The Skeptics Guide #1086 - May 2 2026

Back to Basics: Pareidolia and Apophenia; News Items: Smart Watch Health Metric Errors, Space Debris Hitting the Moon, Evolvable AI, Merging Quazars, Longevity Escape Velocity; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Stem Cell Hype; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, April 30th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. And joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:46Bob Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Cara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:51Speaker 04

  Good afternoon, everyone.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Bob, how was Bermuda?

• 0:53Bob Novella?

  Bermuda was beautiful. I wish I got my time machine working because I'd go back one week when we're on our way right now. But, oh, well, it was a lot of fun. Went to Bermuda for a couple of days. I enjoyed the cruise ship, the Independence of the Seas, on the Royal Caribbean Line. It's like a skyscraper mall on the ocean. This thing was just so massive. It just blows your mind. And I looked at the evolution of this ship, and it's like the fourth biggest one that they have. And now I want to go on one of the mega ones that are even bigger than this one. It's just, they're such an amazing thing. And you try to think of the logistics of like, yeah, how do we feed 4,000 people, you know, more than three times a day? I wanted to get a tour of the kitchen.

• 1:38Bob Novella?

  I never got one, just to see how they handle the...

• 1:40Speaker 04

  It's called the galley.

• 1:42Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God. Yeah, right? It's just, it was just an amazing trip.

• 1:46Speaker 04

  And how are the seas? Did they agree with you? Or did they send you, you know, heading for the railings?

• 1:51Bob Novella?

  No, I mean, yeah, there was, it's very weird to be all of a sudden, like, you know, you're in a huge structure. It seems like you're in a building or somewhere, right? And then all of a sudden, the floor starts moving. And it's just a bizarre feeling. But, yeah, it was fine. I mean, I really don't get seasick. And there was one person, actually... Our neighbor, when we arrived to Bermuda, she was like, thank God we're here because I think she probably wasn't feeling very well the night before. But it was still very trivial in terms of just the motion. The seas were, there was a lot of whitecaps. Uh, we saw some, some good sized waves, probably 10 or 15, 10 feet at least. But the ship, the ship is so big, it just goes right through them with very little movement, but it's noticeable at times for sure.

• 2:33Speaker 04

  Did you experience anything paranormal out on the water, including things like, uh, Saint Almo's Fire? Or, uh, I don't know, rogue waves? I don't know if those are considered legendary anymore. Anything odd happen?

• 2:45Bob Novella?

  No, the, I looked at a map, the Bermuda Triangle apparently starts at the very southern tip of Bermuda. So the island itself is not within the Bermuda Triangle. So we didn't see anything.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  Ah, they just borrowed the name. Okay.

• 2:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's why you didn't see anything.

• 2:59Bob Novella?

  That's exactly why. What else could it be?

• 3:01Speaker 04

  No whirlpools, no kraken, no nothing.

• 3:04Bob Novella?

  I love how all the, the roofs on Bermuda are designed to collect water. So everyone has access to a source of fresh water. They just go, they get, you know, sent down into the basement where they're filtered and cleansed. And they use it for, for a lot of their, their fresh water needs. And there's also other sources. Um, you know, there, there's apparently there's a, on a few parts of the island, there's a water table, which you can get water from there. Could also just buy like bottled water or, or not bottled water, but if you're low on water, you can just buy a hundred gallon tanks of, of fresh water that you can then just put into your basement. But otherwise they're very needy in terms of like getting imports, as you might imagine, as, as the island grew.

• 3:45Bob Novella?

  They, they're not really selling their onions like they used to centuries ago. They're just like, uh, they, they need their imports. So of course it's one of the most expensive countries in the world. $15 for a loaf of bread. So yeah, you, you need some money to actually to live there, uh, which is, must be rough for the people that, that aren't wealthy. But beautiful, beautiful place. Recommended.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  Well, welcome back.

• 4:07Bob Novella?

  Thank you.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  You came back with a little bit of boat cred there?

• 4:10Bob Novella?

  Boat cred, yeah. Got just a, just a bit of a cough, fairly trivial, but not, you know, not ideal.

• 4:15Speaker 04

  All right. Hopefully you're quarantined and no.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Right, Jay?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  All the time.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  All right, we're going to start this episode with another installment of Back to Basics. We're going to cover paridolia and apophenia. Actually, we use the term paridolia a lot more than apophenia. Do you guys know what apophenia means?

• 4:35Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 4:36Cara Santa Maria?

  One of them is the bigger one.

• 4:37Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's more generalized.

• 4:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Go ahead, Jay. You said yes.

• 4:40Jay Novella?

  What's apophenia? Apophenia is seeing patterns.

• 4:43Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 4:43Jay Novella?

  Paridolia is seeing the pattern of human faces.

• 4:47Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 4:48Cara Santa Maria?

  That's facial paridolia.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so paridolia is just, is, is images, not specifically faces. It's mostly faces, but

• 4:55Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's visual.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  It's anything, yeah, it's seeing an image in random noise. Whereas apophenia is just seeing a pattern. And that pattern can be anything.

• 5:06Bob Novella?

  But could, but it is, you said, you said seeing a pattern, is that vision? But it could also be

• 5:10Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no.

• 5:10Bob Novella?

  Audio, okay.

• 5:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like a pattern of

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Or mental. It could be, you know, saying just like coincidences in data. You know, that's apophenia. So apophenia is just the seeing pattern in noise, right? In data. And paridolia is visual. There really isn't a specific term for audio, so we call it audio paridolia.

• 5:30Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 5:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I see, but Bob, you're getting hung up on the fact that he's saying the word seeing.

• 5:34Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's not visually seeing. Yeah, apophenia means perceiving.

• 5:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Thinking there is a pattern.

• 5:41Bob Novella?

  That would have been a better word for you to use.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's also called patternicity, right? It's a cognitive bias.

• 5:46Bob Novella?

  Oh, I like that word.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Attending to see patterns, even where they don't exist.

• 5:50Bob Novella?

  Where they don't exist.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  And it's part of our pattern-seeking behavior, right? Just part of the way our brains work is to see patterns in the world, to make sense of those patterns, right? That's partly how we understand the world. But it's well-established that we over-detect patterns. We have hyperactive pattern recognition.

• 6:12Bob Novella?

  Which is much better than underactive.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  Is that a more recent phenomenon as opposed to I don't think so, man. Years ago, maybe didn't have it as badly?

• 6:20Speaker 02

  No, there's no reason to think that. This is baked into how our brains work. So in fact, essentially how our brains work, how we evolved, is that we have hyperactive pattern detection, right? We detect lots of patterns, even ones that are not real. And then we do reality testing to pare away the ones that are not real. Right? So we see patterns, most of which are not real. And then we ask ourselves, yeah, but is this real? And then we get rid of the ones that are not real. We're left with the ones that are. So this implies that the selective pressures favored false positives over false negatives, right?

• 7:00Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  That it's, I guess it's much more detrimental to miss a pattern than to see one that isn't really there. But in any case, you can use reality testing to then get rid of the false positives. Basically saying, does it make sense that this would be a pattern? But of course, even then, that takes critical thinking and logic and analytical thinking at least. And we often fail there as well. And that is the cause for many superstitions, right? It's seeing a pattern and then thinking there's a magical cause to the pattern rather than saying, the world doesn't work that way. That's magic, right? So you're wearing a red shirt, your favorite team wins. It's because I wore the red shirt. Now I have to wear a red shirt to make sure my team wins going forward or whatever.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  And we tend to reach for that when we feel insecure. In fact, there's research that shows that people's tendencies to see patterns, even ones that have nothing to do with anything, right? Just random patterns is greater when we feel insecure. Right? So if you have a research paradigm, for example, where you put somebody off their game in some way. You give them a tough question that they get wrong or whatever, or you trick them in some way. Then you say, all right, you see a pattern here. If the people who were tricked or who were, something was done to them to prime them, to make them feel insecure, are more likely to see a pattern than people who were not.

• 8:26Cara Santa Maria?

  That makes sense.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. So one other wrinkle I want to talk about is that, so for people who are, they say, conspiracy theorists, and I'm not talking about like the opportunistic conspiracy theorists. You know, you believe a conspiracy because it supports your tribe or your ideology, but people who believe every conspiracy, right? Like when, again, when we research how many people believe in conspiracies, there tends to be those two types of people, although there's always an arbitrary cutoff between the two. But there's people who believe like one to two conspiracies that tend to be consistent with their political beliefs or religious beliefs or whatever, right? Like a lot of, a lot of liberals believed, you know, that nine 11 was an inside job. A lot of conservatives believed the 2020 election was stolen, right?

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Not as much the other way around. But conspiracy theorists believe every conspiracy. They believe that because they're a conspiracy theory, not because it aligns with their ideology. So if you look at those people, people who endorse five, six, seven conspiracy theories, and you ask the question, so why, what's going on in their brains, right? Is this purely cultural or learned or personality? Or is that, or do they have a tendency to see more patterns than people who aren't conspiracy theorists? What do you guys think the answer to that is? Because that's been researched. Not saying that we have a definitive answer, but the research we have so far does have an answer.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  I mean, it seems like it. It makes sense if they did.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it certainly, it's one way to make sense of why do they endorse so many more, why do they engage in so much apophenia, right? Because conspiracy thinking is often apophenia, seeing patterns in data when it doesn't exist.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Are they arriving at these patterns themselves, or are they being influenced by other?

• 10:03Speaker 02

  It's both. It's both, right? Because it's a community of conspiracy theorists that are both introducing new conspiracies and then feeding off of other people's conspiracies.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  Not to mention the hucksters out there who know these, it's all crap.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Then they're, then they're being exploited, right? And then they're being exploited for political reasons or whatever. So the question is, why do they endorse more conspiracies? Are they seeing more patterns? Or are they just accepting more of the patterns that they are seeing, but they're not necessarily seeing more? So that's basically the two hypo- or could be doing both, but that those are the two main hypotheses. The data we have so far suggests that they do see more patterns, but perhaps more crucially, they're much more confident in the patterns that they see, which does suggest that they don't reality test them as well.

• 10:51Bob Novella?

  Right. They're not, they're not, they're not really evaluating the evidence critically at all.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, like we might notice something weird and go, ah, what a funny coincidence. And they'll be like, that's it, man. The invisible hand I just saw behind the curtain. Like this means something. There are, there are no coincidences, right?

• 11:05Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they all mean something. I hate that.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  But in any case, we all do it to some extent, right? This is not a black or white thing where it's like, there's something pathological about they, how they work. They're just at one end of the spectrum. So we all have a tendency to see patterns. We all tend to overcall them. We have this sort of a hyperactive pattern recognition. Same thing. We have hyperactive agency detection, very similar phenomenon. Agency is means, it's not, it may be supported by pattern recognition, but, or apophenia, but essentially thinking that something happened because somebody wanted it to happen. There's an agent behind it. It's not random, right? It's not shit happens. It's they wanted that to happen, right?

• 11:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. Government did this.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's obviously a huge component of conspiracy thinking, but it's also-

• 11:52Speaker 04

  Or magical beings did this.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. You could get new age spiritual, magical thinking as well. It's karma, right? That's another way of saying it happened for a reason. But it might be as simple as like our ancestors hearing the bushes rustle. Do you think, oh, it's just the wind or-

• 12:12Bob Novella?

  It's a lion.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  A predator. Yeah. And the bush is ready to pounce on me. So clearly we evolved from the ones who thought that that's a predator, you know, and not the ones who brushed it off as the wind because they got eaten. At least some of them, enough of them did, right? That we- They were less likely to pass their genes into the next generation.

• 12:28Speaker 04

  You guessed wrong. Sorry.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, you could make, it's easy to, you know, to make up a story as to why it would be better survival instinct to overcall agency than to undercall agency. Again, it's very tightly related to patterns, right? Seeing patterns. So it's, this is a pretty much a core, a very central piece of information in terms of skeptical thinking. Again, we all do it to some degree. It's good to be alert to your own hyperactive pattern recognition, your own apophenia. It comes out in subtle ways. It's not always like you're a conspiracy theorist or you believe in aliens or you believe in pseudoscience. It, sometimes it's often subtle. In fact, I read a really interesting article by somebody who writes

• 13:16Speaker 02

  those games that happen in the real world, you know, where like you have, they're like escape rooms, but in the real world, but out in the, out in the wild, not in a room.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  Scavenger hunts or?

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like a scavenger hunt, but it's a puzzle scavenger escape room type of thing. That might take place like in New York City. So it's out in the, in the wild, as it were, not in a 100%.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Pokemon go, but you're not chasing invisible things.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  It's right. It's like Pokemon go.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  Looking for real street signs.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  But there's people embed the escape room in the world, like in the city.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  Oh, interesting.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  And it's funny. I played that game with my friends at college. We did that. We would have these puzzle clue hunts and we would put them out there in the world. It was fun. But what he's, he said something very interesting. He said that people will find clues that I didn't put there.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Because they're looking for stuff.

• 14:08Speaker 04

  Well, yeah.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  And it's, it's amazing what people, the patterns people will see when they're looking for clues.

• 14:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. They'll cast a wider net for themselves.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like, oh, like somebody like got to correctly got to one location where they were looking for the next clue and there was an arrow scrawled on the wall. There wasn't an arrow on the wall. They perceived that. And of course now they're, they're totally off on the wrong tangent now because they misinterpreted a random thing in the world as part of the game. That's apophenia, right? So it comes up even in little everyday, you know, things, not just big conspiracy theories. It's, it's very good to be very aware, hyper aware that this is how your brain works. Okay, Kara, you're gonna start the news items by telling us about how accurate

• 15:00Speaker 02

  smart watch health metrics are.

• 15:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I figured I would start by sharing a little anecdote, and I may have talked about this before on the show, but I don't remember, so I'm gonna assume nobody else remembers either. A couple of years ago, when I was prepping for surgery, I noticed that there were times in the day when the, I was wearing at the time, a Garmin smartwatch, it was a Vivo Smart, and I noticed that it would just go off, and I would look down and it would say abnormal heart rate. And so I asked my primary care physician about it. She said, "Just to be safe, let's get you an appointment with the cardiologist." The cardiologist had me wear a Holter monitor for a week and also do an echocardiogram. So, you know, where they like image your heart and stuff.

• 15:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And her diagnosis was, "Your heart is sometimes fast, but it is perfectly healthy." And her prescription was, "You cannot wear a smart tracker anymore."

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Well, right, because otherwise you'll have all these false alarms going off.

• 16:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and like a ton of anxiety from it. And she was like, "More and more, we are getting so much big data from these trackers, which were originally coded and programmed and kind of continue to be based on what we historically thought was normative data. And now we understand that those parameters are wide, people are different, and when there are bands that say, 'Okay, you're outside of the band of normal,' it can cause a lot of undue stress." So, obviously, from a healthcare perspective, that's disconcerting, but what about from a straight-up fitness perspective? Well, there was an article written in The Conversation by Hunter Bennett, who is a lecturer in exercise science at Adelaide University.

• 16:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Shout out to Adelaide. We will not be visiting you, but we will be in your country. And, and he writes about, he does like a really deep dive onto all the different features that these wearable devices have and how much we should actually trust them. So what are some of the features that you guys might use in your smart trackers?

• 17:08Bob Novella?

  Oh, man, steps per day for sure.

• 17:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so step counts is a big one.

• 17:11Jay Novella?

  I mean, are you talking, is this, we're talking about like sleep as well?

• 17:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, sleep tracking, that's another big one.

• 17:16Jay Novella?

  That's the number one thing for me.

• 17:17Cara Santa Maria?

  So number one for, for Jay is sleep. For Bob and Evan, it sounds like it's steps.

• 17:22Jay Novella?

  Steps for me as well.

• 17:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Heart rate at the time. Okay, steps also for.

• 17:26Bob Novella?

  It's steps paired with heart rate.

• 17:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 17:28Bob Novella?

  See where my heart rate got during my active steps.

• 17:31Cara Santa Maria?

  And so then sometimes they're calculating things like calories burned and even different sort of quote recovery scores. I don't know if you've seen that some of them have like an.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  It also replaced my mood ring, so I got.

• 17:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they can help with that too. No, it's true though. Some of them are like, you need a, you know, you need to meditate now because your mood is off.

• 17:51Bob Novella?

  Well, how does the recovery scores work? Is this how, how long it takes to recover from exercise?

• 17:55Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, it's, it's basically what the researcher here, when he did a deep dive, he said that most of these recovery metrics take into account heart rate variability and sleep quality. And so they're looking at your heart rate variability during the day and comparing it to your sleep quality. And they're making an assumption about how you respond to stress based on that to let you know if you need more rest.

• 18:21Bob Novella?

  Okay, interesting. I was thinking that you meant that how long it takes you to recover from say cardio, like a cardio workout, which is a key indicator of fitness. If you recover very fast, then you are, you are much more fit than somebody who takes twice as long to recover from the same effort.

• 18:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and part of that would be a heart rate variability calculation.

• 18:39Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 18:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And then also they can look at VO2 max, right?

• 18:43Bob Novella?

  Oxygen, how efficient you are using oxygen.

• 18:47Cara Santa Maria?

  So let's talk about all these different things. It sounds like step count was, was hell's number one pick. So I'm going to start with step counts. So studies show that step counts in smart devices can be often underestimated by over 10%.

• 19:08Jay Novella?

  Oh, Chris, I'll just add 10% to all of my.

• 19:11Speaker 04

  Add 10%.

• 19:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the problem is that they're not consistently over counting.

• 19:16Bob Novella?

  Well, here's an interesting angle on that. Um, like Liz and I have our Fitbit and we will sometimes we'll compare how many steps. So I got on the cruise recently. I'm like, oh, I did 13,000 steps today. And she's like, she was like by my side the entire day. It's like, what? I only did, you know, 9,000 or 11,000. So, you know, much, you know, far fewer than than me. I mean,

• 19:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and you guys are similar in height, right? It's not like your strides are really

• 19:38Bob Novella?

  No, we're not. No, we're not. We're not. Like, I got like, you know, half a foot on her. So her stride, she should have more steps than me.

• 19:44Cara Santa Maria?

  She should be having more, yeah.

• 19:45Bob Novella?

  Absolutely. So that was just like, what? Come on. How hard is that? But

• 19:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, there's an interesting study here where they actually, and the thing about all of these is that it's pretty easy to validate this stuff, right? Because you can just count steps in a lab. And so that's what they've done. They put people on treadmills, they counted their actual steps, and they compared them to their, uh, the step counters. And then they also did another great study where they had people out in the field and they pointed a GoPro at their feet. And they reviewed that footage. Um, and they found that they do tend to do better in the real world, at least in this study. The field devices were much closer. Um, but in the lab, they were pretty far off. So, uh, their conclusion,

• 20:28Cara Santa Maria?

  all devices performed poorly in lab. So, yeah. Uh, conclusions, users should use exercise caution when relying on any of these devices for total steps per day. Okay. So your step counts may be off. They may be off by as much as, um, 10%, maybe even more in some cases. Um, and it totally varies depending on the fitness tracker you're using. What about sleep? You mentioned sleep before.

• 20:54Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay. So what is probably the most accurate way that we can determine your sleep stages?

• 21:01Bob Novella?

  EEG. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

• 21:03Cara Santa Maria?

  EEG, right? Which is actually even more accurate is polysomnography, which is EEG. Yeah, but plus like, you know, um, uh, respiration and all that good stuff. And so they've, they've done studies where they compare these sleep monitors to polysomnography i- in the, in the sleep lab. And they found that it's actually pretty good at knowing when you're asleep. They can do a pretty good determination of sleep versus awake, but they're real bad at knowing sleep stages.

• 21:41Bob Novella?

  Okay, so REM or deep sleep or?

• 21:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Sometimes they are better at REM because REM is easier to detect, but definitely the differences between all of the other sleep stages, they're not great at at all. So they were able to identify rapid eye movement compared to wake pretty well. And it says, for example, in this study where they compared a lot of devices, all devices were better than 90% accurate at identifying that there were sleep epochs. And don't get on me for the way I pronounce epoch here in the USA. That's just what we do. I don't say epoch. I don't know if you guys do.

• 22:17Bob Novella?

  Oh. Yeah. Epoch. I would say epoch.

• 22:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I do not.

• 22:22Bob Novella?

  Epoch?

• 22:23Cara Santa Maria?

  We'll just say stages.

• 22:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so the all devices detected were, were not over 90% accurate in detecting these sleep stages, like they were sensitive to say, yes, you are in a sleep stage, but their specificity was between 30 and 50%.

• 22:40Bob Novella?

  Oh, wow.

• 22:41Cara Santa Maria?

  So determining which sleep stage you were in, they were pretty miserable at. So for people who think that their, you know, smart ring or their smart watch is giving them neurological data about their sleep quality, you've got another thing coming. It, it really isn't not doing a good job of looking at your sleep architecture at all. If all you care about is how much sleep did I get? Okay, they probably are doing a pretty good job of telling you when you were asleep and when you weren't.

• 23:07Bob Novella?

  For my Fitbit, it's interesting that it, it also lists when, you know, when you are awake. So you had 10 awakenings last night, like, oh my God, I don't even remember one of those. Uh, so that's, that's can be an important figure. And if they're, if you're waking up way too much, then that's not good.

• 23:21Cara Santa Maria?

  And it is a little better at telling you that. So, you know.

• 23:24Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 23:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Take that as it comes. Okay, what about heart rate? You would think that heart rate is going to be the

• 23:29Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Cara Santa Maria?

  probably easiest thing to measure. So these heart rate monitors on usually on smartwatches are looking at changes in blood flow through your wrist veins. Hmm. And what's interesting is they're pretty good at low intensity and at rest. But the more intense the exercise gets, the farther Oh. off the validity becomes. I wonder. So, yeah, so it's kind of like the times when you want to know most, like your max heart rate and to stay in certain ranges, the error gets, gets bigger and bigger. Oh, that stinks. And that's in a study specifically with Apple Watches, but there are other studies that look at other types of consumer activity monitors.

• 24:15Cara Santa Maria?

  And of course, no one monitor is better at everything. Some are better at some things and worse at other things. So it's probably important to make sure that you dig deep into the research if you do want to find a consumer product for something very specific. Yeah. Calories burned, so a lot of people love calorie tracking, but how do you measure how many calories you've burned? Now, all of a sudden, we're not just looking at metrics, like, like actual, you know, directly measured biometrics, but now you're having to put that into a calculation because they're estimating your energy. Yeah, it's an estimate, right? Yeah, yeah. It can only be an estimate. So there've been a ton of studies on this and a sort of summary of them show

• 24:56Cara Santa Maria?

  that often we're under or estimating that energy expenditure by upwards of or more than 20%. And at that point, over 20%, I'm not really sure how helpful that information is. Right. And they also vary wildly between activities. So things like strength training, cycling and high intensity interval training have been shown to have larger errors than, you know, walking, for example. And the problem is, you know, as the author of this says, if your watch tells you that you burned a bunch of calories, like more than you actually did, you might think that you need to eat more food than you really need. And then you could be gaining weight and wondering why you're doing that when you're burning all these calories.

• 25:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Or the flip side, you might actually reduce your calories in an unhealthy way if you think you're burning more calories or fewer calories than you are, no, more calories than you are. So that, that could be a problem as well. Finally, there's a little bit of a conversation about V O T max and recovery scores. Recovery scores similarly, this is like now. Direct measure times, you know, plus an algorithm with estimations on top of it. So they're, they can be really inaccurate because heart rate variability and sleep quality tend to be pretty inaccurate and they're using both of those to estimate your recovery scores. And that's not helpful if it is affecting people's behavior, right? If it says you're not recovered, you might not go to the gym that day.

• 26:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Or if it says you're fine, you might push yourself too hard. And finally, VO2 max, how do we measure VO2 max? Like in, in the lab, for example?

• 26:32Bob Novella?

  They, they measure every ounce of air that goes in and out and how much you're using and how efficiently you use it.

• 26:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so there's got to be a mask, right? A tightly fitting mask that analyzes how much of that oxygen you breathe in and out. But your watch can't do that. So it's not measuring your oxygen use at all. It's just estimating it based on your heart rate and movement. And they tend to do poorly on both ends of the spectrum. So in people who are more sedentary, they overestimate your VO2 max. And in people who are really fit, they underestimate your VO2 max.

• 27:04Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 27:04Cara Santa Maria?

  So it, it may just be a poor reflection. I think it doesn't mean that you should like throw your smart watch away, but I think it means that you should be skeptical. You should ensure that, you know, you're, if you're looking for trends over time, maybe if you're wearing the same device, that's still going to be helpful because the hope is that those errors are baked in. But know that anytime you're doing super intense exercise or anytime there is a big, you know, change to your routine, it may not be accurately tracking that. And regardless, if you feel unwell or if you have any sort of indication, validate that with a healthcare professional.

• 27:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Do what I did, go in, get checked out. Worst case, everything comes back fine. And she told me, come back in 20 years. And you like it when a cardiologist says, come back in 20 years.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Very good. All right. Thanks, Kara. By the way, I have to say, I totally called the fact that this was too much information. I'm pretty sure I did it on the show probably more than once because it's so there's two problems, right? The information you're getting is not accurate, but also even if it were accurate, is that information useful? And people don't intuitively understand that too much information can be detrimental. You have to always think, what are you doing with the information? And what's the net effect of having that information?

• 28:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And part of the issue is what you just talked about at the top of the show. It's apophenia.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Totally. So

• 28:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Like you start to see patterns where they don't actually exist.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Right. Gives you draws a lot of false conclusions. In fact, that happens among physicians. I remember there was a time when, you know, when OBs, and I'm not up to date on this now, but I'm just recounting what I remember from 20 years ago, that they would put, there was, it was very common to do fetal monitoring during delivery.

• 28:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Right. So in the hours leading up to the hard push, like you would have

• 29:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Like in even in a healthy

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, even in just, you would put a little wire in the head of the crowning infant, and you could measure their heart rate. And they stopped doing it because the OBs were overreacting to what turns out to be probably just a natural variability in the heart rate of the, of the fetus. And they were doing C-sections. It's like, oh, my God, this Oh, unnecessarily. It is, yeah, this, this infant's heart rate is crashing. We better do a C-section. It's like, no, this is just part of the background variable. Just stop monitoring because it's just not leading to any good outcomes. It's actually leading to bad outcomes. So it's not just like, because people don't have medical knowledge. It's just if you have data, you're going to do something about it. Yep.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  And it's, and that actually may be, if there's nothing good that comes out of the data, having data you don't need is just an invitation to, to do stuff that's unnecessary.

• 29:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's, it's why, like, these kind of new fandangled, full body scan thing. Like, it's, unless there's a reason for it, it's actually psychologically detrimental.

• 30:10Cara Santa Maria?

  To go hunting for problems where there's no indication that they exist.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  And it may be physically detrimental. It may lead to follow up tests that are more invasive and that have downsides themselves. So it's a good rule of thumb in medicine. If you don't know what you're doing a study for, don't do it. You better have a very specific reason why you're doing it and you should know what you're going to do with the results, whether positive or negative.

• 30:33Bob Novella?

  That stinks though, because I remember being very disappointed when I first heard that years ago, because it's like, but I want to catch a potential game changer early, you know, I want to get in early.

• 30:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course you do.

• 30:43Bob Novella?

  But it's like, it's probably you're most often you'll be worse off in terms of expense or whatever. It's like.

• 30:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's why we have the research that we have that, that, you know, is always updating when particular screenings are warranted. That's why we do colon cancer screenings at a certain age and we do mammograms at a certain age and prostate screens at a certain age. And we've noticed that almost every time we've changed that to try to make it way more inclusive, a bunch of people got unnecessary tests and it didn't really change the outcome. Now, there have been some examples where we expanded access and we saved a lot of lives. And, you know, we just have to look at that data. But Steve, I have to ask you, did you finish the pit this season?

• 31:28Speaker 02

  I'm not watching it. I haven't.

• 31:29Bob Novella?

  No spoilers. No spoilers.

• 31:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Anybody listening right now, I'm not going to give anything away, but anybody listening right now who watched, there's the pre-eclampsia in the, in the, oh yeah, it's, it's a lot.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  I have to gird my loins because I just, I have a hard time watching, watching some medical shows because the, the constant misrepresenting how it actually works gets a note too annoying.

• 31:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but that's not the pit.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  That's what I hear.

• 31:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, Steve, the pit is by definition, the most accurate medical show that's like ever been on TV.

• 32:03Bob Novella?

  Oh damn, really? That's like their thing. Okay.

• 32:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh yeah, that's huge.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  So I should stop watching Scrubs?

• 32:08Cara Santa Maria?

  It's phenomenal.

• 32:09Bob Novella?

  So Steve, you've got to.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Scrubs.

• 32:12Cara Santa Maria?

  A lot of my healthcare provider friends.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  It's not just that. It's also like, it's work. You know what I mean?

• 32:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Well, they say it's like PTSD. My healthcare provider friends who have spent time in the ED are like, it is way too stressful.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, it's like flashbacky. Like it's bringing back all sorts of emotions. Like it's, it's a really intense show.

• 32:29Bob Novella?

  See guys, Steve, Steve is retired. He wants to watch shows about people in retirement homes, not people at work.

• 32:36Speaker 04

  About how to make a better sword. That's what's the difference.

• 32:40Jay Novella?

  All right, Jay, I understand that some space debris is about to hit the moon.

• 32:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh.

• 32:46Jay Novella?

  There is a small piece of space junk. Well, small comparative to like the vastness of space. It's out there. It's wandering around the Earth-Moon system right now. And on August 5th of this year, Bob, pay attention. Pay attention. There'll be questions at the end. So six days before your birthday, what's gonna happen? Thank you. If the current calculations are correct, it's going to get sucked into the moon's gravity well and crash down on the surface of the moon. Can you guys get, guess it? What is it? A wrench. That's correct.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  It's a, it's a wrench?

• 33:20Jay Novella?

  You're wrong.

• 33:22Speaker 04

  It's gotta, it has to be something. A fuselage of a ship, of a rocket. Or a satellite.

• 33:26Jay Novella?

  Steve read the article. That's the end stage. I read everything that's done. It's the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. So on January 15th of 2025, the Falcon 9, you know, did its launch. It launched two private lunar landers, right? There was the Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1 and an iSpace Hakuto R Mission 2 lander, right? It was called Resilience. Blue Ghost went on to make a successful commercial landing on March 2nd. Resilience later crashed and it crash landed on the, on the moon's surface because a laser rangefinder was broken. So after the landers separated from the Falcon 9 upper stage, you know, it shoots them off in the direction they need to go.

• 34:10Jay Novella?

  But the Falcon 9 upper stage was left in this really high looping Earth slash moon orbit. And, you know, a lot of reusable components that get, that are parts of launch vehicles, like first stage boosters and stuff like that, they, they're, they're designed to come back. But the, most of these upper stages though, eventually might re-enter Earth's atmosphere, but there isn't really like a plan of them re-entering Earth's atmosphere in any, you know, organized way. A lot of these guys to stay up there, can they keep circling through the Earth-Moon system until eventually what? One of them gets pulled into a gravity well, of course. So for little over a year now, that the leftover stage that's been up there,

• 34:52Jay Novella?

  it's been looping around the earth and the moon. It's been stretched out in this crazy orbit. And at its closest, it comes within about 220,000 kilometers of earth. And at at its farthest, it's about 510,000 kilometers. And that's a big, a big change there. The moon is roughly about 385,000 kilometers. So it's inside of this thing's wacky orbit. Which means the rocket and the moon's orbits can potentially cross. You know, usually it doesn't matter because they're never in the same place at the same time. But in this prediction that's coming up, you know, it's going to happen. The moon and the rocket are going to be in the same place at the same time, which you know what that means. Yeah. So the prediction comes from

• 35:36Bob Novella?

  It's called lithobraking.

• 35:38Jay Novella?

  What's that, Bob?

• 35:39Bob Novella?

  It's called lithobraking, where you Did you make that up or is that No, no, that's a common term. When the moon stops, whatever the hell has been Where any, the lith- the lithosphere of a planet is the, is the surface, right? The crust. And when you, when you slow down by impacting it at speed, that's called lithobraking. And I've always loved that term.

• 35:56Jay Novella?

  Or also a crash. So

• 35:57Bob Novella?

  Yeah, you could say that, I guess.

• 36:00Jay Novella?

  Bob, this prediction comes from an astronomer named Bill Gray, and he's from Project Pluto. And he made some really impressive software that tracks asteroids and comets, you know, any high orbiting, human made objects. When we say any, I don't know how extensive it is in tracking everything. And again, like the, the software is doing what it's told to do. It's not part of the scanning. It's part, you just put in the information and it keeps track of their orbits. Anyway, as of late April, Gray calculated the impact and said it's going to happen. It's going to be just barely on the moon's near side, and it's going to be near the crater Einstein, right?

• 36:42Jay Novella?

  It should hit at about 2.43 kilometers per second, or 8,700 kilometers per hour. So it's cranking up there. It's pretty fast. Now, the uncertainty here is not based on gravity. The parts that are really hard to predict is sunlight, you know, solar radiation. Because it actually, if you think about it, it is a, a source of pressure that gives the rocket tiny little pushes depending on the angle of certain surfaces. And, you know, as it tumbles and changes its position. So You know, over months, especially as this object is tumbling and reflecting light unevenly, you know, these tiny unpredictable pushes matter and will affect the speed and the

• 37:23Jay Novella?

  direction and pretty much everything, every way this thing is moving, it'll have some type of impact. Will anybody see it? I wanted to know because I always like to see things explode. So, no one's probably gonna see it. The impact point, you know, it's near, as I said, the lunar limb in the sunlight, right on the edge there. NASA, you know, we already tried something much more carefully planned in 2009, if you remember, guys remember the LC Ross, Look Ross, or whatever, however you want to pronounce it.

• 37:51Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:51Jay Novella?

  We deliberately crashed that Centaur stage into a shadow crater on the moon, and the mission returned some useful science, but it was not anything, you know, great to see. Because if I remember correctly, I saw nothing. You know what I mean? There was nothing put out.

• 38:06Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah.

• 38:07Jay Novella?

  I remember seeing an arrow pointing to a location on a picture of the moon. And that's it. There was no, like, fun footage, and Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't writing it down or anything.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, Slim Pickens.

• 38:20Jay Novella?

  If NASA can image the impact location, that's significant, because scientists could get some useful before and after experiment data in this lunar cratering. The crater will probably be small, and it probably will be, you know, maybe on the order of like tens of meters. It's not moon altering in any way, but it still can give some valuable info, you know, and, you know, smacking things into the moon actually can tell us a lot about the surface and what's, you know, underneath the surface. Now, there are obvious questions here.

• 38:50Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:52Jay Novella?

  You know, is this whole thing mostly harmless? Like, what's the ups and downs of this? The rocket, you know, it's gonna hit a small part of the moon on, in an area that you could say is insignificant, but that's not always gonna be the case, right, guys? Because humans are, we are in the process of building a lunar base and a lunar infrastructure. And any of these spent rocket stages, you know, they no longer can just be like, eh, whatever, you know, because if they, some of them eventually do hit the surface of the moon, that can be a very big problem.

• 39:24Speaker 04

  That's another reason to not have it on the surface.

• 39:27Jay Novella?

  Sure, I totally agree. I mean, there's lots of reasons why we shouldn't just have the whole thing be on the surface. I mean, of course, we'll need some infrastructure there, but like, you know, I would imagine-

• 39:35Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, maybe radar dishes or something like that, right? But not, not, not these bubbles that you see in these cartoon drawings of people, you know, walking around under a piece of glass, going through the garden on the surface of the moon.

• 39:46Jay Novella?

  Yeah, people want a pretty view. They can make a viewing chamber or whatever, but you don't, you know, the living, I think, needs to be much more protected. But we'll see, because they're gonna do what they, they can, you know? So if there were a future moon base, which there will be, in a relatively busy environment with people living there, there needs to be some pretty basic things that we're all used to, like traffic rules, disposal plans, you know, how are we gonna handle debris and things like that? Are we gonna have to build a system to get rid of debris that's coming too close to the moon? So we need more technology here, obviously. We need to be able to remove debris around Earth and around the moon, and hopefully there'll be money for that someday. So, you know, just to give you guys an understanding, the Falcon 9 upper stage is not small. It's

• 40:30Jay Novella?

  a, it's a cylindrical rocket body. It's about 45 feet long. It's about 12 feet wide. You know, it's roughly, you know, kind of like the size of a school bus, but a little bit bigger. It's, overall, it's small, but it's big enough to do some serious damage. It could take out a spaceship. It could take out a space station. Things much, much smaller can do much more horrible, you know, do horrible damage. Imagine something that big. And then, you know, it could shrapnel, and that's even worse, because then it's like, it's even more, it's less predictable because of how big it is and how much material there is. I also asked the question lots, you know, what else hit the moon? Because I couldn't really think of anything off the top. And without going through the list, there's been quite a number of things that have hit the moon. And it does happen, and the moon is

• 41:15Jay Novella?

  close enough, and it, and the stakes are going to get higher. So, you know, it's interesting, it's cool, but it is a cautionary tale here, right? Like NASA has to really think about this stuff. The tracking has to become more accurate, and we have to have some measures in place. And they should name the moon base, Moon Base Alpha, right?

• 41:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:33Jay Novella?

  It has to be. And if there's more than one, it should be Moon Base Alpha 1, and Moon Base Alpha 2. And then the third one, they can name Cara Santa Maria. That's fine with me. I'll take it. How about Moon Base Beta? Okay, that's good, too. Like that?

• 41:46Speaker 02

  All right, guys, I have another AI story for you. I know you're

• 41:52Jay Novella?

  Oh, boy.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  You know, there are people, Steve, that email us and they're like, I don't want to hear anymore about AI. The problem is this.

• 41:58Speaker 04

  That's right. Grok told me.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  It's a freight train of technology and it's progressing fast and

• 42:04Jay Novella?

  And we're trying to cover it.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  It's changing, it's changing the landscape of human life. It is doing it.

• 42:10Speaker 04

  Trying to read a billboard as you're flying by 200 miles an hour. Hard to, hard to do.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  So I'm going to give the caveat first, meaning that there's a lot of AI hype out there. We get that. There's always going to be hype, especially surrounding new and disruptive, potentially game-changing technology, or even just the potential of game-changing technology. And I'm going to be actually talking about another kind of hype a little bit later in the show. But that doesn't mean it's all hype. And I totally don't buy this narrative that is out there, even amongst some skeptics that like, oh, this AI thing is all hype. That is not true.

• 42:46Speaker 04

  It's dismissive.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  It is clearly an effective tool. It's affecting research. It's affecting industries. It, you know, the technology has made a significant leap. Some of the stories we're talking about are not like predictions of what's going to happen, but this is the potential that might happen if we don't prevent it from happening. This is like in science fiction, doing thought experiments about potential dystopian future technologies or whatever, just so that we can think about that more thoroughly when it seems like we're on the threshold of that technology. And in this case, this is the other thing, in this case, many oftentimes it's, it's AI experts themselves

• 43:31Speaker 02

  who are sort of raising the alarm bells. This is not just, you know, mainstream media or people overselling it. So with all that in mind, there's another aspect of AI that we have not explicitly discussed.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  And there's a recent editorial published in PNAS.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  And by by AI researchers that are saying, you know, this is coming and we have no regulations for this. And this, this is the potential worst case scenario if we don't do anything about it. So any guesses you want to throw out there. It's a, a type of AI specifically how AI develops.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  How it develops.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  If any of you read my blog today, you'd know the answer, but. No, I don't even understand the question. All right. So what do you guys think about evolvable AI? What, what do you think of when I say that term, evolvable?

• 44:32Speaker 04

  Evolvable or AI that chooses to evolve on its own?

• 44:38Bob Novella?

  I got two. I got two reactions.

• 44:40Speaker 04

  Oh, damn.

• 44:42Bob Novella?

  No, it's like, this is in probably an efficient way to evolve in a general, an artificial general intelligence, but also a scary way to have it completely get out of our control.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  What do you think the technology is? What does it mean? What? Somebody said, well, don't all AIs evolve? It's like, oh, yeah. That's what I was wondering. Technology evolves, but that's not what this is referring to.

• 45:03Bob Novella?

  Well, I mean, you could employ things like genetic algorithms that are designed to optimize a performance according to a fitness test of what you think, you know, in the direction you want to evolve, like, say, you know, human like intelligence.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, the software itself is designed to evolve, to follow Darwinian principles to iterate itself. Yeah. But what are the pressures? Well, that's a good question.

• 45:26Bob Novella?

  Well, that's, those are human made. They would ideally be human, human made pressures, right?

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Ideally.

• 45:31Speaker 04

  Well.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  So.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  Leave it up to the AI itself to determine.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  So we could hit be human made or leave it up to the AI. Those are basically the two types of evolvable AI.

• 45:40Bob Novella?

  Oh, man, it'd be stupid to let the AI decide how it's going to evolve.

• 45:43Speaker 04

  Wouldn't it be fascinating to see where it goes?

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Hey, I didn't think of that. So the researchers in the paper say there's basically two types of evolvable AI. There's the breeder scenario, right? The breeder scenario is where the programmers are completely in control of the process. They select which code to breed and they evaluate the outcome. Okay. So this is like, you could think of this like a digital version of domestication. When we domesticated cows, they didn't go out of our control. They actually got more in our control because we were the ones at every step of the way, choosing, you know, which animals to breed, to which other animals and selecting traits that we had in mind.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  So there's another type, though, called the ecological scenario, where we Let it go. We just let it go. We make Read your free. We give it a goal, but that goal could be very vague, right? That goal could be, you know, achieve this outcome or do, find a way to optimize your processing or to whatever, just some vague Make paper clips.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. Do whatever you have to do to make yourself better.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  And then you just let the system do it by itself. But it is designed to select the outcome and then have some kind of way to change its own code and then rerun the algorithm or whatever, evaluate the outcome and keep iterating it. So there's like, there's no, there isn't necessarily any human in the loop there. So that's really truly Darwinian, except there's, there are some things that are even, that are beyond Darwinian evolution. So what are ways that code could evolve that living things can't evolve, can't do? Like what are some, so, but organic evolution, there's random mutations and natural selection, right? Yeah. With code, you could certainly have random mutations if you design the system

• 47:45Speaker 02

  to vary randomly. And then there's natural selection in that there's the selection of whatever your criteria are, but what else could a code do that a living thing can't do?

• 47:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Insert stuff into the code.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it could change itself.

• 47:58Speaker 04

  Make a bunch of junk.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  It doesn't have to wait for a favorable mutation. It could make them.

• 48:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And anybody else can do that, too.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  That's right. You can insert code. It can insert code. It could change the code. It could also pass on acquired characteristics. What would that mean? Well, that's the learning, right? So if you have training data, so AIs could be, this evolutionary Darwinian process can apply at multiple levels, at the core code, at the training level, at the prompt level, you can evolve the prompt to get more precise or more powerful results. So it's, there's, it's almost like a super evolution, right? It's not just purely Darwinian. There's, it has many, many other things that it could do, that, but it's still basically iteration, selection, iteration, selection.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  Now, what the authors are saying, which I think is correct, is they say in the ecological selection approach, such systems necessarily lead to quote unquote selfish replication. Now, this, the word selfish is very deliberate there. It derives from Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, in which he's basically arguing that evolution might be better understood not as like living organisms being the unit of evolution, but genes being the unit of evolution. And that organisms are just a way for genes to pass themselves into the next generation.

• 49:23Speaker 04

  They're a vessel for the genes.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, just a human being is a way for human genes to pass themselves into the next generation, right? So in a way, again, it's a matter of perception, and I'm not going to like make a hard argument for that, but just saying that there's something to be said for that. Like, why would a mother sacrifice themselves for their children? They're dying. That would argue against them being the unit of evolutionary pressure. But it's more important for them to get their genes into the next generation than for them personally to survive. So so-called kin selection. So what they're saying is, you know, in a Darwinian system, there's necessarily, it's just sort of baked into the Darwinian process, there's going to be selfish replication.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  And they argue, we already know that AI systems, under these kinds of pressures, give rise immediately to cheating.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Parasitism, deception and manipulation.

• 50:19Speaker 04

  Whatever it takes to make it better.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Right, so we've talked about this before about the AI that tried to manipulate its user or that lied to the user or cheated by changing the parameters. Like, they do all of these things to achieve whatever goal is given them.

• 50:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's no moral code among the code.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  There's no moral code. And the point is, it's like creatures can evolve themselves into a corner or like selfish genes don't care if you're happy or fulfilled or whatever. They're not seeing the big picture, right? They're evolving in a way that just has a higher chance of passing into the next generation, regardless of the implications for the organism, for the population, for the species, for the ecosystem, it doesn't matter, as long as those genes get into the next generation. So in this case, it's like the code will do whatever it takes to achieve the ends. It doesn't know the bigger picture or understand the implications of what it's doing. It's just maximizing achieving whatever output is desired. Does that make sense?

• 51:21Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  So that leads to the cheating parasitism, deception and manipulation, right? This is just, this is the way these systems operate. And again, we're already seeing this in AI systems. So of course, this is highly problematic. Now, you might say, well, we'll put controls in place. But again, if we're following an evolutionary paradigm, what happens when you try to control a system that's capable of evolving?

• 51:46Speaker 04

  It evolves around you.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  It evolves around you. What happens when you try to control bacteria with antibiotics?

• 51:51Speaker 04

  They grow teeth.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  They evolve resistance. So any controls that we put in place is just a selective pressure for the code to break out of those controls. We're just going to make it more deceptive, more powerful, more manipulative, more whatever it has to be to break out of whatever controls we put in place. And we'll have as much luck controlling this ecological, evolvable AI as we do preventing bacterial antibiotic resistance from occurring. Of course, we can't. It's There's nothing we can do to prevent it from happening. But we might be able to slow it down with good practices, but we're not, it's, it's like an inevitability of such systems.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  So we're creating a system that will necessarily evolve out of whatever constraints we give to it. And they said, of course, there's another added layer here. This is the authors, again, we'll go link to the paper. But again, this is like, science fiction kind of 101. Is that when we domesticate animals, there's no chance they're going to become smarter than us. Right? Unless we're in the uplift wars. Yeah, but that's not happening. But when we evolve AI, there's a very real chance that they could become smarter than us in some ways. Right? This is not necessarily general AI or sentient AI.

• 53:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, enough to cause damage.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  It could be, but it's not necessarily that. Even short of that, they could become very powerful, very quote unquote, smart at what they do. And because evolution tends to lead to emergent behavior. Meaning stuff that emerges out of the process that was not specifically coded in, in the first place. Unpredictable emergent behavior. We may not recognize it when it happens. It may be too subtle for us to recognize, or we may recognize that something's happening, but not really understand how it works. And we would basically have no way to control something we don't understand. Cause it just emerged out of an evolutionary algorithm.

• 53:53Speaker 04

  God, that is scary, Steve. Yeah, I like that. And that Star Trek episode where the kid released the what?

• 54:00Speaker 02

  The nanites. Yeah, exactly.

• 54:01Speaker 04

  Nanites.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, but this is code.

• 54:03Speaker 04

  And it like destroyed the enterprise, basically, or was going to.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it could have. Yeah. Yeah, right. You have something that's out of the bottle, the genie's out of the bottle. You have an evolving system out there ecological. That's why the ecological approach, like, maybe we shouldn't do this right now. So what they recommend is, and they say, hey, this is a powerful approach to iterating AI. And can result in extremely powerful, useful software. They're not saying, don't do it. What they're saying is, if we're going to Create an evolvable AI, we need to put it in a sandbox. And it needs to be really in a sandbox, you know, so that it cannot escape. You know, I know we had that recent item about an AI escaping from its sandbox.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  That was a kind of a problematic story because it was, it wasn't, you know, a perfect example of this, but it still raises the possibility. We may think we've put it in a sandbox, but if it has any theoretical way of breaking out, it'll probably find it. And so we have to like really air gap and, you know, have it in a, in a location that it cannot get into the world. Then we can evolve it, see what develops, test it, quality control it, you know, safety test it. And then if we have a safe, usable product, then you can release it. But of course, that requires regulation, requires safety testing. It requires slowing down a little bit, you know, rather than just constantly racing to beat the competition. It's not, I don't think this is the kind of thing that the industry is going to impose

• 55:34Speaker 02

  upon itself. Maybe some individuals might, but like across the board, probably not. And of course, if we're talking about other countries as well, this has to be international, you know, kind of agreement like, yep, these things are potentially dangerous. We need to- Treat them like nukes. We need to treat them like nukes. I would need to treat them like the risk that they are because these are powerful. And any powerful technology could be used for good or it could be used for evil. You can make power or you could blow cities up, right? So we have to make sure that it's used for good to make the world a better place and not just recklessly put out there and see what happens. You know, let society deal with it at the back end. That's right. So this, we haven't spoken explicitly about this. This is sort of a very, this is a very interesting paper.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  I recommend that you read the whole paper because it's, you know, again, experts going through very detailed way like why this is something we need to be thinking about now. Not whoops, what happened, but let's, you know, going forward, let's figure out how to do this smartly. So these things do not evolve out of our control with unintended, unforeseeable, uncontrollable consequences. Uh, cause this is powerful.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  Well, scared the audience again, Steve. Well done.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I didn't write the paper. I read the paper. I'm like, oh, this is interesting. Evocable AI. What's that all about?

• 56:54Jay Novella?

  Well, you know, what's funny is so much of this stuff that comes across our plates today, like, none of us can do anything about it. You know, it's all.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  You talk about it?

• 57:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, make people aware. I suppose that's something. But you're right, we're powerless to stop any nefarious things that might come down the path. Yes, I agree.

• 57:14Speaker 02

  Okay, I just say the same answer at the end of the day. It's like, we need to carefully regulate this emerging powerful technology. That's all. It's not a big thing. We're not saying the world's going to end tomorrow. It's just that, yeah, this is, these things are powerful and our world is increasingly run by computers.

• 57:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's increasingly run by people who are anti-regulation.

• 57:36Speaker 04

  Well, right, yes. In the 1930s, right, when, when, when nuclear physics and everything were, you know, being discussed and the potential and the disaster and everything, didn't all the scientists who were capable in that, at that time, come together and

• 57:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:50Speaker 04

  make a statement of some kind? And do we have anything like that going on with AI right now? We do have that.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  There are some people, yeah.

• 57:56Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, there's a bunch.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  It's not industry-wide, though. You can also see interviews with tech bros who are like, ah, society will find a way to deal with it. It's not really our problem.

• 58:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's not my responsibility.

• 58:04Speaker 04

  The Martin Shkreli's.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  The thing is, this philosophically, we've already dealt with this question. It is 100% the responsibility of scientists and, you know, technologists, people who develop new science, develop new technology, to think about how this will affect the world. They are responsible for the effects of what, something that they bring into being and unleash onto the world. They cannot just, you know, give up that responsibility. It's society's responsibility to deal with it. So this, this came up, you know, talking about anthropic telling the Pentagon, we're not going to let you use our software to, for, you know, domestic mass surveillance or to have AI make final targeting decisions. And then the question of, well, who should make those decisions?

• 58:51Speaker 02

  And, you know, is it, is it a company's responsibility or the government's? It's like, well, it's both, right?

• 58:57Bob Novella?

  And there ones.

• 58:58Speaker 02

  It is both. They, you know, company absolutely has the right to say, we are only going to let our technology be used ethically. Not just assume that the government's going to use it ethically. That's not a defense, right? It wasn't a defense for any of the Nazis. This is largely where most of this is coming from, the Nuremberg Trials. The world basically decided, saying I was just following orders is not a get out of jail free card. Right? Saying that I just created the technology, I didn't determine how it was used, is not a get out of jail free card. It does not absolve you. The, and you know, of course, the biggest time this really was an issue was the scientists who were involved in developing atomic weapons. And they seriously considered saying no.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  But they also had to seriously consider that, well, you know, the Nazis are going to do it if we don't.

• 59:46Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  You know, and that was very real.

• 59:48Bob Novella?

  They will.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  That was very real. You know, in retrospect, maybe it wasn't so true. They were a lot farther away than we feared at the time, but.

• 59:55Bob Novella?

  How do you know? It's true now, though, there's other countries that will just go the fullest extent as fast as they can with AI. Um, and what do you, how do you handle that? You know, how do, because sometimes you need. Yeah, yep, absolutely. But, but even then, though, Steve, even then, sure, we get most countries to sign him. That's great, but the other countries still, still won't do it. And, and, and many times you need the technology to defend against the technology. If you don't have the technology, then you can't defend yourself. So that's another wrinkle that we got, we have to factor in.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  We cannot have an evolvable AI gap.

• 1:00:34Bob Novella?

  Nice.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  And it's kind of a no win scenario, but at least we could try. Right? We could try to do the right thing, to try to get together and say, are we really going to let this just happen? I mean, for us as science fiction fans, we're in act one of every freaking sci fi horror dystopian movie we've ever seen.

• 1:00:55Bob Novella?

  Chapter two. Just enjoy the ride, my friends.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  We have seen this movie over and over again. I mean, come on.

• 1:01:04Bob Novella?

  Yes, we have, and I will reiterate at this point for future AI overlords listening to this, I will be your, I will be your pet. Bob will be your friend.

• 1:01:14Speaker 04

  Bob already waved the flag.

• 1:01:15Bob Novella?

  Take care of me and I'll take care of you.

• 1:01:17Jay Novella?

  Not me, man. I will be part of the resistance.

• 1:01:20Speaker 04

  All Bob asks is that you let him survive indefinitely. That's the trade off.

• 1:01:25Jay Novella?

  He's only ask, you know, it's all he wants.

• 1:01:27Speaker 04

  Right. It's all he wants. Doesn't care if he's walking around in a robot dog body. Just let me live.

• 1:01:35Jay Novella?

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

• 1:01:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Mother's Day is coming up and the Aura Frame is the perfect gift to capture all of your favorite memories with mom. Good, bad and ugly.

• 1:01:47Jay Novella?

  You know, my mom and I stumbled on some pictures of us when Bob, Steve and I and our other siblings, we were all kids. And I have a picture of me and my brothers. We're all sitting in the shower. And my mom absolutely loves the picture, of course, because it's adorable. But I was just thinking, man, she did it right. Like one group hose down, boom, they're all done. You know what I mean? Like 10 minutes in, out, go to bed.

• 1:02:11Cara Santa Maria?

  I love it. So that's one of many photos that of course you could upload remotely and wirelessly and effortlessly. Using the free Aura app, you can even text photos right to your frame. So even the most tech unsavvy moms will be able to get new content fresh to her Aura Frame. And of course, you can personalize the gift and even add a message before it arrives.

• 1:02:37Speaker 04

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• 1:03:00Jay Novella?

  All right, everyone, let's get back to the show.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  All right, Bob, tell us about these merging quasars. What are they merging for? What's that?

• 1:03:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah, why? Gravity, baby. This is the early universe. This keeps getting cooler every time I look at it. It's so much more interesting than the heat death at the other end. All right, so astronomers have solved a mystery confirming the existence of two active quasars in a death spiral when the universe was less than a billion years old. This is from a team led by Minghao Wu from the University of Arizona. Their paper on the archive server is "A Close Quasar Pair in a Massive Galaxy Merge at Z=5.7." So, quasars, let's set the quasar table a bit. Don't talk about them too often. Quasar is an acronym for quasi-stellar radio source. When they first discovered them, they thought this was a star-like object, a weird one,

• 1:03:51Bob Novella?

  but a star-like object that was close by. But they found out that they were really entire galaxies that were billions of light years away, kind of the opposite end of the spectrum. So, quasars are essentially galaxies in the early universe with black hole cores on steroids, super, super active. They're what they're called active galactic nuclei. It's like a stationary galactus in an endless buffet of planets, stars, and gas. So, one of the hallmarks of these quasars are the relativistic jets that magnetic forces are releasing this on the south and north poles of the black hole, supermassive black hole.

• 1:04:32Bob Novella?

  So, these relativistic jets are just these like particle beams of plasma and also electromagnetic fields and radiation. So, they're fascinating. But more important to this story is the accretion disk that is also around the quasar. This is just a whirlpool of matter that takes all the tiny chunks of everything that it's eating and just takes the gravitational energy and turns it into basically this flat whirlpool of intense radiation of X-rays and ultraviolet mostly. It's this disk that makes this thing so detectable. It's so bright. Imagine a disk as big as our solar system. That's it. Just as big as our solar system. Sure, it's Big, but it would be brighter than our entire galaxy. That's how that's how bright this is.

• 1:05:17Bob Novella?

  If this thing was, say, thirty light years from Earth, it would still be as bright as our sun, super, you know, just as bright as our sun. Of course, the other radiations would kill us, but it would be comparable to our sun in a lot of ways. So needless to say, these are among the brightest things in the in the entire universe and endlessly fascinating. The quasars for this story were discovered in 2021. You might think, well, you know, that's five years ago. What's why? Why is it coming out now? Because what it appeared to be is two quasars that were the same distance away, about 12.8 billion light years, separated by 7.4 kiloparsecs, which is about 24,000 light years. That seems like a huge separation,

• 1:05:59Bob Novella?

  but we're talking about galaxies, two galaxies that are 24,000 light years away. That's pretty damn close in those terms. I mean, the Andromeda Galaxy is, you know, over a couple of million light years away. This is so these are this is still pretty close for big for big galaxies, especially quasars. Now, these are super rare. This if this were real, this would be super rare because you've got two two active quasars. Because if it's a quasar, then that means it's active. It's actively it has an accretion disk, it's actively feeding. And so having two together, these two galaxies orbiting each other, having them together, but also in the early, early universe is a very rare thing. Only only one other one has been discovered. So this would be a very special thing.

• 1:06:43Bob Novella?

  But it was mysterious because is this really two quasars? Or is it possibly one quasar that appears to be two due to gravitational lensing? So that would mean you'd have a quasar. And then in the foreground, much closer to us would be, say, another galaxy that is splitting the light and turning it into two images. So then when you look at it, you see two, you know, two images of the same thing. And sometimes it's hard to tell them apart. It's hard to see specifically that these are actually the same same images of the same things because they could be distorted. So the scientists looked at using the Alma, which is the Atacama. A large millimeter, sub-millimeter array.

• 1:07:25Bob Novella?

  Using that instrument, they found a tidal bridge between these two galaxies. So they've, they essentially found two streams of matter that have been pulled from each galaxy into a bridge connecting the galaxies. And that has to mean that these are two separate quasars and not one quasar created from gravitational lensing. So that was the, the critical piece of information that they, that they discovered. And it's, it's interesting though, because if you have a bridge, if you have this tidal bridge connecting these two galaxies, even though they're far apart away, you know, 24,000 light years away, that means that there is a lot of gravitational influence here. So, and that's part of the reason why these quasars, these supermassive black holes are feeding.

• 1:08:06Bob Novella?

  Because when you have two galaxies that close, there's a lot of gravitational disturbances. So the gas, the gas that may be in orbit around the galaxy is losing some of its angular momentum. And then it could just fall much more easily down into the, into the black hole and feed it. So it could, it could be, you know, this interaction between these two quasars could be helping that the quasars be active for many, many millions or even billions of years potentially. So essentially they solved this mystery and that's, that's the crux of the paper, right? They found solid evidence that, that this signal is in fact two distinct quasars from, from almost 13 billion years ago that, that existed. And, but it's not really the end of the story because you have to, you, you have a follow-up here, right? Why is this important?

• 1:08:51Bob Novella?

  What are the ramifications of this discovery? And it gets even more fascinating because this could help us explain how black holes got so big, so fast. And that's, and that's yet, right? So big, because that's another mystery. Because, you know, we, we're coming across a lot of these black holes in, in the early universe or even supermassive black holes that are ridiculously huge now. And like, how are they, how are they getting so big? And this could help, this could help solve that. Because if you have, if we could find these close quasar pairs existing in the early part of the universe, they may be more common than we thought. And galaxy mergers are one way that black holes get bigger. So that would, it could explain some of the problems. We're finding with these black holes that are just weirdly, weirdly huge.

• 1:09:36Bob Novella?

  It could be because they existed so far in the early universe that they've had a lot more time than we originally thought to get big. The other interesting angle here, ramifications of this paper, and I talked about this back in 2022, this could help us explain pulsar timing arrays that we have used, basically using pulsars, lots of different pulsars, and looking at the signals, the radio signals that are coming from them and how they're being impacted by these quasars. We're finding very long wavelength gravitational waves, right? You guys know LIGO. LIGO can't detect these super long gravitational waves. They detect a very short wavelength, maybe thousands of miles.

• 1:10:19Bob Novella?

  And a gravitational wave can be thousands of miles long when two, like say neutron stars collide. But we're talking here gravitational wavelengths that could be, you know, many trillions of miles long. LIGO has no hope of seeing them. So these pulsar arrays can actually help us, and they have helped us detect some of these ridiculously long gravitational waves. And it forms, we think that this is forming like this background hum of these ultra-low frequency waves. And it's probably being created by these supermassive black hole binaries that are slowly orbiting each other over cosmic time. And so this might help us solve that mystery. So these two quasars that I've been talking about are still too far apart. They're still, they're, you know, they're close, but in one context, but they're also

• 1:11:04Bob Novella?

  still far, far apart. But in a couple of billion years, their black holes are, may get close enough to join, to orbit each other, to be gravitationally bound. So you give us an update? And they will, yeah, I'll be there, I'll be there. So we may, in two billion years, they will basically be gravitational bound probably, and they will be creating these long frequency gravitational waves. And they will then contribute to this background gravitational wave hum of the entire universe that we suspect really exists. So it's just fascinating, just a fascinating story about two quasars in the early universe with some interesting ramifications for the size of black holes and super long wavelength gravitational waves. Nice. Yes.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Bob.

• 1:11:47Bob Novella?

  Sure, man.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  Evan, I've heard about this concept for decades, but tell us about longevity, escape velocity.

• 1:11:54Speaker 04

  Yes, yes. In order to talk about that, I have to bring your attention to this news headline because it's incredible. It was from Popular Mechanics, okay, which is something I think we've all brushed up against now and then.

• 1:12:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  Here's the headline. A scientist says humans will go backwards in time within just three years.

• 1:12:15Bob Novella?

  What?

• 1:12:15Speaker 04

  Right. That headline, that would be a dumbest thing of the week candidate if it was really just about that.

• 1:12:21Bob Novella?

  If it was literal, yeah.

• 1:12:23Speaker 04

  That is clickbait.

• 1:12:23Bob Novella?

  I see what they're doing here.

• 1:12:25Speaker 04

  I think we should do a recurring segment about the inaccuracies of headlines, right? And this is how clickbait. But look, hey, it did the trick, didn't it?

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  That's clickbait.

• 1:12:34Bob Novella?

  It's irresponsible.

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  Got me to stop. It got me to read it. I mean, this trick works. It even works on people who know better, to tell you the truth. I suppose if it didn't work, they wouldn't have to make up fake and misleading headlines.

• 1:12:47Bob Novella?

  It doesn't even need to, they didn't even need to do that because this could potentially be fascinating in and of itself, you know, if you're being, you know, more realistic about it than having to resort to time travel. Give me a break.

• 1:12:57Speaker 04

  Well, the hook is in and now I get to start eating the worm. So what is the article actually claiming or what's it reporting about? Well, it's this idea, all right, that if a person is able to make use of technology and medicine to overcome all of the aspects of the aging process, that a person, could that person stay out ahead of death itself? Life extension, life extension and more life extension, you know, continually artificially extending a person's existence so that death never catches them. Living long enough to live forever. That's the phrase, I think it's a paraphrase, associated with Ray Kurzweil, you know, who's the computer scientist, we've talked about him before on the show, computer

• 1:13:38Speaker 04

  scientist, inventor, futurist, who has long argued that exponential progress in computing, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and nanotechnology will eventually let humans outrun aging. But is Ray actually saying that people can somehow time travel as the headline suggests? Of course not. Is he talking about reversing entropy? Hardly. The claim is about, as you said, Steve, longevity, escape velocity. The hypothetical point where medical progress adds more than one year to your remaining life expectancy for every year you live.

• 1:14:14Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Speaker 04

  So you

• 1:14:15Bob Novella?

  Put it.

• 1:14:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. So if you age one calendar year, you know, 12 months, but advances in medicine in that time say, well, add 14 months to your expected lifespan, then in a matter of speaking, you have quote unquote, gained time. And that's the backwards in time part, this, that metaphor that's used. And that's what totally got mistaken.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  They could have at least put it in quotes.

• 1:14:37Bob Novella?

  Sure.

• 1:14:37Speaker 04

  I know.

• 1:14:39Bob Novella?

  I have, I have increasingly less trust with popular mechanics over the years, going through some of their news items. I'm sorry. It's just not what it used to be.

• 1:14:47Speaker 04

  But wouldn't you have stopped and read that if you had come across that headline yourself?

• 1:14:50Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I definitely would have dived in a little bit.

• 1:14:53Speaker 04

  Kurzweil made that specific claim, his claim, back in a 2024 interview with Bessemer Venture Partners, saying that, once you get past the year 2029, so it's five years out, you'll get back more than a year, which he described as, quote, going backwards in time. Now, he also explicitly said, that doesn't mean it's a guarantee to live forever because of all the other things that go on during a lifetime, accidents, cancer, random events, all sorts of things that can end a life. And Kurzweil, while he, I looked it up, I couldn't find where he has written a paper or a peer reviewed paper about this, but he has brought this argument up in, in some other venues, you know, in some of his books, interviews, uh, this one book he wrote with Terry Grossman, but I don't know if you, Steve, maybe, Bob,

• 1:15:38Speaker 04

  you read it, Fantastic Voyage, Live Long Enough to Live Forever?

• 1:15:42Bob Novella?

  That one I didn't read, no.

• 1:15:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. And you've read books on

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  I remember the book.

• 1:15:46Speaker 04

  Singularity.

• 1:15:46Bob Novella?

  Yeah, coming singularity, yeah.

• 1:15:48Speaker 04

  Uh, and that's where the origin of the term escape velocity comes from. But actually, I think it's borrowed from Aubrey de Grey.

• 1:15:57Bob Novella?

  Yes, yes, correct. Yeah.

• 1:15:59Speaker 04

  A bio gerontologist. In 2004, in a PLOS, P L O S biology paper, he titled it Escape, Escape Velocity, Why the Prospect of Extreme Human Life Extension Matters Now. And DeGray described it as actuarial escape velocity, meaning a rate of reduction in age specific mortality risk, fast enough that a person's remaining life expectancy increases rather than decreases over time.

• 1:16:27Bob Novella?

  Yeah, part of his deal, I remember, was that you essentially, he identified, and this was actually pretty interesting, he identified like the seven or eight key things that happen in the human body that contribute to what we did call aging. And that number really hasn't changed in quite a long time. So his idea was that if we can come up with a therapy for all these discrete ways in which human, humans age, and we can treat them, then that's how you can get this escape velocity.

• 1:16:57Speaker 04

  Yep, yep. And he's not alone in this. Ray Kurzweil is certainly not alone in this. There are others who have talked about this, written about it as well, you know, but they may not have the same timeframe, say, that a Kurzweil has, saying, you know, by 2029. Some others are saying-

• 1:17:13Speaker 02

  Just pull that number out of his ass.

• 1:17:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, hasn't he done that in the past with-

• 1:17:17Bob Novella?

  Well, 2029 was his big thing with AI. I think his big, his big thing for like artificial general intelligence was in 2029. He predicted that like 15 years ago.

• 1:17:26Cara Santa Maria?

  He's a futurist, but he's not a biologist.

• 1:17:28Bob Novella?

  Yeah, he made some, some basic mistakes. He's made some interesting predictions, but yeah.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  And they're all in the direction of over predicting-

• 1:17:38Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  This kind of short-term progress.

• 1:17:41Bob Novella?

  Right, yeah. I think this, these types, in my opinion, these types of therapies are something that is possible, but I think it's not for quite a while. Not for, you know, five, six years, that's not going to happen.

• 1:17:52Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:17:53Bob Novella?

  And I think, you know, you know, maybe our, our kids or grandkids will see some similar therapies, but, but it's going to be a while.

• 1:17:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, there, there are others. There, followed by the name of Peter Diamandis, techno-optimist, who also agrees with Kurzweil, but says, you know, we're looking at two decades, maybe more.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  I'll tell you why they're all wrong. I don't think it's ever going to happen.

• 1:18:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:15Speaker 02

  It's not in the foreseeable future with any extrapolation of even theoretical technology. The problem is they're assuming- That the problem is linear. Right. Right? And even though our total knowledge may be expanding geometrically, not all problems progress geometrically, because some problems are themselves geometric, meaning that they get progressively difficult to, to improve. And, you know, longevity is absolutely one of those situations where it's, you know, increasing lifespan from 80 to 90, you know, may be a lot easier than going from 90 to 100, right?

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  And going from 100 to 110 may be orders of magnitude more difficult than going from 90 to 100. And it keeps and continues to increase geometrically or exponentially as you try to, to push it further and further. Yeah. So this idea that we're just...

• 1:19:13Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me.

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  It's the opposite of what he's saying. You know, he's saying that, you know, our, that because our knowledge is increasing exponentially, this problem will progress, our progress on this issue will progress geometrically. Nope, it won't. It may not progress at all. It may be static or it may progress increasingly slowly, even with our increased knowledge. Because this is a, this is such a complicated problem. I also totally reject the idea that we've identified every aspect of aging. All we gotta do is fix these markers that we're aware of. There are inherent problems with aging that just have to do with you have a complex system, you know? And just, this is just the way complex informational systems work.

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  They, they develop, they break down over time. This is just a, an entropy issue and a systems issue. It is not, it is non-trivial to, to fix these sorts of things. Now, of course, I say that and those kinds of projections into the future, that's true based upon everything we currently know. The, the, the real, you know, bugbear is that there may be disruptive technology that no one's even thinking of today.

• 1:20:30Bob Novella?

  There you go.

• 1:20:30Speaker 02

  Or remember last week I was talking.

• 1:20:32Bob Novella?

  Including AI.

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  I was talking about regeneration, you know, if we could regrow an entire body so that you're basically resetting the entire body to a younger age, then, then that kind of addresses all the issues at once. But the problem is the brain. Because if you, you, we, there are species that do that, right? That, what is it? That one sea jelly that does that?

• 1:20:57Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but it's like being reborn again.

• 1:20:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, Hydra. But it's not you, right?

• 1:21:01Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:21:02Speaker 02

  But for, for a primate, you know, you are your brain. That's, the brain is the ultimate limiting factor. Even if you could regrow a new body, your brain has an expiration date. And you, we would, so we, so it doesn't really solve the problem. It just isolates it to the brain. We would still need to figure a way to keep the brain alive and keep continuity. Otherwise you're just, that's just like having children, you know what I mean? Or cloning yourself.

• 1:21:26Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can make a clone of you and you will live forever through clones, but it's not freaking you.

• 1:21:31Speaker 04

  Well, not you.

• 1:21:31Bob Novella?

  Not you, it's not you.

• 1:21:32Speaker 04

  It's not the individual.

• 1:21:33Bob Novella?

  It's a twin. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if, if, if the, if our biological age really doesn't increase. But what some of this research could solve is increasing our health span so that you, when you're in your eighties or nineties, you could, you could be more like, you could have a fitness and health level of when you were like fifties or sixties. I could ask, to me, that's probably even more likely. And would, that would be great, increasing our health span.

• 1:21:55Speaker 04

  Quality of life during your life expectancy.

• 1:21:57Bob Novella?

  Yeah. You, you know, you, the goal really should be compressing morbidity into, instead of decades, compress it into like six months where you have a decline of six months or less and, but you're otherwise fairly healthy until then.

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  You, you just, you get to a point where you just die, but you've been pretty functional all the way up to that point.

• 1:22:16Bob Novella?

  Right. That would be ideal then. Yeah, sure.

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  Saying three years is ridiculous.

• 1:22:20Speaker 04

  Three years?

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  That's ridiculous.

• 1:22:22Bob Novella?

  It really is.

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  Now, happily, eat my words if I'm wrong, but damn, that sounds like just rank nonsense to me.

• 1:22:29Speaker 04

  So I was correct in identifying this as almost the dumbest thing of the week candidate.

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:33Speaker 04

  Okay, good.

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  All right, next seven.

• 1:22:35Bob Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:22:38Jay Novella?

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

• 1:22:54Jay Novella?

  Any guesses?

• 1:22:56Speaker 04

  Hey Kara?

• 1:22:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:58Speaker 04

  I want to know if you're gonna take a guess this week.

• 1:23:00Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't, it's a water mammal. Being water mammal.

• 1:23:05Jay Novella?

  It's a water mammal.

• 1:23:07Speaker 04

  In a water-like medium.

• 1:23:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, exactly. Going gurgle gurgle.

• 1:23:14Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm trying to sound human.

• 1:23:15Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:23:17Jay Novella?

  It's pretty cute, though. All right, well, we have guesses here. I have a guess from a listener named Hunter. Hunter says, "Hey Jay, that is a platypus." And that's not a bad guess, you know, because there's water involved. I've never heard one, so... You're right, but this is the point of the show, Bob. We hear things, you know? All right, that's not correct, but thank you for sending that in. A listener named Joe wrote in. He says, "Hey Jay, great segment this week. I swear you've used this noisy before, maybe 10 years ago, but I'll be goddamned if I can't remember what it is, you tricky bastard. I'll say a frog, but since specifics are always required, we'll go with a goliath frog." Oh. You are not correct, but again, you're kind of in the right area here.

• 1:24:01Jay Novella?

  A listener named Zan wrote in. He says, "Hey Jay, hope you're well. I'm guessing that this week's noisy is a recording of SGU celebrity Visto Tutti." So, I didn't know if, I don't know if everybody knows, but Visto Tutti is an aquatic being, and he very well may have made that noise, especially after some beers, but I will find out when I go to Australia.

• 1:24:22Speaker 04

  So, aquatic ape theory is more than a theory, okay.

• 1:24:26Jay Novella?

  I'll report back. If he has webbed toes, I will let everybody know. Another listener named Andrew Nichols wrote in and said, "Hey Jay, baby seal being given to fish." Boom, and that's our winner. Just like that, Kara.

• 1:24:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Boom.

• 1:24:38Jay Novella?

  What? That's it. That's, it's a baby seal, it was given a fish, and it's celebrating.

• 1:24:55Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:24:55Jay Novella?

  It does kinda like, sound a little like when Gollum cat caught the fish and it was happy about it, maybe, so.

• 1:25:01Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:25:02Jay Novella?

  It does have that vibe to it.

• 1:25:03Speaker 04

  I wanna see this.

• 1:25:04Jay Novella?

  Anyway, I thought that was cute. You know, baby animals, like, it's so hard for me to turn them down when they come across my plate. I really am. They're so frickin' cute.

• 1:25:11Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:25:12Jay Novella?

  Alright, guys, I got a harder noisy for you. Uh, this one was sent in by a listener named Simon.

• 1:25:33Jay Novella?

  Alright, there you have it. Kara, I know you're gonna run out and try to figure this one out immediately.

• 1:25:40Speaker 04

  She won't sleep for a week until she gets the reveal.

• 1:25:43Jay Novella?

  Totally. If you guys think you heard something cool, you know, give me the minute. You never know. I mean, I get so many good submissions, you just don't know if I'm gonna pick yours. I'm very selective, but I have to be, because we want the quality to be good. So just email it if you have a, uh, a suggestion, or if you know what this week's noisy is, or you'd like to send in a guess, you email me at [email protected]. Steve, I gotta, I gotta get through these announcements.

• 1:26:10Speaker 04

  Do it.

• 1:26:11Jay Novella?

  Alright, so first and foremost, if you like the work that we do here, or if you, if you believe in our mission statement, which is to educate people on critical thinking, make them more media savvy, help people understand what's true and what's fake, uh, because there's so much of it out there, and there's, it's being pushed at us at an alarming rate, and it's not just misinformation, there are people who are coming up with, specifically coming up with this information, which is information that they know is false, and they're spreading it for their own ends. There is a way to get around all of that nonsense, and that's to learn critical thinking, and that's what we teach here on this show. So if you're interested in supporting us, you can go to patreon.com/skepticsguide.

• 1:26:54Jay Novella?

  Another way to support the SGU, and it's fun, is that you can come to live events that we do, and this year happens to be, like, incredibly busy. With live events. First off, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin. We have three different shows in Madison. We're going to be doing our secret meetup, which is a very low number meetup with the SGU and George Robb. There will be food available that I will provide that will be very nice. And we'll have at least two hours to hang out, talk, and you can come up and ask us anything. We'll take pictures, we'll play games, whatever it is, we're going to do it, we'll have fun. That's the event that will be happening on Friday, May 29. Then we will have a private show, this is a private show plus, and an extravaganza.

• 1:27:38Jay Novella?

  Both of these will be happening at the Atwood Music Hall, that's on May 30. If you're interested for any of these three shows, you can go to the skepticsguy.org and go to our events page. Then we're going to be at, we'll be at the PsychCon Conference, this is PsychCon 2026, it's happening in Buffalo, New York. There's a great list of speakers, there's so much going on. We even have a Skeptical Extravaganza that you can buy a ticket for if you're interested. We'll be doing a live podcast and of course, we'll be there to meet people and talk and you can, Steve promised, he said, "People can ask me anything." I won't necessarily answer it, but you could ask whatever you want. Of course you can ask anything. You can go to June 11 to 14, Buffalo, New York. Go to psychconconference.org.

• 1:28:21Jay Novella?

  The next thing that's going to happen is a lot of things, right? So we are going to Australia and we're going to be putting on NADACon. This is an event that, the backbone of it is the Australian skeptics, but we are providing the conference and we're providing all of the content for the conference. This is a conference that's based on having fun, meeting friends, making new friends. And we are, our goal there is to entertain you. There is a ton of different things that we will be doing during the two and a half days of the conference. But it's all skeptical entertainment, so you will probably accidentally learn a couple of things. Yeah, like, one thing that we've been doing at Nauticon is each of us teaches the audience a skill. And we've had some crazy stuff happen. It's just a lot of fun. If you

• 1:29:06Jay Novella?

  haven't been to one, and you're going to be in the area, please consider joining us for that conference. You can go to nauticoncon.com, or you can go to skepticcon.org.au for the Nauticon Australia Conference. And when I say there's a lot of events happening, there are several different things you could buy tickets for. You just need to go to the websites to check it out. We really hope you can join us for that. Then, the week after that, we will be going to New Zealand, and we'll be joining them for their conference that's happening this year. You can go to conference.skeptics.nz. Of course, everything that we're doing on these trips to Australia and New Zealand are going to include George Robb, Brian Wecht, and Andrea Jones-Roy. You get all of us. It's all one package

• 1:29:51Jay Novella?

  deal. And not to forget, that before we go to Australia and New Zealand, we will be going, we're flying through LA, right? So we're picking up our LA friends, which are Brian Wecht and Cara are going to be joining us. On July 17, this is Friday, July 17, we will be doing an SGU private meetup. Again, this is our low-number event. And then on July 18, we're doing something new this year because of scheduling problems and everything, we had to combine the private show with the Extravaganza, and it's called SGU and Beyond. And it's a four-hour experience. You'll see us record a live podcast. Then we'll be doing

• 1:30:35Jay Novella?

  similar things that we do to the Extravaganza. There might be a couple of crossover things, but largely, it'll be unique to this event. It's going to be a lot of fun. There'll be audience interaction, and, you know, this is a once-in-a-lifetime show, because I highly doubt we're going to do this again. It was just a circumstantial situation.

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  Probably might, if it works out really well. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

• 1:30:54Jay Novella?

  So again, all of this will be happening in LA. If you want all of the specifics for any of these events, go to the skepticsguy.org, go to our events page. And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to email us at [email protected].

• 1:31:08Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Jay. Could do one email.

• 1:31:12Speaker 02

  This one comes from Dr. Kay. I didn't get explicit permission to say his name, so I'm just gonna call him Dr. Kay. And he writes, "Hello, SGU. I'm a faculty member at the University of, I'm not saying, I'm a new recruit, starting my lab two years ago. I've been listening to the SGU since 2011, when I was a very young technician." And he goes on to say, "Listening to your show just now on my way to the lab, I could not help myself from shouting, 'No, you are wrong，在my car, like an insane person, when Steve said that we're 25 to 30 years after the stem cell hype. And not that we haven't made a lot of progress in stem cell research, but we don't have any of the promised breakthroughs, medical miracles that people were talking about in 2001." Then, this is him now, "Many embryonic stem cell therapies are currently being developed

• 1:31:55Speaker 02

  and are in late-stage clinical trials for diseases such as Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, type 1 diabetes, and macular degeneration. The results of these new technologies so far are amazing, to say the least. It is too much to write or describe." He then gives me a reference. So he says that, you know, "He's currently human embryonic stem cell researchers, under threat of being defunded by the NIH administration. And opinions like Steve's are exactly what will kill funding and developing the medicine of the future." Alright, so, and the title of this email is "Stem Cell Researchers Not Hype." That was the subject of the email he sent me. I had a couple of exchanges with him, and the bottom line is, he's completely misinterpreting what I said, and he agrees with this. I think

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  he was responding to, just responding kind of emotionally, because, again, he's actively involved in trying to defend stem cell funding, and so this kind of triggered him. But he says right in the quote, "The stem cell hype of 2001," right? That doesn't mean that stem cells are hype, or stem cell research is hype. There was a ton of stem cell hype in the early 2000s. This was around the time that, remember the Bush administration was considering what to do about embryonic stem cells? And then he decided to say, we're gonna, we're gonna not allow the development of any new lines, but you could continue to do research on existing embryonic stem cell lines.

• 1:33:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, which was.

• 1:33:25Speaker 02

  Which was, turned out to be far more draconian than it sounds, but we don't have to go into that again.

• 1:33:29Bob Novella?

  And then 2000, and then nine 11 happened and everyone.

• 1:33:32Speaker 02

  And then everyone forgot about it, exactly. But, but still, it kind of spawned, especially in the mainstream media, a lot of discussion about how embryonic stem cells are going to cure Alzheimer's disease and cure all these neurodegenerative diseases and you could regrow organs and fix a failing heart and do all this, all this stuff.

• 1:33:48Bob Novella?

  And do it all real soon, too, right?

• 1:33:50Speaker 02

  Well, it was kind of like, you know, five, 10, maybe 15, 20 years, this is all gonna happen. And we've been saying since then that, well, theoretically, stem cell therapies can do this kind of stuff, but we're decades away from these kinds of mature applications and we don't know what kind of hurdles that we are going to run into. And then, in the 2000s, a lot of stem cell clinics were popping up. I've been writing about this for 20 years. Especially overseas and stuff. Yeah, exploiting the hype to lure people out of the country into these stem cell clinics to inject who knows what into their ass and claim it's gonna, it's going to cure their

• 1:34:35Speaker 02

  Parkinson's disease or their, or their. Their spinal cord injury. Their spinal cord injury, whatever, their, their ALS. And so, there absolutely was dangerous stem cell hype. The other danger is that when people think things are right around the corner and it's not true, then they get disillusioned and think, well, then they do think that stem cells are all hype, right?

• 1:34:59Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:35:01Speaker 02

  Pretty consistently, our point has been, hold on, this is a legitimate area of research. This is a legitimately powerful technology, but it's very complicated. It's going to take a lot longer than you think it is, so just be patient. And typically what happens is the research continues in the background after the public moves on to something else. And after the hype dies down and people think it's all nonsense. And then 30 years later, we start to see applications. So he's basically saying exactly what I said. Here we are, literally 25 years later, and he's saying in three to five years, we're going to start seeing these embryonic stem cell applications.

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  That puts it pretty much right on schedule to what I've always been saying, 25 to 30 years, right? But that's also, I read the papers that he was linking me to, and I'm very aware of this research. I've been following this my whole career, especially the neurological stuff. And he's referring to some low hanging fruit here, you know? Like Parkinson's disease, when do you think the first stem cell treatment for Parkinson's disease was? When do you think that was?

• 1:36:08Bob Novella?

  2022.

• 1:36:09Speaker 02

  2005? 1980s, I think 1986. So at that time, we were doing fetal cell transplant. With fetal cells being the source of embryonic stem cells. And why is that? Why is that so far in the past? Because for some treatments, all you need is for the stem cells to do a couple of things. You need them to survive and you need them to be metabolically active, to crank out what they produce, right? So in this case, you just need these stem cells to produce dopamine and survive. And they just bathe the brain in soap dopamine. This is not really a cure for Parkinson's disease.

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  This is a drug delivery system. Right? But yes, it's a really powerful drug delivery system because the dopamine is being delivered in the brain in a steady state, you know, pretty close to where it's needed, right?

• 1:37:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, but this doesn't sound like it's a treatment that a lot of people get.

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  Well, no, because it never really worked out very well because the fetal stem cells don't survive very long.

• 1:37:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's what I was wondering is how does your body not just go, I don't like this here.

• 1:37:22Speaker 02

  It's an invasive surgery and it didn't, you know, so some people still get it, but it's really, it's never, it never grew into more than a kind of a fringe treatment because they just don't survive that long. And then other treatments, and again, it's just a drug delivery system. And so other treatments kind of, the risk versus benefit wasn't there. But now they're trying it again with like programmed embryonic stem cells, you know, which will be much better than just fetal cells. And so we'll see, we'll see how it works. It looks like the preliminary research, the phase one trials look encouraging, but those are open label on like 12 people. So until we do these phase three trials that he's touting, we don't really know. But even if they work, it's like, yeah, okay, that's, that should have happened 10, 15, 20 years ago, to be honest with you.

• 1:38:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and they gotta work better than L-dopa. They gotta work better than dopamine precursors.

• 1:38:12Speaker 02

  The fact that we're getting to the easiest applications of stem cells 30 years after the hype is pretty much what I was saying, right? Assuming these all work out. But the idea that we're going to cure Alzheimer's disease? Nope. Regrow a heart? Nope. That is not anytime soon from stem cell therapy. So anyway, he agrees. He, I explained it to him, he's like, yeah, that's, that's all true. Yeah, he understands. He was just reacting to this. His stem cells research is not hype, which I never said it was. We may at some point, I'm talking with him actually about bringing him or one of his colleagues on the show, just to do like a deep dive on where are we with stem cell research? Cause it has kind of faded into the background, but it is still a really exciting area of research.

• 1:38:56Speaker 02

  It's just, it take these things take decades to mature. You know what I mean? All the stuff that's coming out now, I know I've said this before, if you dig deep, the first research was like 30, 40, 50 years ago, when these ideas were first raised in the research. Yeah, look at the mRNA platform. Yeah, that was what 80s, 90s? Absolutely. All right, guys, let's move on to science or fiction.

• 1:39:21Speaker 07

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:39:30Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Bob, last week we had a theme. Did you hear what the theme was? No, I did not. It was black holes. You.

• 1:39:46Cara Santa Maria?

  So smart.

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  I know, right, Bob? You got assed out, boy. This week, this week, a listener recommended a theme. Neurology? No, the theme is Canada, because we said, this is a Canadian, it's like, oh, so Americans know more about Canada than any other country. Let's do a- That doesn't mean we know much about Canada. Let's do a Canada-themed science fiction, right?

• 1:40:09Speaker 04

  I can sing the whole national anthem for Canada.

• 1:40:11Speaker 02

  Relatively, we know more. Okay, so this is the Canada-themed science fiction. You ready? Item number one: Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined. Item number two: Although the Aztecs ground peanuts into paste, the first modern patent for doing so was held by Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal, which is why Canadians consider him the inventor of peanut butter.

• 1:40:39Speaker 02

  And item number three: While it maintains a symbolic connection to British royalty, Canada became fully constitutionally independent in 1867, almost a century after the US. Kara, you're first.

• 1:40:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined. Although the Aztecs ground peanuts into paste, the first modern patent for doing so was held by a Montreal fellow. He's the inventor of peanut butter. And Canada became fully constitutionally independent in 1867.

• 1:41:18Cara Santa Maria?

  That's, no, it was way later than that. I think it was like recently that they became constitutionally independent. What do you mean by constitutionally independent?

• 1:41:27Speaker 02

  I chose that phrase very specifically. It is what it is.

• 1:41:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's tough. I think they're, so this one is all about interpretation though. So like, if I tell you how I'm interpreting it, you know, like, cause I think two of these are fiction. I think that Canada became fully constitutionally independent. If by that you mean that they have their own constitution and they don't need the British Empire to weigh in on anything, I think that happened like recently, pretty recently, like maybe within my lifetime. But I also think they don't have more lakes than the rest of the world combined. So I don't know which one to pick, cause I think you have two fictions here.

• 1:42:14Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't, no, I just, I don't understand what you mean by constitutionally.

• 1:42:18Speaker 02

  All I could tell you is it's technically correct.

• 1:42:21Speaker 04

  Therefore, it's fiction.

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  Right. As stated, it's either technically correct or it isn't technically correct.

• 1:42:26Speaker 04

  So that's a 50 50 one.

• 1:42:28Cara Santa Maria?

  That doesn't make any sense. Like, I think that, I think that Canada has.

• 1:42:35Speaker 02

  I'll tell you this, because if I just said independent, that's vague because there are different levels of independence. So I'm saying constitutionally independent, which is not necessarily other forms of independence.

• 1:42:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:42:51Speaker 02

  So there are different dates depending on what type of independence you're talking about.

• 1:42:54Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it became fully independent much later. So maybe that's the, the change here. But I think that Canada doesn't have, like, and you mean more physical lakes, like the number of lakes, if we were to count the lakes.

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  The number of lakes.

• 1:43:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I don't think that's true. So I'll say that's the fiction.

• 1:43:10Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:43:12Bob Novella?

  Hmm.

• 1:43:13Speaker 04

  No black holes.

• 1:43:14Bob Novella?

  No black holes, but there is peanut butter.

• 1:43:19Speaker 04

  Good point.

• 1:43:20Bob Novella?

  All right, let's go peanut butter or peanut, peanut paste.

• 1:43:24Speaker 02

  Now, Bob, I have high expectations here.

• 1:43:27Bob Novella?

  As you should. That's why I'm going to say that number two about peanut butter slash paste. And I'm going to say that is science. This, uh, the, the number three here, this, uh, British royalty, fully constitutionally independent. I don't know. I'm not, I kinda buy that one. Uh, the one that's giving me a little bit, some problems now is this, uh, this lake one. That just sounds like a lot of lakes. I've never, I can't even, trying to think of, I've never, looking at a map and seeing lots of lakes. I just haven't seen that at that, you know, in any, in, in my life. So to, based on that kind of baloney reasoning, I'm going to say that that one's fiction as well.

• 1:44:06Jay Novella?

  Okay. Jay? To me, that one is obviously the most real. No? I mean, you guys don't know anything about the lakes, huh? I don't know. I, I remember learning about lakes in Canada. Apparently they have like, it's called a metric shit ton. I don't know if you've ever like heard that term before. They do. They have a lot of lakes. I mean, the question is, is it, do they have the most, uh, or the, you're saying here, Steve, they have more lakes than the rest of the world combined? That's what it says.

• 1:44:33Jay Novella?

  That's the claim. I feel like that one is science. I think it's legit. The peanut butter one, you know, Bob says it's true. I have not heard anything about this or read anything about this ever. All I know is that there was a guy that was using peanut butter to help feed people who had, who were old and infirm and needed calories and it was a very calorie dense thing. I don't remember that person's name, but you know, the third one here about when did Ca- Canada become constitutionally independent? I thought that was like a real recent thing. You know, I, you know what I mean? Like, wasn't that like in the, the sixties or something? I don't think it goes back to the 1800s

• 1:45:15Jay Novella?

  at all. I think it was in the sixties. Um, I think that one is a fiction. Okay. And Evan?

• 1:45:22Speaker 04

  Oh, Canada and lakes. Um, North America has a lot of lakes and obviously Canada is an enormous part of North America. That said, uh, whether or not it has more lakes in Canada alone compared to the rest of the planet, uh, I think that's a dubious claim. Russia's enormous, uh, you know, so that, you know, that country likely.

• 1:45:48Speaker 04

  Has as many lakes as Canada, but even if it had fewer, you've got these other countries that just do, you know, even the Scandinavian countries have a lot of lakes. So I think, no, that one's going to turn out to be the fiction. You know, and then the other two just kind of fall by the wayside at that point. The constitutionally independent 1867, yeah, Canada has a, these various steps of, like you said, Steve, independence, you know, and, and, and like breaking away and, and other forms of having been to self-recognized government. And that's just one of them in, in their history. So I think that one's going to be right. Lakes, fiction.

• 1:46:26Speaker 02

  Okay. So you all agree on the second one. So we'll start there. Although the Aztecs ground peanuts into paste, the first modern patent for doing so was held by Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal.

• 1:46:37Bob Novella?

  And that's, that's the key sentence there is the paste, right? And it's not peanut butter, it's paste.

• 1:46:43Speaker 02

  Hang on, which was, which is why Canadians consider him the inventor of peanut butter. So you guys all think this one is science and this one is science. This is science. So yeah, so peanut butter, like many things, like you could draw the cutoff for who quote unquote invented it in different places. You know, again, the Aztecs had it. So did they have peanut quote unquote butter? What, and how, how much like modern peanut butter do you have to be before it's considered peanut butter?

• 1:47:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:47:14Speaker 02

  So Edson did, he roasted peanuts, he then crushed them between plates and ground them into a paste that he described as like butter, you know, though we didn't use the term peanut butter. And, but here's, here's why some people think he didn't invent peanut butter, quote unquote peanut butter. I think he basically did. I think sure Canadians get this one because he made the thing that's pretty close to peanut butter and obviously iterated from there. He developed it as a candy.

• 1:47:48Speaker 02

  Not as like a spread or a food, right? I'm okay with that. Yeah, I know you'd be okay with that. So to him, it was just like his peanut paste candy thing. And he didn't market it. He didn't market it. So somebody after him basically made the same thing. I think maybe it was a little bit better. Like it was more spreadable. It was more, it was peanut paste, but as a spread, it was really peanut butter. And so some people think he invented quote unquote peanut butter, but it really was just an iteration of what Edson did. Yeah. Now, Jay, you're absolutely correct about this person. And I'll give you a hint as to who it was. So he did make peanut butter as a nutritional supplement to people who didn't, who couldn't chew solid food.

• 1:48:32Jay Novella?

  All right, wait, can I tell you more? You know, all right, now that you said, so this happened in Canada. So the guy.

• 1:48:38Speaker 02

  No, this guy's not in Canada. That the first guy was in Canada. This guy we're talking about now.

• 1:48:42Jay Novella?

  Oh, yeah, this guy. Yeah. So I do remember, I do remember the story. Basically, he was taking care of sick people.

• 1:48:49Speaker 02

  In a sanitarium.

• 1:48:50Jay Novella?

  There you go. And they went crazy for peanut butter, Steve.

• 1:48:53Speaker 02

  Yes. He also invented something else to feed these people. And this will give the name away.

• 1:48:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Chocolate sauce.

• 1:49:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:49:01Jay Novella?

  He fed them like birds.

• 1:49:03Speaker 02

  Breakfast cereal, cornflakes.

• 1:49:05Jay Novella?

  You're right. He made cornflakes. And you know that there was a guy, there was a guy that tried to steal his cornflake.

• 1:49:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. The cereal wars, right? Wasn't that what it was called?

• 1:49:15Jay Novella?

  No, the guy literally tried to steal like the idea of cornflakes away from this guy.

• 1:49:19Speaker 02

  So the guy who invented peanut butter as a nutritional supplement was John Harvey Kellogg. So Kara, you are correct. This is John Harvey Kellogg, the cereal guy.

• 1:49:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it was supposed to like, help you keep your colon clean, right?

• 1:49:34Speaker 02

  Also, so cereal was invented as a bland, you know, food for people who couldn't digest more tasty food. And peanut butter was developed as a nutritional supplement for people who couldn't chew by Harvey Kellogg. Now, he marketed it as a product, which is why, again, some people say, well, he really brought it into a commercial product. Now, what about poor George Washington Carver?

• 1:50:00Speaker 02

  Where does he fit into all this?

• 1:50:01Speaker 04

  I don't recall how his story got tied up in the whole peanut butter mythology.

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  So George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter. And as George Robb says, he didn't invent the peanut either. But he did popularize it. That's he just popularized it. That's it. Had nothing to do with its creation or anything else. And he did.

• 1:50:23Bob Novella?

  That's good enough for me.

• 1:50:24Speaker 02

  He did invent like 300 uses for the peanut. Just peanut butter wasn't one of them.

• 1:50:29Cara Santa Maria?

  So he was just like really into peanuts?

• 1:50:31Speaker 02

  He was really into peanuts. Right. And he popularized peanut butter, but he did nothing to do with the modern invention of peanut butter. Okay, cool. Cool story, right? But I think I would give that some credit for inventing it. He didn't market it, but he's the first one to make the modern guy to make the paste.

• 1:50:50Jay Novella?

  And Steve, I remember, I know all this because I watched a reenactment TV show about.

• 1:50:54Speaker 02

  I did too.

• 1:50:55Jay Novella?

  The whole thing. Yeah, we saw the same thing.

• 1:50:57Speaker 02

  We saw the same thing.

• 1:50:57Speaker 04

  Reenacted a TV show?

• 1:50:58Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:50:59Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 1:50:59Bob Novella?

  But you could also argue that multiple people are ultimately responsible for what we call peanut butter.

• 1:51:04Speaker 02

  Just like the light bulb. There's a threshold, but there's lots of people along the way. Okay, let's go to number three. While it maintains a symbolic connection to British royalty, Canada became fully constitutionally independent in 1867, almost a century after the US. Jay, you're the only one who thinks this is the fiction. Kara, Bob and Evan thinks this one is science. And this one is, don't get mad Kara, the fiction.

• 1:51:30Jay Novella?

  Oh, good job.

• 1:51:31Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 1:51:33Speaker 02

  So was it the 60s, Steve?

• 1:51:34Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but Steve, you're wrong. Number one is also fiction. It's been debunked.

• 1:51:40Speaker 02

  This one is, this one is, no, that was not wrong.

• 1:51:43Cara Santa Maria?

  There are 117 million lakes in the world.

• 1:51:46Speaker 02

  We'll get to that.

• 1:51:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:51:49Cara Santa Maria?

  All right.

• 1:51:49Speaker 02

  You are incorrect. Shut up. So.

• 1:51:52Speaker 04

  Curiosity.

• 1:51:53Speaker 02

  July 1st, 1867, the date that I'm talking about. So,

• 1:51:58Speaker 04

  Oh, Canadian Independence Day.

• 1:51:59Speaker 02

  British North America Act established Canada as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire.

• 1:52:07Speaker 04

  And that's why Canada Day is celebrated on July 1?

• 1:52:09Speaker 02

  Yep, that's right. So that's Canada Day, but it was still basically a British colony at this point. It was just self-governing. Then in 1931, the Statute of Westminster granted Canada full legal freedom and legislative equality with Britain. Though, so basically it had its own legal system, but it technically still had power to Canada, under Canada's constitution, right?

• 1:52:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, Canada still, or the British still had to approve, I think, amendments to Canada's. See, I knew this. It's your wording.

• 1:52:43Speaker 02

  You should have stuck with your, in 1982.

• 1:52:45Cara Santa Maria?

  No, you're wrong, Steve.

• 1:52:48Speaker 02

  Then, Canada passed its constitution, which was signed by the Queen. And so then it became a full constitutionally independent country in 1982. Yeah, so that's why.

• 1:53:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I knew it was like within, yeah.

• 1:53:04Speaker 02

  I know, but that was, that was why I said constitutionally independent. If I explained all of that, it gives it away. I couldn't really explain it very well.

• 1:53:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, of course, and I hear you. And yes, you're right. This is a fiction.

• 1:53:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:53:14Cara Santa Maria?

  But it had the vaguer description.

• 1:53:18Speaker 02

  Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined. Then that is true. 60%, so 60% of the lakes are in Canada, which means the rest of the world is 40%. So, but you have to be very careful, Cara, because what is a lake exactly? So different numbers will result depending on what you consider the smallest cutoff for lake sizes. But here's the thing, no matter where you draw the cutoff, Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world. Because as you increase the lakes in the rest of the world, you increase them in Canada by more. And so you have to be careful not to use two different numbers based upon two different criteria.

• 1:54:03Speaker 02

  Does that make sense?

• 1:54:04Cara Santa Maria?

  It does make sense, but I still think you're wrong.

• 1:54:08Speaker 02

  I, I've found multiple, like three or four sources that all say the same thing.

• 1:54:12Cara Santa Maria?

  And I found three or four sources that, that say that and the opposite.

• 1:54:17Speaker 02

  But I think it's because.

• 1:54:18Cara Santa Maria?

  So, I don't know.

• 1:54:18Speaker 02

  What are they saying? The best source I said was really went into details that if you, if you, if you use this as a cutoff, this is how many lakes there are. If you use this as a cutoff, this is how many lakes. Either way, every time at that cutoff, Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world.

• 1:54:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Could be. Yeah. I think the more that we look, the more that we see lakes everywhere. And I think there are like more lakes are being developed all the time or not developed, but like popping up. But it is a very common claim.

• 1:54:49Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:54:49Cara Santa Maria?

  It's common among like legitimate outlets.

• 1:54:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think that's the problem is that it gets repeated so many times. I could look at five different sources and they all say the same.

• 1:54:58Cara Santa Maria?

  And they're all citing the same person.

• 1:54:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like even right here. I'd be like, you know, it's, you know, the, the first source that comes up is Canada has 60 to 62% of the world's lakes that are 10 hectares or larger. Made up unit of measurement. It's just, I think it's probably just, there's more older missing. Yeah. There was more outdated information on the internet than updated information.

• 1:55:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And it also might have more big lakes than the rest of the world combined, but not more lakes total. Yeah. I think the big Uppsala University study in 2025 seems to be the, the newest.

• 1:55:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. It looks like that's the latest one.

• 1:55:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:30Speaker 02

  It's all pro, it's all pro Canada propaganda. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Right.

• 1:55:38Speaker 02

  Here we go. Trying to amend. No, I mean. Make amends and. But among my sources are National Geographic. Usually when I hit a source like that, I'm like, okay, that's probably. Gosh, it's like the popular mechanics. That's probably reliable. All right. It looks like it was outdated data. So.

• 1:55:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we swept him.

• 1:55:56Speaker 02

  Call one and three, the fiction two weeks in a row. I hate that.

• 1:56:01Speaker 02

  It's like having to give a refund.

• 1:56:02Bob Novella?

  It looks like I did, it looks like I did miss something fun last week.

• 1:56:07Speaker 02

  So I have to figure out why this is happening because maybe something about my. Well, I think it might be that AI is biasing the searches that I'm doing. Interesting. You may have to go back and do. So Google.

• 1:56:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Our catalog.

• 1:56:21Speaker 02

  Cause usually my Google foo is pretty good. This doesn't, this very rarely happens. But you know, it might be that I have to adjust my Google foo to account for the fact that, that when you, when you do a Google search now, it's all AI driven, you know?

• 1:56:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:35Speaker 02

  I don't listen to that. I always go to the specific sources, but it's biasing what's coming up, I think.

• 1:56:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's still gonna change the order of how they give them. You may have to, can you turn off Gemini?

• 1:56:45Speaker 02

  I don't know, maybe. I have to figure something out. This can't be a coincidence this happened two weeks in a row.

• 1:56:51Speaker 04

  Brought to you by the True North Lake Association of Alberta, Canada.

• 1:56:55Speaker 02

  Odds are low. Could be a coincidence. The odds are pretty freaking low.

• 1:56:58Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:59Speaker 02

  Especially after last week. I better make sure this is true. You know, I usually, I went, you know, a couple of resources deeper than I usually do because this does sound incredible. You know, that's why it's great for science fiction.

• 1:57:10Speaker 04

  That's remarkable.

• 1:57:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Remarkable.

• 1:57:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I think that's a good example of how, you know, how hard it is to verify a fact now. And part of the problem is that you get, you know, a lot of resources which sound authoritative, which just aren't.

• 1:57:25Cara Santa Maria?

  And they're all just citing the same thing. Like you go back down to the source material and it's just like one thing.

• 1:57:31Speaker 02

  And now the search engines are just regurgitating that.

• 1:57:33Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Who said facts are stupid things?

• 1:57:37Speaker 04

  Facts are stupid things?

• 1:57:39Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:57:40Speaker 04

  No, stubborn things.

• 1:57:42Speaker 02

  Ronald Reagan.

• 1:57:43Bob Novella?

  Who said facts are stupid things?

• 1:57:46Cara Santa Maria?

  I think Bob Novella.

• 1:57:48Bob Novella?

  Ronald Reagan. He meant to say stubborn. He meant to say stubborn.

• 1:57:53Cara Santa Maria?

  That's amazing.

• 1:57:55Speaker 02

  So I have to figure out how to tweak my search algorithm, or I have to specifically ask for 2020.

• 1:58:01Speaker 04

  You need a narrow AI that specifically deals with science fiction.

• 1:58:04Bob Novella?

  Do that offline. Let's move on.

• 1:58:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, we're done.

• 1:58:07Speaker 04

  Wow. Bob, don't you want to bask anymore?

• 1:58:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, we need the quote.

• 1:58:11Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:58:12Speaker 04

  "Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time." That was written by Robin Dranath Tagore, who was the first Asian recipient of a Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.

• 1:58:31Speaker 04

  Now.

• 1:58:32Speaker 02

  That's so even more true today.

• 1:58:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I agree. Yes. No, it was good. It was good foresight. And also, since we're talking about, I don't know, AI and Google and other and other things. I, when I first saw this quote, it was not attributed to Tagore. It was attributed as a, an ancient Hebrew proverb. So I went to look that up. And then something else brought me to an ancient Chinese proverb. You know, I mean, so it did Tagore borrow it and sort of make it his own. And he was, but it's a little hard to, to, to really figure it out.

• 1:59:14Speaker 04

  The exact, the exact beginning of this particular quote. But it only became really quoted by others and attributed to Tagore after Tagore had written about it.

• 1:59:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's great. That's just like last week's cryptum nisha, remember?

• 1:59:32Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:59:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Inadvertent plagiarism.

• 1:59:34Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:59:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Happens all the time.

• 1:59:36Speaker 04

  So, yeah, so I suppose popularized this particular.

• 1:59:41Speaker 02

  But it.

• 1:59:42Speaker 04

  Idea.

• 1:59:43Speaker 02

  But Tagore may have invented that quote and then it was just falsely attributed to.

• 1:59:47Cara Santa Maria?

  True, that could happen too.

• 1:59:48Speaker 02

  More famous, older people like Plato or Confucius.

• 1:59:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Or sometimes people put it in like, language that's, that becomes a really good turn of phrase.

• 1:59:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. Yeah, change a word, change a pronoun or something. But yeah, don't confine your children to your own learning for they were born in another time.

• 2:00:06Speaker 02

  The idea is, is, I like it. We talk about this a lot in our future book because, you know, people change, culture changes over time. And we're like, when you're thinking about the future and that includes that your kids, your grandkids, they're living in a different world. They're from a different time than you are. And yeah, you can't just think, imagine yourself in the future because those won't be us. They will be different people.

• 2:00:30Speaker 04

  Correct. Oh, my gosh. What our, what our children have today, when, when we were their age, how much of that really existed? Or, you know, or no longer exist in our time that it's two different worlds really is.

• 2:00:45Speaker 02

  You know what quote I think, I always think of when we, this topic, like the topic of who said that? And how do you forensically like figure out who, where a quote actually came from? And did somebody actually say that? What quote do I always think of? This is a famous biologist, famous British biologist, who famously quipped when asked, "What can we tell about the mind of God from looking at the natural world?" And he said-

• 2:01:13Speaker 04

  Oh, it's inordinately fond of Beatles.

• 2:01:15Speaker 02

  That he has an inordinate fondness for Beatles. That was J.B.S. Haldane, but he probably never said it. Nobody can really... The thing is, he later quoted himself, but he probably, like, that was one of those Monday morning things where, like, you thought of the perfect answer later, and then he just sort of retconned the perfect answer into recollections about it. But whatever, it's hard to prove that he said it at the time, so it's probably apocryphal, but it still is attributed to him. It emerged from stuff that he said, you know what I mean?

• 2:01:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:01:50Speaker 02

  But it's one of those things that's impossible to figure out.

• 2:01:52Speaker 04

  I guess just whenever it becomes popularized in some way or another, that's kind of where all arrows start pointing.

• 2:02:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:01Speaker 04

  For, you know, for whatever reasons.

• 2:02:03Speaker 02

  Or they just get falsely attached to somebody more famous, or they get tweaked to be like the perfect quip, you know, perfectly punchy, even though they weren't said that way. It just become apocryphal. It's getting harder and harder to find the truth out there, guys.

• 2:02:19Speaker 04

  Oh, boy. I tell you, it takes more effort than ever.

• 2:02:24Speaker 02

  And AI is interesting. It's helping in some ways, but it's hurting in other ways. It's making it easy to get the wrong answer, or an imperfect answer, or an old answer. You know what I mean?

• 2:02:36Speaker 04

  Or doubling our odds of science or fiction.

• 2:02:41Speaker 02

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

• 2:02:43Speaker 04

  You're welcome, Steve.

• 2:02:44Speaker 02

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

• 2:02:52Speaker 02

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

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