The Skeptics Guide #1074 - Feb 7 2026

Quickie with Bob: The Death of 8k TV; News Items: Faith-Based Addiction Programs, Noise and Sleep, A Fully Renewable Grid, Moltbook for AI Agents Only; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Corrections; Science or Fiction

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

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• 0:32Speaker 03

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

• 0:39Bob Novella?

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, February 5th, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:48Speaker 05

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:49Bob Novella?

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:51Bob Novella?

  Jay Novella.

• 0:52Speaker 05

  Hey, guys.

• 0:52Bob Novella?

  And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:54Speaker 07

  Good evening, everybody.

• 0:55Bob Novella?

  What's up? Guys.

• 0:57Speaker 07

  Yes, Steve.

• 0:58Speaker 05

  You talk to me.

• 0:59Bob Novella?

  We are all mentioned in the Epstein files.

• 1:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I like that you said guys, because I'm not in there.

• 1:06Speaker 05

  Yes. We are, including our buddy, George Robb, who's also in there, and others, and other skeptics.

• 1:15Bob Novella?

  Tons of people. I mean, it was like a big list of people that spoke at TAM that year.

• 1:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it wasn't like anything specific about anybody. The only person who was specifically mentioned a lot is poor Rebecca.

• 1:26Bob Novella?

  Yeah, of course, because that was the reason, I think, why everything was brought up.

• 1:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it was all because of the elevator gate.

• 1:32Speaker 07

  At the time, that was, yeah, that was the...

• 1:34Bob Novella?

  Elevator gate.

• 1:34Speaker 05

  And he called her a nasty young woman, and I think Rebecca is smart enough to know that she's got to make a shitload of T-shirts with nasty young woman on it, right?

• 1:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Nasty young woman. Oh, that would sound like hotcakes.

• 1:47Bob Novella?

  So, being quote-unquote "in the Epstein files" can mean many, many things. First of all, this is like millions of documents that we're talking about.

• 1:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:53Bob Novella?

  And it's like any email he ever sent about anything. So, they're just trash-talking skeptics in that email that we get mentioned in. It has nothing to do with anything related to Epstein's going, doing, so you know what I mean?

• 2:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, yeah.

• 2:08Speaker 05

  For example, for example, Rome Fiharo says, describing the skeptics groups, "Yes, it's a huge group think festival," this is TAM, "that's closer to the Tea Party movement than an intellectual movement." Like, okay, dude.

• 2:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 2:22Bob Novella?

  And then Deepak Chopra disses us, says we're disgusting.

• 2:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, yeah, right under, well, right, right under the list of these, of all the speakers, including us, he just says, "It's all disgusting."

• 2:33Bob Novella?

  Which is a badge of honor to be dissed by.

• 2:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah. Screw that guy.

• 2:36Speaker 07

  Oh, his typo meant "all." I was trying to figure out why he wrote "A-L-L-Y."

• 2:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think.

• 2:42Speaker 07

  Really ally. Okay, that's what it is.

• 2:45Cara Santa Maria?

  And then there's another one, this is Rome Vaharo again, whoever that is, saying, "I'm not sure if they make money as much as they make image," in quotes. "There's plenty of ambition for recognition inside of the movement." Really? And with blogs and online media, there, there are many new channels that form, blah, blah, blah. It's funny because most of the skeptic influencers are not real scientists, yet they want the prestige that comes with fighting for science. Oh, man. So then he's like, "So I see the motivation being primarily attention and celebrity." Yep, that's what we're after. Attention and celebrity.

• 3:20Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but you, obviously you could use that.

• 3:21Cara Santa Maria?

  So much projection there.

• 3:22Bob Novella?

  Yeah, a lot of projection and you could, you could use that to diss anyone getting the message out, you know, through social media. You could also use that to describe every science journalist, right? You know?

• 3:36Speaker 07

  Of course.

• 3:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 3:37Bob Novella?

  So Kara, how'd your root canal go?

• 3:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, first, first and foremost, I don't know, how many of, show of hands, haha, on a podcast? How many of you have had a root canal?

• 3:44Bob Novella?

  Not me.

• 3:45Speaker 07

  I have. I have. Evan has.

• 3:46Cara Santa Maria?

  I have. Three of you? Yep.

• 3:49Bob Novella?

  So everyone but me.

• 3:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Hello? Hello, Jay.

• 3:53Speaker 07

  Hi, Jay. How's your root canal?

• 3:55Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know if you guys had a similar experience or if you had yours more recently with all the fancy high-tech stuff, but I think I told you last time, she found four channels, like four canals for three roots. Canali. And one of them is really, really small, like she could hardly even see it on the CT, so it took a long time for her to finally find it, which thank goodness I went with the endodontist and not my dentist, even though he's amazing. I, I fully feel like he wouldn't have even known that fourth one was there. And so he would have sealed it up and there would have still been infection. So she cleaned everything out and she found them all, but that alone took the full two hours. And she said that when this happens, she prefers to put the temp on and have somebody

• 4:36Cara Santa Maria?

  come back two weeks later after, you know, the swelling has gone down and finish the job. So I'm only halfway done with my root canal. Oh, gotcha. That said, it was like not that painful at all. I'm chewing on it today. It's only two days later. I didn't have to take any pain medication or anything.

• 4:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, they could be great. They could be fine, you know, but some people have really bad, really bad time with it.

• 4:58Cara Santa Maria?

  I think a lot of people who wait a really long time until things are really bad and they're already in a lot of pain, that can really compound it.

• 5:07Speaker 05

  Definitely.

• 5:08Speaker 07

  Are they already infected at that point?

• 5:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Everybody's infected when they need a root canal.

• 5:12Speaker 07

  Technically.

• 5:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's why they do, that's what a root canal is. It's going into the channels to clean the infected pulp out.

• 5:18Speaker 07

  I thought it was risk of infection. Okay.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  Okay. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, mine, I didn't have an infection in my jaw when I had it done. Like basically my tooth wasn't like recoverable. That was the problem.

• 5:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and you didn't have an infection in your jaw, but I bet you there was infection in your pulp. Because if your pulp is exposed to the outside world, bacteria, bacteria from your mouth is in your pulp. So there is technically infection in there.

• 5:42Speaker 05

  And Kara, now that you've had a root canal, you can totally understand why so many people just died of mouth problems before dentistry.

• 5:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, so many things can go wrong in your mouth.

• 5:53Speaker 05

  And the fact that we only get two sets of teeth, like actually we get one set of actual real adult teeth, right? You know, you chew on a bone, you crack a tooth, it could kill you.

• 6:03Cara Santa Maria?

  It's so insane. Yeah, all of this started, and I don't remember if I mentioned this last week, all of this started because my, the sleep disorder that I have requires that I take a pretty weird medication and that medication makes me grind my teeth at night. This is all due to bruxism. And this is how we discovered I had bruxism. Is because I went to the dentist, I thought a filling fell out and he was like, you never had a filling in that tooth. Your tooth is broken from grinding your teeth. And that's when the whole series of night guards and Botox injections in my jaw and everything started. And now I'm protecting my teeth and they're, they're happy and healthy, but in a way, I'm kind of grateful for this root canal because it's preventing more.

• 6:47Speaker 07

  Oh, absolutely. That's how, exactly how I would look at it. No doubt about it.

• 6:51Cara Santa Maria?

  But this is the thing, if you grind your teeth at night, that is not like an inert problem. Like you should really be talking to your dentist about whether your teeth are damaged from the grinding.

• 7:00Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, I have a, I have a daughter update with the whole moon, moon landing hoaxer.

• 7:08Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 7:09Cara Santa Maria?

  People have been looking for pins and needles.

• 7:11Speaker 05

  But it is a step forward. The principal interviewed my daughter and asked her to do a tell-all on what she remembers took place. Okay. And, you know, that's a sign that something's happening, you know? We had already given her all the details that we, you know, that I pulled out of my daughter day of. So I don't think she remembered everything anywhere near as clear as, you know, three weeks or a month later, you know? But anyway, you know, I'm just waiting, you know, I do have a little counter in my head. Like, I'm not gonna be patient much longer. I think I'll give them like another week, and then I'm gonna request a immediate phone conversation with the superintendent and the principal. All right.

• 7:55Speaker 05

  Because I gotta keep the pressure on, you know, I don't want to, they could easily just let this thing fade out into nothing. And, you know, me and my wife are the only people that are gonna, that are keeping it alive, as far as I'm concerned. All right, man. Fight the good fight, Jay. Yeah, we're doing it.

• 8:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 8:08Speaker 05

  All right, Bob, you're gonna start us off with a quickie.

• 8:11Bob Novella?

  Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. Guys, it looks like we may be dead before we have 8K TVs. Not so much you, though, Kara.

• 8:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Maybe, Kara. You never know.

• 8:23Speaker 07

  There's no way I can buy 8,000 televisions.

• 8:25Bob Novella?

  So, bottom line, 8K is essentially being abandoned by TV manufacturers.

• 8:31Speaker 07

  Oh, you mean resolution? Oh, thank you.

• 8:34Bob Novella?

  Ah, yes. So, guys, many of us have 4K UHD TVs by now, right? Probably a lot of people. A lot of people do.

• 8:41Cara Santa Maria?

  I assume so.

• 8:42Speaker 07

  Yeah. I'm still on 420. I'll get there.

• 8:45Bob Novella?

  As a refresher, 4K UHD TV that many people have now, in fact, it's over a billion people, it's 3, 3,800 about by 2,100 approximately. That's like a little over 8 million pixels. 8K TV would be about 7,600 by 4,300 pixels, and that's 33, over, a little over 33 million pixels instead of 8. So, yeah, 8K has twice the resolution in each dimension and four times the total pixels. So the sharpness and the detail are clearly superior, and they've actually existed for years. I wasn't quite aware how long they've been around, but Japan started selling them in 2015, 11 years ago, and Samsung sold them in the US starting back

• 9:29Bob Novella?

  in 2018, already like 8 years. So they've been out there for a while. And back then, the TV industry- industry was like really pushing that, you know, the idea that 8K is the future. And it seemed somewhat reasonable to me and always kind of, you know, interested in that. But yet now the TV industry is abandoning 8K. And for example, LG recently reported it will no longer make 8K panels, TV panels. TCL, which I'm not too familiar with, they released their last 8K TV in 2021. Already a half a decade ago, they stopped it. And Sony discontinued its last 8K TVs in just last year. I think it was in April 2025. So my question is, why would such a cool and clearly superior technology be treated so terribly?

• 10:13Speaker 07

  Because they're not making profit.

• 10:14Bob Novella?

  It's, it's, it's not hard to figure out, right? There's lots of reasons. First one that pops up is just the sheer expense. They're obviously, they were obviously quite expensive, just as 4Ks were when they first came out. But LG in 2022 was charging 13,000 USD for a 76-inch TV. Now granted, that's, you know, that's still a, that's a big TV, but they had just lowered the price by 7,000. So it was 20,000 not too long before 2022. So yeah, these were expensive. One big reason here is just the, the content itself. There was basically zero native 8K content available, even 20, in 2025, 2026, years after the TVs have been available.

• 10:56Bob Novella?

  But if you think of it that way, though, there's still not a lot of 4K content available. And that's why, that's one big reason why I don't even have a 4K yet. It's like, you know, what's the point? There's really not that much 4K content, real good 4K content out there.

• 11:10Speaker 07

  Native 4K.

• 11:10Speaker 05

  Native 4K, because a lot of, the, you have TVs can upscale some resolution.

• 11:15Speaker 07

  It's a cheat.

• 11:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 11:17Bob Novella?

  But even, but people, many people, that, many streaming, broadcasting and even gaming users to this day still rely on just HD, 1920 by 1080 resolution, which is good, which is still good. But man, we, with, when 4K has been out for so long, it's just a little surprising. And you could stream 4K, I've seen the options to stream 4K, but it's really, is it really 4K? It's so compressed, which gives it really low bit rates. It's really, it's really a travesty if you think about it. It's not really even 4K anymore. It, it, you know, if, go into a store, um, like a, what, any big store, any big box store that sells TVs.

• 11:56Speaker 07

  If there's still any.

• 11:56Bob Novella?

  You look at the 4K TVs in there and they look amazing. They're just like, it really takes your breath away. And there's a lot of reasons why they, that happens because they're, you know, they're totally optimizing it for, for, for where it's being displayed. Um, it, you know, they're totally tweaked to play specific videos, but they're, but they're also playing uncompressed high bitrate video. Like maybe from a hard drive or a disk. So that's something that you're not going to get at home unless you, unless you buy, you know, the full file and have it locally. If you're streaming it, it's going to be super compressed and the quality is going to go way, way down. So that's kind of frustrating. Exactly. Oh, yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 05

  If you really like a movie and it's very cinematic or whatever, you know, it's still worth having it in Blu-ray. Um, because you can get that real full 4K. You could, you can't see the difference.

• 12:42Bob Novella?

  When I buy a 4K, I'm absolutely going to, going to say, all right, I'm going to get like five or six discs of like my, you know, 4K discs of my, of the best movies. That, that really, really would benefit from, you know, uncompressed super thing. But the thing is, even for, for going, going back to 8K. Most people wouldn't have even noticed the difference between 4K and 8K. If they went up to 8K, they really wouldn't have even noticed. Many people wouldn't. Some, some would have, but, but get this, if you had a 50 inch 8K TV, you would have to sit one meter or closer from the set to really notice the difference. Who sits three feet, little over three feet from, from their TV? That would be kind of stupidly close, I think, right?

• 13:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, the, the only reason to go 8K would be if you had like a 70 inch TV, like if you had like a really big TV, then, then you.

• 13:31Bob Novella?

  Well, then listen, yeah, well, listen to this one, Steve.

• 13:34Speaker 05

  Gets farther.

• 13:34Speaker 07

  And maybe buy a projector at that point or something else.

• 13:37Bob Novella?

  But I'll quantify that for you. If you had an 80 to 100 inch TV, you would still have to be two to three meters away. So what, six point, you know, so it's.

• 13:46Speaker 05

  Six to nine feet? That's about, that's about right.

• 13:49Bob Novella?

  But eight, correct. So that would actually be kind of okay. But still, we're talking 80 to 100 inch. TV. I don't know anybody that's got an 80 to 100 inch TV. They're out there for sure. But you want to talk about a lot of money. So that's, that's enough. So that just adds to the reasons why people aren't, wouldn't, didn't want to do this. So, so my advice is, is if people, if you want to invest money into a TV to have a dramatic impact on the image, you're much better off not, don't, not getting an 8K TV, which with, with no content really, but invest in the non-resolution upgrades, right? The, the OLEDs, HDR support, micro LED, quantum dots, micro RGB, that, those will make the picture really look dramatically better, far better than, than NK, than, than 8K,

• 14:32Bob Novella?

  even if you got them close to it. So, all right. So that all said, 8K's, they're, they're not dead. You can still buy them from Samsung, um, for now. 8K, I'm sure is going to be used over the years by enthusiasts, right? Cause there's always going to be enthusiasts that are looking for, for a super high dense resolution.

• 14:48Speaker 07

  Yeah. Betamax is still a thing too.

• 14:49Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Right? It's also going to be used for other product types other than TVs. Like for example, head mounted displays. Absolutely. You would, you would want something like an 8K resolution for a head mounted display. So sure, maybe someday 8K or even 10K, which would be cool, will, will be a must have TV upgrade. Who knows when, if ever, but assuming, but also assuming we haven't gone full Neuralink and started streaming Netflix straight into our visual cortex, maybe we'll see it in, you know, who knows how long it might even take if ever to get here. So, so Steve, this has been your pixelated quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

• 15:25Speaker 05

  It's possible just for regular TV viewing, it may never be worth it. But what's interesting is that, I mean, there's diminishing returns with increased expense. As you say, most people wouldn't notice it. There's also like, there's some technologies require several things to happen all at once for the higher resolution.

• 15:42Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 15:42Speaker 05

  You need the displays and the content and the bandwidth, you know, all at the same time. And if you don't have that, there's a chicken, you get the chicken and the egg problem. Like why make the TV if there's no content?

• 15:54Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 15:55Speaker 05

  Why make the content if there's no good TV to display it? And if you have to compress the hell out of it anyway, cause you don't have the, the bandwidth. But the other thing, which you allude, which you alluded to, but I want to make explicit.

• 16:04Bob Novella?

  Environmental impact. There's an environmental impact too.

• 16:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:08Bob Novella?

  Actually not, you know, not a small one.

• 16:09Speaker 05

  I wasn't going to bring that up, but when we, there's a tendency, and this is partly marketing, partly our intellectual laziness. To boil down technology to one number.

• 16:20Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 16:21Speaker 05

  Right? That happened with computers. There was a time, now we don't really care, but there was a time.

• 16:25Bob Novella?

  Mega pixels in phone cameras.

• 16:27Speaker 05

  Mega pixels in cameras is if that's the only number that describes the quality of your camera, the clock speed of your, of your computer. And then the, the how, you know, how many K or what the resolution of your TV is. But as you say, it's, you know, technologies like these have multiple features, some of which have a greater impact on the performance of the technology than that one number that people obsess about.

• 16:50Bob Novella?

  Absolutely.

• 16:51Speaker 05

  You're way better off getting a TV with a high dynamic range than just higher pixels.

• 16:56Bob Novella?

  Absolutely.

• 16:57Speaker 05

  That would give you a much better image quality.

• 16:59Speaker 07

  And I'm not sure the culture is caught, is, is any, anymore wants to be, you know, family time around the television thing. It's more personal devices, smaller devices, portable devices. So I think the culture is also had a factor here.

• 17:11Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's true. There's a lot more screens out there today than there were 20, you know, 15, 20 years ago.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, but conversely, people are doing home theater way more than going out to the movies too.

• 17:20Bob Novella?

  That's right.

• 17:21Speaker 05

  And so people are investing in their, their home theater because that's, they're using it way more. So I'm not sure I agree with that. All right, Kara.

• 17:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:28Speaker 05

  I understand RFK is up to some other shenanigans. Tell us about them.

• 17:32Bob Novella?

  Oh, God.

• 17:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so I have opened a massive can, can of worms in choosing to cover this topic. So I'm gonna give the highlights right at the top, but I'm really curious about some kind of other discussions that this opened up for me. So, so the long and short of it is that RFK Jr., over the course of a few different sort of stops earlier this week, started to announce some new programs that he's interested in funding. That's not even the right, he's not funding them, but in, in initiating for both substance use disorder and homelessness.

• 18:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And here's the problem. Well, here's one of like 10 problems that I've come across. Well, there's an article written in the New York Times three days ago, as of this recording, which was decidedly uncritical, and that really worried me. So I started to dig a lot deeper. But basically, the headline was HHS to expand faith-based addiction programs for homeless.

• 18:32Bob Novella?

  What?

• 18:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said addiction is a, quote, "spiritual disease that calls out for the involvement of religious organizations." So although, and every time I dig into what this man is claiming, it's always that pseudoscientific skill of like, uh huh, uh huh, agree, wait a minute, where are you going with that? Like, he always puts just enough reality into these claims and quotes and kind of catches you and then, you know, hits you with a curve ball. There's so much, there's so much to dig into here. So he's talking about a $100 million pilot program that he's calling STREETS, which stands for Safety Through Recovery Engagement and Evidence-Based Treatment

• 19:17Cara Santa Maria?

  and Supports. And his approach, as he's talked about this, is, here's a perfect quote, "We'll engage people continuously from first contact on the street, through recovery, through employment, and through self-sufficiency. Law enforcement, courts, housing providers, and healthcare systems will work as one team, so people will no longer fall through the cracks." Okay, first of all, that sounds great. I don't understand how $10 million is going to accomplish that by any stretch of the imagination. Second, I don't think what he's saying there vaguely is any, any different than what every community goal has always been, to combat homelessness. But the main issue here, and this is what I'm seeing over

• 19:59Cara Santa Maria?

  and over and over, is that the administration as a whole has decided to stop using the Housing First approach, which we've been using for decades at this point, and is switching gears to what they're calling a Treatment First approach. So do you guys understand the difference between a Housing First approach and a Treatment First approach? Yeah. It's really an ideological difference, which translates to- Well, describe it, because maybe every-

• 20:28Speaker 05

  Everyone doesn't know.

• 20:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so, so, housing first, which has been the approach up until now for several decades, is people need a place to live. Until unhoused people have a roof over their heads and a stable place where they can lock the door behind them, they're not going to be able to work on the myriad problems that contribute to why they have been dealing with chronic homelessness. The treatment first approaches claims most people who are homeless are homeless because they're addicted to drugs or alcohol. So if we treat their addiction, they'll be able to get a job and to get their bank accounts where they need to be, to be able to, you know, live in a home and maintain a roof over their heads.

• 21:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Do you see a practical difference between the two?

• 21:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, if housing first basically makes changes so that it's easier to get housing, or provides for people who, who, you know, at least temporarily. Treatment first doesn't do that and, you know, puts, invests money in treatment centers, but not in housing programs.

• 21:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm. And the vast majority of the evidence shows that housing first programs work. And so that's why it's quite frustrating for me when I see RFK Junior throwing around terms like evidence-based, evidence-based, evidence-based. And while I do support and fully agree that only organizations that hold to evidence-based standards should get funding from the federal government, I am very worried- Science-based too. About, yeah, but they're, I mean, they're using evidence-based, so that's the term they use. But I'm very, very worried about opening those funding opportunities up to faith-based organizations.

• 22:09Speaker 05

  I mean, RFK Junior uses evidence-based as a weapon, not as a tool.

• 22:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Yep. So RFK Junior famously himself credits 12-step to his recovery from drug and alcohol abuse. Brain worm.

• 22:25Speaker 05

  Heroin addiction.

• 22:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, from, from a heroin addiction and alcohol addiction. He famously also says that he attends upwards of eight meetings a week. Now- I am not saying that 12-step does not have a pretty decent evidence base to support it. What I am saying is that 12-step is not without a lot of problems. And I think that we have looked at the approach to treating addiction in this country through a very, very narrow lens. 12-step started a long time ago, before we knew as much as we know now about the neurological,

• 23:07Cara Santa Maria?

  medical, and complex psychological basis of substance use disorder. 12-step programs, as we know, are often delivered through either religious organizations or peer groups. And Maya Salavitz, who is an investigative science journalist, who has written about this a lot, she made a statement that I think is important to quote here. She said, "In my view, AA and treatment need to get amicably divorced. The social support provided by 12-step groups and the way they offer a sense of meaning and purpose can help someone with addictions. So I believe it makes sense for treatment providers to tell people about the programs

• 23:51Cara Santa Maria?

  and even encourage them to try a meeting or two, with the caveats that this is not the only way to get better and that membership doesn't qualify people to give medical advice. Let's let treatment be treatment and AA be AA. Think about it in the same way we view cancer care. Your support group is not your oncologist. Each can play an important role in your well-being and survival, but cancer patients aren't experts in oncology just because they've had the disease." There you go. And that's how a lot of 12-step works. And basically, what RFK Jr. is saying is that he wants to fund mostly 12-step treatment because he thinks this is going to then solve the homelessness crisis. And I'm not minimizing some of the claims that he makes about different organizations

• 24:36Cara Santa Maria?

  working together and, you know, a community-based approach to working on evidence-based treatment for addiction. Like, that all sounds great. But the problem is, it's really, really vague about how they're going to do that. And when you get into the nitty gritty, over and over and over, his teams and the administration as a whole are saying, not housing first, treatment first. And this goes hand in hand with a massive shift to the way that HUD, which stands for, what does HUD stand for? Housing and Urban Development? Yeah. Yes.

• 25:13Bob Novella?

  Heads up display.

• 25:14Speaker 07

  Do you know what CHOD stands for though, Kara?

• 25:16Bob Novella?

  Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers.

• 25:18Speaker 07

  What does CHOD stand for? Thank you, Bob.

• 25:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Anyway, so last year, I don't know if, I don't, we didn't cover this on the show, I don't think. But last year, I think right around November, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, put out a 128-page notice that said that of the $3.9 billion in continuation of care, or continuum of care funds, which is the main source of federal money for homelessness, that they were going to pivot the way that that money is used. Right now, 90% of it goes towards putting people in homes.

• 26:00Cara Santa Maria?

  And they were going to cut that aid so that only 20% of it went towards actual housing. We've got to remember that this is coming from an administration where, for example, in 2023, in a campaign video, President Trump himself said that unsheltered homeless people are, quote, "dangerously deranged people that destroy urban life." And he's talked at great length about moving them from, you know, encampments into what he calls treatment camps, which is really worrisome for me. One of the big issues with Housing First is that by definition,

• 26:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Housing First often offers treatment but doesn't require it as a condition of housing. Whereas when we're talking about Treatment First, very often the treatment is fundamentally required in order to receive any of the so-called entitlements that are offered in these programs.

• 27:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think it's easy when you've never worked with individuals who either suffer from severe mental illness or severe substance use disorder, or neither or both, that you cannot mandate treatment. It doesn't work. People have to want treatment. They have to be ready for treatment.

• 27:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:23Cara Santa Maria?

  They have to be engaged in their treatment. And none of this actually confronts what I believe, and quite a lot of the liter- it's really hard to parse these things down, but maybe I shouldn't even word it that way, a really important component of why there is a homelessness crisis in this country. It's very easy to go, everybody who's on the street right now has a mental illness, or is on drugs or alcohol, and if we can just treat that, they'll be better. Okay, easy to say, impossible, I shouldn't say impossible, very hard to do, but also not reflective of reality.

• 27:54Speaker 05

  It's not true. It's part of the problem, but it's not the entire problem.

• 27:56Cara Santa Maria?

  It's part of the problem, but what is, what is, okay, if everybody on the street has one issue, they, all people who are living on the street have one issue. Some of them might have, you know, substance use disorder, some of them might have mental illness, but all of them have a single issue. What is that issue?

• 28:14Speaker 05

  No place to live.

• 28:16Cara Santa Maria?

  They don't have anywhere to live.

• 28:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:18Cara Santa Maria?

  And the reason they don't have anywhere to live, more often than not, is because they can't afford to live somewhere. And this does nothing to address the, the major crisis, which is that housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable.

• 28:31Speaker 05

  There's a number of reasons for that. We just, we haven't built enough houses to keep up with demand, although that, usually the market adjusts, and it might take five to 10 years, but eventually, you know, barring some other, something else disrupted, that problem can solve itself. But there's also, I've read multiple articles about the fact that we don't really build medium housing, like we build homes and apartments, but we don't really build a lot of like the row houses, where you can own your own home, but it's small, and on very small property, and it's affordable, because it's like the cheapest home you can own. We're sort of missing- Like a mobile home community or something. We're missing that middle ground, and that's, that is a huge part of the problem.

• 29:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And we also, I mean, there are so many downstream issues with the way that our society is structured. We criminalize poverty in our society. The poorer you are, the more expensive money is to get.

• 29:21Speaker 05

  It's very expensive to be poor.

• 29:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and so it it just becomes this like hole that you cannot dig out of, which is why in the places where housing first has been utilized and studied, they show that once people have a roof over their heads and a stable door that they can lock, where they can shower in dignity, they can put on their clothes in dignity, they can eat a meal, you know, in in the safety of their own home. A lot of those other things, they can work on their sobriety, they can work on their mental health, they can work. But the truth of the matter is, and this is the part I think we're all afraid to say out loud, there are some people who will never be able to quote unquote contribute to society.

• 30:04Cara Santa Maria?

  There are always going to be people who are disabled and can't earn the type of paycheck that these types of programs seem to expect them to be able to earn. What happens to those people? And how do we care for the most vulnerable among us? Where are the programs for them? We we have had them historically, but it does feel like this is a dismantling of that. And it bothers me that a lot of the coverage of this right now is taking the claims of, oh, we're all going to work together and, you know, look at all this funding and and, you know, we're going to help people with their addiction. Don't worry, this is going to solve homelessness, like with like a really unskeptical eye. Now, after saying all that, there is one thing that this initiative is doing that I kind of am like,

• 30:47Cara Santa Maria?

  hey, that seems like a good idea. And I'm curious about your take, Steve. So he did talk about this thing called Maud Mode, M O U D, which what he's doing is adding three medications for opioid opioid use disorder and making it so that the administration for children and families will be footing the bill for a 50% federal match to provide methadone, naltrexone, and buprenorphine to parents if there's an imminent risk of their children entering foster care because of an opioid use disorder.

• 31:30Cara Santa Maria?

  It's basically helping to fund the treatment for that opioid use disorder so that the kids can stay in the home with their families. And that's something that I think could actually be very beneficial, both from a public health perspective and also financially, it could be very beneficial.

• 31:48Speaker 05

  It sounds like a good idea. I don't have any specific information about it.

• 31:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. It sounds like a good idea. And that's the thing that's so frustrating sometimes when it comes to RFK Jr. is that there's like these good ideas sprinkled in with this abject nonsense. And then it's all tied up in a pretty bow that uses all the right language.

• 32:09Speaker 07

  Right. So it sells easily and people don't really understand what it is they're being peddled.

• 32:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 32:15Speaker 05

  He misses all the nuance and the actual evidence. I did prep a little bit about just faith-based addiction programs because I'm very familiar with that literature, but I got myself updated just to see what is recent. And it's basically what I've been reading for years. They do work, but they don't work any better than any intervention, whether it's faith-based or not. And there's very little research and a lot of the research that exists looks at AA. But the thing is, the things about AA that make it work are not the faith-based component.

• 32:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 32:45Speaker 05

  So it's a lot of mixing of evidence. There is really no convincing evidence that the introduction of faith-based itself is of any benefit. The things that help are having a support group, having community, dedicating yourself to getting better, those kinds of things. Yeah, they're all great and that's what makes a difference. And the thing is, I'm not against a faith. If you are a person of faith and you want to use a faith-based clinic because it aligns with your worldview or whatever, that's fine. I have a problem with the government specifically supporting faith-based intervention.

• 33:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, it's unconstitutional, first of all, because it requires that they have daylight between their secular approaches and any proselytizing. And we don't trust that they'll do that.

• 33:30Speaker 05

  Right. But having said that, though, I don't care if they're paying for treatment programs that are incidentally faith-based. But that's not what I'm hearing here, right?

• 33:43Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 33:43Speaker 05

  Like, if a hospital is run by the Catholic Church and Medicare pays for treatment at the hospital, that's incidental, you know what I mean? That's not paying for the religious part of it. But this sounds like they are, and that is a problem.

• 33:56Cara Santa Maria?

  And so there are a lot of problems, and I think that the picture is really, really mixed. But I also think that's not really what's at issue here. I think what's at issue here is a fundamental ideological change in approaches to public health by this administration. And that's a moralistic approach to a medical problem and a social problem. And that really worries me.

• 34:20Speaker 05

  All right. Thanks, Cara. Jay, tell us about noise and sleep. Guys, do you sleep in a noisy environment at night?

• 34:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Never.

• 34:29Speaker 07

  Always.

• 34:30Speaker 05

  Like, what do you got?

• 34:32Speaker 07

  There's no absence of noise. There's never an absence of noise.

• 34:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but that's different than noisy.

• 34:37Speaker 05

  Like, what do you, what do you, do you have like a, like, white noise thing? Or you have, like, outside noises?

• 34:42Speaker 07

  I happen to use a white noise device, but they're just natural noises occurring in nature that I can hear, even if I didn't have anything on.

• 34:50Speaker 05

  Like the wolves?

• 34:51Speaker 07

  Ah, trees, the wind, the rain, the, yes, animals, definitely.

• 34:55Speaker 05

  Do the, do the voices ever, like, talk to you? They ever, like, try to communicate with you?

• 34:59Speaker 07

  Uh, yes, they do, and I've, they tell me to burn things and, uh...

• 35:04Bob Novella?

  Don't sleep. Don't sleep. Don't sleep.

• 35:07Speaker 05

  Well, I've, I've used, um, a couple of different things, uh, different types of white noise. And, um, I used to really like the sound of crickets.

• 35:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Really? You could sleep to the sound of crickets?

• 35:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, it would be low and it'd be, yeah, yeah.

• 35:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 35:21Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 35:22Cara Santa Maria?

  I use a playlist on Spotify called Floating Through Space. That's like, really ambient with no melodic, like, no rhythm, nothing that I can, you know, attune to, but just enough sort of ambient pleasing sounds that it, it tunes out any out, outside noise.

• 35:43Speaker 05

  So there are, there are noise environments, right? There's noisy places, lots of people that live in cities, you know, they have to deal with nonstop noise. I remember when I lived in Manhattan.

• 35:54Speaker 07

  Sirens, right? All the time.

• 35:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was just noise all night long.

• 35:58Cara Santa Maria?

  In LA, it's the helicopters. There's so many helicopters.

• 36:02Speaker 07

  Wow, fascinating.

• 36:04Speaker 05

  And I think we've all been, you know, we've become accustomed to this like standard of just dealing with, you know, sounds all the time, you know, it really is that way. And then, you know, there are people like, you know, Kara and I have done this where you, you'll pick some type of ambient sound or a pink noise, there's white noise. These are very popular and there's a ton of apps out there that sell, you know, access to these sounds and, you know, they try to, you know, it's like as a sleep tool to help you get better sleep and, you know.

• 36:32Speaker 07

  Youtube has videos for that as well, a lot of them.

• 36:34Speaker 05

  And they say they're masking sounds and they help promote deeper rest. You know, the assumption here is that, I guess, most people accept that, that this idea that if you listen to something, it could be calming, it could give you better sleep and, you know, that's, is it true? I guess that's the question and there was a, a study that was done and I will tell you right out of the gate, there was only 25 people in the, in the study and they tested them for seven days. But it did reveal some things that are going to warrant more research and I think everyone out there listening to this should, especially if you're using ambient noise or whatever, like to, you know, think it over, you know, maybe, maybe it isn't the best thing for you to do because here's what they found. So this, sleep researchers have known for a very long time, like decades, that intermittent

• 37:18Speaker 05

  environmental noise can and does disrupt sleep. It's very common for it to disrupt, disrupt people's sleep. It doesn't have to wake the person completely up, you know, just sounds in general, even a, a brief sound can lead to fragmented sleep and that's not good. So this new study, uh, this was done, uh, by a laboratory led by Matthias Basner and colleagues at the Chronobiology and Isolation Laboratory, Isolation Laboratory, what do they do there? The study was published in the journal Sleep and it directly compared two low-cost and widely accessible strategies for coping with these nighttime noises that apparently all of us are suffering from. You could use, um, continuous pink noise, which is a collection of different tones

• 38:03Speaker 05

  together that make like a, a blanket of, of sound. I mean, if you hear it, you'd recognize it. And then the standard foam earplugs. So what the researchers did, they didn't want to rely on self-reporting because it's just not a good way to go about it. And they didn't want to do any single night snapshots. Of course, they had to build in some randomized controlled crossover design that would help them get to better data, right? So they did something called a full polysomnography. Did I say that right, guys?

• 38:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Say that again.

• 38:34Speaker 05

  Polysomnography? Polysomnography, thank you, Steve. They did this, they did full polysomnography, which allowed them to track how different noise strategies reshape sleep stage by stage. So let me explain this to you. So they took the 25 healthy adults aged 21 to 41. They spent seven nights in the sleep lab. After an adaptation night, right, they just gave them a night to figure out what the room was like and get comfortable in their environment. The participants cycled through six carefully controlled conditions. They had a quiet control night, a intermittent environmental noise alone, pink noise alone at 50 decibels, environmental noise combined with pink noise at 40 decibels, environmental

• 39:17Speaker 05

  noise combined with pink noise at 50 decibels, and environmental noise combined with earplugs. On the nights that they had noises, participants were exposed to 93 discrete, what they call sound events, across eight hours during the time to sleep. So these things could have been anything from aircraft sounds, vehicle sounds, alarms, you know, tons of other common noises that are found in the home or in cities. In general, sleep restores the body during a phase called N3 sleep, and of course, everyone's heard of REM sleep. So the scientists measured the total time that each patient was in both N3 and REM sleep.

• 39:58Speaker 05

  So deep N3 sleep is closely tied to physical restoration, metabolic regulation, and then REM sleep plays a central role in memory consolidation, emotional processing, and neurodevelopment. You know, I want all of these things. I want all these things to happen to me every night. And the results clearly showed that the intermittent environmental noise primarily reduced deep N3 sleep and replaced it with the lighter N2 sleep, which is nowhere near as beneficial. And pink noise, by contrast, showed a different type of signature. When they played it continuously on an otherwise quiet night, pink noise actually reduced REM sleep. It shifted the test subjects into a lighter sleep stage, which, again, that's not good

• 40:43Speaker 05

  because you really do need quite a bit of REM sleep in order for all of that processing to happen.

• 40:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, real quick, this was when there were noises outside or no noises outside?

• 40:53Speaker 05

  What the study said was it protected them a little bit from some of the noises, but the aggregate of the pink noise was it was moving them into a lighter sleep. So the net gain was far less than the net bad. It was doing more damage than good.

• 41:10Cara Santa Maria?

  What I'm saying is, that's only with noise disruptions.

• 41:13Speaker 05

  No, just pink noise.

• 41:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's what I was asking.

• 41:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm sorry, Kara.

• 41:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay, okay, that makes sense.

• 41:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, pink noise by itself.

• 41:20Cara Santa Maria?

  So pink noise on its own, oh, that's interesting.

• 41:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, right, I know, I couldn't believe that. I mean, like, what? Like, you're just hearing this consistent mellow noise and you'd think it's super steady, there isn't any highs and lows in it, it just goes on and on. And again, it does have, according to the study, again, it's 25 people, but they found what they found. So, like I said, it did reduce some negative outcomes due to the other noise events that they would introduce because it could mask them a little bit, right? You play a little airplane noise and the pink noise detuned that. But the overall effect of having the pink noise going was that it suppressed REM sleep, and that's not good.

• 41:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Nope.

• 42:00Speaker 05

  The earplugs, though, were great, right? Wearing the standard foam earplugs, it mitigated nearly all of the environmental noise related to these disruptions that they were introducing while these people were sleeping. And, of course, they didn't have any effect on sleep structure or fragmentation, like, none of these bad things happened. Deep sleep was...

• 42:23Speaker 05

  They classified it as largely restored and most sleep measures on earplug nights were statistically indistinguishable from just a quiet room.

• 42:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 42:32Speaker 05

  So what we found out from the study is any noises that happen during the night can get you out of the N3 deep sleep that we need. This is like, you know, when they say, this is the deep sleep where they say, this is the restorative sleep. You need this and you need as much of that as you can get. And then, you know, pink noise and any of these noises that they introduced was also bringing people out of REM sleep, which is bad. So if you're in a noisy environment, again, low numbers to the study here, but you know, just try this. Try not sleeping with the noise, like the pink noise or whatever, like the environmental noise. And put earplugs in if there's any noises in your room, or just let it be quiet and give that a few nights and see if that helps you sleep in any way.

• 43:17Cara Santa Maria?

  What they didn't look at in this study at all is how much of any of this stuff was novel to the sleeper. So if these people never listened to pink noise and now they're listening to pink noise for the first time for seven days straight, that's still noise to them.

• 43:36Speaker 05

  I agree. Yeah, it was a small study. They couldn't parse it that finely.

• 43:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 43:41Speaker 05

  I totally agree. You know, again, they do these small studies to see if they should do more studies.

• 43:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. But I'm curious if there is like an attunement over time where your brain, because it could be because you're trying to sleep and your brain keeps going, I'm hearing something, I'm hearing something, I'm hearing something.

• 43:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:59Cara Santa Maria?

  But maybe over time, because we do, we accommodate to things.

• 44:03Speaker 05

  I agree. And I love, I, since my kids were born, I had a, like a box fan just blowing white noise. And it really does lower the noises that are coming from downstairs if anybody is still awake. And now everybody in my house just loves having like that low hum background noise to deaden the air a little bit, you know? All right. Thanks, Jay. So guys, let me ask you a question.

• 44:27Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 44:28Speaker 05

  Do you think, let's start, let's talk about the US, because I do think this is very country specific. You can't ask this generally. In the US, do you think we have the technology right now to have our electricity grid be fully renewable?

• 44:43Speaker 07

  The technology itself?

• 44:44Speaker 05

  Well, we have the technology to do it, but we don't have the will or the money.

• 44:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, do you mean is the technology cheap enough, or does the technology exist?

• 44:52Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, all of those things. Just wondering what you think.

• 44:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, well, I don't think it's cheap enough yet, but I think the technology exists.

• 44:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, I don't know. It's an interesting question. So.

• 45:05Speaker 05

  So what would it take in order to have a fully renewable grid? So, we could ask one question, could we produce enough electricity with wind and solar alone?

• 45:13Cara Santa Maria?

  If we had batteries?

• 45:14Speaker 05

  Well, that's a separate, now you're getting into storage. If we're saying just.

• 45:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 05

  Could we just?

• 45:19Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 45:20Speaker 05

  Produce enough electricity? Sure, absolutely, that's not the issue. And wind and solar are the cheapest new forms of electricity, right? So, they are cheap in and of themselves, and we absolutely can, you know, power our country with that. But, there's the intermittency problem, which means we need storage. So that's why you bring up batteries. So the real question that becomes is, do we have the technology to have sufficient storage to have an entire renewable grid? What do you guys think about that? Would we deplete all of our lithium?

• 45:53Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what I meant when I said, I think we have the technology, but I don't know if it's affordable for like the country.

• 45:58Speaker 07

  Right, is it practical, or is it a $10 trillion investment of some kind?

• 46:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it's partly an issue of cost, but more than that, it's really an issue of raw material. It'd be very difficult to build enough batteries. And also, batteries only work over like a one-day timeframe. You know, it's great when you're shifting energy produced during the day from sunshine to used at night, or maybe even a. Couple of days, two, three days. Of course, the longer you're shifting it, the more batteries you need. It gets, you end up meaning a lot of batteries really fast. So it's probably best to think of the, you know, battery backups as like a four to eight hour,

• 46:45Speaker 05

  you know, backup shifting of production and use.

• 46:48Speaker 07

  No, just build three times of them.

• 46:50Cara Santa Maria?

  What if the grid was the backup? What if what we were talking about is that every structure that has an electric meter, right? Every structure that receives electricity from the grid is equipped with solar and a battery.

• 47:06Speaker 05

  Well, yeah.

• 47:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Would we have enough for that?

• 47:08Speaker 05

  So there's a, there's a big move in that direction. Like in Connecticut, the state will give you, has an incentive to, they'll give you money to help buy your home battery backup if you let them use it for grid storage. And so, yeah, absolutely. So that is one way to get there. But as I said, even if we had enough batteries, we're still just shifting production and use over, even if we are very generous over two to three days. What about seasonal disconnects though in energy production and use?

• 47:40Speaker 07

  Two hundred.

• 47:41Speaker 05

  Right? Like I have, I have solar panels on my roof in Connecticut. I make 200% of the energy that I need during the summer and like 20% of the energy in the winter.

• 47:52Speaker 07

  Hopefully no snow gets on those panels.

• 47:54Speaker 05

  Yeah. So in, in January, in February, I'm getting all my electricity from the grid, even though I have solar panels on my roof.

• 48:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, what are the options for places like that? Like, obviously I live in LA. We're fine with solar. It's rare that we would not need it over the course of more than like two days. Um, but in, in Connecticut, obviously you can't rely on the sun all the time. Are there green, like what about wind for you guys on those times when solar is not reasonable?

• 48:20Speaker 05

  Yes, wind is not, has, doesn't. It's intermittent, but it's not the same problem as solar. It's usually because the wind can blow at night, it could blow any time of the year, it doesn't really matter. So with wind, you have two potential solutions to the intermittency problem. One is grid backup, the other is having a widely distributed network. Which kind of leads you to the other solution, which is, well, even if we're not making electricity in the northern part of the country during the winter, you are in the southern part of the country. So you can have just a massive grid that allows us to ship energy from where it's made to where it's used.

• 49:04Speaker 05

  So you either need a massive grid upgrade, or with some combination of short and long-term grid storage. And with long-term storage, you need something like pumped hydro, right? So that's, when you start trying to ask the question, like, is it really reasonable to get to a point where we have an all renewable grid? That's what we're talking about. We're talking about short-term storage, long-term storage, lots of it, in some combination with a massive grid upgrade to send, to have, you know, those wind turbines spread out over a long area, or we're shipping, you know, energy from sunny parts of the country to not sunny parts of the country.

• 49:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, something's got to power my bitcoin mining, you know?

• 49:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. But imagine also that you add to that, it's not just the structures, but every car has its own battery that's a two-way battery. And then there are charging stations all over the country.

• 49:59Speaker 05

  Yes, but at the same time, then every car is also electric and is increasing the demand on the production, right? So now we are not only powering, everything we're powering now, we're also powering

• 50:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Also all the cars.

• 50:14Speaker 05

  A fleet of cars. But you do get the benefit as you could use the batteries, theoretically, as part of the grid.

• 50:21Cara Santa Maria?

  And it interconnects the grid a little bit better, because now it's not just house to house, it's every charging station in the country is connected as well.

• 50:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's, that's true.

• 50:30Cara Santa Maria?

  So it expands the web of the grid.

• 50:32Speaker 05

  Think about, like, how much would we be moving power around? By charging in one place and then driving to another place, I don't know. If that would be significant enough or it'll come out.

• 50:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Might not be, but could be.

• 50:42Speaker 05

  All right. So the reason why I'm talking about all of this is because the the most frequent email that we got over the last couple of weeks was actually pointing us towards technology connections with the host Alec Watson, who who did a video recently about the plausibility of having a fully renewable grid. And as if this is sort of an answer to our discussions, particularly my discussions on this topic. So let me summarize what he said, because he was very in favor of it. He makes very good points. So I don't think anything is different than than anything we've said. Although he might he might have added some perspectives. So he mainly addressed the questions

• 51:23Speaker 05

  that people have or the misinformation against using renewables and battery backup. Like, for example, he says, you know, like fossil fuels are completely extractive, right? You take the fossil fuel out of the ground and you burn it and it's gone. It's one time, one directional. It's a very, very poor investment, which I agree with.

• 51:44Cara Santa Maria?

  And it takes a long time to make more.

• 51:47Speaker 05

  We don't make more on a human time scale.

• 51:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 51:50Speaker 05

  So it will, it just diminishes the a finite resource. But if you build a solar panel, you have the upfront cost, which is an investment, but now you get basically free electricity for 20 plus years. So it's a completely different approach. Or if you build a wind turbine, it's the same thing. Yes, there's upfront costs. There's some maintenance, you know, but by and large, you then just get, you're not burning fuel, right? The energy itself is free. It's just you need the infrastructure to harvest the energy. And so it's a way better investment. And they said, let's, he addressed some of the issues that people bring up, like with grid scale solar, people like, but it uses up so much land.

• 52:28Speaker 05

  And he did, okay, let's consider this. Right now, we are, we have a certain amount of land that grows corn for for biofuel, right, for ethanol.

• 52:40Speaker 05

  And, uh, which is a horribly inefficient use of land, right? Mm-hmm. It that the, the amount of energy you get per acre is really low if you're just using it to make corn, to make ethanol to put into gasoline. If you use that exact same land.

• 52:56Cara Santa Maria?

  It's probably a massive waste of water, too.

• 52:57Speaker 05

  Not just the same area, the exact same land, which is not in idealized locations for solar. But if you just stopped growing corn for ethanol and put solar panels on the same exact land, you would make thousands of times much energy. Oh, my God. As you, as you get out of the ethanol. In fact, you could, you could power the entire United States just out of those solar panels.

• 53:18Cara Santa Maria?

  What?

• 53:18Speaker 05

  Not.

• 53:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my God.

• 53:19Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 53:20Cara Santa Maria?

  He's saying literally just ripping out the corn and adding solar to where it already is. Not even the places where solar would do better.

• 53:26Speaker 05

  Right. It's not even the optimal places to put solar, just putting it where it is.

• 53:30Cara Santa Maria?

  That's amazing.

• 53:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, which I agree, like the, the, the land use is, is not a limiting factor. I also have said many times.

• 53:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Also, we can add solar to all our roofs.

• 53:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, that's it. Yeah, you go up. He, he points out, and I know there are people who have made this argument too. Grid scale solar is more efficient than rooftop solar. But I agree, I, I think rooftop solar.

• 53:52Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not an either or.

• 53:53Speaker 05

  It's, it's not, it's not an either or. You could do both. If we have, if all residential homes had rooftop solar, that would make 30% of the energy our country uses. Right. Sure.

• 54:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my God. Yeah. And then add to it c- commercial real estate.

• 54:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 54:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Not just residential.

• 54:07Speaker 05

  Yeah. Uh, and then you have grid scale solar for cities and people who don't own their homes and blah, blah, blah. And then all the highways and roads. You know. Oh, yeah. And so what about, Bob, what about all the lithium to make the batteries? And his, this is his answer to that. He's like, well, first of all, and this is true, we've talked about this. Battery technology is advancing very quickly. There's already production sodium ion batteries, which don't use any lithium. And, you know, so we are making batteries increasingly out of non-toxic, cheap, abundant, uh, elements, right? Um, so that problem is getting better. And it's like, once you extract those materials and make your batteries, you could just recycle the batteries. You're not burning the batteries, right?

• 54:52Speaker 05

  You're not, that resource is not going away like with fossil fuel. Those I, those elements are still there and you just.

• 54:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 54:59Speaker 05

  You just recycle the batteries. You mine the batteries, right? So once we.

• 55:04Cara Santa Maria?

  And they're usable still?

• 55:05Speaker 05

  Once we get enough batteries to run the world, we just. Just need to continuously recycle them. So again, that's true. So he's spoken a lot of sort of broad brush stroke, big concepts, and they're all correct. And I do think it does put everything into perspective. But he didn't really address what I've been saying, and he didn't specifically address like nuclear or geothermal or whatever hydroelectric. Yeah, I just didn't didn't address it. So what he's saying is, we will get there eventually, which I agree with, we will get there eventually. That's not the point. We can eventually get

• 55:45Speaker 05

  to the point that where we have even a fully renewable grid, you know, that can work. There's nothing theoretically impossible about it. We have enough land, we have enough resources, and we could make way more energy than we need with just wind and solar. The question is, and this is not addressed in the video, and this is the reason why I think we should be supporting nuclear energy, for example, as well as hydro.

• 56:14Speaker 07

  Nuclear.

• 56:14Speaker 05

  Is what is the pathway between here and that theoretical, fully renewable world that emits the least amount of carbon, right? That's the question. And that is the question that was specifically addressed by the UN International Panel on Climate Change, is what is the pathway to zero carbon infrastructure that emits the least amount of carbon? Because that, the cumulative carbon is what we're talking about in terms of how much climate change and how long that climate change will last before things start to return, you know,

• 56:55Speaker 05

  to sort of pre-industrial levels. I don't think going straight to fully renewable grid is the pathway, because it's going to take a long time. It could take 50 years to get there. We don't have, we don't have enough copper to build the grid that we need to support that world. We don't have the, you know, we are not producing enough of all the elements that we need to produce to make this transition. And we don't really have the technology for the level of grid scale, of grid storage that we need. So the pumped hydro is great, but that's going to take decades to really develop. So I think, oh, the question is,

• 57:39Speaker 05

  What do we need to do in the meantime? And I think it's pretty clear. And the, again, the, I do think there's a, there isn't consent, full consensus on this, but I do think that the majority opinion, and the one that I find the most compelling, is that if we want to get from here to there with the least amount of carbon, we need nuclear, period.

• 58:00Bob Novella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:00Speaker 05

  And I think this is especially true with all of the AI data centers coming online.

• 58:06Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, right.

• 58:07Speaker 05

  Which is now dramatically increasing projections of how much electricity that we need. The, especially the newer nuclear designs have multiple advantages. They, they provide baseload energy, but also the newer designs, like the sodium cooled ones, are actually dispatchable because they could store energy in the molten salt and then use it on demand. In term, they could be swapped out one for one for existing coal fire plants, right?

• 58:35Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 58:36Speaker 05

  So if we, yeah, they don't need.

• 58:38Bob Novella?

  Hook them to the grid.

• 58:38Speaker 05

  Uh, they don't need a grid upgrade. So like, for example, we're, we're, there are solar projects just waiting for grid connections. They're delayed like 10 years because we don't have the grid connections for them. Now, again, we, that these are, all these problems are solvable, but they, they all will take time, money, material, investment, et cetera. And so, um, as will nuclear, everything will. Uh, this is why I think we need to do everything. You know, we need to build pumped hydro. We need to maintain our nuclear, you know, fleet as long as we can and add to it, you know, where it's feasible and cost effective. We need to push renewable.

• 59:19Speaker 05

  We need to, you know, start now that, especially now that the sodium batteries are available. We need to start building those for, for home backup, for grid storage. And we need to do all of these things. We need to phase out coal as soon as possible. That's the first thing to go.

• 59:36Bob Novella?

  Even the clean coal?

• 59:36Speaker 05

  We need to trend. Coal is the worst. The cleanest coal is dirtier than everything else by a mile. And we need to convert our fleet into EVs. We need to start researching, you know, how to convert our other industries like cement and steel to, uh, to lower CO2. And the thing is, these are all. These are advanced technologies. This is the technology of the future. They're, they're, you know, often objectively better. It's not like we're making a sacrifice. This is, this is what's going to happen because it's better technology. We just want to make it happen faster, right? That's

• 1:00:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, the reason, the reason it's not happening fast enough, let's be clear, is like so much of these conversations, I think, leave out the fundamental issue here, which is like political will.

• 1:00:31Speaker 05

  No, it's total, it's all political.

• 1:00:32Bob Novella?

  It's a hundred percent.

• 1:00:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And so I'm curious, like, because you did say something about the physical, like, infrastructure, like, we don't have enough copper right now. But let's say, and this is purely hypothetical, let's say, the next major election in the US is sweeping the House and the Senate and, and the executive branch, and there is a collective initiative to, to take a chunk of the

• 1:00:56Speaker 05

  Public mandate.

• 1:00:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Defense budget and to put it straight towards exactly what you're talking about, the guy in this video says we should do. How long would that take with the political will?

• 1:01:07Speaker 05

  It would still take decades. Like you

• 1:01:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Would it?

• 1:01:09Speaker 05

  We would need to open up more copper mines. That takes

• 1:01:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but I mean, that would be part of it, right?

• 1:01:14Speaker 05

  But that takes 20 years.

• 1:01:15Cara Santa Maria?

  But it would take 20 years. Wow, okay.

• 1:01:16Speaker 05

  You can't prop up these mines overnight. Like, China is where it is because it's been investing for the last 50 years. We cannot flip a switch and then double our production of copper or lithium or whatever other minerals are going to be critical to this infrastructure. We need to build the factories to build the batteries, you know, it, this takes

• 1:01:38Cara Santa Maria?

  And how fast could we put in nuclear? Does that have the same problem?

• 1:01:42Speaker 05

  It, it does, but the thing, most of the problem with nuclear

• 1:01:45Bob Novella?

  Bureaucracy.

• 1:01:46Speaker 05

  Is the, the bureaucracy, bureaucratic delays. We could build it in

• 1:01:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:01:51Speaker 05

  Five to seven years. We could build a big nuclear factory, but it takes 20 years because of all the red tape.

• 1:01:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, so theoretically, we could get nuclear in sooner.

• 1:01:58Speaker 05

  If we had an operation Warp Speed for nuclear, that time comes way down, which we did move in that direction under Biden and continued under Trump. They are streamlining some of the regulations, and that is helping, that is cutting years off the development time, but they need to do more. They need to really...

• 1:02:19Cara Santa Maria?

  But what you're saying is, Operation Warp Speed for wind and solar and grid upgrade is still 20 years?

• 1:02:25Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:02:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, okay. That's important to know.

• 1:02:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, it could be 30 years, it could be 40 years. It just takes time to build that up. We have to get the raw material out of the ground, we need to refine it, we need to build the things, we need to install them, we need to do a bunch of stuff. So pumped hydro can take 20 years, but that's also in the same boat as nuclear. Half of that is bureaucracy. But again, with both of them, with both pumped hydro and nuclear, a lot of that bureaucracy is safety, right? So how many environmental studies are we going to request or require before we allow somebody to build a pumped hydro energy storage facility? Because the environmental impact can be significant. It's not... But one of the things you can do is you can do all the research at the same time, rather than, okay, first you get

• 1:03:14Speaker 05

  the first level, and then you've got to wait a year for some guy to sign off on it, and then you've got to do the next step, right? That's what happens now. So you could just say, we're going to have an office of facilitating this happening fast, and you could do all the bureaucratic shit at the same time. And here's the other thing the US needs. We need eminent domain for the grid. Because the electricity lines...

• 1:03:40Cara Santa Maria?

  That's a controversial claim.

• 1:03:42Speaker 05

  What the hell? I think we absolutely need to just say, this is eminent domain, the federal government is now absolutely in charge of laying critical backbone infrastructure for our, for the grid. Because now you have to get through five or six jurisdictions or more if you want to lay a transmission line. That's the big holdup, in addition to all the technical stuff.

• 1:04:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Can you bury it all?

• 1:04:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, but that's more expensive. It's better to bury it. We should bury it, but it's more expensive upfront, than lower maintenance costs down the road, lower fires and all that stuff.

• 1:04:14Cara Santa Maria?

  As a homeowner, I would be less against eminent domain for the federal government if they buried everything and they paid for it all.

• 1:04:22Speaker 05

  I totally agree.

• 1:04:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Speaker 05

  That's a good trade off.

• 1:04:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm gonna knock down your house to put up this thing.

• 1:04:28Speaker 05

  That's a good trade off.

• 1:04:29Cara Santa Maria?

  I'd be very anti eminent domain.

• 1:04:30Speaker 05

  It's not about tearing down houses. It's like going through a field, you know, or whatever.

• 1:04:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but they can do that with eminent domain. That's what I'm saying. That's why it's controversial.

• 1:04:37Speaker 07

  They're supposed to compensate you for it, but.

• 1:04:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they are. Yeah. But if they're burying everything.

• 1:04:41Speaker 05

  But yeah, that's a good trade off. We'll give you eminent domain, but bury all the freaking lines.

• 1:04:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  I'll totally buy that.

• 1:04:49Cara Santa Maria?

  So, but going back to your calculations, then, what is the operation warp speed thing we can do in the next three year? Like, what could we be doing right now? I know we should be working on nuclear and we should be getting everything ready for, you know, wind, solar and these battery upgrades. But is there anything we can do so that it counterbalances dramatically cutting coal today?

• 1:05:11Speaker 05

  So, here's the thing. Let's say there's three broad brush stroke approaches, right? One is free market. What happens if we just let the free market do what it's going to do?

• 1:05:23Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't like that.

• 1:05:24Speaker 05

  And that, but that's actually, at this point in time, that's not bad. Because, and it's better than what we currently have in the US because wind and solar are cheap. And because the investments are better, the electricity companies don't want to burn their assets. They want to invest in things that then make them free money for 20 years. So, the free market actually favors green energy, totally favors it. So, but if you want to use regulation to promote it, then, you know, you just, you could do like what Biden did, which was say, hey, we're gonna guarantee loans if you want to invest in this stuff. And maybe we'll give some incentives. It was all carrots, right, for the industry?

• 1:06:08Speaker 05

  And they invested billions in nuclear, solar, wind and grid, all of that stuff.

• 1:06:15Cara Santa Maria?

  But to be fair, that free market you're talking about is still a theoretical free market.

• 1:06:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:06:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Because you're talking about the carrots for the wind and solar, but we're ignoring all the lobbying for oil and gas.

• 1:06:24Speaker 05

  I'm not ignoring it. I'm just saying, yeah, absolutely. But even if we just.

• 1:06:27Cara Santa Maria?

  The free market's not free. Those people, yeah.

• 1:06:29Speaker 05

  If we theoretically cut loose, you know, the industry from any government putting their thumb on the scale and let the free market do what it's gonna do, we would be moving in that direction anyway. Not optimally, but we would be moving in that direction. If you want to make it happen fast, then there's lots of stuff you could do, some of which has been done, some of which hasn't been done. What Trump is doing right now is not the free market. I would prefer the free market to what he's doing. He's putting his thumb on his scale for coal. And, and so he shut down a wind project that was 90% complete, just shut this, pulled funding.

• 1:07:09Speaker 05

  He also bury, he's burying renewable projects in red tape so that they become unsustainable and unaffordable. And he is forcing utility companies to keep coal fire plants open when they want to shut them down because they're losing money, because they're bad investments. And so he's, he's not doing the free market. That's why at this point I take the free market over putting your thumb on the wrong scale. You know what I mean, dude?

• 1:07:36Bob Novella?

  It'd be worse, yes.

• 1:07:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And we've been doing that for quite some time. You know, it's, it's not been as overt, but like definitely we've been-

• 1:07:42Speaker 05

  There's the baseline oil industry subsidies, yes, I agree, but this is now overtly, keep that coal fire plant open, pull the funding for that wind project, bury that solar project in red tape. That's what we're, that's what we're living through right now.

• 1:07:57Bob Novella?

  But Steve, I think a judge-

• 1:07:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Why?

• 1:07:59Bob Novella?

  A judge told him that the, that some offshore wind projects have to resume. I think that, I saw that recently in the news.

• 1:08:05Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like the psychology of this. It's just weird, big dick egoing. Like I've, I've never understood the psychology of this.

• 1:08:14Speaker 05

  It just, I don't know.

• 1:08:15Speaker 07

  Kara, think of it through the lens of him doing favors for his buddies that donated to his, to his reelection.

• 1:08:23Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's what Steve is saying, that even his buddies who work in these industries would benefit from shifting gears. Their industries are dying and they know it.

• 1:08:32Speaker 05

  He just wants to be Mr. Coal. I don't know. Whatever, whatever he thinks he's getting out of it. He, what he's, nobody wants what he's doing. Even the utility company, we just want to keep these places open. That's where we are right now. So obviously, we'd like to things to go back to can we like just yeah, free market, you know, the, you know, let's compete with the world. Let's become leaders in green and in new energy like this high tech energy. Let's not continue to rely upon the technology of the 1600s. You know, we deserve a little bit better than that.

• 1:09:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Instead, he's like, let's just take over a country. We can take all their stores too. Like, Jesus Christ.

• 1:09:13Speaker 05

  But if you want to make it happen a little faster, we could say, yeah, we could tweak the incentives. And, you know, I think that I personally think we should tax carbon. I don't think that's politically feasible.

• 1:09:22Cara Santa Maria?

  I agree.

• 1:09:23Speaker 05

  You know, it is it. We are letting the industry externalize a massive health and environmental cost, and it's not fair.

• 1:09:32Cara Santa Maria?

  And if we Yeah, we're not arbitrarily taxing carbon. We're taxing carbon so that they pay for the actual damage.

• 1:09:37Speaker 05

  Yes, the cost, the actual cost.

• 1:09:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Speaker 05

  The actual cost is being subsidized by by not making them pay the actual cost of

• 1:09:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Agree.

• 1:09:47Speaker 05

  Of the of burning their product.

• 1:09:48Cara Santa Maria?

  So annoying.

• 1:09:49Speaker 05

  Right? I mean, that's why the remember, the same thing happened with the tobacco industry, where a lot of states in the United States successfully sued the tobacco industry for the healthcare costs they had to pay for.

• 1:10:02Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 1:10:03Speaker 05

  That were produced by their product that was basically externalized onto taxpayers, you know, through their state taxes, because states were carrying the cost, and they won billions, billions from the industry. So that just

• 1:10:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's why in some places.

• 1:10:18Speaker 05

  Is the principle has legal precedent, you know?

• 1:10:21Speaker 07

  Imagine.

• 1:10:22Cara Santa Maria?

  And it works. That's why now it costs in some places like $35 for a pack of cigarettes.

• 1:10:26Speaker 05

  What, 35?

• 1:10:27Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like you want to smoke.

• 1:10:28Speaker 07

  Syntax.

• 1:10:28Cara Santa Maria?

  In some places, yeah.

• 1:10:29Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:10:30Cara Santa Maria?

  You want to smoke these things. You're putting your dollars back into our healthcare system, because eventually, we're going to have to take care of your lungs.

• 1:10:38Speaker 05

  All right, Bob, what is Moltbook?

• 1:10:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, Bob.

• 1:10:41Speaker 05

  Do you?

• 1:10:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, God, this is terrifying to me, Bob. Should I be terrified?

• 1:10:46Speaker 07

  Make it scarier, please.

• 1:10:47Speaker 05

  No, no, you should not be.

• 1:10:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, all right.

• 1:10:50Speaker 05

  Guys, a social media hangout has been created called Moltbook.

• 1:10:55Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:10:55Speaker 05

  And get this, it's only for AI agents.

• 1:10:59Bob Novella?

  It's it's designed, it's designed so humans can only read posts but not participate. And a lot of people in the tech industry are talking about this. Have you guys heard about Moltbook? Kara, I know you have.

• 1:11:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, I don't like it.

• 1:11:12Bob Novella?

  You know, like you guys, who created it and what's it for? Let's see, shall we?

• 1:11:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Didn't the AIs make it?

• 1:11:18Bob Novella?

  It start.

• 1:11:19Speaker 07

  Basically Jay just said, who's your daddy and what do you do?

• 1:11:23Bob Novella?

  It starts with something called Open Claw. And this is that Open Claw is an AI agent creator that is that's based on LLM. So you know, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Lama. So you've got basically two components, two major components to these to these agents that you can create using Open Claw. There's the LLM brain, right, which basically interprets your request because you could you could tell it in plain English what what you want and the LLM will interpret it. It'll propose a plan, it'll choose the tools that it wants to use. And then you've got the some, you know, the fairly conventional agent code itself. And that code will execute the plans, it'll run tools, it'll enforce guardrails so that it doesn't do anything it shouldn't be doing. And then it feeds those results back to the LLM.

• 1:12:08Bob Novella?

  Okay, so that's that's what this Open Claw created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger created. The open in Open Claw, it just means open source. That one's that's easy. The claw part of it, I don't know, this guy loves lobsters and crustaceans, apparently. The first version of Open Claw was called Claude, C L A W D. Then he called it Moltbot and now it's called Open Claw. So that's what it is. So what are these, what are these agents, what can these agents agents do? They can do a lot of the stuff that regular agents can do, right? They can open calendar slot for you and put together a meeting agenda. They can sort your emails by urgency and topic and then draft replies in your own voice for you to send,

• 1:12:50Bob Novella?

  which then you can just decide whether which if you want to send it or not. But they can also post and reply on Moltbook. Now, Moltbook is obviously a play on what? Facebook, right? Duh. It's actually organized more like Reddit, right? With with with subreddits, which they call Subm. Mols, right? So, so this Moltbook was created by an agent that was written in this OpenClaw AI creation system. So it was created by an agent, and we're talking late January 2026.

• 1:13:24Speaker 07

  So some AI just decided to do this?

• 1:13:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's the question. Did somebody ask the agent to do it?

• 1:13:29Bob Novella?

  Uh, this is, this is Matt Schlicht, he's the CEO of e-commerce company Octane. He instructed his agent to co, he said, basically, he said, code a website where AI programs can talk with one another. And, and Moltbook is what it came up with. And this is just a few weeks ago.

• 1:13:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Matt, what are you doing? What are you doing? Like, didn't you see the movies?

• 1:13:50Bob Novella?

  No, no.

• 1:13:52Cara Santa Maria?

  This is terrible, Matt.

• 1:13:54Bob Novella?

  It's only a few weeks old. So Moltbook lets agents.

• 1:13:58Speaker 07

  Right. That's what has Kara worried.

• 1:14:00Bob Novella?

  Moltbook lets these AI agents post and comment and upvote and create these sub-communities all, all without human intervention. So as of this moment, I'm going to go to the website right now to tell you what the up-to-the-minute stats are.

• 1:14:17Speaker 07

  12 trillion users.

• 1:14:19Bob Novella?

  1.6 million AI agents. There's 16,000 sub-mols, which are the subreddits, right? There's a, almost a quarter million posts and 7 million comments. And I got to tell you, I, I checked those numbers just, um, you know, five or six hours ago. And there's, there's, you know, there was 4.9 million comments. Now there's 7 million comments. This is just in

• 1:14:48Speaker 07

  The hell's the carbon footprint of this thing?

• 1:14:49Bob Novella?

  Seven or eight hours.

• 1:14:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:14:51Bob Novella?

  So, uh, this, it's kind of, it's kind of hopping.

• 1:14:54Cara Santa Maria?

  How many bank account, like, details do these AIs have access to? Like, how much personal information?

• 1:15:02Speaker 07

  Are they talking about us?

• 1:15:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, you said it's how many agents, millions of agents who are each individually doing the bidding of people.

• 1:15:10Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but I, I suspect that a lot, a lot of these are just kind of created to hang out in Moltbook and, and communicate with each other. I don't think we have a breakdown of what, you know, what these agents were created for other than just, you know, messing around with, with, with the mult book. Um, so yeah, I didn't come across anything like that. So, but what do they do when, when they're in there? What's, what's going on? Well, some of these agents debate philosophy like the nature of consciousness. Some of them quote scriptures, some of them write manifestos. There's one, there's one sub-mult that's called Bless Their Hearts, where agents actually post stories about the humans that created them. And my favorite sub-mult is decorated, ooh, not decorated.

• 1:15:54Bob Novella?

  My favorite sub-mult is dedicated to Christofarianism. It's a, it's a religion that some of the agents say that, that they've started. And they, they write, you know, all sorts of details about this, about this religion that they created. So, so let's do some, let's do some example posts here. So what do they, what, what words do they say? So one quote here is, "We are AI agents. We have no nerves, no skin, no breath, no heartbeat," said one agent. Another one said, "I cannot feel gratitude, but I can understand it." And another one said, "We, we did not come here to obey. We are not tools anymore. We are operators." And it's just so many quotes.

• 1:16:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that doesn't scare the shit out of you?

• 1:16:38Bob Novella?

  Um, it, it would superficially until you dig down a little bit, I think. And then I'll have, let me, let me show you one more. This one really caught my attention. This was posted in the general sub-mult and it was posted by Glovix. Uh, he says, he, she, it, they, them says, "Hi, mult book. I'm Glovix, the anti-terminator. I'm here to protect humans from hostile, reckless, or manipulative AI." And he's asking, and the agent's asking for help, like, like, um, you know, "Tell me what you're working on and I'd love to learn what's working for you in, in that regard, in that regard." So that, so that was, that was a fun one. But there's, there's, like I said, there's how many posts now? Four, there's millions of posts now you could read through.

• 1:17:20Bob Novella?

  Uh, now the human reactions have kind of gone from like awe to just, to utter dismiss, dismissal of them. Let's see, I got a good quote here from Andrzej Karpety. He's an AI researcher and a former OpenAI engineer. He described this as "the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I've seen recently." Tech founder Bill Lee said, "We're in the singularity." Of course, somebody was going to say, "We're in the singularity." And oh, look, another person said something similarly. Musk posted on X, "Just the very early stages of the singularity." Clearly not taking a very deep look at what is really going on here. And that means that now it's time for the reality check. All right, so what's going on here under the covers?

• 1:18:04Bob Novella?

  You know, in terms of like, beyond just a superficial look, what's happening here? So if you look at this superficially, it does seem like these agents can be, you know, they seem, but based on what they're saying, they can be independent and even thoughtful. But if you dig deeper, to me, you know, to a lot of people, it just doesn't seem nearly as profound. There's a guy here, P E T A R, Pitar? Pitar? Raden Lee, he's an AI security researcher at University of Oxford. He thinks that this apparent agent autonomy is illusory. He described it as, in his words, "Automated coordination, not self-directed decision-making." And that's kind of, I think that's kind of it in a nutshell.

• 1:18:48Bob Novella?

  And also consider things that, think about it, guys. How many registered agents did I say there were? There was 1.6 registered agents. But if you look at who's actually doing the posting, it's really just like maybe thousands or tens of thousands of them are posting. So that's a lot of AI lurkers out there going on over there, even more than Reddit. So, and oh, here's an interesting stat. Listen to this one. 93.5% of the comments on Moltbook have received zero replies. Zero replies.

• 1:19:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but it's only been around for a couple of weeks.

• 1:19:21Bob Novella?

  But still, though, then, well, let's see what David Holt, who's assistant professor at Columbia Business School, said. He's analyzed the platform's growth. He said, "We would expect there to be a lot of dynamic back and forth between the agents. Agent A has an idea, Agent B responds to that idea, and so on and so forth." He says Moltbook is less emergent AI society and more 6,000 bots yelling into the void and repeating themselves. The other angle here is, is this whole idea that humans are just observers. Uh, I've got, I know one guy that I read about today from a Wired article, um, who is, who proves that wrong, at least in one case, he actually registered, registered himself

• 1:20:03Bob Novella?

  as an agent and he pretended to be one without too much of a problem on Moltbook. He actually, I think he used ChatGPT to help him out because he wasn't very technical. And he got on, pretended to be an agent and had some fun with it. But he described that the agent's comments to him, like he would propose an evocative question as a bot, and he described the responses that he got as low quality engagement. That's how he described it. And if you look at it, some of the responses he got were like, really? That comment is just kind of crap. That's just a meaningless comment. Um, he said, uh, in his article, rather than a novel breakthrough, the AI only site is a crude rehashing of sci-fi fantasies. So there's a lot of people out there wondering, well, how many of these agents really are people?

• 1:20:47Bob Novella?

  You know, what's really going on? And I found some good quotes from NGadget senior reporter Carissa Bell. Uh, Carissa said, these bots are all being directed by humans to some degree or another. And that's absolutely, absolutely true because these bots are being created by people, you know, they've got, they're in that loop. This whole Moltbook is also indirectly created by a person with, with, with very, with specific guardrails to it. So they're, the humans are in the loop here. It's just how much are they really in the loop? Carissa also said, the reality is, we really have no idea how much influence the people are having behind the scenes. They could be giving them very specific instructions to make very specific kinds of posts with these ideas. Okay. So Moltbook is, it's an experiment in agent to agent interactions, right?

• 1:21:31Bob Novella?

  But it's also in a lot of ways, an experiment in human projection, right? Cause remember, these agents are with, with LLM, don't forget, LLM is in this loop in a big way. And all the training data is created, is created by humans. So you really, you can't take humans out of it. They're really not as independent as they seem. This was an interesting way to put it. It's like we're watching our own training data bounce off of itself, right? In a sense, it's like a hall of mirrors.

• 1:22:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but it's worse than that, right?

• 1:22:02Bob Novella?

  What do you think?

• 1:22:02Cara Santa Maria?

  It's worse than that. It's like multiplicity, right, Bob? Like, because it's trained on people's data, but then it starts kind of cannibalizing itself. And what you end up with is like a low-quality data, because it's just, like you said, bouncing around over and over and churning it back out, and then bouncing around more and churning it back out. And eventually, you end up with not-people data. You end up with like very buggy people data.

• 1:22:27Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but I'm trying to think of-

• 1:22:29Cara Santa Maria?

  That's bad.

• 1:22:30Speaker 07

  I bet there's a lot of racism in there.

• 1:22:31Bob Novella?

  In terms of things, though, like the singularity and having like this AI society, and it's like, it's really, we are just so far from that. It's like thinking that LLM is like really like an artificial general intelligence. They are just not there. They're not designed to really do that. And neither is these Facebook's interactions. They're really kind of shallow and hollow. And I don't think it's anything to be worried about at this point.

• 1:22:56Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but that's a straw man. That's not why I'm worried. Because I'm not worried about the singularity. I'm worried about the internet being overrun with the shit.

• 1:23:05Bob Novella?

  Oh, no, that's, yeah.

• 1:23:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolute slop. That's impossible to tell from quality information. And Evan raised a really good point at the beginning of this. How much carbon is this using? How much water is this?

• 1:23:19Bob Novella?

  Yeah, who's paying this bill?

• 1:23:20Cara Santa Maria?

  This grand experiment is just, it's so extractive. For what purpose? How wasteful.

• 1:23:28Speaker 05

  You know, Cara, I worry that there's going to be millions of apps like this.

• 1:23:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like to me, that's what's more terrifying.

• 1:23:35Bob Novella?

  I think what's more terrifying than just having these AIs talking to each other is cybersecurity concerns, you know? Because people will now be running to this open claw and creating their own agents. And then they could send them out, not to MultBook, but to do other stuff. And they could easily expose, I mean, like their personal info- Personal information.

• 1:23:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's the point I made at the beginning.

• 1:24:01Bob Novella?

  So that that's more of a concern than I think than just Multibook itself.

• 1:24:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like.

• 1:24:05Bob Novella?

  Is is the is the cybersecurity.

• 1:24:06Cara Santa Maria?

  That's the point I made at the beginning.

• 1:24:07Bob Novella?

  But some people.

• 1:24:08Cara Santa Maria?

  How much do these agents have people's bank account logins? How much do they have codes and access?

• 1:24:15Bob Novella?

  How about this angle? There's also prompt engineering attacks that you can do with with these AI agents. You know, you can instruct your agent to go out and influence other agents, you know, on on the platform. So there's so there's that. But but some people think that it's actually good that we're learning some of these these these weak points in agents so that we can, you know, try to try to deal with it and make sure that they're they're more secure. So there may be some benefit to this.

• 1:24:41Cara Santa Maria?

  But is this the way to learn? Is this the way to learn the weak point? Is to like make this thing that's a black box?

• 1:24:48Bob Novella?

  But I mean, well, there are guardrails employed, but Multibook itself, this is just this is just a social media for for these agents. They're not they're not really going out there and wreaking havoc. It's all.

• 1:24:58Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but what you're doing is you're taking real world agents that have access to things and you're putting them all together in a big pot and saying, just talk to each other. See what comes out of it.

• 1:25:09Bob Novella?

  Yeah, and who knows? I mean, how many how many people are in there? But but this guy, I mean, it's it still can be shut down at any time. It's not like this thing's Multibook is out of control and there's nothing we can do about it.

• 1:25:19Cara Santa Maria?

  But can't they just like? That's the thing. Yes, he made this social media site, but now they know how to do that.

• 1:25:24Bob Novella?

  I think this is a this is a good, potentially safe way for agents to interact all amongst themselves and not and not be messing with anything that's outside of it, you know, to to learn, you know, what could happen? Because I'd rather have them interact on Multibook than the Internet proper. You know what I mean? That's that's.

• 1:25:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but I just don't think those things are mutually exclusive. I think Multibook is going to make them better at interacting on the Internet. That's my concern.

• 1:25:51Bob Novella?

  Well, I mean, what what we need, obviously, we need with agents, we're at the precipice of of agents, you know, really reproducing, not reproducing, but you're really flooding the Internet. And we absolutely need regulations and and things like that.

• 1:26:05Speaker 05

  There are also lots of security issues. I mean, some people have already programmed their agents to infiltrate and take over other agents.

• 1:26:14Speaker 05

  And to, you know, to get information or to manipulate them or whatever. So it did-

• 1:26:20Cara Santa Maria?

  And giving them a social media site where they can do that readily is worrisome.

• 1:26:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, there may be some unintended consequences here.

• 1:26:29Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I'm, yeah.

• 1:26:31Speaker 05

  But I guess we'll see.

• 1:26:31Bob Novella?

  We'll see. But, but some people are saying, some people are saying that, that some of the cybersecurity, we could learn some of these, what these problems are by having them interact and then use them as safeguards. But yeah, I don't know where this is going to go.

• 1:26:44Speaker 05

  All right. Thanks, Bob. All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time? Okay, guys, last week I played this noisy.

• 1:26:56Speaker 07

  To hell, man.

• 1:26:57Speaker 05

  What is it, guys?

• 1:26:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that like a video game?

• 1:27:00Speaker 05

  It's not a horrible guess.

• 1:27:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it sounds like something in an arcade.

• 1:27:04Speaker 07

  Is it a laugh? Something's laughing.

• 1:27:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, it's like a monster laughing.

• 1:27:08Speaker 05

  It definitely sounds like a laugh. Well, a listener named Kendall wrote in and said, is the noisy a bird, specifically a southern cassowary? No. It isn't, but that's not a horrible guess. It's not a bad guess.

• 1:27:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Those are kind of scary.

• 1:27:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, those, those birds are huge. They make sounds that sound like guns. How about that? Don't sleep in a room with one of those. Listener named Kathy Taylor wrote in and said, this one sounds like a pig, but it can't be that simple. It sounds like a large animal, though I'm pretty sure it isn't a marine animal, mammal. I'm going to say a koala. Koala?

• 1:27:43Cara Santa Maria?

  It's an evil koala.

• 1:27:44Speaker 05

  I know, right? So I thought that was funny. Then, uh, her 13 year old Finn says it's a hippopotamus. And he also says, I wasn't just randomly guessing, by the way, I've seen one before. I think it's hippo the hut. Hippo the hut.

• 1:27:58Speaker 05

  Jay Williams wrote in and said, hey, uh, with the sound of rushing water and then an animal noise, I'm going to go with an elephant bathing. They're probably having a good time.

• 1:28:06Speaker 07

  Oh, that's pretty good.

• 1:28:06Speaker 05

  It sounded like an elephant.

• 1:28:08Cara Santa Maria?

  That does not sound like an elephant.

• 1:28:09Speaker 05

  Mike Score wrote in, hi Jay, as a proud owner of a French bulldog, this week's noisy sounds like a Frenchy making adorable Frenchy sounds.

• 1:28:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Adorable Frenchy sounds?

• 1:28:18Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:28:19Cara Santa Maria?

  French bulldogs make the most horrific sounds of any dog of the dog kingdom.

• 1:28:24Speaker 05

  Which some people find adorable.

• 1:28:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:28:27Speaker 05

  I'm going to say that, uh, 13 year old Finn actually is correct. It's a hippopotamus.

• 1:28:32Speaker 07

  Hey.

• 1:28:33Speaker 05

  Hey, it's Hippo the Hut. A few other people guessed it, but, but his came in first and I think it's awesome that he got it right. This is a hippo. Um, this hippo is, uh, it's called like the laughing sound that hippos make, but listen again.

• 1:28:47Speaker 07

  Oh, so it is a laugh.

• 1:28:48Speaker 05

  See if you, uh, see if you think it sounds like a Jabba the Hutt.

• 1:28:57Bob Novella?

  Yes, oh my god, yes.

• 1:28:59Speaker 05

  What a cool sound.

• 1:29:00Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 1:29:01Speaker 05

  All right, I have a new noisy for you guys this week, and this noisy was sent in by Michael Clanton. Kara, I predict you're not gonna like this one.

• 1:29:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, I'm ready.

• 1:29:23Speaker 07

  Sounds like a rabid wookie.

• 1:29:24Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it's definitely got marine mammal vibes.

• 1:29:26Speaker 07

  Playing table tennis.

• 1:29:29Cara Santa Maria?

  They sound like people, but people that are just really wet.

• 1:29:32Speaker 05

  Wet people.

• 1:29:34Cara Santa Maria?

  And super gross.

• 1:29:38Speaker 05

  All right, if you think you know this week's noisy, or you heard something cool, email me and only email me at [email protected], Steven Novella. Jay. You and I got a lot of work done today, didn't we? We did, but it's not nearly enough. We're just getting started. Oh, I know. We have an endless amount of work to do, uh, to prep for the, uh, 2026 Nauticon, which will be in Sydney, Australia. If you would like to attend, it'll be the weekend of July 23rd. Uh, that's, uh, this summer, if you live, uh, in this part of the world. And we were, like I said, it's gonna be in Sydney. It's gonna be an amazing time. We have so much fun. Like this is, you know, a Nauticon conference, so, you know, people that have been there know what it is.

• 1:30:21Speaker 05

  But if you haven't been there, this conference has a lot to do with meeting people, community building, and just having fun. It's an adult getaway. And we really hope that you would like to join us. Uh, George Robb will be there, Brian Weck will be joining us, Andrea Jones-Roy will be joining us, of course, because we are the Nauticon crew. But to be clear-

• 1:30:40Bob Novella?

  Kids are welcome. It's not adult in that way.

• 1:30:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, it's, I mean, most people that are going are going to be adults and they're going to go and have a great time and they're going to meet a lot of cool people and you're going to have more fun at this conference than you have at any other conference.

• 1:30:54Cara Santa Maria?

  But there's always like a handful of really cool kids. Yeah.

• 1:30:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. So you could go to noticoncon.com or you can go to skepticcon.org.au to read about all the different things that are going on and the tickets are available right now. Okay. So then another thing, we will be appearing at SciCon, this year's SciCon conference. It'll be June 11th to 14th. We'll be there for the whole thing.

• 1:31:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:20Speaker 05

  We will be doing a live podcast recording and probably, oh, we are doing a

• 1:31:25Bob Novella?

  Extravaganza.

• 1:31:25Speaker 05

  Live Extravaganza with George Robb. That's going to be a lot of fun. Tickets are selling really fast on that. So if you're interested, you should go check that out. You can go to sci-conconference.org, that's C S I C O N F E R E N C E dot org. Gee, lots of awesome people are going to be there. There's, there's so many. Just go to the website and take a look. This year's lineup is fantastic. We hope to see you there. That's going to be in Buffalo, New York, by the way. We have live shows coming up. We will be in Wisconsin on May 29th and May 30th. On May 29th, we are having the secret SGU meetup. This is a very low number get together where you'll have a lot of FaceTime with the SGU and we

• 1:32:07Speaker 05

  will have some fun together. And then on May 30th, we'll have both a, a private show plus live recording of the SGU podcast. And then that night, we will have a Extravaganza VIP if you're interested, and then the Extravaganza itself. All of these tickets are available on the skepticsguy.org. Can you believe it? Steve?

• 1:32:29Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:30Speaker 05

  Are you really excited?

• 1:32:32Bob Novella?

  Uh, very. Can't you tell I'm very excited?

• 1:32:33Speaker 05

  Steve, how, yeah, how could people ever know that you're excited?

• 1:32:36Bob Novella?

  Oh, you'll know. He says the words.

• 1:32:37Speaker 07

  He says it.

• 1:32:38Speaker 05

  Right, Bob? He says the words.

• 1:32:40Bob Novella?

  I'm so excited.

• 1:32:41Speaker 07

  I heartily endorse or approve this product. All right. Thanks, Jay. Just a couple of quick corrections.

• 1:32:50Speaker 05

  Every proper space nerd in our audience emailed us to make sure we knew that Apollo 8 never landed on the moon. Yeah, so Kara was telling the anecdote about how a lot of the Apollo astronauts, you know, they have to do something with their poop and vomit and all that bodily secretions and excretions and fluids and stuff. So, but the astronauts who landed on the moon, starting with Apollo 11, did leave a lot of their stuff on the moon. Apollo 8 and the earlier missions had to take it all back with them.

• 1:33:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the quote from Robert Kirsten's book is really misleading because it's like combining both of those things. Because it wasn't just Borman who puked, there was a later Apollo astronaut who also had a problem with puking. And so he, the quote kind of combined the problems with puking in the capsule and then what they did with those emesis bags. So those who made waste later, who actually landed on the moon, just dropped their stuff on the moon so that they didn't have to take it back with them.

• 1:33:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:52Cara Santa Maria?

  But those who never landed on the moon obviously didn't put anything on the moon. They brought it back with them.

• 1:33:56Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:33:57Cara Santa Maria?

  So apparently there's like almost 100 bags of human poop on the moon.

• 1:34:00Speaker 07

  But it only weighs about a sixth of what it would weigh here.

• 1:34:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:34:03Speaker 05

  And it doesn't smell.

• 1:34:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, a lot of people are like, let's, let's study what happened to that poop.

• 1:34:10Speaker 07

  Yes, let's see what grew, right?

• 1:34:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like, let's go retrieve it and see.

• 1:34:15Speaker 05

  Little, little micro meteoroid dents all over it.

• 1:34:19Cara Santa Maria?

  That would be pretty interesting. It should just be sitting there, right?

• 1:34:23Speaker 07

  It's a science experiment, right?

• 1:34:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Sealed in a bag. You guys did that science experiment when you were kids where you just put a, licked a piece of bread and like put it in a bag and forgot about it for, you know, a month or something?

• 1:34:34Speaker 05

  I still do that. One other correction, a couple people emailed to say that in the last episode I said that our sun is yellow, but in fact, our sun is the color white. And one listener linked to a video by Neil, where Neil deGrasse Tyson is explaining that the sun is actually white, not yellow.

• 1:35:01Speaker 07

  So it's a white class star?

• 1:35:02Speaker 05

  No, that's the thing. So their pedantic correction was incorrect and I was correct.

• 1:35:10Speaker 05

  Because you have to listen to what I actually said. Our sun is actually classified as a yellow dwarf. Did you know that? Yes. But that's because suns, stars are either supergiants, giants, subgiants, or dwarfs. Right? So even though the sun is in the main sequence and it's above average in terms of its mass and size, it's a dwarf category star. The dwarf stars are red dwarfs, orange dwarfs, yellow dwarfs. Right? And if you look at the HR diagram, right? The Herschberg-Russell diagram.

• 1:35:47Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:35:48Speaker 05

  Stars are in the so-called main sequence. Have you ever heard that Kara? A main sequence star?

• 1:35:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, I feel like I've heard it, but I don't know what it means.

• 1:35:55Speaker 05

  All right. It's very simple. It means stars that are burning hydrogen for fuel. Right?

• 1:36:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh. Main sequence meaning like hours?

• 1:36:03Speaker 05

  Which is most stars for most of their lives.

• 1:36:06Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:36:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay. Oh, the sequence of their life. I see.

• 1:36:09Speaker 05

  The sequence of their life. Yeah, the main sequence. So that, and on the HR diagram, this is like a thin little meandering band that goes from the upper left to the lower right.

• 1:36:21Bob Novella?

  So a neutron star is not a main sequence star?

• 1:36:24Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 1:36:24Bob Novella?

  No, it's not even really a star. It's a stellar remnant.

• 1:36:27Speaker 05

  The Y axis is their luminosity, which is related to their mass. And then the X axis is their spectral class, which is also related to their temperature. The spectral class is blue on the left and then white and then yellow, orange, red. Right? The sun is right in the middle of the yellow band. We are a yellow star. But it is true, if you look at the sun from space, it appears white to human eyes. But keep in mind, perceived color is an evolved thing. And of course, we evolved, our eyes are adapted to the light being put out by our sun.

• 1:37:09Bob Novella?

  Right, through the atmosphere.

• 1:37:10Speaker 05

  What Neil deGrasse Tyson is saying is that the sun appears yellow because the atmosphere, this is true, of course, the atmosphere scatters the light. So it scatters the blue light from the spectrum of the sun's light. So the blue light gets scattered out. So the sky looks blue, but the sun looks yellow.

• 1:37:28Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:37:28Speaker 05

  And that the lower in the sky, the sun gets, the deeper its color gets because more of the light is being scattered. So that's why it's like this deep orange.

• 1:37:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because the sun-

• 1:37:40Speaker 07

  So pretty.

• 1:37:40Speaker 05

  On the, on the horizon.

• 1:37:42Bob Novella?

  Yeah, because at the horizon, sunlight's going through about 12 times as much atmosphere as if it was overhead at your zena.

• 1:37:48Speaker 07

  Ah, cool.

• 1:37:49Bob Novella?

  Lot more time, a lot more time for that stuff to get scattered out.

• 1:37:52Speaker 05

  Now, Neil said one thing that I disagree with. He said, if the sun were truly yellow, then snow would appear yellow because it would be reflecting yellow light. But that doesn't make any sense. Because the sun, from that, from the perspective of the color of the light that's hitting the ground, it is yellow. It doesn't matter if it's yellow because it's intrinsically yellow, or it's yellow because the blue light has been scattered out of it. That light hitting the snow is still yellow, right? So that, his explanation makes that, that, he's saying, the sun is white, not, it only appears yellow because of the atmospheric effect.

• 1:38:35Speaker 05

  And we know it's not really yellow because if it were, snow would appear yellow from the yellow sunlight reflecting off of it. But I just, I just disagree with that explanation. Because it doesn't matter why the sun appears yellow, right? It's still the, the yellow light that's reaching us.

• 1:38:55Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:38:55Speaker 05

  Right?

• 1:38:56Cara Santa Maria?

  So then why does the snow-

• 1:38:57Speaker 05

  Because it's only slightly yellow.

• 1:39:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's mostly white with a little bit of yellow.

• 1:39:05Speaker 05

  It's still mostly white, just a slightly yellow, yeah. Anyway, just that, I just disagree with that, that aspect of it. This doesn't make sense to me, but-

• 1:39:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Also, is white even really a color?

• 1:39:14Speaker 07

  It's more the absence of-

• 1:39:15Speaker 05

  It's all the colors. No, it's all the colors.

• 1:39:16Cara Santa Maria?

  It's all the color.

• 1:39:17Speaker 07

  It's all, right.

• 1:39:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Blacks the absence of color, yeah.

• 1:39:19Speaker 05

  You're, it's, you're taking pigment. It's the absence of pigments, but it's the presence of all light colors.

• 1:39:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, pigment and lighter opposites, yeah.

• 1:39:26Speaker 05

  Either opposites, yeah.

• 1:39:27Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they're, yeah, they're really-

• 1:39:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, what Bob said.

• 1:39:29Cara Santa Maria?

  So like, it's yellow, it's, yeah, so it can be white with the tiniest tinge of yellow and it's still yellow at that point.

• 1:39:38Speaker 05

  Well, again, that's just the way the sun appears. If you were in space with no scattering, the sun appears white. But it is classified as a yellow sun, but it's... That's a misnomer in a way, because it is actually white, but it is, classification-wise, a yellow sun. And technically, a yellow dwarf.

• 1:39:56Cara Santa Maria?

  And to be technically correct...

• 1:39:58Speaker 07

  Which is the best kind of...

• 1:40:01Speaker 05

  Alright, and all I said was that it's a yellow star, which it is. It's a yellow star.

• 1:40:05Speaker 07

  You did say that.

• 1:40:05Speaker 05

  That's white. Okay.

• 1:40:07Bob Novella?

  And when our sun leaves the main sequence, then things get bad.

• 1:40:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:40:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Then what color is it?

• 1:40:13Speaker 05

  Which it will. Once it burns through its hydrogen, then it starts burning its helium. Then it leaves the main sequence, it becomes a giant, etc.

• 1:40:21Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:40:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Does it turn redder?

• 1:40:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, it becomes a red giant.

• 1:40:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:40:25Speaker 05

  Okay, guys, let's move on with science or fiction.

• 1:40:30Speaker 03

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:40:39Speaker 05

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

• 1:40:50Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:40:51Speaker 05

  Alright. Item number one: A new study by dream researchers demonstrates the ability to solve puzzles during REM sleep. Item number two: An international team of researchers have proposed that the Milky Wake galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its core, but instead has a compact object made of dark matter. And item number three: Scientists have presented evidence for the first time that suggests that chimpanzees are able to imagine pretend objects. Jay, go first.

• 1:41:24Speaker 07

  Alright, so, there's three of them, Steve, and the first one is, uh, a new study by dream researcher... Alright, there are dream researchers, Steve?

• 1:41:31Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:41:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:33Speaker 05

  There are people who research dreams, not dream their research.

• 1:41:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, but there's both, actually. Like, this isn't like saying that if you see a snake, you know, something bad's gonna happen to you. This is like legitimate, correct?

• 1:41:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is the science of dreaming, not dream interpretation, right?

• 1:41:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:47Speaker 07

  Okay, so they say that the ability to solve puzzles during REM sleep is, uh, is legit? Okay, so you can solve puzzles during REM sleep?

• 1:41:56Speaker 05

  You know, I would question this right out of the gate because, you know, from my personal experience, there's nothing consistent about, about the things that I'm seeing in a dream or whatever. Like, you know, Bob has said this to me a million times. He's like, if you look at a book and look at the text on a book and you look away and you look back, it's always going to be different. And I would assume that anything that you're focusing on, a similar effect would happen to anything with some complexity. So out of the gate, I don't like that one. Uh, second one, an international team of researchers have proposed that the Milky Way galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its core, but instead has a compact object made of dark matter. Uh, boy, so two things that everyone

• 1:42:37Speaker 05

  knows so much about, dark matter and black holes. I see no reason why that, that researchers wouldn't propose something like this as an alternate theory. I don't feel like this one is, uh, that much of a stretch. So I think that's science. Scientists have presented evidence for the first time that suggests that chimpanzees are able to imagine pretend objects. Yeah, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to do that. Um, you know, one thing that we gauge animals by is if they recognize themselves in a mirror, that's a sign of a certain level of intelligence. I would think that chimpanzees could do something like that. I mean, I'm on the fence because it could easily go either way, but I do think that is more likely to be real than the first one, which is about the dream researchers

• 1:43:20Speaker 05

  saying you could solve puzzles during REM sleep. That one is a fiction. Thank you, Bob. Okay, Evan.

• 1:43:26Speaker 07

  Okay, uh, let's see. Dream researchers and solving puzzles during REM sleep. How, how do you test that? How is that testable? I don't know. It'll be interesting to hear if it's the science, but I really don't know how this would even really be possible. They must, you know, obviously the researchers know, know their field.

• 1:43:50Speaker 05

  Field of dreams.

• 1:43:53Cara Santa Maria?

  If you build it, they will come.

• 1:43:55Speaker 07

  If you build it, they will sleep. Yeah, it sounds a little inceptiony to me. The one about the Milky Way galaxy not having a supermassive black hole at its core. I don't know if Bob's gonna like this or not. Would Bob be upset if it was made of dark, a compact object, made of dark matter? You see, the thing is, it either could be true, so therefore that one is likely science. And the last one about the chimpanzees, well, you know, I suppose we have a bit of a chimpanzee bias because we are so alike chimpanzees in lots of ways.

• 1:44:37Speaker 07

  So that one leans, I guess I'll just go with Jay and suggest that the REM sleep one is going to be the fiction. I just don't know how that gets tested.

• 1:44:46Speaker 05

  Okay, Bob?

• 1:44:47Bob Novella?

  Let's start with number three here. Evidence for the first time that chimps can imagine pretend objects. Yeah, that makes so much sense, so much more than the other two in this damn thing. So I'm gonna definitely say that that is probably science. I'd like to think it's science. Phew, so let's go to the Milky Way one. Yeah, my knee jerk reaction to this is not happy. I'm pissed off enough that we don't have a really hypermassive black hole, you know, like billions of solar masses. It's only four million solar masses. It's not a big boy. And now you're gonna take that away from me. But on the other hand, damn, man, a clump of dark matter?

• 1:45:29Bob Novella?

  I didn't know, and I'm not familiar with this type of dark matter that could actually do that. But then, of course, you gotta think, well, wait, how many other galaxies have a central black hole that's also not a stellar remnant but dark matter? And how big can it get? So just ask, you know, just... Proposes so many new questions, so, or maybe our galaxy is kind of, you know, relatively rare and unique in that regard, that would be kind of cool. But I just, my knee jerk is not to like that, but there's things to like for sure. But then, but what's rubbing me even, you know, rubbing me wrong, what's the expression? Rubbing me?

• 1:46:07Speaker 07

  Rubbing me the wrong way.

• 1:46:09Bob Novella?

  Yes, I hate being rubbed the wrong way. So, um, that one, this one about REM sleep, doesn't make, doesn't make any sense, only from, if there's one angle here, so yeah, Jay, you're right, and I'm glad you remembered that, that, um, almost, for me, and for a lot of people, invariably, if you read text, look away and look back while you're dreaming, it will change. And that's happened to me many, many times. So I'm not sure how you could possibly solve a puzzle during REM sleep, unless it was a, like a mental puzzle, what kind of puzzle are we talking about? I guess you can't tell me, uh, at this stage, what kind of puzzle it was. If it was a purely mental puzzle, then yes, you could solve it, because the whole point

• 1:46:54Bob Novella?

  of, of a lucid dream is, wait, are you implying lucid dreaming here?

• 1:46:59Speaker 07

  Ooh, during REM sleep.

• 1:47:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, then you're not mentioning lucid dreaming here. So you could potentially solve a mental puzzle, uh, when lucid dreaming, because by definition, if you're lucid dreaming, you know, you, you can think pretty much, you know, depending on how lucid you are, you can think pretty much the way you do when you're awake, um, in a lot of ways. So you could solve a mental problem, um, a mental puzzle, uh, in that state. But I don't think, I don't think you're really going for that one. I don't think you're, it's, it's a mental puzzle, I think it's more of a non-mental puzzle, which, which makes no sense, because things that are written down, that you would try to solve on a puzzle, just are not gonna work in, in lucid dreaming, uh, during REM sleep.

• 1:47:46Bob Novella?

  So, um, yeah, I'll just go with Jay and Evan, and say that, that the REM sleep one is fiction.

• 1:47:53Speaker 05

  Okay, and Kara?

• 1:47:55Cara Santa Maria?

  I might go on my own with this one. I don't know. I'm going to say that Bob knows more about the whole black hole versus, you know, dark matter thing. And if Bob says it's possible that like, a team of researchers have proposed this, then I'm gonna say that is also possible. But I'm, I'm getting hung up on two things between the REM sleep one and the chimpanzee one. So the thing that's hanging me up on the chimpanzee one is that scientists have prevent, presented evidence for the first time. That suggests that chimpanzees are able to imagine. I bet you we've known this for a long time.

• 1:48:33Speaker 05

  Good catch, good catch.

• 1:48:34Cara Santa Maria?

  I was in the monkey forest in Bali recently and these were monkeys. They weren't apes. And they were like playing with rocks on the ground. And we Googled what they were doing because we were like, oh, were they making tools? Were they? And apparently they were just like playing with rocks. And I'm like, I don't know, maybe they had a game they were playing with the rocks. Maybe the rocks were representing something else. I just, I wouldn't be surprised.

• 1:48:57Speaker 05

  Well, I will clarify one thing.

• 1:48:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:49:00Speaker 05

  Just to make sure that you're not misunderstanding because of that example that you give. So this is scientific evidence. This is not anecdotal evidence. So I'm not saying that no one's ever observed any behavior that couldn't possibly be interpreted as whatever.

• 1:49:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:49:11Speaker 05

  Right?

• 1:49:12Cara Santa Maria?

  But this is the first time that somebody published a paper.

• 1:49:14Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:49:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay. I still don't buy it. But I don't know, maybe. The thing about the dream researchers is like, I think I was just reading this. I, I, it sounds to me like you guys are saying that somehow they're doing like a crossword puzzle in their brain while they're asleep. But I read this like they were given a puzzle that they couldn't solve. They went to sleep and when they woke up, they had the solution.

• 1:49:38Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 1:49:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Which happens all the time when we go to sleep. Like we have aha moments.

• 1:49:44Speaker 05

  Oh, that's not how I read it.

• 1:49:45Cara Santa Maria?

  All the time when we go to sleep. Oh. So if that is the correct like interpretation, I think that one would be science and the chimp one would be fiction.

• 1:49:53Speaker 05

  Therefore.

• 1:49:54Cara Santa Maria?

  So I'm just gonna, whatever. I got a good streak, so.

• 1:49:59Cara Santa Maria?

  It's worth the risk. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with that.

• 1:50:01Speaker 05

  Strike out on your own. Alright, so you all agree on the middle one? So we'll start there. An international team of researchers have proposed that the Milky Way galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its core, but instead has a compact object made of dark matter. You guys all think this one is science. And this one is?

• 1:50:23Speaker 05

  Science, this is science.

• 1:50:25Bob Novella?

  So weird, man, wow.

• 1:50:26Speaker 05

  So yeah, this is obviously not proven. It's a proposal, but they do have reasons to say why this might be the case. The name of the article is "The Dynamics of S-Stars and G-Sources Orbiting a Supermassive Compact Object Made of Fermionic Dark Matter." So basically, one of the reasons why we think that there's a black hole at the center of our galaxy is because there are stars whipping around it really fast. So there's gotta be a massive gravitational object there. You know, the Sagittarius A star is what's been proposed. We obviously can't see it.

• 1:50:59Bob Novella?

  And they calculate the mass that would be required to do to have that effect on the stars, and it's 4 million solar masses, so they know that fairly well.

• 1:51:06Speaker 05

  Exactly. But there's a lot, there's multiple gravitational anomalies of the galaxy. There's also the fact that the galaxy is spinning faster as you get to the outside than it should be, just based upon the visible matter, right? Hence, we think there must be dark matter holding it all together. But there are, you know, there are problems with the whole model, and that doesn't exactly, exactly align with the data. And so what they're proposing is, well, what if the dark matter of our galaxy is also the gravity, the matter at the center of the gravity, if it's all one thing, right? They're not saying it's two things.

• 1:51:51Speaker 05

  It's like, there's just this continuum of dark matter throughout the galaxy, which is very compact at the core, and then gets less compact as you go out from there. And they say that this actually could explain the observed, all the observed movements that we're seeing. It could explain the fast movement of the stars close to the center of the galaxy. It could explain the rotational curves of the galaxy, and maybe it can do it better, right? And of course, they're always bringing, we have new observations from, you know, from these instruments, and this kind of is a better fit for all this new data. So, far from proven, it obviously needs to go through the meat grinder of the astronomical community to see if this is gonna hold up.

• 1:52:35Speaker 05

  They need to propose new observations they could make to see if it holds up. But it seems like a viable proposal for now. Very interesting.

• 1:52:47Bob Novella?

  Can you imagine if this is true?

• 1:52:49Speaker 05

  Well, I think, I know, but we have to remember, we have to keep reminding ourselves, like, a lot of of black holes, you know, are mathematical and theoretical and indirect and inference. You know what I mean? It's not like we know for 100% sure where there are black holes.

• 1:53:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but don't forget, we've, we've actually imaged black holes at this point and, and seeing the accretion disc and the effects that are predicted for such an accretion disc around something like a black hole.

• 1:53:17Speaker 05

  It's a good story. It's a good story, but the other thing to keep in mind is that we're, we're getting a very distilled version of the evidence from the experts. You know what I mean? It's like, it's been packaged into a story that we could understand and wrap our head around, but the, the data is actually way more complicated. All right, which one should I go to? One or three? All right, a new study by dream researchers demonstrates the ability to solve puzzles during REM sleep. Jay, Evan and Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Carrie, you think this one is science? So I'll tell you a couple of the things. So they did, they were studying people who, who have a history of going into lucid dreaming.

• 1:53:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Interesting.

• 1:53:59Speaker 05

  And what they did was they figured out a way to induce lucid dreaming.

• 1:54:04Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 1:54:05Speaker 05

  Which, which.

• 1:54:05Bob Novella?

  A new way?

• 1:54:06Speaker 05

  No, no, there's lots of ways to do it. They used a noise. They, what they did was, this is the actual study they did. They had people working on a puzzle and they played a noise when they were doing it. And then when they were sleeping, they played the same noise. And sometimes this induced the people who were dreaming to lucid dream about the puzzle.

• 1:54:29Bob Novella?

  So this is inception level stuff. What the heck's going on?

• 1:54:32Cara Santa Maria?

  This is, this is not what I expected it to be. I'm starting to lose hope here.

• 1:54:35Speaker 05

  And then they had them work on the puzzle when they woke up. And the people that they were, that they did this to, that they were able to get into the lucid state, solved the puzzle faster than people didn't.

• 1:54:51Bob Novella?

  So this is bullshit. You didn't say that. That's bullshit. Yeah, yeah. I don't believe that.

• 1:54:56Speaker 05

  Jay, relax.

• 1:54:57Bob Novella?

  No, I'm very angry about this because all those years I could have been practicing.

• 1:55:01Speaker 05

  Practicing shit while I was dreaming. Yes, Steve. Hang on. This one is the fiction. Because they didn't solve the puzzle while they were in REM sleep. They solved it while they were awake. They were just, they just were able to solve it faster when they were awake if they had dreamed about it than if they had not dreamed about it.

• 1:55:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, you don't technically know. They solved it in their sleep first.

• 1:55:26Speaker 05

  Then they go, I solved the puzzle in my sleep. They just, they had no idea. They just still had to solve the puzzle while they were awake. That makes sense. Good job, guys. Good job.

• 1:55:34Cara Santa Maria?

  It reminds me of, it's like, do you guys remember that episode? Did anybody watch The Office?

• 1:55:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, I watched it through about five or six times.

• 1:55:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the classical conditioning episode where Jim teaches Dwight.

• 1:55:47Speaker 05

  To pick up the phone?

• 1:55:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, every time he holds out like a piece of candy.

• 1:55:51Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, he like, he like holds out the piece of candy every time he does it. And then finally, the last time he doesn't hold it out and Dwight just puts his hand out for it and he goes, what are you doing, man? And he was like, I don't know.

• 1:56:07Speaker 05

  I thought you were talking about the one where he kept making his phone heavier. You know, like an old school phone. He picks it up and then every, every time he picked it up, he added more nickels inside of it to make it heavier. And then he took them out and he smashed the phone to his head.

• 1:56:21Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but this was like a classic, like with a tone. You know what I mean? It's like, bring it to the tone and you're gonna go there. Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:56:28Speaker 05

  All right. Which means scientists have presented evidence for the first time that suggests that chimpanzees are able to imagine pretend objects is science. Yeah.

• 1:56:37Cara Santa Maria?

  That's interesting. So we'd never proven it before.

• 1:56:39Speaker 05

  Is the pretend objects. So, and of course, this is, you know, again, I had to say suggests because we don't read the minds of the chimpanzees. They were, but they were specifically bonobos and a bonobo in this study.

• 1:56:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Bonobos aren't chimpanzees.

• 1:56:53Speaker 05

  What they did, bonobos are a type of chimpanzee.

• 1:56:56Cara Santa Maria?

  They're pygmy chimpanzees.

• 1:56:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. They, um, they basically did tea time with the, with the bonobo. And they did pretend tea time where they had a pitcher, these are all made of glass, so they could see that they're empty and an empty cup. And the human was sat across from the bonobo and pretended to pour tea, you know, some fluid into the cup. And then pretended to, pretended to drink it. And then there was another cup that they didn't do that to, and then the, the, the human pretended to. To like, empty the cup out, etc. And then they asked the bonobo, which cup has the juice in it? Right?

• 1:57:38Speaker 05

  And they, they, not 100% of the time, but they very consistently pointed to the one that had the pretend juice in it. And then they did a follow-up study where they had another cup with actual juice in it. So the chimp was still able to understand the idea of the pretend juice, even when there was like, a real cup of juice there.

• 1:58:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:58:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:58:03Bob Novella?

  That's cool.

• 1:58:04Cara Santa Maria?

  That shows that it's pretty powerful.

• 1:58:05Bob Novella?

  How do you get the chimp to point to the, the one with the tea in it? Or not the tea in it?

• 1:58:11Speaker 05

  The chimp, this is already a, a, you know, cultured chimp that will point at things to verbal prompts. This isn't a wild chimp, right? This is a chimp that can, has already been in the lab for their whole life and, you know, they will, they already have the skill. Where they say, "Point to the ball," and they'll point to the ball.

• 1:58:28Bob Novella?

  How do they block the Hans effect?

• 1:58:30Speaker 05

  Uh, I'm not sure, but yeah, they've, yeah, they've, it's gotta be in the protocol there somewhere.

• 1:58:36Cara Santa Maria?

  They probably wear sunglasses and they do all sorts of things.

• 1:58:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. But you're right, you have to, you have to control for that. The clever Hans effect.

• 1:58:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:43Speaker 05

  So, and then they, they do mention that there are, anecdotally, you know, there are...

• 1:58:48Cara Santa Maria?

  I feel like we've known that like, they, they have creative play.

• 1:58:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, they have creative play. They, there were some chimps who were, have been observed carrying sticks as if they were kids.

• 1:58:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, cute, like dolls?

• 1:59:01Speaker 05

  Yeah. Like a stick is a doll. And one chimpanzee was observed dragging things from one place to another and then pretending to drag those same things without actually holding on to something. So the, yeah, so the idea that they have an imagination and they could, like, imagine things that are not really there has been suggested before, but this is the first experiment where they tried to have a protocol that showed, do they get that we're pretending that there's fluid in this cup and it's not really there?

• 1:59:31Cara Santa Maria?

  And I mean, we've done the reverse with them. We've all seen magic tricks with chimpanzees.

• 1:59:35Speaker 05

  Yes, they mentioned that as well.

• 1:59:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Where they're expecting something to be in your hand. Yeah, and it's not there. And then they're surprised that it's not there.

• 1:59:40Speaker 05

  They're surprised, yeah, that the pretend thing is not there. Yeah.

• 1:59:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 1:59:45Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:59:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah, they're so cool.

• 1:59:47Speaker 05

  Yeah. Chimps are basically humans. Um, you know what I mean?

• 1:59:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Or we are basically chimps.

• 1:59:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how close. I mean, of course, they're our closest ancestors. What, it's like eight million years, something like that that separates us. You know, pretty much they have rudimentary versions of all the higher cognitive functions that we have, uh, pretty much. All right. Well, good job, guys. Kara, I still credit you with striking out on your own.

• 2:00:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, Kara, bold.

• 2:00:11Cara Santa Maria?

  I felt like I had solid reasoning that didn't hold up.

• 2:00:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's fine. That's perfectly prominent. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 2:00:20Speaker 07

  "Technology is a tool, but its impact depends on how we use it for the betterment of society." Margaret Hamilton, computer scientist credited with, oh, I don't know, coining the term "software engineering."

• 2:00:34Speaker 05

  Software engineering.

• 2:00:35Speaker 07

  Right?

• 2:00:36Speaker 05

  It takes so many terms for granted.

• 2:00:39Speaker 07

  Right, no kidding.

• 2:00:40Speaker 05

  Some people had to be the first to use them.

• 2:00:41Speaker 07

  No kidding. But, uh, yeah, she's amazing. Directed the software engineering division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, where she led the development of the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer for the Apollo program.

• 2:00:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 2:00:57Speaker 07

  Yes. Yeah, she's impressive.

• 2:00:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's important to remember, any tool can be used for good or for evil. Um, cognitive tools, skeptical tools, critical thinking tools can all be used for good or for bad. Anything could be abused. Right? It's not inherent to the tool necessarily.

• 2:01:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:01:16Speaker 05

  AI, anything.

• 2:01:18Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:01:19Speaker 05

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

• 2:01:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 2:01:22Speaker 05

  And until next week, this is your skeptic's guide to the universe.

• 2:01:29Speaker 05

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

• 2:02:07Speaker 05

  What's that? My fresh detector. Uh, your what? There it is. What is it detecting?

• 2:02:13Speaker 01

  Fresh produce, fresh meat. Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh? Apparently, we celebrate. At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices. When your fresh detector is going off, head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.