are real world consequences to these technologies.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a very powerful tool. It lowers the bar for doing good things and bad things. And we have to make sure that, you know, bad actors don't do the bad things. All right. It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:26:25Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items with facts, two real, one fictitious, and I challenge my panelists to determine which one is the fake. We're going to survey the panel before we survey the audience. Now, a couple of weeks ago, something about the Great Lakes came up on the show and it immediately became obvious to me that my fellow rogues know nothing about the Great Lakes.

• 1:26:45Jay Novella?

  What?

• 1:26:46Speaker 02

  And so, I thought that would be a great theme for the science or fiction in Wisconsin.

• 1:26:51Jay Novella?

  Let's do it.

• 1:26:52Speaker 02

  So here we go. Three items about the Great Lakes. Item number one. Archaeologists have discovered what they are calling America's Stonehenge under the waters of Lake Michigan, a mile-long line of granite stones ending in two concentric circles and featuring a relief of a mastodon.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  Item number two, there are over 6,000 documented shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, with estimates of the true total number of wrecks ranging from roughly 10,000 to 25,000. And item number three, about 20% of the water currently in the Great Lakes is glacial melt from the end of the last glacial period.

• 1:27:34Speaker 02

  All right, George, I'm gonna start with you.

• 1:27:36Speaker 03

  Okay. Oh my goodness, under the waters of Lake Michigan, a mile-long, a mile-long line of granite stone under Lake Michigan, that to me feels like the fiction, because I know there's a ton of shipwrecks. Maybe, maybe he's overestimated the number of shipwrecks and he's trying to fool us, and I could see the water being 20% of the glacial period. So, although, yeah, I'm, I'm doing exactly the thing you talked about yesterday, about how just talking myself out of probably the correct, the correct answer, but I'm gonna go with one, that the America's Stonehenge is the fiction.

• 1:28:11Speaker 02

  Okay, Jay.

• 1:28:12Jay Novella?

  I think 20% is way too low. I think that most of that water came from glacial water.

• 1:28:17Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara.

• 1:28:18Cara Santa Maria?

  What else would the water be? Rainwater? Yeah, this one's tough. So the, I think the shipwreck one I like the most, watch that be the fiction. This America's Stonehenge one could be that it's under a different, like, it could be under Superior, and it could be that there are granite stones, but there's no mastodon relief. Like, there could, he could have changed a few things in that. I have a feeling there is America's Stonehenge under a Great Lake, but is it, are those the details? I'm not sure. And then about 20% of the water currently in all the Great Lakes is glacial melt. It's probably silly to go out on my own, but you, all of you went with the Great?

• 1:28:59Speaker 02

  No, George did the, the Stonehenge.

• 1:29:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh no, George is wrong a lot, though.

• 1:29:07Cara Santa Maria?

  He is, I'm sorry.

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  His recent record is actually not bad.

• 1:29:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, is your recent record better, George?

• 1:29:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, he's doing very well recently.

• 1:29:13Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't mean in life, I mean in science or fiction. Just in science or fiction. You know what? George, George, I'm gonna go with my gut. I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick with George and say that the, uh, the America's Stonehenge is probably a different lake. Maybe there's no mastodon relief.

• 1:29:27Speaker 02

  All right, and Bob?

• 1:29:28Bob Novella?

  All right, um, I'm gonna start from three. 20% of the water in the Great Lakes are glacial melt. At first I was like, I don't know about that because the water flows from Great Lake to Great Lake. So there, there is turnover, but I think these, these lakes, especially Lake Superior, is so deep that there could be a reservoir of water that just has not left, um, for that long, potentially. It kinda makes sense in my head. The shipwrecks, I, I've read that there are massive shipwrecks, lots of shipwrecks, especially Lake Superior, because it's just so chaotic and dangerous, like an inland ocean it's been described as. They could, those numbers could be inflated by a lot. I mean, I don't know how many shipwrecks there are, but I know there are. But one has really rubbed me the wrong way here. A mi- it's a mile long, under Lake Michigan.

• 1:30:12Bob Novella?

  I mean, how shallow is that? I mean, I mean, it would have to be relatively shallow. They've been filled for quite some time, haven't they? I mean, did they get really low and high? I don't know how much the, the levels fluctuate. But what really got me is not a painting of a mastodon, a relief. Somebody sculpted a relief? I've never even heard of an ancient relief of anything. Maybe I'm wrong, but that just was like, kinda the icing on the cake. So fiction for mastodon.

• 1:30:36Speaker 02

  Okay, George, you wanna pull the audience, do the thing? So if you think, you're gonna follow George's hand, you're gonna do the one clap, right? Remember you practiced earlier? If you think that the America's Stonehenge is the fiction, clap. If you think that the shipwrecks are the fiction, clap. If you think that the, uh, the 20% of the water being glacial melt is a fiction, clap.

• 1:31:02Bob Novella?

  All right.

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  All right, so the audience is with the majority of the rogues. The first one's fiction, but most of the people in the room-

• 1:31:09Speaker 03

  The smug is coming out already, you can see it. You can see it.

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  It's just oozing out. You can't read my poker face, George. All right, so most of the people in the room think that the 6,000 shipwrecks is science. They think that there are over 6,000 documented shipwrecks in the Great Lakes with estimates of the true total number of wrecks ranging from roughly 10,000 to 25,000. And that one is... Science.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  So yeah, that's a lot of ships. It's over the last 300 years. But 6,000 ships.

• 1:31:43Bob Novella?

  Which lake? Was it mostly Lake Superior?

• 1:31:45Speaker 02

  Well, everything's mostly Lake Superior.

• 1:31:47Bob Novella?

  So the answer is yes.

• 1:31:48Speaker 02

  Lake Superior has more water in it than all the other lakes combined.

• 1:31:53Bob Novella?

  Combined. It's really a beast.

• 1:31:54Speaker 02

  And then, plus add two more Lake Erie's or something like that.

• 1:31:57Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:59Bob Novella?

  And it's deep. It's deep.

• 1:32:00Speaker 02

  It's deep. It's huge. So, and you know, the water's very dangerous. So these are 6,000 ships where they could say, yes, that ship sank at that time, right? Like, no, like, the ship sank. But they know they're not, they didn't capturing every ship that's ever sunk. So the, the reason why the 10,000 to 25,000 is such a broad range is like, well, how small a ship do you count? And how much inference do you count? The 25 is definitely a maximum estimate. And that is in, yeah, it's also inferring, like, you know, calculating, like, the traffic and how many ships are lost on that, on average, and estimating this is probably how many were lost over that time. But even the 10,000 figure, which is at the low end of the estimate of the true number of ships, is massive.

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  And of course, divers in the lakes are finding them all the time.

• 1:32:48Jay Novella?

  And it just keeps going up.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  And, yes, of course. But the, because of the conditions in the lakes, freshwater, cold, they're really well preserved. Much better than ocean shipwrecks.

• 1:33:01Bob Novella?

  Oh, nice, yeah.

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that, there's a lot of them there. All right. I guess we can go back to number one.

• 1:33:06Bob Novella?

  Oh, what does that mean?

• 1:33:07Speaker 02

  Nothing. It means nothing.

• 1:33:10Speaker 02

  Archaeologists have discovered what they are calling America's Stonehenge, under the waters of Lake Michigan, a mile-long line of granite stones, ending in two concentric circles and featuring a relief of a mastodon. So Kara, George, and Bob think this one is the fiction. The vast majority of the audience thinks this one is the fiction. And this one is...

• 1:33:32Bob Novella?

  Say it.

• 1:33:36Speaker 02

  This is science. It's only in forty meter, meter deep waters, so pretty shallow where the lakes go. And yeah, it's like this mile-long sort of serpentine line of these vertical granite rocks. And, you know, at the end of it, there's these concentric circles of rocks. And there's like a table in the middle, a table, and there's-

• 1:33:56Bob Novella?

  I'm not believing this.

• 1:33:57Speaker 02

  They're interpreting as a mastodon, you know, carved onto that table.

• 1:34:01Bob Novella?

  Intact, this is all intact.

• 1:34:03Speaker 02

  Well, you know, no, it's not intact-

• 1:34:05Bob Novella?

  Sounds like the best stonehenge I ever heard, ever.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  It's under, it's been underwater. So, it's not intact, but it's, you can, I mean, you can clearly see the stones that are there. I mean, you know what I mean? It's, so here's the thing-

• 1:34:16Speaker 03

  How old is it? Like, how, yeah?

• 1:34:18Speaker 02

  If that really is a mastodon, right? And of course, it's not a hundred percent agreement on all of this, but this is, this is, that puts it past ten thousand years ago, right? So we know this is older than ten thousand years ago, which means it probably was before the end of the last glacial period, before the Great Lakes filled up with glacial melt, right? But, you know, we don't know exactly when it's from. But yeah, really, really amazing.

• 1:34:42Bob Novella?

  Steve is so happy right now.

• 1:34:44Speaker 02

  This means that about twenty percent of the water currently in the Great Lakes is glacial melt from the end of the last glacial period is the fiction. Jay's doubly wrong, because it's not because it's higher, it's basically zero percent. Now, when you read the many, again, when I'm doing research on this, many, many sites say that ninety-nine percent of the water in the Grace Lakes is glacial melt. And, because only one percent turns over. It's like, okay, but wait a minute, what is that? That doesn't make sense to me, right? Because if one percent is turning over, over time, that's going to replace all the water. So for each of the Great Lakes, there's actually a turnover period. Like, how long does it take for essentially all of the water in that lake to have flowed

• 1:35:29Speaker 02

  out and be replaced with inflow? And for, Lake Superior is the longest. Do you want to guess how long that is?

• 1:35:35Speaker 03

  Twelve hundred years.

• 1:35:36Speaker 02

  Very close, one hundred and ninety-one years. In a hundred and ninety-one years, all of the water in Lake Superior will have turned over, basically, yeah.

• 1:35:43Bob Novella?

  At the very bottom?

• 1:35:45Speaker 02

  Yes. Well, the water's mixing.

• 1:35:46Jay Novella?

  What is that water?

• 1:35:47Speaker 02

  That's right. You said, this is like, I always get Bob because his mind thinks like I do. I'm like, someone's gonna think the water at the bottom of the lake is not moving. And that's how I came up with the 20% figure. Like, that's a plausible, like, yeah, somebody will say it's the bottom of the lake.

• 1:36:02Bob Novella?

  Got me again, Steve.

• 1:36:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's all, yeah. Well, I mean, it's been turned over so many times in the last 10,000 years that there's no more original glacial melt in there than anywhere, you know what I mean?

• 1:36:13Jay Novella?

  Alright, well, that's a-

• 1:36:14Speaker 02

  It's been completely turned over.

• 1:36:15Jay Novella?

  We, you know, we were still right, so.

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  Alright, so, well done.

• 1:36:21Bob Novella?

  Looks like Kara was right.

• 1:36:23Speaker 03

  So, it's homeopathic glacial water.

• 1:36:24Speaker 02

  It's homeopathic glacial water, yeah.

• 1:36:27Speaker 03

  So...

• 1:36:28Speaker 02

  So, I wanna thank all of you for coming out to see our show. And, you know, it's worth saying, especially, you know, in the world today, I know this is like cheesy, but it's true. Every now and then, it's nice to be in a room of smart, critical-thinking people. The world is pretty, we're going through a wacky period of time. So, it is good to know there are other people in the world who are like just normal adults who are critically thinking. So, we appreciate you coming out and seeing us and having some fun with us. And I love what we've seen of Madison so far. Bob and I confirmed this morning that Madison is actually the capital of Wisconsin.

• 1:37:06Bob Novella?

  Yeah. I saw the capital, I still wasn't convinced. I had to research it.

• 1:37:10Speaker 02

  I don't know if a lot of people here know that, but it's actually the capital. Um, no, we're having a great time. I had the cheese curds this morning, they were great. We all, I think we all enjoyed the cheese curds.

• 1:37:18Jay Novella?

  I have to get the beer, the, uh, the cow beer.

• 1:37:20Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:37:21Jay Novella?

  Thank you.

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  Alright.

• 1:37:22Bob Novella?

  I got it, thanks.

• 1:37:25Speaker 02

  Alright, well, thank you all for-

• 1:37:26Bob Novella?

  Thank you.

• 1:37:27Speaker 02

  Thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:37:29Jay Novella?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 1:37:34Speaker 02

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

• 1:37:45Speaker 02

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

• 1:38:22Cara Santa Maria?

  The Skeptics Guide to the Universe is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.