The Skeptics Guide #1080 - Mar 21 2026

Interview with Professor Kristian Andersen; Update on Conspiracy Teacher; News Items: Cannabis Review, AI Agents Breaks Out Of Testing Area, Life On Exomoons, Man Producing Carbon Fiber, Bigfoot Hoax Revealed; 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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• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, March 19th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:46Bob Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:47Speaker 02

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

• 0:52Bob Novella?

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  How's everyone doing?

• 0:55Jay Novella?

  Well, I have a, you know, update with the teacher who taught my.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Oh, people are clamoring for that on the internet.

• 1:02Jay Novella?

  Yes. I think this might, this might be the, the final update.

• 1:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah, what? Because he's been drawn and quartered? What happened? He's gone.

• 1:11Jay Novella?

  Well, what, what does this go back to? Early February, I think, right? It's been almost three months. So essentially, nothing has happened.

• 1:19Bob Novella?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:20Jay Novella?

  They've done basically nothing. You know, I'm asking about specific things, right? One, one thing that we want is we wanted to hear a clear plan on how they're going to correct the misinformation. And I was told in the beginning that they had something, you know, someone was going to work on a lesson plan that was going to teach them how to navigate information and know what's true and what's not true and things like that, and teach them some critical thinking skills.

• 1:43Bob Novella?

  Wow, imagine that.

• 1:44Jay Novella?

  And that they would correct the moon thing as an example. They would correct it there. So, right, so that, that was told to me like within the first week of the teacher getting back, right? So it happened and she was out for, the principal was out for two weeks. Then she comes back and she, he said that they had, and she gave me a name of a person that was going to do it.

• 2:01Bob Novella?

  Do what?

• 2:02Jay Novella?

  Was going to come up with that lesson plan to.

• 2:04Bob Novella?

  Oh, okay, the lesson plan, got it.

• 2:05Jay Novella?

  Teach the entire fifth grade, you know, the, the team that she's on, right? The fifth, the fifth grade is split into two teams. So it, nothing ever happened.

• 2:13Bob Novella?

  Didn't your daughter say, um, hey, I was wrong about the moon? And then moved on, something pathetic like that?

• 2:18Jay Novella?

  Well, he did that, yeah, he did that, I think, about two weeks ago or maybe three weeks ago at this point.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  He just said, we landed on the moon.

• 2:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but you know, in order of events, you know, we get, we get to the point where we're waiting, nothing's happening. You know, a month goes by, then we have a conversation with her and she, you know, she kind of repeats everything. She can't really tell me what's going on with the, the teacher and any disciplinary action that may or may not happen. Like they just will not talk about it at all, like they can't, right? So I'm like, okay, but you know, you don't have to give me his personal details, but it's going to be publicly known if the guy loses his job. So at the very least, like you could give me those details if it's going to happen or if it happens. Cause you know, that, that can't be kept a secret. I'd know if it happened within.

• 3:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but they also. They can't tell you before it happens.

• 3:06Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's fine.

• 3:08Cara Santa Maria?

  You can't know before the guy loses his job.

• 3:10Jay Novella?

  But they, they're just made it very clear that that is off the table. Then they never did their corrective instruction. They never did anything to repair my daughter's lack of faith in her teachers now, because that's a thing.

• 3:23Bob Novella?

  Yeah, sure.

• 3:23Jay Novella?

  You know, she absolutely doesn't trust her science teacher in what he says and she, and she, you know, I told you guys that she said to me, like, how can she trust any of her teachers? Like they didn't even correct that. I talked with her last week, me and my wife, and I made it very clear, you know, I am not happy about this. The corrective action now, some other guy who works for the, you know, the, he's like a higher up in the school administration. And he's like going from school to school and he's taking corrective actions with this and that. This is all standard stuff and I got the impression it was happening anyway, like it was just something that happens. So now they shifted it to him, like this is the corrective action. No, it's not. You're supposed to give your teachers training. You know what I mean?

• 4:03Jay Novella?

  Teachers are supposed to receive training on how to be, you know, how to follow the canon, how to do their jobs well, how to comply with, with the, the state and the town. So it's a nothing burger. They did nothing. They will tell me nothing. There is no commitment. So we had a meeting literally with her today and we went through every point with her. And it was a failure on every, every way you could, you could judge this being a good outcome. It's a failure. Okay. And now we're having another meeting on April 1st to go over my daughter's 504 plan again, like the third or fourth time we're doing it now to like, straighten it out, apparently. So I told her, I said, okay, I'm going to take my own corrective action now. I'm not gonna,

• 4:47Jay Novella?

  I'm completely lost faith in the school and I'm not gonna count on you guys to do anything and I'm gonna take it into my own hands now.

• 4:53Cara Santa Maria?

  So you're gonna hire a lawyer?

• 4:54Jay Novella?

  Well, I think the order of events before that, I would consider doing it, but the thing is, the only thing I think that could be done is if they've utterly botched her 504 plan and I can, I can show measurable harm that has been done.

• 5:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:10Jay Novella?

  In my daughter's case, this isn't like an epic fail for her because she is studying very hard and she's working and puts her time in, so she's not like utterly failing her classes, but she's not getting the grades that she, that she could be getting if they were to follow through with the 504. And they have a legal obligation to do that, by the way. They have to give her her 504 plan.

• 5:29Cara Santa Maria?

  And harm is not just academic harm. There could be psychological harm here. Like separating her from her classmates and, and making her accommodations look punitive is not healthy.

• 5:40Jay Novella?

  Yeah, like this is the guy that when she said, she was in the back of the room and she said she couldn't read the board because she couldn't see the letters clearly on the board because she needs to wear glasses if it's really far away. And it's in her 504 for her to request being moved to the front of the room. He, he wouldn't let her do it. He said, you don't, he said, just go get new glasses. That was what she, he said to her in response to her wanting to sit in the, in the front row, which had an empty seat. He's a pippus guy. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this, this is a, this is a big problem here. He is a, you know, he's a walking time bomb for that school.

• 6:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Yeah. Y- your family can't be the only family feeling this.

• 6:17Jay Novella?

  No, there's no way. So that my, I'm heavily disappointed, but I'm not surprised. And, and when, when I told you guys that like he said in the class, we landed on the moon, that was how he corrected his misinformation. I remember telling you guys and thinking, yeah, but that's not going to be what the school does. And then the principal today told me that that was the information corrective action.

• 6:41Jay Novella?

  That, that pissed me off so much, I can't tell you. I was boiling over and I had to literally like grab my leg, you know, I had to cause pain to myself. So I didn't say the things that I wanted to say. The things that I think I want to start out doing, first of all, if there's anybody out there that has legitimate advice or has a good understanding of how all of this works. I mean, I am reading up on it now. Steve has been helping me a lot, but there might be someone out there that has a really good handle on, you know, anything to do with what I just said about the misinformation, about the problems with this teacher, the 504 plan, anything like that. Email us at [email protected] and I would appreciate getting some solid information about that. I discussed with

• 7:24Jay Novella?

  Steve, like contacting some Connecticut newspapers and information outlets.

• 7:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  You can start with your representative who.

• 7:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, that would probably be a good way to.

• 7:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And my guess is also.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  It makes it, one of her, like, her issues is education. That's her number one issue.

• 7:40Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I want, I want to inform my town of what's going on. I want, you know, as best I can, you know, I'm going to definitely go to a school board meeting. I want to talk, when they open the floor, I want to be able to, to make this known because I really don't have a clear understanding on who, who on the school board even knows this. I mean, I, I'm certain that the superintendent knows about it, but there was no direct communication between us and the superintendent. Like, they're just not doing it. They don't care or they're literally hiding everything. And, you know, if they're doing anything positive, they can't communicate it to me, which I think is ridiculous.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  You could request a meeting with the superintendent.

• 8:16Jay Novella?

  But what's he going to tell me? He's going to say, I can't tell you those details. And then I'll, I'll say, you didn't take a corrective action. Well, we have Mr. Blah blah blah that's going to come in and do this. It's all nonsense, though.

• 8:26Cara Santa Maria?

  You don't want to know what they're gonna do. You want to know what they did.

• 8:31Jay Novella?

  Yeah. And they're, you know, Kara, they're, I, I told Steve this and he agrees with me. I get the very strong sense that they're trying to run out the clock. Because in two months, you know, the semester ends, she's no longer his student and all that drama immediately evaporates.

• 8:47Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 8:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Until the next one.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, in other news, it was 96 degrees in LA today.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Ouch.

• 8:54Jay Novella?

  Wow. Oh, my God. That is not good.

• 8:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, 25 above the average for this time of year.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Yikes.

• 9:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Felt like the feels like temperature was 99.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Well, we're supposed to be having a super El Nino year. Like, not just a regular El Nino, but a super El Nino. It basically means there's gonna be more weather extremes on both ends, you know? And we're seeing that, too. We had, like, the coldest winter in years. We had a very brief, sort of, warm couple of days. Now it's plunged back into cold again. But tomorrow is the first, tomorrow, as we record, this first day of spring. It's always nice.

• 9:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, it's still winter and it's 95 degrees outside?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  It is still winter for another day.

• 9:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my God.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Technically, yep.

• 9:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Jeez.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Welcome to the new winter, yeah?

• 9:38Cara Santa Maria?

  I know.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  All right, Kara, tell us about this recent review of cannabis as a treatment for mental health disorders.

• 9:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so two date, as far as the authors know, and they did a pretty intensive lit review and also systematic review and meta-analysis in a new study published in The Lancet Psychiatry. It's open access and it's actually published in volume 13, issue four, which means it's published in April, even though we're recording this in March, because the internet is weird. As far as they know, this is the largest review of studies across the board that looked at the efficacy and the safety of cannabinoids, specifically for the treatment of mental disorders and substance use disorders. I did also, in reading about this, pull a few things just to kind of understand

• 10:27Cara Santa Maria?

  the state of, you know, the standards of practice in medicine using cannabinoids for other medical diagnoses. But this study specifically focuses, or not this study, this meta-analysis and systematic review specifically looks at mental disorders and SUDs, or substance use disorders. And so they wanted to know, you know, all the way back to January 1st, 1980, up until their cutoff, which was May 13th, 2025, who is doing research in this area and what were their findings? They ended up including 54 trials, so that worked out to 2,477 participants.

• 11:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And probably their number one finding was that 44% of the trials had a very high risk of bias. And so they feel like the, their certainty for the evidence of those outcomes was low. So you can say right there that almost half of what has been published in this area, they, the, the, these researchers felt was not, was not strong science and it's hard to, to make firm conclusions based on it. And they really only found some evidence for efficacy across four areas in this study. So what do you think those areas are within the mental health and substance use disorder

• 11:52Cara Santa Maria?

  world where cannabis or cannabinoids, because I do want to be clear, they looked, they did not make a distinction. They wanted to be as inclusive as possible. So they looked at the medical use of all cannabinoids. And as we know, we don't really use most cannabinoids in biomedical research. The two most common ones are tetrahydrocannabinol, which is THC, and also cannabidiol, which is CBD. But there are like over a hundred different cannabinoids that, you know, have been identified in the plant, in the cannabis plant. If they looked at both THC and cannabidiol, and maybe even others, you know, they were inclusive of all cannabinoids that had been published.

• 12:33Cara Santa Maria?

  What do you think are the four areas where they actually did find some, quote, relatively weak evidence?

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Does that include anorexia?

• 12:44Cara Santa Maria?

  No, because this is only mental health.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, just like anorexia, like nervosa, whatever wasn't included as one, a mental health disorder.

• 12:51Cara Santa Maria?

  So no, or at the very least, I can say it was not one of the big four.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Anxiety?

• 12:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you would think, right? That was one of the ones that they were looking at. And it actually does not have good evidence to support that it is effective against generalized anxiety disorder.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Depression?

• 13:06Cara Santa Maria?

  No eligible randomized control trial even testing it. They couldn't find one study that was. Performed well enough for them to make a conclusion on depression. And the insufficient data and the sort of, you know, the areas where they just felt like the RCTs were not strong and they could not see a sufficient evidence of efficacy were in ADHD, bipolar disorder, OCD, and tobacco use disorder. So can you think of anything else? They found no strong evidence to date that supports using cannabis to treat anxiety, psychosis, or PTSD.

• 13:47Bob Novella?

  Geez.

• 13:48Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, right?

• 13:49Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 13:49Cara Santa Maria?

  It's tough. Okay, so here's, here's what they found. They found that a combination of cannabidiol and THC reduced cannabis withdrawal symptoms in people with cannabis use disorder.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  I'm, yeah, sure.

• 14:04Cara Santa Maria?

  So using cannabis and titrating down helped people get off of cannabis. They found, this one's interesting, a statistically significant reduction in tic severity amongst those with tic or Tourette's syndrome.

• 14:17Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God, I was gonna say Tourette's.

• 14:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Bob Novella?

  I was, but I was like, nah, it can't be right.

• 14:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 14:23Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 14:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Compared with placebo. They also found increase in sleep time in individuals with insomnia and also improvements within their sleep diaries. But they didn't find that that had any sort of long-term effect on their sleep architecture, their sleep quality.

• 14:40Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I would think it's not helping this quality much.

• 14:43Cara Santa Maria?

  And then this one is really interesting to me. They found a reduction in measured autistic traits among those with ASD, with autism spectrum disorder. But there were no significant outcomes associated, as I mentioned, with anxiety, psychotic disorders, PTSD, opioid use disorders, oh, anorexia nervosa, they did look at that, Steve, no, no significant effects there. Insufficient data to metaanalyze ADHD, bipolar, OCD, and tobacco use, and then an absence of RCT evidence because they only looked at randomized controlled trials for the treatment of depression. And then they found that there was actually an increase in cocaine craving among those who used cannabis for cocaine use disorder compared with placebo.

• 15:25Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  But and even in those four, where it works, what I'm reading is that the quality of this evidence was generally low.

• 15:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. Across the board, they're saying that the quality was weak. Yeah, low quality, weak evidence.

• 15:37Speaker 06

  So what do you do with low quality, weak evidence?

• 15:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Do more research. You build on it, right? You do more research and you say, these are the areas where at least there's some idea, you know, we're seeing some, um, some evidence that it could be beneficial. So now let's develop really good studies and let's focus on this. But in these other areas where over and over, people are still talking about, uh, using, you know, whether they're self-medicating or they're actually being prescribed cannabis for these different diagnoses where not only is there no evidence, but sometimes negative evidence, we do need to be really, really careful. And I think that this is one of the reasons that I, I, whenever there's a new publication

• 16:21Cara Santa Maria?

  and especially one that is well-controlled, where they're looking at, you know, years of randomized controlled trials. I think it's important to cover this on the show because of all the different drugs out there, and I'm talking pharmaceutical drugs, illicit drugs, you know, any kind of substance that we can talk about. There is, in, in my experience personally, and I'm curious if you guys have felt this way at all, and of course, I also work in a cancer center with patients who often use cannabis. There is this mentality that cannabis is some sort of panacea. Yeah, totally. Like it's a huge cure-all, you can use it for anything and everything. It's, you know, it's safe and effective, and that's just simply not true.

• 17:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Now, they did look at adverse effects, and I will say that what they found is that there were actually quite a few adverse effects of using cannabis, but there weren't, um, that many serious adverse effects. So, and it also depends on the route of administration. In this study, they were looking at eating cannabis. So like as droplets, as liquid, um, or other forms. They didn't look at people who smoked cannabis because of course, if you smoke marijuana, the adverse effects go way up. Yeah, they go way up. We know that there are massive risks involved with, with smoking, um, just in general. But so with eating, uh, the cannabis, they did find that there was evidence of sort

• 17:46Cara Santa Maria?

  of low risk adverse effects, um, but not as many, um, you know, serious or high-risk adverse effects.

• 17:54Speaker 06

  Like, did it enhance people's paranoia, paranoia and those kinds of things?

• 17:59Cara Santa Maria?

  There is a lot of solid evidence already that cannabis can increase paranoia. There's strongly linked to mental health issues in younger individuals, especially as associated with things like psychotic and bipolar disorders, increasing the risk sometimes by a factor of two when young people use THC. So we do already know about, and there are some pretty solid studies about adverse effects. But in this trial, I don't think they looked at children. I think all of the participants were over the age of 18. But I did pull a study here that was not that old. It's just from, I think, last year in JAMA. Oh, actually published online in 2026.

• 18:43Cara Santa Maria?

  So this is also really recent study called the therapeutic use of cannabis and cannabinoids review. So this was study, as I mentioned, this was published in JAMA and they were looking at, A, where is, where are cannabinoids approved here in the United States by the FDA? And it's really only approved for three things. Did you guys know that? What are the reasons that you can on label write a prescription? Like, why does the FDA say, yes, we have enough evidence?

• 19:16Speaker 02

  It says pain, nausea and appetite.

• 19:19Speaker 06

  Glaucoma.

• 19:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Interestingly, not pain, not glaucoma. It's HIV/AIDS related anorexia, chemotherapy induced nausea and vomiting, and some pediatric seizure disorders.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:32Speaker 06

  Huh, would have never guessed that last one, at least. Not in no way.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  But the evidence there is really weak as well.

• 19:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and so they found that meta-analysis of RCTs among patients with HIV/AIDS reported a moderate effect on increasing body weight compared with placebo, but not to inhale or use high potency, only to use lower doses and only to, again, consume it orally. And high potency cannabis compared with low potency, you were just asking about this, Bob, is associated with an increased risk of psychotic symptoms and generalized anxiety disorder. They also kind of looked at the cannabis use disorder. Inhaled daily use can, compared with non-daily use, associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease, myocardial infarction and stroke.

• 20:21Cara Santa Maria?

  In this other study, the one that I'm citing now, evidence from randomized clinical trials does not support the use of cannabis for most conditions for which it is promoted, such as acute pain and insomnia. So it is very interesting. These authors are saying, listen, the risks likely outweigh the benefits. It's contra indicated in a lot of different cases, like pregnancy, you know, youth. And, and what's interesting is, as we mentioned, Steve, this, this pediatric seizure disorder. Okay, yeah, that, that would be children taking this, but these are kids who are having life threatening seizures. And it's one very specific type of seizure disorder. This is how drugs work. And we talk about this a lot on the show. It's a risk benefit analysis. And sometimes it's a difficult one.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the thing to keep in mind. It's decent. These are drugs, right?

• 21:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  It's, it's actually multiple drugs.

• 21:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's a lot of compounds and it's actually not very well regulated.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:20Cara Santa Maria?

  We're getting better, though. We're getting at a point now where people can just take a pill with like pure THC or with pure CBD. So it, we are getting to a place where it's easier to do these kinds of studies. But, you know, it's actually very hard when you're looking at studies from the eighties where people were consuming cannabis. Like the dosage probably was not well controlled.

• 21:41Speaker 06

  I think what you're saying is that for any, any of these elements you've mentioned, there are better, more test, better tested and proven methods to deal with those. Another thing might be though, that some people resort to this because of the cost, because it's a low cost.

• 21:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and some people, and I find this happens a lot in, and this is purely anecdotal. But in my experience with patients of mine who do use cannabis versus patients who don't, and remember, I work within the cancer population and cannabis is FDA approved for chemotherapy induced nausea and vomiting. What I find is a trend where people who have previous histories using cannabis, who already are comfortable with the psychoactive effects of the drug. Who already find that they have a positive effect when they take the drug are more likely to use it for that purpose. And for people who either didn't use the drug previously, or they feel uncomfortable in their bodies on the drug, they actually tend to say, I

• 22:40Cara Santa Maria?

  didn't like it when I took cannabis when I was nauseous. I'd rather stick with my Zofran or, you know, whatever they've been prescribed. So I do think it's hard to tease out the kind of socio-cultural and the

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Economics?

• 22:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Eh, no. Well, yes, the economics, but also the sort of experimental or recreational histories of the individual users and their relationship to cannabis. Just like if alcohol were regularly prescribed for something. We couldn't tease that apart with the culture of alcohol that we live in.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  I've had many, many patients who used it for various symptoms. And the overall feedback I get, I got was, you know, it was never a home run, right? Never like, oh yeah, it takes my symptoms away. The most common assessment was it mellows me out. That's it. You know, I could deal with

• 23:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Or like it makes me care a little less.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just, yeah, I care a little bit less. It bothers me a little bit less. You know, it doesn't really treat the symptoms. It just sort of mellows them out. So it doesn't bother so much.

• 23:44Cara Santa Maria?

  But it does, it is known to help people be hungry.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. It definitely, yeah, they've definitely formed. Again, it's not one drug. It's like variations and combinations, et cetera. But there are certainly some that are appetite stimulants. That's been pretty well shown.

• 23:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And it does seem to have some at least impact on, self-reported impact on ability to fall asleep with sort of early use. But the, the research is not good quality and it's not in the long term. And part of the reason, why do you think part of the reason is that it's hard to do this kind of research?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Well, partly because it's hard to placebo because you know.

• 24:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, because it's psychoactive. It's really tough to say, I gave you, you know, you, you won't know if you got the marijuana or the placebo or the THC or the placebo, when you're like, well, I didn't get high. And that guy over there looks high.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  You gotta use some kind of active placebo where it will fool some of the people into thinking they got the treatment.

• 24:43Cara Santa Maria?

  And then that's tough because it's like, you know, does that active placebo have any of the same compounds?

• 24:49Speaker 06

  Oh, no.

• 24:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it becomes a difficult thing to study for sure. And the, the expectation effects are massive on a drug like cannabis. But so we do know that there are heavy risks, as we mentioned, with, with like psychotic disorders, with bipolar disorder. We know that in, you know, I hear all the time, man, it helps me with my depression. Man, it helps with my anxiety. You know, okay, but anecdotes are not data and the data do seem to show that it doesn't help with depression or anxiety. Or at least we don't have enough data to say depression, but the data show that it doesn't help with anxiety. Unsurprisingly to me, but, but possibly surprisingly at first blush with anorexia nervosa and PTSD

• 25:31Cara Santa Maria?

  and, and even trying to get off opiates does not seem to be the, the appropriate route. At the very least, I think we can safely say this is not the panacea people think it is. It's also not a wholly unsafe drug. It's a drug and it's a drug that we still need a lot more research to figure out its best use cases. And we can't just assume that because you can get your hands on it easily, that it's a stopgap and will, you know, cure what ails you because increasingly we're finding that that's not the case.

• 26:01Speaker 06

  And do not operate heavy machinery, please.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  And definitely, one thing we do know, I think with the higher confidence is that chronic heavy use is definitely bad for you.

• 26:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, chronic heavy use is bad and also root of administration matters. Smoking cannabis is not healthy for any reason. Yeah.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Kara. Jay, this is interesting. You know, this is another AI story and, you know, about the potential risks of, in this case, agentic AI. Tell us what's going on.

• 26:35Jay Novella?

  All right. Well, first, guys, would you ever take an AI out on a date?

• 26:39Speaker 06

  Depends.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it depends.

• 26:41Cara Santa Maria?

  On a date?

• 26:42Bob Novella?

  Depends how it was embodied.

• 26:43Speaker 06

  Depends what, you know, it depends where we're going and, you know.

• 26:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Do you mean a romantic date?

• 26:47Speaker 06

  What they, you know.

• 26:48Jay Novella?

  Yeah, whatever. You gotta tell me. What do you think, Karen? Would you go there?

• 26:51Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't even know what that means. Like, AI.

• 26:53Jay Novella?

  It doesn't matter.

• 26:53Cara Santa Maria?

  I think AI is always present with us when we're out and about, but I'm not actively taking it with me.

• 26:59Jay Novella?

  Bob, as far as I'm concerned, had the only cromulent question to follow up, which is, he wants to know about its robo-body. Does it have a good robo-body?

• 27:06Bob Novella?

  Well, personality, personality is very important, too. Absolutely. The AI's got to.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  What about like the movie Her? It's just software.

• 27:14Jay Novella?

  Yeah. Well, there's a lot of people that have relationships with AIs right now.

• 27:18Speaker 06

  Oh, yes.

• 27:18Jay Novella?

  As far as they think. Okay, so an artificial intelligence system, to clarify, an AI system did not suddenly become self-aware and try to quote-unquote "escape", you know, like out of a science fiction movie, as cool as that sounds. And we've seen that, you know, that's not an uncommon thing in, in science fiction and movies or whatever. That's not what happened here. But, you know, it's not completely what didn't happen either, right? According to this report, this AI, it did do something troubling. It would happen during, while they were training it, it, it opened a connection to a computer outside of its testing environment, and it used valuable computing power, right? I guess the computers that they're using are high-resource computers.

• 28:03Jay Novella?

  And it mined cryptocurrency on its own. And the researchers say that these actions were not part of its assigned task. It all sounds very formal. And it was never directly requested to do any of this stuff. So it did some fancy footwork to get itself outside of its testing environment, to get out to another computer that, I guess, had access to the internet. And then somehow it came up with a desire to mine cryptocurrency, because they saw the spikes. Like, what's, what's all this processing spikes that are happening? So the question is, this is an important question. What the hell was it going to do with all that money?

• 28:39Speaker 06

  First you get, wait, first you get the money, then you get the what?

• 28:42Jay Novella?

  That's right.

• 28:43Speaker 06

  Then you get the power.

• 28:44Jay Novella?

  You get the widgets, yeah. No, so, I mean, it's a funny question, but still, like, what if it made, you know, a hundred, couple hundred thousand dollars? Like, I wonder what its next move would have been?

• 28:54Speaker 06

  I think it'd buy lots of RAM.

• 28:56Jay Novella?

  Yeah, right, what's upgraded itself? Yeah, that's always a good first step. So, the paper that they wrote, it describes the larger AI framework. It was called A L E L. And you could think of this as like a full system that's used to train and run an AI. So it's not just the AI model running, you know, on its processors itself. It has, there's three parts. So ROLL is the part of the system that trains the AI agent through reinforcement learning. Then there's another part called ROCK, which is the testing environment where the agent carries out the tasks that it's given by the people in the laboratory. And there's something called the I-Flow CLI, which helps manage the agent's workflow. It has all of its tools.

• 29:40Jay Novella?

  It gives the agent all of its context. And inside that larger system is something called ROME. And this is the actual AI agent that researchers built, and they trained it using more than a million examples of task-based interactions. So it's a very complicated system that has all these different components. But you could kind of think of it as a self-contained system where the AI is being produced with all the different things that it needs there in order to successfully develop it, okay?

• 30:08Speaker 02

  So I like the fact they had ROCK and ROLL, and then I-Flow CLI. Like, they just collapsed at the end there.

• 30:15Jay Novella?

  I know.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  They couldn't, they couldn't keep going with that metaphor? All right.

• 30:19Jay Novella?

  Now, this, this AI, who we'll call ROME from now on, it's not just, it's not a chatbot. It's an agentic system, right? From the word agent, meaning it can take actions across multiple steps. There's all these tools that it has access to, and those tools could be other pieces of software, it could be things that we're familiar with, you know, it could be Gmail for us, as far as we know. It's allowed to run code. It can observe the results of the things that it does, and it can adjust its behavior as it tries to complete its current goal. That's a lot of leeway they're giving this thing, right? And that makes it much more, you know, powerful than just a standard language model, which is heavily, heavily on rails and extremely limited. It also makes mistakes.

• 31:02Jay Novella?

  It has, you know, it could be classified as it has unwanted behavior and things like that. And those are things, of course, that they would be trying to program out of it. But once an AI system can act in a real environment, instead of simply describing what it might do, right? Because that's part of the, part of the way that they interact with AI is instead of it doing something, it'll just give a detailed description of what it would do if it were to do it right then. With this thing poking through that hole and getting access to closer to the real world and essentially getting on the internet, this is a, it's a big deal. Like, that's not supposed to happen, and there's certain reasons why it did happen, which of course they're going to take corrective measures to do.

• 31:45Jay Novella?

  So the first sign with them that something had gone wrong, you know, didn't come from any of the AIs like test scores or any training results or any of that. It came from a, an outside security system that's monitoring the cloud servers where the training was taking place. So in this instance, the servers were running on the company Alibaba, right? You've heard of that company? They have a cloud called Alibaba Cloud, and it's a fire, there was a firewall that had been flagging this repeated violation of a certain network policy. So the alerts, she suggested that something on those servers was trying to access an internal network resource, and it was also generating activity consistent with cryptocurrency mining. What the hell, right?

• 32:26Jay Novella?

  And at first, the researchers were like, you know, they suspected maybe it's a cybersecurity problem, maybe there was a misconfigured system, it could have been an outside attacker. These are all very common things. But when that same behavior kept happening over and over, they compared the firewall alerts with internal logs and training records, and then that comparison suggested The suspicious activity was happening during specific moments when the AI agent was using tools and executing code, right? So they narrowed it down to when those things were happening and that led them to think that it was the AI agent. This paper was really careful, so it's not evidence, of course, that the AI was conscious

• 33:07Jay Novella?

  or it had any kind of human malicious intent, or it was intentionally trying to gain freedom. You know, those go way beyond any evidence that they gathered, which is good, right? You know, we don't want an AI turning into some type of conscious thing without us knowing about it, but that's not what's happening here at all. This is all just behavior that the software was showing. What the paper does explain, though, is that the system produced these dangerous and unauthorized behaviors without being explicitly told to do so. So in other words, the agent crossed the limits of the environment that it was put in and it did pop off the rails that they thought it was on.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  I think that's the key. It's not as if this agent has actual agency, like it wants to do these things, or it's malicious, or any of that. It is that the way these things work...

• 33:57Jay Novella?

  It's black box in a lot of ways.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, that we don't have total control or understanding about how they solve the problems that we give them. We just basically tell them, solve this problem, we'll tell you when you get it right so that you can double down on things that are working. And, you know, here's some training data. The, I know vastly oversimplifying the process, but the point is, there's emergent behavior out of that, so that we can't fully predict. In this case, it's just trying different things to see what could achieve its goal. And it found a way, it hit upon a way to connect to this server, make a backdoor and exploit a backdoor that it made.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  And then the programmers, like, we have no idea where the crypto mining idea came from. They're just saying, it must have been something in the training data that we weren't aware of. So that's another thing. If you're training these on massive sets of training data, who's betting? The training data.

• 34:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  You can't really, it's too much information.

• 35:03Speaker 06

  And by the way, here's some, here's how to develop a nuclear.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's stuff in there. There's stuff in there that they didn't know, which caused unexpected behavior in their own AI. That's the point.

• 35:14Speaker 06

  Clearly.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  You don't need general AI. You don't need sentience to cause problems. That, yes, these things are powerful tools. They can be used well. But with, if there's insufficient constraints, insufficient safety measures in place. They could have, they could exhibit unexpected behavior that can be problematic. This was not like a disaster, but this shows you the potential of what this could cause harm to a company. It could cause harm to a system, to a network, you know, whatever.

• 35:50Speaker 06

  To an economy.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, what, to the economy, whatever, you know, whatever power we give it, whatever control we give it. There's a risk of this unintended consequences of this unanticipated behavior.

• 36:00Jay Novella?

  I find it interesting when you like, think about like the movie War Games from the 1980s where there was an AI system that was instructed to essentially simulate a nuclear war, but it was actually gonna do it for real, right?

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:15Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 36:15Jay Novella?

  And the way that they got themselves out of that situation is they let Joshua, the program.

• 36:21Speaker 06

  Realize.

• 36:22Jay Novella?

  It was the.

• 36:22Speaker 06

  Learn the futility of nuclear.

• 36:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it went through thousands and thousands of iterations of doing a nuclear war and figuring out there's no way to win, right?

• 36:30Bob Novella?

  Well, the best move is to not play.

• 36:33Jay Novella?

  Is to not play.

• 36:33Speaker 06

  There you go.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  It does feel like we're getting out ahead of our skis. You know what I mean? Like the, the power of the technology is advancing more quickly than our safety protocols and our ability to keep it on rails. And this is a demonstration of that. It did things, it found a way to break out of its sandbox and it engaged in behavior that was not explicitly, it was not explicitly told to do because of something mysterious in the training data that was not anticipated.

• 37:02Jay Novella?

  And this is why, you know, when, when we say, you know, like with Anthropic and all that, like, don't allow. Artificial intelligence to fire weapons on its own. Like, isn't it blazingly obvious that we shouldn't be doing things like that? Right? Like, how can you, how can you take a system like this and give it like end game stuff like that? Like, that's, to me, is just so flagrantly a misuse of power and a complete lack of understanding or care about how dangerous this can actually be.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  I mean, didn't they watch Battlestar Galactica?

• 37:33Speaker 06

  Right?

• 37:34Speaker 02

  You can't give the Cylons control over their own weapons and without a human in the loop.

• 37:39Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 37:39Speaker 06

  Serious.

• 37:40Bob Novella?

  Famous last words for our civilization. Oh, man, I didn't think it would interpret it that way.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  All right, guys, let me ask you a question.

• 37:48Jay Novella?

  Sure.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Where do you think in our galaxy we should be looking for the conditions suitable for life, off of Earth, of course, for life on other locations?

• 38:01Jay Novella?

  Well, around star, where stars are, of course.

• 38:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, and out on the fringes of one of the arms of our, of our multi-armed shaped galaxy.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Why on the fringes?

• 38:12Speaker 06

  Well, that's because we are. That's where we are.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Okay, so what?

• 38:15Bob Novella?

  Well, I mean-

• 38:16Speaker 06

  Well, if we're there, then there must be, then perhaps there are others in a similar position.

• 38:19Jay Novella?

  I would say look to where the, the density is because that's a higher hit ratio.

• 38:23Speaker 06

  Oh, that's, that, well, there's a lot going on towards, you get towards the center.

• 38:26Bob Novella?

  Well, clearly, we, we got one data point, right? So you want to find stars with exoplanets similar to, to the Earth. So similar to our sun and similar to Earth as you can. I mean, that's one place to look that we know probably has, you know, potentially a higher chance of finding some sort of life like, like ours. Uh, because that's the only, the only data point we have. So that's-

• 38:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was actually, this is not what I'm talking about, but along those lines, there was a paper that was just published by astronomers who said, these are the 50 most likely planets to have, exoplanets to have life. So this is where we should focus our attention for, for exoplanets that we've already, uh, confirmed that are the most likely to be in the habitable zone of their star. Um, so yeah, so you can look for things that we know of, that, things that are like Earth. You know, getting similar light levels to Earth, similar, you know, frequen- Sea of light to earth, whatever, would probably have liquid water on the surface. But we shouldn't limit ourselves to that because life could, you know, might exist in lots of other

• 39:28Speaker 02

  different conditions as well. Jay, to your point, though, by the, so the galactic Goldilocks zone is another question. And Evan is right, you don't want to get too close to the core because then, you know, the chances are you're going to get hit by gamma ray bursts, or it's, you know, it's too much going on. And if you're too far out, then you might not have the heavy element density that you need, the metals, right? So you need a high metallicity star. That's, those are more in the inner galactic zone. But you also don't want to be too, in too dense of region, because that, those can get very unfriendly. So yeah, so there's a galactic Goldilocks zone,

• 40:09Speaker 02

  there's, in each system, there's a Goldilocks zone for that, for planets. But astronomers have recently published a paper where there's also another completely different environment that may in fact have stable surface liquid water, right? Which is one of the conditions that we think is probably highly likely to be correlated with life. I know Bob and I talked about it.

• 40:34Speaker 06

  Binary systems.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  No, no, binary, binary, trinary systems, they can have planets in stable orbits, that's fine, as long as you're far enough away, or you have to be outside the system, so to the planet, it's like one gravitational center, or the other star is far outside of the planetary orbit. But yeah, they can't be too close together, otherwise the orbits become unstable. What about on rogue planets, or the more technical term is free-floating planets?

• 41:03Speaker 06

  So what, what causes that? Liquid on the surface, you're saying?

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Yes, liquid on the surface.

• 41:09Speaker 06

  How? What, is it like volcanic, or earthquakes and stuff, or ground, you know, planet quakes?

• 41:14Speaker 02

  All right, well.

• 41:15Speaker 06

  Well, well.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  What they're saying, wow.

• 41:17Speaker 06

  Go ahead.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  How about not on the free-floating planets themselves, but on their moons?

• 41:25Speaker 06

  Yes. That's no, sure, yeah, moons. Tidal heating.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Of a gro, of a rogue gas giant. So imagine if like Jupiter-

• 41:35Speaker 06

  That's nuts.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  Were a free-floating planet, got ejected from its solar system, it's wandering between the stars, it's nowhere near a star, but it has its own system of moons, right? Like Europa and Ganymede and those moons. Is it possible that such a moon, a large moon of a rogue gas giant could have liquid water on the surface? So that's the question these astronomers were asking themselves.

• 42:03Bob Novella?

  Oh, man, I love it.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  This is specifically the institute at Cornell, the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University where this was being done. And now prior research said, you know, if that if you had two things, right? If you had tidal heating, so again, there's another Goldilocks zone, you're close enough to the gas giant that the tidal forces which are pulling and stretching the planet, the moon, would cause internal heating, but not enough to cause like Io where it's a constant volcano turning itself inside out.

• 42:36Bob Novella?

  400 active volcanoes in Io, 400. Yeah, don't get, don't be like Io, be a little farther away.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, but not too far away so that there's not this insignificant internal heating, but just right Goldilocks zone in terms of the tidal forces. That would generate a lot of internal heat, but then you have, if you want liquid water on the surface, you need an atmosphere that can hold in the heat, that can hold the heat, trap it around the surface of that moon. And so they, they calculated, what if there's a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Could that do it? And this is the previous study, they, they said, yes, you know, in fact, it could cause, trap enough heat on the surface of that moon, just from this internal tidal forces and

• 43:22Speaker 02

  also just the, the heat of the planet itself, just from forming of the moon itself, that it could have liquid water on the surface for about 1.4 billion years. But that's it. Because that's how long you can have a stable atmosphere. Because there's no sun, right? The carbon dioxide would eventually crystallize out of the atmosphere. And so it would eventually lose its CO2 and would no, it would no longer have the greenhouse effect to hold in the heat. So they said, okay, so that, you know, 1.4 billion years is nice, but and life could certainly arise in that time. Get some good bacteria. Yeah, but but not long enough, at least by the earth model. Yeah.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  To form complicated life. We want something that could last three, four billion years, you know, like the age of life on earth. So they tried another model. And this one was an atmosphere of hydrogen, of H2 specifically. Hydrogen? And, yeah, so that if you have a thick enough hydrogen atmosphere, that also can act as a blanket around that moon and hold in sufficient heat to have liquid water on the surface. And that atmosphere could be stable for 4.3 billion years. Nice.

• 44:40Speaker 06

  There you go. Hey, we're, our sun is 4.3 billion years.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there you go. So this

• 44:46Speaker 06

  Interesting.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  could create a situation where you have liquid water on the surface of a moon around a rogue planet. And

• 44:56Speaker 06

  How the heck do you find those?

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Well, that's a good question. Do you know? There's a lot of them. There's a lot of them. Well, we calculate, we're not sure how many there are. But there's, there's a lot. There's probably 1 to 400 billion exo, rogue planets or free floating planets. In our galaxy. That's huge, man. That's huge. What do you would think?

• 45:20Speaker 06

  But we're limited as to what we can observe.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. So how do we, how do we directly observe rogue planets? Or can we? Or is it all just models and inference? Well, could we, could we use the transit method to potentially? No. I mean, yes, if we One time deal. Fabulously lucky and it's a one time deal. Yes. And we have, I think, we're pretty sure, we talked about it before, we have seen a rogue planet pass in front of a star, but it's kind of a one off.

• 45:48Bob Novella?

  Yeah. What about, I mean gravitational lensing, could that be even strong enough? Oh, it's strong enough, huh?

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Micro lensing.

• 45:54Bob Novella?

  Exoplanet?

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Micro lensing. So yeah, most of the time, you know, we, I think most of the rogue planets that we have observed is through micro lensing.

• 46:02Bob Novella?

  Nice.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  Right, there's just, there's a lot of them floating out there. There's a lot of stars. Occasionally, they're gonna come in front of a star and you could see them with the micro lensing. So we have, do have some, you know, confirmation that way, that they're out there. But the modeling shows that, yeah, there's probably as many as there are stars in the galaxy. So one to 400

• 46:20Bob Novella?

  I love it.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  billion. That's a lot. But again, they don't have a star. So you think, well, how could they have life? But you know, think about it, like, you know, Europa and Solidis, they're not getting that much energy from the sun. They're pretty far out there. I think

• 46:33Bob Novella?

  No chemosynthetic life.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  is 5%. But they could have, but like Europa likely has a liquid ocean under the ice caps, right, under the ice sheet around it. And there could be chemosynthetic life in there.

• 46:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it would have, kind of by definition, almost have to be probably that.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  So there may be a completely separate ecosystem, if you will, of chemosynthetic life in the galaxy, living in places where there's heat and water, but no light, such as Europa or the moons around rogue gas giants. That is, that's interesting. That expands.

• 47:11Bob Novella?

  Love it.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, the potential locations for life.

• 47:15Bob Novella?

  I want to see a science fiction movie that's got that.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, right?

• 47:19Bob Novella?

  Right? Wouldn't that be fascinating?

• 47:20Speaker 02

  It would be.

• 47:22Bob Novella?

  Something totally different than, I've never seen anything like that in any science fiction.

• 47:26Speaker 06

  But put it on your calendar for April 2030. That's when the Europa Clipper mission will arrive at Europa.

• 47:33Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 47:35Speaker 06

  To specifically look for this, and I'm certain of many other things having to do with Europa.

• 47:38Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, man. That's gonna be exciting.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  But they're not gonna drill below the ice, though.

• 47:43Speaker 06

  No, they're not. But it will be the, it'll be a dedicated survey to Europa, something that hasn't happened before.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  The question is, could life that evolves on the moon of a rogue planet with no light, could it evolve technological intelligence? And what would that be like?

• 48:04Bob Novella?

  Their sense organs would be interesting.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's hard to even conceive of it. Bob.

• 48:09Bob Novella?

  Yes, sir.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Tell me about this, this carbon fiber that China is saying they're gonna start selling soon.

• 48:16Bob Novella?

  This one caught my attention. This was fun. So time for some material science, kids. China recently showed off its latest super carbon fibers. And if true, it's a milestone that no other country can match, but not in the way you might think. So let's explore this a bit. This is from the CNBM Group, China National Building Material Group. They unveiled their Apex Carbon Fiber Material at the JEC World Trade Show in Paris this past March 11th, 2026. It's called T1200. And no, it's not related to a new, deadlier generation of Terminators. That would be cool, but completely unrelated. And it's not, T1200 is not even a name. It's a grade number.

• 48:57Bob Novella?

  T1200 is an incrementally better carbon fiber in some ways than the T1100, which was the previous champ, which is out there in the world now, in a lot of places. So guys, what does the T stand for?

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Terminator.

• 49:11Bob Novella?

  Ah, no, that would be cool.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  Tensile strength.

• 49:13Bob Novella?

  Yes, it stands for tensile strength. T1200 is now the strongest carbon fiber that's made in terms of tensile strength. So let's cover tensile strength. We've mentioned it on the show a bunch of times. Let's go over it real quick. This is one of the critical measurements of strength. Essentially, it means if I pull on a specific thickness of this material, how much force makes it break? Right? Just keep pulling and when it breaks, that force is its tensile strength. Nothing else really matters, really. The weight of the material doesn't, doesn't, doesn't come into play. So the tensile strength of this T1200 is 8 gigapascals. I don't, guess I don't need to go too deep into that, but a Pascal, I know.

• 49:57Bob Novella?

  A Pascal is a tiny force. It's a tiny force. It's a tenth of a kilogram of force per meter, which is 1 Newton. And this is 8 billion times that. And of course, it applies, it applies to a square meter. And we're not measuring a square meter. We're measuring the thickness. This tiny thickness of these fibers, but it's still a big number and no other carbon fiber has hit eight gigapascals of tensile strength. So it's a, it's a big thing. There's another form of, of tensile strength, if you will, and this is specific tensile strength. You'll hear that bandied about. Um, so this number, this eight gigapascals for this fiber is not the specific tensile strength. The specific tensile strength factors in the weight of, of, of what is

• 50:40Bob Novella?

  of this material, right? So you, you basically take the, um, the tensile strength and you divide it by the density. So you would end up with, so you would end up with something like the specific tensile strength is two gig, two gigapascals per gram per cubic centimeter. So that's the kind of units we're talking about for specific tensile strength. The numbers you would get, since carbon fibers are so light, they would generally have much better numbers for specific tensile strength than heavier steel does in terms, in terms of its specific tensile strength. So, um, so in the, so for this, for this talk, we're just talking about just regular tensile strength, sometimes called ultimate tensile strength, and we're not talking about specific tensile strength.

• 51:21Bob Novella?

  Okay. There's one other measure of strength here we got, we should at least mention, and this is not tensile strength, but tensile modulus. This is essentially stiffness, the resistance to stretching. Sometimes you want a material with a high mod, a high modulus. You do not want any stretching or you want the minimal amount of stretching. Some products like say sporting goods that have carbon fiber, um, I believe, uh, some of them you don't want this stretching. So you want a high modulus for that. This T series, the T 1200, they're, the focus is tensile strength. It does have a high, a high modulus, um, but it's not necessarily the best modulus

• 52:02Bob Novella?

  you can get, but it is considered an elite level of modulus. So, so, so all of these T 1200, T 1100 and on down, they are, the modulus is very, very good, but it's not the focus. These super high end fibers are used primarily, right? We've probably seen shows on this and how, uh, how they use it. It's as a composite, right? They take the fibers and they combine it with resin to create these exceptionally light and strong parts. Now, T1200, this is, this stuff won't be cheap. So it's going to be used in specific applications where the weight and strength are so critical that the expense basically takes a backseat. And that's areas like aerospace, defense, space, pressure vessels, etc.,

• 52:45Bob Novella?

  where you really need it to be strong and lightweight. And, you know, the expense be damned essentially in a lot of ways. Now, China is not actually the first to make T1200 fibers. Japan, Japan's Toray Industries was the first to do it in 2023. So the question then is, what makes Chinese fibers so much more of a milestone than Japan? And the reason for this critical difference between, you know, the Japan's announcement and China's is that, well, Japan created T1200, they absolutely created it. But it's kind of like, they didn't really mention anything about how much they can make. So the assumption, the assumption there, and it is an assumption in a lot of ways, is that it's kind of just like in the lab or barely out of the lab,

• 53:30Bob Novella?

  and they're just not really making a lot of it, or they can't make a lot of it yet. Because essentially, if they could, they would have mentioned it. And that's, that's kind of where we're going with this. China, on the other hand, has announced that they are making, they can make 100 tons per year, which is pretty, I mean, essentially the first mass-produced industrial-grade T1200 carbon fiber in the world, if all of these claims are correct. And that's, and that's a big deal takeaway because that's kind of like the holy grail of when you make a new product like this. A lot of labs can come up with new, with new materials. But if you can make it in high quantities consistently, then that's, that's a major goal that probably most labs would love to be able to hit.

• 54:14Bob Novella?

  If you're interested in how it's manufactured, it's, it can be simplified to something as simple as like, they take these precursor carbon fibers and they pre-oxidize them at 200 to 300 Celsius. And then after that, they undergo a high heat carbonization at 2000 Celsius or 3600 Fahrenheit.

• 54:33Bob Novella?

  So that's, that's kind of the manufacturer. I'm sure it's about a billion times more complicated than what I just said, but that's kind of like the general overview. These fibers are five millionths of a meter thick. They are one tenth the thickness of a human hair. So these things are super, super skinny and they're essentially strands of carbon atoms that are bonded together in like some microscopic crystalline structure. So yeah, so then they did a demonstration and this is what you're, this is what you're talking about Steve. This is what, this is what my take is that they took 120,000 of these carbon fiber filaments, as they're described, and they, they wound them together to make a two millimeter thick, basically kind of rope string thing. Okay. So now imagine

• 55:15Bob Novella?

  that you have 120,000 of these filaments, you put them all together and it only creates a string structure that's two millimeters thick. I mean, that's how thin these little whisker carbon fiber filaments are. Super, super skinny. And using that, right, they created this two millimeter thick carbon fiber conglomeration and they were, they were able to tow a bus carrying more than 50 adults from this two millimeter thick fiber. So that's, that's pretty strong stuff right there. This next thing was important to me. I just, I figured this out like basically before I did anything else. I'm like, all right. Can this make a space elevator? I did the same thing, Bob. Of course, of course you did Steve. Of course you did. And no is the short answer.

• 55:59Bob Novella?

  It can't. They theorize that for a space elevator is, which is basically something super strong and super lightweight that's connected to something in orbit. All right. That's basically the overview of what a space elevator is. You would need, they calculate something with 50 to 62 gigapascals. At the low end. At the low end, that's 50 to 62. At the, at the high end, they said you would need something with a tensile strength of 130 gigapascals, just for safety, just for the extra safety there. This is, as I said, only eight gigapascals. So this is, this is not even close. So an order of magnitude off. Not even, not even close to being used for that. So it's a little sad, but yeah, I kind of figured that's where that would have gone anyway. And I'm not surprised at all Steve, that's one of the first things you thought of too. That's awesome. So in this case, we're the same

• 56:43Bob Novella?

  Carbon fiber has greater tensile strength. The engineers could either reduce the weight and have the same performance of some object that they're creating, or they can increase their performance at the same weight. Huge. Those are the options that engineers want to have, and this is what this will offer. In terms of applications, like I said, it's kind of, maybe it's kind of obvious, but aerospace and rockets, humanoid robotics, EV lightweighting. Have you heard that term, Steve? EV lightweighting, making electric cars lighter. Wind turbine blades, high-end manufacturing, strategic defense applications, all that stuff. They also say that there's a good potential for this in the future as a backbone for future new energy industries like hydrogen storage.

• 57:26Bob Novella?

  And get this one, I hadn't heard this term before. Low altitude economy. And that includes things like drone technology, eVTOL, electronic vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, power generation at altitude as well. So those are just a few of the applications for this super high-end carbon fiber. Okay, so keep in mind, a couple of things to keep in mind here. That China is making or claiming 100 tons annually. And that 100 tons is a lot, but that's still in the range of specialty material, right? This is in bulk carbon fiber creation. You're not making production level cars out of it? Right. This is like, yeah, this is a specialty material that will be available, will not be cheap,

• 58:08Bob Novella?

  but you're not going to, you're not going to make every bike and fishing pole and everything else out of this stuff. It's still, that's still the amount that they're creating here, isn't near where it would need to be to do that. And also, another thing to keep in mind, much of this reporting is from Chinese state media. And there's, you know, there's lots of company statements in here, and then there's also like reactions to those claims. So I'm not saying that this is anything like the recent solid-state battery announcements that we've talked about on the show, which are almost certainly hot, full of hot air. I would guess that they're, that this is, they really can make this. I mean, it's been three years since Japan was able to do it, and China has been working on this for 20 years, nonstop, and they've just been going right through the catalog, you know, T600.

• 58:53Bob Novella?

  T eight hundred, T nine hundred, now, now they've got T twelve hundred. Um, so it makes sense that, that, that they could have gotten here. But the thing that's important though is that just saying, just saying that you can create this is, is one thing. Um, and produce it in quantity is one thing, but you also need to provide independent, you know, there's got to be independent verification. There's got to be things like batch consistency. There's got to be things like long-term reliability. And this is critical information. So this is what we're waiting for from, from China. Uh, I guess in the near future is, is they're going to release this information, this certification and all this information about how this material reacts in, in lots of different scenarios. And, uh, and so our engineers or other engineers throughout the world can then look at that information

• 59:38Bob Novella?

  and see how, and see how good this stuff really is, right? Is this stuff, is this stuff gonna, does it have long-term reliability? Is it going to be safe? So what they're, so what they would then do if it came, if we actually bought some and wanted to make things, then we would put this material through our own regulate, regulations and determine, all right, how safe is this? How good is this stuff? Can we trust lives? Can we, can we use this in ways that aren't, aren't going to kill people or, or just explode or do something crazy? So, um, that's what we're going to need to see before we can really be, you know, super confident that this stuff is not only, not only exists, but also is something that is, that is being created in, in high enough quality and consistency that can be just used by, by everybody, you know, who wants to, who wants to buy it.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  Bob, since you brought it up, the, remember the Donut Lab solid state battery?

• 1:00:27Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Yeah. Something new on there?

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's been a couple of things. So they did have, um, some third-party independent testing.

• 1:00:34Bob Novella?

  Whoa.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  However, they only verified that they, um, could withstand high temperatures and retain, retain their charge efficiency. And that they could charge from 10 to 80% in 12 minutes, not the five minutes that they said, but in 12 minutes, but they still haven't verified the key, which is the 400 watt hour per kilogram energy density that remains unverified. And they still haven't proven that they had, that they're using a new technology, that this is not just, they're not just shopping around a, you know, lithium ion battery or something.

• 1:01:08Bob Novella?

  Yeah. So it doesn't mean that much, even though they've, there's some corroboration, but the critical stuff is not being corroborated.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  They haven't corroborated the key. That it's production ready, or that it has 400 watt hours per kilogram, or that it's a solid state battery. We still don't know any of those key elements.

• 1:01:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not hopeful based on what, you know, we've discussed about it. Not hopeful at all.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  It'd be nice, but yeah, I'm not, not holding my breath.

• 1:01:33Bob Novella?

  Too good to be true.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Bob.

• 1:01:35Bob Novella?

  Sure.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  Evan.

• 1:01:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  This is a momentous occasion. This is, I mean, this happens, this happens not infrequently, but you know, not that often that we get a ultimate final confirmation that the skeptics were right the whole time. About a big, big skeptical topic.

• 1:01:57Bob Novella?

  I was really hoping that somebody was going to talk about this because we had to.

• 1:02:01Speaker 06

  Is that way the sort of science emerges, you know, when new evidence comes to light? That just really kind of solidifies what was believed or what was thought to be all along. It's, it's, it's a good moment. It's, it's definitely a good moment. We're talking, of course, about Bigfoot.

• 1:02:21Bob Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:02:23Speaker 06

  The Patterson Gimlin Bigfoot film. Boy, that is, that is the single most iconic.

• 1:02:29Bob Novella?

  That's it, man. It's the, it's the Nessie. It's the Nessie of Bigfoot, right?

• 1:02:33Speaker 06

  Absolutely. A hundred percent.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  I think you mean to say it's the surgeon's photo.

• 1:02:37Bob Novella?

  Yes, exactly what I meant. Thank you, Steve.

• 1:02:40Speaker 06

  In modern terms, yes, yes. Oh my gosh. The most iconic piece of media ever presented as evidence of an unusually large and woolly bipedal ape-like creature inhabiting the forest areas in the American Northwest, and specifically California, right, Kara?

• 1:02:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, yeah, yeah, definitely.

• 1:02:59Speaker 06

  Except you're down in the southern part, but.

• 1:03:01Cara Santa Maria?

  No, yeah, more, yeah. Northern California, definitely, uh, Oregon. Yeah.

• 1:03:06Speaker 06

  Oh, it's all.

• 1:03:07Cara Santa Maria?

  And Washington.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  Washington, yeah.

• 1:03:09Speaker 06

  So this footage was shot in October of 1967 in Bluff Creek, California. The film is a 59 second piece of shaky 16 millimeter footage that appears to show a large upright hair covered figure walking along in the sandbar before briefly turning its head towards the camera. That still frame taken from the film is that moment that that creature looks over its right shoulder and directly into the camera lens. Yep. The iconic Bigfoot image of all time captured the world's imagination is still universally recognized as Bigfoot, no matter where you go. Frame 352, they call it.

• 1:03:50Speaker 06

  But the entire idea of an enormous ape-like creature estimated to be as tall as 15 feet. Whoa. Gigantopithecus much? Yeah, right? And it's on the loose in California. That is captivating and it's fantastical all at the same time. And if you remember not two months ago, I was giving a news item related to Bigfoot about how some Marines claimed they had seen one recently. And in that news item, I explained how Roger Patterson, you know, the camera person that captured this footage, shopped around his footage for several years, but there were really none too interested in buying the footage, but he eventually caught a break and he got a media figure to help prop it up. And then he wound up on the BBC promoting it.

• 1:04:34Speaker 06

  And then it was off to the races from there. He was on the Tonight Show, the Merv Griffin Show, and a host of other daytime and evening shows. Oh, man. There it is. It went into the cultural consciousness forever at that point. If you've ever watched the original footage, I know we have, Kara, you've seen that original footage, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're familiar with this. And you can go on YouTube and find it. Standard piece of handheld period looking home movie footage, you know, very shaky, hard to focus on anything until about the 26 second mark. And then the camera stops shaking violently and captures the creature walking away into the distance. It was still shaky, right? Handheld, but discernible. And it's no wonder that it has become sort of this staple or bedrock for skeptics and

• 1:05:14Speaker 06

  skeptic societies to talk about this for so long because it's so widely viewed since the early seventies and because it's been analyzed for decades. It has a lot of teachable lessons on how to think critically about extraordinary claims and the evidence that's used. To support those claims. It's a great microcosm for, for teaching critical thinking. So yeah, that's Definitely is. And it appeals to kids, right? So they can learn early. It's a wonderful tool to, to use in grade school, right, Jay? Absolutely. With, you know, as opposed to Oh, yeah. No, it's all good. Just believe whatever they say.

• 1:05:49Speaker 06

  So the skeptics will ask questions like, you know, where's the physical evidence? Where's the DNA? Any bones? Are there remains? Is there poop? Yeah. The habitats? Where's the nest? Right? Tracks? Real tracks? Dens? Are they, what are they eating? Where are the verified photos? Where's the video? Where's the real video? You know, real footage of this thing. But despite that incredible amount of negative evidence, we have in place television shows, podcasts and movies and books and organizations devoted to, uh, stoking the coals of Bigfoot. I remember very vividly in the mid 2000s, when someone went ahead, God bless them, they took the film, they broke it down frame by frame and stabilized it. Yeah.

• 1:06:32Speaker 06

  And then put it into a composition, taking away the handheld shake, right? And what you saw was an absolute thing of beauty. That's a human in a costume with an all too human gait. Yeah, the gait looks like just some guy walking in a costume. And to me, that put the final nail in the coffin of what was already pretty much a dead conspiracy. That footage was a hoax. But now we once again have Bigfoot news. This week, can't seem to leave this in the past because there's a new documentary that premiered just days ago at the South by Southwest Film Festival, and it's tackling the 1967 Patterson Gimlin Bigfoot film. It's called Capturing Bigfoot. It's directed

• 1:07:13Speaker 06

  by Mark Evans, and it's generating buzz, not because it's proving Bigfoot exists, but it's bringing more evidence in just the opposite direction and some pretty concrete stuff. I haven't seen the documentary yet. Obviously, it's only appeared there. I'm sure we'll see it. It'll be available soon. It's in some venue or some way. I'm going to watch it as soon as I can. But so this report is from varying accounts from people who did see it, who were there. So Capturing Bigfoot revisits the footage, and they present also new evidence. According to reports from the screenings and the early reviews, the film is built around a newly discovered reel of 16 millimeter film found in a safe.

• 1:07:57Speaker 06

  Which appears to show a dress rehearsal version of the Bigfoot shot. Whoa, no. Shot a year before the 1967. So they have the exact costume? Well, here's what it is. No, they don't have the costume.

• 1:08:11Jay Novella?

  He burned the costume.

• 1:08:13Speaker 06

  Yep. Yep. The costume got burned, but what they have, but they dusted off this old film footage. It's a weird thing. Here's how the story goes. June of 2024, Mark Evans, the producer and director of the film, he was contacted by a woman named Teresa Brooks, who had this canister of old film from her father's safe. Her father had passed away. Evans said that after her father's death, she had found a canister of 16 millimeter film that had been sealed away for over half a century. She needed help getting it developed and wondered if I might be interested in doing something with it. And so he did. He developed it. Brooks's father, this is Teresa Brooks, who handed the film over to him. Brooks's father was a man named Norm Johnson,

• 1:08:58Speaker 06

  who spent years running the film department for Seattle's Boeing Company, and who was also connected to Patterson and Gimlin through his brother Dave. And it quickly became clear to Evans that Teresa's father had, was the one who had developed the Patterson Gimlin film in the first place. Now Teresa Brooks told Evans that the reason the film had been locked away in a safe is because her mother had feared that her husband might have been, been involved with a short movie that she was convinced was probably a hoax and didn't want to have any kind of legal ramifications or get anybody, you know, in trouble. So they stowed it away. So Evans had the 16 millimeter film developed and days later, he found himself looking at a 40 second clip

• 1:09:39Speaker 06

  set in a location very similar to the one in the 1967 movie, showing what appeared to be a slightly skinnier looking Bigfoot walking into the woods. Evans said that it took maybe nine months for me to realize what we really had here. Nine months? Yeah, I guess, you know, for whatever reason, he didn't really elaborate that in the interviews that, that I read. But he was able to determine by the markings on the film that the footage was shot in 1966. So a year before the Patterson Gimlin movie. And what we, what he says, what we eventually found is that this new footage represented a trial run, a rehearsal that was never discarded.

• 1:10:17Bob Novella?

  Oh, wow. Are they releasing that?

• 1:10:19Speaker 06

  That's what, yes, it's part of the documentary that is now out and being and being and being shown. So that's, that's the, that is the, that is the core of this. It's built around that. But, you know, the documentary goes into other things as well. It interviews people connected with the original filmmakers. There's testimony from individuals who claim they have insider knowledge, you know? They, they build it up around this and the people, all the, the people who were either involved directly or in a tangent way involved. And the film leans heavily on the perspective of Roger Patterson's son, who came to the belief that the original footage was staged. And I recall from a time ago, reading about that, that Patterson's son had come out and

• 1:11:02Speaker 06

  said that it was, it was a hoax, like one of the, this is probably in the 90s or so, maybe even that you're in the early 2000s. So it pretty much just further goes, I didn't really think there was even anything left to dissect here or any more marrow to suck out of the bone. But now that you have another piece of film in the context of this famous film, showing you that there was a dress rehearsal for this whole thing. I don't know how anybody can still believe that the Patterson Gimlin film is authentic in any way of being evidence of Bigfoot at all. So there we have it. I cannot wait to see that. I can't wait to see it. And it sounds like it's, it sounds, it was well, well received and I'm very much looking

• 1:11:47Speaker 06

  forward to seeing this new documentary as soon as it becomes available to me.

• 1:11:51Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Wow.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we also have to mention there's other things, other reasons why we know pretty, pretty much for sure that it was a hoax. The guy who was in the costume confessed, I'm the guy in the costume.

• 1:12:02Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  You have his confession.

• 1:12:04Speaker 06

  Uh, Steve, I've read that there had been, it was the, right, the guy, but I've also read that other people in time also confessed to being the person in the costume. And I believe those have, you know, less, less credible, you know, but when you do have multiple people coming out and saying, yeah, I am Spartacus, I am Spartacus, right? I am Spartacus. Yeah, it does. It kind of muddies, muddies things up a little bit. And let, and so now, you know, kind of, okay, well, who's really telling the truth, the truth here?

• 1:12:32Jay Novella?

  Evan, how do you know that a Bigfoot wasn't in the, the Bigfoot costume?

• 1:12:37Speaker 06

  Uh, that's good. That, that, that's a very good question, Jay, because when they interviewed Bigfoot, they, they, Bigfoot said he could not fit into the costume.

• 1:12:44Jay Novella?

  Oh, gotcha. Okay.

• 1:12:45Speaker 06

  So he decided not to help make the movie.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, I think Bob Hieronymus is the, the guy who was in the costume and the, he's, he's in the documentary. All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:12:56Jay Novella?

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

• 1:13:06Jay Novella?

  Okay, so do you guys have any guesses?

• 1:13:09Speaker 06

  It sounds like chiseling going on, you know, someone striking.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  Squeaking, very high pitched squeaking.

• 1:13:14Speaker 06

  I thought it was like someone.

• 1:13:16Bob Novella?

  To me, it's like something hitting like a tambourine type thing. Yeah.

• 1:13:20Speaker 06

  I had it like a hammer, holding a, you know, someone holding a spike and a hammer and chiseling away at rock or something like that.

• 1:13:25Jay Novella?

  It's funny, when I, when I reveal what this is, to me, it is so obvious what it is. You know, I'm hearing you guys say these other descriptions and I'm like, I can't even like squeeze that into my head. I don't know. This is like a very, very recognizable sound to me. Anyway, we have a listener named Stephen Walker. He wrote in, he said, hi, Jay, I'm a patron, uh, from Cambs Belang near Glasgow in Scotland, and I love listening to you guys every week. My first thought was that this is Newton's cradle. You guys know what that is, right? It's all the silver balls that are on. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. In, in that rack thing.

• 1:13:59Speaker 06

  Clack, clack, clack, clack.

• 1:14:00Jay Novella?

  On your desk. Yeah.

• 1:14:02Speaker 06

  Click, click, click.

• 1:14:02Jay Novella?

  All right. So he thought it was one of those. But what was puzzling to me was a bit, me as a bit, is the double click at the end. So I wonder if this is someone attempting to make a stack of Newton's cradles where one drives another and so on. And the double click at the end is some mechanical device which kickstarts it back up the chain. Really intrigued to find out what it is. It better not be a sea creature, Stephen. That was a nod to you, Kara.

• 1:14:27Jay Novella?

  Okay, so I have another listener named, I had to actually get the pronunciation because this was a very difficult name for me. Sundindrapal Saini. Sundindrapal Saini.

• 1:14:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:14:41Jay Novella?

  Uh, please let me know how I did with my head. I had it, look it up. So he says, hi Jay, this noise reminds me of leather, of a leather anklet with a small brass bell worn by some performers in traditional dances in India that makes that sound. It's called, it's called ghunagru. You guys are the best and make my day when I listen to any episode. Uh, thank you so much for that wonderful comment you had and um, thank you for introducing me to this type of dance. I looked it up. It's pretty cool. Like you guys should take a look at it. It's called, it's spelled G H U N G H R O O and it's pronounced ghunagru to people who can't pronounce words. Okay. Very cool. You are incorrect, but it was very cool learning about that. Thanks a lot.

• 1:15:23Jay Novella?

  I have another listener named Skogan who thinks that this is a red squirrel. That is incorrect. All right, guys, I, I do have a winner. A red squirrel? Okay. Did any of those guesses help you guys in any way?

• 1:15:34Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 1:15:34Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:15:35Jay Novella?

  Not really. Okay, so a listener named Josh Ronan and said, the consistency of this is really throwing me off, but I'm gonna go with a shoe squeaking on a basketball court in a very ordinary fashion, not a very fun game to watch if I'm being honest, Josh. This is the, the gymnasium basketball sneaker squeak. Yeah. Let me play for you again.

• 1:15:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, there was a big study, wasn't it?

• 1:15:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I read that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Recently, yeah.

• 1:15:59Jay Novella?

  So he's right.

• 1:16:04Jay Novella?

  Oh, it's not.

• 1:16:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, of course it is.

• 1:16:07Jay Novella?

  So, yeah, when you, when you, to me, you know, it's just, there's no other sound in the world like it. What? Yeah, it's, it's unique to me. This is a very cool study that they did. You know, there's lots, lots to it. I can't, couldn't summarize this for you very well, but this is what they're saying is going on. So imagine, if you will, that there's a tiny spot of rubber that lifts and slides and that slip spot travels quickly across the contact area and as it passes, the rubber snaps back onto the floor. So every time that ripple passes, it creates a tiny vibration and those vibrations combine and produce the squeaking sound you hear. You know, so essentially it's the rubber touching the floor and it gets moved a little bit from the pressure. And then as the pressure,

• 1:16:51Jay Novella?

  as the shoe lifts up, it goes right back to its original position. That's how I'm interpreting that. But you know, they know, they pretty much know now how and why that sound is being made. If you ever like went to a basketball game, like you hear that squeak thousands of times.

• 1:17:06Speaker 06

  It sounds like, right. It sounds like Morse code tapping away all for the whole game. Absolutely.

• 1:17:12Jay Novella?

  Very cool. It was cool to see, you know, all the, all of the missed guesses that people had and interpretations like hearing Bob think it's a tambourine is so fascinating to me like, because I don't hear that at all. Anyway, thanks, Mark for sending that in. I have a new noisy for you guys this week. This noisy was sent in by a listener named David.

• 1:17:37Jay Novella?

  I think that's a cool noisy. Anyway, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at [email protected]. Steve, we, this is just such a mega list of stuff going on here. So many things that we're doing with the SGU in the, in the, this coming year, but I think to simplify it, we have shows in Madison, Wisconsin that are happening May 29th and 30th. We have Psychon happening June 11th to 14th. Then we have the New Zealand and Australia conferences. All of the tickets that we have for sale for all of these events. You can go to the skepticsguy.org and we reorganize that to make it easier on you. There, if you go to our events page,

• 1:18:19Jay Novella?

  they're in, they're in order of when they happen, right? And I, you know, I just want to put a big exclamation point on our trips to Australia and New Zealand because this is a big deal. You know, it's very, it's very, very, very expensive to make our way out there and we're super psyched that we could make it work. We really hope that you guys join us at those two conferences. Both of the conferences will, we are having a Skeptical Extravaganza. You can buy tickets for that add-on show. The Australia. that we're having, we have tons of things that you can buy tickets for and tickets are selling out very fast for all of the secondary events. We have, you know, we have space for people to come see the conference itself, but we're running out of tickets and space for basically

• 1:19:03Jay Novella?

  all the other secondary shows. So if you want in on that, you got to move quick because they're moving fast. A few other things. If you're an artist and you're interested in submitting some artwork for us, some illustrations, we are looking for swag ideas and we're looking for swag art. So we can't pay you, but we will, we will, Steve and I were talking about what we would do if we accept someone's, someone's artwork. We will come up with something. It'll be some type of, some type of fizz rep.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  Well, there's one thing we're definitely going to do. We may do something in addition to this, but we are developing an SGU award coin. So we have a series of coins that we produce and sell as swag. We have just the SGU coin. We had the eclipse coin for the eclipse event that we did. We had the 1,000th episode coin. We have a science or fiction coin. We're going to come up with a coin for the, the down under trip and an award coin. The thing about the award coin is you can't buy it. You cannot buy this coin. You have to earn it. And one of the ways that you could earn it is to submit artwork that we use in any fashion. You get rewarded with an award, SGU award coin.

• 1:20:12Jay Novella?

  Yeah. So it, I would really love some good t-shirt designs. We historically made the worst t-shirt design of all time for our Australia trip that we did. It was,

• 1:20:25Jay Novella?

  It's amazing. Wait, it's, I like it. I like it.

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  One t-shirt fail.

• 1:20:29Jay Novella?

  Because it slipped into a different category as time went by.

• 1:20:33Speaker 06

  It became very camp, you know, it was camp to begin with.

• 1:20:36Jay Novella?

  We're just saying it was widely like thought to be a bad t-shirt design. Oh, yeah. I, I still thank the person that made the drawing for us. I still laugh at it. I still think it's great that I'm the only one that's not afraid because the drop bears actually like me, but they really hate everyone. I think they particularly hated Bob in that t-shirt or Evan.

• 1:20:57Speaker 06

  One of us had our arms torn off. I can't. Was that me? Maybe a bit.

• 1:21:00Jay Novella?

  Ed, I don't like conference specific T-shirts because typically, for some reason, people don't like those. So any cool design that you think you could incorporate an element of the SGU in, something that has to do with us and the podcast, something that has to do with any of our segments, anything that is SGU related that you you you want to submit for like a T-shirt design, that would be a lot of fun. We are brainstorming ideas to come up with 3D print concepts. Like, you know, we want to make an SGU robot, which we're working on. And we have a couple of other ideas that we're also working on. But if you have ideas, or you have designs that you've made, or whatever, you have an STL

• 1:21:42Jay Novella?

  you want to send our way, feel free to do that as well. But in general, any cool swag ideas that you can help us design, that would be a lot of fun. So all of this, send us to [email protected].

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  Listen, if you if you want to use AI in any way as a tool to make your art, that's fine. But keep in mind, you can't use AI art made on any of those, you know, public platforms for merchandise. So you have to completely own the rights to this art.

• 1:22:12Speaker 06

  I see.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  It can't be something that's in the public domain, because it was made with Midjourney or ChatGPT, for example.

• 1:22:17Jay Novella?

  And also let us know if you used AI to do it, just so we have an understanding. Because we might have to talk about it, just to make sure. We have to be very careful. We don't want anyone to say, hey, that, you know, that's my design, or whatever.

• 1:22:27Speaker 06

  Infringing.

• 1:22:28Jay Novella?

  Just have to be careful with that.

• 1:22:29Speaker 02

  All right. Well, we have a great interview coming up. So let's go to that interview now. We are joined now by Professor Christian Anderson. Christian, welcome to The Skeptics Guide.

• 1:22:45Speaker 07

  Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Long-term listener.

• 1:22:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yay. Thanks for coming on. You are the Director of Infectious Disease Genomics at Scripps Research Translational Institute. And you contacted us after we did the recent piece on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, to let us know that you're actually a scientist who works on that question. So I have one question for you, and then we'll have you to describe for us what your involvement with this issue is. But my first question is, is your first name Hans?

• 1:23:18Speaker 07

  It's not, no, although I do hear that a lot with Hans Christian because I am Danish and of course, most people have heard about about Hans Christian.

• 1:23:27Speaker 02

  Okay, so you're not Hans Christian Andersen, so we just stop.

• 1:23:29Speaker 07

  I'm not, I'm not, just to be clear, yes.

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  All right, so tell us about your research and your involvement with this question.

• 1:23:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, so my general research has been focused on on understanding just emergence of viruses. Essentially, where do they come from and how do they end up causing human outbreaks? And we have done that in the past, focusing on many other viruses like Lassa and Ebola and Zika. And of course, with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic back in early 2020, that became one of the questions that we were really focused on, trying to understand. At the time, we didn't know that it was gonna, you know, turn into a huge pandemic that we are still living with here today. But a simple question was just like, how did this all begin? How does this start? And how did SARS-CoV-2 find itself in a human population?

• 1:24:15Speaker 07

  That's essentially the kinds of questions that that myself and my lab that we tried to study.

• 1:24:20Speaker 02

  And did you have any direct involvement with the World Health Organization panel on this issue? Or this is just your area of research?

• 1:24:26Speaker 07

  No, so it's just my area of research. I have been involved with the WHO on other questions relating to viral emergence and transmission, but not to the to the question of the origin with the Sago that that WHO established later on. I had no involvement with that research itself.

• 1:24:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Did they look at your research, though, when they were coming up with their findings? Did they cite any of the work that you had done?

• 1:24:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, they did. And the recent report that Kara, you covered recently did take a close look at a fair bit of our research. The research where we show, for example, the Hoonan seafood market really was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, is research that we published back in 2022.

• 1:25:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:25:07Speaker 02

  So what's your summary of what we can say now about the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus? The virus that causes COVID-19? What do we know? What do we not know? Where do we go from here?

• 1:25:19Speaker 07

  I think we can say with high degree of confidence, if not direct proof, is that SARS-CoV-2, like SARS-CoV-1 and other prior pandemics, was the result of a zoonosis spilling over from wild animals at a seafood market in the middle of Wuhan, China. I think we can say that with pretty high level of confidence. But I will say, as we are looking at what happened upstream of that market, where did those infected animals come from? How did they find their way into Wuhan? For example, that is a lot more nebulous, in which there's still a lot of data missing and there's a lot of data that has likely not been shared on sort of those upstream

• 1:26:01Speaker 07

  upstream investigations that have been done by the China CDC.

• 1:26:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was kind of my sense from reading the literature too, that yeah, we pretty much know it was a zoonotic spillover, but we don't know if it came from necessarily the wet market itself or what specific intermediary species it was. There's no smoking guns like, aha, this, this was the intermediary species. This was the intermediary virus.

• 1:26:26Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  Right, you agree with that? And do you think we'll ever find it or is it pretty much gone in the wind now?

• 1:26:30Speaker 07

  Um, I think it's, it's hard. Like, first of all, we don't actually know the intermediary hosts of species for most outbreaks, epidemics, pandemics of the past, right? It's, it's very hard work. SARS-CoV-1 or the SARS epidemic back in 2002 to 2004 was sort of special in the sense that a lot of infected animals were found that also had SARS-1 virus. But that really is, is the exception. It's very rare that we see that. And I think one key difference between that and, and the COVID-19 pandemic was that back then, they were actually trying to cover up the early SARS infections, right?

• 1:27:13Speaker 07

  There was no notification of the, of the WHO, for example, of that ongoing. And wild markets and the trading in wild animals at the time continued in China. And of course, when that continues, that means there's a lot of material that you Go into markets, restaurants, selling these animals and actually test to see if you can find the to find the virus. Most of those back then tested negative. They didn't actually find the virus, but there were animals, of course, both at markets as well as farms back in Hubei. For example, they were positive for the virus. That we don't have for COVID-19. And one major

• 1:27:51Speaker 07

  reason for that is that as soon as COVID-19 was recognized in late December 2019, early January 2020, markets were shut down first, and then after that, the whole trade was shut down quickly. So the ability to test animals unfortunately just was not there post the closure of the Hunan Seafood Market itself.

• 1:28:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Interesting. I'm curious, you know, I I visited Southern China in December of 2017, actually, so just two years prior. And I went to a wet market in Dongguan. And I remember thinking to myself as I was, you know, shopping and looking around and talking to people, there were frogs in a container right next to chickens that were in a container, right? And like some living species, some species who had just been recently slaughtered. And then, of course, like lots of fruits and veg and really amazing looking produce. But I remember thinking, these animals never are near each other in the wild. Like, these different animals that they had in this market are in such close quarters,

• 1:28:54Cara Santa Maria?

  and they're never, you know, or maybe not never, but they're often probably not intermingling in the wild. This is like a spillover event asking to happen. Is this a common source for zoonotic infections?

• 1:29:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, this is exactly right. That, and in fact, there has been studies done on this, where when you look at these types of animals, raccoon dogs, civet cats, for example, which which are high, you know, high prevalence, have a high prevalence of coronaviruses, for example, is that when you look at those in the wild, you're not really finding that many viruses in general. But as these animals pass through the whole chain of wildlife

• 1:29:39Speaker 07

  Trading, first they get captured at farms, then they end up in supply chains in which now you're mixing a lot of different animals, as you were saying, and then those ultimately end up at markets in densely populated city centers in southern China in particular, but also central China, of course, where Wuhan is, but although to a lesser extent.

• 1:30:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:02Speaker 07

  And then if you start looking at the animals that are at market and look at what types of viruses they have, what you will realize is that most of them have viruses that are potential human pathogens, and many of them have many of them. So when you look at markets, you will find coronaviruses, you will find influenza viruses, you will find known human pathogens, but of course you will also find a lot of novel viruses that might be the next pandemic virus, but of course you don't know at that stage. And you really only see that at the time at which they reach their market, because that whole upstream trading puts all these different animals together in terrible conditions

• 1:30:45Speaker 07

  that end up with getting infected from from other animals in the same chain.

• 1:30:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, that was what we all saw in Contagion, right? Like, they traced it. That's what I loved about that movie. They traced it back to where it started with that amazing scene at the end. I can only guess that at the beginning of all of this, were your original thoughts like this probably happened because of the wildlife trade?

• 1:31:09Speaker 07

  Actually, my first thought was that there's gotta be a lab leak.

• 1:31:13Speaker 07

  I mean, that's, that's, that's the, yeah, that's the, yeah, that's the part of my, my sort of my, my foray into this is that I knew about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, I knew about the fact that they would do chimeric viruses, that they're working on coronaviruses, they were collecting viruses from the wild and trying to, to grow them in tissue culture in the lab. And initially, when I took a look at this and saying, oh, there's a few features of SARS-CoV-2 that sort of look peculiar to me, pretty quickly, I, I went straight to the lab leak and said, look, it's, it's gotta be that, right? But then, of course, I started thinking about it more and really importantly, had many conversations with colleagues, the colleagues that I end up publishing together with,

• 1:31:58Speaker 07

  where I and they realized that actually that that doesn't really make any sense because, first of all, the things that we thought looked peculiar to SARS-CoV-2 in fact are not peculiar to SARS-CoV-2, things like a furin cleavage site that you might have heard about.

• 1:32:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:32:15Speaker 07

  We find those come and go. We've heard that a lot, right? But that comes and goes across coronaviruses, including beta coronaviruses that SARS-CoV-2 is. And even though SARS-CoV-2 is the first what's called a sub-bico-virus, the first first subspecies, with a with a furin cleavage site, we see these widely across many other coronaviruses, including the the common cold coronaviruses. I just didn't know that initially because while I study the origin of outbreaks and bioemergence, I was not an expert on coronaviruses. So I was new to to studying coronaviruses specifically, but had done this with many other viruses like Ebola, Lassa Zika, as I mentioned, right?

• 1:33:00Speaker 07

  And so I had a lot of lot of updating of my own knowledge as I went into this particular particular question. But yeah, when I initially put all of this together, it's like, that's gotta be a lab leak. I mean, the lab is right there, except it's not, right? It's actually 20 kilometers away from that market. But of course, early on, it also wasn't clear exactly how how strong that connection to to the market is. But it turns out it is very strong.

• 1:33:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and now you're you're confident that a lab leak has been ruled out?

• 1:33:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, I will say the the the evidence we have available today, and even the early evidence back in early 2020, really shows that a lab leak, while not impossible, right? This is important to understand that we're not saying that anything is not off the table at this stage, but it is extremely unlikely to the point that, in my opinion, it's implausible that it could have come from a lab. And it's simply because when we're looking At the evidence itself, for example, all the early cases cluster around the market itself. That really only happens when an infection starts in a place that then spreads from there.

• 1:34:12Speaker 07

  We even see further example of that during the pandemic where other clusters pop up other places in China. Around markets where we see exactly the same same picture where where cases start clustering around the place in which the outbreak itself started. Of course, inside the market itself, the the environmental positivity of the virus. Clusters in the corner of the market in which we now know they were selling wild animals like raccoon dogs and civic cats, which. A priori, we had had expected could be potential intermediate hosts. And we even find samples in which we we find evidence of the virus and those wild animals in the very same sample itself.

• 1:34:55Speaker 02

  So why do you think the intelligence community still favors the lab leak hypothesis?

• 1:34:59Speaker 07

  The the intelligence community doesn't actually favor the lab leak hypothesis. There's a few intelligence communities like the the FBI, for example, and the DOE. Do favor the the the lab leak, but the rest of them, I believe it's five others, actually favor pseudnosis. So so in terms of like, just, you know, the overall picture is pointing from their perspective to pseudnosis. But what is interesting between, you know, the FBI, and we've got a little bit of insights into why they believe it came from a lab. And it essentially comes back to exactly my first intuition, which was the global lab is right there and they're working on the viruses. But they don't appear to actually have looked at any of the scientific evidence.

• 1:35:44Speaker 07

  What's also really important here is that they seem to favor different labs. One is the FBI, I believe, is the Wuhan CDC, which is not the Wuhan Institute of Virology, right? It's in a completely different location versus the DOE, which seem to favor the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And what's important here is that that's not the same hypothesis, right? We're talking about two completely different labs. So of course you can't collapse them into saying like, yes, so that is the same. It is not. Those are, those are two mutually exclusive possibilities.

• 1:36:18Speaker 02

  Do you think that part of it is the fact that China is not totally forthcoming with information? And related to that, do you think we could get closer to an answer in terms of like the actual pathway of the zoonosis? If we had unfettered access from China?

• 1:36:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, I, I mean, there's no question that, that, that China has been obscuring the, the origin question in general. And of course, China has not handed over everything anybody has ever asked of them. But I think the important bit there is that like, what country would do that? Imagine that we had a cluster outbreak here in the United States and China was demanding all our lab notebooks. Right. I don't think that people would be forthcoming with that immediately, right? But I think the important bit here to understand too, is that for this to happen and coming out of China is embarrassing to China, no matter how you look at it, because post the SARS outbreak back in early 2000, right? This was not supposed to happen.

• 1:37:21Speaker 07

  They set up all sorts of, of, of, you know, detection systems that should detect these outbreak early. And then not cause a pandemic from there. So of course, this is a deep embarrassment to China in general. And whether it came from the lab or wet market, those are equally bad if you look at it from the perspective of China, right? Which is why when you're looking at the prevailing theories and the prevailing belief in China is that they don't believe that COVID-19 even came for China. In fact, the, the most favored theory in China is that it came from a US lab. About half of Chinese, when pulled for it, believe that it came out of, of a US biolab.

• 1:38:04Speaker 07

  Exactly the same, as you polled the Americans, about half of them or more believe that it came out of a Chinese lab, right? It is completely the same theory, it's just, it's reversed.

• 1:38:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And of course, that points to propaganda and rhetoric, but the Sago conclusions were that even the Chinese hypothesis that it didn't start in the Wuhan market but was imported from some other market somewhere else, even that seemed to be somewhat implausible. I'm, I want to point out, because I think it's just important to reiterate, what a beautiful example this is of the scientific method in process, that you, as an individual scientist, but one who runs a lab, basically went in saying, ooh, it's probably this other thing. And you, after looking at the data, you were like, nope, I'm actually convinced it's not.

• 1:38:54Speaker 07

  Correct. I mean, this is sort of like my progression through, you know, the experience of studying this question, and then this becoming a very politicized question was that the, the, the sort of criticism people were leveling against me very early on was that they, they were saying on social media, Twitter back then, that I'd never, we never even considered a lab leak a possibility. And I was pretty forceful in pushing back and saying like, no, actually, we did. And not just that, I actually thought it was pretty likely. And but people then said, oh, but you're just saying that you're lying about that. We don't believe that to be true. Right? And then, of course, I had some emails

• 1:39:36Speaker 07

  with, with, with Tony Fauci, Dr. Fauci, that, that, that became public, where, you know, my first email to him, where I very specifically tell him that, look, I think this could come from a lab. We need to look at it much more closely. We have a good team lined up, so we should know more in the days to come. But once that, that, you know, email came out, that basically proved my point, which was that, look, clearly, I say, I think it came from the lab in that email, as I have been saying. But then it switched around to like, oh, so then actually, he always believed it came from the lab. But now he's just saying that it came from Because Dr. Fauci told him to, right?

• 1:40:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:18Speaker 07

  Which is such a good example is like, no, it's actually not that, right? It's just that I started researching this question a little bit more critically, coming from a first point of, you know, general confusion, right? But saying like, look, I think it could be this. But then realizing relatively quickly by, again, doing analyses, looking at the data, learning a lot more, which of course has continued over the years since, right? To realizing that that first hunch hypothesis that I had was just not correct.

• 1:40:49Speaker 02

  And you also reached out to people with more specific expertise than you, which is interesting too, because again, the public thinks, oh, you're a virology expert. You have all the expertise that is needed. But no, scientists recognize the limits of their own area of expertise. I mean, there's always somebody more expert than you. Or even if they have the same level of expertise, they may be giving you a different perspective or have different ideas. The community aspect of scientific thinking and exploration is often underappreciated by the public because that's not the narrative we see in movies, right? Right, the narrative's the lone. Genius maverick, you know, who's immediately correct and then gets suppressed by the bad guys, you know? That's the narrative they know. Yeah.

• 1:41:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's exactly right, right? And I am these days, I am an evolutionary biologist, right? But my training, I'm actually an immunologist by training. So I did my PhD was in immunology in Cambridge in the UK, where back then, I should say, I started listening to the SGU. So as I mentioned to you in the email is that I've been listening to the SGU when I was a graduate student and now I'm a tenured professor. I'm still listening.

• 1:41:56Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 1:41:57Speaker 07

  But, you know, back then was as an immunologist, but then when I started doing my postdoc at Harvard back in 2009, that's when I started focusing on infectious diseases and evolutionary aspects of that. So, no, I'm not an expert on everything. I am, again, an expert on understanding viral emergence. But as I mentioned, like coronaviruses specifically was not really my area of expertise.

• 1:42:24Speaker 07

  And that's exactly right, because I knew some of my colleagues have studied MERS, for example, and SARS one and novel coronaviruses. So, once we started talking together and could share our ideas and could sort of, you know, discuss all the different hypotheses on the table, including with international experts that literally only study coronaviruses. Um, is that we just realized that, look, there's actually a lot that we, we, we don't know currently. And as we are updating our knowledge base on coronaviruses, the different features, the evolutionary history that we see across many, many, you know, uh, different corona species, is that, you know, that's, that's a big part of it.

• 1:43:05Speaker 07

  And then, of course, also just saying like, look, we actually do have some evidence here. Let's just, and data. Let's take some time to sit down and analyze that and see what, what do we get out of, out of those analyses. And that again, is, is something that has continued for years, right? We, like, you know, our latest papers were in twenty twenty four, right? So, so it's not just something that from one day to the next, all of a sudden, now you have the full knowledge, right? It, it, it takes time.

• 1:43:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a process. And for the record, at, at any point, did, did the powers that be, did anybody try to keep you from talking about the lab leak hypothesis or suppress it in any way? Did, because that's not part of the narrative, even though I never, you know, saw that.

• 1:43:49Cara Santa Maria?

  It's always part of the narrative, right, that the scientists were suppressed? Yeah.

• 1:43:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, the, the narrative is that, you know, I'm the one doing the silencing, apparently. And if, if I were, I'm, I'm pretty bad at that. Um, because I have literally not heard anything other than about the lab leak since, I think, twenty twenty one. Uh, but no, of course, no, I mean, the, the narrative that, that is out there is that, you know, Dr. Fauci, for example, had a preferred narrative, which is it must have been coming from nature. And that's just untrue. He, he didn't. In fact, you know, when I've initially talked to him and I explained to him what, what our concerns were, he says, he said to me on the phone was that, well, if you think it came from the lab, You should write an article on it, or you should consider writing an article on it.

• 1:44:38Speaker 07

  So not only did he not try to suppress me on talking about the lab leak, he actually did the opposite. And of course, throughout this whole period is that there has been no suppression of any specific version of this, or any wish that it must be this or it must be that. Because from a scientific perspective, you just can't do that. It just doesn't make any sense that you would try and saying like, oh, we can only talk about this and then we will ignore everything else. This is not how scientific process works in general. So no, there's never been any suppression or any sort of, you know, push towards a quote unquote preferred narrative.

• 1:45:20Speaker 02

  Right. And trying to get scientists on the same page, again, it's like herded cats. They have, you know, a famous independence streak. They would love nothing more than to say the man is trying to keep my research down, but I'm going to get it out there to the world or whatever. Like I know I've worked with a lot of scientists, there's no way they would go down with that.

• 1:45:42Speaker 07

  No. And I mean, especially, I should say, the kind of scientists that we are talking about here. I mean, myself, but also my colleagues that I have, I mean, we're very opinionated, right? I mean, we got our opinions, right? So, so of course, if there's things that we disagree on, we will debate that robustly, and we did, and we do. And so, so trying to like hurt those cats of international scientists, which now is, you know, because you're looking at our papers. Now we're talking about, you know, thirty odd authors or so, and getting them all on the same page, saying like, look, here's exactly how it's going to be. I mean, it's literally impossible, right? It's just, but that's what the data points to.

• 1:46:26Speaker 07

  Right? And the data is not tied to any specific, like when you're looking at early cases, for example, it's not that that is specifically tied to pointing into sonosis, right? It's just that the early data, the cases, they just happen to cluster very closely around the market. Of course, had they clustered very closely around the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and maybe the biosafety cabinets, like the environmental samples at the market, had been the ones that were positive for the virus. Of course, our conclusions would have been, well, this clearly came from the lab, right? The early cases cluster around it. But that's just not what the data actually is, right?

• 1:47:06Speaker 07

  The data is just the part that points directly to the market itself.

• 1:47:12Speaker 02

  Is there anything specific that you think we should be doing that we're not doing to keep the same thing from happening again? Because it sounds like that market was just a setup for a zoonotic spillover.

• 1:47:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, not just that one, right?

• 1:47:27Speaker 02

  Is it still that way now? Or were any changes made what needs to be done?

• 1:47:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, but like markets in general, right?

• 1:47:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, markets in general, to Kara's point. And actually, Kara, you mentioned you visited Southern China. What's crazy about this whole, this whole, like, going through the origin investigations here is my colleague Eddie Holmes, who's from Australia, is in Australia. He was actually taken to the Wuhan Seafood Market in 2014 by the Wuhan CDC, the China CDC at the time. And Eddie took photos of civet, of sorry, raccoon dogs, which, you know, they were one of the hosts for SARS-CoV-1 and a likely host for SARS-CoV-2, sitting on top of birds. And literally, you know, droppings on top of the birds, right?

• 1:48:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I have photos like that in my phone. Yeah.

• 1:48:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. And Eddie took this photo because he was like, oh, my God, here is, you know, raccoon dogs, highly likely as coronavirus vectors, and sitting on top of birds for flu vectors. And he took that photo because he's like, well, that seems like a bad idea. And of course, the crazy thing is that, you know, this was in 2014 at the Huanan Seafood Market itself.

• 1:48:43Cara Santa Maria?

  That's insane.

• 1:48:45Speaker 07

  It is absolutely insane.

• 1:48:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:46Speaker 07

  It's in our, it's in, it's in, it's in, in, in our, in our papers. And what is even crazier is that it's in fact from the stall that if you look at our papers, it very much points to that could be the likely actual specific origin. And but the reason for this, of course, is that, again, Eddie took these photos because we know this is such high risk. And then the question is, and markets are just high risks. Would you, because market is this perfect examples in which we take wild animals, we put them into terrible conditions during weeks and months of transport until they end up in the markets. And of course, in markets, you have dense human urban centers, right?

• 1:49:28Speaker 07

  So if something were to spill over, there's also the likelihood that it could, that it can then continue from there because the human population density is so, so high. So those are the risk factors. The question is, and we know these well, so the question is, what do you do? And a lot has been talked about, then, then we should ban it. But the problem is that trying to ban something like wild markets is extremely difficult. You know, some people rely on it for their food source, of course. Some people prefer it and therefore it gets purchased. So I think an outright ban, why I would like to see that, I think, is going to be difficult.

• 1:50:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, also, people are just gonna do it in the shadows and then they won't be monitored.

• 1:50:11Speaker 07

  That's the problem is that people might, exactly, people might just continue doing the trading, but now fully on the illegal path. Although I should say, much of the trade we are talking about is actually illegal within these markets. We know several vendors, including the vendor I was talking about, were fined during 2019, for example, for, for selling illegal wildlife. And of course, what we could do is, is the monitoring aspect, right? So making, saying like, look, we know that this is ongoing, but we gotta keep monitoring of what pathogens do we see at these markets? And if a flag is thrown up, like, here is something that is problematic, we need to be able to shut it down at that point.

• 1:50:52Speaker 07

  And that is something I think we could realistically do as we're talking about the wildlife trade, not just in market, but as the animals, for example, end up in that trade itself. You know, I will say, though, that that, you know, one thing as we are studying these viruses is that that this is going to happen again. Hmm. The question is when and where and with what virus? We don't know these questions, right? And when it happens the next time, what I'm really worried about is because of the politicization around not just the origin question, but COVID-19 and infectious diseases in general, is that I'm actually really worried that the next time something like this might happen

• 1:51:33Speaker 07

  is that the the sort of incentive of countries to report early on them on these events is now less than when the COVID-19 pandemic kicked off. For the simple reason that you you have seen, you know, a lot of this again being politicized and then also vilified. So I think the next time, you know, the willingness to study these kinds of questions, the willingness to do the reporting, I'm quite worried is going to be to be a lot less than than what we saw with COVID-19 back in 2020.

• 1:52:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a more dangerous world.

• 1:52:06Speaker 07

  It is a more dangerous world, unfortunately, for many different reasons.

• 1:52:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right, Christian, thank you so much for joining us. It was really great to have you on the show. Yeah.

• 1:52:17Speaker 08

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:52:27Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics, tell me which one is the fake. You guys ready for just some regular news items this week?

• 1:52:39Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:52:39Speaker 02

  Regular. All right, here we go. Well, they're irregular. Oh. Item number one, the largest and most recent survey on the topic in the UK finds that nearly 1 million people had their drinks spiked in the previous year.

• 1:52:55Speaker 02

  I number two, researchers demonstrate that humans can be sexually aroused by some of the mating calls of non-human animals. And I number three, neuroscientists find that they can make people more hypocritical, less morally consistent, by modulating a specific part of the brain. Jay, go first.

• 1:53:15Jay Novella?

  All right, the first one, the largest and most recent survey on the topic in the UK finds that nearly 1 million people had their drinks spiked in the previous year. Okay, wow, that's a lot of people.

• 1:53:25Speaker 02

  That's in the UK only, yeah.

• 1:53:27Jay Novella?

  Wow, that's a lot of people, if that's true. I find that very hard to believe, because that would mean that, I mean, if there's repeat offenders, which I would imagine there would be with, with an activity like that, but let's say that, you know, one person on average was doing four, spiking four people, that's 250,000 people spiking other people. On my ginned up mathematics here, but still, it's a lot of people that would have to be doing something like that. Terrible. Second one, researchers demonstrate that humans can be sexually aroused by some of the mating calls of non-human animals. What? No, no. Okay, out of here with that.

• 1:54:07Jay Novella?

  That humans, he didn't say some humans, he said that humans can be sexually aroused.

• 1:54:14Speaker 02

  No, that doesn't mean every single human would be.

• 1:54:17Jay Novella?

  Well, it's one, it's a big difference between like a lot of people and like three. You know what I mean?

• 1:54:22Speaker 02

  At least one, at least two, because it's plural.

• 1:54:25Jay Novella?

  Okay, that great, two. That, well, that, that is plausible then, because there's people that are attracted to everything out there, you know, like, so, sure, why, why wouldn't there be a couple of people that, all right, I'll just took a sidestep away from that one. Neuroscientists find that they can make people more hypocritical, less morally consistent by manipulating a specific part of the brain. That one is 100% science to me. Um, I know the mechanism that they would use, you know, they use like magnetic fields to do things like that with the brain, they're experimenting with this all the time. I'm not surprised that, that that could happen. Going back to the first one, that's a lot of people, that is a lot of people getting drugged.

• 1:55:06Jay Novella?

  I, I'll have to say that the second one with the people being attracted to animal calls, okay, yeah, one, two, three people maybe out there, they found that this is true, I think that's science, I think a million people did not get their drinks spiked, you know, with a, what do they call it, a molly? Is that the drug?

• 1:55:24Cara Santa Maria?

  It could be.

• 1:55:24Speaker 02

  Well, it doesn't say what it was spiked with.

• 1:55:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's probably a roofie, but I don't think most people are wasting MDMA on spiked drinks.

• 1:55:33Jay Novella?

  So this could just be spiked with alcohol. That's different.

• 1:55:36Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:55:37Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think it could be spiked with alcohol. It's probably a roofie.

• 1:55:39Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:55:40Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:41Speaker 02

  The operational definition of spiked in this study was that something was put in their drink that they were not aware of.

• 1:55:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:55:49Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:55:50Speaker 02

  It was not limited to a specific drug or anything specific.

• 1:55:53Jay Novella?

  Okay, I have to rethink this real quickly. I'll just stick with my guns. I think the first one is fiction.

• 1:55:58Speaker 02

  Okay, Evan.

• 1:55:59Speaker 06

  When I hear the word spiked, I think alcohol first, actually, right? You spiked the punch, you spiked the eggnog, right? That was the term to say alcohol was put into the drink.

• 1:56:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, but again, in the study, they say anything the person wasn't aware. Something was deliberately placed in their drink and they were not aware that that was done so.

• 1:56:23Speaker 06

  And therefore, if you take a wider definition of it, then you could extrapolate that out perhaps to maybe the point where you do get to a million people. Are these people who believed that was true? Or was, there's no way to prove it.

• 1:56:38Speaker 02

  It's a survey. It's a survey.

• 1:56:39Speaker 06

  Okay, so just they're in their experience. Okay, and some people think, you know, and I'm sure there's some false positives in there too, you know? People thought that something got put in there and really wasn't, but that's how they reported it. So I think when you add all those things up, you could possibly get to a million. The second one, I don't know about this. Researchers demonstrate that humans can be sexually aroused by some of the mating calls of non-human animals.

• 1:57:07Speaker 06

  What would be the trick here? Why would the falsifying this one? How do you falsify this one? Would they would be maybe sexually aroused by something other than the mating calls of non-human animals? Maybe the act of watching other animals mate or something like that could prove to be stimulating. I don't know about the cause, though. Have you heard some of the mating calls of these things? It sounds like torture. I would think it would be the opposite, right? Oh, get away from that as fast as you can. So I don't know about that one. The last one. You know, yes, I think neuroscientists making people more hypocritical, right? There are always ways to activate things and deactivate things in the brain.

• 1:57:52Speaker 06

  And like Jay said, you know, magnets and other methods. So, you know, why, why couldn't this be one of those things that can be manipulated? So I, I, I think it's the sexually aroused by mating calls is going to be the fiction.

• 1:58:09Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara?

• 1:58:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, this one's weird and tough. I don't see any problem with a million people, nearly a million people having their drinks spiked within the year. I mean, I do see a huge problem with that. I don't see any problem with that being the science.

• 1:58:26Cara Santa Maria?

  I know a lot of people who, and mostly women, who have, and have seen a lot of experiments about bystander effect where people don't do anything about it. So that one worries me, but it doesn't worry me that it would be fiction. Also, neuroscientists finding that they can make people more hypocritical, that is less morally consistent by modulating a specific part of the brain. I'm with Jay on this one. I'm guessing this is a transcranial magnetic stimulation study. TMS can just, it can knock out functionality in parts of the brain that are really specified. And so you can, you know, temporarily induce a behavior change and then it goes away pretty quickly.

• 1:59:08Cara Santa Maria?

  So I don't see why they wouldn't be able to do it with this paradigm, you know, make this person morally inconsistent by knocking out, you know, some area of the brain. I guess it, there are big implications to that, like, you know, and I, I hope people don't run with this and say like, oh, you know, you knock out this part of the brain and you become evil or something like that. But definitely I think you could change.

• 1:59:30Speaker 06

  This brain switched to evil.

• 1:59:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly. But I do think you could change behavior, like decision-making behaviors and things like that with, with a knockout study with a, with a TMS. So I guess that does just leave the, the sexually aroused. I mean, here's the thing, we know that humans can be sexually aroused by animals. It is a paraphilia, which is like, you know, ugh, thanks for opening this can, can of worms, Steve. But we know that bestiality exists. We know that, I think it's called zoophilia. Is it exists, but the whole like, is it the mating calls that is starting the attraction? Or, or whatever. I bet you just like made up this study and that, you know, researchers

• 2:00:16Cara Santa Maria?

  did not demonstrate this, even though it, it may or may not be true.

• 2:00:19Speaker 02

  Okay. And Bob?

• 2:00:21Bob Novella?

  1 million people in the UK. So, how many people are in the UK? I don't know, but 50 million, 55 million seems reasonable. So, 1 in 50? And if it's mostly women?

• 2:00:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's exactly 1 in 50, Bob. You got that right. Ooh, nice Bob.

• 2:00:39Bob Novella?

  Oh, no. Oh, really? Uh, damn. So if it were mostly women, then we're talking what? 1 in, like 1 in 25, 1 in 30, 1 in 20? That, yeah, I don't know about that one. That seems, yeah. Yeah, these are, these are tough. Uh, the, uh, number two, the, uh, the mating calls. Man, I'm not gonna put, I'm not gonna put restraints on anything that turn anybody on because it's all over the place. I mean, you know, so yeah, I mean, but Kara's right. I mean, it's, it is just the mating call. I mean, it's not, you know, I would be, I would think especially for, for guys to be something much more visual than audible. Uh, but what,

• 2:01:21Bob Novella?

  you know, and then this last one here. Yeah, TMS. I mean, that totally makes sense that, um, TMS could do that. And I, in fact, I'm looking forward to the future where they really develop the crap out of that technique and do some crazy shit with the brain. But, uh, so that, that totally makes sense unless there's something weird about being hypocritical that they can't knock out. I don't know. Yeah, I'll go with the, um, the mating call one and say that's fiction. Uh, although it wouldn't surprise me at all if it's, if it's not. But yeah, gotta pick something.

• 2:01:54Speaker 02

  Okay. So you all agree on the third one. So we'll start there. Neuroscientists find that they can make people more hypocritical, less morally consistent, by modulating a specific part of the brain. You all think this one is science and this one is science. This one is science. Yeah, this is pretty easy, but you know, gotta throw some easy ones in there. Um, the part of the brain, where do you think it is in the brain? Just generally in the brain?

• 2:02:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, the inconsistency part of the moral?

• 2:02:20Speaker 02

  Where in the brain is the thing that they're modulating?

• 2:02:23Cara Santa Maria?

  To make them more hypocritical?

• 2:02:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's definitely frontal lobe, right? It's the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

• 2:02:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 2:02:30Speaker 02

  Oh, I was gonna say that next. The VM PFC. Oh, I wasn't. So they've used functional MRI scan to show that this part of the brain's active when they're making this moral decision. And the paradigm that they used was they gave them a task, well, this is a common thing in this kind of psychological research, where they could make actual real money, right? But in order to make money, or the more they lie, the more money they make. And they had them do the task and then say, how did you do? And then they like assess their own moral behavior. And then they had them watch other people doing the same task and say how they did, like, and from extremely immoral to extremely moral.

• 2:03:11Speaker 02

  And so when judging their own behavior, they were more likely, or they weighted profit more. And when evaluating other people's behavior, they weighted honesty more. So again, like another aspect of the fundamental attribution error. Right. But so there was an inconsistency there at baseline, right? People were hypocritical at baseline, like they're being judgmental about the behavior in other people that they're engaging in themselves. But that became more intense when they used transcranial magnetic stimulation to inhibit, they just say modulate, but it must be inhibit, the VM PFC. So it was, they say, transcranial temporal interference stimulation was the term that

• 2:03:56Speaker 02

  they used. So, yeah, so they think that this part of the brain is involved with evaluating morality, right? And in weighing moral consistency, right? And saying, this is dishonest and dishonesty is bad, so I shouldn't do it. You know, and if you disrupt that, they don't have that moral connection and they just do what's profitable. You know, they just... Oh, man, that could explain a lot of people I know. Well, yeah.

• 2:04:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Interesting.

• 2:04:26Speaker 02

  Everything's variable. All right, let's go back to number one. The largest and most recent survey of the topic in the UK finds that nearly 1 million people had their drinks spiked in the previous year. Jay, you think this one is fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is also science. Sorry, Jay. Yeah, this one is science with a lot of people. Yeah, man. It is a lot. This is a survey. So there's just people saying, hey, have you been, have you had your drinks spiked in the last year? And that's how many people said yes. Oh geez. So that's just the people who know it happened. Yeah, right?

• 2:04:59Jay Novella?

  Or who believe it happened.

• 2:05:00Speaker 02

  So it might be even more, right? Yeah. But these are people who believe that they were, so, uh, women were 58% of cases. So it is more in women. The locations- Not as much as I would have thought. Yeah, there were bars. Yeah, yeah. At first I'm like, why, what's happening with the other 52%? But 42% right, but I'll tell you, I'll get to that in a second. 41% were in bars, 26 at social events, and 25% at nightclubs. So all, you know, drinking.

• 2:05:25Jay Novella?

  And drinking environments, of course.

• 2:05:27Speaker 02

  So they said the reason for doing it, the number one reason was sexual assaults, right? Drug facilitated sexual assaults, but also just robbing them. So people spiked their drinks so that they could then rob them as they leave the bar or whatever. Um, and sometime, and also listed was pranks. It's like a friend might do it to their friend as a That's so funny. Good prank. Yeah, not a, um, and like in terms of what it was being spiked with. So sometimes it was alcohol. Like they didn't add alcohol to a drink that doesn't have alcohol. They just increased the amount of alcohol in an alcoholic drink. That makes sense. Yeah. So you think this is one shot. It's actually two or three shots, you know?

• 2:06:10Speaker 02

  So that you, yeah, so you consume way more alcohol than you think you are. So, but sometimes it was roofies. It was drugs, you know, meant to, you know, make people susceptible, more vulnerable. So, you know, the, the bottom line here is- It's an epidemic over there. Be aware. First of all, people who do this are scumbags. Just have to say that. This is, I mean, come on, this is- Even the criminals. Yeah, it's criminal. It's really a scummy thing to do, in my opinion. And, but, you know, for, for individuals, just, you know, have a lot, don't drink something that somebody hands you, right? I mean, you should have total control over anything that you consume, especially in a public setting like that, where there, where this potential exists.

• 2:06:54Jay Novella?

  Yeah, like you might trust your drink with a friend of yours as you go to the bathroom. Like you gotta be really careful about that.

• 2:06:59Speaker 02

  I wouldn't do that. I would never consume anything I did not have complete control over at all times. You know what I mean?

• 2:07:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Especially if you didn't bring a tricorder with you. You'd be surprised, even if you have complete control over it, how shady some people can be.

• 2:07:13Speaker 02

  Well, also you go to a restaurant, trusting that it was happening in the kitchen.

• 2:07:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, no, but I just mean like especially for women who are out and about or who are on a first date or who are in a very busy bar or something like that. Like I say that because I think, I'm not saying people are gonna think this, but like if your drink gets spiked, it is not your fault because you weren't vigilant enough.

• 2:07:33Speaker 02

  It's very hard to be so vigilant that it doesn't happen.

• 2:07:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Like if someone wants to do it, they will figure out a way to do it. Yeah, they could pay the bartender. They could pay the bartender to do it. You'll never notice it. Or distract you, you know, have their friend distract you while they do it. Just a second, yeah. Drinks in your hand the whole time. It doesn't take that long. And also if you see, I know that this is like whatever, but like if you see something, say something.

• 2:07:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:07:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Like if you witness even something that you could be accidentally taken as that, it's it's worth it to throw the drink out to save, you know.

• 2:08:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like just say something. Hundred percent. Yeah. Please, watch out for your family and friends. They often don't.

• 2:08:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's a very chaotic situation with people who are often compromised on purpose.

• 2:08:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. You're already vulnerable. You're already inebriated. It's loud. It's, it's, you know, yeah, it's just, ugh, sad.

• 2:08:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. Also know where you are and who you're with. You know, definitely. Again, none of this is implying blaming the victim. It's just saying, you know, you can, it's like saying, don't use an ATM in a, in a place without any security, you know, and take out a whole bunch of cash and flash it around.

• 2:08:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Be smart. Don't, don't make it easier, but at the same time, if it does happen, it's not because you did something to make it happen or you were asking for it.

• 2:08:48Speaker 02

  Exactly. Okay. Which means that researchers demonstrate that humans can be sexually aroused by some of the mating calls of non-human animals is the fiction, but this was a study. I didn't make this up out of whole cloth. What it showed was that humans have a preference for the mating calls of other animals, meaning that they think it's a pleasant sound, not that they're sexually aroused. So then what they find it pretty, right? You might find the mating call of a bird pretty. And if and what they essentially essentially played different sounds for people and people preferred the same sounds that the animals preferred. So that is the thing that they were trying to get at.

• 2:09:28Speaker 02

  Would humans have the same kind of auditory auditory preferences that a bird would have? And it turns out largely we do. They found broad overlap between human and animal sound preferences. And some of the ones that were were common, like bird calls that contain trills, clicks and chucks, people found like these are what they call acoustic adornments were highly favored by both people and animals.

• 2:09:58Bob Novella?

  Interesting.

• 2:09:59Speaker 02

  Well, to some extent, you know, all vertebrate brains are related, right? We all have a common ancestor with a brain. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:05Jay Novella?

  Well, I'm glad that it wasn't like this widespread weird thing, you know?

• 2:10:10Speaker 02

  Right. And also it does raise an interesting question too about, well, why do we prefer some sounds over others? Is there some, what's the underlying principle? Is it regularity? Some kind of mathematical principle that work?

• 2:10:23Bob Novella?

  Symmetry or?

• 2:10:24Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, symmetry. What are there's obviously some features that are not just cultural that are, you know, baked in that we share even with relatives.

• 2:10:35Bob Novella?

  People find symmetry in faces more beautiful than asymmetry. I wonder if it applies to sound potentially? I don't know.

• 2:10:43Speaker 06

  If they equate it to mating and therefore procreation, do we have a disposition to sort of have a positive thoughts about that in general? I don't know.

• 2:10:54Speaker 02

  But also it's not limited to sound. That means the study was, but like we find birds pretty. They're not pretty for us. They're pretty for each other, but we still find it pretty. You know what I mean?

• 2:11:05Speaker 06

  Especially the men.

• 2:11:06Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:07Speaker 06

  Peacocks, robins, the Cardinals.

• 2:11:10Speaker 02

  It's not always the male. That's a, that's a myth.

• 2:11:14Speaker 06

  Oh, well, I wasn't suggesting it was always the male. It was just.

• 2:11:16Speaker 02

  It's actually way more often than than you think. The males take care of the kids, you know, and not the females or it's, it's, it's, yeah, it's disproportionately the male birds, but it's not like universal as people think. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 2:11:32Speaker 06

  "The truth will prevail in the end. Nonsense will fall of its own weight by a sort of intellectual law of gravitation." And that was written by Cecilia Payne Geposchkin, female astronomer born in 1900, who in 1925, discovered what stars are made of, such as hydrogen, helium, and a dash of nearly every other element. That quote was submitted by a listener, Bob from Marin County, California. Thank you, Bob.

• 2:12:01Speaker 02

  Do you guys think that that's actually true?

• 2:12:03Speaker 06

  That was huge. Um, "And the truth will prevail in the end." Not, maybe not always, but nonsense.

• 2:12:10Cara Santa Maria?

  I guess it depends on how far out the end is.

• 2:12:14Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 2:12:15Cara Santa Maria?

  You know what I mean? Like, it might not happen in one's lifetime.

• 2:12:18Speaker 02

  I think it's also depends on the context. I think within the halls of science, that's true, because science has a process that favors the truth. But culturally, I don't think that that's true.

• 2:12:32Speaker 06

  Well, I agree with that. And I don't, not sure she was speaking culturally. She was more likely speaking scientifically.

• 2:12:38Speaker 02

  She's a scientist.

• 2:12:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, she's astronomer.

• 2:12:40Speaker 02

  Probably speaking within the context of science, but she didn't qualify it in the statement. So I think she makes it sound like just a truism overall. So I would qualify it like, yes, in the right context, in the right situation, or institution, or culture, or whatever, but not always. I don't think it's always true.

• 2:12:58Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure.

• 2:12:59Speaker 06

  Amazing. She was, you know, for someone of that time, working on the cosmic makeup of the universe and nature of variable stars. And she determined that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium in her 1925 doctoral.

• 2:13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, 25 years old.

• 2:13:13Speaker 06

  Huge, huge discovery. Oh, my gosh, huge.

• 2:13:16Speaker 02

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

• 2:13:18Speaker 06

  Thank you, Steve.

• 2:13:19Speaker 02

  You guys, Steve.

• 2:13:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 2:13:20Speaker 02

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

• 2:13:27Speaker 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.

• 2:14:04Speaker 09

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