The Skeptics Guide #1069 - Jan 3 2026

Psychic Predictions for 2025 and Rogue Predictions; News Items: Psychology Intervention for ADHD, Biological vs Artificial Consciousness, Fentanyl Vaccine, Possibility of Orbital Disaster; 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, January 1st, 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.

• 0:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:52Speaker 05

  Good afternoon, everyone.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  So, guys, I don't know, have we ever recorded on January 1st?

• 0:57Cara Santa Maria?

  I was about to add that.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 0:59Bob Novella?

  We have not.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  We basically had to this week, just because of our schedules. We were all like, are we gonna do, like, is everyone gonna be awake and conscious on the day after New Year's Eve? Like, yeah, well, you know.

• 1:11Bob Novella?

  One of those, not necessarily both.

• 1:15Speaker 05

  Our schedule is such that we had to record today.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Sounds like you guys

• 1:20Speaker 05

  Other commitments.

• 1:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Had a more intense New Year's Eve than I did.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  We did go, we did, we went out to, we all went out to the same friend's house, you know, before we get together. But we were up past midnight. We were social.

• 1:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, we were social.

• 1:32Cara Santa Maria?

  I barely made it past midnight, and I was completely antisocial last night. But it was great. Sometimes an at-home New Year's is just what you want.

• 1:40Speaker 05

  A lot of people did that.

• 1:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:42Speaker 05

  I had one person tell me, tell me that, "Oh, I think I'm just gonna go hang out in the living room tonight, but maybe I'll change my mind and just hang out in bed." Right? So that was their choice.

• 1:52Bob Novella?

  Good to have options. Good to have options.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  But none of us are drinkers. It's not like we're hungover or anything. It's just we're up late.

• 1:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So that's late for you, Steve.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  That is.

• 2:01Cara Santa Maria?

  You could've been early.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  That is very late for me. Normal for me.

• 2:04Speaker 05

  But there were games being played, and, you know, games help move the night along.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:08Bob Novella?

  Look, I'm gonna say it. 2025 sucked.

• 2:12Speaker 05

  It was so yesterday.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  It was a stressful year.

• 2:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. Fuck yeah.

• 2:17Jay Novella?

  Stressed every day.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  It was the year that I retired, so it wasn't all that.

• 2:21Jay Novella?

  That's true.

• 2:22Speaker 05

  No, it wasn't all bad.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  So guys, let me tell you something. I just bought my second EV.

• 2:27Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  So I got rid of my gas car, so now I'm fully EV in my household. We were just yesterday, my wife and I were picking up the car and signing all the paperwork. And you know, you have to like, sit there for 20 minutes while you sign a million pieces of paper. It's just one of those things you got to get through. So we're sitting there, the guy that's, that's doing it with us, he's only been working at the car dealership for two weeks.

• 2:48Speaker 05

  Oh, okay. Two weeks?

• 2:50Jay Novella?

  If that's true.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  So he's, not, not, not to say that he wasn't fully competent, he was, everything went smoothly, but he was very interested, you know, in what was going on. So we asked if we already had an EV, which of course we had, you know, our Tesla for like, six years now.

• 3:06Cara Santa Maria?

  And when you say our, like, it's shared or that's your wife's car?

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Well, we all, we share our cars and like, both of our cars are in both of our names. But that's her primary car and the new one is going to be my primary car.

• 3:18Cara Santa Maria?

  So your old car was all gas or hybrid?

• 3:22Speaker 02

  My most recent car was, was a gas car.

• 3:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so that's a big change.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now we're, no more gasoline cars. So anyway, so the guy asked me, it's like, so what do you think about EVs? You know, so of course I give him a much longer answer than he was.

• 3:36Speaker 05

  Well, sit back for an 80 minute show.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Probably expecting, my wife is like, oh God, we have to get through this now. I have to listen to a lecture on technology lecture from Steve. So I told him, they're great, the best car I ever owned, you know, the handling is great, the acceleration is off the hook. You know, it's so nice to like, not even look at gas stations, you just plug it in when you get at home and it's great. And then he said, you know, a few minutes go by, we're doing more paperwork, he's like, let me ask you another question. What do you think about hydrogen fuel cell cars? So, so I.

• 4:03Speaker 05

  And there's another 80 minute conversation.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then my, again, my wife's like, oh God, here we go. So I, I do not like hydrogen fuel cell cars. Because, for multiple reasons, I told you, went down, the reason, you know, first of all, it's never going to be as efficient as EVs. That's just physics, right? EVs are always going to be more energy efficient than hydrogen fuel cell cars. Plus, the big problem with the, with the EVs right now, so here's the, here's the reason why he was asking. I mean, let me back up a little bit.

• 4:31Jay Novella?

  All right, start over.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  He's, he, not gonna start over, just back up. Because he just went through all of the training, right? This is why him being new is relevant. And the impression that sort of filtered down to the rank and file, right? This is what he was just taught by the car company. Is that EV sales in the US are softening, which is true. They're still robust, but in 2025, they decreased by 2.1% or something from 2024.

• 5:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Our leadership is not promoting this.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, it's 100% because of uncertainty about federal incentives and yeah.

• 5:12Cara Santa Maria?

  And just the culture, isn't it?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  The mood and the culture in the US, so it's not surprising. But at the same time, worldwide EV sales grew tremendously and, you know, breaking 20 million, you know, in 2025.

• 5:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Damn, that should have been my psychic prediction.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, led by China, led by China, then the EU and then Southeast Asia and Africa with the US again softening. So like apparently because of that, some car companies are panicking a little bit because they thought that there was going to be this EV boom and like they're gearing up to completely transfer their, you know, their fleet over to electric vehicles. So I was like, yeah.

• 5:56Cara Santa Maria?

  They're gonna have to eventually.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  So now they're saying, what are we gonna do? You know, maybe we need to shift into hydrogen, maybe that's gonna work better. That was sort of the impression that this guy had.

• 6:06Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so stupid.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  I know, I'm like, oh God.

• 6:08Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like just hold your horses after this administration.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Just relax. First of all, even without the political aspect of it, there's always a hype and a bubble and then it settles down. There's no reason to panic. It's always gonna take longer than you think it does, but it's the EVs are inevitable. Just continue to make them better and continue to invest in infrastructure. Those are the two big issues.

• 6:30Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's not like the market's not there. It's pretty robust.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  It is robust, yeah. And I said hydrogen is absolutely not the way to go, you know, because they're not going to be as efficient. The hydrogen, you think the EV infrastructure is is soft. The hydrogen infrastructure is way less and much harder to develop because hydrogen's a very tricky gas to deal with. I said, also, the deal killer right now is that only 1% of hydrogen in the world that's produced is green hydrogen, right? The rest is basically made from fossil fuel.

• 7:03Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's like having a natural gas car.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  It's worse than just burning the fuel, burning fossil fuel. So there's no real environmental incentive to do that. There's no advantage to going to hydrogen at this point in time. And he's like, well, that's because that's why they're thinking of having their make the hydrogen in the car from water. So then that was my turn to roll my eyes. I'm like, dude, that is a 50 year old scam. That is a complete scam. It takes more energy to get to split the hydrogen from the water than you get back when you burn the hydrogen. Where's the energy coming from to burn to to make the hydrogen from the water? Just use that to drive the car. It makes absolutely no sense. Although he's then he said, well,

• 7:45Speaker 02

  they want to use the hydrogen to to recharge the battery, like to extend the range. Like, okay, maybe there's a system where that might be useful. Not if you're splitting it from the water, though. That makes no sense. But I said, then the thing is, even if like we develop this robust hydrogen infrastructure, or we find tons of hydrogen under the earth, which is possible, we're far better off using that in industry than we are to drive cars.

• 8:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. Not.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, use it for steel, you know, not and for agriculture, yeah, not for cars. And if we do need it for transportation, it's going to be trains, maybe trucks, you know?

• 8:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, places where there's like giant stations where they can safely house this fuel source. Like, it's just not going to be a consumer product.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just not. So it's disappointing. I mean, this is good. This is anecdotal from one salesman at one car company, but this is what is filtering down.

• 8:38Jay Novella?

  Well, then he asked, Steve, what do you think about these rubber band engine cars?

• 8:42Speaker 02

  You got squirrels running in there on occasion.

• 8:45Speaker 05

  Balsa wood, yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  But but he but he did say he'd listen to our podcast.

• 8:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 8:50Speaker 05

  Oh, you better.

• 8:53Bob Novella?

  Direct them to your blog and just give them, give them the 50, you know,

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Articles I've read about, yeah.

• 8:58Bob Novella?

  Articles you've written.

• 8:59Cara Santa Maria?

  So Steve, I'm curious. So you bought this car? You didn't lease it?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:02Cara Santa Maria?

  So I'm driving a hybrid truck now and the reason I purchased the truck instead of leasing is because I knew I was going to like rag it out. It's like tricked out with a camper and stuff like that on it. You can't really do that to a lease. But prior to that, I leased electric vehicles for like 12 years. Granted, I was a very early adopter. So my reasoning was every three years when your lease is up, my range, I think my first electric car was a, it was a spark. It had an 80 mile range.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Eighty.

• 9:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Eighty, yeah.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  It's fine for a lot of commuters though.

• 9:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, for in LA it was fine.

• 9:34Speaker 05

  Forty miles there and 40 miles back.

• 9:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. I mean, I live in LA. It wasn't a big deal. And back then they had cool incentives. It would be like in your three year lease, you get, you know, five different rental car vouchers for your longer haul drives. You know, they would like work around it with you. And like, I think I got a free charger installed in my garage back in the day. But by the end of it, I think it went from like 80 to maybe like 120, 140. And by the end, when I had a Bolt, I think my range was like 260, which was perfect. I mean, that's definitely all that I needed. Where are they at now?

• 10:09Speaker 02

  Over, I mean, for over 300.

• 10:12Cara Santa Maria?

  That's good. Okay.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  So there are, I looked at a lot, I did a lot of research before I obviously made this purchase. The, at the high end, 450, you can get, you can get SUVs for 450. Most of them come out, are coming in in the 300s.

• 10:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  They still need more choices and more, it was hard to find like the exact perfect combination of everything. Cause at the SUV end. But I think because, especially when the silicon anode lithium ion batteries, which are going to go into production in 2026 for cars. That those are the basically the batteries that have twice the the the range, you know, twice the energy density. Twice the cost? Yes, they're also twice the cost. But the thing is, yeah, they're they're half the weight, they're half the size, they're twice the cost. But I don't know that it's that different per range. You know what I mean? You might be paying twice as much for the battery, but you get twice the range out of it. Or you have it half the size and get the same range. So there's still going to be a premium.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  So there's two things happening in the battery market that's going to affect cars this year. One is that, you know, the like the the Ampereus, the silicon anode battery, at the high end, where you're going to be able to get more easily get 400 plus range vehicles, especially the larger vehicles like SUVs. At the low end, in December, a company started, you know, started production of a sodium ion battery. So they are are the advantage there is they're half the price of lithium ion batteries, because they're not using any of the, you know, any of the the more limited elements, right? They're using sodium. So those are going to be like, if you want a car that has like a range of 280 miles

• 11:53Speaker 02

  or 250 miles, which again, for most people is way more than enough, you you'll be able to get it at half the price of the battery, right? Whatever the battery cost is for that car will be half the price. Half. So at the high end and at the low end, there's those two big innovations, you know, that are happening this year for for EVs. And then down the road, if you look like five years down the road, there's lots of other things happening like solid state batteries and. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so. That looks promising, too. Yeah, I think that's why I think the EV market is pretty inevitable. I mean, it's, I think EVs are better than gas cars right now, but they're they're they're still on the steep part of the curve, getting better and better and better. Mm hmm. Right? Where there's no massive innovation going to happen with the internal combustion engine in the next five years.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  But the, you know, EVs are going to get, they're already cheaper to own than a gas car, but they're going to get even cheaper to buy.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's what they need to fix.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, which will be huge. And I think the range anxiety will go away. There's the last bit, though, with the range anxiety in the country as big as the US is the infrastructure, you know, and that's, again, that's the other big piece that was very disappointing about the Trump administration is sort of cancelling all of the EV infrastructure projects, you know, because you just need to know that there's always going to be a charging station on your route that you want to go, you know?

• 13:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm curious, sometimes on the show, our perspectives are narrow because we are who we are and have the life experience we have. Sometimes we have this sort of balanced, like, I'm way over here in California, you guys are over on the East Coast, I'm much more, you guys are more rural, right? I'm in LA, like, in the middle of Los Angeles, both city and county. The infrastructure in California is phenomenal, like, nobody has a problem with EVs. You live not in big cities in Connecticut, but nearish to them.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the EV infrastructure is awesome if you're, like, between Boston and Washington, right? So along the eastern seaboard.

• 13:51Speaker 05

  The corridor.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  If you, when you start to get out into the sticks, then you can find them, but it takes, it becomes increasingly challenging.

• 13:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  And especially if you're finding, like, the particular kind that you want. Although that's getting better, too, because now Tesla is opening up their chargers to other vehicles.

• 14:08Speaker 05

  Oh, they finally have the correct connections, right?

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you get the adapter, but they also have to be able to use their chargers, you know?

• 14:15Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  And so that's good. It's like the car I got, thought a Tesla, but I could use Tesla chargers.

• 14:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's going the other direction, yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the North American standard. I mean, I must just decide, I'm going to call it the North American standard, but then by Fiat, it happened, right? So now everyone's signing on to it, which is fine, because it actually is a better connector, in my opinion.

• 14:32Cara Santa Maria?

  It's faster, yeah, than the J-whatever.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  So it's all, it's going in the right direction, you know, again, every time they add even one more sort of EVs recharging station somewhere that we drive, it's great. And I, again, we take these on long trips all the time, so I'm very familiar with the experience of driving all day on an EV. And it's fine, it's fine, it just takes the slightest amount. Not a planning, but it all happens in the computer, right? You say, I want to go on this route. It tells you, okay, you're going to stop here and recharge, stop there and recharge. And you could alter it if you want to. There's almost always something to do there. Like, we always just do it over lunch, or do it over a stop, or there's shopping there, or whatever. So it's fine. Like, sometimes it even takes less time than filling up your tank. Because it's charging while you're doing something else, as opposed to just sitting there and filling up your car.

• 15:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Also, if you're using your car in that way, like this kind of great American road trip style, right? Driving all day. I would hope that there would be some planning involved anyway.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, you're not just, like, aimlessly driving.

• 15:34Speaker 05

  Let's go for a drive.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  It's what you're used to, right? If, you know, I think if the reality were flipped and we were spent the last hundred years driving EVs, and somebody was introducing internal combustion engines, and you're like, you have to change the oil every so often, and you have to change your filters, and blah, blah, blah.

• 15:50Cara Santa Maria?

  And you have to stop and get gas.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  You have to stop, yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 05

  Screw that.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't fill up at home. Like, if you're out of gas at home, you're out of luck, you know?

• 15:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, people would be like, that's not reasonable.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  That would be crazy. I'm going to be driving around with a tank full of explosive gas, and, you know.

• 16:05Jay Novella?

  Well, I'm always driving around with explosive gas.

• 16:09Speaker 05

  Jay, when you grew up, though, your dad had a gas tank at the, at the house, right?

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. He had a business.

• 16:14Speaker 05

  You got any stories about that? Oh, that's for another time. Another time.

• 16:18Cara Santa Maria?

  No, you guys are rural. Wow.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  It's not that, I mean, you say that, that's compared to you, but somebody like in actual rural America would laugh. Like, we're suburban.

• 16:27Speaker 05

  Oh, gosh.

• 16:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's funny, but yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 05

  Come on, we went to Kansas last year.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  We're Connecticut rural.

• 16:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, Connecticut rural. Because even, like, calling that suburban is really funny, too, because I grew up in the suburbs in Texas, and it's, like, very different. You know, strip mall city, all concrete, like, definitely. I think of suburbs as just more city outside the big city. Whereas you guys have, like, woods behind your house.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  I know. You were, you were cute when you visited us, like, you guys live in the woods.

• 16:56Speaker 05

  This is a fairy tale.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's we're Connecticut rural, whatever that means.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  It's a continuum. All right. So this is the first episode of the year.

• 17:07Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  As always, we are going to do our psychic predictions. So we're just going to quickly go through the experience of psychic predictions for for 2025. See how they did. So I did kind of more of an overview rather than going through just cherry picking specific predictions. First of all, let me say no psychic made any amazing prediction for 2025. Right? Nobody called.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  Or a new year prior to that.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's always the same basic formula, right? Vague predictions, predicting things that are already happening, predicting things that are unfalsifiable.

• 17:42Speaker 05

  But the few sprinkled in that are low, very low probability, but if they hit it, it would make their career.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Right. But none of them hit, right? So there's no like amazing prediction or anybody that's doing beyond chance, right?

• 17:54Speaker 05

  And it, Steve, that doesn't stop these psychics from claiming that they made accurate predictions. Right? That's the other side of this coin is that they think or they're selling to their customers. Yeah, I predicted a whole bunch of stuff that happened, even though they didn't. But that's what they're going to say anyways.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  So here's the overview of the most like, if you just, you know, combine all the psychic predictions for 2025, these are the major themes that emerged. So a lot of psychics predicted global conflict and upheaval. Again, predicting something that's already happening.

• 18:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  The second one, now here's one where they predicted something that's very likely. They just happened to get it wrong. Many, there were many psychic predictions about a COVID like pandemic or plague hitting the world again, and that did not happen. There are always going to be epidemics, right? So but nothing COVID like happened in 2025. And then this is the one that's unfalsifiable, spiritual shifts.

• 18:55Speaker 05

  Oh, I love that.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  You know, focus on karmic payoffs and deeply transformative phase. That's meaningless. Cultural changes, you know, this is again, this is kind of vague and unfalsifiable. Increased respect and transparency in the workplaces, really? This year was not characterized by increased respect and transparency. Major wins for women in sports. Kara, do you know anything about that?

• 19:17Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know, maybe, but yeah, I don't, I don't really follow sports.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  When they say wins, like team, like the actual wins on the field?

• 19:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Something tells me they're not making more money or.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Pretty vague.

• 19:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  And of course, they, you know, psychics don't predict the unexpected things that actually happen, right?

• 19:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Never, yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, they always miss the big stuff and then they just predict things that are already happening or that are very likely to happen or are so vague, you can't say if it happened or not. Uh, but, but I think Bob and Evan, you have some specific ones you wanted to bring up.

• 19:50Bob Novella?

  I tracked Nikki Pizarro and she's been, you know, making predictions for years. Uh, some of them, she loves repeating. For example, a giant gorilla will be, will be found, kind of like a real life King Kong. So she said that they would find a giant gorilla or real life King Kong on a remote island. I haven't heard about one. Uh, I don't think that's happened. Uh, so whatever, uh, let's see. Oh, here's a good one. She foretold, um, uh, several major cities would experience penguin invasions. Penguin invasions.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Bizarre.

• 20:26Bob Novella?

  That as well, never, I haven't heard about that happening, don't think that happened. Uh, she predicted that the Loch Ness monster would finally be caught.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Oh, finally.

• 20:36Speaker 05

  Oh, my gosh.

• 20:36Bob Novella?

  And, uh, also the cloning of a T-Rex. So it's just like, oh man, just, just throw this crap out there, man.

• 20:42Speaker 05

  Only.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  So that's not, she's just watching sci-fi movies.

• 20:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Yeah, right, right?

• 20:51Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, what you got?

• 20:52Speaker 05

  Uh, let's try this one. Uh, Kelly Sutliffe, hmm, you know, one of, one of many out there, the, the greatest and most accurate psychic, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Uh, but they, she categorized some of her predictions for 2025. Here's a category called environment, food and drug administrations. Robert Kennedy is going to rock this world. That's wow. How great to revisit why all these toxic chemicals have been allowed in our food and land and air. You're gonna see some radical shakedowns with the EPA and FDA in the United States. Good, who doesn't want all this cleaned up? That's what she said. I mean, I guess Robbie Kennedy did rock the world, but maybe not in the way.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Not a good way.

• 21:34Speaker 05

  She predicted. Here's a, oh, cancer cure, uh, here. And I'm, I'm reading this, this is verbatim. Cures for the lymph systems.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  The lymph?

• 21:44Speaker 05

  The lymph systems. And autoimmune cancer discovery. Audio? Audio, it says audio.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Not even auto.

• 21:52Speaker 05

  Right, not auto. Now, okay, maybe it's a typo. It's hard to know. Like, what is this? It's insane.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  I was watching Star Trek: Enterprise. Six months ago. And multiple times, the, the doctor referred to the autoimmune system. Like, come on.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  You've gotta have some, some tech people, you know, consulting for your show.

• 22:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, that would be helpful. That would be helpful. Oh, a prediction of a new light therapy discovered for healing. Electrical current to heal. Natural ingredients, common sense drugs, and the earth, drugs will be the new pulse for humanity. Whatever that means. And I don't recall there being a new light therapy.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  It's always light therapy. That's like one that's a common alternative medicine scam, the light therapy thing. There are some legitimate light therapies, you know. But not just like general healing, not like the sci-fi, you go under the light and your wounds close up.

• 22:50Speaker 05

  Zelensky would, uh, be, uh, uh, would not be the leader of Ukraine anymore.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  That's incorrect.

• 22:58Speaker 05

  That is incorrect. Uh, P. Diddy will sing like a canary. And everyone knows what happens to canaries when put into an underground coal mine. In other words, she's saying that, uh, he would have, uh, flipped on a whole bunch of people and got killed.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Get whacked.

• 23:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, and that did not happen either. Uh, let's see, what else? We've got King Charles health issues. Okay. Well, I mean, but he was sick to begin with. She didn't outright say that he was gonna die, but she says, you know, oh, and the Detroit Lions, uh, will win the Super Bowl. And this is back in January and the Detroit Lions did not win it in February of 2025. And, uh, unlikely that they'll even try to win it this, you know, be able to win it this year. So, those are just some of the wonderful predictions from Kelly Sutcliffe, as wrong as any other psychic has ever been.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  They're pretty representative of how they do. They're, they're meant to titillate, you know, they're often stupid. Um, or they're just like, some old guy's gonna have health issues. Like, okay, you know.

• 23:56Speaker 05

  Ridiculous.

• 23:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Don't bash on all these styles of psychic predictions because.

• 24:01Speaker 05

  Ours are good, though.

• 24:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Mine are great.

• 24:05Speaker 05

  But we come up with real tangible, you know, something you can sink your teeth into at least, whether we're incorrect or correct.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  All right. So you want to see how we did for 2025?

• 24:12Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 24:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's go back and see how this turned out.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  I guess I can go first. I'm giving myself a three out of four, but you tell me how you guys.

• 24:20Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 24:20Bob Novella?

  Four? I thought we did three.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  I know, but I did four.

• 24:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, Steve did a four. Bonus. He had a bonus.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Not a hedge, I just wanted to do more.

• 24:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh huh.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  All right. The first one was the Russia-Ukraine war will enter a new dangerous phase.

• 24:35Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so vague.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  That's a hundred percent correct. That's not true, but that could have been wrong. It could, it could have eased off or it could have stopped or whatever. But the, the expert consensus is that in 2025, the Ukraine war has entered a more dangerous, critical and potentially decisive phase. Marked by increased Russian attacks and you know, all the other stuff that's happening.

• 24:57Speaker 05

  What a nightmare.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  So I think that that was accurate. I give myself a win on that one. Two, a new techno signature discovered not explained in 2025. So that's my one complete failure. There was no techno signatures discovered, uh, in 2025, let alone going unexplained. Unless you include Three Eye Atlas, which we don't.

• 25:21Speaker 05

  Which we don't.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Which we do not.

• 25:23Speaker 05

  It's not a techno signature.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Right. But, you know, Avi Loeb would include that. And so according to him, I got that one right, but according to.

• 25:33Bob Novella?

  To reality.

• 25:34Speaker 05

  Going to Harvard crank, you are right.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  All right, just one. All right, I could see where this one might be a little bit iffy, but I think this is reasonable. Generative AI will cross the uncanny valley and create video indistinguishable from real video.

• 25:47Speaker 05

  That's a win.

• 25:48Cara Santa Maria?

  I'd say that's a win.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a win.

• 25:50Speaker 05

  That's also was a relatively easy one.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've crossed the line. There were multiple companies like Sora that came out with, you know, updated apps or better apps that can create AI video. So there was, I was watching one today, again, just seeing this reasonable statement to make. And there's still one area where the AI video is still in the uncanny valley. And so I noticed that in this video showing off how great it could be, they did not show this thing. Do you know what this thing is?

• 26:23Bob Novella?

  A bow.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  No, no, that's a picture. This is video. What's the one thing in a, in a video that always gives it away if it's AI?

• 26:31Bob Novella?

  Well, I would say the

• 26:31Speaker 05

  Water.

• 26:32Bob Novella?

  A human face up close.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  The lip sync.

• 26:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, how do people talk?

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Watching a human speak is the one thing they cannot do. And this video cleverly never showed anybody speak. You know, there was like, you were hearing their voice in their head, or they were, you were seeing them from behind when they were speaking. But otherwise, it is pretty indistinguishable, as long as you don't try to do that one thing. That's going to be the last thing to leave the uncanny valley, in my opinion.

• 27:02Bob Novella?

  I'm proud of you.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you. So that's two out of three. The fourth one is 100% I go homerun. 2025 will not be the warmest year on record, but will be in the top five. It was either the second or the third. It's probably going to be the third warmest year on record. So that was 100%. So three out of four.

• 27:23Speaker 05

  Wrong.

• 27:25Bob Novella?

  What were, what were 2024 and three and two in terms of like

• 27:30Speaker 02

  They were the warmest years.

• 27:31Cara Santa Maria?

  The hottest years of record. Yeah, well, they were trending.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I said last year, why I made that prediction is because we were shifting from an El Nino to a La Nina cycle.

• 27:41Speaker 05

  That'll do it.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  And that gives you a little bit of temporary. There's a little bit of cooling on the background of the warming. So usually when we do that, you end up with a top 10 year, but not a most, not a warmest year. So yeah, I cheated 100%.

• 27:58Cara Santa Maria?

  I was a psychic. I said it will be the hottest on record.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  But you're saying that psychics don't cheat, Kara? Is that your premise?

• 28:05Cara Santa Maria?

  No, my premise is that psychics don't do any research.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  I disagree. I disagree. They're just not good at it.

• 28:11Speaker 05

  Define cheat.

• 28:12Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm joking, but clearly, when we talk about psychics on the show, we've got two camps. We've got the people who just look at trends and then they predict based on trends and they're often right because of that. And we've got the people who just make wild guesses. And that's what I did.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  All right. So go Kara. What did you do?

• 28:29Cara Santa Maria?

  So I said that a stable democracy will fall when an elected leader successfully abolishes term limits. That's probably my most specific one. And so because of that, I'm giving myself like, I don't know, a quarter of a point. Because there was no specific instance where a stable democracy collapsed simply because the leader removed term limits. But there are two examples, and maybe even more, but two notable examples where term limits were dismantled due to constitutional changes. So in El Salvador, the Legislative Assembly approved an amendment to abolish presidential term limits. And in Chad, in October,

• 29:13Cara Santa Maria?

  their parliament approved a revised constitution that removed term limits in order to keep both of those leaders in office. So even though the democracies haven't quote unquote collapsed or fallen, I mean, I guess we shall see. The thread started to be pulled there.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  They took a hit. Yeah.

• 29:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  All right. Yeah, I'll give you a partial.

• 29:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, well, I'll take partial for that. The next one, H5N1 will mutate to become transmissible from person to person. That hasn't happened yet. But researchers are very concerned that it will. So as of right now, there are mutations that have been identified. We covered some of them on the show that could increase the risk. But so far, every human case has been successfully linked to an animal spillover event.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  So here now, this is my recommendation for transforming this into more of a typical psychic prediction. You say H5N1 will will have mutations that will move it in the direction of person to person transmission, which did happen. And then you could take full credit if it goes person to person, but you still can claim victory, even if the thing that we know was going to happen happens.

• 30:24Cara Santa Maria?

  I need to edit the language of my my three for this next year. And then the last one, I said it'll be the hottest year on record, so that's a fail.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  So you need to go one level deeper in your research, Karen.

• 30:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 30:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, and you're cheating, Karen.

• 30:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Damn it. I'm just cheating wrong.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  Okay, Evan?

• 30:42Speaker 05

  All right, I made three predictions. Number one, a bridge on an interstate highway system will collapse, causing zero fatalities. And that turned out to be correct. This took place in June 2025. Interstate I-20 overpassed in Aiken County, South Carolina. A gasoline tanker crash and subsequent fire caused an overpass above I-22 collapse. The bridge collapse was directly tied to the interstate highway system, and only minor injuries, no fatalities.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 31:11Speaker 05

  Correct. Number one. Number two. Numbers two and number three, I have to tweak a little bit. Here's what I see. Here's what I said, okay?

• 31:19Speaker 02

  I know what you said, because I wrote it down.

• 31:22Speaker 05

  You did, damn you. A computer will achieve 1.99 petal flops, becoming the new champion of supercomputers. 1.74 was tops in 2024. I got my terminology incorrect, and actually, a few listeners corrected me on this. It's not petal flops, it was, uh, what is it? Exo, exoflops.

• 31:41Bob Novella?

  How did I miss that, man?

• 31:42Speaker 05

  I don't know, I don't know. So it's a thousand times more. So I basically used the wrong, what, term?

• 31:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Prefix, yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  So you meant exoflops?

• 31:51Speaker 05

  I meant exoflops. And that, but petal flops came out. I don't know if it was something like copied and pasted or just failed to verify on my own. So, so let's say it was exoflops, right?

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Let's say it was exoflops.

• 32:03Speaker 05

  And if it was, then I was off, but maybe not by too much. Um, the world's fastest supercomputer in 2025 remained El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It was measured at about in 2025, 1.809 exaflops. Um, the highest performance on record for the year. One point, still short of 1.99.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:27Speaker 05

  So, so that's a no. I'll give myself a no on that one.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 32:30Speaker 05

  And then this third one, I said, and I probably, I should have qualified this more. Supernova explosions, not one, but three of them will be visible to the naked eye.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Oh geez.

• 32:38Speaker 05

  I, I, I really meant to say Nova and Supernova would have been part of the category, right?

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:45Speaker 05

  A broader definition of Nova is Supernova. Supernova is more specific. Um, so I should have said Nova. Now, had I said Nova, I would have been correct for one third of it because there was a Nova. That was bright enough to see with the naked eye in June of 2025. V462, LUPI, L U P I, uh, that one was definitely visible.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  Uh, wait, naked eye?

• 33:08Speaker 05

  Naked eye. Yep. Bright enough to see with the naked eye in June 2025.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:14Speaker 05

  However, there were not three of them. Uh, there were, there were, uh, other supernovas observed by scientists, but they needed instrumentation to see them.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  And they were probably in other galaxies.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, they were absolutely in other galaxies. I'll take one third of one point for that one.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  They'll take a, with an asterisk because you said supernova when you meant Nova.

• 33:33Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly. So I'll be, I'm going to be a little bit more careful in, uh, going forward on that.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  Please.

• 33:38Speaker 05

  One, otherwise I'm embarrassing the whole show, you know?

• 33:43Speaker 02

  All right. What about you, Bob?

• 33:44Bob Novella?

  Last year I predicted for 2025, ChatGPT 5 will be released a year later than initially anticipated in mid 2025. It will be even more lackluster than anticipated. However, this will not start a third AI winter. So I think I pretty much got that one, right? I mean, it was released.

• 34:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was released.

• 34:01Bob Novella?

  Kind of, you know, kind of lackluster, not, you know, what I had hoped, especially what I had hoped a couple of years ago. Like after like three came out and four, like damn man, what's five going to do? No diminishing returns here and you know I use it it's helpful in specific scenarios but it did not create a third day I went there but that's not to say that that won't be coming in the near future anyway. Um, all right, let's go to number two. I said Nos Ratu will win more Academy Awards than any other horror movie. Yeah, I think that's like after I had recently seen it and really enjoyed the crap out of it. And it's an utter failure. There were four Academy Award nominations.

• 34:42Bob Novella?

  And as usual, for technical achievements, best cinematography, best production design, best costume design, best makeup and hairstyling. It didn't win anything and some people felt that it got snubbed, especially for acting and picture categories, but um, yeah, it didn't. But it was it was still a really solid movie that I need to watch again. Damn, I may need to re- oh, I think I'll do that. Oh, crap. I might need to go with four predictions this year. Cause I just thought of another one. My third prediction was a full on bird flu epidemic did not happen.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Did not happen.

• 35:15Bob Novella?

  So, one out of three, whatever.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Good. That's not bad. It's better than.

• 35:19Bob Novella?

  Thirty-three percent, yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 05

  You're more accurate than any other psychic I know.

• 35:23Bob Novella?

  I'm just not impressed with my predictions.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  All right, Jay, what do you got?

• 35:27Jay Novella?

  Okay, so the first thing I said was that prices of groceries won't go down in the US.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  That was correct.

• 35:33Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 35:34Speaker 05

  Well, it was mixed, I would say, probably.

• 35:37Cara Santa Maria?

  No, groceries have gone up.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  Prices never go down. I mean, the price of eggs went down, but that's because eggs were in a bubble because.

• 35:44Speaker 05

  Inflated, yeah.

• 35:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but across the board, groceries are more expensive now.

• 35:48Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, the reason why I had this prediction was because Trump was saying that on day one, he's going to lower the prices. And I knew that was complete nonsense.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 35:56Jay Novella?

  Um, the next one is no company will achieve general AI. I mean, that was another one where I felt like it was pretty obvious that it wasn't going to happen. But you know, I brought it up because so many people are saying that, you know, we're going to have general AI right away and blah, blah, blah. That we already have it and I just think it's a good point to make that we do not have it. And it is a lot more, you know, elusive and it's just not going to happen, I think, in the near future. I think it's quite a ways away. I'm sad I'm wrong about this next one. The war between Ukraine and Russia will end.

• 36:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're all hoping for that.

• 36:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah, a year ago, I really felt like, you know, it was, it was on the precipice, but I don't think so.

• 36:36Speaker 05

  It's awful.

• 36:37Jay Novella?

  And then I'm happy that I got this one wrong as well. The world will have another pandemic. You know, definitely, definitely nothing on pandemic level, but you know.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  It'll be true eventually.

• 36:47Jay Novella?

  Yep, it's gonna happen and.

• 36:49Speaker 05

  And then you can do what the other psychics do and say, I was right. Go back, you know, eight years to whatever.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  If not next year, then definitely soon after that.

• 36:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Alright, so I think overall, we did pretty good.

• 37:00Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 37:01Speaker 05

  Again, better than the pros.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Better than the people who make a living doing it.

• 37:05Speaker 05

  Right, the people who charge $800 an hour to tell, talk to people on the phone about this stuff.

• 37:09Jay Novella?

  Steve, can I start with my new predictions?

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Yes, go right ahead.

• 37:12Jay Novella?

  Alright, so.

• 37:13Speaker 05

  Ooh, new predictions.

• 37:14Jay Novella?

  I predict that I will get sick in December and miss at least one show.

• 37:18Bob Novella?

  Uh huh.

• 37:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Boo, that's not 2026. Oh, you're saying for next year.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, 2026.

• 37:22Jay Novella?

  Yeah. Someone pointed out on Reddit that every year at Christmas, Jay's sick and that person is correct. And then someone else wrote to that person in response, yeah, Jay has kids.

• 37:35Speaker 05

  So, yeah, duh.

• 37:38Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so it is 100% related to the fact that I have, you know, two kids in school. My daughter's the patient zero in my house always. And I did catch this flu from her. So that is, it is very likely that I will be sick this time of year, next year. Next prediction, the Democrats will win the House and the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections in the US.

• 38:01Bob Novella?

  And Senate.

• 38:01Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, I know that that's a lot less likely, but I just wanted to put myself out. I didn't want to, you know, just do an easy guess, but I think it's unlikely, but I, that's my prediction. Another one here, the US will lose its measles elimination status in 2026 and there will be a massive measles outbreak. I think these two things are very likely.

• 38:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Didn't we already lose our elimination?

• 38:23Jay Novella?

  No, we didn't lose it yet.

• 38:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, we haven't yet?

• 38:25Jay Novella?

  Nope, but we will. And, you know.

• 38:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Right on the way.

• 38:28Jay Novella?

  As things are trending, I mean, there was like, what, a 14, am I remembering this correctly, guys, that we've had a 14,000% increase in measles infections?

• 38:36Speaker 05

  Oh, jeez.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Something like that.

• 38:39Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's absurd. It's absurd.

• 38:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I mean, it's gonna look like that when the numbers were so low before.

• 38:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:45Cara Santa Maria?

  And like, now they're not.

• 38:46Speaker 05

  Very low numbers, right.

• 38:47Jay Novella?

  My final prediction for 2026 is that Steve will love his new car and not let his wife drive it.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  That's not gonna happen. I'll go. I had a, we have one overlapping prediction, but, so, number one, I said a major tech company will claim to have produced sentient AI, but these claims will be met with extreme skepticism.

• 39:10Cara Santa Maria?

  By us.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  By us.

• 39:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  The US will see the largest measles outbreak this century. So we got a little bit more specific. Not just massive, but the biggest one this century.

• 39:21Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  And number three, astronomers will discover the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered.

• 39:28Jay Novella?

  Cool.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  Who wants to go next?

• 39:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so I've got mine go from specific to vague, but I vagued up my second one per your recommendations.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 39:37Cara Santa Maria?

  So the first one is, a piece of AI-generated content will be used as evidence in a criminal trial leading to a conviction. Upon this discovery, the defendant will seek a new trial.

• 39:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Number two, a cryptocurrency scam will wipe out the wallets of many victims before I had numbers. Now I do not, leaving them with no recourse. And number three, because we don't do deaths, Donald Trump will suffer a major cardiac event.

• 40:05Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 40:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 40:07Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 40:08Jay Novella?

  I like the way you, your mind works, Kara.

• 40:12Cara Santa Maria?

  I think these things are gonna happen.

• 40:14Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, otherwise you wouldn't have predicted them.

• 40:16Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know. Sometimes I just predict crazy stuff.

• 40:18Speaker 05

  And you don't cheat.

• 40:20Cara Santa Maria?

  No cheating. Whatever that means.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  You mean, knowing something about reality?

• 40:27Speaker 05

  I mean, when a psychic says they're using the Akashic file, right, or something to get the, couldn't that be called cheating in a way? Right? Wouldn't it be? I think you could make an argument that it would be.

• 40:37Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 40:37Speaker 05

  If there was an Akashic file.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  I use the Google files. Does that work?

• 40:43Speaker 05

  It works as well as any of the other set of files.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, what do you got?

• 40:48Speaker 05

  Three predictions for 2026. Number one, pieces of the Amber Room will be discovered. Do we know what the Amber Room was?

• 40:58Bob Novella?

  I don't.

• 40:59Speaker 05

  The Amber Room was a magnificent chamber of amber panels, gold leaf and mirrors, originally built in Prussia and gifted to Peter the Great of Russia, becoming a symbol of imperial wealth at the Catherine Palace. It was looted by the Nazis in 1941 and its panels disappeared during World War II. Its fate remains one of the, one of history's great unsolved mysteries.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  That's a good prediction. I like that.

• 41:23Speaker 05

  That's a very good prediction. I like that.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  There was a hall near where we grew up that was called the Amber Room. That's where we had all of our big events growing up.

• 41:32Speaker 05

  Oh, so in, in honor of?

• 41:34Speaker 02

  I guess so.

• 41:35Speaker 05

  Of that room. Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So like any wedding, any whatever like that, any anniversary, people rented a hall. It was the Amber Room.

• 41:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, opulence and, you know, high class and all that stuff. Number two, the, the first major public data breach caused by AI. Agentic AI, in fact. The first major public data breach caused by AI. How's that?

• 42:01Bob Novella?

  Okay, I like that one.

• 42:02Speaker 05

  And number three, Morocco stuns Argentina to win the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Now, those are very, very specific predictions. No wiggle room there. These will either happen or they won't happen. Take that psychics.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  All right, and Bob, what do you got?

• 42:22Bob Novella?

  All right, predictions for 2026. I predict major satellite collisions, multiple, in low Earth orbit caused by a solar storm in 2026. And you'll learn more about why I'm saying this later in the episode.

• 42:37Speaker 05

  Oh, gosh, foreshadowing.

• 42:39Bob Novella?

  Uh, let's see, second one, uh, an event will happen involving Sagittarius A star, our four million solar mass black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Something's gonna happen.

• 42:51Speaker 05

  Something wonderful.

• 42:52Bob Novella?

  Something.

• 42:55Bob Novella?

  I don't know if it's gonna be wonderful, but you want to be real close there when this happens.

• 42:58Speaker 05

  It's like the movies.

• 43:00Bob Novella?

  And number three, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein will win major Academy Awards.

• 43:06Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, Bob, I love it. I love that.

• 43:09Bob Novella?

  Better than Nosferatu, I think.

• 43:11Speaker 05

  I love that you go back to that, to that theme for your prediction.

• 43:15Bob Novella?

  Right, such a wonderful, such a wonderful movie. I kind of thought this when I read that at the Venice Film Festival earlier in the year, during this is the world premiere, he, there was a, like a 15-minute massive standing ovation, which is the longest ovation at the festival. And it just, and these are people that are, you know, they're just kind of like totally hardcore, like they've seen it all type of thing, and they loved it so much. I loved it for so many reasons. It was so, it's so wonderful. All practical effects, no, you know, no AI effects anywhere to be seen. Everything was handcrafted. It was just like such a wonder, and the acting and everything about it, I just, I really enjoyed it.

• 43:56Bob Novella?

  And I would love to see a real horror movie, a graphic horror movie. This thing pulls no punches. I would love to see something like that win some major awards. And so, let's see if it happens.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  It was good, yeah. And some of the scenes with the practical effects were amazing.

• 44:10Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  They really were good.

• 44:11Bob Novella?

  Oof, yep. Especially that one, towards the beginning.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yep.

• 44:16Bob Novella?

  Oh, boy.

• 44:17Speaker 05

  Oh, boy.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Worth seeing. All right, well, I think we have some good predictions for next year. We'll obviously check back and see how we do. But let's go on with some news items. Jay, you're gonna start us off with an intervention for adult ADHD.

• 44:34Jay Novella?

  So, guys, what percentage of adults do you think have, have been diagnosed with ADHD?

• 44:40Speaker 02

  5%.

• 44:41Bob Novella?

  Diagnosed?

• 44:41Speaker 05

  10%.

• 44:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's about 6%.

• 44:45Bob Novella?

  Got it.

• 44:46Jay Novella?

  Different numbers that people come up with, but the average, it's about 6, 7.

• 44:50Speaker 05

  I came up with.

• 44:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Six, seven.

• 44:53Speaker 05

  Yes, 2026, seven is off to a great start.

• 44:56Jay Novella?

  All right, now, more interestingly, though, what percentage of people are suspected to have ADHD, right? Because everyone doesn't get diagnosed.

• 45:04Speaker 05

  Two to three times that number.

• 45:05Jay Novella?

  It's 25%.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  That is two to three times that number.

• 45:09Speaker 05

  One in four.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Put the cutoff.

• 45:11Jay Novella?

  Yeah, of course, this, you know, this isn't like, you know, there's no real precision here because it all has to be guesstimated. But roughly one in four people, one in four people. So people with ADHD frequently have traits, of course, that can be hard to deal with. You know, I have it, my kids have ADHD, trouble focusing, impulsivity, disorganization, emotional regulation problems. You know, these are pretty, pretty common with people that have ADHD. The vast majority of talk about ADHD, though, focuses on all the negative aspects, right? Because these are the things that we're, that we're trying to give people help with. This new study that was recently published in Psychological Medicine questions if some

• 45:53Jay Novella?

  of the same traits associated with ADHD can also function as strengths, right? This is something that my wife and I tell our kids, that, you know, there are, there's things that you have to learn to, to deal with, having ADHD. And we try not to make them oppressive for the kids, right? But we tell them, but ADHD also gives you some superpowers. You know, of course, I'm talking to children here. This isn't the way I would talk to an adult about it. But we want them to, to see a positive angle to the whole thing, because actually, there is some things that can be positive about it. So this is what the, this study is, is looking at, is, you know, what are some of the traits that come with ADHD that are actually beneficial to people? And then what, you know, and how

• 46:35Jay Novella?

  to deal with that after that? The study is actually titled, "The Role of Psychological Strengths and Positive Life Outcomes in Adults with ADHD." They looked at adults with and without an ADHD diagnosis, and they compared how they view their own strengths and how these strengths have affected their lives. Now, it's important to note here that the study doesn't claim that ADHD is secretly a gift, or that, you know, that it's, the challenges that people have with it will disappear if you just look on the bright side. That's all nonsense. What the study does, though, it asks a narrower question. It's more of a testable question. Do adults with ADHD report certain positive traits more strongly and does awareness and use of those traits relate to better outcomes?

• 47:19Jay Novella?

  I think that's an incredible question and an incredible topic for this study, and this is why I really wanted to talk about it. So the researchers surveyed 400 adults. Half of them reported having been diagnosed with ADHD, the other half not, and the participants were asked to rate 25 psychological strengths commonly associated with ADHD in popular and clinical discussions. So these people were including traits like creativity, humor, spontaneity, imaginative thinking, hyper-focus, intuition, and having broad interests. These are all things that could actually be positive that people have, like, meaning, like, people with ADHD tend to have more creativity, or, you know, advanced humor, or more spontaneity.

• 48:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Are they testing for whether people have those things in the study, or are they assuming that they already do? Because that is not well documented.

• 48:10Jay Novella?

  No, they're just asking them, of these 25 psychological strengths commonly associated with ADHD, which of them do you say that you have? And then it goes further than that. This is just the first step.

• 48:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Sure. I guess my question is, where are they getting the information that these things are commonly associated with ADHD? Like, having broad interests?

• 48:32Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean...

• 48:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Because that is not part of the diagnostic criteria. So unless there are multiple studies that show that these are, like, concurrent, you know, strengths, I don't like that they're just shooting from the hip.

• 48:44Jay Novella?

  Well, they said that these were 25 psychological strengths that have been deemed commonly associated with ADHD. Now, I don't know where they got that information from.

• 48:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Maybe they have, like, a pool of their own research.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  But that's a separate deep dive.

• 48:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  I mean, so, there is, there is at least preliminary evidence for these things. I don't know how solid they are, but they don't require a separate, really, exploration.

• 49:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:11Jay Novella?

  They also had them complete a questionnaire measuring how well they understood their own strengths, how often they use them. Their overall well-being, quality of life and mental health symptoms. Right, so they're getting a profile on each of these 400 people. And then they were able to pull information from those questions. So the first result of this is it's probably the least controversial. What they found was adults with ADHD were more likely to strongly endorse a specific subset of strengths. Right, so the top 10 strengths that people with ADHD reported that they have were creativity, humor, spontaneity, imaginative thinking, intuition, image-based thinking, seeing opportunities,

• 49:56Jay Novella?

  being up for anything, broad interests and hyper-focus. And now, all of these traits had a stronger endorsement by those in the ADHD group. And for the other strengths, there was no difference between the two groups. People with and people without ADHD, they kind of were, you know, on par with each other. And this is important because it cuts against the idea that people with ADHD are universally more or less strong across the board. The differences that they pointed out or that they discovered are specific and not global. Right, and like if you focus on those 10 things, for example, that I listed, those were the most common ones that they said that they had a stronger connection to.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Now, that kind of fits the growing trend in neuroscience. To think of these conditions that were previously thought of as just disorders as being neurodiversity, right?

• 50:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, a different type.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, like even like autism in the mild to moderate end of the spectrum. Like not like the non-verbal autistic children, but people who have what might previously have been called Asperger's Syndrome is now, you know, considered to be like either type one or mild autism. They have, they have challenges, absolutely, but they also have strengths as well. And it's just that their brains just operate differently than is typical. And it's just, they're just a different, you know, neurodiversity. ADHD, previously we thought of as just a pure deficit, but maybe it isn't. Maybe it, it's a trade off.

• 51:31Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  Everything in evolution is trade offs, right? Yes, you, yeah, you do have challenges, but, but you have other areas where you have strengths. And what usually determines like the impact of those strengths and weaknesses is often your culture, right? If you live in a culture where you have to go to school and be, be, pay attention in a, in a controlled environment for many hours a day, that's sort of magnifying the, the challenges of ADHD.

• 51:57Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  Whereas if, you know, as adults, people with ADHD generally find their way to careers that lean into their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses.

• 52:08Jay Novella?

  Whether they're conscious of it or not.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  Whether they're conscious of it or not, yeah.

• 52:11Cara Santa Maria?

  I think the thing that, that I don't like about the study, and I get that it's preliminary, is that similar to an autism diagnosis, a, a robust ADHD diagnosis can't be made just based on self-report.

• 52:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:24Cara Santa Maria?

  You have to take neuropsych tests. And also, you really should, in an autism setting at least, get corroborating information from other people that know you, like your parents or your peers.

• 52:37Jay Novella?

  Well, Kara, I think you'll understand what they were going for here a little better once I describe the next two findings.

• 52:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, okay.

• 52:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. You're, you're absolutely right.

• 52:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because it's very easy to be like, I'm creative.

• 52:47Jay Novella?

  Yeah. This was more, this was more exploratory and just trying to get a sense of a couple of things that I haven't even discussed yet. Like, everything I, I said was more of the setup. So, so remember, I said the first result was that the people were more likely to endorse a certain subset of strengths, right? So people with ADHD have like these 10 typical, common subsets of strengths that seem to come with ADHD. The second finding, which was more surprising, is that even though adults with ADHD were more likely to say they had these certain strengths. They were no better than adults without ADHD at recognizing those strengths or using them in daily life.

• 53:28Jay Novella?

  And that's very important here because the awareness of those strengths is a very important factor here, right? It's like, you know, without knowing what your strengths are, you can't leverage them. And that was the thing that they found here was that it seems like people with ADHD simply are not, you know, fully aware of what the strengths are and certainly not using them. And the third and most important finding has to do with real life outcomes. They said in both groups, people who were more aware of their strengths tended to feel better overall. They reported a higher quality of life and they have fewer mental health symptoms. So using those strengths showed a similar pattern, though there was a weaker link there. So this was true whether or not someone had ADHD.

• 54:11Jay Novella?

  While ADHD adults, on average, reported lower well-being and quality of life, those who were better, who better understood their strengths and made use of their strengths tended to do better than those who did not. And let me make a couple more quick points here. It's crucial to be clear about what this does and doesn't show. So this is a cross-section study. It can't prove that knowing your strengths causes better mental health. It's entirely possible, of course, that people who are doing better mentally find it easier to recognize and use their strengths. There also may be unmeasured factors, like Steve was saying, like their social support, education, workplace flexibility influencing these results.

• 54:55Jay Novella?

  And the authors acknowledge these limits. However, that said, the implications are actually a little hard to ignore here because much of ADHD treatment focuses on managing the impairments, right? So there's medication, there's behavioral strategies, there's accommodations. You know, this is critical to helping people with ADHD, but, and this is the, this is the most important thing I'm going to say, this study suggests that, that a strengths-based approach is not just a feel-good add-on, that strength awareness appears to be a legitimate factor with how people are Doing in their lives.

• 55:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm.

• 55:33Jay Novella?

  So what they recommend is changing or having a shift in how ADHD is discussed and supported. Right. So therapy, coaching, education and workplace accommodations should also include helping people identify where they function well. And how to use those abilities deliberately, not just treating the symptoms. And I think it makes perfect sense when you think of it in this context. Listen, you're going to have some things that are very hard to deal with, or most people with ADHD. You know, you're going to identify the problems that you're having. You know, I know exactly what my ADHD symptoms are, and I know exactly how hard they are to deal with. And I know exactly what impact they're having on my life.

• 56:12Jay Novella?

  And, and I am a part of this because I have not recognized and fully embraced the strengths that I'm getting from my ADHD. And I find this so provocative that, you know, there's untapped potential in people that have ADHD. And what they need to do alongside, you know, dealing with their deficits is leaning into those strengths. Now, of course, this applies to everybody. It's not just people with ADHD, but it's a little bit more pronounced with people with ADHD. Because they, they seem to on average have certain deficits and more likely bonuses.

• 56:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And I think it makes sense too, that this is a study on adults. Um, because I think where things get hairy, and I'm not saying we shouldn't be using a strengths based approach with children. Of course we should, and hopefully like good therapists and psychiatrists are already doing that.

• 57:05Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 57:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Um, but with adults, oftentimes the difficulties that come with ADHD are self carried. Right. Like a person identifies, I'm struggling at work, or this is causing problems in my relationship. With kids, a lot of times those difficulties are identified by teachers and parents.

• 57:23Jay Novella?

  By other people. Yeah.

• 57:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So the deficits are causing like difficulty in school, for example. And so a solely strengths based approach, while it sounds amazing and ideal, it just doesn't seem that feasible in like a standard educational setting.

• 57:40Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 57:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Unfortunately.

• 57:41Jay Novella?

  To summarize this, I think anybody with ADHD should consider any deficits that they've identified and try to get support with them. Go to therapy. You might need medication. You might need different accommodations or whatever, but you know, try to raise your awareness of those things. And at the same time, you'll lean into the idea that there are probably some traits that you have that are enhanced because of your ADHD, and those are the things that you should be focusing on and leaning into. And we need to, we need to have the positives be, you know, be working for us and mitigating the negatives instead of just focusing, obviously,

• 58:22Jay Novella?

  on the negatives, which I think, you know, modern medicine is, is putting 99% of their eggs in that basket.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's usually, that's, people present with an identified problem, right? I'm having this problem. Help me fix it. So that's kind of the medical model. But yeah, psychologists need to be aware of, again, this more holistic view of how does this affect all the aspects of your life? And how do we leverage all of that to have the best outcome?

• 58:50Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think most psychologists are aware of that.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so.

• 58:52Cara Santa Maria?

  I think, yeah, I think one of the big changes is

• 58:54Speaker 02

  This is the cutting edge. This is what's happening. This is standard.

• 58:55Cara Santa Maria?

  People should also be seeking psychological support and not just medicinal support for their symptoms.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  Yes, and also not be afraid of medicinal support. There's a huge anti-medication bias in the culture.

• 59:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's true. And, and we know that ADHD almost by definition, like, it's diagnosable when we see relief, when they get medication.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, sometimes it's dramatic.

• 59:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:16Jay Novella?

  And the medication, it can be incredibly helpful. I mean, you know, I started taking my medication again, and it gives me like six hours of more clarity and, and, you know, more drive and all, you know, lots of positives. So I recommend if you have ADHD, talk to your doctor.

• 59:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, talk to your doctors. Don't be so afraid of it that you don't listen to good advice about it.

• 59:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  All right, let's move on. All right, guys, I want to talk about the difference between biological versus artificial consciousness. We had a couple of our items were about predicting whether AI will become sentient and, or, you know, the more general concept of like a self-aware consciousness. I think we could all agree, current AIs are nowhere near that. They're not programmed to be that way. They're not necessarily even on a path to becoming conscious. But the question is, how will we, can we, and if so, how will we create artificial consciousness? So there was a recent paper that, you know, hoping to push this conversation forward.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  The paper is on biological and artificial consciousness, a case for biological computationalism. They review the two existing schools of thought as to what it would take to create consciousness, or what, you know, which relates to what's the nature of consciousness. Does anybody have an idea what those are? No.

• 1:00:39Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  Any summary I can give is going to be a massive oversimplification, but these are the basic ideas. So, one is computationalism, right? Computationalists say that consciousness is a function of the, basically, the software. It's the program. It's the information and the information processing. And the substrate does not matter, doesn't, is irrelevant. Does that make sense?

• 1:01:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but, I mean, do they have some sort of threshold?

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  What do you mean?

• 1:01:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, then a calculator is conscious.

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  No, no, not, it's not just that any information is. If you, if I had all the information in your brain, and all of the information processing networks, et cetera, and I ran that on silicon, it would be conscious.

• 1:01:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, then by definition, that would be conscious.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  Yes. It's just the information. The substrate doesn't matter. But you still need the complexity and all, you know, you need that complexity of information processing to be conscious, but it doesn't matter. It's only the processing of the information itself that is responsible for consciousness. The other school of thought is that it's all about the hardware, right? That it's all about the physical processes. That's the biological naturalism side, right? It says that consciousness is inseparable from the distinctive properties of living brains and bodies. So biology isn't a vehicle for cognition. It is cognition, right? It is part of cognition. Yeah.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  So computational functionalism versus biological naturalism. All right. So, they're saying we need a new, a third way, right? A new way called biological computationalism, which kind of combines those two.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  So A hybrid. It is a bit of a hybrid, right? So there's one thing I disagree with them about, about the authors of this paper. So here's a quote from their discussion of their paper. "For decades, it has been tempting to assume that brains compute in roughly the same way conventional computers do, as if cognition were essentially software running atop neural hardware. But brains do not resemble von Neumann machines, and treating them as though they do forces us into awkward metaphors and brittle explanations. If we want a serious theory of how brains compute and what it would take to build minds in other substrates, we need to widen what we mean by computation in the first place."

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  So my problem is that they're writing as if this is a new idea, which to me, it's like, well, I already assumed that was what we were doing, right? That was the standard of the neuroscientific consensus. And I looked back, I knew I had written about this. The earliest instance of me writing about this was in 2017, where I wrote, "For starters, the brain is neither hardware nor software, it is both simultaneously, sometimes called wetware. Information is not stored in neurons, the neurons and their connections are the information. Further, processing and receiving information transforms those neurons, resulting in memory and learning."

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  The earliest reference to this idea I found goes back to the 1970s. So this is a seriously old idea, that the brain is neither software nor hardware, but both simultaneously. So I don't know if that's just because they're just not as aware of the history of this field, or if they're just trying to overemphasize their own contributions. This is kind of an aside, but I do think it is interesting that antecedents, especially conceptually, always go far deeper than you think. You know what I mean? Like, if you've had a new idea, chances are pretty good someone's had it already, you know? And good scholarship always involves a thorough exploration of the history of the idea that you're discussing.

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  But in any case, I do think that they formulate it in a way that does maybe push things forward. So here is their formulation of biological computationalism. Again, consciousness is not software running on hardware, but the two things are inseparable, right? So their first, they said to biological consciousness, they say it requires three things. First, that biological consciousness is a hybrid between discrete events and continuous dynamics. So what does that mean? A discrete event would be something like a neuron firing, right?

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  But you can't sort of understand the phenomenon of neurons firing in isolation. You can only understand them if you understand how the continuous dynamics of the brain influences those firing, and how that firing influences the continuous dynamics of the brain, such as hormone levels, neurotransmitter levels, and the synaptic connections, et cetera, et cetera, right? So all of that influences the firing of neurons, and the firing of neurons influences those dynamics. So it's a hybrid between the two. So trying to make a computer that duplicates the neuronal firing isn't going to get you to consciousness, right? This is what they're saying, unless you are also accounting for this more continuous

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  dynamics of the brain itself. The second is that the brain is what we call scale inseparable, which is just another way of saying you can't separate it into hardware and software, right? There's not an algorithm running on brain hardware. The brain is the algorithm. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. You're saying neurons that are firing are also making the connections, you know? Yeah. So and then, third, the brain function is constrained by the availability of energy and resources, what they call metabolically grounded. They said this affects every aspect of how the brain functions, because, you know, the brain evolved to be very energy efficient, metabolically efficient.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  You know, it's a massively powerful processing machine. If we tried to duplicate it in our current computer technology, it would take a massive amount of energy, and yet our brains are able to do it with orders of magnitude, you know, less energy than computers do. And so it's just intrinsic to its functioning, that, you know, it is designed to optimize its metabolic efficiency and energy efficiency.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  All right, so the thing is, the first two points I agree with, that meaning that these are things that relate to the way in which the brain creates consciousness. The third thing about being metabolically grounded, that I find that, my sense is that that's incidental. It may be, have a tremendous effect on how the brain functions, but I don't necessarily, I can't see how that affects how the brain creates consciousness. You know what I mean?

• 1:07:40Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I think that's just like a, it's like an indicator that separate, it's basically saying it's got to have wetware. Like, it's got to be biological to be biological.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, but yeah, but doesn't, that doesn't mean that you couldn't create consciousness in a machine that mimicked the first two things, just used a lot of energy.

• 1:07:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I think that's the thing, right? Because it's like, the more reductionist we get, we always get down to that argument.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is, if it's not in a biological entity, can we call it consciousness? And then it's like, now we're just defining ourselves with our own definitions.

• 1:08:14Speaker 02

  Right, we're just defining what our biology is like.

• 1:08:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  Saying, see, it has to be like that. So I, this is, they didn't, they're just presenting a thought experiment here, they're saying, hey, this is how we should think about consciousness. And I think they're, they make a lot of good points. They're not presenting evidence, right? They're not saying that here's a reason why we wouldn't expect to generate consciousness unless we are mimicking this particular aspect of biology. I think they're saying that if, this is one pathway to consciousness, if we're, if our goal is to mimic biology, we've got to consider these things. And if we don't consider these things, we're not mimicking biology, and that's probably going to fail. But that doesn't mean it's the only way to generate consciousness, right?

• 1:08:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  We could maybe be able to have a thinking machine, a sentient machine that has, that follows a completely different set of rules, right? And evolution tells us this all the time. There's many ways to skin a cat, right? There's many ways to achieve the same functional outcome.

• 1:09:12Cara Santa Maria?

  It makes you think that like, these kind of computer scientists who are interested in, in psychology and neuroscience, they've got to go talk to the astrobiologists who are grappling with similar questions. It's like, will we recognize life elsewhere in the universe, since we're only looking at it through our own lens?

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's like saying, life has to be Earth life.

• 1:09:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Right. Consciousness has to be human consciousness.

• 1:09:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Has to be human life. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  It doesn't have to be, but again, if we are trying to create consciousness, it is something to keep in mind. So what is happening, which is, I think, a good thing, is that neuroscientists and computer scientists are kind of playing off of each other. Whereas the more we learn about how the brain works, this gives ideas to computer scientists about how to design their computers. And then when they, and then what we learn from information processing, et cetera, et cetera, on the computer end informs our thinking about how the brain works. And then in the middle, it's when we use computers to simulate actual brain function. Like, we built a cortical column virtually in a computer, and then we turned it on and saw what happened, you know?

• 1:10:21Speaker 02

  We will get to the point where we have a complete vertebrate brain that we could then run in a computer either. You know, there's another layer here, and that is like, how much is virtual and how much is hardware, right? So like, you could have a human brain simulated on a regular computer entirely virtually, right? Or you could build the computer to mimic the functionality of, like, a neural network where it's trying to mimic some of the aspects of how brains work. And one interesting question is, does that even matter, right? Would a virtual brain, virtual human brain, be a human consciousness? I don't see any reason why not.

• 1:11:06Bob Novella?

  Right? I mean, we gotta, we gotta at least try, man. That's like...

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  And if it is, then regular silicon can be conscious. Then that kind of supports the computationalist perspective, if you think about it. It's like, as long as you have the information running in the right way. But I think the caveat there is like, yeah, but you're sort of mimicking the hardware of the brain, not just the software of the brain, virtually, right? The virtual brain is mimicking both the hardware and software, the wetware of the brain. So it kind of doesn't necessarily support the computationalist view. Does that make sense? You know, I'm not the first one, again, these antecedents go back decades. I'm the first one to ask this question, is like, if that's true, if we built a big enough computer out of vacuum tubes that we could virtually simulate a human brain, would that be conscious?

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  And if that's true, like, how primitive can you get? Can a mechanical computer be conscious? If it's, this is again the maximalist computationalist view, which I, I think breaks down at some point, right?

• 1:12:05Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  Because you need to have emergent properties that require a certain amount of, I think, speed and interactiveness and robustness of the interconnectedness, et cetera, et cetera. Or may, you know, it just may be just a flicker of conscious, I don't know.

• 1:12:22Bob Novella?

  Right, or a super slow thinker.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, I think what's fascinating about this is that it gives us the ability to actually ask and answer some of these questions as we develop this technology. But of course, we rapidly run into ethical considerations. Like, would it be ethical to create a virtual human brain in a computer? Or even a hardware brain, you know, like, build a human brain on a neural network, increasingly designed to mimic all of these aspects that these authors are talking about, in terms of how the human brain works, and also have the networks and the algorithms, et cetera, et cetera, to have all the aspects of a human brain? Would, would it be ethical to do that?

• 1:13:04Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:13:05Speaker 02

  We're creating a consciousness of-

• 1:13:07Bob Novella?

  It would be ethical, just how you treat it is where the ethics comes in.

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  Well, so then, but then what you're saying is, is that we better have all of the regulations in place before we do it.

• 1:13:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:13:21Cara Santa Maria?

  But also, I don't know if that's true, that it's ethical to create it, either.

• 1:13:25Speaker 02

  It's an interesting question.

• 1:13:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I don't think that's a given.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not something that we should take as a given, I agree. It's something we need to thoroughly explore. And if it is ethical, under what conditions? And can we guarantee those conditions?

• 1:13:38Bob Novella?

  The thing is, the regulations will never be in place until we do it.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  But that's a bad thing. That's, I disagree with that, that that's a foregone conclusion.

• 1:13:45Bob Novella?

  I don't, I mean-

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  That may be likely, given your cynical view-

• 1:13:48Bob Novella?

  Overwhelmingly likely.

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:49Bob Novella?

  Come on.

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  That doesn't, that doesn't mean it has to be true.

• 1:13:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it doesn't have to be that way.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, it doesn't have to be, but come on.

• 1:13:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Not to take this on, like, on a huge aside, but I watched a documentary last night about this huge building fire in London that, like, killed a lot of people.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:08Cara Santa Maria?

  And it had to do with, like, the cladding. It's called the Grenfell Tower Fire, if you didn't hear about it, in 2017. And a big part of what they were talking about is that all of these, like, politicians were basically saying, "We don't need to change regulation until there are deaths." And then, of course, there were deaths.

• 1:14:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:22Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's like a very common way that we write policies. It's all reactionary instead of preventive.

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:29Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but a lot of that is foreseeable. I mean, there's not a lot, a lot of people that say, "Yes, we definitely can create a thinking entity within, within, you know, it's like, I, I think that's what it's gonna take." Evidence that this works.

• 1:14:42Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's what we're doing right now, is we're foreseeing it. I mean, there are people who dedicate their whole careers to foreseeing stuff like this.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  And Bob, there are, there are regulations about things like cloning humans that predate our ability to do so. So it's not true that we can't do it.

• 1:14:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, we just did a story, like, two weeks ago. I just covered the thing about growing organs in animals.

• 1:15:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. I do think regulations can get ahead of technology if you have people raising the question.

• 1:15:07Bob Novella?

  In this case, I don't, I don't think it will. I think it's gonna take some, some scientists to create it. And, and even, and as you know, even once they create it, a lot of people, maybe probably most people, even with good evidence, still won't believe it. They still won't believe that it's, you know, it's a duck. You know, that it talks like a duck, walks like a duck.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  That's a separate issue. How will we know if something is acting sentient? And we're already running into this problem with even just the narrow AI that we're developing now. It's just showing you how good you could get at mimicking conscious behavior without being conscious. So if we made something that we think this could have the emergent property of self-aware consciousness, how would we really, really know, other than just saying, "Well, it acts conscious, but that's not enough, and that's never gonna be enough"? I would say the, the best way to know is, "Well, if it's mimicking a human brain, we have to assume it's conscious." Right? That's how I know you're conscious, otherwise I can't really, really know. But for other things, if it's different enough from a human brain?

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  Then we may not really know, but I think anything, this is where the experts have to get together and say, if it has these qualities to it, which is where this kind of paper comes into, is very helpful. If it has these qualities to it, we may not know for sure, but we have to assume it is, because it could be conscious, and therefore that gives it certain rights, and puts responsibilities on anybody interfacing with it.

• 1:16:35Cara Santa Maria?

  And I'd rather have a bunch of false positives than false negatives in this case.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:16:39Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think the part that's so scary is that because we are people and we recognize that people are people, if a person looks at you and says, "I am conscious," we believe them, right? Like, or if they say, "This is my name," or "This is how I identify," or "This is who I am," it's like, we will affirm that and we will believe them. But if a machine says, "I am conscious," what do we do?

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:00Bob Novella?

  Well, there's no precedent. Entirely different beast, right, at that point.

• 1:17:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:17:04Bob Novella?

  Until they're common. Until, I hope we get to the point where we can create reasonable regulations. I'm just not, I'm not confident that we will.

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think.

• 1:17:13Bob Novella?

  Before it's actually created.

• 1:17:15Speaker 05

  When will they start self-replicating?

• 1:17:17Speaker 02

  Well, that, yeah, I think we should be very careful before that happens, before we give the sentient AI the ability to self-replicate.

• 1:17:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, we already have viruses that can self-replicate, right?

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  That's the point. That's a dangerous thing. Then that's what resulted in the Borg, right, basically? You don't want technology that self-replicates and takes on a life of its own.

• 1:17:36Bob Novella?

  Control A, Control C, Control V.

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  All right, Kara, tell us about this fentanyl vaccine. Sounds good.

• 1:17:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, and I'm doing a little bit of digging, and I, you know, I am not an investigative journalist, so I'm going to caveat this at the very beginning, that a lot of what we know about this fentanyl vaccine is based on press releases by the company developing it. That said, we do know that there's a clinical trial that's going to happen, and we know that there is quite a bit of funding for this company. Now, the company's called Armor Sciences, and this is another one of those annoying things, but I looked it up, you guys, like, in. Nvidia, Nvidia. Oh, here we go. Oh, no, no. Poor Kara. I know. But ARMOUR, science is it spelled A R M R, all capital.

• 1:18:29Cara Santa Maria?

  But at least that one looks like ARMOUR, I guess. They are a, see, this is the part where I get so skeptical. They are couching their entire company as like a biodefense company. Now, it's hard to tell when you look at their website and when you look at their marketing materials, if this is because they are almost completely funded by the Department of War. And so because of that, they're having to sort of twist everything into a very like biodefense language. Could be just framing. Yeah, it could just be framing because the interesting thing is most of the scientific coverage of this does not frame it this way, but their website is like, next generation

• 1:19:12Cara Santa Maria?

  biodefense, countermeasures to protect against bioweapons, starting with fentanyl. And you're like, hmm, what? And then so all the coverage that you read about is like, fentanyl is a huge global killer. This is a huge problem. How can we prevent deaths from fentanyl? But of course, their framing a lot is like, this could be a bioweapon and we need to shield against it. And actually, when you look at their R and D, they're developing vaccines not just against fentanyl, but also against nitazines. So these are like sedatives. Most of these are opiates. Metotomidine is not an opiate, but the others are opiates. They also have carfentanil. These are just like synthetic, very, very powerful opiates that they're trying to explore

• 1:19:56Cara Santa Maria?

  other than metotomidine. That's a, that's a sedative, that's a non-opiate sedative. But let's focus on, on fentanyl because that's what all of the coverage is about right now. So basically, we know that fentanyl is a massive, massive problem. When we look at different coverage of what's going on with the fentanyl crisis, like the DEA website claims that in 2024, they seized more than 60 million fentanyl laced counterfeit pills and nearly 8,000 pounds of fentanyl powder. So they're, they're saying this is equivalent to more than 380 million lethal doses of fentanyl.

• 1:20:38Cara Santa Maria?

  And part of the reason that they can make that claim is that a lethal dose of fentanyl can be as small, of pure fentanyl can be as small as two milligrams. And like, think about what two milligrams is. That's what, like 20 grains of salt?

• 1:20:51Speaker 02

  It's very potent, yeah.

• 1:20:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's very potent. It's 50 times stronger than heroin. It's 100 times stronger than morphine. Fentanyl does have medicinal uses, though, and I want to get back to that in a minute. But it is used, right, to treat severe pain. It's used during surgery.

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's used for anesthesia, absolutely.

• 1:21:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's part of the anesthesia cocktail that a lot of people get.

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  And for extreme pain relief, yeah.

• 1:21:15Cara Santa Maria?

  And for extreme pain relief immediately after. And we also see it, of course, in, you know, my line of work. A lot of the patients that I work with who have advanced cancer take fentanyl. They often use fentanyl patches to relieve some of that pain. But the problem is, it is very addictive and it's very easy to die when you take fentanyl, because it's a very, very strong drug that causes depressive reactions, right? Like respiratory depression and sedation. And so people just stop breathing when they're on this drug, which can cause them to die. Now, we do have treatment. We have naloxone, which can, or Narcan is the brand name,

• 1:22:00Cara Santa Maria?

  which is a nasal spray that's often used, which can reverse the overdose, because it's an opioid antagonist. So it basically bumps the fentanyl out of the opioid receptor and replaces it. And so the person who receives the Narcan treatment, if they get it soon enough, will, it'll reverse not just the high, but also the side effects. And hopefully, that person will live. There are also drugs that can be taken. One drug, like Suboxone, which is a mix of Narcan or naloxone. So there are also drugs that people can take as part of their treatment for opioid use disorder.

• 1:22:44Cara Santa Maria?

  So like, one, Suboxone is a common one that you'll hear about, where it's a mix of naloxone, which is the opioid agonist. That's the thing that like bumps the opiates, you know, out of the receptor. And also bu... Buprenorphine, which is a partial agonist. The buprenorphine is important here because it prevents people from getting that high when they take it, but it also helps with withdrawal symptoms, right? So it's like partially activating those opioid receptors so that the person, when they take it, they don't feel as sick as they would if they just clean came off of opiates. But they also don't get high like they would have if they were to take fentanyl, for example.

• 1:23:28Cara Santa Maria?

  And so these drugs are around. There are obviously issues with these things too, you know, there are side effects with these because they are partial agonists. There are a lot of interactions. There's even the potential to misuse suboxone. So this reminds me of, what's the old school one that people used for heroin? I mean, they still use it, methadone, right? So, yeah. There were problems with methadone clinics where people would become addicted to methadone after they kicked heroin or when they couldn't find heroin. And so, you know, nothing is a perfect system, but of course, this is a harm reduction approach.

• 1:24:05Cara Santa Maria?

  But what the folks over at Armor Sciences are claiming and working towards is a vaccine. And so this idea is that the vaccine actually blocks the effects of fentanyl altogether, including overdose. So including all the negative things. So not only does it prevent you from getting high when you take fentanyl, it prevents you from having respiratory depression and all of the other side effects that can lead to death. And it's about to go into clinical trials, phase one clinical trials in January or February of this year in the Netherlands. So phase one is very, very early, as we often talk about. They're only looking at safety.

• 1:24:47Cara Santa Maria?

  But they have looked at this drug, or this vaccine, I should say, in rats, and they did find, you know, positive outcomes. And what's really interesting about the vaccine is that it's different than Narcan. It's different than suboxone. And the reason it's different is because those drugs bind to opioid receptors, but this drug actually circulates in the blood as a vaccine.

• 1:25:16Cara Santa Maria?

  And prevents the drug from ever binding to begin with. So how would it do that? How would it prevent a drug from binding? Well, what they did is they found compounds that are often used in vaccines already. So one of them is a compound called CRM197, which is a deactivated diphtheria toxin. So it's, it's not toxic. It doesn't cause diphtheria, but it does cause an immune response. And then they added a second compound that does something similar called DMLT. That is a, a compound that's made from E. coli bacteria. Again, it's not toxic on its own, but it has been used in previous drug trials to induce an immune response.

• 1:26:00Cara Santa Maria?

  And they combined those two components to a synthetic piece of the fentanyl molecule, which does not induce a high and does not cause pain relief and does not cause respiratory depression. So they found kind of a, a section of the fentanyl molecule that's inactive, but that the immune system recognizes. And they combined it with, with two different non-toxic portions of toxins that induce an immune response. So the idea here is that when the immune system sees this combination, antibodies bind to the opioid and the opioid never crosses the blood brain barrier.

• 1:26:40Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:26:41Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's a really interesting way to approach this, right?

• 1:26:45Speaker 05

  So are there other vaccinations that also work this way?

• 1:26:47Cara Santa Maria?

  There are vaccine, vaccines that have been in trial, but that have not yet been approved. But this is kind of a new approach to, um, there, there is actually the C, the CRM197 compound is used in some vaccines that are already on the market as, as a partial immune kind of responder. But the E. coli one, the DMLT, it's been tested, but it's in, uh, not yet approved vaccines. And so they've done rat studies on this called an immunocomjugate vaccine alters distribution and reduces the anti-nosusceptive behavioral and physiologic effects of fentanyl in male and female rats. And they found, you know, that it worked. It prevented changes to oxygen saturation, to heart rate.

• 1:27:32Cara Santa Maria?

  It prevented pain blocking. So here, herein comes the other issue, right?

• 1:27:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Risk benefit analysis. Obviously, fentanyl drug-seeking behavior is very, very dangerous. If you can block the fentanyl from having any effect when somebody who is struggling with opioid use disorder takes it, it's going to help them get through that withdrawal and hopefully no longer have those physiologic urges and need, what feels like a need to use the drug. That's huge because their risk of death goes down and we know that the risk of death is very high in people who are struggling with fentanyl addiction. The problem is, what happens if they need an opioid?

• 1:28:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, because it works against all opioids.

• 1:28:18Cara Santa Maria?

  It does not bind to morphine or methadone or oxycodone.

• 1:28:22Speaker 05

  Oh, okay, so you can still?

• 1:28:23Cara Santa Maria?

  But the problem is, is morphine good enough in anesthesia?

• 1:28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it would limit your choices. It means, but that also means you probably need to wear a medical bracelet so that you get, you know.

• 1:28:34Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure.

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  Somebody doesn't give you fentanyl as your anesthetic and not knowing that you're immune to it, basically.

• 1:28:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because they think that the vaccine would last like a year, a year and a half. And that's a cool thing, too. At least it's not like a lifetime vaccine, you know? And your risk of needing kind of intense medical intervention requiring fentanyl over the course of a year and a half is probably significantly lower than your risk of dying of a fentanyl overdose if you're actively dealing with that.

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, so we wouldn't put it in the water. We wouldn't do this to everybody. This would be people who are at high risk for relapse, essentially, or already addicted to opioids.

• 1:29:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's a lot of people. I mean, 48,000 people or more likely died of opioid overdoses in 2024, just here in the US. You know, that's all opioids, but fentanyl is a huge problem. And I think part of the issue here, and this is where I'm interested in how they could see giving this vaccine. It's one thing if somebody knows that they have an active opioid addiction and that they're seeking out fentanyl. It's another thing to prevent against all of the preventable deaths that are caused by drugs being cut with fentanyl. Because that's a huge problem, is that a lot of like stimulants and painkillers that people buy on the street are cut with fentanyl, so they don't know what they're taking.

• 1:29:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:29:55Cara Santa Maria?

  And the dose can be, yeah, the dose can be high enough to cause real problems. But a lot of people aren't seeking those drugs out when they accidentally take them. So would they? Want to take a vaccine against fentanyl, maybe. Maybe if they're actively, you know, enjoying taking kind of recreational drugs, or they know that they're struggling with another type of substance use disorder, and proactively, this could be beneficial downstream. You know, maybe it's something that they could work with their addiction specialists on. But first, they've got to see if it even works.

• 1:30:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:32Cara Santa Maria?

  And if it causes any sort of harm, because-

• 1:30:35Speaker 05

  The concept's fascinating.

• 1:30:36Cara Santa Maria?

  It is. It's a really interesting idea. And I think this is the only, I don't want to say that, but this is the company that's getting all of the press.

• 1:30:43Speaker 02

  It's not the only company. There are other companies.

• 1:30:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Maybe they're just the closest.

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're the same. It'll be a few years before we're at the point where it could either get FDA approval or not. And it'll, it sounds like it'll have a role. You know, this is not, you know, as we say, not the silver bullet, not the one, not the cure for everybody, but this might be a good option for some people and could prevent a lot of deaths.

• 1:31:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, which would be really important, for sure. It's a big problem.

• 1:31:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right. Thanks, Cara. Bob, tell us how low Earth orbit on Earth is going to go to crap.

• 1:31:17Bob Novella?

  That's one way to put it. This is from a new study that argues that mega satellite constellations like Starlink have made low Earth orbit much more fragile than previously in terms of collisions, inevitably raising the dreaded specter, again, of that worst case scenario we've mentioned on the show, the Kessler syndrome, where satellite orbits are mostly just debris waiting to smash anything that goes through them. This is in the archive preprint site. The name of the paper is "An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Mega Constellations Close Conjunctions." So, "House of Cards" is a good way to put it. So, Kessler syndrome, we've mentioned this on the show a bunch of times.

• 1:32:01Bob Novella?

  This is inspired by a 1978 paper by NASA researchers Donald Kessler and Burton Corpilay. So, sometimes it's called the KCPS scenario here. So, that'd be the Kessler-Corpilay syndrome. They created equal- Equations to model the known satellites that we have in orbit, this is back in the 70s, and predict how they could collide and create debris in orbit over a period of years and even decades, and yes, that's true. Even this worst-case Kessler syndrome or KCPS syndrome is not something that's going to happen like in the Hollywood movies over the course of a weekend or a few hours. This is something that could build up over years and decades or more before it gets kind of ridiculous. So that's actually a little bit encouraging because I thought it was a little, I didn't

• 1:32:46Bob Novella?

  think it could potentially even take decades to happen. But be that as it may, this is something that we absolutely want to avoid. So what these researchers wanted to do is they looked at this Kessler syndrome idea and they realized that this is a very slow process. Like I said, years to decades to really come to full fruition. And that brought to mind that famous image of a frog not noticing the water it's in getting hotter and hotter, which is fake, by the way. That's not the case. They're definitely not that stupid. But this idea that it's like you're in a slow burn that you're not really recognizing. So to make it more noticeable, to make this danger more noticeable over much shorter periods

• 1:33:27Bob Novella?

  of times, these researchers introduced a new key environmental indicator and they call this a CRASH clock. CRASH is of course yet another acronym, but it's a good one. I kind of like this one. CRASH here stands for Collision Realization and Significant Harm. So this CRASH clock is essentially an indicator of orbital fragility. That's kind of what it is. It's the time, specifically, it's the time it would take for a catastrophic orbital collision to happen if we stop our collision avoidance maneuvers or if there's a severe loss of situational awareness of our satellites. So that's basically it. So to derive this number, to come up with this number, the researchers had to look at

• 1:34:11Bob Novella?

  lots of different things. They had to estimate how crowded the orbits are, how often close encounters happen, and then from there, they kind of like calculate this overall catastrophic collision rate. It's also important to note that this CRASH clock, it's not a measure of when a Kessler runaway cascade begins. It's not really meant to point to that. Hey, look, you know, this is going to, this is happening now because of these collisions. It measures how quickly huge collisions could happen when our ability to alter the orbits is impaired. Right, so that's, that's the big takeaway here, that huge collisions can happen really fast and really bad if we lose our ability to alter their orbits, for whatever reason.

• 1:34:56Bob Novella?

  So, so the crash clock, according to these researchers, in 2018, what, eight years ago now, or so, was 121 days. So the crash clock in 2018 was 128 days, 121 days. That means that if satellite operators lost their ability to send commands to satellites for a performance, to perform these avoidance maneuvers, there would almost certainly be a large collision before 121 days pass. So you got that?

• 1:35:24Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:35:25Bob Novella?

  The crash clock says 121 days. That means if we're not doing anything, 121 days, some big stuff's gonna happen. So as of mid-2025, what, seven years later or so, the crash clock has changed to not 121 days, but 2.8 days. Just under three days. That's alarming. That's very, that's very, if, if not red alert, it's definitely yellow alert. I mean, this is like, damn, man, this isn't good. So that means that less than a few days of not being able to move satellites as you want, will almost certainly result in, in a major collision. Even if we lose control for just a day, just 24 hours, that would,

• 1:36:10Bob Novella?

  that would mean that there's a 30% chance of some potentially catastrophic collision happening. One in three, essentially one in three of some really bad collision happening. And by bad collision, I mean, it's kind of a big collision, but also leading to secondary and tertiary collisions.

• 1:36:26Speaker 05

  Well, it's cascade, right?

• 1:36:27Bob Novella?

  Right. But it could be, you know, it could be just a secondary and tertiary with nothing really identifiable after that. It's not, like I said, it doesn't necessarily mean, okay, here we go, Kessler syndrome is, is starting here. That, that's not what, that's not what, what they're saying here. What do you guys think was the major cause for that drop from the crash clock?

• 1:36:47Speaker 05

  Starlink.

• 1:36:47Bob Novella?

  From 121 to 2.8. Yes. Satellite mega constellations like Starlink, with thousands to tens of thousands of satellites in orbit. So here's another quick concerning number here. The close calls under a kilometer, meaning that, you know, two satellites just whiz by each other by just a kilometer, which is really very little. It happens every 20 seconds in low earth orbit, every 20 seconds. So it's just like, damn, man. So that's pretty bad. So now

• 1:37:14Speaker 05

  Like a highway system up there, right?

• 1:37:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah, you think it, you think, you know, low earth orbit is, is just endless, but it's, it's obviously not endless, but also getting filled up fast.

• 1:37:24Jay Novella?

  That's it, man. Game over, man. Game over. What the fuck are we gonna do now?

• 1:37:31Bob Novella?

  Oh, man, I miss that dude.

• 1:37:32Jay Novella?

  Thanks, Bob.

• 1:37:33Bob Novella?

  So, um, so now we have shown, we have not had a lot of major collisions, um, in the past couple of decades. It's not like we would be hearing about it. It has happened. These accidents have happened, but we are doing well with this ballet of coordination of moving satellites around. But the thing is, we can, yes, we can cope with, with the situation as it is. We can, we, you know, we can move them. But as if you talk to an engineer, engineers will bring up in this scenario, the idea of edge cases, right? Edge cases are events that don't happen in a typical environment. Um, and they are the cause for most of the big failures. So, so what do you think are the edge cases for, for these earth orbits?

• 1:38:14Bob Novella?

  Um, especially low earth orbit and that a real dramatic edge case here is solar storms. It's just like solar storms.

• 1:38:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, things beyond our control, right?

• 1:38:23Bob Novella?

  Right, that, that, right, ultimately unpredictable. They're not inherently part of the typical environment. And especially the bad solar storms, they don't happen very often, but they can make everything go to crap, you know, uh, pretty badly. So, so these, these solar storms impact satellite operations in two ways. They, they pump a lot of energy into our atmosphere that causes them to puff up, right? They, the satellite, the demarcation line between at the atmosphere and space essentially just goes up in altitude. And the lowest, the lowest satellites in low earth orbit then just experienced drag and they, and that causes major problems. Um, in May 2024, I'm sure you remember the Gannon solar storm, uh, caused this.

• 1:39:04Bob Novella?

  Get this, because of this Ganon solar storm, more than half of all satellites in low Earth orbit had to be maneuvered to prevent collisions. And it's not just because the drag is causing these satellites to need to be maneuvered. Also, the fact that you're maneuvering the satellites themselves, just by maneuvering them, causes other maneuvers that need to be happened. So it just gets, it kind of builds on itself.

• 1:39:27Speaker 05

  It's a ballet.

• 1:39:28Bob Novella?

  It's really bad. In their paper, the researchers say, "In such conditions, positional uncertainties can easily become as high as several kilometers, making collision avoidance maneuvers extremely uncertain." So you move some satellites, and then you're not sure exactly where it is for a while. It could be days, you're not sure. So then if you do other maneuvers, you could be causing a collision. And then another related impact to the satellites, based on solar storms, is this idea that the storms can take out satellite navigation and communication systems to a certain extent, preventing them, you know, sometimes they go into hibernation mode, and you can't, they can't come out, or it just causes issues so that you can't maneuver them well to prevent a collision.

• 1:40:10Bob Novella?

  So it's really, it's a double whammy of really bad possibilities when we've got these bad solar storms. I mean, we could potentially be one solar storm away from initiating satellite collisions that could potentially, over time, cascade into something far, you know, far worse than just a few satellites crashing into each other. But even without a solar storm, it's not like you need a solar storm in order for this to be a scenario. In the paper, they say, "The number of collision avoidance maneuvers made by Starlink has historically been doubling every six months. Every six months, this doubles. Each maneuver creates uncertainty in the estimated satellite positions for multiple days, with one study even finding inaccuracies immediately after the maneuver of up to 40

• 1:40:55Bob Novella?

  kilometers." That just causes, that just cascades into these other issues of moving other satellites.

• 1:41:00Speaker 05

  Didn't you say some of these satellites move within a kilometer of each other?

• 1:41:04Bob Novella?

  Well, this, yeah, this just happens. Yep, they're every, what, every 20 seconds that happens. So the bottom line here, I think, is that these mega constellations are really a scourge in a lot of Not just because what it's doing to low earth orbit and making it so filled up that it's it that collisions are becoming, you know, more potentially really scary, but it's also, as we all know, there's been that they cause a disruption in astronomy. Astronomers hate these things for lots of great reasons. There's also pollution. We've covered this on the show as well. They cause pollution pollution in the upper atmosphere because there's more and more satellite ablation happening. There's even increased ground casualty risks, you know, because of so many, so many of these satellites and so many of them in

• 1:41:48Bob Novella?

  low earth orbit that eventually they're meant to be disposable. So it kind of like it's kind of like a self cleaning this low earth orbit, but still that doesn't mean these collisions aren't going to be happening. And now we've got this scenario of these of these collisions with this crash clock. So I'll end with here what the paper says here. They said it had an interesting quote, "By these safety and pollution metrics, it's clear we have already placed substantial stress on low earth orbit and changes to our approach are required immediately." So absolutely, we need to change our approach, but are we going to do it? I mean, who's who is confident at all that we're going to do what's really needed to fix this crash clock number? I mean, get it back up from 2.8 days, get it back up to 50 days. If you know, 20 days would be better than 2.8 or get, hey, get it back

• 1:42:33Bob Novella?

  to the where it was in 2018 with 128 days. I don't think we're going to do that. Is this too much money in this? Short term thinking is rampant in in human psychology and and the cultures that that are doing these launches now. It's just like I have, as usual, I'm extremely cynical that we're going to do what's needed. And it's just we it may come to the point where we could definitively say, hey, you know, we have been ignoring this and these collisions are happening now so much that it's not only is it incredibly expensive to put satellites in orbit now because we're losing so many of them, it's they could potentially even say at some point in the near future that this cascade, this Kessler cascade seems to be happening and there's very little we could do about it.

• 1:43:16Bob Novella?

  And in a few, in a couple of generations or whatever, how many years, these orbits are going to be unusable for a long time. So I don't know. It's just scary and pisses me off that we're so short sighted.

• 1:43:27Speaker 02

  Yep, I agree. I do agree with your pessimism on this one, Bob.

• 1:43:30Speaker 05

  Which good.

• 1:43:31Bob Novella?

  Embrace the skepticism, Steve. Embrace the cynicism.

• 1:43:36Bob Novella?

  You have met people, right? You have met people.

• 1:43:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:39Bob Novella?

  I'm just checking. Yeah, okay.

• 1:43:40Speaker 02

  All right, Jay, get us up to date on who's that noisy.

• 1:43:42Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, weeks ago, I played this noisy.

• 1:43:45Bob Novella?

  Weeks.

• 1:43:56Jay Novella?

  All right, so Evan actually just guessed what the sound is.

• 1:43:59Bob Novella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:00Jay Novella?

  And Steve didn't play him saying the answer because you guys have to guess and I have to do, I have to do a slow reveal here. Okay, so good job, Evan. I'm very

• 1:44:09Bob Novella?

  Thank you.

• 1:44:09Jay Novella?

  Very happy that at least one of my peeps guessed it. A listener named Stephen Hunter wrote in and said, "Jay, this is the sound of Simon Cowell's blood replacement device." Sounds like

• 1:44:23Bob Novella?

  That's the best answer.

• 1:44:24Jay Novella?

  A listener named Kevin Walsh wrote in and said, "Hi, Jay, I want to guess a bird of some kind, but it seems too regular and has too many different components, so I'm going to guess an alarm from a fictional spaceship completely isolated from other noise. Let's go with the USS Enterprise." Not correct, but you know, you were at least in the right region. Let's continue. We have a listener named Robin Ten-Kate. "Hi, Jay, for this 'Who's That Noisy?' I'm going to guess it's a mechanical wind-up toy from the 50s or 60s. At the beginning of the record, it sounds like a toy just gets finished being wound up, and then it let go to make the noise and annoy any nearby parents. I know you like specifics, so I'm going to guess it's a fire engine." Well, thank you for the specifics, because I wouldn't have included your email if you

• 1:45:09Jay Novella?

  didn't put that line in. And Robin, you're incorrect, but there is another kernel of truth in your guess. Let's continue. Michael Blaney wrote in and said, "Hi, Jay. Echoing Steve's vocalized thoughts at the end, definitely giving me Star Wars vibes this week. Could imagine an upgraded probe droid making a noise like that. I'm going to guess it's someone quickly tapping on a long metal pipe, creating a periodic resonance that the tapper then interrupts before starting again." Michael, you should have went with your instincts. Moving on to a correct and only guest from Ron Hart. Ron wrote in and said, "Hi Jay, love the show. This is a thermal detonator about to blow." Evan, would you please explain what a thermal detonator is?

• 1:45:51Speaker 05

  I'd love to. Jay, from Star Wars, Episode VI, Return of the Jedi. When Princess Leia went into Jabba's lair to try, as disguised as a bounty hunter, she threatened to blow up Jabba's palace using this thermal detonator, a handheld grenade, basically, and when it became activated, this was the noise that it created.

• 1:46:14Jay Novella?

  Here it is.

• 1:46:18Jay Novella?

  And then, um, C-3PO says...

• 1:46:22Speaker 05

  What?

• 1:46:23Jay Novella?

  "She's holding a thermal detonator."

• 1:46:27Speaker 05

  Oh my god. In his classic panicked voice. I'd love that voice.

• 1:46:32Jay Novella?

  And then Jabba, uh, liked the bounty hunter's style.

• 1:46:37Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:46:38Jay Novella?

  For threatening to blow up the palace and...

• 1:46:40Speaker 05

  This bounty hunter's my kind of scum.

• 1:46:44Jay Novella?

  Alright, so good job, Ron, and I have a new noisy for you guys this week. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Cameron Harris.

• 1:47:11Jay Novella?

  How cool is that? If you guys think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, you can email me at [email protected]. Steve, we have the Seattle shows, and we have the Wisconsin shows.

• 1:47:23Speaker 02

  We're just, yeah, just days left to get in on the Seattle shows.

• 1:47:27Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's not too late to get in on the Seattle. Lots of, I think we're, basically the only thing that's left at this point, we might have a few seats left at the private show, and we have some seats left at the Extravaganza, but the VIP and the Friday night thing are sold out. If you're interested in going to any, you know, the SGU live show, or coming to see us do the Extravaganza, you can go to the Skeptics The Skeptic's Guide.org and we have two different venues at two different dates. So Seattle is the weekend of January 10th and Saturday, May 16th is the Madison, Wisconsin shows. So go to the skeptics guide.org.

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  Thank you, Jay. All right, guys, let's go on to science or fiction.

• 1:48:10Speaker 01

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:48:20Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And I challenge my panel of skeptics, tell me which one is the fake. Are you guys ready for the first one of 2026? Clean slate. We'll see how you do. These are all technology anticipated for 2026.

• 1:48:40Speaker 05

  Ooh.

• 1:48:40Speaker 02

  Okay, here we go.

• 1:48:41Speaker 05

  Two of them are real. That's exciting.

• 1:48:43Speaker 02

  Item number one, tech companies are investing billions of dollars in small modular reactor technology with plans for three test models to go online in 2026. Item number two, the US will begin phasing in digital IDs to replace physical passports for international travel. And item number three, Major League Baseball announced that it will introduce so-called robo-umps in 2026 with an automated ball-strike challenge system. Okay, we'll reverse the order that we went in last week at the end of the year. So Carrie, you go first.

• 1:49:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Tech companies investing billions of dollars in a small, in small modular reactor technology. So three test models in 2026, phasing in digital IDs in 2026? Is that what you're saying? All of these things are in 2026?

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, that one bugs me. I think that I could see it happening, but I don't know. In 2026 for passports? I could see for driver's licenses, but that seems really soon for passports. And then robo-umps? Yeah, I could see there being some sort of automated challenge system. I mean, the human eye is not good. So why wouldn't there be like additional, I guess, like a second layer of sort of validation in baseball? I bet that's actually already started. I don't know. I think the one that bugs me is the, is the digital IDs. I don't think we're ready for that yet.

• 1:50:10Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:50:11Bob Novella?

  All right. I like that these small modular reactors are in the news ostensibly here. Three, three test models going online in 2026? That seems like a lot. And I know they've had, I haven't done a dive on them in a while, but I know they're having problems with just like cost overruns, which is kind of like almost defeating their purpose in a sense. But three sounds like a lot. Let's see, I'm gonna jump to three. Yeah, the baseball introduction of Robo-Ump sounds reasonable. But I think I agree with Kerry here on two, that the digital IDs for passports just sounds like something that's a little too soon. And sure, driver's licenses kind of makes sense, but not for passports. I

• 1:50:54Bob Novella?

  mean, it's nothing like having a nice physical passport on you. And especially with concerns of, you know, duplicating them if they were purely digital. I don't know. Yeah, so I'll just join with Kerry and say that number two, digital passports are fiction.

• 1:51:13Speaker 02

  Okay, Jay.

• 1:51:14Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, out of the three, the digital passport thing, you know, made me think, you know what, really? Because first of all, in the US, we all just had to upgrade our driver's licenses so we can travel domestically. Like, you actually can't fly in the US if you don't have like the special star.

• 1:51:31Speaker 02

  The real ID.

• 1:51:32Jay Novella?

  The real ID, right. Thanks, Steve. And then I was, you know, thinking, well, if we just got mandatory upgrades to our driver's licenses in order to travel, then if this digital thing is happening, then, you know, why would they do that if the digital thing is about to happen? Also, you know, I mean, we live in a highly insecure digital world, you know, like presenting, you know, another digital credential that would, where would it live, Steve?

• 1:51:56Speaker 02

  On your phone.

• 1:51:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Your Apple Wallet, or whatever, Google Wallet.

• 1:52:00Jay Novella?

  Okay, so you have

• 1:52:01Speaker 02

  Your iWatch.

• 1:52:02Jay Novella?

  Some identifier on your phone. First of all, if you lose your phone, that's a breach. If, unless it's using biometrics, which I don't think would be secure enough. Those sounds could be faked. I just think it would be something that would be severely taken advantage of. Because if the government were to issue this thing, they're so freaking incompetent that they wouldn't do it, right? So I think that one is the fiction.

• 1:52:23Speaker 02

  Okay, and Evan?

• 1:52:25Speaker 05

  Well, I'll join the chorus. I'm gonna say, agree with everyone else that the passports one is gonna be the fiction. There's also, I think, a political pushback to it, in a sense. Maybe, you know, on state levels, these things have a, usually advance faster than on a federal level. Getting all 50 states to kind of agree to this. So I think that's, that's also an obstacle here for all the same, all their reasons that everyone else specified. Major League Baseball, yeah, the robo-umps. Not sure if they were already using them in the minor leagues and did tests in the past couple of years with them, and therefore they said it's ready for primetime now, major league, perhaps. And, uh, yeah, the other one about the small modular reactor technology. Bill, one of Bill Gates's company is definitely working on one of those, I believe.

• 1:53:09Speaker 05

  I don't, just don't know if it's ready to go online in 2026, but having three of them, at least three of them, maybe. I don't think that's out of the realm of possibility. So I agree with everyone else.

• 1:53:18Speaker 02

  Okay, so you guys will all agree with the second one, so let's start with three. Uh, major, that seems to be the easiest one. Major League Baseball announced that it will introduce so-called robo-umps in 2026 with an automated ball-strike-challenge system. You all think this is science. And this one is science. This is science. Evan, you're correct. This has been tested in the minor leagues. Uh, and they are ready to introduce it into the major leagues. There was debate about whether or not they should go to, like, an entire robo-ump system for balls and strikes, right? Just having the, the, the automated system call all balls and strikes.

• 1:53:58Speaker 02

  They basically, based upon fan feedback, fans did not like that. They wanted the physical umpires to do that. But, so they went with the, the ball-strike-challenge system. So each team will be able to challenge two calls per game, and then they will go to the AI system to see if it was an, you know, to see if it was actually a ball or a strike, as called by the umpire. So this is probably a transition to get people used to it, you know, and then... But for things like this, like, did that ball go in the strike zone? Computers are gonna be way better than, at that than people, right? There's no reason not to go to this system at some point.

• 1:54:41Speaker 02

  This is, they were, they were planning on doing it, it was really just based upon fan feedback. They went to this me, this intermediary step of doing just the challenge system, rather than the primary system.

• 1:54:52Speaker 05

  And the strike zone is not a fixed position in space, it's relative to the batter.

• 1:54:56Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:54:57Speaker 05

  So, so there is some variance that does have to occur here, depending on who is at the plate. And I guess they perfected the system enough that it's accurate enough to, uh, to handle that.

• 1:55:08Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, yeah, apparently it works fine.

• 1:55:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:55:13Speaker 02

  Uh, okay, let's keep going backwards. The US will begin phasing in digital IDs to replace physical passports for international travel. You guys all think this one is the fiction. So it just says phasing in, doesn't say completely turn over.

• 1:55:28Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:55:29Speaker 02

  To digital IDs.

• 1:55:30Bob Novella?

  Good point. I always miss those key damn words.

• 1:55:35Speaker 02

  This one is the fiction. But we're a lot closer, we're a lot closer than you guys seem to believe. So, first of all, there are already digital IDs replacing the driver's licenses. In about a third of the states, uh, the federal government has basically given the state a waiver to use the digital IDs. Not Connecticut, by the way, California, yes, I think, but not Connecticut. You have to have the real ID, Jay, so you have to be, have the real ID. And then you can get, you can get a digital version of your real ID. And you could use it for anything that you would use your driver's license for.

• 1:56:13Jay Novella?

  And they have it now and you can get it on your phone?

• 1:56:15Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, that's correct. Uh, again, in about a third of the states, uh, it's, the federal government says, yes, you could use that for anything federal. They do have digital passports as well. However, only for domestic travel. You cannot use a digital passport for international travel. That's that, just those last two words, international travel is what makes this the fiction. So I guess they're testing it out for for driver's licenses, you know, state licenses and for passports, but they're still not using it for international travel. This is only for domestic travel. But you could, especially if you come from one of the states where they have the waiver, you could entirely use your phone as your ID, as your federally

• 1:57:00Speaker 02

  accepted real ID at this point.

• 1:57:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, I suppose that makes sense.

• 1:57:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it kind of makes sense. The downside, I don't think it's as much of a security risk as Jay thinks. You know, in many ways, it could actually even be more secure.

• 1:57:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, than like a physical.

• 1:57:16Speaker 05

  I bet people lose wallets more, as much if not more often than phones.

• 1:57:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so and what you do now, you know, I very recently traveled internationally. You know, you guys have, not that, you know, all of you, but in the last few years at least. Basically, what you do now is when you go through customs and through the the security, you know, when you're traveling internationally, is you just step up, you put your passport on the scanner, you look at the thing, they take your picture, they compare your picture to the one stored in the system, and if they match, you're good. And that's it. You think they're really, it's very fast, it's very simple. It's basically your biometric ID is your face. This would be the same thing. It would just be, and a lot of the passports now, they even use RFID, you know, just send you the information through RFID. They can,

• 1:58:04Speaker 02

  they take your picture. If it matches, you're good. This would be the same thing, except your phone instead of the physical passport. So I think we are rapidly transitioning to this system. You know, again, we're sort of in this intermediary test phase, but it's one of the main concerns is like, well, what happens if your phone goes dead? You know, you're trying to get off an airplane and go through security and your phone is dead.

• 1:58:27Cara Santa Maria?

  They're just gonna have to have charging stations.

• 1:58:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, just, but yeah, there is a, but I agree. I like the physical security of having like my physical passport on me and secure.

• 1:58:38Speaker 05

  Are you allowed to have both?

• 1:58:40Speaker 02

  I'm sure for a time you will be allowed to have both, again, unless there's a security reason not to allow that, but you know, probably you have a physical for a backup and a digital if you can do it. Also, like, not 100% of people have phones, you know what I mean? So for people who don't have phones, they still have to have the physical option. So I don't think the physical options are going to go away anytime soon. But there's a huge incentive to have the bulk of people move to digital because it costs millions of dollars every year just to handle the physical IDs. And especially for states, like if states could save millions of dollars so they don't have to create physical driver's licenses, they would do it, right? So that's the big incentive to move to this system.

• 1:59:22Speaker 02

  All right, this means that tech companies are investing billions of dollars in small modular reactor technology with plans for three test modules to go online in 2026. Is science. So yeah, we've talked about this before. One of the big challenges of data centers, especially for AIs, that they're very energy hungry and you can't just, you know, plug into the grid and start dramatically altering the demands on the grid. You have to have a plan for where the energy is coming from. And in states in the US where that wasn't planned out, well, local electricity prices will go up and people get mad, right? And there is a lot of local pushback now against AI data centers being put in neighborhoods

• 2:00:05Speaker 02

  because like, what's going to happen to the water supply? What's going to happen to our energy supply? What's going to happen to our energy prices? So a lot of the big companies think, well, if we just build like a small nuclear reactor next to the data center, we cover all of the energy. You know, I like the fact that it's covering it in a, you know, low carbon way. There are SMRs active around the world, but none in the US right now. But there are some that are being developed. The three test designs that are going online in 2026 are being run by the Department of Energy. They are planning on actually reaching criticality in 2026, right? So they will be fizzing in 2026. So we'll see how that

• 2:00:49Speaker 02

  whole thing works out, but it's not a bad idea, you know, to create the energy that the data center will use rather than just thinking you're going to pull it from the grid.

• 2:00:58Bob Novella?

  Agreed.

• 2:00:59Speaker 02

  So, good job, guys. You're starting me with a sweep in 2026. Yay. You're all one in zero, 100%.

• 2:01:07Bob Novella?

  100%, I think I'm just gonna stop.

• 2:01:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll see how long that lasts.

• 2:01:11Speaker 05

  Bob's gonna take his chips down right now.

• 2:01:14Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, give us the first quote of the year.

• 2:01:16Speaker 05

  First quote of the year. I actually found this quote on my own, but as I am wont to do, I check it to make sure we had not used it before. Part of my research in doing that is I go through a lot of old emails to see if listeners have submitted quotes that I have found. And I found it. Someone's actually submitted this quote back in August 4th of 2022. Their name is M O I E N. Moyen? Moyen?

• 2:01:42Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:01:43Speaker 05

  From Chicago. So, thank you so much for submitting this. He says, "Hello, Evan. I always look forward to your quotes at the end of the show. I saw this on the Furmatz Library LinkedIn page." Here it is. "In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo, Galilei."

• 2:02:05Speaker 02

  Yep, that's a good quote. That requires some historical context as well in that at the time, you know, Galileo was kind of at this nexus of science and natural philosophy, as they called it at the time, transitioning from being basically authority-based to being logic and evidence-based. That was the fight, right?

• 2:02:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:02:26Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, he's saying that, yeah, no, authority should not be the criterion on which all knowledge is based. It should be based on facts and empiricism and process and transparency.

• 2:02:39Speaker 05

  Objective shit. Because who was the authority at the time? The church?

• 2:02:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 2:02:42Speaker 05

  And, right?

• 2:02:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, or whoever. Yeah, it doesn't really matter, but it's the idea of knowledge and scholarship and everything. And it's not, it wasn't just the church. A lot of it was Aristotle, right? Now, the church sort of based their authority on Aristotle, but they cited Aristotle as like, "This guy, this ancient Greek philosopher, he got everything right, and we have to align with Aristotle. And if you're saying something that he didn't say, you're wrong." So, it was also based through them to this, you know, one towering, you know, individual from antiquity in a lot of cases. That was the intellectual fight of the age, you know, the replacing authority-based knowledge with process-based, evidence-based knowledge.

• 2:03:27Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:03:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:28Bob Novella?

  Yeah, so how's that battle going these days, do you think?

• 2:03:32Speaker 05

  We're still fighting it in some circles.

• 2:03:34Speaker 02

  I mean, we've basically won that fight and the institutional, you know, institutions of the modern world, science and academia, etc., are not based on authority. They are based on

• 2:03:46Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:03:46Speaker 02

  knowledge and evidence. Big picture, it's going well, you know. Yes, you could focus on specific locations, specific times, where people in authority try to take over, you know, try to say, to replace the process of science with their authority. But certainly the institutions, you gotta remember, at the time, the intellectual elite were saying, "Authority is the basis of this, our knowledge." That was the standard.

• 2:04:13Bob Novella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:04:14Speaker 02

  And now it clearly isn't. You know, we talk about violations of science and scholarship. But there is no serious intellectual movement to say, "We should, we need to go back to authority-based knowledge and get rid of all this evidence and logic stuff."

• 2:04:26Speaker 05

  And anyone who might be saying that, nobody's taking them seriously, or...

• 2:04:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. That's not, maybe that's happening in some ways in the political realm. It's certainly not happening within

• 2:04:36Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 2:04:37Speaker 02

  science and academia, or philosophy, or whatever. I do hear that a lot from religious people, though, absolutely. That, I've had debates the last 20 years, you know, with people saying that, like, especially when it comes to morality. Have you guys had this debate where it's like, morality has to be based on God?

• 2:04:56Bob Novella?

  I hate that.

• 2:04:57Speaker 05

  Oh, sure, yeah, that's so much.

• 2:04:59Speaker 02

  That's, yeah, that's an authority-based sort of argument, or philosophy. It's like, no, we can reason our way to ethics through logic and first principles and philosophy. We don't need

• 2:05:11Speaker 05

  Right. No deity required.

• 2:05:12Speaker 02

  Some magical, yeah, alleged authority figure to impose that on us. Because again, it's, the reality is, there is no God telling, you know, imposing that on us. It's just individual peoples falsely citing the authority of God to impose their morality on other people. And you can't prove that that's not the case, right? And there's 180, whatever, different religions all think that they have the one, you know, true line to God, and therefore the ultimate morality. But there's no way to resolve those differences. If it's all authority-based, you know, it's gotta be based on logic and reason and philosophy in order to agree on what ethical principles should be.

• 2:05:53Bob Novella?

  I don't know about you guys, but if somebody could prove that God doesn't exist, I'd be raping and pillaging every day.

• 2:05:59Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what they claim. That's the crazy thing.

• 2:06:02Speaker 02

  That's the thing. They have such a dim view of humanity.

• 2:06:05Bob Novella?

  It's disgusting. Is that what you'd be doing? Really?

• 2:06:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I'd often say. Is that what you would be doing? Well, not me, but other people. Come on. No one's... You know, yeah, maybe there's that 1% of psychopaths out there in the world, but whatever. But for most people are not gonna start just become violent criminals just because they don't have the threat of divine retribution at the end of their life. It is a very dark view of humanity.

• 2:06:28Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 2:06:29Speaker 02

  You know? Where it's not. We actually have the intellect to reason our way to morality and ethics.

• 2:06:35Bob Novella?

  Yep.

• 2:06:36Speaker 02

  All right. Well, thank you all for joining me for the first episode of 2026.

• 2:06:41Jay Novella?

  Happy New Year, guys.

• 2:06:42Speaker 02

  Happy New Year, everyone out there.

• 2:06:44Bob Novella?

  Be safe.

• 2:06:45Speaker 02

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

• 2:07:27Speaker 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.

• 2:08:04Speaker 07

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