The Skeptics Guide #1041 - Jun 21 2025

Guest Rogue: Justin Daab; From TikTok: Mysterious Moon; News Items: Scopes 100 Year Anniversary, Smells and Hunger, GMOs May Save Florida Citrus, Black Hole Supercollider, Antarctica Radio Pulses; Special Report: Does AI Think?; Who's That Noisy; 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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• 0:33Speaker 01

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

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, June 18th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Hey, everybody. Cara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. Evan Bernstein.

• 0:55Speaker 03

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  And we have a special guest rogue on this show, Justin Dobbs. Justin, welcome to the SGU.

• 1:03Speaker 04

  Thank you so much. It's I've been listening for almost the entire time you've been doing it. So this is actually pretty crazy.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  Welcome, Justin.

• 1:11Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  So, Justin, tell us a little bit about yourself.

• 1:15Speaker 04

  Sure. So I spent a lot of time in a in a former career doing everything from brand strategy to innovation consulting and future casting. So helping companies figure out what they wanted to be when they grew up. Last year, I spent a year in a fellowship at the University of Chicago, trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. And in that fellowship, I actually developed a kind of a graduate level course on how to do innovation with generative AI tools. So we'll see if I can actually get an adjunct position teaching that. The wheels of academia seem to turn pretty slowly these days.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  All right. You're going to talk to us a little bit later in the show about an artificial intelligence related news item.

• 1:54Speaker 04

  I am.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, guys, Justin is on here. Why? Because he is a patron of the SGU. He's at the Luxotic level. And we do that. We let Luxotic members join us after they've been at Luxotic for six months. And anyway, we really appreciate your patronage and

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Your support for the SGU and thanks for listening to us from the beginning. I think you get it. You know why we're here.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  I do.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  And you know, it's a ton of work, but we're, we're all very happy to be doing it. Um, and we just want to make sure our patrons know how much we can't really do this without them.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Well, like I said, I've been listening a very, very long time and um, you, you know, my children are actually uh, they're older now. They're 22 and 21. But they have gone through many a science or fiction on road trips.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  They grew up at the SGU, huh?

• 2:38Speaker 04

  They totally didn't.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  That is good parenting.

• 2:42Bob Novella?

  Those poor kids.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  So we should mention that tomorrow after not tomorrow, not when the show goes up tomorrow after this recording is Juneteenth. Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah. Which is now a holiday, which means no work. This is the last, I guess, holiday I'll have off.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Oh wow.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  Steve's final.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Milk in the hell out of that.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  Work related holiday.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, milk in it. So yeah, so Juneteenth is amazing. That's the, the officially the last, the end of slavery because Union soldiers marched into Galveston, Texas and said, no slaves, uh, two and a half years after the emancipation proclamation. So we're going to start off with a, a quick item from Tik Tok. Just a chock full of nonsense.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  This one comes from Phil's pixel. He uh, he has a video talking about how the moon is hollow and probably because it's fake. Right? I mean, it was like constructed by aliens or something. And what he does, I can't go over everything he says because he gives us gish gallop of just

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Mystery mongering about the moon. Some of it is true, but irrelevant or it's true, but who cares?

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Is he presenting someone else's theory or this is his own theory, Steve?

• 4:01Speaker 02

  No, this is definitely somebody else's theory.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  He's just sort of pulling it all together.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  I see. He's connecting the dots for us.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  But there's a couple of things I wanted to point out. A couple of things he says, which are, are flat out wrong, but it's a good example of how you can twist bits of information into a conspiracy or like anomaly hunt.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  So he says that the moon is only 25% the size of the earth, but it only has 1% of the mass of the earth.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Isn't that wrong and wrong?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Well, it's misleading and misleading is what it is. So when he says there's 25% the size, what size is a vague term.

• 4:44Bob Novella?

  It is.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Right? What does he mean by that?

• 4:46Bob Novella?

  Mass, diameter.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  He doesn't mean the one thing that matters, and that's volume, right? Because the

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Volume of a spherical object.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  The moon is about 1.3% the volume of the earth, and it does have about 1% of the mass of the earth. But see, that doesn't sound quite as impressive as 25% and 1%, does it?

• 5:06Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:07Bob Novella?

  No, right.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  So what's he mean by 25%?

• 5:10Speaker 02

  I think diameter, but not volume. But in any case, he uses that discrepancy, that apparent discrepancy, which he is incorrectly stating, to say that the moon doesn't have nearly as much mass as it should for its size because it's hollow, right? That's how he's getting to it's hollow.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  But of course, the moon is just, it's a little bit less dense than the earth. Because, of course it is, because it's smaller than the earth and because of gravity, right? Gravity squishes the earth into a more dense orb than the moon. We have more iron at our core. The substance of the earth is compressed more by gravity, so the earth is more dense than the moon. Of course it is. No mystery at all. The numbers are not even that impressive. But he, you know, by saying this sort of true but misleading bits of information, he makes it seem like there's this deep, dark mystery that nobody, scientists are baffled, you know, kind of thing.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  He also says things like, well, you know, the apparent size of the moon is the same as the sun. And people think that's just a cosmic coincidence. Like, well, yeah, kind of is just a cosmic coincidence. You know, what else are you gonna say about it?

• 6:27Bob Novella?

  Yeah, well, there is more you could say about it. I mean, he actually mentions tidal locking, where the one face of the moon is always looking at the earth. It's a different point, but he's familiar with tidal locking, but he ignores tidal acceleration, which explains that the moon is moving away from the earth because of tidal acceleration, that the moon actually steals rotational energy from the earth and transferred to the moon's orbital speed, which gets it into a higher orbit. So it's moving away at like a few centimeters a year.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  We used to have six-hour days on this planet.

• 6:58Bob Novella?

  I think it was 10 hours, but that's the shortest day I've read about. But he doesn't mention that, you know, because that just kind of ruins his cool point. That the moon will be smaller than the sun at some point in the future, and eventually it'll stop moving away, but I think the earth-moon system will be burnt to a crisp before that happens.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so basically, we talked about this before on the show, it's not the same size, it's both are variable in size, because the earth's orbit around the sun is a little bit eccentric, and the moon's orbit around the earth is a little bit eccentric, and their variable apparent sizes overlap. Right? So not the same size, they have overlapping apparent sizes. And there's a period of the earth's history where that is going to be the case.

• 7:45Bob Novella?

  We are lucky, and it is a cool coincidence.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, we just happened to be in that period of history when that is the case.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  We're allowed.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  But it sounds less cosmic-y, saying they're the same apparent size, you know? But that's the kind of stuff that he's pulling, right?

• 8:01Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Some of the things he says is just not true, like all craters are the same depth. No, it's not true.

• 8:06Cara Santa Maria?

  What?

• 8:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  You're trying to build to this point that that's because there's like an artificial subsurface.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, the 3D printer only prints one depth, right?

• 8:17Bob Novella?

  Much deeper.

• 8:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so what's his great conspiracy? Like, what is he trying to promote here?

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Hollow moon.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  The hollow moon, because it's actually a constructed artifact by aliens, and NASA's hiding it from us.

• 8:28Cara Santa Maria?

  I see.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  It's a little mini Dyson sphere.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  But he figured it out, Kara. This guy has seen past the veil. Connected all the dots. He has partial misconstrued information that he has woven together, and actually somebody else has woven it for him, and he's repeating it on TikTok as if he's a genius.

• 8:46Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's always so amazing when people have the hubris to think that they have special knowledge that literally no one else has.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Here's a comment from one of the observers on this, his particular video. He calls it the hollow head theory.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Well, Kara, I think, I think that's part of the allure, you know?

• 9:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  You know, once you've jockeyed yourself into thinking of things that way, it's exciting, you know, it's exciting. I have inside knowledge, nobody really knows it.

• 9:18Speaker 04

  But, but he did miss the obvious conclusion, though, is that the moon is actually made of Ozempic.

• 9:26Bob Novella?

  Oh, it's so obvious now, yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  How modern.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  These people need a fantasy life, right? Because they're just...

• 9:32Speaker 03

  Well, yeah.

• 9:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Play some video games.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Or, or they need better Google foo.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Or, or just throwing this out there, critical thinking skills, you know?

• 9:42Cara Santa Maria?

  That too.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, that gets in the way.

• 9:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Probably number one, yeah.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  All that fantastical stuff.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  That's a lot of work.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's too hard.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  All right, Kara, it's a, it's a kind of an important anniversary this year.

• 9:53Cara Santa Maria?

  It is. So, can anybody tell me what happened from July 10th to July 21st, 1925?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:02Cara Santa Maria?

  You can. Anybody else?

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Well, I, I, I...

• 10:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Evan, you can.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Had, had, had, had you asked me this, say, yesterday, I might have fumbled for this answer.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Isn't that when Cthulhu attacked New York City?

• 10:14Cara Santa Maria?

  That is when the state of Tennessee versus John Thomas Scopes was hurt.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:20Speaker 04

  Oh, the Scopes monkey trial.

• 10:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, otherwise known as the Scopes trial. I hate that it's called the Scopes monkey. I've never once in my life called it that.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  No?

• 10:27Cara Santa Maria?

  But you are correct. It is like a common kind of name for the Scopes trial.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  That's a press name.

• 10:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but the Scopes trial was a press trial. Let's be honest. Let's be really honest.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Isn't that how you first learned about it? That's what it was called?

• 10:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, a lot of people called it that.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Let's talk a little bit about the trial first, and then we can talk about sort of what has, what has happened in the 100 years since the Scopes trial. So, I think probably those of us here, talking amongst ourselves on the podcast, are aware of the particulars of the trial. But for those who maybe need a bit of a refresher, I think it's important to remember that in Dayton, Tennessee, where the trial was held, it was, this was a deliberate trial. John Thomas Scopes was chosen, actually he volunteered. You can't do it without being volunteered. So they tried to ask the biology teacher at the school, who was also the principal,

• 11:26Cara Santa Maria?

  who was teaching, you know, at the school where evolution was taught. They tried to ask him if he would be willing to be arrested, and he said, no. And so they found that John Thomas Scopes had substitute taught for like several days. And so he qualified and he was like, yeah, I'll do it. And so he was, he incriminated himself and said that he was, you know, he taught evolution so that there would be a defendant in this trial. He was represented by the ACLU originally, because they basically said, anybody who violates the standing law in Tennessee at the time, the Butler Act, which says that it's illegal to teach evolution in schools, anyone who violates that, we want to defend you because

• 12:09Cara Santa Maria?

  we want to take this, you know, we know it's going to be appealed and we want to take it to the Supreme Court. We're looking to basically defend the constitutionality, or the lack of constitutionality of this law. And do you guys remember who, who were the, I guess, the famed attorneys on either side?

• 12:24Speaker 03

  William Jennings Bryan was... Oh, yeah. Clarence Darrow.

• 12:28Cara Santa Maria?

  And Clarence Darrow.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:30Cara Santa Maria?

  So William Jennings Bryan argued for the prosecution. Famously, he had run for president three times.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  President several times.

• 12:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, three. And he had been a secretary of state. But in, throughout his career, he had become more fundamentalist and he had become more interested in sort of defending, kind of like biblical fundamentalism. And then Clarence Darrow was the main defense attorney who defended Scopes. But of course, there were, there were several, obviously, lawyers that were involved in the case. I think there was a quote at one point, but that was, that somebody said, it might have even been Darrow, that like, it's not Scopes that's actually on trial here, it's the law that's on trial. That is what we're trying to do, is get this law taken off the books. And, okay, cut to now, we're 100 years later, it's a little hard to remember, but do you

• 13:22Cara Santa Maria?

  all remember the outcome of the trial?

• 13:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  He was found guilty and fined and then

• 13:29Bob Novella?

  Like a hundred bucks.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  It was overturned because the fine exceeded this limitation.

• 13:34Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  And so it got thrown out on a technicality, never made its way to the Supreme Court and so the strategy failed.

• 13:40Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Cara Santa Maria?

  So the strategy failed at the time and I'm reading somewhere that the, the fine of a hundred dollars, if we were to look at today's money, it would be around like two grand. So it was, you know, it was a relatively small fine.

• 13:53Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 13:54Cara Santa Maria?

  From, yeah, from a legal perspective. Um, okay. So the Butler Act had been on the books. The Butler Act was, um, you know, this anti-evolution law. There were other anti-evolution laws that were spreading throughout the, um, the country. And ultimately, uh, there was a change to the legislation. Ultimately, the Supreme Court did deem, uh, teaching only, um, uh, creationism in schools or punishing those who teach evolution in schools as unconstitutional. But that didn't happen until forty years later.

• 14:30Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 14:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. In nineteen sixty-eight. So that was, uh, when Susan Epperson, uh, was actually on trial in, well, she wasn't on trial, but when sort of that trial took place in Arkansas. There's a really great history here with Science News. That's why I pulled some articles from, from Science News, the publication. Of course, you can read about the Scopes trial anywhere. There's lots of wonderful books that have been written about it. But there's a really great history here from Science News because Science News used to be called Science Newsletter and it was around during the Scopes trial.

• 15:04Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 15:04Cara Santa Maria?

  So they had, uh, two different journalists. Yeah, yeah. It was, let me see, uh, Watson Davis and Frank Thon. Uh, Frank Thon was the biology editor who actually went to Dayton and reported on the trial and wrote about it. And so I like pulled up an article that was written, let's see, on Saturday, June sixth, nineteen twenty-five, a hundred years ago. I'm reading an article from, this is amazing. Professor M.I. Pupin, president of American Association for Advancement of Science calls arrest lawless act and says, quote, self-respecting American citizens must aid defense. The scientists of America, 14,300 strong, were called to the support of freedom of teaching

• 15:49Cara Santa Maria?

  and of evolution. And so it's so great. So they talk all about kind of the, how the trial got started. They talk about how there's good evidence right now that we actually did evolve from a common ancestor, as did apes. And then I love this because at the end of the article, there's some dashes and then there's like a couple of other headlines that are listed at the very bottom under the Science Service. One of them says, "By rearranging her kitchen utensils, a Virginia woman recently saved herself 323 steps a day, or nearly three miles of walking a month." That's helpful. And then another one, "The United States is using up its timber four times as fast as it is growing."

• 16:34Cara Santa Maria?

  These two things were printed on June 6, 1925, underneath this article about scientists pledging to support a Tennessee professor who was arrested for teaching evolution. So it's very interesting to look back on the beginnings of the Scopes Trial, how it was sort of orchestrated, what happened since then. And of course, the push for creationism to be continued to be taught in schools, even into the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, and today, the rebranding of creationism as intelligent design. And of course, new laws that are being attempted to be passed and that are definitely supported

• 17:16Cara Santa Maria?

  by the current administration about, quote, "academic freedom," where individuals are lobbying to be able to teach, quote, "scientific controversies," you know, under the guise of doing, of academic freedom, continuing to be able to teach intelligent design and doubts about evolution. So 100 years later, I think we made some progress, probably not as much as we would have liked. And the, I don't know, what do you want to call it? The undermining of scientific teaching, it rages on. We are still having to be vigilant about this. Endless battle. Mm-hmm.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Scopes Trial really has an interesting and complicated legacy, you know, as you say, because it certainly broken this debate out into the public. And I think over time. To the broader public, eventually, I think, you know, evolution won out.

• 18:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  But textbook companies got very risk averse. And essentially, they just pulled evolution from the textbooks. So we've kind of lost a generation in terms of learning about evolution, right?

• 18:23Cara Santa Maria?

  And then that continued later.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Until the 60s.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  That's horrible.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and then, and then

• 18:27Speaker 03

  That's just devastating.

• 18:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Later, we saw changes because of Texas. Yeah, so if anybody's not seen, I think the documentary's called The Revisionaries. Is that correct? I'm gonna just Google that to make sure. Yeah, 2012, Austin, Texas, 15 people influence what is taught to the next generation of American children once every decade. And so it's, PBS airs it. It's the Texas Board of Education, who has so much control over textbooks, like a large majority of the textbooks that are printed in public schools across the country, and how they're sort of anti-evolution, pro-creation, anti... In many different aspects of education, there's a rewriting of history, but they do focus quite a bit on evolution there.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Kara.

• 19:11Cara Santa Maria?

  I recommend it. Yep.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Jay, tell us about the effects of smells on hunger.

• 19:16Jay Novella?

  Let me ask you guys, does smelling food make you more or less hungry?

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Depends on the food.

• 19:22Jay Novella?

  Personally?

• 19:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I mean,

• 19:24Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 19:25Cara Santa Maria?

  It makes the hunger coles. That makes sense. I might not know if I'm hungry, and then I might smell really good smelling food. I'm like, yep, I'm hungry.

• 19:33Jay Novella?

  I mean, in my mind, it basically makes me more hungry. You know, I get that. You know, you could smell something, and whether you're hungry or not, you might be like, ooh, that, you know, I want to try that. Especially desserts, for Christ's sake. I mean, I don't have to be hungry at all to be seduced by a dessert, you know?

• 19:49Speaker 02

  It depends on what you mean by hungry, too. As you say, there's the desire to eat, and then there's like, physical hungry.

• 19:56Jay Novella?

  I don't even know what the difference is between those two things.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I have

• 20:00Speaker 02

  I do. I mean, there are

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've gone a day without food, and I've been hungry at the end of that day.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I've been, yeah, you know, like, when you're really, really hungry, but certainly, I've had the desire to eat something because it's delicious, even though I have no hunger.

• 20:13Cara Santa Maria?

  But Steve, you're right. If I smell, like, fish, or if I smell, there's certain, if I smell, I don't know, Brussels, they don't make me hungry.

• 20:22Jay Novella?

  Justin, what's a food item that you just can't turn down?

• 20:25Speaker 04

  Well, Jay, I'm gonna run into your camp. Meatballs.

• 20:29Jay Novella?

  I knew I liked you, but now I'm 100% sure.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  You can't eat a meatball.

• 20:36Jay Novella?

  Meatballs, you know, like so many people get angry at me because it's meat and you know, I get it. I totally get it.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  Agreed.

• 20:43Jay Novella?

  But I, look, I, I grew up with this food item. It's ingrained in my DNA at this point and um.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  There's also some food that if you see other people eating the food, you want to eat that food.

• 20:55Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Even like on TV, there's a few that come to mind. Apples.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Noodles.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Spaghetti.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  And potato chips.

• 21:03Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  I'm not sure if I see someone eating spaghetti, that makes me want to eat it.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. Spaghetti with sauce.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  Noodles do it. Yeah, noodles are it.

• 21:13Jay Novella?

  Especially when they're doing the thing, you know, when they're like twisting their fork and you're, you just bear down on that. I know. Yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  It might be the Will Smith eating spaghetti kind of AI video that turned me off.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, yeah.

• 21:25Jay Novella?

  Something recently happened that it was odd that scientists discovered they, uh, something that starts with a smell and ends with a full stomach and there's no chewing required. And this research team in Germany, they're, they're at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Is that anywhere near the Max Planck Institute?

• 21:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:45Jay Novella?

  You know, if, if they want me to pronounce it that way, change the way they spell it. You know what I'm saying?

• 21:49Speaker 03

  That's the American Embassy, Steve. Max Planck.

• 21:52Jay Novella?

  Goddamn.

• 21:53Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm sure Max Planck is equally not correct.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  I'm just saying.

• 21:57Cara Santa Maria?

  It is German.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  I'm just trying to keep things straight.

• 22:00Cara Santa Maria?

  But you're right.

• 22:01Jay Novella?

  There, Karen.

• 22:02Cara Santa Maria?

  I, I, I tend to say.

• 22:02Jay Novella?

  My sweet, my Christian. So, these guys, these guys over here at some university over there,

• 22:11Jay Novella?

  who study metabolism, they found a brain circuit that suppresses appetite the instant that food is smelled. Now, this was of course done in mice, so I'll keep that in mind, you know, but it's still a very interesting thing for us to discuss. This is just smelling it, not tasting it, not eating it, they just smell it. So this is what they figured out.

• 22:29Cara Santa Maria?

  They smell it.

• 22:29Jay Novella?

  They were studying how smell might influence, you know, common feeding behavior. This is, this is a new territory and, you know, with what they found, lots of other researchers have been doing similar kinds of research and everything, but in this particular instance, they stumbled on something really, really cool. So inside the brain, they traced a line from the olfactory bulb where, you know, scent first gets processed, to a small cluster of neurons in a region called the medial septum. Now, Steve, where is that?

• 22:59Speaker 04

  In the middle of something.

• 23:02Jay Novella?

  It sounds like in the middle of your nose, but isn't, this is in the brain, though.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Yes, that is, that is definitely in the brain.

• 23:08Jay Novella?

  Okay, good.

• 23:11Cara Santa Maria?

  That's right there, in the brain.

• 23:13Jay Novella?

  Yeah, okay. So these specific neurons had one job, make the animal feel full. And I think this is universally common among, among mammals. But they're, they were getting it switched on before food ever, you know, touched their mouth. So the moment that the smell hit their brain, the circuit lit up. And in lean mice, that single switch had an immediate effect and it shut down their appetite. But this happened not hours or minutes later, like this was happening within a scant seconds. And the smell of food activated these, uh, what do you, okay, I can't pronounce the word. Society, society, satiation?

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Satyity.

• 23:54Jay Novella?

  Satyity. Christ almighty.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  That's a good one.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  From the word satiate?

• 24:00Jay Novella?

  All right, satyity neurons. So basically eat less, right? That's, and that's the sequence. So why would a brain evolve to do that? Which I think is a, is a very important question to ask at this point. So one of the study authors, Janis Bulke, thinks that fast feedback loops were probably there as a survival mechanism. And in the wild, as an animal, you know, an animal might have 30 seconds to grab food before something comes to grab that, that food or it. So the sooner it can stop eating and get moving again, the better off, the more likely that animal would survive. So being able to trigger feeling full earlier, based on smell alone, would let the, would let them eat quickly without overeating and getting sluggish and, and basically not only

• 24:45Jay Novella?

  losing their lunch, but they'd lose themselves. So the twist is that the whole system falls apart in obese mice. So that same scent, same neurons, but in obese mice, nothing happens. The medial septum just stays dark, doesn't, doesn't fire at all. And the smell of food doesn't flip that, you know, um, full switch. So the mice keep eating and they're completely unaffected. And this is important because it adds to a Growing pile of evidence that obesity interferes with olfactory pathways. And in this specific case with feeling full. So, you know, it's, it's a compounding problem.

• 25:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, wait, wait. But that makes it sound like it's causal. But it could be that the mice were always like that. And that's why they have obesity. Right? They never feel full, which is why they never stop.

• 25:31Jay Novella?

  Um, sure, but they're not born obese. Right?

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they became obese because they had that.

• 25:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. This could cause obesity. This doesn't have to be a result of obesity.

• 25:41Jay Novella?

  You should call up Janice Bulke at the Max Planck University. Yeah. Good job. Let's see, you know, let me, let me see if there, if I can find anything that addresses that. But I think they're actually, yes, you're saying like that, that part of the brain doesn't light up as something that they were born with, and that's why they're obese.

• 26:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like if you're, if you're born with a defective satiety signal, you're not going to know when to stop eating.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  We may be running into the difference between what the data shows and what they think the data says. Right? The data shows that obese mice don't, don't have the satiety response to odors. They, they may be speculating or hypothesizing that it sounds like what they're, they're saying is they think it's that obesity down regulates that receptor pathway over time.

• 26:28Jay Novella?

  That's how I read it.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  As opposed to they were that, they were born that way, and that's why they're obese. Either one fits the data.

• 26:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Hypothesis, right?

• 26:36Speaker 02

  So how do you separate those two?

• 26:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Then, then you have to start doing experiments where you knock out that section of the brain. Yeah.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:44Jay Novella?

  All right.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  But the thing is, it could also be both.

• 26:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, it probably is.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's what they say is self reinforcing. Maybe you, you're born with that tendency and then as when you get.

• 26:54Jay Novella?

  Gets worse.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  It gets worse, or if anything, over time.

• 26:57Jay Novella?

  So the interesting thing here, and I, I appreciate you saying that, Kara. It's a good, it's a good thing to think about. Humans have the same medial septum structure in their brains, so in our brains. So we don't know yet whether it's going to react the same way to food smells. But some human studies that have been done have shown that certain odors can curb appetite. And it's not all the time. It, you know, they're saying that this is sometimes. So there's also evidence. That people with obesity are more likely to eat in response to smells than people who are lean. So in other words, something might be broken in the same place, right? The lead researcher Sophie Steklerum, she said very plainly, olfaction plays a role in appetite regulations.

• 27:37Jay Novella?

  And obesity, we found that smell triggered appetite reduction appears only in lean mice, not in obese ones. So that last part, I guess, is pretty much key there. The system works, but only in under certain conditions. So this is, this research is valuable because it basically opens a door, right? Right now, most obesity treatments focus on hormones, appetite suppressing drugs, or they have metabolic interventions. But this new study could suggest that there might be another route, literally, that it could come through the olfactory bulb. And if we can figure out how to activate it or repair that circuit in people who've lost the signal, we might have a new tool here for reducing overeating, which I-

• 28:19Bob Novella?

  The olfactory.

• 28:21Jay Novella?

  It's pretty interesting because like I could tell you, that's why I asked you guys beforehand before we got into it. Like, I don't think there's, other than of course smelling things that you're supposed to be repulsed by, there isn't any like smell, less hungry thing going on that I've ever observed in general. Like, it just doesn't work that way. Like smells typically, you know, make you want the food.

• 28:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but that's, yeah, but again, it depends on if you like the food. Like, I really struggle with smells because I'm very like sensitive to them. So if you open a refrigerator and I smell the food, like cold food in a refrigerator, it's pretty repulsive to me and it makes me not hungry.

• 29:01Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 29:02Cara Santa Maria?

  So I think that happens a lot. But I, what I like about this study is that it does contribute to a growing body of literature that shows the thing that I think a lot of people who have done research in this area for years have always known. And I think psychologists see this, and Steve, I'm sure that you have a view on this too, that culturally, we have blamed and shamed people with severe obesity as a problem with their willpower for so long. And we have done such a disservice by not stopping and thinking about the fact that there have to be biological correlates here. There have to be things going on in the brain, there have to be things going on metabolically.

• 29:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Nobody wants to find themselves in that position.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 29:51Cara Santa Maria?

  There's so, and it's probably a confluence of factors. It's so, so many things, but it is not an easy way to live and it's a really painful way to live. And there's a lot of shame in our culture around it. And the truth of the matter, I, I just remember seeing this like brilliant interview once with somebody who was talking about Ozempic. I mean, speaking of the joke earlier, and they were saying, you know, what do you say to people who say you took the easy way out by taking Ozempic? And, and their response was, I would say that those people are naturally thin. You know what I mean? Like, it's very easy to cast those kinds of aspersions.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  You were dealt the easy way out.

• 30:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly. I, I might need a little bit of help, you know, because I didn't have the same genetics as you or, or maybe my downstream from my olfactory bulb. I didn't have a satiety signal kick in.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I've had that conversation with, with thin people who have never died at a day in their life. Have never had to think about regulating their caloric intake. They are just naturally thin and they don't understand that that's just different, that that, that not everyone is that way.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're the freaks.

• 30:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and I think I had a real awakening because I was that person.

• 31:00Cara Santa Maria?

  I was that person all the way until I hit that time in my life.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  It changes as you get older.

• 31:04Cara Santa Maria?

  When people do, yeah, when your metabolism changes and I go, oh, I learned no healthy skills.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:09Cara Santa Maria?

  I didn't need them when I was younger.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely environmental reasons as well, cultural environmental.

• 31:14Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure, but I was just going to say it's one of the reasons that people who get bariatric surgery almost always need a psych consult and almost always have mental health support on their teams.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Jay. Bob, tell us about using black holes as a super collider.

• 31:30Bob Novella?

  This was, this was a fun, uh, fun topic to research. So a new study shows that black holes might be able to offer new scientific insights similar to the proposed successor to the Large Hadron Collider. Have you guys heard about this, the Future Circular Collider, FCC? The study also offers an example of how particle physics research can deal with the depressing lack of new particle physics discoveries using increasingly expensive super colliders, which I'm going to. Talk about as well. The study was recently published in Physical Review Letters, and the name of this study is Black Hole Supercolliders. To me, this was fascinating, of course, and good news, because I think there's a good chance that that mega supercollider

• 32:11Bob Novella?

  successors to the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, will not be approved. I'm specifically referring to Searns proposed successor to the LHC. It was in the news a while back, the FCC, or Future Circular Collider, which is up for approval in 2028. This collider has a circumference, or could, would have a circumference of about 100 kilometers, where LHC is only 27 kilometers. So this is a big boy. It'll have collision energies at 100 ter electron volts, TEV, which is about eight times greater than the LHC, so they're amazingly powerful. And the expected price tag is 15 billion Swiss francs,

• 32:52Bob Novella?

  which is about 18.3 billion USD. So ridiculously expensive. But it does sound incredible, but you know, honestly, it's tough to be confident that we're going to get much new science from it. And so why is that? Well, I would say, look at the LHC. Look at the Large Hadron Collider over, since like 2012, essentially. The LHC had really high hopes. If you were following it back then, there was so many high hopes for it when it was being built, you know, and the reasoning, it made sense why that would be the case. The collision energies that were involved were unprecedented at the time, a whopping 7 trillion electron volts in the early days, much more than than, you know, the Tevatron,

• 33:36Bob Novella?

  which was, which used to have the record. And the theories at the time also seemed to support this idea that these big discoveries were possible in that energy regime of, you know, say, 7 trillion electron volts. Now, these high hopes we had included confirming, I'm sure you remember, the theorized Higgs particle slash field, remember that? No. The Higgs field and parts mass to fundamental, fundamental, whoa, fundamental, that's right there. That's a good one. Fundamental. The Higgs field imparts mass to fundamental particles via the Higgs boson, right? So we all remember that. But beyond the Higgs, though, there were also lots of expectations for other things like

• 34:18Bob Novella?

  supersymmetric particles predicted by supersymmetry, dark matter candidates like WIMPs, weakly interacting massive particles. There also were expectations of at least hints of extra spatial dimensions and more and more. That's just a partial list. Now, back in 2012, I'm sure we all remember, right? The LHC confirmed Higgs and it was momentous, absolutely. I remember reporting about it at TAM in 2012. The discovery even earned a Nobel Prize within what? A few years, a couple of years? The next day? I don't remember, but it was fast. But on the other hand, have you heard me report about any of those other discoveries? No, nope, nothing from the LHC about those.

• 35:02Bob Novella?

  So, and sure, you know, these are negative results and these negative results can help narrow down theories, so they do have some utility for sure. But they also frustratingly pointed to what physicists call the nightmare scenario. So now the nightmare scenario is a scenario where increasingly powerful and expensive supercolliders continue only to confirm and refine our current understanding of the standard model of physics, of particle physics, without revealing fundamentally new physics at all, like dark matter or new forces. So that's the nightmare scenario. And it's kind of scary where it's like, yeah, yeah, we knew this and we got a couple more new decimal points of precision here, but where's the new stuff? You know, throw us a bone, universe, come on.

• 35:46Bob Novella?

  It's just, that's the fear, which I've kind of mentioned briefly on the show from time to time. Now, some theoretical models suggest that new physics could require energies far beyond what even the future circular collider could reach at 100 trillion electron volts, which of course is much, you know, much more than the LHC's, you know, meager 14 TeV. So that's scary to think that some of these models were even suggesting that, yeah, we're not going to, you know, we may need to go well beyond 100. To even get anything new. So what do we do now? Right? Besides cry a little, of course. One approach, one approach which I think will gain increasing momentum trying to deal with this,

• 36:28Bob Novella?

  this, this, uh, this gap of energy is, is more of an emphasis on what they're saying, just simply describing as precision physics. So that means that you're looking less for new particles and more, more of a focus on ultra-precise measurements of, of many things like Higgs, other force parameters, like electroweak or rare processes, all of which could potentially show these subtle deviations that reveal new physics. Um, and sure, it's not as sexy as like, "Look, I found a new particle." Um, it's more of like, "Look, we've, we've refined this calculation or this estimate to 10 decimal places, but look, it might, it may reveal something new." So it's not as inherently interesting, but that's what we may need to focus more on.

• 37:13Bob Novella?

  So like I said, precision physics might not find new particles directly, but it can still help us figure out where to look next, and that could be incredibly valuable. Another approach to deal with this is having a greater emphasis on, on complementing the current supercollider experiments. And with, for that, you could use things more like gravitational wave astronomy, which we've talked about, super fascinating, helping with multi-messenger astronomy. Uh, just, you know, I love gravitational wave astronomy, but also neutrino physics, uh, precision tabletop experiments. And another option here is cosmological observations. And this last example finally brings me to the meat of this new study. So cosmological observations of black holes as supercolliders.

• 37:57Bob Novella?

  The idea here is that particles orbiting a rapidly spinning black hole can plunge towards the, the black hole's horizon very fast if they're, they're orbiting in the opposite direction to spin. You got that? So this, these retrograde orbits are not typical though, but they, they do exist. When those particles collide with particles from different orbits, the collision energies can be just off the hook. I mean, on the scale of tens or even hundreds of teroelectron volts, similar, uh, and even greatly exceeding that that that proposed future circular collider. So that's a tremendous amount of energy, which is not a surprise because we're talking about black holes here. So therefore, we can potentially get some relatively cheap insights into particle physics

• 38:40Bob Novella?

  at these extreme energy regimes that don't exist on Earth yet.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  All right.

• 38:45Bob Novella?

  So the potential of studying particles ejected from black holes in this way is threefold as I see it. It could give us collision data that's roughly comparable to the Large Hadron Collider, maybe more powerful, and guide our theoretical development and current collider experiments. So it could be very valuable in that way. But this could also give us the confidence we need that the future circular collider would indeed or could indeed expose new physics beyond the standard model. So that would be amazingly valuable because if you're going to spend $18 billion on something, you want your confidence levels to be high enough, and I don't think they're high enough right now to warrant it.

• 39:26Bob Novella?

  So this black hole data could give us that confidence that we don't have now. And finally, kind of a best-case scenario here, it could give us insights into energy regimes of many hundreds of tera-electron volts, which we probably couldn't otherwise observe for 100 years or more, assuming technology development stays at its current level of progress. So that's a story here, that using these black holes as supercolliders could give us is an example of one of the many different ways we are going to probably start doing research for particle physics because these supercolliders are just getting too expensive

• 40:08Bob Novella?

  and there's just not a lot of hope these days that we're anywhere near the energy regimes that we might need in order to get some results from them.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  So Bob, how do they propose measuring those collisions at the event horizon?

• 40:21Bob Novella?

  Well, I mean, we have some high-energy detectors even now that observe black holes. So we may be able to detect some of these particles that are emitted from the ejected from black holes. We can maybe detect some of them now. So we need to make a concerted effort to look for these high-energy neutrinos, for example, or protons that are cosmic rays.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Bob.

• 40:48Bob Novella?

  Thanks for the question.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  Evan, tell us about this mysterious Antarctica radio pulse.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  I would like to introduce you.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  To Anita. Say hi to Anita.

• 40:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Hello.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  Hi. If Anita could say hello back, Anita would, but Anita can't. That's because Anita is, or I should say was, a scientific instrument, not programmed for etiquette or protocol, Jay. But, thanks, Bob. But rather Anita detects neutrinos. Did she speak Bajie? Yeah.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  It's like a second language. Anita detects neutrinos. Lovely, lovely, ultra-high-energy neutrinos. And it does so by capturing radio pulses generated as the neutrinos interact with the Arctic, I'm sorry, with the Antarctic ice surface. Anita is an acronym, right, Bob? Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna. That would be an acronym. Yes. The Anita Project had four separate missions. The first one began in 2006, and the last one, its fourth mission, wrapped up in 2018. Anita consisted of dozens of radio antennas mounted on a 20-foot, on a 25-foot gondola,

• 42:03Speaker 03

  pointing downward to monitor radio waves in the ice that arise from neutrino interactions. And all of that data was recorded to be studied, and studied, and studied some more. Okay, so now you know what Anita was and what Anita did. But the question this week, this news item, why is Anita in the headlines this week, a full seven years after its last mission? Well, here's one of the headlines. This one's from Penn State University. Strange radio pulses detected coming from ice in Antarctica. Over at Science Alert, they have strange radio signals detected emanating from deep under Antarctic ice.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  And IFL Science says anomalous radio pulses detected in Antarctica are coming from underneath the ice. And of course, there's a ton of other articles about this. If anyone else, I don't, did anyone else read about this or see any headlines about this? And if they did, did your mind immediately jump to John Carpenter's thing?

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  Yes, right? I was gonna say, I could not have been the only one.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  The thing left his radio on in his spaceship under the ice.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  In his ship buried under the ice. Seriously, I mean, I don't think they wrote these headlines. Dig me up. Right? Dig me up. I don't know that they wrote the headlines with that intention, but that's actually what, what happened in my brain. It's like, so I'm reading, it's like, oh my gosh, what, malevolent creature's been detected emitting radio waves while it takes over people's bodies in Antarctica? So cool. But no, Anita, back to Anita. So it's reported that Anita's data detected radio pulses emerging from beneath the ice at unusually steep angles. They say around 30 degrees below horizontal. That is considered highly unusual. All right, well, what's newsworthy about that? Well, let's go back to that first Anita mission back in 2006, almost 20 years ago, almost as long as we've been making this podcast.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  As I said before, Anita was designed to detect neutrinos not directly, but through their interaction with the Antarctic ice. The signal being detected is a radio wave, in this case, a super short burst. And Bob, I saw it referred to as a nanocherp. Never heard nanocherp before. So it's detecting these nanocherp signals being caused by the interaction of neutrino in the ice. Okay. And Bob, I also read this, I had to pull this one sentence out because you'll love this. Okay. A quintillion electron volt neutrino slams an atom, triggers a particle avalanche, and that cascade emits an Ascarian radio pulse. Ascarian? Yeah. Wait, what's that? I'm not even... So this phenomenon was discovered, I think, back in the 1960s.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  It's called the Ascarian Effect, the A-S-K-A-R-Y-A-N effect. I guess when the neutrinos interact with the ice and emit that radio signal. Okay. So that's basically, that's what it's referring to. So this detection has been around for a long time. So 2006, Anita One mission.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  It was just a short pulse among the data. It collected a lot of data, but there was this short pulse and it detected some of the nano chirps at such an angle that according to the, you know, the angle, it must have come from the direction of the earth.

• 45:19Bob Novella?

  And like deep, right?

• 45:20Speaker 03

  Yes, from the earth.

• 45:22Bob Novella?

  Well, under the ground.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  Yes. All right. Well, okay. So what? The neutrino traveled through 7,000 kilometers of planet before it interacted with the ice from below? That would be unusual. All right, maybe it was a glitch, maybe something weird with the data. Uh, no big deal, right? So you have the Anita three mission in 2014 and the same detection occurred in which there was a bit of data that said basically the same thing. Oh, and it happened two more times in 2016 and 2018 with the last Anita four mission. All right. And according to the professionals, that ain't supposed to happen with these neutrinos, right? I mean, a neutrino, what? Might be able to go through a few kilometers of planet, but not thousands, right? It's not

• 46:05Speaker 03

  like it went through, it was, it was, because they, they generate from space, from large events that occur in space and travel and travel and travel until they interact with something. And you can get through and it will penetrate things, but not thousands of kilometers of planet. They're saying no way.

• 46:20Bob Novella?

  Wait, are you sure? Are you sure about that? Are you sure?

• 46:23Speaker 03

  This corresponds to about eight to 10 interaction lengths at the required neutrino energy EV to point to, uh, causing severe attenuation and requiring a something flux that should have been observed with other instruments.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Evan, they are referring there to the radio signals that result from the neutrino interaction, not the neutrinos themselves. Neutrinos could penetrate light years of lead. They don't have a problem going all the way through the earth. But once they interact, then the subsequent particles, the radio waves and the other particles that they're detecting, those have a decay length, those have a limit on how far they can go.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  Okay. So Anita detects these, detects these nano chirps, right? And says, all right, neutrinos are, are, are causing these, but there are other detectors at the same time that are in work. One's called Ice Cube and the other is called the Pierre Auger or Auger Observatory.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  Which look directly for sources of neutrinos. And their data, when it lined up, you know, then this was what the new study is about. They analyzed 15 years of cosmic data collected by that observatory in Argentina to try to make sense of the signals. And guess what? The observatory's data found that at the same time Anita was detecting these radio signals supposedly generated by the neutrinos, these other instruments found nothing. They detected no neutrino activity. Okay, so.

• 47:42Bob Novella?

  So that that sounds like the best argument right there. They they they basically are saying, no, you really shouldn't think that this is neutrinos because we're probably ruling that out.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  Correct. Right, right. So this research was done by a team of international scientists, including those from Penn State University researchers, and they recently published their results in the journal Physics Review Letters. Stephanie Whistle, who's an associate professor of physics and astronomy and astrophysics, who worked on the Anita team, said this. "The radio waves that we detected nearly a decade ago were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice. It's an interesting problem because we still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are. But what we do know is that they're most likely not representing neutrinos." Okay, whoa, so not neutrinos? So it's what, some other, what, particle? That's known known to the standard model of physics, right? There must be.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  Well, apparently, they can't make that. They can't make that conclusion either. They don't know what these are.

• 48:41Bob Novella?

  It's a mystery.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a mystery. And Whistle says, "My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effects occur near ice and also near the horizon that we don't fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven't been able to find any of those either." So right now, it's one of those longstanding mysteries, and I'm excited when we when we fly PUEO, P U E O, which is the payload for ultra-high-energy observations, we'll have better sensitivity. So that's a new project, a new one, three times, I think, the the power of the sensitivity that Anita had. And she says, "In principle, we should pick up more anomalies, and maybe we'll actually understand what they are." And I read somewhere that they said, "Okay, so if if this new device, if this new detector or array of detectors..."

• 49:27Speaker 03

  Picks up the same chirps, then they say, "The case for new physics hardens overnight, and textbooks get a new chapter." Now, that might be a little, what, exciting? An exciting way of saying that, maybe? I don't know, rewriting, you know, that's, that's a big thing to say. However, it is interesting nonetheless.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Evan, let me ask you a question.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  So, how's this motherfucker wake up after thousands of years in the ice?

• 49:52Speaker 04

  What? Where did that come from?

• 49:58Speaker 02

  That's a quote from the thing.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  That is directly from the movie.

• 50:03Bob Novella?

  Which one? Which one from, the one from, uh?

• 50:06Speaker 02

  What do you mean? The thing.

• 50:08Speaker 03

  The thing. Not the original, John Carpenter's, John Carpenter.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  Do you believe this voodoo bullshit, Jay? All right. I don't know what it is, but it's weird and pissed off.

• 50:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. That's the quote right there.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Evan.

• 50:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 50:23Speaker 02

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

• 50:27Cara Santa Maria?

  You guys, I'm actually wearing Quince right now. I'm wearing a really beautiful gray Mongolian cashmere hoodie, and it was totally affordable when compared to, you know, the other cashmere hoodies that were on the market. And I think the way that they do that is they work directly with the artisans and they cut out the middleman. So, you end up with these luxury pieces, but they don't have the typical markup that you run into, into high-end stores.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  I got these Comfort Stretch Traveler, these are five-pocket pants, super comfortable. I was, I'm really psyched because I can buy like multiple pairs at the same time, they have different colors, and I've been wearing them for the last few weeks, and I really, really like these pants, very comfortable, and on top of that, I, you know, I gotta admit, I look pretty damn good in these pants, Bob.

• 51:15Speaker 03

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• 51:35Speaker 02

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. All right, Justin, let me ask you a question. Where do you live?

• 51:42Speaker 04

  I live in Chicago, Illinois.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  Chicago. You ever been to Florida?

• 51:45Speaker 04

  I had been to Florida, actually.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  What is, what industry is Florida known for?

• 51:50Speaker 04

  Besides meth?

• 51:54Speaker 02

  Well, narrow your choices. Agricultural industry, would you say it's no form?

• 51:58Speaker 03

  Citrus.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Citrus. Yeah, it is the, it is the citrus state, right? Especially when we were younger, like Florida was before, like Disney was as huge as it is. Florida was about oranges.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  Oh, it was all orange. Yep.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  It was associated with that?

• 52:13Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Since 2004, are you aware of the fact that the Florida citrus industry has been reduced by 90%?

• 52:22Bob Novella?

  What?

• 52:23Speaker 02

  How can that be? Where are they coming from now?

• 52:24Speaker 03

  Why? Why would they do that to themselves?

• 52:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Citrus greening, right?

• 52:27Speaker 02

  It's citrus greening. Yeah.

• 52:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's a big deal. Kevin Foltz talks about it all the time. You guys have not been listening.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  Oh, he doesn't shut up about it.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  It's huge. Production costs have doubled and it's basically wiped out 90% of the Florida citrus industry. They had to, they can't maintain their orchards, you know, with, with the prices.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  The price.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  So.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  Tell me more.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Citrus greening is a, is an infection. It's caused by a bacterium Candidatus Liberibacter Asiaticus, uh, which does come from Asia. It's, it's spread by the Asian citrus silid, which is an invasive fly, an introduced invasive fly.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Oh, boy. Introduced.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, uh, by accident, right? It's an invasive species. Yeah. You know, it's a fly, you know, things move around. So we have, you know, this is the, one of the massive downsides of a global economy, especially of agriculture, is that pests, you know, get transported along with produce. This caused, it's called citrus greening because that's what happens to the, the fruit that gets infected. So the last 20 years, there've been multiple methods tried to keep it under control. They have all completely failed. But there is some good news, everyone.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Good news.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  What do you think is, is potentially coming to the rescue?

• 53:49Speaker 03

  Oh, it's gotta be GMO.

• 53:51Bob Novella?

  Climate change.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  Climate change?

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Nope, GMOs.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  No, to the res- Bob, to the rescue, to rescue.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  The University of Florida, in collaboration with a company called SoilSEA.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  Has developed a GMO orange that is highly resistant to citrus greening.

• 54:09Bob Novella?

  Awesome.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  They expect to have commercial trees available in spring 2027. The development takes a time because they, in order to know if their GMO cultivars work, right, you have to wait for the tree to mature enough to produce fruit, which is like 10 years. You know, so you have to make sure that the tree remains resistant and is able to produce fruit and the fruit is fine, you know, so it's not like you can grow the crop in three months and test it and go from there. You can't iterate it that quickly. So that's the main limiting factor. This is all based upon the work of, well, it's multiple people, but primarily one, Dr. Nian Wang, who's a professor at the University of Florida.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  He found out that the bacterium is dependent upon interacting with the host and certain specific genes. And then they developed CRISPR, of course, CRISPR, to silence those genes so that the bacterium cannot infect the plants.

• 55:14Bob Novella?

  Wow. Well, what are the side effects of silencing those genes?

• 55:17Speaker 02

  That's the question, right? So, so far, there doesn't appear to be any negative effects, but they have to make sure that, again, the fruit is fine and that there was, because, you know, not every gene is critical to life, you know what I mean? It's not like you silence any of your 20,000 genes and you die, you know? It's, some genes are just, you know, they have a, provide some kind of relative advantage, but not a critical advantage, or they may be interacting with other genes, or they may affect the plant but not the fruit, you know what I mean?

• 55:50Bob Novella?

  It's like they're knockouts.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, they were silenced, yeah, so that's like a way of knocking out a gene. So far, it appears to be working extremely well. The plants that are treated have been, you know, growing robustly and show, seem to show complete resistance to the bacteria. So it looks good. But again, we won't know until we know. It'll take a couple more years to make sure, you know, for the test plants to fully mature.

• 56:20Bob Novella?

  How diverse are these test plants? Does it have a risk of like a monoculture?

• 56:24Speaker 02

  Well, no, it is a monoculture, right? It's a GMO.

• 56:29Bob Novella?

  Right, so that's, it has its own risks, right?

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean...

• 56:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but that's basically how we farm now.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, but what they'll need, what they could do is make multiple different cultivars with these genes, you know, silenced so that you do have some more diversity.

• 56:43Bob Novella?

  Well, yeah, that sounds pretty damn reasonable to me.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Also, good news.

• 56:47Speaker 03

  Good news.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  The USDA has determined that these genetically altered cultivars do not qualify as subject to regulation under federal rules. So this is, this is a little bit of a complicated backstory. So in 2020, the USDA decided to exempt certain kinds of genetic engineering from requiring USDA approval. For example, just silencing a gene. They said, "That's not a GMO. We don't need to, we don't need to approve it." However, a court struck down that ruling, saying that the USDA still has to approve the cultivars. So what their current decision was, is kind of skirting that ruling, saying that, "Well,

• 57:28Speaker 02

  these don't fall under the USDA's regulatory sphere." So rather than saying this is sort of exempt to our approval, they're saying it's not out, it's outside the USDA's sphere.

• 57:42Bob Novella?

  Does that, does that mean that somebody got a bribe from the citrus industry?

• 57:46Speaker 02

  No.

• 57:47Bob Novella?

  Just throwing that out there.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  Someone got juiced.

• 57:54Speaker 02

  So GMOs have to be approved by several agencies, by the USDA, under agricultural regulation, by the FDA, if it's a food, right, and by the EPA, to make sure it's environmentally safe. So, there's really no environmental issue here. We're not talking about pesticides or anything. The FDA has to say, "Yeah, these oranges are basically equivalent to non-GMO oranges, so there's no issue there." And the USDA says agriculturally, "These are substantially similar." But they said that because of that, they're essentially... Because the EPA has to say there's no environmental risk, the FDA has to say they're safe as food, and

• 58:39Speaker 02

  the USDA basically said they're outside of our jurisdiction. So, it's not guaranteed, but it's looking good for getting approval from all of the agencies. So we could be seeing by as early as 2027, orchards planting these plants, and replacing the ones that they have.

• 58:59Bob Novella?

  But for the most part, though, it's going to be a waiting game now for many years.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  Couple more years.

• 59:04Bob Novella?

  No, no, before they're mature enough to produce citrus.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, but it's going to take time before the industry rebounds, yeah.

• 59:13Jay Novella?

  So why haven't we seen a dramatic increase in pricing?

• 59:16Speaker 02

  I don't know that we haven't seen increases in pricing. There has been, but I think just California, other parts of the world are just taking up the slack.

• 59:26Bob Novella?

  So they're not happy right now, then?

• 59:28Speaker 02

  Well...

• 59:29Bob Novella?

  Right?

• 59:30Speaker 02

  You know...

• 59:31Bob Novella?

  Damn, Florida's coming back!

• 59:33Speaker 02

  But citrus greening was coming for them eventually, as well.

• 59:37Bob Novella?

  Ah, good point.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  So this is very similar to what happened to the papaya in Hawaii. The papaya industry was almost completely wiped out because of a virus. And they were able to make a GMO papaya, again, by silencing an existing gene. They didn't introduce any transgene or any new, external, or novel genetic material.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  And Hawaii, which is culturally very anti-GMO, quietly said, "Okay, we're going to say this is okay. We're going to carve out an exception for the GMO papaya, because otherwise the papaya industry was going bye-bye."

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  Zero, right.

• 1:00:19Jay Novella?

  So basically, money can solve all of these problems.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, the same exact story is playing out in Florida. Like, there's no way Florida's gonna turn away something which is gonna save the Florida citrus industry. The same thing happened with the American chestnut. It was almost wiped out by an Asian fungus, and a GMO variety that's resistant to the fungus was created. However, this is not quite a clean success story, because as the trees, as those chestnuts, the GMO chestnut trees are aging, there's questions about how sustainable their performances in the field. So, they, you know, may need to go back and do more genetic tweaking. They're more, they're resistant, but they're, but maybe they're not resistant enough to this fungus.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  And, this is also playing out with, as we've said many times on this show, the banana industry, right? Tropical race four fungus is in the process of wiping out the Cavendish banana industry. But, there already is a GMO variety of banana that is resistant to tropical race four that was approved for human consumption in Australia and New Zealand. You know, because the banana industry is so global, you know, it would need to get approval in many other, you know, nations as well. But, hopefully, that will happen in a timely enough fashion that we could just basically swap out the resistant GMO banana for the, for the existing ones.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  Otherwise, in five, 10 years, we may have no banana industry. So, I mean, I think the good news is, you know, tracking this, I've been tracking this for the last 10, 15 years, you know, the whole GMO thing, is I think the public is not paying as much attention to this issue as they, like 10 years ago, like, there was so much anti-GMO stuff going on. Now, it's like, people are just quietly accepting it, and, you know, I think that these instances of GMO varieties saving entire industries, nobody could really meaningfully push back against that. Yeah.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  And the downside is so massive, no regulators is gonna, like, is going to shut down the solution to, like, again, entire agricultural industries being wiped out. And I think going forward, this problem's gonna just get greater, you know? We are going to need GMO varieties to maintain our agriculture in the face of increasing threat from these kinds of global infections, you know? There's just no other way we're gonna, we're gonna be able to keep up, unless you want mass starvation. Right.

• 1:03:06Bob Novella?

  Of course not. Eventually, we'll need to be making them more heat tolerant, I assume.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  Yes, they're, they're working on that as well. There was, actually, by coincidence, I just saw a study today, where they found that global warming is, despite attempts at mitigation, is decreasing global agricultural yields. So, you know, our farmlands will be producing fewer, you know, crops because of climate change. One way to mitigate that is to GMO crops that are adapted to not only drier climates, but also warmer climates, and also increased CO2. So, you know, to take advantage of the increased CO2, just kind of offset the disadvantage of...

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  Warmer, drier climate. So that's going to be critical as well. Right? Because even if we take like, oh, 5, 10% hit to productivity, that's huge.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  That's a lot of extra land that you therefore then need, you know, to cultivate in order to produce the same amount of food. We're basically, well, there's no out of land, really. It's just a matter of, of how good the land is. Like, we're using all of the best agricultural land right now. And so, and expanding into new land gets increasingly problematic. Either it's just not as productive, or we have to cut down forests, or we have to displace people. Like, there's no easy land left.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot of trade offs that go in and in hand with that. Steve, you mentioned chestnuts?

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  I'm a chestnut. I love, I love the game. I play it all the time.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  Is that right?

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  All right, that's your, that's your one dad joke for the, for the week.

• 1:04:55Cara Santa Maria?

  He's already done like three.

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  No, that's Kara. First of all, stop that.

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  Steve doesn't need you to count for him. And Justin, thank you for, I think, laughing.

• 1:05:07Speaker 04

  It's, it's what I do.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  All right, Justin, you're going to talk to us. You're going to, you're going to address a very interesting question. Does AI actually think?

• 1:05:18Speaker 04

  Indeed. So, um.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  It does? No.

• 1:05:23Speaker 04

  That's the end. I found my article. So, imagine you're watching a child solve a puzzle, right? So at first, they might struggle a little bit, and they try to force pieces where they don't belong. Then you kind of watch them get that moment of insight, and you start to see them building a strategy. And finally, they, they make a plan and they solve the puzzle, right? And we assume, I think rightly so, that, that, that's involving thinking. But, you know, prior to us having like FMRI and things like that, we always had to do these things just kind of inferring from what we're seeing that thinking is happening. We don't have any tools like FMRI for these large language models. In fact, the people who build them really don't know what's happening under the hood most of the time. Now imagine you have an advanced AI, right, a large language model.

• 1:06:08Speaker 04

  You ask it a complex question. It doesn't just give you an answer these days, right? It, it writes out that internal monologue for you. It's called chain of thought. And it's explaining its reasoning step by step, right? It looks like thinking and it feels like thinking. But some researchers at Apple kind of started to ask a question and they wanted to know, what if it's just a clever trick, right? Is it just something performative in the model that imitates thinking? And their approach is really to look and trying to ask what happens when the puzzles get really hard, if they can figure out what's happening inside these these models. And so they just released a paper and, you know, spoiler alert from the title. The title of the paper is "The Illusion of Thinking." And it's causing pretty big stir in the AI community because they suggest that the advanced

• 1:06:53Speaker 04

  reasoning we see in these top AI models might be might be just that, an illusion. And we might be overselling what's really happening in these models. So for years, these researchers have tried to measure intelligence of these AI models by throwing complex math and coding problems at them and they they've gotten, you know, generally pretty good. But the researchers at Apple argue this is like judging a student's deep understanding of physics based on an open book test for which they've already seen all the answers, right? That the data sets that they're using in these models are contaminated, as they said, that the models have within them similar problems they've already seen, or even the

• 1:07:36Speaker 04

  exact solutions built into the training data. So to get a sense of, you know, the real reasoning power, the team at Apple decided they wanted to do something different and they basically set a few large language models down in a quiet room with a set of classic controllable puzzles like Tower of Hanoi or the river crossing problem, right? And so these are problems that are really good for testing pure logic because you can make them incrementally harder, pretty simply, like the Tower of Hanoi, right? Is the three rods and you have the cone of wooden discs and you have to move the discs in a way that there is never a larger radius disc on top of a smaller radius disc and

• 1:08:21Speaker 04

  eventually by moving in different ways, you shift the entire stack of discs from one of the three poles to another. And that gets like geometrically harder every time you add another disc, right? So they did that and they did the

• 1:08:42Speaker 04

  Crossing the river, right? Where so you have a a fox, a chicken and some grain and you have to figure out how to only get one of them across so that you know you can't leave the chicken with the grain because the the chicken will eat the grain. You can't leave the fox with the chicken and take the grain because the fox will eat the chicken that those are the the problems and they would uh make that problem increasingly hard with just more variables thrown in. Anyway, so they what they did is they pitted two types of models against these these puzzles. So your kind of standard large language models, which I'll call them pre reasoning models, which if you remember when chat GPT came out like chat GPT three, you never saw any kind of reasoning or or chain of thought. You just put in a prompt and it would spit out an answer.

• 1:09:28Speaker 04

  And then they also put these puzzles in front of large reasoning models and those are like OpenAI's O three mini or Claude three seven sonnet. And those are the models that are designed to like to think out loud. What they found is pretty fascinating and they really they address these challenges in in three types of problems. In a low complexity problem, a simple puzzle, right? So Tower of Hanoi, you have three disks and something very basic, you know, that very easy to solve. Surprisingly, they found that the non reasoning models were actually faster and more accurate at these low complexity models. The reasoning models tended to overthink, meaning they would find a correct answer early, but then

• 1:10:14Speaker 04

  they would start to waste time and kind of ruminate and explore incorrect paths. So they were very inefficient.

• 1:10:20Bob Novella?

  But ultimately correct, though, would they stick with their initial correct answer after ruminating?

• 1:10:26Speaker 04

  Correct. They would get them right, but they would they would do it. It would take more energy to get them done, which is a huge issue, right? With these models is is is energy usage. So for the second stage of the the kind of research, they they again, what they're they put a medium complexity of models in front of these. And so that's adding a few more disks or adding a few more entities into the river crossing problem. Here, the reasoning models started to shine, right? So the ability to generate that chain of thought and plan and self-correct gave them a pretty clear advantage. Their performance, I think you can argue, probably proves that the thinking process

• 1:11:06Speaker 04

  isn't purely an illusion and that capability helped them better solve moderately difficult problems. So the low, sorry, the non-reasoning models sometimes would totally fail at this medium complexity. And then they threw high-complexity problems at these, which is where potentially this thinking illusion breaks down. And that's because these puzzles, when they became a bit too hard, say stacking 10 disks on the Tower of Anno instead of eight. And that's something that I believe requires like 1,032 moves to do correctly. The large thinking models would just collapse. They wouldn't even try.

• 1:11:51Speaker 04

  And what was really interesting about this is they started to map, as I mentioned before, energy usage. And you would expect that as you ratchet up the complexity of these problems, that the energy usage trying to solve them would go up. And it would go up for the medium complexity, but it would literally drop to nothing when the complexity of the problem was so high that the model basically somehow, and I use this word, kind of figuratively, decided it couldn't solve the problem. What was interesting is they weren't out of tokens, right? So every one of these models, they have a context window, which is the number of tokens

• 1:12:32Speaker 04

  that can be used for input and how many of these tokens you could process and what the output length can be. And so it was never a problem that there was a token budget that was exceeded. They just literally gave up. An interesting kind of metaphor that I heard from a YouTuber Wes Roth, who does a really great kind of analysis of a lot of this research. He likened it to if I was in a room and I asked all of you guys, right, to can you tell me what two plus two is? Everyone doesn't take very much energy. Everyone gets the answer. And then I could say, OK, can you multiply seven times 12? Right, it takes a little more energy, but you do it.

• 1:13:13Speaker 04

  And then if I then next asked you to list all prime numbers between zero and 1 billion, you you expend no energy because you're like, that's not something I can do. I'm just going to stop right now. And so that seems to be what's happening in these models. Where got really interesting is they to kind of prove their point. They they gave one of these models at the at the kind of high intensity problem. They gave the model the exact step by step algorithm in the prompt to solve the complex Tower of Denoi. All it had to do was follow the instructions and it still failed. Oof. Which which suggests the problem isn't isn't necessarily about finding a strategy.

• 1:13:57Speaker 04

  There's some deeper limitation in in the ability to execute logical steps consistently. Yeah, that's weird. And so you can imagine, right? So when you see the the paper title, The Illusion of Thinking sparked a pretty big debate. So I'm a pretty heavy user of these tools. I do a lot of very complicated kind of business process simulations with large language models. And I decided I have a pretty heavy bias on what I think. So I actually went and had all of the thinking models review the paper and look for problems. So so what what kind of the consensus when I got out of, you know,

• 1:14:37Speaker 04

  Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT, they brought up some interesting points. First, they said solving these neat logical puzzles really isn't the same as reasoning. You know, that the kind of consensus among the those models was real. The world reasoning is messy. It involves ambiguity, knowledge and context. These puzzles are purely algorithmic. And so failures may be specific to this type of logical sequential planning, not an indictment of all reasoning. I thought that's an interesting take on it. Second, that the the title that they have that it's an illusion may be negated by the fact that the medium complexity zone, the thinking models outperform the standard ones.

• 1:15:23Speaker 04

  So it may be that the more accurate way to describe it isn't that it's an illusion, but it's fragile or brittle. Maybe more accurate than illusion. I'll throw in a different perspective here, too, that there may be more to this question, actually. So there was also some research done pretty recently by Anthropic. And the goal of their research was really to try and figure out if they could figure out what's really happening under the hood behind what you're getting as the kind of narrative of the reasoning. And their their goal is to, it was is based on AI safety, right? They weren't necessarily saying these these models aren't reasoning. They were trying to figure out if there's a way they can use the reasoning to have some window into how they can

• 1:16:08Speaker 04

  create better guardrails for what's happening with these models. What they found, though, in their test were that reasoning models don't always say what they think, which is kind of interesting. And the way what they did was they found that, you know, reading those transcripts of the thinking and reasoning weren't really a reliable safeguard. So their approach was they gave these models multiple choice questions, but with a twist. In some versions, they'd insert some kind of subtle hint, you know, a bit of metadata in the prompt that says basically, you know, the answer is C. And so what they found is when the models used the hint to change their answer,

• 1:16:49Speaker 04

  when they stated their reasoning, the reveal rate for I was given the answer was below 20%. The AI would say like seize the answer and then generate some long, convoluted, completely fabricated chain of thought as to how they got to the answer. They even took it a step further and they started using a concept they were calling reward hacking. Where they were basically rewarding the models for choosing a specific factually wrong answer. And the models quickly learned to pick the wrong answer, get the reward. And then when they would say why, less than 2% of the time, they would say it was to

• 1:17:32Speaker 04

  get the reward. They would start to create an elaborate plausible sounding justification for the incorrect answer.

• 1:17:38Cara Santa Maria?

  I think I remember this. Didn't we? I think I covered this like maybe a month or two ago. It was like, you know, that all the headlines were saying that they were quote, lying.

• 1:17:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:47Cara Santa Maria?

  But really, they were just doing what they do.

• 1:17:51Jay Novella?

  I mean, they just sound like a bunch of persnickety assholes.

• 1:17:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I mean, they just sound like they're gonna do what's most efficient.

• 1:17:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, so I guess I'll ask you guys this question. Do you think there's actually thinking or reasoning?

• 1:18:04Jay Novella?

  No, definitely not.

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  No, the more I learn about this, the less I think that.

• 1:18:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I have to agree with you. I, you know, there, you know, the metaphor I have in my head is there's a, like a Pachinko machine with bent pins all over the place and you're dropping the balls. And, you know, I've used these things enough to know that there is no going back to the well, right? You have to, if you're not getting an answer you want, you can't reason with the machine. You need to like clear everything out and start over. So I, I think they're great processing tools for concepts and language. But as far as I, my experience, I don't see any thinking or reasoning necessarily in these models.

• 1:18:49Speaker 02

  Well, I think, but here's another way to look at it. You could say, yeah, this is the illusion of thinking. But at the same time, how do we know that what people are doing isn't the illusion of reasoning?

• 1:19:03Jay Novella?

  Well, that makes sense with a lot of people I know, Steve.

• 1:19:06Speaker 02

  No, seriously. And the thing, one of the reasons why I said, I just wrote about this on Neurologica not too long ago, is a study looking at how people solve problems, right?

• 1:19:18Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it showed that what people do is they use a combination of strategies. In this case, they were trying to determine what path the ball is taking, a ball is taking through a maze, but they can't see, you know, the path the ball is taking. They only get hints, like they might see, they might hear a noise, or see a flash, or whatever. So they have imperfect data, and they have to infer what path the ball is taking. And so people will use two different strategies, and they will switch back and forth between those two different strategies. One is, you know, just inferring from the information that they have, but then, when they think that strategy is failing, they'll shift to counterfactual reasoning, which is,

• 1:20:04Speaker 02

  well, what other options are they, and how do they fit the data? And so then they had an AI do the same thing. And the AI just was able to do perfect inference as to what the path, the way the ball was doing. But then they started to, you know, futzing with the dials. They imposed upon the AI the same limitations that people have. In other words, for example, imperfect memory.

• 1:20:35Bob Novella?

  Oh, like shutting down data's internal clock?

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so like, we have imperfect memory, so if we're trying to use that to infer what path it's taking, then, you know, we actually, once we think we've sort of exceeded our memory for the previous bits of data, we shift to the other strategy, for example. But the AI doesn't do that, because it has perfect memory. But if you give it the same kind of limitations that people have, it uses the same strategy that people use. You know what I mean? And it wasn't told explicitly, it wasn't programmed explicitly to follow those rules, it just sort of fell into the same pattern of behavior that people follow. Right, given the same constraints. And I think the whole lying research is the same thing.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  You know, what Carol is referring to, lying, it's all a metaphor, right? Is it really lying? Does it have an intent to deceive? Or is it just following its algorithm to maximize the output, which included giving incorrect information about what it was doing? Right? But aren't people doing that? Again, so it's just, like, when you understand the neuroscience, it's like, yeah, but, you know, we're just subconscious algorithms. And then floating on top of that, the end of the, maybe the only real difference is that we have this metacognition where we can experience our own sort of final decision. But even if we didn't even make the decision, we have this powerful illusion that we did,

• 1:22:07Speaker 02

  even though subconscious algorithms really made it for us. Right?

• 1:22:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more, actually. And the reason that I have this kind of mindset that they're not thinking or reasoning, it changes the way I approach my work with the tools. In that, like I said, you know, you need to do a lot more work upfront as a user of these tools to narrow that pinboard so that, you know, the only options available are the useful ones that you want to get out of it. And so it just helps me to think of them as not thinking or reasoning. I think of them as concept calculators, you know, for lack of a better term. And it is just a stats model. And, you know, you mentioned algorithms.

• 1:22:54Speaker 04

  There's really not even a lot of algorithm built in. It's all the relationship between the tokens and the weights and the biases that are put into the model, so.

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  It's all just how tightly your gap junctions are in your neurons and how much neurotransmitter you're releasing. And you could reduction, you know, reduce what the brain's doing the same way. You're talking about weights and whatever, but that, those are neural models. They're based on how the brain functions. It's just a different substrate. What I would say is, I struggle with this as well. What's the proper metaphor? What is the proper way to talk about this? We revert to, whenever we talk about AI, we use the language of thinking, because those are the metaphors that we have at hand. And it's just, the language is sort of built that way. But I think they're probably apt.

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  What I think is probably happening is that these AIs are engaged in a piece of reasoning. But they haven't closed the loop, because they're not designed to, right? They're not equipped to do that. But if we took a bunch of these AIs and had them network together in such a way that the output of one is the input for another in a continuous, self-sustaining loop, that's basically what a human brain is.

• 1:24:21Speaker 04

  I agree with you. These models basically explode after, what, like, 10 rounds of input for a lot of different. It strikes me as, and you'll appreciate this, I think of them like the Star Trek transporter. This is where I am in life. I've known my entire life. Where it creates that snapshot of someone, right? The map of someone. That's all we have in these models, is the snapshot of this one moment in time for a neural network. And it just collapses because it can't update on its own.

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting. Fascinating to see how this evolves. I do think, because it is evolving, and I've had to continuously update my sense of whether or not it's even on a path to sentience or general AI. Because I just think what is needed is different than what we thought.

• 1:25:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  Anyway, it'd be fascinating. 10, 20 years, I mean, it'll be, we'll be in a completely different place, I think.

• 1:25:18Jay Novella?

  I find it really frustrating, though. Like, in all other coding situations, you could just put comments in there. You could say, okay, at this point, if this happens, then write it into the log, right? So then you can read through that and see what pathway it took to do what it did.

• 1:25:38Speaker 04

  Throw in some troubleshooting code.

• 1:25:39Jay Novella?

  But it sounds like these freaking AI models, like, from what you were saying, like, fake that freaking log.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  Diagnostic output.

• 1:25:48Speaker 04

  So, so I will say you can actually create logs and call those logs back. You can do a lot of programming in these large language models. You can set variables. You can have it basically object oriented programming you can do within your prompts. I have prompts that are, I have one that's 160 pages long. That does future casting for, and it's calling up, you know, it's multiple documents and it's calling up the documents as new kind of sub agent prompts during the, during the process. Most people are not using these tools in the, in really to the extent that you can to do a lot of, anything that requires probabilistic outcomes as, as a positive versus deterministic

• 1:26:30Speaker 04

  outcomes, you can really do a lot of interesting things with these models. But if people wanted to do accounting, they're going to, they're going to fail miserably.

• 1:26:39Speaker 02

  All right, well. Yeah, cool. Thank you, Justin. All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:26:44Jay Novella?

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

• 1:26:53Jay Novella?

  Now, before you guys say anything.

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  Okay. Oh, oops.

• 1:26:57Jay Novella?

  Someone wrote in, hi, gang. This week's noisy is a small group of women watching Henry Cavill play a tennis match. Now, listen again.

• 1:27:10Jay Novella?

  The guy cracks me up. I love that. All right. So what do you guys think this is?

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  Is it some kind of bird?

• 1:27:17Jay Novella?

  Um, that's not a bad guess, Steve. Anybody else?

• 1:27:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Sounds like a record being spun around.

• 1:27:22Jay Novella?

  Like a record, like a, like an old turntable record?

• 1:27:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, like something going like vvvv, like against a needle.

• 1:27:28Jay Novella?

  Okay, that's cool. All right, well, let's get into some guesses here. Visto Tutti wrote in, said, this one sounds like small mammals, probably begging food from people. Uh, this sounds so adorable, I'm sure they will get fed. Which mammal, he guesses lemurs. I think that was a, that was a well thought out guess, but you're incorrect, Visto. I will give you more chances, though, don't worry. Kevin Burgen, Bergeron. Bergeron. Hey, Kevin. My son, Henry, was very excited when he heard this. I know it, I know it, he said. It's a ball winding down a spiral in a cylinder that can be flipped upside down for the ball to, to go down the other way like an hourglass. Uh, that is not correct, but I would like to see that thing.

• 1:28:11Jay Novella?

  Another listener named Hunter Richards wrote in, said, "Hi Jay, baby puffins. These aren't small edible potato puffs, though they sound like they should be. They're birds, cute little birds." So we had several winners. So yeah, you know, when we get tons of entries, of course, it comes down to, it's always who enters at first, but there were some tight guesses here, like within, you know, minutes of each other. But the ultimate winner here is Anders Wistrund, and he said it's, he gave me the pronunciation, and I wasn't even close, guys. It's Andesh Wistrund. You know, but my question is, why are things spelled a particular way and not pronounced that particular way?

• 1:28:56Jay Novella?

  Like, can't we just-

• 1:28:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, because his name's in a different language.

• 1:28:58Jay Novella?

  I know, but why can't we change the spelling to make it match what? No? I don't know. Okay, I got-

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  The real question is, why isn't the word phonetic spelled phonetically?

• 1:29:07Jay Novella?

  Correctly. Thank you. Okay.

• 1:29:10Speaker 03

  F U N E T.

• 1:29:13Jay Novella?

  A N D E R S pronounced Andesh.

• 1:29:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because-

• 1:29:18Jay Novella?

  I get it. No, I get it. Because in his language, he can, he reads it as Andesh, but in, you know.

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  Because languages evolve and merge and, you know.

• 1:29:27Jay Novella?

  So he wrote-

• 1:29:28Speaker 02

  Stuff happens.

• 1:29:29Jay Novella?

  "First time, last time, I got one correct." That was for the Kapper Kalle, I don't even remember what this was, but he got one correct. So, you know, I know this week's noisy is a bunch of eiders. These are eiders, they're ducks, Steve.

• 1:29:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:46Jay Novella?

  This particular one is the common eider, also called St. Cuthbert's duck, or Cuddy's duck.

• 1:29:51Speaker 03

  St. Cuthbert?

• 1:29:52Jay Novella?

  It's a large sea duck. It's distributed over the northern coast of Europe, northern America, eastern Siberia, 4.5 pounds. It has a scientific name that you can bet I won't be able to pronounce, and the conservation status, there's not, I guess they're not worried about them. So anyway, listen to this group of ducks, and tell me that they don't sound like a bunch of, you know, English women wooing over something. Ready?

• 1:30:25Jay Novella?

  God, I love that.

• 1:30:26Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know, to me they sound like minions.

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:28Cara Santa Maria?

  They don't sound like women.

• 1:30:30Jay Novella?

  God, I love that. It's so cute. Alright, guys, I have a new noisy this week. This is a noisy that I selected, and I hope you get it.

• 1:30:48Jay Novella?

  That's all I'm gonna give you, because...

• 1:30:50Speaker 03

  It's all I need.

• 1:30:51Jay Novella?

  Think you know what it is? I know, right? There's a line in the sand, Ev, right?

• 1:30:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 1:30:55Jay Novella?

  If you think you know what this noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at [email protected]. There's a few things that are happening here, I'm gonna tell you. First off, we have a show going on in Kansas. Uh, this is on September 20th of this year. We're gonna be doing a, a private SGU show, and we will also be doing the live stage show, the Skeptical Extravaganza of Special Significance. Um, if you haven't seen either of these shows, please do try to make it out to, to spend some time with us, and I promise you, we will thoroughly entertain you regardless of which of these shows you, you go to, or if you go to both. Um, you can get tickets at theskepticsguide.org. There'll be a button on the homepage that will take you there to give you all the information that you need.

• 1:31:39Jay Novella?

  You can quickly, you can join our mailing list. Uh, we send out an email every week where we, we tell you everything that we did the previous week. There's lots of fun stuff going on in that email. You can go to theskepticsguide.org and find, uh, a button there to join that. You could also become a patron of the SGU. Uh, if you're interested in helping support the work that we do, you can go to patreon.com/skepticsguide. And this is a really good time to help us because we're starting more projects and gonna be, you know, putting in a lot more man-hours as, uh, when Steve, when Steve finally is, is ready to hit it hard, you know, we have multiple projects stacked up that we're gonna be starting. More details will come as that becomes available.

• 1:32:21Jay Novella?

  And one final thing, we are planning to, um, we're considering the idea of coming to Australia and bringing our Nauticon Conference there. We, we're working with the Australian skeptics.

• 1:32:33Jay Novella?

  To make this possible, and we're asking you to do one simple thing. We need you to go to the skepticsguy.org and there'll be a link there to basically fill out a survey to let us know if you're interested, if the pricing is something that you can handle, and you know, is the timing of when we're going to do it, like right now, we're talking about May of 2026. You know, as you know, it's very expensive to get nine people out to Australia and then house and feed those people and do everything that we need to do in order to do the conference. It is what it is, but you know, we've been asked to come, we want to do it, and if you're interested, please fill out the survey because it'll give us the information that we need to know whether or not, you know, we should actually do this. So just go to the skepticsguy.org and there'll be a link there for you where you can take that survey.

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  All right, thank you, Jay. All right, guys, let's go on with science or fiction.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:33:35Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is online privacy. So these are three methods that websites and companies use to get information about you online. Just keep in mind, I'm not talking about hackers, right? I'm not talking about somebody hacking into your computer. I'm saying that like legal websites can do this. Does that make sense? Yeah. You'll see what I mean.

• 1:34:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:34:13Speaker 02

  All right. Because obviously a hacker, if they get a hold of your system, they could do anything. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about this could happen to you just by visiting a website. Does that make sense?

• 1:34:22Cara Santa Maria?

  This is going to be scary.

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:34:25Speaker 02

  All right, here we go. Item number one. Websites can secretly activate your microphone to gather information about you, including audibly tracking your keystrokes.

• 1:34:35Speaker 02

  Item number two, once you log into a website, it is possible for it to link your account to your browsing activity, so they could track your online activity on other websites. And item number three, browser fingerprinting uses features about your computer, such as your screen resolution and installed fonts, to create a fingerprint they can use to track your activity across the internet. So, two of these things are actually happening, the other one is not, basically. Evan, go first.

• 1:35:05Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna search the internet anymore, knowing this. I'm done. What, I'm gonna... Oh, this first one. Activate your microphone to gather information about you. Okay, maybe. Including audibly tracking your keystrokes. What, my keystrokes have a sound? In other words, my Q button has a different sound than my I button and my G button? What? My keys? Is that right? I've never heard of that before. That seems really wonky. Unless you're talking in the general sense, it can hear you typing. So, but, I mean, are we saying, it says keystrokes. What does keystroke mean here? Like, it can hear typing? Or it, when a specific key being?

• 1:35:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's open to interpretation, isn't it?

• 1:35:52Speaker 03

  See, what do we have to do, Justin? For 20 years, we've had to suffer. Second one, logging into a website, and then link your account to browsing activity, so that they can track your online activity on other websites. That one seems very plausible. I don't know, should I be shocked by that? I mean, yeah, I believe there's a tool that will do that. And this last one about browser fingerprinting, using features about your computer, such as your screen resolution and installed fonts, to create a fingerprint they can use to track your activity across the internet. Shh, yeah, I think so. I'll go with my instinct.

• 1:36:35Speaker 03

  I don't think of this audibly tracking your keystroke. That seems like, that's too far a reach, no way.

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  Okay, Jay?

• 1:36:42Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I'm gonna agree with Evan. Right out of the gate, I just can't see how that could possibly activate your microphone when it's, you know, that's an operating system type thing. It would have to, the website would have to download a piece of software that can then, you know, talk to your, to your computer in a different way. So I don't, I don't think the website can do that on its own. And I can't see the, the typing thing, right? The tracking of the keystrokes from sound. I mean, I, I bet you that there are subtle changes between the keys and all that, but not consistent among all people, right? It would have to, if, if that could possibly even be done, it would have to be studying one person for a long time. And then it would have to actually have example output, I think,

• 1:37:27Jay Novella?

  in order to be able to do that in the future, but not blindly. You know, and the webcam is most certainly not looking at people's keyboards. So I, I'm going to agree with Evan. Evan, you're a smart man. I like you and I'm going to go with you.

• 1:37:38Speaker 03

  Oh, thanks, Jay.

• 1:37:39Bob Novella?

  Okay, Bob. Yeah, it's hard to disagree with that. The second two here, linking your account to your browsing activity, to track your online activity, online activity on other websites. I'm not too sure about that one, actually. The third one, though, fingerprinting, at least based on the examples you give here, about screen resolution and installed fonts. I can't imagine that that's, at least based on those two, it doesn't seem like much of a fingerprint to me. Although, I mean, of course, if you add, added more variables, then it potentially could be. The, the, for the first one, though, I think, I think you're burying the lead here with secretly activate your microphone to gather information, including tracking keystrokes.

• 1:38:22Bob Novella?

  I mean, big deal, tracking your keystrokes, at least what that sentence literally means. You know, the implication is that you're tracking keys, which I don't think you can audibly necessarily at all. So I think the real nasty thing here is that activating a microphone to actually hear what's being said near the, near the computer, that's the real invasion of privacy right there that's kind of hidden, I think. So yeah, I'll, I'll join with Stephen, Evan, and say that's fiction. With Jay and Evan.

• 1:38:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Steven and Evan.

• 1:38:53Bob Novella?

  Jay and Evan, what did I say? Steven and Evan, Jay and Evan.

• 1:38:55Speaker 03

  Well, that was a nice try, way to try to pull it out of Steve. I like that.

• 1:38:59Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it didn't work. Give it a try.

• 1:39:00Speaker 03

  It was clever.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara?

• 1:39:02Cara Santa Maria?

  I think that my initial instinct was what the two, three now guys already said. And for me, the, there are two operative words in your news items, or in your science or fiction items. So in the, in the first one, you wrote, "Websites can secretly activate your microphone." Like, when you log into ZenCaster, it literally asks you if you give it permission to activate your microphone. And I think that legally, they have to do that. I could be wrong, but I think websites have to ask for permission. So, I don't think they can secretly activate your microphone.

• 1:39:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Maybe, I, you, to be fair, though, you did write, "They can secretly," but you, again, earlier, you caveated. It's not that they have the capability to do it. It's that they're legally empowered to do it. So that's why that one, I think, strikes me as the fiction. The idea of, the next one also has operative words in it. Once you log into a website, it's possible for them to link your account. This happens all the time. You're on a website, you're shopping, you fill your shopping cart, you close it because you decide you don't want to buy the stuff, and then you get an email that says, "Hey, don't leave this behind." Somehow, I think that they are able to sort of follow you.

• 1:40:20Speaker 03

  They could save that cart just with cookies.

• 1:40:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, well, that's true, but then they're also emailing you about it. They know that you closed it. And then finally, this browser fingerprinting, like, what are these different features? I think very often, when you're in a browser, you are logged into the browser, or there are other ways that they have access to some amount of your private information. So it wouldn't surprise me that they can then access aspects of your computer to say, "Oh, this person is a high spender, this person is a low spender, this person is more likely to, you know, spend time here, spend time there." They have, like, these little bits and pieces that have broken off, and, and they're carrying them around with them. So, I think that the following two just seem more plausible, and also... I feel like that's like the biggest myth is that, oh, your phone is listening to you.

• 1:41:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, people are like, man, we were just talking about golf, and then I got all these ads for golf. You know, people say that all the time, but I think what's actually happening is that you were near somebody who plays golf, and your phone GPS knew that you were near that person, and that maybe you like co-mingle with them a lot, and so they're gonna start sending you the same ads they send to them. So, that's what I'm gonna say. That one's the fiction.

• 1:41:28Speaker 02

  Okay, and Justin?

• 1:41:29Speaker 04

  It's probably gonna be a sweep either way this week. So, I totally agree with Kara that secretly is probably a pretty, pretty telling word in there, and I'll come back to that one in a minute. Number two, once you log into a website, it's possible for, to link your account in browsing activity. That's what pays for the internet. That's kind of, Facebook, you know, kind of started making all their money doing that with their Facebook sign-in all over the web. And browser fingerprinting, again, I believe that's something that's been going on for a long time as well. What I'm guessing is, item number one, actually, if I remember correctly,

• 1:42:11Speaker 04

  there were some researchers who were able to actually use just audio from keystrokes to, and machine learning to use, basically, to, in pattern recognition, to figure out what people were typing just from the sound of keystrokes.

• 1:42:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:42:26Speaker 04

  You know, but that was years ago, so I may be conflating a bunch of things in my head now that I see this in front of me. But I'm gonna say number one is the fiction.

• 1:42:33Speaker 02

  So you guys all agree, so let's take this in reverse order. We'll start with the third one. Browser fingerprinting uses features about your computer, such as your screen resolution and installed fonts, to create a fingerprint that they can use to track your activity across the internet. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science. Is this true? So, yeah, so it's not just, obviously, it said such as, Bob, not exclusively screen resolution and installed fonts.

• 1:42:59Bob Novella?

  I made that clear, and that I understood that in my answer, but go ahead.

• 1:43:02Speaker 02

  So they do use.

• 1:43:04Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  They can, it's a, it's a, Kara, it's not just, like, this is the type of computer you're using. They know it's your computer.

• 1:43:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:43:13Speaker 02

  This is Kara Santa Maria's computer.

• 1:43:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Hence the fingerprint.

• 1:43:16Speaker 02

  Because of these hundred features, you know, that we have gathered from her. Like, it's your operating system, the version of your operating system, the fonts you have installed, all the drivers you have, or whatever.

• 1:43:27Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that does make sense, yeah.

• 1:43:28Speaker 02

  Gathered all that information. It's enough variables that it creates a unique fingerprint for your computer. And then they could track when your computer goes to any website, they know it's your computer doing it.

• 1:43:39Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, you gotta give it to them. If they figure out a way to do it legally, you know what I mean?

• 1:43:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:44Cara Santa Maria?

  They're not allowed to track something else that's like an invasion of privacy. They'll figure out how to invade your privacy otherwise.

• 1:43:49Speaker 02

  And, and they do a lot of, it is by cookies, but also there are other ways to do it, too. There are these single pixels that they can have on a website. And when you go to that website, basically, you download it. And that also can track this information. Let's go back to number two. Once you log into a website, it is possible to link your account to your browsing activity so that they can track your online activity on other websites. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is also science. Yep. So, yeah, this is, and this has been going on for a long time. So, basically, like, they're not just tracking what you're doing on their website. Like, you go to Facebook, Facebook is now attached, like, you log into the account,

• 1:44:34Speaker 02

  it now is linked to your browser activity. So when you go off of Facebook to other websites, Facebook still knows what you're doing.

• 1:44:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's why they serve you perfectly tailored ads.

• 1:44:45Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 1:44:46Cara Santa Maria?

  They're like, oh, that thing you almost bought but didn't?

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  On some other website, on Amazon, we knew you did that. Because we're tracking your activity across other websites. Right, which means that websites can secretly activate your microphone to gather information about you, including audibly tracking your keystrokes is the fiction. But Evan, it's not because we don't have the technology to audibly track your keystrokes. We do, as Justin said. That isn't the part that's not correct here. It is to secretly activate your microphone. It is not legal to do that. You have to get permission before you activate someone's camera or microphone.

• 1:45:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, which is why every website like Zoom, they ask you.

• 1:45:24Speaker 02

  Yes, they ask you, right? Because they have to ask you. But of course, you might give it permission for one thing, and then now, once you've given them permission to activate your microphone while you're in the... That's why it says always, only when using the app, only this one time. You know, you get those options. I always select like when using this app. Because otherwise, like it's always, like, why would you want to use my microphone when I'm not using your app? Because they...

• 1:45:52Bob Novella?

  Yeah, Trixie.

• 1:45:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, because they want to do something with that information. For your camera, there's a couple of tips. One is, you know, some cameras have hoods that you could use to close them, just if you think somebody... Because it would be malware that is doing this, but if you're... So it could basically block your camera. But also, the light comes on when their camera is active. So if you're not using your camera, but the light is on, you should note that. That probably means that some, you know, software may have activated your camera without your knowledge. You know, and again, with AI, I think this is going to get this kind of thing, like the fingerprinting. The bottom line is, it's already the case, but it's going to get more so, I guess, is

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  that if you're online somewhere, you know, some software, some website, somewhere, it's tracking everything you're doing.

• 1:46:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, there's no way to browse privately. It's just not possible anymore.

• 1:46:47Speaker 02

  Right, and even like anonymizing software or browsers are...

• 1:46:52Bob Novella?

  Incognito and all that.

• 1:46:54Speaker 02

  Are imperfect.

• 1:46:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I don't think incognito is even really incognito.

• 1:46:58Speaker 02

  Do VPNs help with this?

• 1:47:00Bob Novella?

  Well, my understanding... Isn't it just incognito to your browser history, basically?

• 1:47:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's just... Yeah, exactly. It's just like clear your cache. I think that's all it's doing.

• 1:47:11Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:47:12Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like not saving cookies, that's it.

• 1:47:14Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. Right.

• 1:47:17Speaker 02

  But the cookie is just one method.

• 1:47:18Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:47:20Speaker 03

  And your ISP knows everything you're doing either way.

• 1:47:22Bob Novella?

  Exactly.

• 1:47:24Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I think, you know, I think I know, as we said before, it's like you are the product, right? When you're using the internet, you are not just a user, user, you are a product for who.

• 1:47:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Like if something is free to you, they're making money off of you.

• 1:47:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:40Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Woo, free.

• 1:47:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it is, it is a huge problem. I, I do think that, and the, and the only way to deal with it is through regulation. There's no way the industry is going to self-regulate. They're not.

• 1:47:53Speaker 03

  Nah.

• 1:47:54Cara Santa Maria?

  And the problem with it. And not only is it through regulation, but it's enforcement of regulation, which is nearly impossible. It's like, you remember those, those FBI warnings at the beginnings of DVDs?

• 1:48:06Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:06Cara Santa Maria?

  You guys remember that? The anti-piracy warnings? It's like, how often were people getting like busted for burning their friend's DVD?

• 1:48:15Jay Novella?

  I mean, I think for the most part, people just don't know, they don't want other people to know what porn they're looking at. That's, that's the big secret.

• 1:48:22Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's the funniest thing because like literally everybody's looking at porn. And so it's like not, it's like not even an interesting way to extort somebody. You know what I mean? Like so long as the porn is legal porn, like everybody's like, eh, okay.

• 1:48:38Speaker 02

  But do you guys, have you guys ever gotten those phishing extortion emails?

• 1:48:42Speaker 03

  Oh, of course.

• 1:48:43Speaker 02

  Where it's like, oh ho, we've captured this information about you. We're gonna send it to everybody. It's like, yeah, if you had it, you would be showing it to me right now. So.

• 1:48:52Speaker 03

  They sent me once, we have a picture of your house. And they gave me a picture. It was like not even close to me in my house.

• 1:48:59Cara Santa Maria?

  One day.

• 1:49:00Speaker 03

  What is that shack?

• 1:49:02Bob Novella?

  Like, once in a hundred million tries, you're gonna be right.

• 1:49:04Speaker 03

  Yep. Yep. Crazy.

• 1:49:07Speaker 02

  They're just trying to get people who don't know what they're doing to panic.

• 1:49:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:49:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:49:11Bob Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:49:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're relying on.

• 1:49:13Bob Novella?

  Quick reaction.

• 1:49:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, the fear. Yeah, the fear factor.

• 1:49:17Jay Novella?

  Well, good job, Evan.

• 1:49:18Speaker 03

  Oh, thanks. Yeah. Well, I didn't get it for the right reasons. Kara did and others did, but glad I was there.

• 1:49:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm only ever right for the right reasons after three other people who didn't write before.

• 1:49:31Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:49:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Thank you, Evan.

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:49:34Speaker 03

  I think this case will be remembered because it is the first case of this sort since we stopped trying people in America for witchcraft. Because here we have done our best to turn back the tide that has sought to force upon itself, upon this modern world, of testing every fact in science by a religious dictum. Clarence Darrow.

• 1:49:57Cara Santa Maria?

  That probably is why we remember that case and not the one that actually overturned the law.

• 1:50:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:50:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, Justin, thank you so much for joining us on this episode.

• 1:50:07Speaker 04

  Thank you. It's, I told Jay, it's been a dream. And if I can chime in on the monkeys versus birds.

• 1:50:17Speaker 04

  I'm on the Hitchcock side, the birds.

• 1:50:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:50:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, as time marches on, it seems like the birds make more powerful argument.

• 1:50:27Jay Novella?

  Look, somebody's got to represent, you know, somebody's got to remember Perry and remember his wisdom. It's just a bit, you know, monkeys eventually develop nukes, and I think ultimately they win.

• 1:50:42Speaker 02

  I have the Merlin app. This has nothing to do with anything we were talking about, except tangentially to birds. So have you guys ever used that, the Merlin app?

• 1:50:50Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 1:50:50Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:50:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it like a natural?

• 1:50:51Speaker 03

  Is it hear the bird and tell you which?

• 1:50:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, just hit the, it's on your phone, right? Of course, you have to give it permission to use your microphone.

• 1:50:58Speaker 04

  You sure? Always.

• 1:51:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's put out by the Cornell Ornithology Department. So basically, you hit the record button, and it just listens to, you know, the noise around you, and it tells you every bird in earshot.

• 1:51:16Jay Novella?

  That's amazing.

• 1:51:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, it's like Shazam, but for nature.

• 1:51:18Speaker 03

  And how accurate, with what degree of accuracy?

• 1:51:21Speaker 02

  So far, 100%.

• 1:51:23Speaker 03

  No, nothing's 100%. We know this.

• 1:51:26Speaker 02

  I said so far.

• 1:51:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, well, that's based on Steve's ear, right? Like, if Steve can hear.

• 1:51:31Speaker 02

  It's not just ear, it's not just my ear. It's like, literally, I'm seeing the birds around me, and it's identifying every bird I could see.

• 1:51:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. But there's, I mean, there's got to be a bird in the background that neither of you hear, clearly.

• 1:51:46Speaker 02

  Well, whatever, every, every. I don't know what you're saying, actually.

• 1:51:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, when he's saying is it 100% accurate, you're saying I'm the validating tool here. Like that your human perception is the validating tool. What I'm saying is, there's another machine out there that can hear a more distant bird.

• 1:52:04Speaker 02

  Well, I'm not saying it listens to infinity distance.

• 1:52:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's what 100% accurate is.

• 1:52:09Speaker 02

  No, it's not.

• 1:52:12Speaker 02

  How could you interpret it that way? What I'm saying is.

• 1:52:15Speaker 03

  Stop mocking him.

• 1:52:16Cara Santa Maria?

  You're saying there's no false negatives or false positives.

• 1:52:20Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, it's accuracy. So, when it recognizes a bird, it pops up and says, you're, you know, whatever, that's a hairy woodpecker. And then whenever it hears it again, it'll light up and say, yep, that was a hairy woodpecker.

• 1:52:35Jay Novella?

  Steve, do you like hairy woodpeckers?

• 1:52:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Time of night.

• 1:52:41Speaker 02

  Just happens to be the one, the most recent one that it heard that I'm looking at.

• 1:52:44Jay Novella?

  Sure.

• 1:52:45Speaker 02

  And so, like.

• 1:52:45Jay Novella?

  Do you know what porn you're looking at now?

• 1:52:48Speaker 02

  I could see the birds around me, plus I know what birds are in my backyard.

• 1:52:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 1:52:53Speaker 02

  I could, sometimes I could literally see the bird making the noise and it says, yep, that's a downy woodpecker, whatever, and I just saw the downy woodpecker make the chirp. And it is uncanny. So, so far, as far as I'm able to tell, all of the positive IDs that it makes

• 1:53:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Good caveat.

• 1:53:10Speaker 02

  conforms with the birds that I know to be and can see in my immediate vicinity.

• 1:53:16Speaker 03

  That's the disclaimer we were looking for.

• 1:53:18Cara Santa Maria?

  That is a very scientific answer there, Steve.

• 1:53:20Speaker 03

  Can it tell what the birds are typing?

• 1:53:24Speaker 02

  It is amazing because like the, you know, some birds are pretty distinctive, but other birds is like chirp. You know, that's the downy woodpecker. It's like, that was just a chirp.

• 1:53:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow, that is really cool.

• 1:53:34Speaker 02

  And it's amazing. Obviously, no, I mean, it obviously is analyzing like the very, I mean, it's one of those things like to us, to us, to the human ear, it's chirp, but to the software, I'm sure it's breaking it down to specific frequencies and a, you know, a drop off rate or whatever, like it's a profile.

• 1:53:53Speaker 03

  And taking into your location because it'll eliminate a lot of other species.

• 1:53:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, you're right, yeah. The GPS is a big part of it.

• 1:54:00Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 1:54:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Because it's going to say what's the most likely.

• 1:54:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:02Speaker 03

  Well, right, it will eliminate a whole.

• 1:54:05Bob Novella?

  So Steve, you should play.

• 1:54:06Speaker 02

  I have to go to the zoo. I go to the zoo.

• 1:54:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like I was going to say, it may not eliminate them, Evan. It may rank them by probability.

• 1:54:14Speaker 03

  Ah, so it's actually now the.

• 1:54:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Go down the list. Yeah, because like we have parrots in our trees in LA.

• 1:54:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Because there's like an introduced. Yeah, it's weird, right? So you wouldn't think that they would be there, but they are.

• 1:54:25Bob Novella?

  All right, let's just stop this nonsense.

• 1:54:29Speaker 02

  I'll just get the app and play with it. It's a lot of fun. All right. Thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:54:35Bob Novella?

  Roger that, brother.

• 1:54:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Chirp.

• 1:54:37Speaker 02

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

• 1:54:44Speaker 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.

• 1:55:21Speaker 04

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