The Skeptics Guide #1011 - Nov 23 2024

Interview with Kevin Folta; News Items: Sense of Self in Robots, New Energy Secretary, Finding Planet Nine, Stress and Paranormal Belief; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Dumb Idioms; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 0:33Speaker 01

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

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Tuesday, November 19th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Hey, everybody. Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:51Speaker 03

  Howdy.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:55Speaker 03

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  How's everyone doing? We're recording a little bit early because we're getting ready for the Thanksgiving break. I'll be going away this weekend. Yeah, I'm going to see my family in Denver. Yeah, Ross, this is the holiday where the Novella guys are all splitting up. I'll go into our in-laws.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  Don't worry, I'll hold down the state for you. I'll remain in Connecticut. I'll take care of things. Just leave the peace.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Mom, she's all set.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  I'm going to Oregon.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Oregon?

• 1:18Speaker 03

  Oh. Oregon. I always mispronounce Oregon.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  It's Oregon. They don't want you to say Oregon.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  No, it's Oregon.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Oregon.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  Exactly. And that's the people of the state who get to decide that, right?

• 1:33Speaker 02

  I guess so.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  I suppose that's fair.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  So I know you guys have heard about the fact that The Onion has acquired Infowars. It's amazing. How wonderful is that? Well, there's a wrinkle. Did you guys hear the wrinkle? No, what happened?

• 1:46Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  It's being contested.

• 1:48Speaker 03

  Of course it is. Okay.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  So, just as a quick review, Infowars is the media outlet of Alex Jones, who got sued for lots of money and has to award like 1.5 billion dollars to the families of the Sandy Hook massacre because of his hateful conspiracy theories, right? One little bit of justice in the world. And to pay off the money he owes, they're selling off his assets, including Infowars. And so that just was up for auction and it was purchased by The Onion, or the parent company of The Onion, Global Tetrahedron is the name of the parent company. And they plan on launching it as a basically satire of itself.

• 2:33Cara Santa Maria?

  That's amazing.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Sometime next year. It would be amazing, totally amazing. But a company affiliated with Alex Jones is claiming that the bidding was not fair, that they did not have a fair opportunity.

• 2:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, whatever.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  To, yeah, to make a counter bid. So now it has to go before the judge and hopefully this is just all a waste of time and it'll still happen.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  A stall tactic, it sounds like.

• 2:55Cara Santa Maria?

  The judge is not going to allow a company affiliated with Alex Jones to buy the company.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Well, their argument is that the goal of the bid is to get as much money for the families as possible. And so if they have a higher bid, the judge should honor that.

• 3:09Cara Santa Maria?

  But then are they just going to turn around and give it back to Alex Jones?

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Well, they could. I don't know. Hopefully, you know, this won't sink the deal because it would be awesome if The Onion gets Infowars. Also, you know, the people who sued Alex Jones, who are getting some of the money, essentially gave The Onion some of their money to get the bid up enough to win.

• 3:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, interesting.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Oh, so they're investors in a sense?

• 3:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  I guess so, yeah, because they wanted this to happen, right? They wanted to keep it away from Alex, you know, a company affiliated with Alex Jones.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Okay. All right. Well, yeah, it sounds like a delay tactic more than anything to me.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they make. I don't know. I think they legitimately want, he wants to get it if he's got the money. I don't know how much they paid for it, but I mean, it's, you know, look, people just don't, people will throw lawsuits out there like crazy today, you know?

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  It's all BS. Like, he didn't, he didn't do it. He lost it. He wasn't on his game. Whatever the problem was, the time came and the time went. It's all, you know, forecasted. It's not like they, you know, secretly put it out. Like, it was in the public eye. That's it. Yeah, we'll, we'll update you on if there's any, I think it's going to be, go before the judge next week. Yeah, well, we'll see.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Okay, quick resolution, let's go.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, hopefully there'll be a good, quick resolution. All right, well, let's get into our news items because we have a great interview coming up later in the show with Kevin Folta. We want to leave time for that. I'm going to start us off by talking about giving robots a sense of self.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Oh, don't do that.

• 4:39Bob Novella?

  Well, just throw that brain circuit in there.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  I've seen too many movies where that didn't work out as intended.

• 4:46Cara Santa Maria?

  But don't they need that for like, I don't know, that embodied kind of?

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the question, Karen. So there was a recent paper published by three, uh, three experts. One is a ro- is a robotic, a cognitive roboticist, right? So they, uh, deal with AI that controls robots. Another one is a cognitive psychologist who specializes in human robot interactions. And the third was a psychiatrist. So they wrote a paper talking about the fact that we should be studying, um, the elements of a human sense of self, the components that make that up in robots. And then we, we could then do research on those elements in the robotic, you know, model.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  To break this down, what's interesting about this, what I found interesting about this, obviously I'm a neuroscientist. I love, you know, the cognitive neuroscience and I also love robots and AI. So it's all comes together. What I've been saying for years is that AI is going to be a fantastic way to study neuroscience, right? Because it essentially gives us an actual model that we could mess with, you know, like what happens when we take this component down? Or what happens when we dial this all the way up or whatever? We could see how the pieces interact with each other. But first we have to know what all the pieces are, right? So this is, you know, they're, they're talking about what are the pieces of a sense of self? Do you guys have, I mean, I've spoken about this before, but do you guys have any guesses? Like what, what do you think would be something very specific?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Like some circuit in the brain that not, doesn't create necessarily by itself a sense of self, but that would contribute to our sense of self?

• 6:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I think there's the obvious things like our proprioception, like our understanding of our own body map and where we are. In space. I don't know. I did a whole podcast with this really interesting cognitive, um, I think he was a cognitive neuroscientist. Ooh, he might have been a psychologist about how the concept of self only develops in relation to other. And so you can't really have a sense of self if you're in a vacuum.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Right. So that's correct. And the different components, you're one that you're getting to, we would call is embodiment, right? So it's, there's a sense that you are in your body. Right. There's also a sense that you are separate from the rest of the universe. Right. At some point you end and the rest of the universe begins. What's interesting is that infants don't have that. That develops after birth, like over time. They then that module clicks in and then they can see like, this is my hand and everything beyond that is not me, you know, it's.

• 7:19Bob Novella?

  Imagine that day like, oh shit.

• 7:21Cara Santa Maria?

  You're so good to see it.

• 7:23Bob Novella?

  I'm not a god. What the hell?

• 7:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, you can like see it when they recognize their own parts and stuff and they start to see themselves in the mirror and all those good things.

• 7:31Bob Novella?

  They passed the mirror test.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  So then another component is the sense that you own your body parts.

• 7:38Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  And then.

• 7:40Bob Novella?

  Agency, right?

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Well, sometimes I rent out parts. Agency is a separate thing, Evan. Then there's the, the sense that you control your body parts. That's the agency. And then there's the sense that you can have an influence. You can do stuff that influences the rest of the world, right? You could do something that would affect something else. And there's also the sense that other people have the same kind of sense of self that you have.

• 8:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that comes much later.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  That comes later. Yeah.

• 8:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 8:09Bob Novella?

  What does that have to do with your own sense of self?

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Because you have to have a theory of mind, right? And the theory of mind is that you have to know what an agent is in order to feel like you're an agent. And if you're, if you are an agent, that has to mean that other people are also their own agents. And they're not you. They are separate from you. The thing is, and we're, I think a lot of people get tripped up who haven't, you know, who are not neuroscientists or who haven't. Thought about this is that these things seem so fundamental. You might wonder, it's like, do we really need a circuit in the brain to make us feel that way? These things are true. But but that's naive. That's not how our consciousness works. We don't feel that way simply because it's true.

• 8:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  We have to have, it's a constructed, subjective experience that the brain has to actively make.

• 9:04Cara Santa Maria?

  And it can be knocked out.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  And it can get knocked out every, mostly, we know about these things when they get knocked out.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Brain injuries.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Injuries and drugs are the two big ones, right? And now, now we could do it with like transcranial magnetic stimulation. We could turn off this circuit or turn off that circuit. And so there are drugs, for example, that will make you have an out of body experience. What's an out of body experience? You lose your sense that you are in your body.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Or you feel like, and I remember when we interviewed a neuroscientist who did LSD. She said that when she took it, her body expanded to the size of the universe. So what's that?

• 9:44Speaker 03

  Jennifer Willett.

• 9:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, she and Sean did LSD for one of her books.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Although I don't think that's who that quote is from. It's from Susan Blackmore.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  And but in any case, so what is that other than you not feeling you are separate from the universe? You feel one with the universe, right? Which feels like a spiritual experience, but it's just a breakdown of your sense that you are not one with the universe. Right? Which is again, is an actively constructed sense that you have. Because how can you have a sense of self unless you're distinguished from not self? Right? So you're in your body, self versus not self. And then we talk about alien hand syndrome. What's alien hand syndrome? The circuit that makes you feel as if you control your body is not working at some point. How does that circuit work? Well, first you decide I want you want to make a move.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  You make a move and then you feel and see the move. And if it matches, your brain says you control your hand. If it doesn't match, or that circuit is broken, you don't feel as if you are controlling your hand. You feel like it's acting on its own agency, not your agency. Even though subconsciously it may be your agency, you don't feel that it is. So people will, with alien hand syndrome, will like be walking down the street and then their hand like empties their pockets onto the sidewalk, you know.

• 11:05Cara Santa Maria?

  And there's the famous example

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:09Cara Santa Maria?

  in Oliver Sacks' book where a patient kept waking up on the floor and they discovered that he was, he thought that there was a cadaver leg in his bed and he would throw it out of the bed out of fear. And then he would go with it because it was his own leg.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  That's a different phenomenon. That's neglect. That's neglect. Yeah. So that's the, so the sense that that a part of your body doesn't belong to you because it's not part of, because you feel like a stroke in your right hemisphere. You won't know that the left side of your body belongs to you.

• 11:43Cara Santa Maria?

  So you're talking about the difference between it feeling like it's possessed by somebody else or feeling like it's not possessed at all?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Well, so this is the difference between feeling like you own it versus feeling like you control it. Alien hand syndrome is the lack of feeling that you control it.

• 11:56Cara Santa Maria?

  And neglect, it's a lack of ownership.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Neglect can result in a lack of sense that you own it. So, yeah, and what patients will say, there's another patient in the bed with me because that's not my leg. It must be another patient's leg. And the quickie bedside test we do is we take their paralyzed hand, you know, the one that they're neglecting. We hold it in front of their face and we say, whose hand is this? And they invariably say, that's your hand. Even though you're showing them their own hand. Wow. Because they don't feel like it's part of them and therefore it isn't, right?

• 12:26Cara Santa Maria?

  What a good example of both versions or of like the two, how those things are actually separate.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  They are. They are distinct phenomena, although they're obviously, these are all related, but they are, these are the components that are distinct.

• 12:36Bob Novella?

  Steve, if you put on an alien costume, would that enhance your alien hand syndrome?

• 12:40Speaker 02

  No, it wouldn't. It's not necessary. Now-

• 12:44Bob Novella?

  Not even one chuckle from anybody.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  No.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  It would look cool.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  I was laughing on the inside. Now-

• 12:50Speaker 03

  You do that a lot for me, too.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  The, a couple of other interesting wrinkles here. You can have a sense of ownership over a part of the body. You don't, that doesn't exist, right? So you can have what's called a supernumerary phantom limb. And so this happened, these are now like, you have a stroke. The, the ownership module gets disconnected from the paralyzed limb, but it's still working. It's just they're not getting any feedback from your arm, so it makes up an arm. You, you know, you, you have a phantom limb and it's separate from your, your real physical limb. And you feel like you own it, it's part of you, you control it. You just can't obviously manipulate external reality with it because it exists only as a figment in your mind.

• 13:33Bob Novella?

  What about your homoculus in that scenario, Steve?

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the homoculus, the homoculus is somewhat plastic, right?

• 13:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it can rearrange itself.

• 13:41Bob Novella?

  So it would have, by definition, would that have adapted to that phantom supernumerary limb?

• 13:47Speaker 02

  They tend to go away over time, so they don't, they tend not to persist indefinitely. The, the one case, the, the most extreme case was somebody who had four phantom limbs. Four supernumerary phantom limbs. So he was literally Doc Ock because he had eight limbs, but there were four of them weren't real. So, you know, and there's also phantom limb when you, you like have a paralyzed arm or you have like an amputated arm rather, and you still feel like it's there. Because the arm is physically gone, but your ownership module still owns the, the limb. It's, that circuit is still there, even though there's no physical arm in place. And Carrie, have you ever heard of this? I forget what the technical name of it is, but there's a very rare syndrome

• 14:29Speaker 02

  where people feel like they don't own parts of their actual body. And they often present to doctors saying, I want you to amputate this thing attached to me.

• 14:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, interesting.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Because it's not me and it makes them feel very uncomfortable. And there's a huge ethical discussion going on as to what is the appropriate thing to do about that.

• 14:50Bob Novella?

  Like their liver?

• 14:52Speaker 02

  No, like they're, it's usually a limb.

• 14:54Bob Novella?

  Well, their arm.

• 14:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, let's say they don't want their, yeah, they're pinky.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  But imagine feeling like your left arm is not you, it's attached to you.

• 15:04Cara Santa Maria?

  And there's something neurological going on, but they're probably often misdiagnosed as having some form of psychosis.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:09Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right. Can medicines help with that?

• 15:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, not if that's not what's wrong. He's saying there's a circuit in their brain that's faulty.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Right. And it's so rare, we don't really have like a lot of research into it, so I don't know that we have it all fleshed out. And certainly not a lot of treatment trials or anything with it. Yeah. So all of these components can be disconnected from each other is the cool part. So now getting back to the robot thing with the paper, what they want to do is say, yeah, let's, now that we kind of know all of these components, mainly from people with strokes or people on drugs or whatever, where these circuits go off for one reason or another, or anoxia or whatever, you know, this is again, part of, often part of a near death experience, for example, the out of body experience. Let's see if we can replicate these components in a robot, make a robot feel as if it's inside its robot body.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  And so they could replicate the circuits. For example, for the, the agency module, you could say like, like the robot knows what it wants to do, meaning that at least there's the circuit that says you're going to raise your right arm. So that information is in the AI controlling the robot. It then will raise the arm and then you have sensors that feed back to say, how is the limb moving and does it match what you intended to do? And if it does match, you have to give some kind of positive feedback to the algorithm. And so that would essentially mimic that loop that exists in a human brain that makes you feel as if you own your body part, right?

• 16:39Bob Novella?

  Aren't they kind of doing that now, though?

• 16:41Speaker 02

  To some extent, but they want to explicitly try to replicate these components of a sense of self that humans have in a robot. And, and then see how that influences the robot's behavior. Maybe it will improve the robot's ability to control its movements, for example. Maybe it will have some, you know, consequences, you know, probably we evolved these things for a reason.

• 17:03Bob Novella?

  Maybe, maybe give it a psychosis, some robotic psychosis.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Now, the question is, this now, if you want to keep going forward with this, if you add all these things together, what does that add up to, right? Does it add up to an actual sense of self that the robot has? Now, I don't think that if we had all these circuits disconnected from each other and not connected to anything, that was also trying to replicate consciousness.

• 17:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Consciousness, yeah.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, and what is consciousness? Again, that we could try to replicate that in an AI slash robot. That is, you know, essentially, if I had to strip it down, what we know now is wakeful consciousness. If we're talking clinically now, what is wakeful consciousness? It is a constant communication that the brain is having with itself, right? There's just this constant loop of neurological activity, and it's being activated by the brainstem. The brainstem's constantly giving your cortex a kick in the ass. And then every time something happens, it leads to something else, which leads to something else, which leads to something else. And if that just keeps happening, that, that chain of neurological events is your stream of consciousness, right?

• 18:16Speaker 02

  And it's taking in sensory information, it's taking in information from your own body, it's taking in information from other parts of your brain that are communicating with each other, and it produces this stream of consciousness, right? That sort of self-propelling.

• 18:29Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's not just excitatory. It's like, there's a lot of inhibitory action going on.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, then at the high levels, when you, you know, there's a lot of stuff's happening, you have to sort of inhibit the stuff that you, to, to control your behavior. So it's not just chaos.

• 18:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Or, or a message seizure.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's, the, the seizures are inhibited at a really basic level. Like, if you, every time you, like, one neural circuit, bunch of, clump of neurons, sends a signal to another clump of neurons, they inhibit all of the adjacent neurons. So that's to keep it from spreading outside of the circuit. Yeah, to prevent seizures and prevent what we call ephaptic transmission. Have you heard that term, Kara?

• 19:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Ephactic?

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Ephaptic, E.P.H., ephaptic. Yeah, that's basically meaning not through, not through a circuit, but just spreading it to adjacent neurons, yeah. Yeah, seizures are when the bunch of cells or neurons are firing not along pathways, but just, just because they're all next to each other and they're just all firing.

• 19:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep, it's bad.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:29Cara Santa Maria?

  They're not good for the brain, for that to happen.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And here's the final question I want to leave you guys with. Is there a difference between a general sentient AI that exists only virtually and one that's in a robot? And is it, what would an AI that exists only virtually be like? Now, the gray zone in between these two states is what I call the Max Headroom thing, which is that you could have a virtual body, an AI that's not in a robot, that's just on a computer, could have a virtual body and could have all of these sense of self modules.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Running with the virtual body. But what if you didn't do that? What if you had none of these sense of self circuits running? You just had the AI. What would it experience? And would that be sustainable? Would that be functional? Do we really need to embody it in order for it to be a functioning, self-aware AI?

• 20:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and I guess to make it even more complicated, if this, if we're talking now about software, not hardware, software can control external hardware. So even if it's not a robot body, if that AI has access to the grid, or it has access to a server, could it then embody other machinery?

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe your house is its body.

• 20:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Or a spaceship is its body.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  That's Futurama right there.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Right? Spaceship is, is the, is the machine, is the entity.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  But it's embodied in something. Yeah, it's embodied in something.

• 20:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. It's embodied in something, but in a much more, I think, useful way. Like, that to me, you could do a lot more with that than like a robot in a humanoid body.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Well, was Hal 9000 that?

• 21:07Speaker 02

  I think so, because it had total control over the ship.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:12Bob Novella?

  Yeah, except the insides of those pods.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  It seemed to be indistinguishable.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Anyway, it's fascinating, but the thing that's interesting is that we will be able to investigate all of these questions once we do it, right? We could speculate now, but once we do it, we'll get a much better sense of how this sense of self and embodiment affects artificial intelligence, whether it's virtual or just in the void, or if it's embodied in a robot. We will see. Cool. All right, Kara, tell us about the new energy secretary, or at least

• 21:44Speaker 03

  Oh, energy.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  The proposed new energy secretary.

• 21:46Cara Santa Maria?

  You sound so happy when you say that.

• 21:50Cara Santa Maria?

  I feel like this is going to be a new series because as I was prepping this, I found out that Dr. Oz has been selected for Medicare and Medicaid.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 22:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh huh. But well, I did not, I did not do a deep dive for that one, so just set that on the shelf.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  I thought a board of trustees dealt with that.

• 22:10Cara Santa Maria?

  I guess there's somebody at the helm.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  There's always somebody at the top.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  There's always somebody appointed who's in charge.

• 22:16Cara Santa Maria?

  So instead, we're not going to talk about Dr. Oz, at least not this week. We will be talking about Chris Wright. His full name is Christopher Allen Wright. He's the CEO of Liberty Energy. It's the second largest fracking company in the US, and he is the presumptive nominee for United States Secretary of Energy under this next Trump presidency. He's obviously got a lot of experience in the energy sector. He is a board member of a nuclear energy company, also a board member of a royalty payment company for mineral rights and mining rights, but there's a little bit of a wrinkle

• 22:59Cara Santa Maria?

  in that he does not believe in climate change.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Didn't he also work for a solar company too?

• 23:05Cara Santa Maria?

  He's worked for, yeah, he's, he's been on boards and worked for like companies across the board. And that's what Trump really pushed when he did his post on, I think, Truth Social, where he said, I'm thrilled to announce that Chris Wright will be joining my administration as both the United States Secretary of Energy and member of the newly formed Council of Energy, Council of National Energy. He's been a leading technologist and entrepreneur in energy. He's worked in nuclear, solar, geothermal, and oil and gas. He is an oil and gas executive. He is a firm believer. Well, I actually, it's hard to know what somebody actually believes in their mind, but he's a firm

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Proponent.

• 23:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Proponent. Not proponent, that's not the right word either. He claims that there are no negative impacts from fossil fuel energy on the climate.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Wow. That's a remarkable statement. Thank you.

• 23:59Cara Santa Maria?

  He claims, in, in a video that he posted on his LinkedIn, and this is what he labeled the video, "Five commonly used words around energy and climate that are both deceptive and destructive: climate crisis, energy transition, carbon pollution, clean energy, and dirty energy. #EnergySopriety." So, he claims that, quote, "We have seen no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, or floods despite endless fearmongering." He says that there is no climate crisis. And he goes on in this 12 and a half minute video that he posted to his LinkedIn about a year ago, to basically argue that carbon

• 24:39Cara Santa Maria?

  dioxide cannot be a pollutant, and carbon dioxide cannot have all of these downstream negative consequences because it's natural. Because it's a natural phenomenon that occurs via photosynthesis.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Right. Which is a nonsensical argument.

• 24:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And, and respiration. Yeah. So, it's pretty scary. He says that there is no climate crisis, and the negative impacts from climate change, because of course, he's, he can't fully argue that climate change doesn't exist. Like, there are very few people who do that now. Instead, they've sort of moved the goalposts. And he says that the negative impacts from climate change are less than the benefits of using fossil fuels. So he is a firm believer that we need to continue to drill, we need to continue to burn. That these approaches to energy are going to allow us energy independence. And according to Donald Trump's Truth Social post, "Energy, US Energy Dominance." He put it in all caps.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Well, that's dominant.

• 25:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, which is a large goal of the administration. You know, to be fair, Chris Wright has worked in alternative energy. He works in energy, which means he's worked in renewables and nonrenewables. It does appear, I cannot speak for him, but it does appear that the motivation here is money. It's not clean energy. It's just energy, right? And however it's going to be the most lucrative and the easiest to produce that energy is going to be, is going to be the path. And that's what's so scary because we know the cost now of natural gas. We know the cost of crude oil. We know the cost of fracking.

• 26:22Cara Santa Maria?

  And these just aren't arguments that he's making. And he's going to have inordinate power, if he's confirmed by the Senate, to lead the Department of Energy.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  He will 100% be confirmed. There's no way that they're not going to confirm him.

• 26:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, God, don't say that.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  But, but let me tell you this, Kara. I'm going to make an argument for why this is not as bad as it seems.

• 26:41Cara Santa Maria?

  I know where you're going with this.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  Good luck.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  And I'm not just comparing him to the other secretary or whatever, other people.

• 26:47Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I know where you're going with this. It's an argument, but it's still bad.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Let me put it out. Obviously, it's bad to have somebody in that position who just straight up denies the science, right? That's not a good thing. And this will absolutely be a setback and it'd be worse, obviously, than if we had somebody who was fully on board with transitioning away from fossil fuels, which he isn't. But at this point in time, there's essentially, we have two strategies for transitioning to renewable energy, green, you know, green energy, low, low carbon energy and away from fossil fuels. And these are not mutually exclusive, but there's some combination of reducing supply and reducing demand for fossil fuels, right? So far, we are not. Taking the reduce the supply approach.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Under the Biden administration, the United States is producing more fossil fuels than any other country at any time ever in human history, including during Trump's administration.

• 27:48Bob Novella?

  So we're right, so we're right on plan then.

• 27:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that a function of just there being more people in more need?

• 27:52Speaker 02

  It's, it's a function of, you know what it is? It's a function of Russia invading Ukraine.

• 27:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, right, of course, of course, of course.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  We, we, we jacked up our, our oil and gas production to essentially displace.

• 28:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Russia's sales to Europe. So we're trying to replace.

• 28:07Bob Novella?

  Oh, I see.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Russia's sales to Europe of natural gas and oil. And that put us over the top to like more production than we've ever done before. So the idea that it's always been like silly for Trump to say, we're going to bring oil back and we're going to be dominant. We're already there, dude. He's already, we're producing more oil than we ever have before, or anyone has ever had.

• 28:27Cara Santa Maria?

  But Biden didn't do that willy nilly.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  No, he did it deliberately.

• 28:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, deliberate with a lot of calculation.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  But the point is, we're already there. We're already producing all this oil and, and we're doing that to keep prices down. Now, keeping prices down is actually a good thing because it lowers the value of pulling that oil out of the ground. It's also good because it takes money away from, you know, authoritarians who are basically funded by the sale of fossil fuels.

• 28:52Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  That, so ideally.

• 28:54Bob Novella?

  That's what we're about to.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Ideally, we will reduce demand first. How do we reduce demand first? Cause then that again reduces the cost. We could reduce, reduce the value of fossil fuel and the incentive to go after it. You do that by transitioning to green energy, right? So.

• 29:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, fewer cars that run on gas.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Fewer cars that run on gas and then, and fewer coal and gas powered, you know, energy production. So for right now, it's more important that we build non fossil fuel resources than that we.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Restrict fossil fuel. Eventually, we have to dial down the fossil fuel. But for now, if we if we're just investing in expanding our non fossil fuel infrastructure, that's fine. And so my hope is, again, this is just a hope. But there has been a lot of good news recently on the nuclear power front, which I just summarized in my blog post. The Biden administration and also a consortium of countries around the world have pledged to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050.

• 29:59Bob Novella?

  Good.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  And triple, that's huge. That is huge.

• 30:04Bob Novella?

  It's a big piece of the puzzle.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, no, no, if if by 2050, we have a 50% increase in our energy demand, that means doubling the nuclear percentage of production. So right now, we're about 19, 20%. So we're talking about going to about 40% nuclear worldwide and in the US. And that's probably where we should be. So I don't think I don't know of any reason why this guy or why the Trump administration is going to undo.

• 30:33Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I think he's, yeah, he's pro nuclear.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  They're pro nuclear.

• 30:36Cara Santa Maria?

  This has broad bipartisan.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  So, yeah, this has this has broad bipartisan support. So as long as this keeps happening, that could keep us on pace to where we need to get by 2050. Right? It may not be good for the solar or the wind industry. I get I get that. That's where I'm more concerned. But here's the thing, some people have argued that because wind and solar are currently the cheapest form of new energy to add to the grid, that it doesn't need a lot of subsidies at this point in time. Companies are doing it because it's the cheapest. And so hopefully, you know, that will have inertia unless they actively try to inhibit it, which they may, which Trump may just decide to mess with the wind industry just just to do it because he doesn't like wind.

• 31:17Bob Novella?

  It kills birds, you know, and stuff.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  I don't think this guy would do that because, as you say, he's kind of neutral.

• 31:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, he's new. I think he's neutral about the source, like from a moralistic perspective, but that's actually a bad thing.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. But I mean, but for now, doing the all of the above so that at least the renewables and the nuclear and the geothermal and the hydroelectric can. Still grow and expand. We it may not be that much of a disaster is what I'm saying. It may not be bad.

• 31:44Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know. I think that he wants to fully deregulate.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  Well, they're going to deregulate.

• 31:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Oil and gas.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  They're going to deregulate, but they're also probably going to deregulate nuclear and deregulate solar and wind too. And so.

• 31:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but that's not going to. So all of those things, yes, are going to make for more competition for alternative sources in the marketplace. But what they don't do is they do not mitigate the pollution.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Of course, absolutely.

• 32:08Cara Santa Maria?

  That is what is actually causing the climate crisis.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  I agree, but I I think though my point is it's really complicated to try to figure out over the next four years, what the net effect of this is going to be. And if they continue to expand the non fossil fuel infrastructure, it may not be that dramatic a difference. And if we are in a much better place in terms of more nuclear, more wind, more solar in four years, that might be a better time to start like really thinking of ways to dial back fossil fuels. It wasn't going to happen in the short term anyway. It wasn't happening under Biden. It's definitely not going to happen under Trump. So.

• 32:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, how quickly does? I mean, don't these nuclear plants take quite a while to get online?

• 32:49Speaker 02

  But part of what Biden is already doing, he also put together, I mean, there's so many things going on. So he announced $900 million to support startup gen three nuclear reactors. He was, you know, the part of 25 signatories pledging tripling nuclear capacity by 2050. And also there's the advance act, which is, which was just passed with bipartisan support, which streamlines regulations and also provides sweeping support for the nuclear industry. So they're trying to figure out ways, there's a commission, they figure out ways to make us be able to build nuclear reactors cheaper and faster

• 33:29Speaker 02

  and to streamline all the regulations. That's already happening. Again, I don't see that being undone under this guy or Trump.

• 33:36Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, and this is, this is my spidey senses picking up, but like, while I agree that the regulatory burden is high right now, and we've talked about this on the show before, and there does need to be some streamlining. I think that it is still very important.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Absolutely. You can go too far.

• 33:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Safely. And I'm very worried that too much streamlining could lead to disaster.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  And we should be worried about that. We should be worried about that.

• 34:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Because then that will set us back like the last disaster set us back.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  So the devil's always going to be in the details. And there is like a nuclear industry too. You know, they don't necessarily want to build unsafe reactors. That's what I'm saying, the net effect, it's hard to really calculate the net effect of all of this. So yes, they probably, because Trump deregulates with a machete, not with a scalpel, right? We've seen that before. That's clearly what they're going to do now. And so, yeah, so that, that is a legitimate concern. But, you know, the investors and the industry probably will welcome the deregulation. But hopefully this, there's already international standards in place for the nuclear industry. And hopefully they won't be eroded too much.

• 34:41Cara Santa Maria?

  I, you know, it's like that, that is really where it bumps up. And that's the part where I don't have the same kind of hope that you have. I wish I did.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Trying to be positive over here, Kara. But the other thing is, the other thing is in four years, they could all snap back. You know what I mean? Or at least some of them, or if there's, if they went too far, we could, you know, we have time to claw that back. It's not like whatever happens now is forever. It's really just, it's, we're losing four years.

• 35:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Whatever happens now with regards to regulation is forever if a plant is built under those regulations.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably not in four years. That's a little fast.

• 35:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And that's the hope, right? Because ultimately, while I agree with you that people who work in this sector do not want unsafe plants, there are many people who care more about profits than they do about safety.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So this is, this is a complicated issue. This is one that I am definitely going to be keeping my eye on. I think it's not all doom and gloom. This guy, you know, because of the nuclear thing, because that's all getting, gaining momentum. I'm hoping that over the next four years, that's where they'll focus their efforts.

• 35:42Cara Santa Maria?

  I hope so too. I mean, I, I do, I agree with you that it's not all doom and gloom. But I do think that the goalposts have been moved so far at this point, that the reason it's not all doom and gloom is because, exactly like you're saying, maybe we'll have nuclear, but like, the deregulation of fossil fuels is scaring the living shit out of me right now. I gotta be honest.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. I agree. I'm not so sure how much more damage they can do. We're already producing more than we've ever produced. You know what I mean? Like only so much they can produce.

• 36:12Cara Santa Maria?

  We're already producing more than we've ever produced with, with strong regulations in place. So imagine when the lid comes off.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Yep. So we'll see. We'll keep everyone updated. We'll see where it is in the spectrum of worst case versus best case scenario. Of all of Trump's appointments, this is not the one that keeps me up at night.

• 36:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Right? Yes, this is not ideal. This is basically what you would, this is exactly what I would have expected. I guess it could have been worse, but...

• 36:40Cara Santa Maria?

  I didn't expect somebody who fully denies climate change.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I did. Oh, 100% because Trump does.

• 36:44Cara Santa Maria?

  I just thought we were past this at this point.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  No, because Trump denies it. Trump is 100% denying climate change. He's still saying it's a hoax. Clearly, there's two people that keep me up at night in terms of the appointments right now. One is Tulsi Gabbard, because she's, don't need to get into that. As the head of intelligence, that's actually dangerous for the country. And the other one's RFK Jr. because he could destroy the federal health care.

• 37:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and now I'm going to add Dr. Oz to that.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Dr. Oz is not nearly as bad as RFK Jr.

• 37:13Bob Novella?

  Yeah, at least he's a doctor.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  I am not a fan of Dr. Oz. I don't know how much mischief he could make at Medicare Medicaid.

• 37:21Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know what he can actually do, exactly.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Whereas RFK is actively wants to cause mischief, wants to oppose vaccines. He is the wrecking ball. And Gabbard just doesn't know reality from fantasy. And that's dangerous. As the head of intelligence, that's very, very dangerous.

• 37:37Cara Santa Maria?

  But I guess my thing is, you can say, "Don't get vaccinated" all you want. I don't know if he can actually block a vaccine from being available to the public. But you can say, "Don't get vaccinated" all you want. But if you defund or deeply change the structure of Medicaid and Medicare, people will die. Lots. And lots of people will die.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Well, there's lots of ways that RFK Jr. can undermine our vaccine infrastructure in this country. This is a separate talk. Maybe we'll give this, you know, probably what we should do is bring David Gorsky on because he's been really writing a lot about RFK Jr.

• 38:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah, because I just did a little primer last, or two weeks ago.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll do a good deep dive on like, what could he actually do? Because that is a very interesting question. But that's, I think, the most, you know, those two are the most scary appointees so far.

• 38:28Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the big question, will he have a larger US body count than he had during COVID? That's the big question.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, possibly. It is possible.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, the next pandemic scares me.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  All right, Bob, tell us about finding Planets 9.

• 38:41Bob Novella?

  Ah, it's my turn, is it? Okay. Planet X, or is it Planet 9, was in the news recently. Scientists have published a proposal to use an array of 200 small telescopes that they say can prove if a massive planet indeed exists in the farthest reaches of our solar system, in the region where the so-called trans-Neptunian objects dwell. Daniel Gomez and Gary Bernstein, from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, wrote on the online archive their paper. It is named "An Automated Occultation Network for Gravitational Mapping of the Trans-Neptunian Solar System." Okay, so to better appreciate this, let's explore the few bits of terminology typically found in these discussions.

• 39:23Bob Novella?

  First off, is it Planet X, or is it Planet 9? Planet X is more general. That's a general term that's been used for many, many years, many decades. Oh gosh, 100 years. Used, yeah, used for the, right, used for the potential planet beyond Neptune. That's Planet X. Planet 9, on the other hand, is often used interchangeably with Planet X, of course, but it seems Planet 9 is used most often when referring to the idea that the ninth planet of our solar system could potentially be found by observing its impact on the orbits of trans-Neptunian objects. Right. So that's where you're going to mostly find the term Planet 9, and that, and that makes sense, and that's fine. All right, so this brings us to trans-Neptunian objects, and it's not hard to predict what that term refers to.

• 40:07Bob Novella?

  It refers to objects beyond the orbit of Neptune, but those objects have two primary categories. The most distant trans-Neptunian objects exist in a region that I wasn't aware of called the scattered disk. Whoa. Now, these are really, really far away, up to 100 AU's, astronomical units. Each AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, 93 million miles. Sorry, I don't have the kilometers memorized. The scattered disk contains small icy bodies, and they're in very eccentric orbits, really high off of the plane. The other major area where trans-Neptunian objects exist is, that's the place you really want to be. If you ever hang out beyond Neptune, it's going to be the Kuiper Belt. That's where you got to go. Oh, yeah, sure.

• 40:51Bob Novella?

  This right, sure, sure, Evan, you know, the belt, the Kuiper Belt starts at Neptune's orbit, right beyond its orbit at 30 AU's and stretches out to 50 AU's or 55 AU's I've heard as well. So it's huge. It's about 20 times as wide as the asteroid belt that we know between Mars, we know very well, between Mars and Jupiter, 20 times as wide and potentially 200 times as massive. So the Kuiper Belt is gargantuan. Kuiper Belt objects, though, they're not technically asteroids. I wasn't quite aware of this. As far as I can tell, it's because the word asteroid is mainly reserved for a location, not really what you're made of, but really where you exist. So the large rocky objects

• 41:36Bob Novella?

  between or near the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, those are asteroids. So if you're there, if you come from there, you're an asteroid. But Kuiper Belt objects are not referred to as asteroids. They're just basically Kuiper Belt objects. And they're actually, they're different also as well. They're made up of frozen volatiles, various ices composed of methane or ammonia and water too as well. Trans-Neptunian objects or anything beyond Neptune, and within that area, there's a huge Kuiper Belt area, and there's also the more distant scattered disk object area. So now, these objects are thought to be remnants

• 42:16Bob Novella?

  from the solar system's formation. So they are ancient, and since they're so far away, they're basically unchanged. So they would be amazing repositories of information of the early solar system, because they have not been melted, they have not been changed really in any way out there. Now, they're distant orbits, though. This was interesting. They're in such distant orbits beyond Neptune, we think, because Jupiter and Saturn got, basically, they got together and they imposed their gravitational will on these remnants, and they forced them from out, in the, you know, in the inner solar system, closer maybe to Jupiter-Saturn area perhaps, but they've basically forced them out into the orbits that they are in now.

• 43:01Bob Novella?

  Beyond Neptune. The question then becomes, can there be a true planet-sized object out there? A Planet 9, or even multiple such objects hiding in the Kuiper Belt? Many people think so. Now, the evidence most often cited for this, you know, it's subtle. It's nothing really that's overt, but it is there and a lot of people are looking into it very closely. It's this subtle clustering of orbits of some of these Kuiper Belt objects. To the scientists, to the astronomers, the orbits just don't seem to be as randomly distributed as you would expect them to be. And one explanation they contend could be a very distant unseen planet.

• 43:43Bob Novella?

  Some say it could have as much, as many as five Earth masses, a super Earth, out there waiting to be found. That's five, I mean, that's would be, I mean, I don't believe that, but I think there could be something out there and I hope, I hope there is. That would be amazing. Now, of course, they have, they have searched and searched for Planet 9. Nothing has been found. And this is where the paper comes in, this latest paper. So the authors contend that using 200 small telescopes, like something like 20, 30 centimeters, I mean, pretty small, separated by five kilometers and lined up in an array that stretches end to end 1,000 kilometers wide, that such an array of 200 telescopes could tell us these

• 44:27Bob Novella?

  critical details about Planet 9, if it even exists. So the key technique that they describe in detail in their paper is called occultation. Occultation appears more capable and fascinating than I, than I would have thought. So here's, here's how this works. So imagine you're observing an asteroid or a trans-Neptunian object. So you're, you're observing it and you precisely time to the nanosecond or so when it blocks a distant star, right? It's moving in its orbit and it moves in front of a distant star that's, that's, that's in our galaxy somewhere, say, whatever, 10, 20, 30, 40 light years away, whatever it is. So you time, you time to the nanosecond when it's blocked and then also to the nanosecond that when the star reappears.

• 45:12Bob Novella?

  And we could do that very, very precisely. Now, if you do that, not only with one telescope, but 200 of these telescopes, each one having their own slightly different angle, right? Each one has its own. Specific angle onto that occultation event. And so they'll have their their own view, their own timings. So if you take all these 200 timings and put them together, you combine all that data. What you get is you get an extremely precise understanding of the asteroid's orbit. Where it is and when, very, very precisely. It gets even better than that. The more of these occultations that you observe, the more accurate your timings and your positional data become. More so than any other method that's used alone.

• 45:57Bob Novella?

  So then ultimately, then the idea here is that once you have these hyper accurate orbits mapped out, we could then detect very subtle gravitational anomalies, right? If we know down to down to the third, fourth, fifth, sixth decimal point, when this star should be blocked by by an asteroid or a trans Neptunian object. If we know where that and it doesn't happen, then you've then there's some you have you have you have an anomaly. You have a gravitational orbital anomaly, and that's something that can be investigated. So we may discover, for example, through these anomalies, that various asteroids are moving or trans Neptunian objects are moving in a way that points to an unknown large gravitational source in a very specific orbital location. In other words, planet nine.

• 46:42Bob Novella?

  So that's the hope, that this hyper accurate information can actually say, there's got to be something over here. Multiple asteroids, multiple trans Neptunian objects are telling us that there's some mass in this specific area. It seems like it's got, say, two Earth masses and it's in this orbit, this distance from the Sun. It could potentially be that specific. So all we would then have to do is just zoom in on that specific area. And we'd have a relatively, you know, very small parcel of space to investigate, and we could potentially find it, best case scenario.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  That's how Obi-Wan Kenobi discovered Carina.

• 47:18Bob Novella?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  Oh, that's right, because something was missing.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a gravitational source that was missing.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  But there was no right, but there was no body assigned to it. It was a dead spot in space, but there had to have been something there.

• 47:30Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  All right.

• 47:32Bob Novella?

  So.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  Bob, we're talking. Science here.

• 47:35Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 47:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Science.

• 47:37Bob Novella?

  So even if even if Planet 9, though, is a bust, a server like this could be incredibly informative about our outer solar system, right? There was still so much to learn even without Planet 9. They believe, the researchers believe, that a 10-year survey could find 1,800 new trans-Neptunian objects and reveal details about their properties, their orbital dynamics, their surfaces, so many different things. It could refine also our understanding of the boundary of our solar system and how it evolved.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  And Bob, a lot of the objects that it discovers could be dwarf planets, even if they're not full planets.

• 48:10Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, well, I didn't say, but yeah, if it's not clear, Kuiper Belt, dwarf planets, basically are all in the Kuiper Belt, with one exception, I think, is Ceres in the main asteroid belt. Yeah, in the asteroid belt, one. Pretty much all the other ones are. So, yeah, that's where we find dwarf planets. Favorite long shot, though, is the outside chance that it could reveal information about primordial black holes, you know, black holes that existed from the early, early, small ones, that existed, you know, early in the, in, in the universe, soon after the Big Bang. So if a primordial black hole was to pass in front of a star, we could detect that by the microlensing event that would happen to the star's light, right? It would just bend the light, and we could say, oh crap, there's a, there's a super-dense mass right there.

• 48:53Bob Novella?

  It could be a primordial black hole. Long shot, I know, but that would be cool. But it would be really truly amazing, finding a true planet in the Kuiper Belt. How epic would that be? That would be the astronomical discovery of the millennia, really. I mean, another planet, potentially, you know, multiple Earth masses, you know, the number would go, you know, back from eight, back up to nine. I think it would make Pluto feel a lot better, you know, since one of its Kuiper Belt buddies was recognized as a true planet, even if Pluto could never re-attain that. And at this, this project is estimated to cost only 15 million USD.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  That's intense.

• 49:33Bob Novella?

  That really, that is, that's smaller than I would have anticipated. That's, that really is. I mean, sure, I mean, I like to have that in my bank account.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  It's a rounding error.

• 49:40Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's, yeah, it really is. It's so tiny. It sounds like an amazing deal. It seems like a no-brainer deal to me. Of course, once this is truly vetted by, you know, other, you know, other scientists and astronomers, and make sure their numbers look good. I mean, this sounds like a great idea. I hope they do it.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Bob.

• 49:57Bob Novella?

  Sure.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Evan, tell us about stress and paranormal belief.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  Ah, it stresses me out.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  Does it though? Well, it depends. Did you know there's something called the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale, the RPBS? This is a tool I had not heard of before. I have no, and shame on me. I probably should have read about this before at some point. It is a 26 item survey that measures a person's belief in paranormal phenomena. It's a widely used tool in parapsychological research and was developed by Jerome Tabasek and published in the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies in 2004. So this has been around a while, and I believe there are even references

• 50:44Speaker 03

  to this prior to that. So yeah, for many decades, this tool has been there. Basically, you have the participants respond on a Likert scale, one strongly disagree to seven strongly agree. And they ask you questions about, well, what are your, how do you feel about witchcraft? How do you feel about superstition, or spiritualism, or extraordinary life forms, and down the list it goes. So much, much prior research has relied on this, using this tool. And the results have suggested that paranormal belief in general is not linked to poorer psychological

• 51:24Speaker 03

  well-being. However, certain facets of paranormal belief, such as superstition, could be linked with stress vulnerability.

• 51:33Cara Santa Maria?

  You're saying that's the claim of these authors?

• 51:35Speaker 03

  Well, no, this is, this is, again, this is the prior research. I haven't even gotten to the current study yet. I'm just, I'm just-

• 51:41Speaker 02

  That's what I've read as well. It's like superstition is the one that gets triggered by feeling lack of control, feeling under stress, et cetera, depression.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Until along came a revised version of this tool called the Rash-Purified Revised Paranormal Belief Scale, RPPBS for short. Yes, another tool to measure people's beliefs in paranormal phenomena, but it's considered a better statistical method that they use that within- Improved validity and reliability compared to the original one. Enhanced ability to compare results across different populations and a more robust measurement of paranormal belief as a unidimensional construct. I also wanted to look up, I said, you know, because I had, I'm unfamiliar with these tools. I, I, I did a little more research into it to figure out, like, is this legitimate?

• 52:34Speaker 03

  Is this considered scientific or is this kind of just, you know, something that experimental researchers are kind of throwing together on their own? But no, they say it is. They say this is, this is legitimate.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  It's part of psychological research. It could also be used for parapsychological bogus research, but it is part of just psychological research.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  It's considered widely accepted as a reliable tool.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, like psychologists studying conspiracy theories doesn't mean that they believe in the conspiracy theories, they're studying them. It's the same thing, they're studying paranormal belief.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  And that means, yeah, so that gets us now to the news item this week, which we can now better understand. There was a new study that was published in plus one, P L O S one, titled reevaluation of the relationship between paranormal belief and perceived stress using statistical modeling. The authors are Kenneth Drinkwater, Andrew Denovian and Neil Dagnall. Drinkwater and his colleagues had 3,084 people complete the rash model survey, which is the more refined survey, alongside a questionnaire evaluating different facets of perceived stress, called the perceived stress scale, of course, to help deepen their understanding of potential links between paranormal belief and stress.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  Here are some quotes of what the researchers found. Finding support that the notion that traditional paranormal belief is associated with external control, specifically the notion that unknown supernatural forces and powers influence existence. Feelings of distress and reduced ability to cope with stress were associated with these traditional paranormal beliefs. So superstition is one of those considered traditional paranormal beliefs, right? Sort of belief in witchcraft, ghosts, these sorts of things, external forces that you don't have control over. And on the other side of this coin are the new age philosophy, sort of paranormal

• 54:34Speaker 03

  beliefs dealing with sigh, spiritualism, precognition. They could not find it to be statistically linked to any tendencies regarding distress or coping for these new age philosophy. And these, this is what was expected in their findings, in line with the idea that traditional paranormal belief reflects anxiety. And again, it's about that lack of control over those external forces. They do admit the study was exploratory and does not support any cause effect relationship. Why is it important? So why, why did the authors, you know, why are they bothering with this? And I thought they summed it up nicely in the abstract of the paper, which I will read to you now, this part of it. Research into

• 55:19Speaker 03

  paranormal belief is important because supernatural credence persists within contemporary society and potentially influences everyday attitudes and behavior. For instance, investigators report that paranormal belief is associated with lower levels of trust in science and higher anti-science attitudes. These are notions not based upon reasoned or reliable evidence which conflict with prevailing conceptions of the world. Specific examples allied to belief in the paranormal are endorsement of alternative medicine, anti-vaccination, and conspiracies. Evidence suggests that paranormal belief is a form of non-clinical delusion arising from an over-reliance on emotional content and the failure to rigorously

• 56:04Speaker 03

  evaluate the validity of information. And what is it we talk about on this show for the past 20 years and the 10 years prior to that, that we've been a skeptical organization? And all the shoulders of the giants that we've stood upon that came even before that? It all boils down to this, right?

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I do think there's multiple moving parts here, you know, having followed this literature somewhat over the years, you know, as a skeptic. There's also other studies which show that there's a correlation with intuitive thinking style versus an analytical thinking style, which makes perfect sense. And there's also this question of, which I don't see as much in the literature, the fantasy prone personality type, which I think is just an extreme version of this, you know, tendency to believe in the paranormal or maybe intuitive thinking. But also, this is very context dependent. You know what I mean? It's like, what culture did you grow up in? And what is, or how culturally acceptable are the beliefs that you're talking about?

• 57:03Speaker 02

  And that may be where the real divide here is between traditional paranormal beliefs and new age paranormal beliefs, in that the new age one seems to be more of a, like, you get into that subculture and that worldview. And I think it tends to attract people who have, again, this sort of fantasy prone or intuitive thinking style, whereas like the more traditional ones may come about because of stress or whatever. It makes sense that they would not be, it's not all one phenomenon, it's not monolithic.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  And I just, I also think that conspiracy beliefs are its own phenomenon. You know, like the tendency to believe in conspiracies, while there's a ton of overlap, that is an entity unto itself.

• 57:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's interesting, the conspiracy, I would imagine there would be, and of course, more research is needed.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:52Speaker 03

  Correlations of stress and conspiracy theory, conspiracy thinking.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe, but again, the conspiracy thinking comes in two flavors. Opportunistic conspiracy thinking and dedicated conspiracy thinking. People who are conspiracy theorists, they believe in all conspiracies. And people who only believe in ones that support their worldview.

• 58:12Speaker 03

  Ah, I see.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  Opportunistically, yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 03

  So those comforting ones won't cause the stress.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Right, probably.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  Would not, probably not cause stress for them.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  All right, it's an interesting area. You know, again, I tend to follow this because it's pretty much in our sweet spot of what we do. And it's fascinating, you know, to look at this as a psychological research project. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Aura Frames.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, Aura Frames. These are digital picture frames that allow users to display photos and videos directly from their smartphones or other devices. These frames are Wi-Fi enabled, facilitating seamless photo sharing and display. There's no memory cards or USBs required, and there's a reason Wirecutter named it the number one best digital photo frame.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  I got my father-in-law, I got my mother-in-law, I got a couple of other relatives that we bought these frames for. They're super easy to use, and they report back to me. I have one too, but I'm just telling you what the people in my life thought. They absolutely love it. It's a fantastic present.

• 59:13Bob Novella?

  For a limited time, visit auraframes.com and get $45 off Aura's best-selling Carver Matte Frames by using promo code SKEPTICS at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-frames.com promo code SKEPTICS. This exclusive Black Friday/Cyber Monday deal is their best of the year, so don't miss out. Terms and conditions apply.

• 59:32Speaker 02

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy Time? All right, guys, last week I played This Noisy.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  In its entirety. So, guys, have any guesses?

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  I have a guess. That was Jay's first attempt at playing the didgeridoo.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  It sounds like a super old recording. That's a, that's a nice guess. Anybody else?

• 1:00:11Cara Santa Maria?

  It just sounded like an insect to me.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  It has an insect-like quality, absolutely.

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  I thought I heard "Help me" in there.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  There was a listener, many that wrote in, one of them named Benjamin Davort. Ben here, the Frenchy from Japan. I think- This is a drone, quadcopter equipped with ultra-low noise propellers, probably the asymmetrical type with a counterweight on the side opposed to the blade. That is, oh, and he says, "My name is pronounced Da Vu," so Benjamin Da Vu. So that's an interesting and very specific guess. And, you know, quadcopters do make that kind of, you know, that, what would you call it, a buzzing sound, like, almost like a droning-

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  A droning noise.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. That is not correct, though, and we will continue on. So, a listener named Shane Hillier wrote in and said, "It's a murder hornet." So, yeah, Kara, somebody else agreed with you about the insect-like noise.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh, murder hornets.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  Listener named Stephen Walker wrote in. He said, "Hi, our guess is a bee, a honeybee, doing its waggle dance to tell its buddies which direction to find the good stuff." So, yeah, there's a, there was a murder hornet and a bee, so definitely people are hearing that kind of sound. And I always find it fascinating that, that bees, you know, they talk with pheromones, which is basically, you know, smells. It's pretty frickin' cool that they can communicate with that. So now I'm gonna click right over to the winner. We had multiple winners, but I'll play, I'll read one of them here. So Frederick Neant was the first person to guess right, and he guessed this as the first known recording of a human voice. Oh, wow. And I think, at some point, I've played this previously. I had a different recording,

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  and now this is like an update, because something pretty remarkable happened where they, they were able- Mark-a-ball. So let me, another, let me give you another listener's answer. This is Joshua Banta's answer. Very, very nice description here. He said, "It's an actual recording from 1860 of Edward Leon Scott de Martinville singing a Clair de Lune." This is a, something, it's played on something called a phonautogram. But let me give you some more specifics here. So James, he said James Buchanan was the US president at the time, pre-Civil War, pre-Abraham Lincoln. And he said, "De Martinville invented a device called the phonautograph that collects sound by using a horn connected to a diaphragm, which caused a rigid bristle

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  to vibrate and inscribe a visual representation on a handcracked cylinder." But this was never intended for playback, by the way. It only produced visual images to show you what sound, you know, looked like. It's the squiggles on paper. But there was absolutely no capacity for there to be any playback. Now, we click forward to 2008 and the recording was transformed into a playable digital audio file by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, and it worked really well. So it was inferred to be played back at a 10-second speed, which caused the voice to sound like a woman, or even a child, but later the scientists realized that this was the wrong speed, and when they played it back at slower speeds, they found the one that they thought sounded the most correct, and it is of a man, and they think it is

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  Martinville himself, singing Clair de Lune. So I'll play it again. Now, keep in mind, you know, this is the lowest fidelity recording you'll probably ever hear.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  So that's pretty cool, guys.

• 1:03:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Weird.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  Unexpected. So, uh, thank you for sending that in. I have a new noisy for you guys this week, and this was sent in by a listener named John Karabai. Thank you for sending in the phonetic pronunciation of your name, and I'm gonna play the sound now.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  If you guys think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email us at [email protected]. Steve, it's not too late. It's actually, it is, it can be too late, but it isn't now, if you're hearing this. And it's, and it's basically like, what, the 20th, or the 21st, or soon thereafter, in November? You could buy tickets to, uh, we have two shows going on in Washington DC. We have a private show. That is a live recording of the SGU, limited audience size, and we record the show and then for an hour, all of us, including George Robb, will do something fun and unique that has never been done before in a live audience. So if you want to have some fun, you can

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  join us at our private show, or you can also go to the Extravaganza. This is the Skeptical Extravaganza stage show that we have. It's going to be in DC as well, and it's going to be that night, right? The private show will be starting at 11:30 a.m. and the Extravaganza starts at 8 p.m. Please get there around 7. You can go to www dot the skeptics guy dot org. We have buttons on there that link to tickets, which means you can buy them and you can come see us and we'd love to have you. And Jay, we should tell people all of the social media stuff that we are on as well. So first of all, we do a live stream, most Wednesdays, starting at 1 p.m. and most Fridays,

• 1:05:29Speaker 02

  starting at 5 p.m. Eastern. We have a Facebook page, two blogs are affiliated with us, Neurological and Science-Based Medicine, and we are, we are still on X, but we are also now on Blue Sky, and we are on Instagram, and we post TikTok videos, two or three TikTok videos every week. My, my most popular TikTok videos, what do you guys think? What's it up to?

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  4.5 million.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  5.7 million.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 1:06:01Bob Novella?

  5.7?

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  And climbing.

• 1:06:04Bob Novella?

  Damn, man. How, is it really slowing down?

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  No, it's still ticking along. Yeah, still going on.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  Still tickety-tackety.

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  The interesting thing is, like, there is just no rhyme or reason, right? It just, it just went viral. So, sure, we could have slipped into TikTok's algorithm or whatever, but like, we make a ton of these videos and it's all, you know, all revolving around the same theme. Steve watches something on TikTok and then he'll explain why that person is wrong or whatever. Like, you know, we just kind of, you know, go into the, some of the more wilder things that people are talking about and, and bend the skeptical eye at it. But this one, we, you know, me, Steve and Ian were like, what happened? Yeah, wish we knew the formula, it just happened. We're happy about it, but it is what it is. Oh, and Steve, I can't forget, hold on. These events in DC are fantastic, and I do hope that you can make it. But my God, you gotta go to Nauticon.

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  This is our socializing conference. This is the conference where people make connections with each other. Tons of socializing. We have a ton of entertainment that we do. George Robb, Brian Wecht, and Andrea Jones Roy will join all of us here at the SGU. It's 2.2 days of a lot of fun, and we really hope that you can join us. You can go to notakoncon.com, right? That's notakoncon, C-O-N-C-O-N, dot C-O-M, com. Bob, are you understanding what I'm saying? Pretty simple. Right. It's notakoncon.com. Ian, I swear to God. All right. So anyway, guys.

• 1:07:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Did you say 2.2 days?

• 1:07:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  Roughly, yeah, because it's like...

• 1:07:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Making sure.

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  You don't need to explain that, Jay. Okay. Anyway.

• 1:07:40Speaker 03

  Two tenths of a day.

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  You'll see, because you'll be there. So anyway, please try to join us for that. It's going to be a wonderful thing. You know, we need some happiness in the world, and their happiness will be there. So please join us. All right. Thanks, Jay. We're going to do one quick email. This comes from Mike Hampton, who writes, "On Friday's livestream, you began talking about phrases like 'way anchor' and such. It reminded me of a phrase that I think wins the award for the dumbest phrase. That is, 'you've got your work cut out for you.' I lived most of my life thinking this phrase meant you have an easy road ahead, which is what it should mean. Any project you do that involves cutting, whether that be carpentry, paper crafts, sewing, etc., at least a quarter to a third of the project is cutting the material to

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  the sizes and patterns you need. So if someone has prepared the material by cutting it out for you, the project is suddenly that much easier and going to make and going to take less time. I was shocked to learn..." Shocked, shocked! "...that it actually means the opposite, which shot that phrase to the dumbest phrase in the English language as far as I'm concerned. So I looked into it, because I love the etymology especially of these kind of phrases. What's your guess? Where does that phrase come from? What's the origin of... You've got your work cut out for you."

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh. I'd only be guessing.

• 1:09:01Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, yeah, who knows?

• 1:09:02Bob Novella?

  Farming? Something with farming?

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  Nope. It comes from tailoring.

• 1:09:05Speaker 02

  Tailoring.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Which is on his list sewing. And usually, uh, the way, you know, like a professional tailor would work is they would have an assistant. The assistant would cut out all the patterns. And they would, uh, for a dress or whatever, anything that they were going to make. And they would do all of that ahead of time. And the, the primary reason for that was to make sure that they had everything, right? So you cut out all of the pieces, you make sure that every piece is there. And then the tailor would sew them all together into the final piece, the final, uh, dress or whatever. Now, the, the sewing was the, that's where all, you know, most of the skill.

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  The artistry.

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  The artistry and the, and that was a lot very exacting and complicated work. Whereas the cutting was, you know, you're cutting it out of a pattern, not that that, you know, wasn't a lot of work. But that wasn't, you know, the tailor's work. So as a tailor, if you have your work cut out for you. That means you have a lot of work ahead of you, all that intricate sewing ahead of you.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  I see.

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  Somebody else.

• 1:10:14Cara Santa Maria?

  But I get what the dude is saying because if you don't have your work cut out for you, there's even more work to do.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  I hear what he's saying, but that, but because there was built into the origin of this phrase, this division of labor, not for the tailor. You have nothing to do because your assistant hasn't cut out the patterns yet.

• 1:10:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. So you get to rest right now, but once your work is cut out for you.

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  Then your work begins. So basically this is when your work begins, when the work is cut, quote unquote, cut out for you.

• 1:10:38Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's not really how we use the phrase.

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  No, we've, we've twisted it a bit. You have a long road ahead of you.

• 1:10:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's gonna get rough now from here on out.

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. But basically it means you have a lot of work or difficult work or like. Yeah, like you have a job to do, like this is your job and you gotta do it. Uh, yeah, that the use has evolved, you know, over time, but it does make sense in the context of.

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  It does.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  But yes, some phrases do end up meaning the opposite of what they originally meant. Like, for example, "Blood is thicker than water." We've talked about this on the show before. Means the opposite-

• 1:11:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's because it- doesn't it lob off the last part of the phrase?

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the "Blood of the..." I forget now. It was like, "The blood of the Christ is thicker than the water of the womb," or something. And it means the opposite of what people use it to mean now. It means that your dedication to your religion is stronger than your familial ties, where people now use it to mean that your familial ties are the strongest.

• 1:11:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  "The blood is thicker than water."

• 1:11:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  It was flipped in its meaning. Yeah, interesting.

• 1:11:43Cara Santa Maria?

  But I feel like we do that a lot, where we shorten the phrase, and the phrase... I've seen a few other examples of this, where there's a long phrase with a moral at the end, but when we shorten it, we only focus on the first sentence, which is actually the opposite of the point.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Like, "The proof is in the pudding."

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  "The proof is in the pudding."

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  I mean, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Or, this is my... one of my big peas, when people say, "I could care less."

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:12:06Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  And we've talked about that.

• 1:12:07Bob Novella?

  You can?

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Bob Novella?

  So you care more... so you care more?

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  No, "I couldn't care less." "I care so little, I couldn't possibly care even less." But people, they shorten it, because we tend to shorten things, but that... it flips the meaning when you shorten it.

• 1:12:20Bob Novella?

  That's annoying. That's annoying, yeah. Everyone out there, just stop that one.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  Say, "I couldn't..." Add the "and." "I couldn't care less," please. Okay.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  Guys, we have a great interview coming up with Kevin Folta, so let's go on with that interview now.

• 1:12:51Speaker 02

  Well, we are joined now by Kevin Folta. Kevin, welcome back to the SGU.

• 1:12:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, thank you. It's really nice to be here again.

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's been a while, and it's always good to interview people in person, you know, so we could look face to face and have a discussion, rather than over the interwebs. So I've been dying to talk to you about a topic, about a new technique that we've been talking about just very, very briefly, about that plant biologists are using to make new cultivars. You know what I'm talking about.

• 1:13:15Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, this was the work that was done. We've mentioned this briefly with Judd Ward and the folks. I can't remember the name of the company now. But the newest, it's a new technique that is involving doubling the genetic material inside of a cell. So basically creating a, not just the old polyploids, but actually creating hybrids from hybrids. So allowing complete genetic sets being to pass down. So you're not getting genetic mixing in each generation.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  So yeah, so if you make a hybrid, then you can have those hybrid traits breed through to subsequent generations.

• 1:13:46Speaker 06

  That's right. You have it breed through going forward.

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, because right now you can't do that with a hybrid.

• 1:13:51Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  This is something that we, that I know we bring up when we're talking about GMOs. And we should probably remind our audience, you are a plant biologist and tell us, tell, give us.

• 1:14:00Speaker 06

  Well, I'm a molecular biologist by training. I ended up working in plants and we do a lot of work in genomics, mostly around flavors and aromas. But other, other major plant traits that are involved in, traits that are important for farmers.

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  You're still a strawberry guy, though.

• 1:14:14Speaker 06

  Not so much. I'm out of strawberries now.

• 1:14:17Speaker 02

  You don't have strawberries? No, because I wanted to get my new strawberries from you.

• 1:14:20Cara Santa Maria?

  I tried those strawberries, like on camera once with you.

• 1:14:24Speaker 06

  That's right. That's right. We did. We did. And all those strawberries went in the autoclave, unfortunately. We created a fungus resistant strawberry and we, but the industry wouldn't use it. So it's gone now.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  So Kevin, you selectively bred these strawberries, right? Just correct me when I'm wrong.

• 1:14:40Speaker 06

  Well, you're wrong. That's why, that's why I asked you. Go ahead. Yeah, these were a variety that already existed that we added a gene that would prime its immune system. So even before a pathogen came along, it was ready to confront the pathogen.

• 1:14:54Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:14:54Speaker 06

  So, and it was awesome because they didn't get as sick. You could, they would recover from disease. It was great. And as we know, fungicide or strawberries are fungicide dependent crops. And so it allowed us to potentially make something that would help the industry farm with fewer fungicides, which is great for the environment, great for farmers. But there was a lukewarm feeling in the industry about it. So.

• 1:15:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Because it was GM?

• 1:15:17Speaker 06

  Because it was genetically.

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, really?

• 1:15:20Cara Santa Maria?

  What, what, where the gene, was it a synthetic insertion? Was it something? From another organism.

• 1:15:25Speaker 06

  It was a plant gene in a plant. So it was a plant was from a Rabidopsis and.

• 1:15:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Cotton? No, that's not cotton.

• 1:15:30Speaker 06

  Rabidopsis is the little white lab mouse.

• 1:15:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, yes, yes. The lab mouse of plants.

• 1:15:34Speaker 06

  Of plants, right. And so we put that in and it seemed to prime. It did great. The strawberry did wonderfully. But it did have a yield hit. So in other words, you were resistant to disease, but you had a slight dip in yield. And between that and the genetic engineering trait, they weren't so excited.

• 1:15:50Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so interesting because a slight dip in yield, yes, I could see on paper that would be frightening to a farmer. But when all of your crop gets taken by fungus, that's a big dip in yield. So I guess they're willing to roll the dice.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  Long term, it might be positive.

• 1:16:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  But wait, way more importantly, they were delicious. And people need to, you know, people I think would be very responsive to it if they knew how good they were.

• 1:16:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, but the base, that comes from the base hybrid. The basic strawberry was so good that, you know, you add one more gene, you couldn't taste it.

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:21Speaker 06

  It just purely was in the management. It was allowing farmers to use less chemistry, which is really expensive to apply.

• 1:16:27Speaker 02

  All right. So why, you might not know this answer, but why would we still get these supermarket strawberries that don't have a lot of flavor? Like, why aren't they just starting to grow these, even, even without the gene editing?

• 1:16:38Speaker 06

  But that's changing. And it's because over the last decade, my lab spent a lot of time identifying the genes that control the traits that consumers really like. So we identified, we interviewed consumers, having them taste strawberries. And they tasted hundreds of different kinds of strawberries. And then we went through and did principal component analysis. So we took a strawberry, exploded it into its chemistry and then said, which ones always line up with consumer liking? And there was always a list of 12 that consumers really liked, you know, that when the consumers liked it, one of those 12 or multiples of those 12 was available. So then we found the genes that underlie those 12 volatile aroma traits. And then, uh, once we had those genes nailed down, identified markers associated with them, so DNA signatures

• 1:17:21Speaker 06

  that would then, as they were inherited, would allow us to get all of them in one place.

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:26Speaker 06

  So that work is still ongoing by the strawberry breeding program.

• 1:17:29Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's conventional breeding at that point.

• 1:17:31Speaker 06

  Conventional breeding.

• 1:17:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you're not actually turning those genes on. You're just finding cultivars that already have them and breeding them together.

• 1:17:36Speaker 06

  That's right. And the cool part is, is this is all done in a seedling. In the old days, we used to have to put out 10 acres of strawberries and taste them and run them through gas chromatography to find the ones that had it. Now you take 384 seedlings in a Petri dish, basically, do the assay, and then throw away the ones that don't have the markers. So this work is still ongoing at the University of Florida, and I'm a little bit separate from it these days.

• 1:18:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Can I ask a quick question? Like with this example, now that we have that kind of in our minds of how that works, could you just like CRISPR those things on?

• 1:18:08Speaker 06

  Now that's more possible, yes.

• 1:18:09Cara Santa Maria?

  And would that then be considered, obviously it is genetic engineering, but would it be considered genetically modified organism?

• 1:18:16Speaker 06

  That would be only if we left around the hardware that did the edit. So if you had Cas9, if you had the enzyme that does the little scissors trick. If that enzyme was engineered in to do the work, then it would be one thing. But there's a lot of plants where you can engineer a single cell with CRISPR and do it in a single cell with the protein itself rather than have to install the gene. So in other words, you just put in the hardware rather than have the cell make the hardware.

• 1:18:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh my gosh, this is so annoying that you have to worry about this.

• 1:18:45Speaker 06

  Totally. But then you have that one cell, and sometimes you can get that in the two cells, five cells, 10 cells, whatever. And then eventually having a whole plant in that one cell. That one's foreign DNA free. Yet it contains the edit you're looking for. That one is not a regulated article by the USDA.

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  It's genetically engineered but not genetically modified in the US, is that correct?

• 1:19:03Speaker 06

  Well, it's not a, as the USDA says, it's not a regulated article.

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the bottom line.

• 1:19:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it just goes to show that, yeah, the fundamental choices that are made in legislation around this are so divorced from the science. Yeah.

• 1:19:18Speaker 02

  I mean, people that, you know, have this perception that if they eat a genetically modified organism, that's going to do something to them. To their DNA. To their DNA and everything. And again, it's misinformation. It's disinformation. It's big industry. There's motivations behind all this stuff. I want to get back to the hybrids, right? So just as we were saying, that when you hybrid two plants together, the daughter plants have a certain mix of genes. That whatever is a good, is a good crop. But if you take those seeds and breed them together, you end up with a mix of genes. That might not be what you want. So, and now before GMOs came out, like 95, 98% of crop seeds were hybrids.

• 1:19:57Speaker 06

  Oh, still are.

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's still on. It's like they can't be, you can't save your seeds and replant them. Which is like an annoying thing about the whole anti-GMO thing. You can't save seeds. You never could. You could never do that with the hybrids. But now what you're saying is you can make a cultivar where the hybrid traits do go through to subsequent generations. Because, so is that like in the seeds now? Or is that you still have to do it every, every generation?

• 1:20:19Speaker 06

  It is a, once you have the first plant, there's a process that you basically break meiosis, right? So the, the segregation of alleles during, or of genetic complements during segregation of gametes. I know I gotta straighten that out.

• 1:20:33Cara Santa Maria?

  He's talking about sex, y'all.

• 1:20:35Speaker 06

  When you're making the, you're making the pollen and the egg cells. You, you make sure that that doesn't reduce its gametes. It doesn't go down with half the genetic complement.

• 1:20:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:20:43Speaker 06

  It passes the whole thing in one of the two.

• 1:20:46Cara Santa Maria?

  So you're turning meiosis into mitosis?

• 1:20:48Speaker 06

  You're basically turning meiosis into mitosis.

• 1:20:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Interesting.

• 1:20:50Speaker 06

  And that's passing down its, its genetic material.

• 1:20:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, so instead of reduction, division, you're just dividing the cells. Yeah, okay.

• 1:20:58Speaker 06

  And one of them gets the entire complement of the hybrid. The other one gets nothing.

• 1:21:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, so quick question, just to interject. When, when a hybrid, in the before times, like you were talking about, which is still the now times. When a hybrid would breed with a hybrid, you might, it's like Punnett squares, right? Then you might get traits that were undesirable. But are they always even viable? Like, cause I'm thinking about animal biology, which is where I come from. And sometimes hybrids can't breed.

• 1:21:23Speaker 06

  Right, that's true.

• 1:21:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Does that happen in plants as well?

• 1:21:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's, there are examples where plants produce infertile offspring.

• 1:21:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Interesting.

• 1:21:29Speaker 06

  But that's usually a functional polypleidy. So if you can, so like a seedless watermelon is a combination of one that has four times the genetic material bred against one that has the normal complement. And it comes out with 3X. And then so that's where you get seedlessness.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's deliberate to make it seedless.

• 1:21:45Speaker 06

  That's deliberate, yeah. So you have to have the right female flowers in the field and the right male flowers.

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, cool stuff.

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  So Kevin, there's a question that I've been wanting to ask. For a long time, I've been saying on the show a lot, you know, like everything we eat, all the food, all the meats, all this stuff, it's all been selectively bred, right? And some of it has been genetically engineered. So we have this limited spectrum of different types of fruits and vegetables and meats and everything. But I'm curious to know, like, how broad could this flavor profile be? Like, could there be a million more brand new fruits that don't taste like anything we've ever tasted before? That just haven't been created yet?

• 1:22:20Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Yeah, there's so much volatile diversity out there. And what you're looking at is a combination of two different things. There's the volatiles that are out there, which are the major things that shape flavor, along with acids and sugars and other aspects, where the tongue and the olfactory system collide in the brain, right? With all the different things it's sensing. But there's so many unusual volatiles that are out there, and we find things all the time. But also things that disrupt your ability to perceive them. So things like miracle fruit. You can eat a miracle fruit and then not be able to, and then when you taste acid, it tastes sweet. So there's, it's a weird sensory combination that's very interesting.

• 1:22:58Speaker 02

  So to visualize it, this might be a hard thing to answer, but like, we have like these little, you know, along the horizon, we have like a pineapple and watermelon, blah, blah, blah. But there, I mean, literally, there could be like millions of fruit flavors that we've never tasted before.

• 1:23:13Speaker 06

  Well, there, well, maybe you've tasted them, but you don't know you did. Because what's happening in a strawberry, there are very small hints of the major flavor of peach and the major flavor of grape. And you have to think of it like an orchestra. All these things contribute just a tiny little bit that's barely perceptible, unless you really know what you're looking for. But we can use gas chromatography and other analytical methods, analytical chemistry methods, to be able to detect them. And consumers notice when they're not there, even if they don't know why.

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  So maybe we could think about this in two ways. One is, if you have all the fruity flavors that we could taste, right? Then a fruit is some combination of those flavors, some subset, and some are more powerful than others. So, yes, strawberry has peach in it, but a peach has a lot of peach in it.

• 1:23:57Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  But there are also potentially, like, you talk about the chemical space, you know, like, is there a space of? Flavors that nature hasn't necessarily fully explored all of those flavors and maybe there is more room for even new flavors that we've never tasted before.

• 1:24:11Speaker 06

  New volatiles.

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, can we even know about that?

• 1:24:14Speaker 06

  That's interesting. I think there probably are. I think if you start going into especially floral aromas where you're attracting pollinators and unusual pollinators, where you attract the enemies of herbivores, so you have plants that are being fed or are being fed upon, and then the plant will exude volatiles to attract the predator of the thing that's feeding on it.

• 1:24:36Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:24:37Speaker 06

  Kind of calls in the troops. But all these things may have some sort of flavor response in us, but we just haven't integrated them into fruits and vegetables. You know, there's the volatile om is expensive.

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  Right, yeah, right, exactly. There may be flavors in plants that are delicious, but the plants are poisonous to humans.

• 1:24:57Speaker 06

  Could be.

• 1:24:58Speaker 02

  So we could maybe make a non-poisonous version of them or get their genes into stuff we can eat.

• 1:25:03Speaker 06

  Absolutely. And all kinds of other interesting stuff, not just, you know, not just flavors and aromas. Look at like Sichuan pop peppercorns that have that numbing effect. There's so many interesting sensory aspects of plant biology. And I wish I still played in that field. I've really kind of moved out of it a bunch, just because now it's in the hands of the breeders. Now they got to put it all together.

• 1:25:23Bob Novella?

  It reminds me, I was reading an article about medieval food and what it tasted like. And the flavor profiles that they enjoyed, if modern people had that, they would be like, what did I just eat? That was horrible. But it is making me think in the future, that people of our future, our descendants, might think, might feel bad for us, because then like, can you imagine they had such, so few things to eat, so few fruits, and they're enjoying, they have this cornucopia of tastes and flavors and volatiles that we just can't even imagine right now. And you're just like, they would think of us as like- I think people are also- -these poor people that had horrible food.

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  Tainted, people are can be tainted by these artificial flavors that are out there. They think they know what a strawberry tastes like because they taste enough artificial strawberry. They don't really know what a strawberry really is supposed to taste like.

• 1:26:07Speaker 03

  Or bananas.

• 1:26:08Cara Santa Maria?

  But isn't isn't so much a food science, understanding the basic interests of the consumer. And consumers like fat, they like sugar, they like things that historically, evolutionarily were rare. And if we can make healthy food taste that way, then we can have the best of both worlds and I'm down for that.

• 1:26:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, that was one of the big issues was could you find volatiles that replaced sweetness? And and you can, that's been some work by Linda Bardaschuk at our in our institution, a guy named Thomas Calhoun. They were looking at the flavor volatiles that made people sense sweetness in the absence of sugar.

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:26:46Speaker 06

  And so you would take two glasses of water, put in a tablespoon of sugar and mix it. In one of them, you would add some of these fruity volatiles and people would say the one with the volatiles was sweeter.

• 1:26:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Smart.

• 1:26:56Speaker 06

  Even if they couldn't perceive the volatiles.

• 1:26:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  But it's it's incredible when you think of like, you know, someone who enjoys cooking a lot of Italian food, right? You know, onions and garlic, you know, these are like the basis of so many different things in that, right? And then like you can go to India now and like the the basis of their flavors, there's a lot of curries, which are constructed flavors anyway, right? Like, the complexity is so broad that could you imagine if there was like another 50 culture versions of food? That we just have no idea what it tastes like, but it's partly because we don't have the vegetables in the in the big, the beginnings to start those all those completely different types of foods that could be out there, you know? I I just love that because I just think, like Bob said, in the future, people might have access to this stuff.

• 1:27:40Speaker 02

  They might be able to genetically engineer something like just by talking to an AI and then grow it and be like, oh, my God, I made a new frickin' fruit. Never had no one's ever tasted this before.

• 1:27:49Cara Santa Maria?

  That's cool, yeah.

• 1:27:50Speaker 03

  Are they using AI in this development?

• 1:27:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, they are using this and mostly that's happening with the breeders now. That's not anything, my lab is working on the opposite of AI. We we we decided why everyone's going AI, we're just going to go to kind of ignorant randomness. And so what we decided to do, this is the coolest new. Science. We were taking, um, we always wanted to take an organism and just put random DNA in it. And see what comes from it.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  And what do you mean by random DNA?

• 1:28:15Speaker 06

  Random DNA.

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  Random genes or like literally random?

• 1:28:18Speaker 06

  A random sequence.

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  So it's not even a gene?

• 1:28:20Speaker 06

  It's not even a gene.

• 1:28:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:21Speaker 06

  It never, it encodes a protein product, a peptide that has never existed in the universe before.

• 1:28:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so instead of sort of having a hypothesis and going top down theoretically, you're just like going bottom up and going, what happens if we just mix this stuff up?

• 1:28:35Speaker 02

  You're just throwing a whole bunch of shit against the wall.

• 1:28:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, see what sticks.

• 1:28:38Speaker 06

  I always liken it to throwing monkey wrenches into the machine.

• 1:28:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:41Speaker 06

  That you're standing next to this elaborate machine, throwing monkey wrenches in. Most of the time they don't do anything.

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:46Speaker 06

  But once in a while, one sticks in the gears. And so this is the coolest thing that we've been doing because we've been showing in bacteria as well as plants. That we can identify new vulnerabilities for lethality. By using random peptides. And the random peptides stick in either, um, in different places that, or the random RNAs suppress RNA that's required for certain developmental transitions. And so why this is so cool is because we're not going to create a new herbicide or a new antibiotic by creating a peptide or a mimic of that peptide. But what we will expose is a new vulnerability we didn't know about before. And then have smart people who design molecules make something that fits that vulnerability.

• 1:29:25Speaker 02

  Is this like a new kind of mutation farming where again, you're just trying to make random shit happen to see what, if anything good comes of it?

• 1:29:30Speaker 06

  It's, I think it's even weirder.

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  It's even weirder.

• 1:29:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is, this is just, this is pure, just, and you have to have huge populations to be able to do this. But still with large populations, we find that lethality in about 5%, which is pretty amazing. It's much higher than we would have predicted.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  What plants are you doing this in?

• 1:29:48Speaker 06

  We're doing this in a rabidopsis, which is the laboratory plant. But it also works in bacteria that we can disrupt very well characterized bacterial processes.

• 1:29:56Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 1:29:56Speaker 06

  Um, with, uh, with randomness.

• 1:29:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. How, how do you feel the GMO attitudes are out there in the country? How, have we made any progress or are things getting better or are they? We, do we just stop talking about it? What's going on?

• 1:30:08Speaker 06

  We have absolutely made progress.

• 1:30:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Speaker 06

  And, and, uh, I, I teach classes now on, uh, I teach a class on critical thinking in agriculture and medicine. Designed this course and it's so much fun. And we talk about all the different ways in which we are deceived, deceived ourselves, cognitive bias, statistical deception, all the things like that that you guys talk about every week. It's fantastic. We talk about alternative medicine, then we talk about genetic engineering. And now when I talk about GMOs, everybody kind of glazes over. Nobody cares.

• 1:30:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:36Speaker 06

  None of the students are thinking it's a threat or a problem. There's no problem to solve in that room. But then it turns into how do we solve the problem that's still out there in the public?

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:46Speaker 06

  And how do I deputize this room of thirty students to engage their skeptical friends? And how do I get them to engage online, in social media where this stuff runs rampant? And how do we do it effectively? And so that's where I've really just taken such a turn away from biology science into much more sociology and psychology and understand how we can be better persuaders.

• 1:31:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:09Speaker 06

  And then I think that's been just the magic in the last ten years.

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Obviously, this is what we do, like thinking very carefully about how do we persuade the people individually, the general population, you know, the people who matter and sort of like regulators and whatnot. And it's tricky and each topic is different, but I think, yeah, the GMOs, I also think that we've been moving the needle on that. I do think because this topic is amenable to information. You know, and there was just, we are just combating misinformation and it's very correctable. I also think, and this is just now just my gut feeling, is that a lot of the pushback against GMOs, the anti-GMO attitude, was just an unfamiliarity with the technology and just a disgust kind of reaction to it. I think, this is my hope, my thought and my hope,

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  that much like IVF in vitro fertilization, remember the test tube babies and all the protests and everything? And now nobody cares, right? I'm just hoping that the same thing is going to happen, like genetic engineering, everything is genetically engineered, who cares, right? Do you think that we're heading in that direction?

• 1:32:10Speaker 06

  I agree a hundred percent. I also think there's a lot of disaster fatigue.

• 1:32:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:14Speaker 06

  That we've been told, well, you know, you're going to get lumpy and, you know, things are going to fall off and all the problems that we're going to have, never materialized.

• 1:32:21Speaker 02

  Never happened, yeah.

• 1:32:22Speaker 06

  And I think that has a big role in that too. And so now when we can remind people of what they said, of what the opponents said.

• 1:32:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:32:29Speaker 06

  And then we can show the progress of where it's going and we can show all the beautiful things that we could be doing. That people do change their minds.

• 1:32:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:37Speaker 06

  And you can kind of persuade.

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:39Speaker 06

  There still is a rather vigorous anti-GMO movement out there that if you look for it, you can find it.

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, no question.

• 1:32:45Speaker 06

  But it's all, it's, uh, it is changing and the big, the big problem is, is that so many of the really good innovations that we have still haven't hit the road.

• 1:32:54Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:32:54Speaker 06

  And, uh, that rubber hasn't hit the road.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:57Speaker 06

  And so all the, you know, we don't have golden rice yet, you know, uh, we don't have the, we, the bananas, the soybeans, uh, all the other stuff that can solve vitamin A deficiency.

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  When they're so close.

• 1:33:07Cara Santa Maria?

  But also it's like when, when the solutions are, feel like they're happening in the background to solve ever increasing prob- problems. Like, oh, here's a solution to solve a blight that you never would have even known was there because we got out in front of it before it devastated the crop. People don't recognize all of the progress. They only recognize the progress when there's like a fundamental or radical change. And so I think that's always a problem is that in science, so much of what we have to do is to try to prevent devastation. And then people don't recognize that we prevented the devastation.

• 1:33:39Speaker 02

  If we stopped COVID from happening, nobody would know about it.

• 1:33:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  That's my job as a producer.

• 1:33:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  If you do your job well, nobody knows that you did it or that it was hard.

• 1:33:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  So I think that's, that's crazy.

• 1:33:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:50Speaker 02

  I, and I, I agree with you and I, I think, you know, we were in a situation where we fight hard, many fronts. And GMOs are like, you know, I think it's ironic when, um, you know, there was, what was it, Steve? Was it papaya or was it? Papaya in Hawaii. When Hawaii had a papaya blight, they just were like, we're gonna, we're gonna plant the GMOs and we're just not gonna talk about it. Quietly ignore the papaya industry because otherwise the Biden should go. Right. It's that, I liked that, that example. I also used the cheese example. Yes. There would be no cheese industry without GMO Rennet. Like, forget about it. But, but you know what I think though? I think the big one is gonna be chocolate. Yeah. Because there's, there is a, there is a cow blight. Yeah. Right? You know this? If GMOs save chocolate, then we've won.

• 1:34:32Speaker 02

  No, but that's what I'm saying. No, I know. It's funny. It's funny, but I really do think like, imagine if like chocolate went away. For a little while, they'll go, we could bring it back. We have GMO, we'll bring it back. You'll have it in six months. Well, that's like the American chestnut tree, you know. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I agree. I do think like the like the anti-GMO crowd like panicking a little bit about golden rice and some of these applications. Because I think they know that like if we solve on a vitamin A deficiency or make a huge improvement with a GMO food that breaks all of their propaganda. It's not patented. It's not controlled by Monsanto or some big corporation. It's free to farmers. They can plant their own seeds, whatever. None of your your boogeyman is true and it's going to receive in blankets.

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  You know, it's like a perfect PR, you know, super storm pro GMO and, you know, against the the whole anti GMO narrative. That way, Steve, you're right. They're panicking about. That's why they're so desperate for it not to come to market.

• 1:35:28Cara Santa Maria?

  It would also help, I think, a lot of the people who are on the fence or who are confused, understand the difference between genetically modified organisms and corporate practices.

• 1:35:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:35:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Because very often they conflate the two.

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  Yep. A hundred percent.

• 1:35:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:43Speaker 02

  Almost always what I'm talking to is skeptic who's anti-GMO. It's that's the reason there.

• 1:35:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Corporate stuff that they're upset about.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  It's really, I don't think corporations should have that much power. Well, they already do.

• 1:35:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and also like, that's not what we're talking about.

• 1:35:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what we're talking about.

• 1:35:54Speaker 03

  Is the anti-GMO lobby waning?

• 1:35:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think so, especially because gene editing has been so democratizing. So going back to this CRISPR-Cas9, the ability to change a letter or two, that's been, that technology has been very in the hands of universities and small companies. And it's just is a different field. Small governments can do it. Everybody can do it. And with that kind of ability, it really changes the dynamic of who can bring a, who can bring a product to market. The traditional transgenic approach, what we usually think about as genetically modified. The fact that it was so regulated and that people pushed for more regulation meant that only a couple of companies had the ability to navigate that.

• 1:36:36Speaker 02

  It was like three or four companies, right, that were putting out all the GMOs?

• 1:36:38Speaker 06

  And and those three or four companies said, you know what? Make the process harder.

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:42Speaker 06

  Make it harder, because if you make that process harder, it gives us exclusive. ...in that space. And so the anti-GMO folks who are out there who said, "We hate these companies," were doing nothing more than empowering the companies they hate.

• 1:36:54Cara Santa Maria?

  That's hilarious. Yeah, that these companies were like, "Yeah, keep it up, guys."

• 1:36:59Speaker 06

  And they were, too.

• 1:37:00Cara Santa Maria?

  "We love your protest."

• 1:37:01Speaker 02

  They were. They're actually really doing the devil's work. Yeah, regulate the hell out of it, right? Because then nobody can compete with us, right? Yeah. Anything else you want us to talk about that we didn't get to?

• 1:37:09Speaker 06

  No, I think that's pretty much it. The one thing that it may be to mention is, people do need to be participating in these conversations still, and that it's not a dead issue.

• 1:37:18Speaker 02

  We can't get complacent. Never, because it'll come right back.

• 1:37:21Speaker 06

  It has the possibility to come back. And now they're fighting things like appeal, you know, this coating that you put on fruit to make it last longer, saying that it's Bill Gates poison, you know?

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  Poor Bill Gates.

• 1:37:32Speaker 06

  I know. I never give away billions of dollars, you know? So, but all of these things are still, um, still being discussed, but the bottom line is, is they limit how technology can reach the poorest people on the planet. The affluent are not missing meals.

• 1:37:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:37:48Speaker 06

  And so being active in this and remembering who we're really trying to help here, and making food last longer, make it taste better, all that stuff, that's what we have to be doing. We've got to keep on it.

• 1:37:58Speaker 02

  Well, thank you for your service.

• 1:37:59Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:38:00Speaker 02

  We appreciate it. Kevin, doing the good work.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:38:16Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is US trivia. Just randomoid facts about the US.

• 1:38:34Speaker 03

  Random.

• 1:38:35Speaker 02

  All right, here we go. Kansas is not only the flattest state in the US, it is literally flatter than a pancake, with a flatness score of 0.9997.

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  All right, number two, the coastline of Alaska is longer than the coastlines of all the other 49 states combined. And I number three, the first telephone directory in the world was published in New Haven, Connecticut in 1878. The names were not alphabetized and there were no phone numbers included. Evan, go first.

• 1:39:07Speaker 03

  Well, Kansas, yes, that's the name of a star, according to a movie I once watched, Wizard of Oz, anyone? No. Literally flatter than a pancake. Wow, that's flat. That's pretty flat. Although, well, I didn't even know there was this thing called a flatness score, frankly. Even in these flat, flat states, you know, you are gonna have some elevation differences, right? So, saying it's flatter than a pancake, I have no, really can't say. The coastline of Alaska, number two, longer than the coastlines of all the other 49 states combined. Okay, so, thing you gotta remember about Alaska, Alaska's big. It is the largest state for area.

• 1:39:51Speaker 03

  And also Alaska's got all these little islands among so many other things, so, and that coastline is a, kind of a jagged maze, so could it be, could it be longer than the rest of all the coastlines? I think it could be. I have a feeling that one's gonna wind up being science. And the last one about the first telephone directory in New Haven, Connecticut, not far from here, 1878. Names were not alphabetized and there were no phone numbers included. I have a feeling that one is also science. Therefore, I'm dubious about the whole pancake, flatness, Kansas thing. That one, I think, is fiction.

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:40:30Bob Novella?

  All right, Kansas, not the flattest state. Oh, it is, it is the flattest. Yeah, I could see it being flatter than a pancake. I mean, pancakes generally are a little domed, you know, because just the nature of how you just spread it, it just glop it on, and then it spreads, right? It's got a viscosity, it spreads, and, you know, it's, the middle's never gonna spread quite as much as the outer edges. It just seems to me that, that's not that big of a deal. The, the Alaska one, that's tough. I assume that when comparing the coastline of Alaska and the rest of the United States, that they use the same fractal dimension for all of that, those measurements? I'm just, I'll make that, I'll make that assumption.

• 1:41:06Speaker 02

  We will make that assumption.

• 1:41:07Bob Novella?

  You have to, because then you could say, you could say Florida has more coastline than every other country on the planet. If you, if you mess around with your fractal dimensions. Thinking about it, it seems like it would be close, but I think there's kind of like lots of little ins and outs of Alaska. So it might, it might sneak by and actually be a little bit long. I don't think it's, I don't think it's by a dramatic amount, but so that would mean this last, I don't know what to make of this stupid. So it's a phone directory, not in alphabetical order. And oh yeah, it doesn't have phone numbers. What the hell? Why? Then, then it's not, then it's not a phone directory, telephone directory. I don't know what you would call it, but not a telephone directory. So I don't know what the hell's going on with that. I'm just going to say Alaska fiction.

• 1:41:48Speaker 02

  Okay, Jay. Yeah. So going backwards, I mean, I, I, Steve, you live close to New Haven, you know, we both do. I never heard of this, but you know, this is one of those news items where I'm like, I don't see any reason why, you know, the first telephone directory wasn't published in New Haven. Okay. I mean, there's nothing really there that's making me go, hey, you know? Now let's keep in mind about item number two here, that Alaska is freaking huge. And most of the times that you see a picture of it, it isn't relative size, not the actual size compared to the other things on the map.

• 1:42:17Bob Novella?

  That's true. The Mercator projection will expand.

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

  You know, it's got tons and tons of jigs and jags and islands and blah, blah, blah, you know, it just like adds up. So I, you know, I think that's probably true. I mean, I can't imagine, I can imagine easily that it has more coastline just because of all the shapes, you know? You look down California, you know, relatively straight, look down the east coast, relatively straight. You know, Alaska's just got so much busy going on. So that leaves me to the first one here. I wonder if they took into account the, the curvature of the earth when they said how flat Kansas is. But it could be in like a basin, I guess. Um, and I have no reason to not believe that it's wicked flat. I don't know about the number that Steve said, but I do not think that Kansas is the flattest state. I just don't think it is. I have reasons to believe this and I will say that this one is.

• 1:43:06Speaker 02

  Fiction. And Kara.

• 1:43:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I gotta go with, is that just Jay or is that Jay and Evan? I gotta go with Jay and Evan on this because I seem to remember living in Florida and Florida being really damn flat, like really flat. And I don't know, maybe Kansas is flatter, but I bet you Florida gives it a run for its money. I buy the Alaska one. I think we have to remember that also a lot of the US is actually landlocked. So like, we're not just coastline all the way around. I'm with Bob on the whole, like, why is it called a telephone directory? But my assumption is 1878. Did they not have phone numbers? Was it like telegrams or something? What was before phones? Telegraphs?

• 1:43:45Bob Novella?

  Smoke.

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  Telegraph.

• 1:43:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it was a smoke signal directory.

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  Telegraph.

• 1:43:48Cara Santa Maria?

  So maybe it's something like that and they just called it that. I don't know. But I think I'm gonna go with Evan and Jay and say that Kansas is not the flattest state in the US. I have no idea if it's flatter than a pancake, though.

• 1:43:57Speaker 02

  All right, so you all agree on the third one, so we'll start there. The first telephone directory in the world was published in New Haven, Connecticut in 1878. The names were not alphabetized and there were no phone numbers included. You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. And yes, the telephone directory was a telephone directory, not some other kind of directory that they just called a telephone directory. Do you know why there were no phone numbers listed?

• 1:44:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Because operators.

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  Only like eight names or something.

• 1:44:25Speaker 02

  There were no phone numbers.

• 1:44:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you would just call the operator.

• 1:44:26Speaker 02

  Phone numbers did not exist. Yeah, you would call up and say.

• 1:44:29Speaker 03

  You would just pick up a handle and talk to the connector.

• 1:44:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, give me Joe Bag of Donuts and then the operator would know who he was and would literally just connect you to the person.

• 1:44:40Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  Guess how many names were included?

• 1:44:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh.

• 1:44:44Speaker 03

  I think it was like eight or nine.

• 1:44:46Cara Santa Maria?

  150.

• 1:44:47Speaker 02

  Fifty, fifty.

• 1:44:48Speaker 03

  Fifty?

• 1:44:48Speaker 02

  Five zero. Yeah, so that was just all the businesses and people who had phones in the New Haven area.

• 1:44:55Speaker 03

  Not many.

• 1:44:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you had, you know, you'd call the switchboards, they'd connect me to this person. And then, you know, a few years later, when they had more people, they said, you know, we should probably put these names in alphabetical order. And why don't we just assign numbers to them in case we have somebody, like, you know, there's an operator who's covering, who doesn't know everyone's name. You know, like, that was the next step. And then that's where phone numbers were invented. But yeah, first one in New Haven, Connecticut.

• 1:45:19Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 1:45:20Speaker 02

  All right, I guess we'll go backwards. The coastline of Alaska is longer than the coastlines of all the other 49 states combined. Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is science. This is science. Sorry, Bob.

• 1:45:34Bob Novella?

  So what about the Mercator distortion? You that right? Cause, cause if you, if you look at a, if you look at a map, flat map.

• 1:45:40Speaker 03

  If you, yeah.

• 1:45:41Bob Novella?

  Alaska is not that big.

• 1:45:43Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's still pretty damn big.

• 1:45:45Speaker 02

  It's not as big as it looks on the Mercator projection, but it's still big. But it is really because of what some of you said, it's got so many jigs and jags and islands that it just, and there's like that, that one huge, you know, panhandle, I think at the, like the whisker thing at the bottom of Alaska. It's just, if you look at it, it's a lot of coastline. The rest of the US has a lot of coastline too, but it doesn't get up to quite as much as Alaska.

• 1:46:11Bob Novella?

  What's the, what's the ratio?

• 1:46:12Speaker 02

  Well, Alaska has 34,000 miles of coastline officially. The next, what's the next most coastline?

• 1:46:20Speaker 03

  Hawaii?

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  Which state?

• 1:46:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, Hawaii, maybe California, Florida.

• 1:46:24Speaker 02

  It's Florida, which has like 8,000, it's not even close. Yeah.

• 1:46:28Speaker 03

  That's for states.

• 1:46:29Bob Novella?

  What's the total though of the states?

• 1:46:30Speaker 02

  Less than 34,000. I don't know.

• 1:46:33Bob Novella?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:46:34Speaker 03

  Less, huh?

• 1:46:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's less than that. Yeah, I think it's by a lot, like it's not even close. So yeah, because it's because of how crazy the Alaska coastline is. As Jay said, like the west coast is pretty straight. The east coast is mostly straight, then you get Florida and then it's straight again. Okay, let's go back to number one. Kansas is not only the flattest state in the US, it is literally flatter than a pancake with a flatten score of 0.9997. That of course is the fiction. The flattest state, Kara, is Florida.

• 1:47:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah, no way.

• 1:47:07Speaker 02

  Now, the other way to designate flattest, you could do a calculation of the difference between the highest point and the lowest point compared to its area, right? I mean, Evan, you have to imagine a pancake the size of a state. It would have a massive mountain in the middle. You know what I mean? Like it would be, it would be a massive difference between the height. But anyway, what do you think is the second flattest state? After Florida.

• 1:47:33Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm assuming not Kansas.

• 1:47:34Speaker 03

  The second flattest state.

• 1:47:36Speaker 02

  Kentucky.

• 1:47:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Really?

• 1:47:37Speaker 02

  Then Delaware, Louisiana, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Missouri, Minnesota, New Jersey, Connecticut, Alabama, Arkansas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and then Kansas. It's like right in the middle of the pack.

• 1:47:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:47:51Speaker 03

  Wow, like it's the middle of the country, middle of the...

• 1:47:53Speaker 02

  All it needs, all it needs is one hill and you, then that screws it up, screws you over. So, the other way to designate it is just the difference between the high point and the low point, right? So for Florida, it's 345 feet. That's it. That's the difference between the highest point and the lowest point in Florida. Kentucky's close, 388. Delaware's 450. Delaware's pretty flat as well.

• 1:48:13Speaker 03

  I knew that fact about Florida. I would not have guessed Kentucky as number two.

• 1:48:17Speaker 02

  Kansas is 3,363. It's not anywhere near as flat as Florida, but it just has that reputation of being just like a big cornfield, you know, it's just a flat state. But it, but it is flat on the pancake. That part is true. All right. Well, good job, guys. Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:48:33Speaker 03

  There is only one thing worse than coming home from the lab to a sink full of dirty dishes, and that's not going to the lab at all. That's a wonderful quote by Sheng Xing Wu, experimental physicist. She is considered the first, she was considered the first lady of physics, the Chinese Madame Curie, and the queen of nuclear research.

• 1:48:56Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 1:48:57Speaker 03

  A very impressive resume she has. She should have won a Nobel Prize in Physics. She was part of a team that did win the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics with two other Chinese researchers, but the men got the credit and she did not. So, again, another injustice that should have been, should not have gone down that way. Should not have happened that way.

• 1:49:23Speaker 02

  All right. Well, thank you, Evan.

• 1:49:25Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:49:25Speaker 02

  And thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:49:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:49:27Speaker 03

  You got it, brother. Thank you, Steve.

• 1:49:29Speaker 02

  And happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

• 1:49:31Speaker 03

  Happy Thanksgiving. Be safe out there, please.

• 1:49:34Speaker 02

  Next episode will be, will come out after Thanksgiving, and that'll be the episode we recorded while we were at SciCon.

• 1:49:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:49:40Speaker 02

  Yep. So, and then we'll be back with a new episode in two weeks. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 1:49:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:50:28Speaker 00

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.