The Skeptics Guide #1110 - Oct 17 2026

Flu Season; News Items: Future Forests, Carbon Nanotube Product, Rethinking Normal, Smart Clothing; Who's That Noisy; Name That Logical Fallacy; Your Questions and E-mails: Lab Leak Theory; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

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

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, October 15th, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:18Bob Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  And Jay Novella.

• 0:21Jay Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  So have all of you guys gotten your flu vaccines?

• 0:26Jay Novella?

  Not yet.

• 0:26Cara Santa Maria?

  I have.

• 0:27Jay Novella?

  I keep saying I'm gonna go, but I gotta wait till like Monday now.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Why? Just go.

• 0:31Jay Novella?

  No, because I have my sister and brother-in-law and their kids are out. From hearing from Josh say how she was like knocked out for two days, like I can't.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  No, she got COVID. That wasn't just the flu vaccine.

• 0:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's, yeah. I got COVID flu and my last HPV at the same time, which I think I already had, but it wasn't showing up in the registry, so I got another one, just to be safe.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, flu's nothing.

• 0:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, flu is, yeah, you might have like a slightly sore arm, but I don't think you'll feel any side effects.

• 0:55Bob Novella?

  I got flu and COVID when sitting, and I barely noticed it this time around, but that's unpredictable.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  It's a little weird.

• 1:02Jay Novella?

  How was it for you, Steve?

• 1:02Cara Santa Maria?

  I got sick from the, from the COVID shot this go around, which is weird because it had been a long time since I, I'd say the last three, four boosters I didn't really have an effect from, but this go around, the new variant, I guess, was.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like viral and achy for two days.

• 1:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Same, same. It was about a day, but it happened to be a day I was traveling and I was like, oh, God, this sucks.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  So this year, they're, they're saying that the flu's hitting early, especially in the western part of the US.

• 1:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  So they're really recommending you get vaccinated before the end of October.

• 1:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think when they, when they tested the samples in late September, it was about a sevenfold increase over normal positive hits for this time of year.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  And it looks like it's a good match this year. So the, now all flu vaccines are trivalent, right? You're getting three strains. This year, they're covering H1N1 and H3N2 strains. Those seem to be the ones that are out and about, so hopefully it'll be a good match. And did you guys know that there's now an mRNA flu vaccine available from Moderna?

• 2:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 2:06Jay Novella?

  Oh, wow. So is it performing better?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  The manufacturing speed is two to three months versus six to eight months for the traditional vaccine.

• 2:14Bob Novella?

  Oh, that's huge.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  See, that's huge. That's, no, that's way you're, they're able to.

• 2:18Bob Novella?

  Respond.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  To, yeah, to match the, the strains better because it's less of a delay, right? Otherwise, you're guessing what strains are gonna be going around six to eight months in the future. This vaccine is, Jay, it's supposed to be 26.6% more effective than traditional flu vaccines.

• 2:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  And it's egg-free, so if you have an egg allergy, you can't, so for people who can't take the egg-based vaccines, it's good. But there, so far, it's for people 50 years old and older only, just because they're ramping it up still and they're reserving it for the people who would benefit the most. Yeah.

• 2:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And don't forget, too, that if you are an older adult, you also have the option to get a high-dose shot. There are shots that have adjuvants in them. You do, yeah. I don't think I am eligible and/or need it, but.

• 2:59Bob Novella?

  A high-dose shot, really?

• 3:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:01Bob Novella?

  Is for the flu or COVID?

• 3:03Speaker 01

  For flu.

• 3:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Flu.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  And the other thing is, there's good evidence that if you get the flu vaccine every year, you do build up cumulative immunity.

• 3:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Because even though there are different variants, the, the variants are still related, they're still similar. And so if you, like, every year you get a flu vaccine, just over time, you know, you just get more resistant to the flu in general. So it's not bad to build that up before you do get old and are more vulnerable to things like the flu.

• 3:30Cara Santa Maria?

  It's still influenza. It's like COVID. COVID's the same way, right? Like, it doesn't completely fade within the course of a year.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:36Cara Santa Maria?

  It's just not as effective.

• 3:38Jay Novella?

  And Steve, it's, you know, a good refresher, like, how deadly is the flu and COVID?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, both are similar in that the people who are most vulnerable are people who are already sick or have chronic illness, people who are elderly or young children, right? Those are always the target populations. And, you know, I mean, traditionally, the flu can kill a lot of people every year.

• 4:01Bob Novella?

  I'm seeing 300,000 to 650,000 respiratory-related deaths worldwide each year from seasonal influenza. Damn, man.

• 4:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Get this, get this, a billion infections worldwide, three to five million are severe, which means like there's already a risk there. So it's not just about the flu can kill you, the flu can hospitalize you, the flu can severely dehydrate you, the flu can exacerbate other illnesses that you have and cause all sorts of nasty downstream effects.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  So for the, for example, 2024, 2025 flu season, the CDC estimated 45,000 deaths in the US.

• 4:40Cara Santa Maria?

  That's just the US, yeah. And it's about, it's about 10, 10-fold across the world.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  That's not insignificant. I mean, this is, this is, this is very significant.

• 4:48Bob Novella?

  That's, that's in, in range of, you know, annual traffic deaths in this country as well. Yeah, greater.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and it's, it's preventable.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, again, the, the flu shot is not always 100% efficacious, but still, the, there are massive benefits to getting a flu shot. It dramatically reduces your risk.

• 5:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. I mean, the odds go, go way down. And, and the truth of the matter is, even if we're not talking about death or severe disability, it sucks to have the flu.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's terrible.

• 5:19Bob Novella?

  That's what I hear.

• 5:20Cara Santa Maria?

  I think a lot of people, when they're like, eh, I had a flu, it wasn't so bad, that wasn't the flu.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  The flu, that was a cold.

• 5:24Cara Santa Maria?

  That was a cold.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  The flu is not a cold. The flu is way more severe.

• 5:30Bob Novella?

  Jay, Steve, how many times have you guys had the flu?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  I think I've only had it like once.

• 5:35Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I'm similar. Like, I, I can't remember ever having it, so I'm pretty, pretty lucky with that, I guess.

• 5:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Well, it's not like I get the vaccine every year for the last whatever, my entire adult life.

• 5:44Bob Novella?

  I went, I went quite a few years where it wasn't even on my radar, mainly because, I guess, because I never really got it, but.

• 5:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah, that false sense of security.

• 5:52Bob Novella?

  Right? But I got, I'm getting it now. I mean, I've been getting it for many years now, but.

• 5:56Cara Santa Maria?

  I had it in college once, and I was so sick, you guys. Like, my roommate had to drag me to the student health clinic. I was so dehydrated. They were like grappling with whether they needed to take me to the ER to give me an IV.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:12Cara Santa Maria?

  It was bad.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, Mark Chrislip, who's our infectious disease guy, he said, "You know you're having the flu if you feel like you want to cough up a lung." Like, it's not, it's not a cold, it's the flu, right?

• 6:25Cara Santa Maria?

  And for me, it's like, it's the malaise. Like, your bones hurt. It's so bad.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So get your flu shot. All right, let's go right into the news items. Jay, tell us about the forests of the future.

• 6:39Jay Novella?

  Well, that's putting a nice spin on it, Steve. It sounds, yeah, like these are robotic trees.

• 6:44Bob Novella?

  First thing I thought.

• 6:45Jay Novella?

  So we, everybody knows about global warming here, right? I can, I can speak openly about it now.

• 6:51Cara Santa Maria?

  You gotta skip over that part, yeah.

• 6:51Jay Novella?

  Yeah. So, you know, we have global warming and there's lots of wildfires, you know, like, they happen.

• 6:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, we're on red alert right now in, in LA County because of the winds, so, oof.

• 7:03Jay Novella?

  California and Colorado, you know, they're, they're happening and they're frequent. So the question is, what do we do with those forests after, you know, a lot of it burns down? And in some places, you know, the trees that historically have thrived in that area, right where the forest is, you know, they might not survive if we just simply plant, you know, saplings again because of global warming, because, you know, the temperature, global temperature's changing and, you know, lots of things are affecting the ability for, for trees to grow in a place that they historically just were doing it for a very long time. So what do we do? This is a big problem. And scientists are now, you know, they're aware of it and they're actively investigating, you know, what can be done?

• 7:45Jay Novella?

  What are the, what are the right steps to take here? So there's a group in Colorado that have been taking this very seriously and they're looking at the American West region. What, what happens is that forests recover from a fire, right? You know, under normal circumstances, you know, the new seedlings would grow. It's funny, I've heard many, many times accounts of saying that, you know, after the burn and everything, yeah, it's terrible and a lot of animals get displaced and all that, but, you know, the forest can bounce back pretty quick. But that's not really what's happening everywhere anymore. You know, the world is definitely changing and it's gonna be serious, right? You know, trees obviously play a big role in carbon sequestering and with the amount of oxygen

• 8:28Jay Novella?

  that's available. So we, we have to really figure this one out and I think we should be doing it as quickly as possible. Now, some of these fires that happened there are so unbelievably intense because of just how much stuff is burning that they'll kill all of like the trees that are nearby that didn't even catch on fire just from the heat, right? The trees can just get permanently damaged, but most of the trees burned down, they're gone. And then, you know, they, there's always places to get seeds, even if most of the forests burnt down, they typically can find seeds for replanting. Now, with the hotter and drier conditions, you know, this is making the fires more aggressive, and it's also making it much harder for young trees to survive in the region that they typically are growing in.

• 9:12Jay Novella?

  So in 2018, there was a study published in Ecology Letters, and the researchers examined about 1,500 sites affected by 52 wildfires in the Rocky Mountains. That's a lot of wildfires to happen just in that region. They found that forests were having, you know, pretty much a miserable time trying to regenerate after these more recent fires, and particularly in areas that had already been experiencing dry conditions, either through global warming or whatever, but it's from global warming, right? Scientists are now experimenting with something called assisted migration. So you guys probably can guess what this is, right?

• 9:51Speaker 01

  You gotta plant the right trees in the right location.

• 9:54Jay Novella?

  Yeah, Steve, you're so smart.

• 9:55Bob Novella?

  I thought they were gonna like genetically engineer tree legs.

• 9:59Jay Novella?

  So they can get up and walk, Bob?

• 10:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Or wings, so they can fly south.

• 10:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah, wings, that's good, too.

• 10:04Jay Novella?

  I think it would just be easier to plant other types of trees, and, you know.

• 10:07Bob Novella?

  But not cooler.

• 10:08Jay Novella?

  So anyway, the idea, like I said, is simple here. Instead of replanting the trees that were in the forest from the local area, they're using seeds from trees that have already adapted to warmer climates. And this sounds like a no-brainer, like, oh, yeah, why don't we just do that? Sure, but it is a little bit more complicated than that. So let me give you a quick examples, example here. We have trees growing at lower elevations, and these are generally, you know, they experience warmer temperatures because of the, you know, they're lower in the atmosphere. So seeds from those trees might be better suited for the higher temperature, the higher temperatures that are coming. Would they thrive at a higher elevation in the future? The answer is yes and no. So we're trying to grow forests that can survive the climate of the future, the one

• 10:51Jay Novella?

  that, you know, will be here, not the climate that we have today, but they want to future-proof it, so they're predicting what the weather will be, and they'll plant things that'll be able to handle 1, 2 degrees, whatever, whatever it is. And, you know, the goal would be to try to create or recreate the forest that used to be there. But the scientists at Colorado State University, they're testing this idea by planting thousands of seedlings in areas that burned during Colorado's 2020 wildfires. But the complications are that the trees adapted to warmer temperatures seem to struggle with colder winters and different soil, or a change in how much water is available. And I think the soil one is particularly difficult.

• 11:36Jay Novella?

  But what are they gonna do with the hectares of property here that would need to be changed somehow so the trees would be able to live there? It's just, they can't do that. But there is some good evidence that they found, things that would encourage more investigation into this. In 2024, there was a study published in Forest Ecology and Management. Did you guys know that there's a magazine that's based on forest ecology and management?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  There's a magazine for everything.

• 12:01Cara Santa Maria?

  There's probably multiple magazines based on that.

• 12:04Bob Novella?

  But far fewer magazines than there used to be, man.

• 12:06Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but these are like trade magazines, you know, like, and the world is filled with these. So the researchers examined 5,600 seedlings that they planted after nine different Colorado wildfires. Now, about 80% survived their first growing season. And the interesting part here were the seedlings that were grown from seeds collected at lower elevations, these typically survive better when planted at the higher elevations. And so right on its face there, like, we're seeing that a tree that normally would have, you know, wanted to grow under different properties is now growing in a higher elevation because it is giving those environmental properties. So there is absolutely a success story here, but the devil is in the details, because now

• 12:50Jay Novella?

  they have to do a lot more research to figure out very specifically, first of all, you know, are the soils compatible, and what seedlings from where would actually work with the local soil here? And then they have to extrapolate into the future and say, what will the temperature be in the future? What will the relative humidity be in the future? And what will the soil do with the changes of temperature and humidity? How will it change, and will these trees be able to survive the future, like, maybe 30 or 40 years from now? So they're doing it, and this assisted migration seems to be a big player, or, you know, important tool, that will be used for restoring forests. You know, the goal isn't just to replace the trees, right? We want to have thriving forests, you know, for all the reasons I listed before.

• 13:35Jay Novella?

  And, you know, going on into the future, I would imagine that they might have to make these adjustments, assisted migration adjustments, like, many times, right? Because if the temperatures continue to go up, and, you know, we don't know exactly how high things are gonna go, or what it's gonna do to global weather, they might do a change, and then 30 years later, they might have to start planting yet again different seedlings. And I think, Bob, you know, you said it, I can't imagine that they're not gonna genetically modify trees to specifically be able to handle what environments that they're gonna, that we want them to grow in. Now, the thing that bothers me is things like this that seem so important, you know, this is a, you know, pay it forward scenario, right?

• 14:16Jay Novella?

  It just seems like funding and, you know, the level of importance and immediacy isn't there for things that are going to protect us in the future, that'll pay off a generate, say, a half a generation or a generation from now. But these are the things that we need to do in order to, you know, continue to maintain the level of health on the planet, meaning, you know, oxygen levels and getting rid of as much carbon as we possibly can. And they're not doing it. And, you know, we're not seeing a big rush to the door by all the major governments in the world that are in charge of a lot of the land around the world to do things like this.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  So Jay, I've been following this issue actually for a long time, and it's always seemed to me that the big issue from what I read is the water levels, because it's not just the temperature and the soil and everything, but the amount of water might be the key limiting factor here. So, right, just because of global warming, even the forest fires aside, the zone where forests dominates over grassland, which is all determined by water availability, is actually shifting and shrinking, which, of course, would be a huge problem. That would exacerbate global warming, right? Basically, fewer trees, fewer tree land, you know, there are a significant carbon sink. So the forced migration, you know, is one way to try to maintain the same area by, because

• 15:35Speaker 01

  the trees don't migrate fast enough naturally to really keep up with the rate of change in the climate.

• 15:42Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  So that's why we kind of have to do it ourselves. And the thing is, I don't know that we'll need genetic engineering, it'd be great if that would help. I don't know that we need it, because there are so many different varieties available in different, you know, adapted to different climates, that we have the tree, the tree types to do it, the tree varieties, we just need the program to do this, to plant them in the right areas.

• 16:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but I mean, think about the downstream effects, Steve, of if we didn't genetically engineer specific tree species to withstand change more quickly, however that looks, right? Salinity, whatever, then, and we only relied on this migration, whole swaths of the ecosystem would probably die out, because the animals couldn't keep up with the movement.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree.

• 16:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Just because a tree thrives in this area doesn't mean that the animal that's adapted to it will.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  I agree. The point is, we don't have to wait for genetic engineering. There's a lot we can do right now.

• 16:38Cara Santa Maria?

  All of that should be happening at the same time.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  But there's something else genetic engineering can do as well, and that is adapt plants, not just trees, but other plants, to the higher CO2 content. Because they can't, you know, the higher CO2 can be an advantage for plants, but they need to be adapted to take advantage of the higher CO2, and they're not. And again, it takes time for evolution to fix that problem itself. So with genetic, they already are working on genetically engineering plants to take advantage of higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere to sort of mitigate the downsides of the warming itself. So anyway, so, yeah, I think, as I said, genetic engineering is great, and then we should definitely see how we could leverage that.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  But in the meantime, just using existing cultivars, the existing plant species, we can regenerate these forests. The thing is, after a forest fire, it's very common for the forest to bounce back pretty quickly. In fact, there are lots of tree species that thrive after a forest fire, but that's not happening. Like, the normal bounce back in a lot of these areas that have been ravaged by forest fires.

• 17:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, also, the forest fires themselves are not normal.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, they're more extensive.

• 17:50Cara Santa Maria?

  They're so destructive.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  But it's, part of it is that the trees are no longer optimally adapted to that climate, right?

• 17:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  The trees that are already, I mean, it's one thing if you're already in established forest, but if you're not, growing from seedlings is, or from seeds, is hard if you're not well-adapted.

• 18:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and that's sort of like, the thing that makes trees so incredible is also, sadly, one of their biggest vulnerabilities, and that's just that it's slow. Trees are slow compared to a lot of other organisms.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  All right, thanks, Jay. So, Bob, I know you have been following this along with me, the promise of carbon nanofibers. When are we gonna have an application? With macroscopic nano fibers, like long cables of carbon nanotubes.

• 18:42Bob Novella?

  When?

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:44Bob Novella?

  Yeah, 20 years. Oh, it's always 20 years, 30. I don't know, man. Unless there's a really promising advance I haven't quite seen yet. It just seems like it's never, it's like never gonna be here.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  How about now?

• 18:56Bob Novella?

  Well, talk to me first.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  All right. So there is a company that is producing, this is a Rice University spinoff. You know, if you make a big enough innovation in a lab for something that's, you know, commercializable, oftentimes they spin off a private company. So the company is Dexmat, and they have a product called Galvorn, which is a carbon nanotube fiber. We've been, so carbon nanotubes, to back up a little bit. This is based upon, you know, the carbon nano sheets, which is essentially, you know, think of chicken wire with each, you know, each of the nexuses being a carbon atom, right? And then their, their carbon atoms are arranged in that chicken wire pattern, right?

• 19:40Bob Novella?

  You just roll them up, right?

• 19:42Speaker 01

  And it's a two dimensional material. It's one molecule thick. Yeah, and if you roll it up, if you have a sheet of it, it's a, it's a carbon nano sheet. If you roll it up into a tube, it's a, it's a carbon nano tube. And if you weave that into a fiber, it's a carbon nano fiber. So this is, so we're talking about a CNT or carbon nanotube fiber. What are the advantages of this material? Well, it's, it's extremely strong, first of all.

• 20:08Bob Novella?

  Carbon, baby.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Yes, and you can do what's called doping, which means you just include other elements in the structure of the carbon nano fibers that can give them different properties. So the, a lot of the research that's been happening over the last 10 plus years has been figuring out how to make these carbon nano fibers so that they have good thermal properties or good electrical properties, though they're an insulator or a conductor or a semiconductor or whatever, to specific purposes. But there's been a huge problem with, you know, translating this to actual industrial products, meaning products that you can produce economically at scale.

• 20:50Bob Novella?

  Consistently, yep.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  And, and what's the problem there?

• 20:54Bob Novella?

  The fibers just, are there, the quality of the fibers is one.

• 20:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Consistency?

• 20:59Bob Novella?

  One problem is consistency. As I said, yeah, getting super consistent is one, was one of the issues.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yes, and length.

• 21:06Bob Novella?

  And length, just getting it up, yeah.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  This is one of those situations where length does matter. So the applications that we've been seeing for the, for the carbon nano fibers is basically what we call carbon nano fiber soot, which is just a collection of short strands. And you can add that to other material, like cement or whatever, in order to make it stronger or give it, you know, desirable properties. But no one has been able to, on a commercial scale, right? Been able to make long carbon nano fibers. You could do it in a lab at great expense, but not on a scalable, commercially viable scale, right?

• 21:49Cara Santa Maria?

  And is it because they just fall apart?

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Well, just how, how do you, how do you build the long, long, long, long fibers, you know? So this is the, this is the innovation of the company. This is the technology that spun off the company. They figured out how to mass produce it at scale. And how do you think they do it?

• 22:07Bob Novella?

  They, they take all the short pieces and get some crazy glue, kind of sticking together.

• 22:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I guess I don't understand what the difficulty is, so it would be hard for me to answer how they do it.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  It's just difficult to do it at scale, right? You could make a little bit of it.

• 22:21Cara Santa Maria?

  But I don't know why it's difficult to do it at scale. So if I knew that, I would probably know how they solve the problem. Because I don't know what the problem is.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I'll tell you what the problem, I'll tell you what the solution was. The solution was a wet solution fiber spinning process. That basically, they spin them using spinnerets like a spider making spider silk.

• 22:39Bob Novella?

  Yeah, baby.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  But it's very similar to the process that's already being used to make Kevlar, which is good, because you already sort of have an infrastructure built on it, around a similar technology.

• 22:51Bob Novella?

  I'm sure it's fairly mature at this point for Kevlar.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  So the company has built a pilot scale but commercial factory, and they were able to increase the productivity of this material 3,000 times. So they could produce it 3,000 times faster than they were able to. And they reduced the costs of production by 99.5%. So this is your classic economy of scale, right? So they went to a pilot scale commercial factory. Now they could mass produce this stuff cheaply. And of course, they, they've planned on going to full commercial, you know, scale factories as well. So now you could basically have a spool of, and as long as you want, cable of this carbon nano fiber, carbon nanotube fiber,

• 23:38Speaker 01

  and it has a host of very interesting properties, which I looked into just to, because you know, whenever you read the information provided by the company itself, it's.

• 23:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, it can like cure cancer, it can do everything.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's always the best foot forward. And they, they don't really give you a real honest look at it. So they, here are the claims that they're making for it. Claim one is that it's 15 times stronger than steel and half the weight of aluminum.

• 24:03Bob Novella?

  Well, stronger than steel, how?

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Bob was gonna hit on that immediately. So whenever you hear that, whenever you hear somebody claim that their material is quote unquote, "stronger than steel," I almost guarantee you that they're talking about specific strength, which is the strength to weight ratio, not absolute strength, right? It's not absolutely stronger than steel. But if you, if it's, but the strength to weight is 15 times that of steel, because it's a lot lighter than steel. As I say, it, so that's, so that at face value, it's true. It's 15 times stronger than steel, specific strength, and it's half the weight of aluminum. But because it's so light is why the specific strength is so high, right? But, but for many applications, specific strength is what counts, right?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Because you could always make things stronger just by making it thicker or whatever. But if you, if you're like building a drone, you, you need to achieve the strength that you need with the lightest weight possible. And so specific strength is exactly what you want. Okay, they also claimed that it has the conductivity of copper.

• 25:08Cara Santa Maria?

  That's right, copper.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  So this is doped, it is doped with material that, that gives it conductivity, because normally just straight pure carbon nanotubes would, would be not a good conductor. So that claim is true but misleading, and it's misleading in a very interesting way. Any guess, Bob?

• 25:28Bob Novella?

  If you're gonna be misleading, at least make it interesting.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  So it has the conductivity of copper by weight, but not by volume. It only has one-sixth the conductivity of copper by volume. So that would mean.

• 25:43Bob Novella?

  You'd need a thick wire, then.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  You would need a cable that had six times the cross sectional area to carry, carry the same amount of electricity as copper. But it would be about the same weight.

• 25:52Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Because it's a lot lighter than copper. So to begin, it depends on your application. That, that's fine for some applications, but for ones where, where, where the space that you have is of, is at a premium, it might not work, right? So they, they kind of left that part out of their, you know, their page, their splashy page selling the, the product. That really depends on application. They said it has a very good thermal expansion profile, meaning it doesn't change that much in volume with temperature. And that is true. It has very little thermal expansion. So that thermal expansion is a huge problem for things like power lines, right?

• 26:35Speaker 01

  That's why they sag in the summer, or they sag when you're putting a lot of juice through them. And then they tighten up when they're colder. And that can cause power lines, for example, to, to sag down and then touch a tree branch and catch on fire, you know? So reduced, you know, a good thermal expansion profile, very good property for a product like this to have. And then they say it's 1,000 times as flexible as copper wire, and this also appears to be true. And it kind of makes sense, because it's a fiber and copper's a metal. So maybe it's not a fair comparison, but because they could have similar uses, it is fair. So it is more like Kevlar than copper, right? So good thermal expansion, you know, conductivity, depending on whether you, you know,

• 27:19Speaker 01

  size or weight is more important, good specific strength, good flexibility. So based upon that, what do you think are the low hanging fruit applications for this type of product?

• 27:32Bob Novella?

  If it can conduct electricity, so obviously they could use it to power things.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Okay, so there's something else I didn't tell you about, which was also not apparent on, on the website. There's a significant limitation to which use as a conductive material. At 100 degrees Celsius, the doping material that makes it conductive bakes off, which, which permanently destroys the conductivity of the wire.

• 27:58Cara Santa Maria?

  So they have to keep it cold.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  So it has an absolute temperature limit. It's gotta be significantly less than 100 degrees Celsius.

• 28:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Telephone wires, you know, routinely heat up to more than 100 degrees C, power lines. And in fact, they've specifically manufactured heat tolerant conducting wires, you know, more the, the high technology wires, so that they can heat up more, so that you can force more electricity through them, right? So, but interestingly, one of the early applications is going to be in reconductoring, in replacement high tech power lines. So why is that?

• 28:38Bob Novella?

  Oh yeah, we've talked about that, yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  But it has this limitation on temperature. So ironically, it's go, it is being used now, or at least that's the plan, to use it in electrical wire for, for power lines, just not as the conducting part of the wire. So basically, you think of it this way. This wire, this, this fiber has two properties that can be used. One is it's strong, and the other is that it's a conductor. So in, for power lines, ironically, it would be used for its strength, not its conducting property.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  So right now, the sort of the modern power lines have a core of steel and that is used for strength. And then it's surrounded by aluminum, which does the conducting. So this, the Galvorn, the, there's this carbon nanotube fiber would replace the steel at the core for strength, not replace the aluminum for conduction. And you can get the same strength with 20% reduction in weight. So that is where the specific strength, you know, is, is important.

• 29:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, so it doesn't get that hot when it's just near something that's conducting electricity?

• 29:51Speaker 01

  It's not conducting.

• 29:52Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, but it's next to something.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter. You can destroy the conducting ability. It doesn't matter. It's not conducting.

• 29:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, it only destroys the conducting ability. So it can get hot, is what you're saying.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  It doesn't destroy its strength. It just destroys its conducting ability.

• 30:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  So it doesn't matter if you're not using it for conduction in the first place.

• 30:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, then they shouldn't even add the thing that makes it conductive.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I don't know.

• 30:15Cara Santa Maria?

  It seems like a waste of engineering.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  They have two different manufacturing processes, one with and one without the doping. But I couldn't find that piece of information. It makes sense. You're right. It makes, but it might not make sense if it's just easier just to just make the one kind. And it doesn't matter if it gets baked out in the application.

• 30:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Or if you need that baking for something else in the manufacturing process.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so this is probably going to be used for reconductoring, replacing steel in the core of advanced wires. And that, that reduction in weight is critical because that affects how much you have to reinforce the towers that hold up these cables, right? So it could significantly reduce the cost of having to replace a power lines. So that's good. That's great. What's another, what's another, I already kind of gave a hint as to another likely use.

• 31:05Bob Novella?

  Well, I mean, in terms of strength and light and lightweight, I mean, cars, aircraft, spacecraft, aerospace, wind turbines, all of that.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Aerospace. Yeah, yeah.

• 31:13Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Is sort of the next one where they're, they're targeting as an industry that will benefit from this. As I said, you knock a few pounds off a drone and you've extended its range, right? So in, for the, for aerospace, it could be used not only as a structural material, but also as a conducting material, again, as long as it's not in a context where it's going to get too hot, right? As long as you can keep it cool enough, it could also be, so for electronics in drones or in aerospace or whatever. And then of course, as Bob said, in non-aerospace electronics, so like electric vehicles, where weight is still an issue, maybe not as critical as aerospace, but it's still nice to have something that's both strong and conductive and flexible is nice, right? So there's that suite of properties.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  So those are sort of the three industries that they're targeting.

• 32:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, what was the third one?

• 32:03Speaker 01

  So, so aerospace, power lines and non-aerospace electronics.

• 32:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, and non-aerospace. What about just like?

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Like electric vehicles.

• 32:12Cara Santa Maria?

  What about like building infrastructure?

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. As just a regular building material, it's kind of, it's probably a little high tech for that, you know, in terms of costs.

• 32:21Cara Santa Maria?

  But I could see it being really an interesting like dual use in like a, like in a high tech office building or, you know, because it can be conductive in the walls. There may be a way to keep it cool enough. I don't know.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Maybe what, you know, as they scale this up and they pick off all the low hanging fruit, they may expand into other industries as well. Because yeah, having a light, strong material has so many different uses.

• 32:43Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  As long as you can produce enough of it. And as they scale up, the cost will continue to come down.

• 32:48Bob Novella?

  What about high pressure storage, like hydrogen storage?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:51Bob Novella?

  That doesn't fit into those categories, I don't think.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  You could think endlessly of applications for this kind of material.

• 32:55Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. But let's talk about the elephant in the room, shall we?

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Which is?

• 32:59Bob Novella?

  Go ahead, Bob. Which is, how much, I don't think it brings us all the way, but how much closer does this bring us potentially for a space elevator on Earth?

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Not even close.

• 33:08Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Not, I'm not surprised because it's basically, it doesn't look, it doesn't look very feasible at all for Earth, but for other smaller planets, you know?

• 33:18Cara Santa Maria?

  But I'm sure somebody's already writing about that.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I haven't seen a specific analysis, but I just know from, because we've looked at these numbers multiple times, that is, this is not even close. So this is the first application for a macroscopic scale carbon nanotube product. This is, this is a clear milestone.

• 33:38Bob Novella?

  This is huge, guys.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  It's huge.

• 33:39Bob Novella?

  This is really big.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  This is big. And

• 33:41Bob Novella?

  Definitely.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  I looked into this as well. This is also version 1.0. So now that you have, you know, you have a commercial product, you can mass produce it, that could, this could spin off all kinds of varieties that have other features, right? That might be more thermally insulating or conducting, whatever you need, like in terms of properties. Or maybe they could make a version that can, that's, that is heat tolerant up to higher temperatures and still retain its conducting ability. So now just incremental advances from here will further and further expand the potential applications of this. I also love the fact that it's basically carbon, right? And so this is, I don't know if, how significantly this will sequester carbon, but if it's a big,

• 34:26Speaker 01

  becomes a big enough industry, right? You're better, you're better off making, if we're going to reconductor all of the grid in the United States, I'd rather be putting carbon in them than steel, right? Steel, which produces, releases carbon in the process of making it, rather than sequestering carbon. Now, but Bob, if there was one thing you can add to this, one physical property that you could add to this cable.

• 34:50Bob Novella?

  Superconducting.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Superconducting, of course.

• 34:52Bob Novella?

  Of course.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  If

• 34:53Bob Novella?

  But that's impossible, right?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  No, it's not impossible. There are actually theoretical pathways. There are theoretical pathways to make something like this product, this carbon nanotube cable, superconducting.

• 35:07Bob Novella?

  At temperature and pressure, I assume.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so depending on what, you know, again, it's always at what temperature, you know, superconducting at sort of existing, superconducting temperatures, like liquid nitrogen temperature.

• 35:17Bob Novella?

  That'd be fine.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  That would be great. If we could get this to be superconducting at room temperature, that is technology changing. That is, would be a massive breakthrough, like even orders of magnitude greater than this in and of itself.

• 35:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's just like, Steve and I would start crying.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  But, but making this kind of, you know, a flexible, strong, conducting, you know, superconducting cable, even at like liquid nitrogen temperatures, also would be massive for lots of, lots of things, you know?

• 35:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, Steve, can I just say that I legit hate the word reconductoring?

• 35:55Speaker 01

  I know. I'm not, I'm not a fan.

• 35:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Why? Because you can't say it? No, it's just weird. Why isn't it just reconducting?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  But it's the word. It's, I hear you. I hear you. It's weird.

• 36:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Every time I'm like, ugh, ow.

• 36:05Bob Novella?

  Ow, it hurts.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  But that's the term. Okay.

• 36:08Cara Santa Maria?

  It just sounds wrong.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  All right. Kara, tell us about normal. What is normal?

• 36:16Cara Santa Maria?

  I, I love this topic and I'm glad that when I sent this to you, Steve, you were like, we have to talk about this because this is something that's like very near and dear to me as well. So this is something I come across a lot. So I'm going to give a little bit of personal perspective and I'm sure that you'll do the same. So I work in a cancer center as a psychologist, which means that I am not a physician. I do not diagnose anything other than mental health issues. I do not prescribe medication and it is not within my purview to interpret tests. That said, I am often carrying the burden of holding space and sitting with patients while they are struggling to make sense of their health outside of the doctor's office. It's like they have what they can see in their chart, what they have access to on, on

• 37:01Cara Santa Maria?

  the patient reading side. They have the conversations they had with their doctor, what they can remember and what made sense to them. And then we're working together to navigate what questions should we ask? What strategy should we take moving forward? And it can be really, really hard in lots of scenarios, but one very specific scenario, and this is again, on the patient facing side, but we're going to talk about both. When a patient opens up their portal and, you know, at a large hospital where I work, we have our own proprietary chart software that they can access. And, and because of an act that was passed while Obama was in office, the 21st Century Cures Act, this was way back in 2016, patients do have greater access to healthcare information. It's a double edged sword though.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 37:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Because they can read notes. They can read their doctor's notes. They can see a lot of things that they couldn't see before. And so very often, this is the scenario. A patient has a scan, a patient has a blood draw, a patient has a tissue sample taken and, and sent off to pathology. The results come in prior to anybody ever looking at them, prior to any conversations they have with their doctor. And the patient can see what the radiologist wrote, or they can see what the lab kind of auto identified as normal or abnormal. And you better believe that almost every test under the sun has some sort of cutoff

• 38:27Cara Santa Maria?

  baked into the way that the labs report the results. And at least in the experience of many of the patients I work with, there is a large, red, bold exclamation point when their result is abnormal. Can you imagine the psychological toll that that has on somebody who is dealing with a cancer diagnosis and who is trying to monitor their circulating tumor DNA? Or who is monitoring their liver function due to their biliary cancer, their biliary duct cancer, right? So. These abnormal kind of cutoffs can have really psychologically detrimental effects for the patient.

• 39:10Cara Santa Maria?

  But the other side of the equation that many people may not realize is how much that normal versus abnormal has pretty long-reaching effects on the way that physicians handle medical decision-making. Very often physicians are overtaxed, they're overtired, they have too many patients, they have too little time with those patients, and definitely too little time outside of their patient-facing interactions, when they're charting, when they're coming up with treatment plans and protocols. And it's a big data world. You collect a bunch of blood, you run a bunch of tests, you know that there are certain tests that are relevant to this disease, and you look at the chart and say, okay, these

• 39:54Cara Santa Maria?

  things are normal, these things are abnormal. Based on that, what is my diagnosis? Based on that, what drug should I use? Based on that, what is the treatment plan? So in this piece that was written for The Conversation by Dr. Amiran Badwashvili, that's probably wrong, sorry about that, who is an associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, he writes about this idea of normal versus abnormal. And he and his colleagues have actually done some really interesting research on how to present data to physicians that has a direct effect on their decision-making pathway. So we'll talk about that in a second. They talk about interval likelihood ratios, which is a different way. It's a metric that they can use as opposed to just a straight-up threshold or cutoff.

• 40:39Cara Santa Maria?

  But he talks about three examples, real clinical examples, in which disaster either ensued or was narrowly avoided. In one case, they were looking at something called BNP, which is often an indicator of heart failure, along with other measures. And there was a specific case where a BNP reading was normal. The resident on the unit remembered that sometimes in patients with obesity, a normal BNP could actually still be an indicator of heart failure. So they were like, this is heart failure, these are the things we need to do, it's a slow process. But what was actually happening at that point was something called cardiac tamponade,

• 41:21Cara Santa Maria?

  which is, it's funny, because a lot of people say tamponade, and a lot of Brits say tamponade. And I think that that has moved its way in.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  These things are always regional.

• 41:33Cara Santa Maria?

  They're so regional.

• 41:34Bob Novella?

  I've heard tamponade as well.

• 41:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they're very, very regional. But in cardiac tamponade, tamponade, there's so much fluid around the heart that it can't even pump effectively. And it's really acute, it's dire, it can kill you. And so that was missed with this patient, but luckily it was caught the next day. Other examples that they use have to do with D-dimer, which is a test that's often used to diagnose blood clots, and cholesterol, which has different indications depending on your clinical status. Like, you might be okay with an LDL reading under 100mg/dL, but if you've already had a heart attack or stroke, 75 is probably too high. You have a different cutoff available.

• 42:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Another thing that is not mentioned in this article, and Steve, I think this is probably more, well, it's highly relevant to you and to me in our work, so often in my elderly patients with cancer, their B12 is not tested. And once we see their B12, and it's abysmal, it's like 275 or even 400, which the cutoff, I think the normal cutoff in a lot of tests is around 400 or 450.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Well, it depends on the lab. Like, in our hospital, the actual cutoff was 185.

• 42:54Cara Santa Maria?

  That's great to hear, because I often will see like 400 or maybe 300 as the cutoff. And it'll say "normal" at 285, which by 285, people can have neurological symptoms, they can have peripheral neuropathy, brain fog, confusion, exhaustion. I mean, it's, depending on the patient and depending on the other loads on their bodies, a low B12 can mean something wildly different, and it can explain a lot of symptoms. Also, high B12 can be dangerous. And sometimes the only cutoff is on the low end for some of these tests. And so it looks like it's a normal result, even though it's way too high.

• 43:37Cara Santa Maria?

  So Steve, before I get into this conversation about normal versus abnormal cutoffs as compared to these interval ratios or interval likelihood ratios, I'm curious, your experience teaching other physicians about, I guess, the risk of just looking at a normal versus abnormal.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  I mean, this comes down to just clinical maturity, right? And I've taught not just physicians, but students, interns, residents, fellows, and fellow physicians, the entire spectrum in terms of experience. And, yeah, you can't just think in terms of normal versus abnormal. I think even at the medical student level, like, we are teaching them that. First of all, normal, how do you determine normal? For most things, it's you take two standard deviations, and that's where you draw your line, right? So by definition, 5% of people who are healthy controls will have an abnormal, you'll be out of the normal range, will have abnormal testing.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  So if you do 20 tests on people, you're going to get one abnormal by chance alone.

• 44:44Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's, yeah, that's a function of big data. And to interject really quickly, I don't know if you guys remember, but I had an experience like this when my fitness tracker kept going off and saying I had an abnormal heart rate. I ended up having to get an echocardiogram, I wore a Holter monitor, and her diagnosis was, "Your heart is fast, but it's healthy."

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:05Cara Santa Maria?

  So you can't wear a fitness monitor, because it's just going to freak you out, and there's nothing wrong. I'm just in that group where, on paper, it looks abnormal, but from a health perspective, it's normal for me.

• 45:16Bob Novella?

  What's your baseline beats per minute, then?

• 45:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my resting pulse is probably around 80.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Wow, that's pretty high.

• 45:22Cara Santa Maria?

  It's high, yeah.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not bad, though.

• 45:24Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not uncommon for it to peak over 100 at rest.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100 is the traditional cutoff, but again, suspiciously round number. So the thing is, the normal range, it's more of a guideline than a rule, right? These are all just guidelines. They're just to help sort of orient you.

• 45:44Bob Novella?

  Hard to define reference care.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  For this lab, this is the range, this is our two-standard deviation range. Sometimes the range for some numbers is tied to studies which show, this is the inflection point where you start to see bad things happen, right? Like, blood pressure, diabetes, or whatever.

• 46:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And we have to remember that things like cutoffs are not being updated every six months with the newest available evidence. We would hope that that's happening. But some of these cutoffs are literally based on old studies, of mostly men.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes they're old. That's another issue. Yeah, or, yeah, I know.

• 46:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Mostly white men.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  My pediatric colleagues hate the fact that a lot of the data's in adults rather than kids.

• 46:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  But, when you actually start to think clinically about individual patients, you're looking at their numbers, it's not just the, did they eke over this threshold of what's quote-unquote "normal" or "abnormal"? It is what the actual number is that makes a difference. It is like, is this is low-normal versus high-normal? Or is it just barely abnormal? Or is it in the toilet? Like, these are completely different things. And what I've always tried to reorient people into terms of their thinking is, you have to think about the predictive value. And the predictive value is not a cutoff, right? It is a continuum. And so, right, so like, the more abnormal a number is, or the deeper into the normal

• 47:09Speaker 01

  range, or whatever, it's like, B12's a great example, because I tested that on every patient, and especially my older patients. But basically, if you have a neurological symptom, you need your B12 checked, basically.

• 47:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's the threat, there's the number that the lab says is their cutoff for normal, but then there's a number that is the threshold for, when would I supplement their B12? And that depends on the clinical context as well. But like, I would supplement at 200, or 300, or 400, depending on what their symptoms were and what their age was, et cetera. The cutoff from the lab almost becomes irrelevant at that point.

• 47:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, and it's irrelevant also often when you're not actually looking at baseline measurements, but you're trying to look at progress and trends. And I see this a lot with my cancer patients, where they'll be like, "Oh, my God, it's abnormal." And it's like, "Yeah, but it's way less high than it was before you started treatment." And this is how the body works. I think about a very particular situation in which there was a slow bleed that was caught. And after an infusion, you know, after, or a transfusion, the hemoglobin or the ferritin or whatever they're looking at, is like, really high. But without a transfusion, just catching the bleed, your body doesn't just recover from anemia overnight.

• 48:29Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a slow process of rebuilding. And so I think a lot of times, I had the procedure, "Why isn't it better yet?" It's like, because it takes time.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think for a lot of things in medicine, and it's also not just, it's the whole picture, it's not just one lab value or one number. It's, you know, like, if your B12 is low, okay, but what are your other numbers? Does it show that you're, like, if your B12 is low-normal and you're anemic, that's different than if your B12 is low-normal and you're not anemic, right? If there's no other marker that you're functionally low in B12, and that's an individual assessment. So that's about being a mature clinical decision-maker and understanding how to look at things more predictively and more thoroughly.

• 49:16Cara Santa Maria?

  And also, I think, looking at the data in different ways. And so one thing that the author of this kind of piece, this like, public-facing piece that they wrote in The Conversation, talks about, and I'll keep it brief, is using something called interval likelihood ratios, that kind of look across a range of values and compare them to each other. And that data, and it is actual, like, tangible data that can be presented to decision-makers.

• 49:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Actually does have a dramatic effect. So they did a trial where they had 611 participants. These were physicians and allied health professionals. And they gave them single threshold to like cutoff, you know, numbers within the context of a cutoff and then numbers within the context of an interval likelihood ratio, which is this sort of binary test characteristic. And then, and each of these clinical examples, the numbers were the exact same, like the lab test gave the same number. But, but how they contextualized it changed. And then there was a case vignette with like a quote, correct outcome answer and an incorrect outcome answer. And they found that across these, you know, working physicians, 93.4% made the right decision when they were given

• 50:33Cara Santa Maria?

  interval likelihood ratios compared to 82% who gave the right decision when they were only presented with cutoffs. Because that isn't enough information.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's better, it's a better way to present the information. It also matters, like, how familiar are the physicians with that set of data? Right? When you become familiar enough, you don't care what the numbers, like where the lab puts their cutoff. You've lived these numbers. You know what they mean.

• 50:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's great for specialists. That's great for people who work with very specific illnesses over and over. But like, when you think about primary care physicians, when you think about, you know, general practitioners, like they don't, they can't be an expert about everything.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  You're right. So they do rely more on a simplistic approach, like cutoff values.

• 51:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. And at that point, okay, fine. Here's the cutoff you're above. Let me refer you to hematology.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 51:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. But you know, you know what, Cara? What is really good at looking at lots of data for their predictive value?

• 51:32Cara Santa Maria?

  AI.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  It's a strength, it is, it is an absolute strength of the way that AI's process information. And so that, and sometimes the predictive value of data is surprising to humans because it's not the way our brains really necessarily intuitively work. Like you think, oh, this is, like, there's so many signs of this happening. So yeah, but, you know, even collectively, the predictive value is almost nothing. Just don't be persuaded by that. That's why experience becomes so helpful to physicians. Because you say, because we learn the predictive value by case by case. We build up this repertoire where we say, yeah, whenever I see this, that this is what's happening, right?

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Or like in that tamponade case where somebody, an experienced clinician would be like, yeah, maybe it's heart failure, but I've had cases before where you get fooled because it's actually tamponade. So let's make sure that's not happening. But an AI could also tell you that from looking at the experience in data of thousands or millions of physicians or cases. And that's why it could be such a useful tool in the hands of a clinician.

• 52:40Cara Santa Maria?

  It's also, on the flip side of that, it's also why I know that no time soon will AI fully replace my job. It's helping me a lot now. It's helping me with my charting. But I can tell you, one of the biggest things that it does that I constantly have to correct before I sign my notes or complete my, you know, my charting, is that it cannot tell the difference between when somebody's like, oh, my God, I was so pissed yesterday at my sister. I was gonna kill her. She blah, blah, blah. It's like, do a homicide risk assessment. And it like puts all these red flags.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely. The interpreting information from people.

• 53:15Cara Santa Maria?

  It does not know the difference.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Requires a person. Yeah, absolutely. Bob, tell us about smart clothing.

• 53:22Bob Novella?

  All right, guys, this news item deals with researchers that have created a printable textile that can cool its wearer, detect movement and generate electricity without any external systems or multiple layers. So this is from researchers in the Granger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, paper published in the journal Advanced Science. Similar garments have been attempted in the past and with similar, you know, with similar abilities. But, you know, dealing with cooling and energy harvesting and stuff. But they were, they were typically, or basically invariably complex with many different assembled layers with different functions.

• 54:04Bob Novella?

  Just, just too much, you know, just too many layers, too complicated. This new material brings these multiple functionalities into a single 3D printed textile. And that, that's the real innovation here. The material is zirconium oxide, which is a nano composite. And it's two properties that are, that are most important in this context is it's got a high refractive index, which means it's good at scattering light. And it's got dielectric properties. It is able to accumulate a triboelectric charge. So this is triboelectricity or the triboelectric effect. I wanted to just dive into this just a little bit because you, everyone's familiar with it. But you might not know it from this term anyway, or some of the details.

• 54:49Bob Novella?

  So this is a type of contact electrification. So can you guys give me an example of this triboelectric contact electrification that you've probably done when you were kids many times?

• 55:01Jay Novella?

  Static electricity?

• 55:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah. So like rubbing balloons together, right? That's the iconic, that's the iconic example of this triboelectric effect. When, when you have contact or friction creating an electric charge. Now, see, the idea between this effect is that when two materials touch, electrons move from one surface to the other, right? This is caused by like electron affinities, like how, how strongly they attract electrons. So yes, the balloons are definitely are an example of this. But also friction plays a role here, right? That's why you're rubbing the materials together. Why? The rubbing is not creating the charge. But what happens is that when you rub it together and with this friction, you're increasing that this microscopic surface areas that touch each other. So you're just, you're enhancing the effect.

• 55:46Bob Novella?

  And then the other critical component of this is the actual separation of the materials, right? When, when the surfaces move apart, one surface will have an excess of electrons typically becoming negatively charged, right? And the other surface, the other material loses electrons, becoming positively charged. So that's the triboelectric effect. And that's what, this is what this material can take advantage of. And I'll just throw out, you know, an obvious industrial use here. This effect is utilized in things like xerography. Photocopiers uses this effect totally. So, so to sum that.

• 56:21Cara Santa Maria?

  That's called xerography?

• 56:24Bob Novella?

  That's, yeah.

• 56:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, that makes sense why it would be called Xerox, why they would have chosen that name. But who knew that there was like a

• 56:30Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I don't see that.

• 56:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Technical xerography.

• 56:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I don't hear that. Yeah, you don't come across that word very often. All right. So, so to sum up, this zirconium oxide nano composite with one layer does two things. It scatters light and it accumulates this triboelectric charge that it can put to use. So, all right, so what happens with this material when you're actually going to wear it, you know, if this ever really becomes a product? So the first thing is cooling. Specifically, this is radiative cooling. So this material reflects 96% of incoming solar radiation. So if you're outside, it's going to keep you cool outdoors. This is different than conventional fabrics. Why? Because when you're wearing a conventional fabric, the fabric itself heats up and transfers that heat to the wearer.

• 57:14Bob Novella?

  So, so not good when you're, when you're trying to stay cool. And this material, this nano composite also radiates away the wearer's thermal energy. It has a, let's see, it has a 97% mid-infrared emissivity. So the heat of the wearer radiates away as infrared radiation.

• 57:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so you can wear it at, like, I get hot when I sleep. And I was like, oh, this wouldn't help me, but it would.

• 57:39Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah, it would. So to test this, they tested it outdoors in sunlight, not, not in bed, unfortunately, Cara. And they found that the textile was 3 to 6 degrees Celsius below ambient air temperature. And that does, it might not sound like a lot, but for context, a human can detect 1 degree Celsius or 1.8 degree Fahrenheit. We can detect temperatures, differences in air temperature under normal conditions of that magnitude, 1 degree Celsius. So if it's 3 to 6 degrees cooler than ambient temperature, you're gonna, you're gonna notice it and you're gonna feel definitely a little bit better. Okay, so besides cooling, if you're wearing this, this material can engage in biomechanical energy harvesting, right? Energy harvesting is one of my favorite harvests.

• 58:23Bob Novella?

  It essentially is taking wasted energy and put it to use. And this is where the triboelectricity comes in, right? The triboelectricity is generated by the movement of the person as their body moves against this material. And I need to be clear about this. This is an extremely small amount of electricity that, and it can never do anything like charging your cellphone. That's just not gonna happen. These, these effects are too tiny. But those triboelectric charges can be collected over time and stored in a small capacitor, say, or, or rechargeable battery are probably might be more, more likely. So that harvested energy then, right? So you've got this, this store of harvested energy and that energy can help power a low energy sensor, like a temperature sensor or a motion sensor.

• 59:08Bob Novella?

  And that would probably require, this would be an additional layer or material or electronics that would be, that you'd have to have on you somewhere, either embedded in another layer of clothing or, or somewhere else on your body. So the temperature sensor, if, say, you want to, you collect this, this triboelectric energy charges and, and the temperature sensor can then turn on a separate heating layer to warm you up. So if you're, if you're, if it's getting cold out, it would automatically just start heating you up when it, when it reached, say, a designated temperature. Now, if you use this, this captured, these captured charges for a motion sensor, it could potentially determine how you're moving and how intensely you're moving.

• 59:51Bob Novella?

  It could monitor, for example, your reps at a gym or your posture. If you're, if you're really concerned about your posture, it could determine when your posture is not what you, you know, is not helpful. Or it could detect motions, say, if you're in rehab and it could detect motions that you're doing that are like, nope, these motions are ill-advised. And it could warn you like, hey, don't, don't do in that. It's going to impact your, your rehabilitation, for example. So, so that's kind of what this thing could potentially do. So would you guys think there's going to be any demand for this, say, in the next, you know, say 10, 20 years?

• 1:00:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, of course. But only if it's cheap.

• 1:00:29Bob Novella?

  Yeah, of course, cost and effectiveness will be huge. But if you look ahead to 2050, which is the classic mid-century year that a lot of predictions are based around, the demand for cooling is predicted to increase by 10 times due to, of course, climate change. So there's going to be a big market for things like this. So let me ask you guys some questions here. So regarding cooling systems today, how much of global energy generation is used for cooling systems? What percent?

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a lot.

• 1:01:04Jay Novella?

  A lot, yeah. 20%?

• 1:01:06Bob Novella?

  No, 15%. I hate when you guys do that. It's 15%. Still, that's a lot for global energy generation. For global, it's 15. Other ways you want to ask that question, it definitely would be higher. So then, all right, here's another one then. So cooling systems account for what percentage of global greenhouse gas emissions?

• 1:01:27Cara Santa Maria?

  15%.

• 1:01:28Bob Novella?

  Close, very close. 10%, 10%. So huge. Global greenhouse gas emissions, 10% just for things that cool things off. That's a lot, and it's going to get bigger. So the idea here, obviously, is that if you're going to cool a person, it's much more efficient to do that than an entire living or working space. So just from that, efficiencies are going to be king for things like this. So this is important. So yeah, I think, I hope this takes off. I've been waiting to try such clothing for how long, Steve? How many decades have we been hearing about this stuff? And I have never, the only thing I've used to warm myself, like if it was cold out,

• 1:02:12Bob Novella?

  is that the haunt with those gel packs, those chemical packs that you massage that generates heat? I've never had anything that I wore that actually helped keep me warm or cool me or anything like that. I know you can get things, but it's never happened. It's just not, it's not common. But I think, based on this type of technology, it's going to be much more, much more common in the near future, potentially.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  All right, cool. Thanks, Bob.

• 1:02:37Jay Novella?

  All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time? All right, guys, last week I played this noisy.

• 1:03:01Jay Novella?

  Any guesses, guys?

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it obviously sounds like some kind of steel cable kind of situation.

• 1:03:07Jay Novella?

  Kara, what do you think? I'm curious.

• 1:03:09Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, yeah, it's got like a boy yo-yoing going on with it. A spring, something.

• 1:03:15Jay Novella?

  Okay, yeah. So I got a lot of the similar guesses. So of course, I always pick the first person that writes in with that guess. So a listener named John Sandlin said, "It sounds like hitting a tot guy wire." Right? I guess, I've never heard that term before. Have you guys heard of a guy wire?

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, not guide wire?

• 1:03:39Jay Novella?

  Well, he typed G U Y.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  No, I specifically remember hearing guy wire and thinking, I always thought that was guide wire, but it's guy wire.

• 1:03:47Jay Novella?

  Well, let me look it up. A guy wire, also called a guy cable, stay wire, or down guy, is a tension cable attached to a tall, freestanding structure and anchored to the ground to provide lateral stability. Okay. So these are the wires you would see coming down off of, say, a telephone pole, which most of us have probably seen, that help hold it up. Okay, so this is, I know that a lot of people were going to guess that, of course, and a lot of people did, a whole lot of people did, but this is not a guy wire cable being struck. Another listener named Thea Moran wrote in and said, "This sounds like walking along a metal bridge and striking the rails and tensioned wire." Similar, but again, not correct. But you guys are all like dancing in the right neighborhood, though.

• 1:04:32Jay Novella?

  Michael Blaney wrote in and said, "Hey, Jay, is someone plucking a guitar string underwater?" Has anyone ever done that? I've never heard that. I would think that it wouldn't vibrate that well, and the sound would last for a very short amount of time. I don't know. It's interesting. But I actually had a winner, because this is, it would be very easy to just say that this is a steel cable of some sort. But Peter Ritter wrote in and said, "I believe this week's noisy is the sound of a long, hard, massive object, such as a railroad track, being struck repeatedly. Between the strikes, you can hear the ringing of dampened oscillations." And then he said, "As kids, my friends and I used to do this while we were waiting for

• 1:05:16Jay Novella?

  a train to pass us and flattened coins we placed on the track." All right, so I'm pretty sure that this was some type of railroad tie shape. It was in this shape, but it was more of like a beam, like an I-beam.

• 1:05:34Jay Novella?

  But I gave it to him for the railroad tie, because they're very, very similar, as far as the noise that they would make and the shape. This one was difficult, because it could have been lots of different shapes of metal, like long metal laid out or whatever. But if you can visualize an I-beam, in the very beginning of the sound, you'll hear the guy using a steel brush to actually brush a section of the I-beam, and then he strikes it with a piece of wood. And then later in the recording, you can get a better sound of him actually tapping. You hear the tapping sound before the special effects sound is audible. So listen again.

• 1:06:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah, those last two taps were unsuccessful at making the noise. But very cool. Now, of course, everyone is thinking of Star Wars, right? Because Ben Burt, who created the Star Wars blaster sound, he used a high-tension wire, like a guy cable, to, this one was on a radio tower, and he used that to create the blaster noise. He struck it with like a wrench or whatever, and he had a microphone like way up close to the wire. But he stumbled on this. He accidentally bumped into a wire like that, a similar wire, and kind of heard that ringing noise. And then when he was making the sound effects for Star Wars, he remembered that, said, "I should just go back and see if I can get something really good out of it."

• 1:07:15Jay Novella?

  And one cool video you can find online of him striking it at different places and moving the microphone, like he's holding the microphone like right next to the cable, but he'll change where he's holding the microphone, and he dials in the sweet spot, and then you hear the exact blaster sound.

• 1:07:31Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:07:32Jay Novella?

  That's a really fun video to watch.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  By the way, I had to look up the etymology of guy wire.

• 1:07:37Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah, what's the deal with that? It sounds so wrong to me.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  So it's a nautical term. Dutch sailors used to call the ropes that they would use to steady the sails guy wire, G E I, which means like to guide, steady, or secure. And English sailors adopted the word, but twisted it into G U Y, guy wire. So yeah, so guy wire is the correct technical term, and it just comes from the Dutch, meaning, eventually, the etymology does come from the same root for guide, but to guide or steady or secure.

• 1:08:15Jay Novella?

  There you go. All right, you got new noise for us, Jay? All right, guys, I have a new noisy for you. This one was sent in by a listener named Chris. I'm Hough.

• 1:08:44Jay Novella?

  If you guys think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, you can email me directly at [email protected]. That's the only way you can actually send me an attachment. So if you want to send me a sound, you have to use that email address. Steve, we don't have anything actually planned, but we are talking about lots of different ideas. We're going to be shaping up next year's calendar and probably going into the year after that as well. But we'll keep you informed when we're ready with some dates of things. In the meantime, though, if you appreciate the work that we do on this podcast, as you know, the world is desperately needing critical thinkers out there, and this is a great podcast for new people to learn about critical thinking and skepticism.

• 1:09:26Jay Novella?

  We also have our Political Reality podcast, where Andrea, Jones, Roy, and Steve teach people about basically civics lessons. How does the US government function? And all the little details in there, like they talk about the upcoming election and details about that. They talk about voting and all sorts of different topics. As a producer of that show, when I listen to them do the show, I learn a lot every time, because there's just so much detail in all of these. Steve, give me a couple of ideas of episodes that you've done recently.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Well, we did just drop this week a show where we go over the midterms. So that one, you should listen to now, before the midterms. But we've had episodes on like different voting structures, how to measure democracy, war, what is it good for? But seriously, like what ends wars? How do wars end? Things like that. Always, every episode I found totally fascinating.

• 1:10:28Jay Novella?

  Yeah, we've been running the show now for 10 months, right? We started at the first of this year. So for both the SGU and Political Reality Podcast, if you want to help support the effort of producing these shows, you can support the SGU by going to patreon.com/skepticsguide and you can support Political Reality. If you're interested, go to patreon.com/politicalreality.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  All right, thanks. We're gonna do a named not logical fallacy. This is based on an email we got from Tyrion in California.

• 1:10:59Bob Novella?

  Lannister again?

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Not Lannister, the other Tyrion.

• 1:11:02Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  This is about the Goomba fallacy. Have you guys ever heard about that?

• 1:11:08Bob Novella?

  Can't wait.

• 1:11:09Jay Novella?

  No, what is that?

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  Not to be confused with the Givone fallacy. Now, the Goomba fallacy is an informal logical fallacy where one essentially conflates the opinions of differing opinions within a group as if they collectively apply to everyone in the groups. In other words-

• 1:11:29Bob Novella?

  That's weird.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  If, yeah, so if like, for example, if you hear two contradictory opinions from two different Democrats, then you say those Democrats think these two contradictory things. It's like, but those are two different people you're pointing to, right? So it's conflating that. That, does that make sense?

• 1:11:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Kinda.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, just so you know-

• 1:11:51Cara Santa Maria?

  It's sort of, it's making a synecdoche out of people and not out of a platform.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  So you're saying, yeah, so if two people, two different people that are members of the same group hold contradictory opinions, you say that group is hypocritical.

• 1:12:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah, I see. Yeah, but then you could just do that all the time, everywhere.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  Of course, of course. But it's very, very common, apparently, on the internet for people to do this. It's unfair, essentially, just, it's not contradictory because different people can hold different opinions. Okay, anyway.

• 1:12:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  So Tyrion writes, "The Goomba fallacy is an informal logical fallacy where one conflates two opinions stated by one's opposition, usually online, dismissing them because they contradict even though they are said by different people. Everyone on the SGU seem to mostly have converged at this point, so I feel safe saying it feels very odd that the opinion now seems to be that it-" He, I infer from context, he's referring to artificial intelligence in the "it" there. "It is both an incredible tool that everyone should use whenever they like and the underlying grumbling that this obviously threatens the entire enterprise of getting people to build up their own critical thinking skills. Secondly, and this may be me being a Goomba, when it's time to end the discussion, the

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  line comes out that it's not going away." It could, you know, he's quoting us as saying, "It's not going away." And then he says about that, "It gets under my skin because I feel I'm being made a strawman. You're conflating all possible arguments against AI with a very simple, 'Well, you can't turn back time.'" "In a pretty recent episode, the panel was discussing the problem with climate change deniers, and that exact idea is one of their very common refrains about why we don't need to do anything about global warming. And like it or not, that's how it comes across when you use the same line to talk about AI, to deny all possible negative outcomes and to do nothing at all because the genie is out of the bottle." Tyrion-

• 1:13:47Cara Santa Maria?

  When did we say didn't do nothing about AI?

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so-

• 1:13:50Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  I think that this feedback, and I sent him an email expressing this, is a massive strawman on multiple levels. We've said nothing of this sort, but let's break this down into, I think, the two, what are the two main focuses here. One is the Goomba fallacy itself, and then we'll talk about this argument that, well, there's nothing, it's too late, nothing you can do about it. So I think, I don't think the Goomba fallacy has anything to do with this topic on the SGU, right? I mean, I do think that we're all in a similar place here, and when we disagree, we disagree, and we pretty much state it.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  He's making a massive strawman here when he says that on one side, we say, quote, "Everyone should use whenever they like." None of us have ever said anything like that.

• 1:14:43Cara Santa Maria?

  That is definitely not my position.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  Should use what?

• 1:14:46Cara Santa Maria?

  AI.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  AI, again, this is all about AI.

• 1:14:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Just like for everything all the time? No, no, thank you.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  It's an incredible tool that was just used with abandon whenever we like. That's not our position.

• 1:14:54Cara Santa Maria?

  We've said the exact opposite of that multiple times.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, at the same time, we grumble about, well, it's not good for your critical, for developing independent thinking skills or critical thinking skills. So that's just not what we've said. We've said, you know, we have said that it needs to be regulated, that the companies doing it should emphasize safety, that they should develop specific useful applications for it, about the individual, that you should use it intelligently, and you should not use it to replace your thinking. Specifically, we have said that. You should not use it that way.

• 1:15:32Bob Novella?

  It's a double edged sword, you know? And you've got to just deal with that, the nature of the thing.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:15:38Bob Novella?

  Like cars, cars are a double edged sword. I mean, life would be horrible without them, but it would also kill so many people worldwide. It's, you know, it's a-

• 1:15:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, and they're a scourge on the planet.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so a thing could be good and bad at the same time, and so it's not contradictory to say that.

• 1:15:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Most things are.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  Most things are. Things are trade offs, you know? There's a trade off to everything, and pointing out the good and the bad, that's what we do. I just did that about the technology that we were talking about. That is what we do. We say, yes, here are the strong points, here are the weak points. You have to use it intelligently. Some technologies need to be regulated, and this is on a, you know, the industry needs to develop these technologies smartly. They need to also emphasize safety. The government needs to regulate intellectual property. They need to regulate the infrastructure, you know, that AI requires, and they need to require safety.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  And individuals should, you know, use it in ways that are useful, not use it frivolously or to replace your thinking. Don't use it to write for you. I think that's a very bad thing. But there are some incredible uses for it that you cannot deny. That's not contradictory, right? All right, now let's get to the second part, where he likens saying, well, the genie's out of the bottle with AI with the doomism of climate change deniers saying, well, it's too late, nothing we can do about it. What do you think about that? What's, I think there's a core logical fallacy in there.

• 1:17:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, climate, climate change is not a tool.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:17:21Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:17:21Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not something we-

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  It's a false analogy.

• 1:17:23Cara Santa Maria?

  We created, it's an outcome of a bunch of unintended stuff that we didn't do enough about.

• 1:17:28Bob Novella?

  And we can, we can do something about, you know, climate change.

• 1:17:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 1:17:32Bob Novella?

  Even very late in the game, we could still prevent it from being as worse than it otherwise would be.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  So, right, so in what I said to him, that's a false analogy. That's the fallacy, because climate change is a problem and AI is a technology.

• 1:17:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  And, you know, so saying the doomists who are saying it's too late to do anything about climate change, they're saying that specifically so that we do nothing about climate change. But saying that, A, a new technology that's out there in the world, like, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, that's a very different argument. And I think history is on our side there. I mean, if history is any guide, you can't just make a new technology go away because you think there are problems with it.

• 1:18:15Cara Santa Maria?

  No, you've got to mitigate it.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  You have to, yeah, you're far better off controlling the, managing the technology rather than fighting against it, you know, because you think, because you don't like certain aspects of it or whatever. They're two completely different things. So I think that's just a massive false analogy there. All right, we got time. We're gonna do a question. This one's aimed at me, but we could all take a crack at this. And it's just, it says, "Dr. Novella, if interested," it's a link to an article. He says, "I respect that you favor natural origins, but the same virologists are creating self-spreading Ebola vaccines for fruit bats, which are the SARS-2 reservoir host." This comes from Jim Haslam from Houston, Texas, and he links to an article that he

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  wrote on Real Clear Science, which is not a bad site, and arguing essentially that COVID-19 may have been created in a University of North Carolina lab and then was sent to the Wuhan virology lab where it leaked, where it got out.

• 1:19:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Based on what evidence?

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So I read his article, and it's a really good example of somebody marshaling completely circumstantial evidence. Right? And then, but you put enough, pile up enough circumstantial evidence. Of course, if you're, you know, seeking out that evidence, you know, you could make it seem more, more interesting than it really is, then you can create a story for anything. I always, one of my go to examples is the book, The Naked Ape, which argues that our ancestors were aquatic at one point.

• 1:19:54Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  Or the aquatic ape, I'm sorry.

• 1:19:57Bob Novella?

  Aquatic ape, that's right.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the argument was that the, our ancestors were aquatic at some point, and the entire book is built out of 100% circumstantial evidence, and it's all BS, right? It's all nonsense. So anyway, I feel like, reading this, it's like, yeah, this lab is using these Mexican bats, which are also similar to the bats that are in China, and they are using it, and the coronavirus can spread in them and blah, blah, blah. It's like, okay, but is there any actual evidence that the virus comes from there? And the answer is no. But I also think he's downplaying, or you're dismissing, the fact that, again, this guy's an engineer, right?

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  He's not a, he is not a virologist, he's not a biologist, and he has no relevant expertise. And he acknowledges that, but he is a engineer. What the actual virologists and the experts are saying, and this is, this was settled years ago, is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not genetically engineered. And this guy, you know, Jim, is resurrecting the, the Furlan cleavage site argument.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  That SARS-CoV-2 has a furin cleavage site, which basically is a feature that allows it to be more virulent, right? To be more infectious. And that, you know, the argument is that this was a gain-of-function bioengineering feature of SARS-CoV-2. And, but this argument was definitively debunked in 2020, the first year of COVID. So for a couple of reasons. One is that if you were going to engineer a feature like the furin cleavage site, you would have, there are certain features of genetic engineering that you would have

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  used. There would have been, like, you would have optimized certain features. If it evolved naturally, then evolution is messy, right? And so there are many suboptimal features of the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site that strongly suggests it naturally evolved. And it has none of the signatures, right, of the telltale features of that feature being genetically modified, being inserted into SARS-CoV-2. Also, this family of viruses is known to spontaneously evolve this feature. So this is not a new thing for these types of viruses. The bottom line is, that question was asked and answered.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  This virus was not genetically engineered. That feature was not genetically engineered. It has none of the features you would predict would be there if it were genetically engineered. It looks as if something that evolved through evolutionary pressures. You add that, of course, to the epidemiological evidence, instead of the other evidence would suggest that this was a zoonotic spillover and not a lab leak. But the specific evidence he's pointing to, nope. The actual experts in the field have already dismissed this. And the circumstantial evidence that you're trying to pile up here is not convincing, in my opinion, at all. All right. You know what time it is, guys? Yep. Let's go on with Science or Fiction?

• 1:23:22Speaker 00

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  Each week, I come up with three science news items, or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, and then I challenge my panelists to tell me which one is the fake. Just three regular news items this week. You guys ready?

• 1:23:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  All right. Item number one, a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil shows the first evidence of death by wooden spear. All right, number two, a new study finds that if 50% of available marginal agricultural land in the US were dedicated to growing bamboo for feedstock, the resulting biofuel could replace up to half of the current demand for transportation fuel. That's in the US, obviously, not worldwide. And item number three, a new analysis finds that 27% of the Earth's land is under some type of conservation. Jay, you go first.

• 1:24:23Jay Novella?

  All right, the first one here, a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil, it shows the first evidence of death by wooden spear. Yeah, I mean, I have no reason to doubt that. We can conclude that that was a, if it was a real wooden spear that was made by, I don't know, I guess another Neanderthal, right, Steve? They had a fight, they were clearly arguing over something very important, right, Kara?

• 1:24:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:24:48Jay Novella?

  What would you think? It'd be like a loincloth that one of them wanted?

• 1:24:51Cara Santa Maria?

  I think maybe food.

• 1:24:53Jay Novella?

  Probably.

• 1:24:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:24:55Jay Novella?

  But we can come up with something more exciting than that. All right, well, anyway, yeah, I think that one is science. It sounds all good to me. I don't think sharpening a spear would be difficult for them in any way, so that seems legit. Second item here, there's a new study that finds that 50% of available marginal agricultural land in the US were dedicated to growing bamboo for feedstock. The resulting biofuel could replace up to half of our current demand for transportation fuel. Okay, that's, this is a massive claim. Well, it's two massive claims. Our marginal agricultural land. So Steve, what is, can you define what that is?

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  Yes, I can. Would you like me to?

• 1:25:31Jay Novella?

  Do it.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  All right, so it basically means it's land that's good for growing some stuff, but not really great for crops, right? So in this case, you could use it to grow bamboo, but you couldn't use it to grow corn.

• 1:25:43Jay Novella?

  Okay. I mean, we know people eat bamboo. I would imagine it's a very specific bamboo, though.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  Why would you bring that up? It makes me think you have a misconception about what's going on here.

• 1:25:54Jay Novella?

  Growing bamboo for feedstock, you had, you wrote.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, feedstock, all right, so now I need to define the term feedstock. Feedstock is something you feed into a process that by which you make biofuel, right?

• 1:26:05Jay Novella?

  So you weren't trying to bamboozle me, is that correct?

• 1:26:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I thought you meant feedstock, like agricultural feedstock.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  No, not to feed, not to feed animals, but just, feedstock is the generic term used for anything that you start with that you make biofuel out of. So you're making biofuel out of the bamboo, and that's it. That's why I, the reference to transportation fuel at the end.

• 1:26:26Jay Novella?

  Got it. Okay, all right, this makes more sense now. So I would imagine this could go both ways. It could be that, it could, you know, cover up to 50% of the fuel needs, right? Is that what you're saying at the end? Or half? Could cover up to half of the fuel needs for transportation, but of course, it doesn't seem likely that we're currently growing enough bamboo to do that today. It's more like, yeah, this is what.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  That's not the claim. It said, if we did that, if we took half of the available marginal agricultural land, we planted bamboo and used it for feedstock, we could make enough biofuel to meet half of our transportation fuel.

• 1:27:01Jay Novella?

  Right, that suddenly sounds much more reasonable. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I don't know a lot about the process and how good bamboo would be as feedstock for this purpose. You know, but bamboo is a very versatile plant. It's a grass, right, Steve?

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  You are correct.

• 1:27:20Jay Novella?

  I think it's possible. It's a big claim, though. That's, you know, it'd be wonderful if this would be one way we could solve a fuel problem, but I'll put that one as a maybe. The last one, a new analysis finds that 27% of the Earth's land is under some type of conservation. Yeah, I would think that that's science as well.

• 1:27:36Cara Santa Maria?

  So they're all science.

• 1:27:37Jay Novella?

  It's tricky, though, right? Because would, for example, farmland be considered under conservation?

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:27:44Jay Novella?

  Like, regular farmland?

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:27:46Jay Novella?

  I didn't expect you to answer that. That seems kind of high. I got to think outside of the United States, of course. Like, there could be, like, you know, is the Amazon under conservation? And how large is it? And, you know, and how many places around the Earth would do that? I mean, 27% sounds like a lot of land. But I do think it's science. I really do. I think that's the surprise here, that that is correct. So I would say that number two is incorrect for some detail.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  Okay, Kara?

• 1:28:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think I might be going with Jay on this one. I like the Neanderthal with the death by wooden spear. I think that's cool. So it's really between the one with all the numbers, 50% of available marginal agricultural land being dedicated to growing bamboo for foodstock, and then up to 50% of the current demand for transportation fuel. I feel like one of those numbers is probably really off. Maybe it would only get us a quarter of the way there, or a tenth of the way there. Whereas the, but see, 27% of the Earth's land being under some type of conservation actually feels low to me. But I guess, again, it depends on how you define conservation.

• 1:28:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Because if you're saying what percent of the total land is managed, and that includes things like farming, then yes, I think that number is way, way higher.

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  So this is under protection, conservation protection, so it's not farming?

• 1:29:07Cara Santa Maria?

  There you go. Because I think, yeah, and even if it, even if we took away all of farmed land, and we said what percentage of the kind of quote-unquote "wild" land out there is managed, I think the number would be really high. But what percentage of the land out there has some sort of protection, whether it's like a federal, or a state, or a municipal, or even a, just like a neighborhood type of protection? I think that, like a conservatorship, I think that that probably is as low as 27%. So, yeah, I'm going to go with Jay on this one.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  Okay, and Bob?

• 1:29:45Bob Novella?

  Oh, let's see, so the third one, some type of conservation. Yeah, some type of conservation, I think is also important here. I don't know the levels of conservation, but I would suspect that the lightest type of conservation is, you know, not nearly as dramatic as the other end of the spectrum. Number two here, the bamboo, yeah, there's a lot of wiggle room in here for there to be mistakes, so, you know, to, you know, for things to be manipulated. So I agree with Kara there. So I'm going to lean towards this one being true. Bamboo is amazing, it grows so ridiculously fast. I don't think they'll ever get 50% of available marginal agricultural land and be able to

• 1:30:30Bob Novella?

  grow bamboo on there, because that just seems like a huge ask that probably would fail for other reasons. But I think they, someone did a study and determined that it would work. That's what I suspect here. The problem I'm having with number one here, with the Neanderthal, that nobody mentioned is, 75,000 years ago, and was the wooden spear fossilized? Probably not. Almost certainly not. So how did they determine that this was a wooden spear, or that it was even a spear at all? What kind of evidence would be fossilized? Maybe markings on the bone would be diagnostic enough where you could say, yes, this is a wooden spear, and not like anything else, you know, pointy and sharp and strong?

• 1:31:15Bob Novella?

  So I think there's something wrong with that. And it may be, maybe they couldn't determine that it was a wooden spear, and this, and that's why this is, this is the fiction. I'll reiterate, I'm not saying that it's impossible to determine it was a wooden spear from 75,000 years ago, but I think it's highly unlikely, and I think that might be the Achilles heel on this one. So number one, fiction.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  All right, so you all agree with the third one. So we'll start there. A new analysis finds that 27% of the Earth's land is under some type of conservation. You all think this one is science, and this one is science. But I think, not for the reasons that you think.

• 1:31:54Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  So first of all, the previous estimate was 18%.

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  And this new study significantly increases it. But the difference was that the estimate of 18% was for officially nationally registered conservation areas. The new study included other areas that might be like under local government conservation. They basically expanded the net. And it's actually 27% of the earth's surface is under some, that's why it's some type of conservation. And this is, yeah, this is not farmland. This is, this is for, with the, with the express reason of preserving biodiversity loss, you know, preserving biodiversity. Now, the goal, right, there's a, there's an international agreement that, and that

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  I think most nations have signed on to, to get to at least 30% by 2030. And so the idea was that we, well, we're at only at 18%. We're not even close. We're not going to make our goal. And this paper's like, actually, if you look at all types of conservation, we're at 27%. So we're actually not far off of the goal. But of course, they, they redefined how to measure it, but still in a reasonable way, I think. But yeah, so basically, if we're not living it or farming it, it's most, it's going to be probably under some type of conservation, a lot of the wilderness out there, which doesn't necessarily mean that it's managed, right? That's a different level, Cara, which you keyed in on.

• 1:33:24Cara Santa Maria?

  I actually think it's the other way around.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:27Cara Santa Maria?

  I think more land is managed than is under conservation.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Cause I think people are, you know, tagging animals. I think people are putting up fences. I think people are doing at least wildlife management at a much larger, I think a lot of people think it's just wild out there, like in most African countries. And it's, it's like, no, there are a lot of people dedicated to maintaining certain populations of animals.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  Right, right. All right, I guess we'll keep going backwards. Go to number two. A new study finds that if 50% of available marginal agricultural land in the US were dedicated to growing bamboo for feedstock, the resulting biofuel could replace up to half of the current demand for transportation. Jay and Cara, you think this one is the fiction? Bob, you think this one is science? Before I do the reveal, this, this was based upon an actual study. And they did, were looking at using bamboo as feedstock for biofuel. And they did find that it would be a highly cost-effective way, a source of feedstock. So for a feedstock, you need something that you can grow a lot of.

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  And bamboo has, as Bob said, it's super fast growing. And so that's, if you're talking about how much bang you get for the buck, like how much biomass you can create on an acre of land, bamboo kicks ass. And it would be much better than corn. Like right now, like in the US, we use corn for biofuel. That has, one limiting factor is that we're using farmland, you know, that we could be using to grow food.

• 1:35:03Bob Novella?

  And it needs farmland, you're saying, right?

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you, you know, corn needs farmland to grow. But bamboo, we could grow on land that's not good enough. It's not, it's marginal for, we couldn't use it to grow crops. It's, it's more viable in that way. And just the bamboo itself turns out to be an excellent feedstock for, for biofuel. It's very efficient in terms of the energy that you get per, per unit. And it has, would have less waste, et cetera. It's got good features.

• 1:35:35Bob Novella?

  But, I said, but.

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  And you could do it cost effectively. And they estimated in this study that you could produce biofuel from bamboo for like $2.75 a gallon, which is, you know, is pretty, is pretty good.

• 1:35:53Bob Novella?

  But, what's about that?

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  They also calculated that in a 30-mile supply radius, you could make 299 million gallons of diesel per year out of that much bamboo.

• 1:36:05Bob Novella?

  How much bamboo?

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  30-mile supply radius, which is not a lot, if you're looking at like farmland. But this would be, if you did the, I did the calculation, if you, if you used 50% of available marginal agricultural land in the US, you would make maybe 5% of our demand for transportation fuel, not 50%.

• 1:36:27Bob Novella?

  Oh, so it is fiction?

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is the fiction. Biofuel is never going to significantly displace transportation fuel. You know, even like this best case scenario, a great feedstock using marginal agricultural land, and even if we maximized it, maximized it, it would be a tiny percentage. What, so what, but what is biofuel therefore good for?

• 1:36:50Bob Novella?

  Science fiction topics?

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if we can only ever displace one or two or three or whatever, small percentage of transportation fuel, then why even bother with biofuel?

• 1:37:01Bob Novella?

  Cause it's clean?

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is, but it's only displacing a tiny amount. So it's never going to get us anywhere.

• 1:37:07Bob Novella?

  Better than nothing. I mean, it's a little chip away here, chip away there, no? So it's great as a distraction.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, yes. So it's, you might consider it greenwashing. Here's the answer I'm going for. It's, it's good for that last 5% that we cannot displace with electrical vehicles. Right? So large, large vehicles, planes, whatever, things that we cannot electrify, then we were better off using biofuel rather than fossil fuel. So we're not going to use it for cars. We, I mean, we use it for cars now, right? We use blends, like the, we use biofuel blends. We usually can use like ethanol from corn, for example. But it's always going to be a roundoff error, right? It's never going to be significant.

• 1:37:56Speaker 01

  So, but, but if we can, if we electrify our car fleet and our, you know, small truck fleet or whatever, but we're still left with some, some like big backhoe, whatever, big, big machinery that we just cannot run off of batteries, you have to burn fuel, then like biodiesel could fill that last 5% or whatever, that close that gap. That's really what it's for. In the meantime, you know, it's chipping away at best. Maybe it's better than nothing, but it's, you know, it's never, it's not going to be the answer, right? Especially if we have to use farmland to grow the feedstock.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  Ideally, you want the feedstock to be waste, stuff that we would throw away anyway, or something that you can harvest from non, non-agricultural land, right? So it's not displacing crops. All right, that means that a 75-year-old Neanderthal fossil shows the first evidence of a, of death by wooden spear is science. And Bob, you, you hit upon the key question here. What is the evidence? And you actually got pretty close to what the actual answer is. So we don't have a spear, right? We don't have anything wooden. In fact, this is the problem with trying to figure out, I mean, although 75,000, that's within the range, I think, of the oldest wooden, oh, this has, you know, this has 400,000 years.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  We have wooden artifacts.

• 1:39:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Just regular wood?

• 1:39:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, wooden artifacts.

• 1:39:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:39:25Bob Novella?

  So they could have found it, potentially.

• 1:39:27Speaker 01

  Theoretically, they could have, but they didn't. If you go back millions of years, like, like the question is, did our ancestors use wooden tools before they had stone tools? Like, well, how are we going to know? You know, because the wood's not going to survive for millions of years. But there, we do have bone evidence. So the bone evidence is a round hole in the left scapula of a Neanderthal fossil. Now, paleontologists have gotten very good at microscopically examining bones, especially any injury to a bone. They could tell a tooth mark from a stone tool mark. They could also tell if there was a metal or stone tip used that caused injury to the bone.

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  They could also tell the direction of the injury. So basically, what we are seeing, that hole in the scapula is an exit wound, right? So the scapula's on the back, right?

• 1:40:22Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:40:23Speaker 01

  And this is on the left side, so.

• 1:40:25Bob Novella?

  So they, they ruled out stone, basically?

• 1:40:28Speaker 01

  Yes, by the microscopic features of the, of the edges, like the bevel on the edges, we can tell it's an exit wound that was not made by stone or metal. So it fits the profile of a wooden implement. And, and so something, you know, about the diameter of a wooden spear was thrust through this person's body from the front and came out his scapula. And the fact that it's on the left side, you know, suggests that this was, this, no, that it was probably intended as a killing blow through his heart, right?

• 1:41:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh geez.

• 1:41:06Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  Cause that's where, it's where it would have come out, right? So yeah, you can imagine one Neanderthal on the ground, defeated. The other guy takes the wooden spear and shoves it all the way through the front to the back, out the, out the scapula, killing him. All right, yeah.

• 1:41:21Bob Novella?

  So that would imply a knowledge of a Neanderthal anatomy?

• 1:41:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:26Bob Novella?

  So Steve, what do you think happened? They were, they, it was a fight and they were arguing over what?

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  It's, you know, probably a female Neanderthal, I don't know. Or food, land.

• 1:41:40Bob Novella?

  Food or sex?

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  I want something like cinema-worthy, you know? We could, we could make up a story. So again, this is not proof. We don't, this is just evidence, right? This, this is one interpretation that fits all the evidence that we have. I was trying to think of what else, could this guy have fallen on it? I guess, like, you know, it's possible. Was this like a?

• 1:42:01Bob Novella?

  An accident?

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, a vertical, you know, spike that there was being used to delineate, like as a wall or something, and this guy fell and landed on it.

• 1:42:10Bob Novella?

  A spike pit, maybe he fell in a spike pit.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  Could have been, yeah, something like that. But it wasn't necessarily a spear wielded by somebody's hand, but it could have been. That's probably still the simplest explanation, but.

• 1:42:21Bob Novella?

  Maybe they were making a bet whether, you know, an injury from a wooden implement would fossilize for 75,000 years.

• 1:42:29Bob Novella?

  And now one of them won.

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  Now one of them won. There you go. Yeah, but it is the first evidence that points to a hostile killing of a Neanderthal with a weapon. Pretty cool.

• 1:42:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Very cool.

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

  All right, Bob, give us a quote.

• 1:42:46Bob Novella?

  Okay. Carl Sagan tried to find something that was not, you know, something we've heard a billion times. So Carl Sagan said, "The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas." So I like that. And it's ironic, though, that nowadays, I immediately thought of, we're looking, we're listening to politicians nowadays, and they make arguments, they propose arguments that they know, they know are their fallacious. So it's kind of like an edge case to what Carl Sagan was saying, but that's what it made me think of.

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  Well, Bob, I sort of agree with you. I wouldn't call it an edge case, though. My reaction to this was, this is so sweet and so 1990s, like so, this is so pre-social media. And for the reason that you state, this assumes, the unstated major assumption,

• 1:43:41Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  or major premise here is that everyone involved is intellectually honest.

• 1:43:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  But as we know, you know, this happened to be before the word trolling was used, was applied to social media.

• 1:43:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Or truthiness.

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  Or truthiness, or whatever. But in a world, in a milieu where intellectual dishonesty, or a post-truth world, or whatever, where so many people are making fallacious arguments because they don't care about the truth, or they're doing it deliberately, or they're trolling, or they're going for clicks, or whatever, you know, it puts, it basically, it puts a very different light on this idea. I still agree with the core notion here.

• 1:44:25Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  But we have to apply this in a world where it may not be the edge case, but it may be more the rule than the exception, that in the exchange, the marketplace of ideas, most people are not intellectually honest, or, right, they're being disingenuous. And so how do we deal with that? That is basically just opening yourself up to exploitation by trolls. And so this is now the edge case, if anything. We need to modify.

• 1:44:59Bob Novella?

  I get it.

• 1:44:59Speaker 01

  We need to put this in the context of the current marketplace of idea context, you know? Right? Did you guys agree with that?

• 1:45:09Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  It seems quaint, you know?

• 1:45:13Cara Santa Maria?

  It was quainter back then.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  Right. It was a quainter world.

• 1:45:18Cara Santa Maria?

  You could be quaint.

• 1:45:19Bob Novella?

  It was quaint delicious.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  But this is a huge topic, though, for us. This is one of the core dilemmas that we face. Because I think we all agree with the principle of free speech and the free exchange of ideas.

• 1:45:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 1:45:35Speaker 01

  Of course. We are all big supporters of that. But at the same time, we have to recognize that just an unregulated environment leads to trolling, right? Where the psychopaths basically can completely shut down the exchange of ideas by just being the loudest, or whatever.

• 1:45:54Cara Santa Maria?

  I think the First Amendment assumes an equal voice of each citizen. And it didn't foresee, like, bot farms.

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:46:03Cara Santa Maria?

  And, you know, all of these things that actually, because it is true. We think about how the scientific machine works. People publish, maybe they make a mistake, other people recognize the mistake, it gets retracted, blah, blah, blah. But that doesn't happen once it becomes weaponized.

• 1:46:18Speaker 01

  Right. Right, right. Yeah, ideas have been, arguments have been weaponized. You're right, bot farms is a perfect example. You could have troll farms and bot farms and AI, whatever, that are putting their thumb on the scale and just saying, let the ideas flow, which is great. We need an environment where that can happen. But in order to create an environment where we can have a genuine exchange of ideas, it needs to be managed so that it's not overrun by bots or trolls.

• 1:46:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  And that's challenging. It's hard to do that because how do you do that without suppressing free speech? Or without, you know, empowering somebody to decide, you know, how to do that? And it's like, basically, the trolls have ruined it for everybody, right? Because we can't have this ideal world anymore. We have to make tough choices.

• 1:47:10Bob Novella?

  Well, maybe, what about to deal with it, getting rid of, at some level, anonymity, you know, in social media, right? That'll help.

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  I understand why some people would want to protect their anonymity, because you don't want to,

• 1:47:25Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  you know, unleash the world of trolls against you. Like, that's the whole idea. Like, you're basically would be self-doxing if you had to engage in social media in a way that anybody could find you. So I get that, but I also, this again, this is another trade-off, but if you are expressing those ideas anonymously, what does that really mean?

• 1:47:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. It's almost like if we lived in a world where there was a contextual layer that people actually looked at.

• 1:47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:58Cara Santa Maria?

  You know what I mean? Like, here's the thing, and here's the context of the thing.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:48:02Cara Santa Maria?

  The problem is, we've tried that. We've tried putting context labels, and people just don't read them.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  I know. Or they, any system like that could be gamed.

• 1:48:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's true, too. Yeah.

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  And then you end up with dueling systems, right? Any kind of control, quality control, then becomes another weapon.

• 1:48:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:48:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep. Absolutely.

• 1:48:23Speaker 01

  In the comments to my own blog, getting back to the anonymity bit, because I think this is such a big issue. Like, at one point, somebody said to me, like, you know, in the comments, like, this is my job. I'm an expert in this area, so you should listen to me. And my response was, "I don't know who you are. You're commenting under a pseudonym. I have no idea who you are. Now, if you want to tell me who you are, so that I could check out your credentials, then I could take that into consideration when evaluating your opinions."

• 1:48:54Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:55Speaker 01

  "You're just an anonymous commenter on a blog. You cannot refer, you cannot have it both ways. You cannot simultaneously protect your anonymity and claim expertise that cannot be verified." So that's the dilemma that we're living with today, right? So much more complicated back than when Carl Sagan made that comment. All right, well, thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:49:21Bob Novella?

  Thank you, Steve.

• 1:49:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:49:22Bob Novella?

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

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

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