The Skeptics Guide #1025 - Mar 1 2025

Interview with Adam Russell; News Items: Congestion Pricing, AI Therapists, Redefining Dyslexia, Small Modular Reactors for Cargo Ships; Who's That Noisy; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Speaker 01

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

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, February 26, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:50Bob Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:51Speaker 02

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

• 0:56Speaker 04

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  So unfortunately, we've got some sad news today. Just today, as we're recording this, Michelle Trecktonberg died.

• 1:03Speaker 04

  I read it, and I didn't believe it at first.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, she played Dawn on Buffy, the vampire.

• 1:10Bob Novella?

  That's how I know her, and she was great. She was so good.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, she was great. She's had a whole acting career, obviously, not just Buffy. But, yeah, apparently, she was only 39. Yeah. Apparently, she had a liver transplant. Ah. And so probably died of complications of that. I'm not seeing any specific information, but that's probably has something to do with that. Although, I couldn't find why she had the liver transplant in the first place.

• 1:33Speaker 04

  Does it seem, I imagine by average, it's young to be having a liver transplant.

• 1:38Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I mean, it can be, but, you know, some liver transplants are related to lifestyle, and some liver transplants are not.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46Cara Santa Maria?

  You know? People can have things wrong with their liver for a lot of different reasons.

• 1:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I imagine there's a genetic disposition for liver disease or other factors like that.

• 1:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Actually, recently saw a patient in the hospital who had a form of cirrhosis that is non-alcohol-related cirrhosis. It can just happen.

• 2:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, oh, boy.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Or you can get an infection, or you just have, you know, just some other liver disease. Yeah, so no information. But yeah, that's that.

• 2:08Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you're younger than me, by definition, you're young.

• 2:13Cara Santa Maria?

  And if you're younger than me, you're really young.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're really young.

• 2:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. You remember my friend Holly?

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18Cara Santa Maria?

  She, a rocket just launched, like just now. She was posting about it.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah?

• 2:23Speaker 04

  Like, ten minutes ago?

• 2:25Cara Santa Maria?

  No, like today, there was a rocket launch for, with like, going to the moon, I think. Yeah, SpaceX Falcon 9 launches the IM2 moon mission, and there's a bunch of like, science on it.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  That's a lunar lander. Yeah, intuitive machines.

• 2:38Cara Santa Maria?

  So, I don't know, I think I might have mentioned a friend of mine who is an optical engineer. Her name's Holly Bender on the show before. I've definitely had her on Talk Nerdy, but gosh, that was probably like, almost 10 years ago now, so I should probably have her back on.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  We meet her in Washington, seriously?

• 2:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you guys met Holly. So she worked on an instrument, the Lunar Trailblazer. I guess the instrument that she was working on is looking to see how much water there is in this one crater in the moon. Where did the water possibly come from? Could it be used? And so, yeah, I got to watch the launch, you know, through her Instagram feed, which was only, it looks like, just an hour ago, she posted the launch and said, "We're going to the moon", which is like, just really, really cool. What a cool thing to be involved, to be an engineer who worked on something and then watch it go off to space.

• 3:30Bob Novella?

  That would just, I can't even relate to how that awesome that would.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  I know, right? Could you imagine?

• 3:35Speaker 04

  And nerve wracking.

• 3:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that too. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I don't know much about the instrument or about the actual, like, what's all gonna, in the payload on this rocket?

• 3:44Speaker 02

  So it was a Falcon 9 rocket that launched two probes, right? So it was, I was calling it a rideshare. So it was the Intuitive Machines Lunar Lander.

• 3:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  And NASA's Lunar Trailblazer, which is the one that your friend worked on.

• 3:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  That's the one that's gonna be looking at the water.

• 4:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, very cool.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  But they're both basically missions to support the eventual Artemis, getting people back to the moon.

• 4:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah, if it ever happens.

• 4:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, these are the kinds of things that'll make it happen.

• 4:12Bob Novella?

  Well, I mean, Musk, Musk doesn't want it to happen. So what Musk wants.

• 4:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it looks like this is on Musk's rocket.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 4:21Cara Santa Maria?

  So.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  You think he would want it to happen then?

• 4:23Bob Novella?

  He does not. He wants to go right to Mars. He does not want Artemis. That's my understanding. He does. He does not think we need to go to the moon at all.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  It's too late. We are so committed.

• 4:33Speaker 04

  Haven't we talked about this before? You have to have the moon before you have Mars, right?

• 4:36Bob Novella?

  Of course it does, but that he does not. I don't think. I haven't read about it in a little while, but I don't think he agrees with that.

• 4:41Speaker 04

  Let me call him. I'm getting him on the show here.

• 4:43Bob Novella?

  He thinks we can just go straight to Mars, which is of course utterly ridiculous.

• 4:47Speaker 04

  His line's busy. I'll try him later.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  All right. Let us know if you get in touch with us.

• 4:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'll let you know. I'll pipe him in.

• 4:52Bob Novella?

  And another thing.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  And another thing.

• 4:56Speaker 04

  And about that asteroid.

• 4:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah. Sorry.

• 5:00Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. Did you guys hear about the news about that asteroid? Well, it looks like, you know, we're not going to get hit at all.

• 5:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Why do you sound disappointed, Bob?

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Good. I know. Good. I reached a peak.

• 5:12Bob Novella?

  I'm gonna own this. I'm disappointed. It's down to four one thousandth of a percent chance of it here. And that's fine. That's fine. But like, I forget what venue I said this at, but I was like, you know, I can't help but be a little disappointed because for me, a best case scenario would be like, yeah, we're nervous. And we're like, you know, a little bit of like, holy crap. But I like the idea of countries uniting to to address this and be have a rocket ready within a couple of years to like a DART type mission to deal with like a kinetic impactor, right? To deal with an asteroid that's heading towards the earth and and and then, you know, in 2028, like, oh, look.

• 5:51Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, it's not going to hit us, but we got a we got a rocket ready to go. That's what I wanted. I wanted to for us to take even more seriously this idea that we need to be ready to go with an impactor to to push away or or change the trajectory of any asteroid that we might find and not have enough time. And it's great that, you know, getting hit would have that would have been horrible. I mean, not, you know, an extinction level event, but we could have lost a city. So, yeah, obviously. I wouldn't want anything like that, but I wouldn't mind a little bit of a scare for a couple of years to be prepared for something that could potentially hit us. You know, you know, who knows?

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Could it still hit the moon or is that ruled out too now?

• 6:31Bob Novella?

  I just read about the earth. I'm not sure.

• 6:33Speaker 04

  Bob, the estimate not long ago was as high as 3.2% chance.

• 6:36Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the highest, highest ever, highest ever calculated probability for something like that, which was.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  So that's what got you all worked up and going, right?

• 6:46Bob Novella?

  No, that one I got actually a little scared because we had gone.

• 6:49Speaker 04

  That was a little too much?

• 6:50Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, I could we went from one in when I started tracking the news, it went from one in 88 to one in 72. Then it was down to one in 32 or something like holy crap. This is like going in the wrong direction, which is common. That happens for these things. It seems to get even more likely than ah, uh, then it's like gone like, oh yeah, it's not going to happen. Yeah, but one like 1% is that was the big, that was the big point. That's that. That was the, you know, the important percentage because over 1%. That's when, you know, these agencies get involved and start making plans and stuff. So if it stayed, if it stayed at like 1.5%, then we probably, we probably would have, you know, made serious plans, including potentially getting a rocket ready with a, with a, with an kinetic impactor. If it stayed at 1.5%.

• 7:35Bob Novella?

  So whatever, you know, it's just like, it's just weird to be even just a little bit disappointed about that. It was kind of a weird thing, but, but I think you, I think I've related my reasoning behind that.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  But it's not going to hit us.

• 7:48Bob Novella?

  Probably not overwhelmingly unlikely, but not impossible.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Not impossible.

• 7:53Bob Novella?

  Just saying.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Is it possible that the percentage will start going up again as we get more data?

• 7:59Bob Novella?

  Probably not.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Usually does not happen.

• 8:01Bob Novella?

  I put some good money against that. Once they get it down that low.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  But don't worry, Bob. Eventually another asteroid will threaten to kill millions of people.

• 8:09Bob Novella?

  It's basically inevitable. So yeah, that's why, dude, that's why I think we need to be even more prepared. We are, we are much more prepared than we used to be. But I want to be even more prepared than that.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Double prepared.

• 8:22Bob Novella?

  You know, it's one of these, it's one of these existential crises, crises, crises that. That we could do something about.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Yes, we could actually prevent.

• 8:32Bob Novella?

  Right. If there's a, if there's a wicked Carrington level solar flare level event, you know, there's, well, we can, we can actually do a little bit about that, too. But we probably.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  We could do a lot about that. That's in the, but I actually, that's.

• 8:43Bob Novella?

  That's true.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  That's not a good example. That's another thing that's going to happen eventually is going to be really bad and we can completely 100% prevent, not, not from happening, but we can prevent any of, any damage from it. Just have to harden our infrastructure against it.

• 8:59Bob Novella?

  The difference is that we are making really good strides in tracking these near earth objects, but we are, I don't think we're doing much. We're not doing near enough, in my opinion, to guard against such a, a solar event.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Actually, Bob, I've been reading that we aren't doing a lot about that.

• 9:14Bob Novella?

  Really? Well.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  And actually, we've been hardening the, the grid and the infrastructure the last 20 years or so significantly. Not, again, not enough, but it.

• 9:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I think, I think it's not, it's glad that's a little bit better than, than what I had thought based on what you've said. But still, I think we, we could get, we can get fried. I mean, and even, you know, even for, you know, um, an EMP electromagnetic pulse, I mean, you don't even need a solar flare to, to induce those currents. You could, somebody could just, just basically explode one nuke over the country and ah, you're back into the 1700s. Uh, that's the, that, that level of hardening, we're nowhere near the hardening required for that. And that's something that is not unlikely, unfortunately.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, we'll probably do ourselves in before any kind of cosmic event does us in, so.

• 10:00Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I can't disagree with that. But yeah, there are, there, there are events though that we, we really can't do anything about. And those are the ones that, yeah, just like, you know, whatever. That's why it feels good though.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Being in, being in the crosshairs of a gamma ray burst, getting on what we.

• 10:13Bob Novella?

  Yeah, GRB, yeah, they're about a light year wide. Yeah, there's not much you could do about that.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:18Bob Novella?

  You didn't even know it was coming, really.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:20Bob Novella?

  Right? It's like, oh, here, there it is. We're done.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  Turn into the Hulk.

• 10:24Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  All right, Jay, start us off by telling us about congestion pricing. What is that and does it work? Well, you know, when.

• 10:33Jay Novella?

  You get a stuffed up nose?

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:35Jay Novella?

  It has nothing to do with that.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  Thank goodness.

• 10:37Jay Novella?

  Everybody knows about traffic congestion, especially if you live, you know, near any cities in the United States. You know, it's a constant problem. This is happening in cities around the world. And the standard response is typically to do what? To add more lanes, right? We've all seen it happen.

• 10:53Bob Novella?

  Double the lanes.

• 10:55Jay Novella?

  It works for a little while, but what happens after a period of time is it stops working, which is a big problem. And a lot of people might think that adding lanes is actually a good thing to do, but but research and real world evidence tells us a completely different story.

• 11:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 11:09Jay Novella?

  Ultimately, it makes the congestion even worse, which I I really think is amazing when you think about it. The reason is something called induced demand. Bob, have you ever had induced demand?

• 11:21Bob Novella?

  Have I had it? I'm gonna have to say, I'll guess, yes.

• 11:25Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  I have. Actually, I I've experienced induced demand. Exactly the same phenomenon in a completely different context. We our clinic is backed up, especially for new referrals, right? If you want an appointment and you're a new patient, you might have to wait six months to get an appointment.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  And over the years, I've been there again. I've been there for 30 years. So I've had to experience this cycle many, many times. We hire new clinic clinicians, which opens up a whole bunch of new new slots. The wait time goes down and then it goes right back up.

• 11:59Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Because the idea is that if there is basically a bottomless pit of pent up demand, you know, people will basically wait a certain amount of time for their appointment. And so the wait time is always going to inflate to that point. No matter how many slots or people we bring on or whatever we do. You know, the question is, is there a limit to that? Though at some point, like it is not literally bottomless. It's just much larger than the supply. So the same question comes up with traffic. If you added, if you keep doing that, you keep adding lanes, at some point, will you outstrip the pent up demand or not? And then the other question I have, if adding lanes makes it rebound and even worse,

• 12:42Speaker 02

  then would reducing lanes make it better?

• 12:45Jay Novella?

  I don't, I don't think so.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Does it work the other direction? It's not reversible?

• 12:48Jay Novella?

  And the, and the sense of traffic induced demand is, it's well documented. It's where you increase the road space, which then encourages more people to drive. Because the, people are aware that the projects are happening. And then they think, okay, I could, you know, I could drive on that road during times I normally wouldn't, because they expanded it, should be fine. So over time, the, the roads become just as clogged as they were, because essentially, people were waiting for the opportunity.

• 13:16Bob Novella?

  Or taking like backroads too, isn't that, isn't that play a factor?

• 13:20Jay Novella?

  All of that, all that, all the behavior that people have to avoid the traffic jam.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Or they make, may make less of an effort to carpool, or, or they'll drive, they'll take trips they wouldn't have otherwise taken.

• 13:32Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and the list that the researchers were talking about, you know, they're saying, these are people who previously avoided rush hour, or who switched from public transit. In some cases, the expanded highway entices people to take jobs from farther away, particularly if they're driving to their interview during off-peak times. And like, oh, this was great, the commute is fine. This actually happened to me once, where it really bit me in the ass. The research shows that over time, the highway fills up again, and congestion is back to where it started, or worse. So that, we've observed this repeatedly. It's been happening so much, and it's so well documented, that we're not, there's zero question about whether or not this is happening. A study of expanded highways in the US found that traffic volumes tend to rise in direct proportion to the new capacity,

• 14:17Jay Novella?

  which is basically what Steve was saying. So in other words, for every 10% increase in, in lane miles, traffic increases by about 10 or more percent. So road expansion doesn't eliminate congestion. It kind of fuels it, if you think about it from that perspective. So beyond traffic, expansion has other unintended consequences, like more vehicles on the road mean more pollution, and encouraging suburban sprawl leads to longer commutes and higher infrastructure costs. Like, there's all these dominoes that fall, once you start doing this. Cities end up in a really expensive cycle of expansion that never actually solves the problem. And I was talking to Bob about this, like, when you, when you talk about road expansion

• 14:59Jay Novella?

  and the costs that it takes to do like these, you know, three, five, you know, 10-year projects to expand the roads. You know, we could be talking about billions of dollars.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. No doubt about it.

• 15:11Jay Novella?

  It's not cheap.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  And chances are they'll go over budget in more cases than not.

• 15:16Jay Novella?

  All right. So, hold on to your pants, guys, because you might not like what I'm about to say. So, the researchers concluded that the most effective way to help congested roads is something called congestion pricing. All right. You guessing where I'm going with this?

• 15:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's toll.

• 15:31Jay Novella?

  Exactly. So, it's a toll to drivers who use the roads during these high-traffic peak hours. And what this does, it's an incentive for drivers to adjust their driving habits. You know, if you want to look at it in a very nice way, you're saying, "Look, we got to charge a toll during these particular times on these particular roads, because the goal here is to help the congestion problem." And people who have to take those drives at that time, no matter what, they can't deviate, they're going to be really unhappy about it, because it's going to add up. And it could, you know, be a problem for certain income levels, absolutely.

• 16:04Cara Santa Maria?

  How is that different than like, here in California, it's really common on the larger freeways, that there are HOV lanes that are toll lanes?

• 16:11Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I don't know how effective those HOV lanes are. I mean, I always use them when I can.

• 16:16Cara Santa Maria?

  But you have to pay for them here.

• 16:17Jay Novella?

  Oh, you do have to pay for them?

• 16:18Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what I'm saying. Yeah, they're like fast-track lanes.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  Do they work?

• 16:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, they're not nearly as congested as the rest of the traffic.

• 16:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:27Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I don't know if they didn't say anything about it in this study. And I'm sure that there's a ton of different things that states do. Like, I know some states have, like, stoplights on the entrance ramps.

• 16:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we have those too in California. We have all the things that you need for congestion in LA.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  The point seems to be, though, that it's tied to what price someone's willing to pay. And it's enough people, it's a discouragement for them to not want to pay it.

• 16:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and if it wasn't, I think that, because LA is an interesting case, because we have it side by side, right? Like, if you're driving down the 110, on the left side of the 110, there are paid lanes, and the rest of the 110 are not paid. And the left side is less trafficky than the main side. So, people are willing to sit.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Here's your free internet, but if you want the fast internet, pay more.

• 17:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know it works.

• 17:13Jay Novella?

  I kind of like that idea, though. You have the option.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  Build your own.

• 17:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Jay Novella?

  Trying to do is encourage people to take options that they probably wouldn't take without a little nudge. Right. So can you drive off peak times? Can you work from home? Can you shift to public transport? Can you carpool? Because all of these things have have directly shown to to help reduce congestion if people are exercising them. But what it turns out to is we're animals of convenience and we usually pick the most convenient thing that, you know. And sometimes that's not in the better good for our society. So unlike expansion, this congestion pricing can act. It actively manages traffic rather than passively accommodating it. And as we know, the accommodating part doesn't really work anyway.

• 18:00Jay Novella?

  So cities that have implemented this congestion pricing have seen some really good measurable improvements. London introduced a congestion charge back in 2003 in the traffic. And the the city center dropped measurably quite a bit. Air pollution improved and public transit investments increased.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  I didn't realize it's been 20 years that they've had that. Interesting.

• 18:20Jay Novella?

  Then they did it in Stockholm back in 2006. And traffic declined by 20% and the policy became permanent after the public support grew. And then they did it in Singapore. They have one of the the most advanced congestion pricing systems. You know, they have adjusting tolls in real time based on traffic levels and keeping roads flowing efficiently. So we could clearly see that this works. And the question is, why aren't, you know, more cities doing this? So I think the real problem here is there's political resistance. Like, look what happened in New York City recently, right? We had, you want to go to New York City, you got to pay, what was it, 10 bucks or something to get into the city?

• 18:58Speaker 02

  It was initially 15.

• 18:59Jay Novella?

  Or 15?

• 19:00Speaker 04

  And then they reduced it to nine, I believe.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they reduced it.

• 19:02Speaker 04

  And that's on top of whatever tolls you're paying to cross bridges and and other things. This is on top of that.

• 19:08Jay Novella?

  You know, but the the thing that society has to realize is, you know, it's like you turn this thing on and it costs money. But it's it is a solution, though, right? Like, we can't just not do things because we don't want to pay more money. Like, there is really no option, if you think about it. Cities will become so crowded that

• 19:27Speaker 02

  There will not be another way to fix them. There's only so much that a city can handle traffic wise and foot traffic wise and everything like there. There's just is going to be a limit. There's an upper limit to all of these things. What are the other solutions that we could do that they're really, as far as I could tell, there aren't any.

• 19:42Cara Santa Maria?

  I think what's hard about this is a similar argument that you'll see regarding our prison systems, which is that unintentionally or intentionally, what we often do is either criminalize or financially penalize poverty in our cities. And so the very people who are like, let's say you're going to work and you need to be there at a particular time and you can't afford the time it takes to drop your kids off at school and then get on the bus to get to work. And you can't carpool because you don't know anybody else, you know, at your work, you know, whatever the case may be. They're the very people who can't afford this and they have to do it.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you can, you can apply for a discount, basically.

• 20:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, that's good to hear.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, yeah, so what I've been reading, like, yeah, the congestion pricing can work if implemented correctly. Right? If it's not implemented smartly, then yes, it's a regressive tax. And it can hurt low income people, especially if you're a worker, barely hanging on. Now you gotta spend 10 bucks a day to get to work. That could be huge, but you, but if you handle it so that, let's say, the revenue is used to expand public transportation and people who would have a hard time affording it can get an exemption or a discount, et cetera. But there's lots of things that you could do that would, that amplify its effectiveness and minimize any downside.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  And so that's, you know, that's just always the nuts and bolts of, of smart management, right? And it just takes thought, it takes the ability to make changes, to, you know, to evolve, to react to how things work.

• 21:24Cara Santa Maria?

  And to adapt to that particular, the needs of that particular city.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 21:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Because, you know, you think about New York and yes, maybe I'm wrong here, but it probably is more of a privilege to be able to ride around in a car. In New York, if you can afford a taxi and Uber, a driver, like because you can get anywhere in New York on foot or in the subway. And you can do it fast. Like usually it's actually faster to take the subway somewhere than it is to take a car.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  If you forget about parking, oh my god.

• 21:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  Parking's a nightmare.

• 21:52Cara Santa Maria?

  But I think about Los Angeles, it's a wildly different scenario.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 21:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Right? You have to have a car. You cannot get by without a car in Los Angeles. And so.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  But that's a choice too. That is a choice as well that, you know, we collectively make. And we could, you know, especially in cities and in large metropolitan areas, we could invest in public transportation, have dedicated bike lanes, have e-bikes and e-scooters or whatever, have other options that make it, that make walking and using these other forms of transportation way more convenient and not just rely on cars.

• 22:30Cara Santa Maria?

  But within reason, like.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, within reason.

• 22:33Cara Santa Maria?

  LA is also just an enormous city.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:35Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think that, like, we have to sometimes remember too, that, like, different geographic locations have different struggles.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  But yeah, I mean, congestion pricing should be on the table as one of the options. Right?

• 22:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it makes sense. And now we have the technology to do it. I don't see how we could have done this, you know, 20, 30 years ago.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  Well, London did it. I mean.

• 22:56Cara Santa Maria?

  That long ago?

• 22:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, 2003, right?

• 22:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And how did they adjust that? Was it adjusting like minute by minute?

• 23:03Speaker 04

  It's a good question.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  No, it's just like in New York, it was just basically like 8:00 AM to 9:00 PM or something. Like it's just pretty much most of the day.

• 23:09Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 23:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so it wasn't really, see, I'm thinking of it as like an adaptive rate.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  No.

• 23:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Kind of like surge pricing on an Uber.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  No, it's not surge pricing. It's just in this zone during, you know, the day and the weekdays or whatever, they carve out basically most time, not at 2:00 in the morning, but basically whenever there is actually be traffic there. Yeah, it's not surge pricing. That's something completely different. But where like AI comes in and that kind of analysis, which also needs to be part of the equation here, is like really managing traffic light timing, having turn lanes, things like that, that could also really mitigate congestion.

• 23:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Turn lanes, that's our biggest complaint in LA. We just don't have that many of them.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:52Cara Santa Maria?

  We do something called like anti-grid lock, which is during morning and evening rush hour, the parking lane, you cannot park in or you'll get towed.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's really helpful. Like, they turn an entire parking lane into a lane of traffic. But of course, there's always like that one asshole. You know, and every, it's like, well, until they're towed, they're just blocking miles of traffic.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  That's a setup for disaster, right?

• 24:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  But you might, and some, you can sometimes just turn a traffic lane into a turning lane. And even though you're taking away one traffic lane, that could still improve congestion.

• 24:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, massively. Yeah. At these huge intersections where everybody's going left, for sure.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Um, okay. AI will solve it all. Don't worry. Speaking of AI.

• 24:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Speaking of AI not solving things.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  Wait, AI solves everything.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  So are AI therapists coming? And how do they work?

• 24:46Cara Santa Maria?

  AI therapists are pretty much already here. But yeah, there's, um,

• 24:52Cara Santa Maria?

  there's a lot of conflict around this topic. And I think part of the reason why this is a good topic for the show, you know, it has all the things, it has all the ingredients that we talk about a lot on the show, but also I think it lends itself to hearty debate. Hearty debate. So I hope that, um, that my fellow rogues will engage and give me your two cents on what you guys think about this as well. Um, so there's a recent article in the New York Times, it was actually just published on the 24th, um, so two days ago, by Ellen Berry, titled "Human Therapists Prepare for Battle Against AI Pretenders." Uh, and the subtitle is "Chatbots Posing as Therapists May Encourage Users to Commit

• 25:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Harmful Acts." The nation's largest psychological organization warned federal regulators. So what she's referencing there is a recent presentation to a Federal Trade Commission panel in which Arthur Evans, Arthur Evans Jr., the, who's the chief executive of the APA, and specifically in this case, I'm talking about the American Psychological Association, which is the, let's call it the professional organization. It's not really a union, it's more of an advocacy group, but the professional organization that I belong to, the APA, for psychologists here.

• 26:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Other APA is the American Psychiatric Association because that's not confusing at all. But here we're talking about the psychological APA. In this presentation, specifically, Dr. Evans cited court cases involving two teenagers. And these teenagers used an app called Character.ai. Character AI allows people to create fictional characters and then interact with them, chat with them, and the fictional characters chat with each other. But those fictional characters aren't just avatars. Very often, the characters have AI technology behind them.

• 26:52Cara Santa Maria?

  And so what happens, and happened in this case, and it's cited that it's happened in other cases, is that those chatbots start to sort of sprout up, and they sprout up with different roles. And because of the nature of being involved in an app where there are avatars, where there is anonymity, people start to talk about stuff that's hard to talk about. And when they start to talk about their mental health, what's going to happen? These sort of chatbot therapists start to pop up like weeds. And very often, they use terms like therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist. They claim to have advanced degrees from universities.

• 27:37Cara Santa Maria?

  They claim to offer particular types of interventions. In this particular case, the one that was cited at this APA presentation, they were talking about Character AI, but there are other apps. Obviously, ChatGPT is one that we use a lot, Replica. Because they use generative AI technology, they're not programmed to have particular guardrails, right? Their outputs are coming from a black box, and they learn from the user. One of the things that often happens is that they follow. It's not encoded, but it's something that's been observed by computer scientists over and over. They observe a tendency of chatbots.

• 28:22Cara Santa Maria?

  To utilize a phenomenon called sycophancy. So it's this tendency for the chatbots to mirror, amplify and validate whatever the person interacting with them says, right? That's what's going to enamor you to the chatbot. That's what's going to make you feel like it's safe. Of course. Right? A safe space. You're not going to want to engage in a chatbot that's like, you're wrong and let me tell you why, or I'm going to challenge that belief of yours, right? You're going to want to engage in a chatbot that's validating what you're saying, that's amplifying what you're saying, that's reinforcing what you're saying. Now, don't get me wrong, that is a fundamental principle in mental health intervention.

• 29:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Any psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, or other mental health worker that has legitimate training, that is a licensed provider, will tell you that part of what they do is validate the patient-client, you know, whatever term that they use within their, within their profession. They validate the very human components, their fears, they validate their, their worries, they validate their emotional expressions. It's, it's important to establish rapport, but we know the difference between psychologically

• 29:39Cara Santa Maria?

  beneficial or fundamentally human experiences and unhelpful or sometimes dangerous negative self-talk, unhelpful or sometimes dangerous beliefs and narratives, and we know what to look for, the red flags we need to look for if somebody is at risk for engaging in harmful behavior towards themselves or towards others. Not only are we trained in how to see that, we're trained in what to do about it. We have a duty, right? We are legally bound to protect individuals from themselves and from others in, in particular situations.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  Now, Karen, it sounds like these are not AI therapists. They're chatbots that people are using as therapists. But they're not programmed to be therapists. They're programmed to be chatbots.

• 30:30Cara Santa Maria?

  They're just chatbots that are generatively, that are getting labeled as therapists and are generatively moving more and more into that role. But the point, I guess, here that's important is you make an important distinction, but to the end user, they don't know the difference.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Right. But something shouldn't be offered as an AI therapist unless it's programmed to at least follow the standard of care.

• 30:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, why allow this confusion to reign?

• 30:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and that's the question, right? So Character AI is simply a platform where people go and they chat to each other. And so you may be chatting to a person behind an avatar. You may be chatting to a chatbot. You don't know. Because they say, hi, my name's Dr. Whatever, Dr. Laptop.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  Well, should it be obligated to disclose?

• 31:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. So here are some guardrails that Character AI says that they, since these, and I didn't even tell you about the scenarios, but have said that they are using these new safety features that they say they're using within the last year. They said that they have a disclaimer present in every chat that reminds users that, quote, "Characters are not real people," and that, quote, "What the model says should be treated as fiction." They also said that when users are dealing with mental health issues, a disclaimer is added to any character that calls themselves a psychologist, a therapist, or a doctor that says, quote, "Users should not rely on these characters for any type of professional advice."

• 31:58Cara Santa Maria?

  And also, if the, I guess they're able to scrub the content of the chats, if references to suicide or self-harm come up, a pop-up will direct users to a suicide prevention helpline, likely 988 or an online version of that. But some people argue that that's not enough. Because what ended up happening in the two cases that were cited by the APA chief executive, they cited two teenagers, a 14-year-old boy and a 17-year-old boy. The 14-year-old boy, and I'm gonna, and I probably should have said this at the top of the show, but I'll, I'll say it now, that there's a, a kind of trigger warning here because I am gonna be discussing suicide. The 14-year-old boy in Florida died by suicide after interacting with a character claiming to be

• 32:43Cara Santa Maria?

  a licensed therapist, and the 17-year-old boy in Texas had what they're calling, quote, "high-functioning autism," and after interacting with a chatbot that claimed to be a psychologist, there was a lot of kind of hostile and violent behavior that started to develop, and that was particularly targeted towards his parents. So both of the boy's parents are now suing Character AI because of what happened. That raised alarm bells for the APA as a whole. Like, he was saying, basically, if this was a real therapist, they would have lost their license. But because it's an AI chatbot, there's no recourse. What do we do here? Okay.

• 33:25Cara Santa Maria?

  It's, it's almost like it's a part of the design that these chatbots are going to mirror, mirror, mirror. So if you have a person saying, "I'm concerned about this, I'm worried that I might do this," is there sort of a bug within the actual black box that is generative AI, where they would say things like, "That sounds like a good idea." "That's concerning." "It's deeply concerning." And so, how do we regulate something like this? That's an important question. It's one thing if a company is building an AI therapist and they're trying to market it. It's another thing if chatbots within a platform are popping up, whether it's the users themselves that are creating them,

• 34:09Cara Santa Maria?

  or I don't even know how they're, if they're sort of like self-creation within these platforms. How do we police that information? Are disclaimers enough, especially when we're talking about children on the platforms who may not understand the difference? And honestly, shouldn't be engaging in anything Even remotely claiming to be therapy without consent of their parents.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  If you make the companies that produce the chatbot liable,

• 34:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and

• 34:36Speaker 02

  they'll find a way to keep it from happening.

• 34:38Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's the interesting thing about what's happening right now is that the parents are, you know, are engaging in civil suits against the company. And so, you know, money talks. And so in in this particular situation, I guess time will tell. You know what comes from that? So, you know, the APA said part of the concern right now is that generative AI is just too damn good. 10 years ago, you knew. You knew when you were talking to a bot. That's just not the case anymore because of generative AI. In this New York Times article, the the author also talks about some examples of when this happened in the past that were really problematic. So of course,

• 35:18Cara Santa Maria?

  organizations that are concerned about the mental health of the citizenship or of the citizenry. They cite the National Eating Disorders Organization. This is an organization that is legitimately concerned about eating disorders in America and wants to enable or provide intervention or at least screening for individuals so that they can get the help that they need. We know that we have a mental health crisis in this country. We know, Steve, you just mentioned this in the very last segment. We know that people sometimes wait months to see a professional. Of course, as professionals, we want to make it so that people can get access to help sooner.

• 35:59Cara Santa Maria?

  We're not trying to bottleneck access to services here. The problem is, here's an example that was cited. In 2023, a chatbot was developed by the National Eating Disorders Association, and it utilized generative AI and doing what generative AI does. Ultimately, they found that it was offering users weight loss tips.

• 36:23Cara Santa Maria?

  That is not what you want from an eating disorder chatbot therapist. There's a lot of screenshots up on Reddit, you can search for them, but showing chatbots encouraging suicide, encouraging eating disorders, encouraging self harm, encouraging violence. You know, some of these may not have intended to be therapeutic chatbots. They may have had a totally different intention, but there is a real risk there. So, so basically the APA is asking the FTC to start an investigation into chatbots claiming to be psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health professionals. And they're hoping that this inquiry will then compel companies to share this data so that then there can either be new legislation or the legislation that already exists on

• 37:07Cara Santa Maria?

  the books can actually be enforced by law enforcement. And we can start to see a change because we are at a point where this can be really, really dangerous. And we have seen some changes before. For example, during the Biden administration, they cite that the FTC chairwoman Lynda Kahn was really focusing on AI and fraud and that only recently, within the past month, the FTC imposed penalties on Do Not Pay, which is, I don't know if it's an app or a website, but they claimed to offer, quote, "the world's first robot lawyer." And they're like, you cannot say that. That robot is not a lawyer. They did not pass the bar.

• 37:48Speaker 04

  Pass the bar? What state and where?

• 37:50Cara Santa Maria?

  And so now they are prohibiting the company from using that language and making that claim.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:55Cara Santa Maria?

  And so that is sort of one direction that we're hoping, we, they are hoping that this goes. The article talks a lot about the two tragic cases with these teenagers and how they were harmed. But the article also does the thing that I sometimes struggle with in media, which is that they, in an effort to provide, I think, balance, they tell the other side of the argument and the other side of the story. Now, to be fair, on the one side, they're talking about the APA, this massive organization that represents tens of thousands of psychologists. And on the other side, they talk to one psychologist, somebody named S. Gabe. Who is both a clinical psychologist and also an AI entrepreneur.

• 38:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And they talked to him about some of the the computer or the AI work that he's been doing. Where he's been trying to design experiments that test people's ability to get help from AI chatbots. So in this experiment, he asked both human clinicians and ChatGPT to comment on vignettes where there were like fictional couples in therapy. And then they asked 830 human subjects to look at the answers and choose which ones were more helpful. Now, in his study, which was recently published in in PLOS Mental Health, they found that the bots received higher ratings.

• 39:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And the subjects said that they were more, quote, empathetic, connecting, and culturally competent.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  Kara, my wife, as you know, is a PhD counselor and she teaches counseling students, right, to get their degree. She's been using ChatGPT to create her vignettes for teaching purposes. And she says they're awesome. Like, it just saves you so much work.

• 39:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  Completely nails it. It's like, whatever, it has access to that information. So, yeah, I mean, if, again, in the hands of a professional who could then read it and evaluate it, it can function in that way.

• 39:51Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's that's an important point. And that caveat should not be lost in the hands of a professional. And here's a quote from Dr. Hatch. He said, I want to be able to help as many people as possible. In doing a one hour therapy session, I can only help at most 40 individuals a week, which, by the way, is insane. There's no way you see 40 patients.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. When you go to the bathroom.

• 40:10Cara Santa Maria?

  But, yeah, then he says, we have to find ways to meet the needs of people in crisis. And generative AI is a way to do that. And what I say to that is not yet, not yet.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  More bugs to work out.

• 40:21Cara Santa Maria?

  We need stronger regulation.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:24Cara Santa Maria?

  We need more research into this area. And just like when we talk about robotic surgery, just like when we talk about all of these other ways that technology is really, really helping provide increased access, we need to be able to have a human being at the helm. Checks and balances are necessary. You know, they didn't talk about this in the article, but one thing that I think AI would be brilliant at is the assessment component.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, the triage.

• 40:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, because a lot of people don't make the distinction, and it is harder to make when we're talking about psychology psychiatry, less so with counseling and like LMFTs and LCSWs, but sometimes this is the case as well. When we're talking about psychiatry and psychology, a large component of what we do is psychodiagnostics. And then another component of what we do is psychotherapeutic intervention. But oftentimes, while we are doing psychodiagnostic work, we are also therapeutically engaging with our patients and vice versa. When we are doing intervention, we may see the need to tweak a diagnosis or to dig a little bit deeper. But sure, screening tools?

• 41:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Does this person seem to be at high risk for depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia? You know, a decision tree of questions that are answered to help flag somebody who's at risk? Of course, an AI could do that. I do not like the idea of AI intervention yet. I think that there are probably going to be cases, kind of very, very fundamental CBT, ACT, DBT interventions that are already quite manualized, where this may actually be really, really helpful. I, and maybe this is my own bias, I see it being tough to do the type of like existential work that I do with, you know, cancer patients and end of life patients.

• 42:19Cara Santa Maria?

  If you're an AI chatbot, I could be wrong, though. You know, that's probably my own hubris.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  What I think is that I think the technology is there, it just hasn't been adapted to purpose yet. And as you say, like evaluated, regulated. And you also have to think about like, how is it going to be used? By whom? What's the workflow going to be, et cetera? You can't just throw it at the problem and hope that it works. This is too critical an area. You have to use it intelligently.

• 42:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And you can't assume that just because generative AI is really good at, you know, providing information or producing a piece of art or, you know, producing a song, that they're also good at ethics.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:00Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's a huge part of mental health intervention.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  But what I can see, you know, a role for it in the nearer future is, let's say, in conjunction with a therapist or a psychiatrist or whatever, that you have, like, they do the assessment and whatever, they get the patient to a point where they say, all right, I'm going to see you once a month now, and you have access to this AI, you know, therapist that you could use in the meantime.

• 43:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  And that program is designed to flag concerning language and alert the therapist or whatever. So it's, and that way, it could be an increase, it's like an extender of the physician, not a replacement, and it makes them more effective. They could see more patients.

• 43:45Cara Santa Maria?

  And you can have a bigger caseload.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could have a bigger caseload because, you know, 75% or 80% of the work is being done by AI, et cetera. So, yeah, and used correctly, it could be huge. But, yeah, you can't just throw it at the problem. All right. Thanks, Cara. Guys, let me ask you a question. Cara, I don't want you to answer this question.

• 44:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, I always do that to you, Steve. I'm like, everybody but Steve.

• 44:04Speaker 04

  Four for one.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  How would you define dyslexia? What is, well, phenomenologically, what is dyslexia?

• 44:14Speaker 04

  The, I think the common understanding is that people will read words and get the characters either in incorrect order, and they interpret, their brain can't interpret the words that they're trying to read.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  What do you think, Bob and Jay?

• 44:28Bob Novella?

  Is transposition, is that the proper word for that, of letters and words? Misidentification of word strings, letter strings and within words? I don't, I mean, it's a pretty superficial understanding of it.

• 44:41Speaker 04

  Do they see letters upside down? Is that part of it? I've never really known.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you guys are reflecting the common, you know, public conception of what dyslexia is. That idea is about 100 years old.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  Oh, happy birthday.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  And it's amazing, the cultural inertia of that idea.

• 44:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it is incredible, because you're right.

• 45:01Speaker 04

  I used 10% of my brain to figure that one.

• 45:03Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think about it that way at all, but it was probably

• 45:06Speaker 02

  That's why I didn't ask you.

• 45:07Cara Santa Maria?

  beaten out of me. Yeah, that's so interesting. But most people think it's like transposing.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  Reversing words, or transposing words, or letters, reversing letters.

• 45:15Speaker 04

  See what Sigmund Freud had to say about it.

• 45:18Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a reading disorder.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so now I'm gonna ask you, Kara, see how up to date you are. This is kind of more neurological than psychological, but.

• 45:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay, so from the psych, because I'm thinking from the DSM, that's when we diagnose it.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:32Cara Santa Maria?

  It's identified in the DSM V as a specific learning disability, and it's specific to reading. So there are different kinds of learning disabilities. Dyslexia is the one that's specific to reading.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, so you're like in the 1960s. You're up to the 1960s, 70s.

• 45:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, yeah. So reading comprehension, things like that.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's very interesting, because, you know, I, obviously, I'm very interested in neuroscience in general, but also just definitions, how we define things, and how that shapes how we think about it. Dyslexia was first identified and named, that name was coined in 1887, by German ophthalmologist, that's important, Rudolf Berlin, by an ophthalmologist. And he thought that this inability to read, that he was detecting in some specific cases, was due to quote unquote "word blindness", and he thought it was a difficulty of visual processing, right?

• 46:32Speaker 02

  And that, part of that was like that they reverse things or get them in the wrong order. That idea from 1887, which was never correct, then got stuck in the public consciousness and will just not go away. But it's not correct. You know, in 1925, next milestone, now, very interesting, a neuroophthalmologist, right? So this is somebody who's both a neurologist and an ophthalmologist.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  That is 100 years from there right now.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's 100 years ago.

• 47:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, stop.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Advanced a theory that it's not due to word blindness, so it's not a visual problem. It's not a, an eye problem. It's a neurological problem. And he thought it was due to a problem of cortical dominance, which is not correct. But he did shift the conversation from the eye to the brain, basically. Not a visual processing problem, it's a word, a language processing problem. And so then that became the dominant theory. Then, of course, it moved to neurology entirely, like it has nothing to do with ophthalmology. And, you know, by, you know, more research was done by the 1960s. You have kind of the definition that Cara was talking about where it, it, the definition focused on the fact

• 47:46Speaker 02

  that it was a specific learning disability, meaning

• 47:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  there were children who had, this is still part of the diagnos- of the definition.

• 47:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, this is, it's a specific learning disability still in all of the

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So in other words, you have more of a problem with language than you, than your general IQ or your learning level would indicate, right? That make sense?

• 48:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. So you take, you do a full neuropsych battery and it shows that you, we would predict that you would have this level of, you know, reading comprehension, language understanding, but for some reason, there's a decrement there.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there's a specific decrement in language. But that definition is just, not that it's wrong, it's just inadequate because it, because it doesn't address

• 48:31Cara Santa Maria?

  It doesn't say why.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  Doesn't address the why. Exactly. It is completely agnostic as to the why. It's a purely clinical diagnosis of you have this specific problem. But of course, that's not enough because we want to research and think about, and especially if we're going to treat it, we want to know what's causing it. What kind of a problem is it? Not just what the deficit is, but what actually is producing the problem? So when we go beyond the 1960s, more research gets done. By, by the 1990s, the term phonological awareness comes about. And Cara, have you heard that before?

• 49:10Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, I mean, I've heard of the phonological loop. I know phonological and I know awareness.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  All right. But yeah, but you've never heard of like dyslexia is a problem of phonological awareness.

• 49:21Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I don't think I have.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think that's when it really became a neurological disorder.

• 49:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I don't think we use that. Even in neuropsych, I don't know if I've heard my neuropsych colleagues.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  But that's since the 90s. That's been, that's what I learned in medical school in the 90s. Like I remember I, you know, there were two, a husband and wife. Doctors at Yale, pediatric neurologists, very good, who specialized in dyslexia. And that's what they taught me in 1990, you know?

• 49:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I guess it's the awareness part that I don't often hear.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  Phonological awareness, yeah.

• 49:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, talking about.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  It's the problem, and the way it was described to me at the time was, these are children who have difficulty understanding at a conceptual level that words are made up of sounds. And so they have difficulty going from phonemes to words. Like, that's the problem. They, and so if you're decoding the letters in a word, you don't know how that relates to the sounds, and you can't build a word out of the sounds, out of the letters. So they never get to that point where they can go from the written word to a, to knowing what the word is. And then, of course, everything flows from that.

• 50:31Cara Santa Maria?

  And you know what? The more, I'm actually like, now I'm interested, and I'm like, looking up a few things, like, from neuropsych rehab, and I am seeing that term used a lot.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 50:39Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm seeing phonological awareness, but I'm also seeing things like, obviously, visual processing, auditory processing, orthographic processing, executive function, and even something called rapid automatized naming. So there are a lot of different domains.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  There are, and this gets to where I'm eventually getting. So, in 1994, the definition, this is the sort of the official definition of dyslexia was, dyslexia is a specific learning disability, and it's still part of that, that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition, and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. In 2002, this was expanded a little bit. The definition then became, "A deficit in processing and phonological component of language resulted directly in difficulty with decoding, spelling, accuracy, and fluency that, in turn, impacted comprehension and reading experience.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Impoverished reading experience further impacted the development of vocabulary and background knowledge, which also had a negative influence on comprehension." So it's just a more of a holistic, if you will, view of, of, of language. And dyslexia. So it's like, yeah, at its core, it's a specific deficit of phonological awareness. But you have to see this in the context of how language develops, how people learn their culture, their language, because it has, it affects different languages differently. Some languages are easier to read than others, and it doesn't have as much of an impact.

• 52:09Bob Novella?

  Interesting.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, for example, and, and the child's other intellectual abilities, right? So it's in the context of, of each individual child. But at its core, yep, they're just that the part of the brain that turns words, letters into sounds and sound into words is not working well, and, and that has all these downstream effects.

• 52:30Bob Novella?

  It sounds almost an all or nothing thing. The way I've seen it in modern culture, though, it's like-

• 52:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's totally a spectrum.

• 52:36Bob Novella?

  Huh?

• 52:36Speaker 02

  It's totally a spectrum.

• 52:37Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a spectrum.

• 52:38Bob Novella?

  Yes. Why would some words, why could they, why would they have trouble decoding some words, but not other words?

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Well, some word, I mean, think about English. English is a horrible language. I mean, the-

• 52:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we all have trouble decoding some words and not other words.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Some words are more phonetic than others, right? I can't remember who it was. Somebody said, why is the word phonetic and not spelled phonetically?

• 53:00Bob Novella?

  Exactly.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  But, uh-

• 53:01Bob Novella?

  That's pretty funny.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So somebody with dyslexia is going to, somebody without dyslexia is still going to struggle with encoding certain words.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 53:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Somebody with dyslexia is going to struggle with more of them. Yeah.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  And again, you could have mild, moderate, severe, like dyslexia is a continuum. But interestingly, even up into the 2000s, even, you know, the 2000 teens, people deny that dyslexia even exists as an actual neurological disorder.

• 53:33Cara Santa Maria?

  What, do they think it's a disorder of will?

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Well, here, I'll, I'll tell you. In the 2000s, a UK Labour MP, Graham Stringer, called the diagnosis of dyslexia a cruel fiction.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  And stated to label children as dyslexic because they're confused by poor teaching methods is wicked. So basically, poor reading ability was blamed on poor teaching and poor parenting. Now, where have we heard that before? So blaming neurological disorders on bad parenting or bad teaching has a very long pedigree, from ADHD to autism, right? Pretty much any-

• 54:12Cara Santa Maria?

  To schizophrenia, refrigerator mothers.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  Schizophrenia, it means so many things.

• 54:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And it doesn't make sense because you have a class with the same teacher and some kids are struggling and some aren't.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  But they're just a bad teacher.

• 54:24Bob Novella?

  Right, you think it'd be widespread in the classroom.

• 54:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  But it's just easy just to blame the parents or blame the teachers. And plus, some people just don't understand neuroscience. Like, no, you're, these are specific abilities. We're not blank slates. Our brains have strengths and weaknesses. They have abilities. And everything is on a spectrum. Everything is a bell curve, you know, basically, of ability.

• 54:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And I think that there's a cultural phenomenon here, which this taps into as well, which I struggle with a lot, being a psychology researcher, who is both, kind of, has a foot in the very medical model, but also a foot in the very, kind of, like, phenomenologic, like, philosophy side of psychology, which is that we do have a tendency as a culture to talk about things as if they're, quote, "real" and "medical," or "in your head" and "not real."

• 55:14Speaker 02

  They're not real, exactly.

• 55:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is insane to me. Yeah, it's totally false. Everything is real. Like, unless we're talking about pure malingering, right? Feigning a mental illness for secondary gain. Or for primary gain, actually, just for primary gain.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Even then, like, it's complicated.

• 55:31Cara Santa Maria?

  It's even complicated then.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  Is Munchausen disease, is that a-

• 55:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, Munchausen is secondary gain, so let's get rid of secondary.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  But that could be a disorder unto itself.

• 55:39Cara Santa Maria?

  It could be, it could be. So I'm saying just straight up primary gain, right? Just straight up malingering.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, deliberate fraud for primary gain.

• 55:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, fully faking so they can get out of prison, or so they can make money, or something like that.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  But that aside, which is not-

• 55:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is super rare.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  Super rare compared to all the more complicated.

• 55:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like functional neurological disorder?

• 55:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:58Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm sorry, there is something going on there.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  And the distinction between psychiatric and neurological is also kind of a fiction. It's all the same. It's all the brain.

• 56:06Cara Santa Maria?

  It is.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  It's just different specialties about how we treat it and the kinds of things that we're familiar with, but it's all the brain.

• 56:12Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's really dangerous, I think, not only to my profession, but also to the patients who need help.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 56:17Cara Santa Maria?

  To talk about something being legitimate over here and just in somebody's head over there.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 56:22Cara Santa Maria?

  That's super dangerous.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  It's a very harmful false dichotomy. And, and we have, you know, as a profession, we have tried to move as far away from that as possible. Like even calling it a functional neurological disorder or non-epileptic seizures.

• 56:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Like we use terms that are not judgmental, just describing the phenomenon, not saying like, oh, this is fake seizures.

• 56:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Conversion disorder.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  Or this is psychogenic or whatever.

• 56:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they still, yeah, some people still use those.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  I know, it's, it takes time, takes time.

• 56:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 56:49Speaker 02

  Um, all right, so in 2009, there was the Rose Report, which was an overview of dyslexia. It basically reinforced the phonemic awareness theory and that dyslexia is a specific neurodevelopmental disorder with genetic predisposition. It made, focused however, just making a number of very specific recommendations for interventions at the individual and societal school level, et cetera, et cetera. That's basically where the definition of dyslexia sat until today, right? Until, you know, this year. But there's been research going on and every now and then, like you, so much research gets something, okay, we have to now retool our definition based upon the last 10, 15, whatever years of research.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  So there's a new study that is called Toward a Consensus on Dyslexia: Findings from a Delphi Study. So this is basically looking at a lot of data and saying, all right, what can we say about dyslexia, given all the latest research? Basically a consensus of an expert panel on dyslexia. So they, here's their conclusion. They, they conclude with a proposed definition, which had a lot of pieces to it. I'm going to read you the ones that they emphasize. Here's the consensus statement. Dyslexia is a set of processing difficulties that affect the acquisition of reading and spelling. It's a little bit more broad than just phonemic awareness, because that's not the whole picture. It's only part of the picture.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  They say, "In dyslexia, some or all aspects of literacy attainment are weak in relation to age, standard teaching and instruction, and the level of other attainments." That's the specific disorder part of it. "Across languages and age groups, difficulties in reading fluency and spelling are a key marker of dyslexia. Dyslexic difficulties exist on a continuum and can be experienced to various degrees of severity. The nature and developmental trajectory of dyslexia depends on multiple genetic and environmental influences. Dyslexia can affect the acquisition of other skills such as mathematics, reading, comprehension, or learning another language. The most commonly observed cognitive impairment in dyslexia is a difficulty in phonological

• 58:58Speaker 02

  processing, in phonological awareness, phonological processing speed, or phonological memory. However, phonological difficulties do not fully explain the variability that is observed." That's kind of the new bit. Working memory, processing speed, and orthographic skills can contribute to the impact of dyslexia. So that's now the modern sort of synthesis, the consensus on what we're doing. It's more complicated, more nuanced.

• 59:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but it's also like, honestly, it's clunky AF.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, what do you say to a parent when they go, "What does it mean that my kid has dyslexia?"

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Well, that's translating that to the family, to the patient, to the parents. That's part of the skill of the job.

• 59:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 59:37Speaker 02

  I don't know what to tell you.

• 59:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Like, you've still got to give them the elevator answer.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  That's not meant for a public-facing, you know, concise definition. That's professionals talking to professionals. So it has evolved over time, and, you know, basically tracking with the research, I think it's really important to note, to know what the professionals say now about what it is. And it's really fascinating also to think about how persistent that 100 and whatever, 40-year-old myth about dyslexia being a visual processing problem is. It's really interesting. All right, Bob, you're going to tell us about using small modular reactors for cargo ships.

• 1:00:18Bob Novella?

  Yes, I am. Earlier this month, a Korean shipbuilding company unveiled a bold new design, a nuclear-powered container ship using a small modular- modular reactor coupled with an innovative propulsion system using carbon, uh, carbon dioxide. Now, of course, I had to, I had to do a deep dive on this. Doing that, though, I, I kind of reinforced the, the idea in me that, that if nuclear reactors are cool, mobile nuclear reactors are even cooler. And so not just reactors that sit in one spot to power cities or research labs or whatever, but ones that are integral to propulsion. It's just such a fascinating idea. One iconic version in history that I found and reminded myself about was the atomic car

• 1:00:59Bob Novella?

  from the 1950s. You guys remember that? There was actually a few ideas tossed around. The one that stood out for me was the Ford Nucleon. What a great name. The Ford Nucleon. Bring that back. Was a concept car. It was designed as a fission powered car of the future. The reactor was in the back. It would, it would power a steam engine for propulsion. And it seems ridiculous now, right? Just thinking about that. It's like, really? Obviously, technical and safety issues make a car like that impossible. Even 70 years later, it's like, we would, could not pull that off. If you go through those years, though, nuclear planes and tanks were, were seriously studied as well, especially during the Cold War, but those designs always had issues like weight,

• 1:01:43Bob Novella?

  shielding, radiation, size, you know, just not practical at all. But all that said, we do have mobile nuclear reactor powered vehicles today. And by nuclear reactor, I'm, this is, I'm talking fission. This is, a nuclear reactor is basically fission or fusion or, or other even more sci-fi ones like antimatter, whatever. This is, so I'm talking fission when I say nuclear reactor. So we do have them. What are they? What, what exists today?

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  Nuclear subs.

• 1:02:10Bob Novella?

  Nuclear subs, right? But also aircraft, aircraft carriers, right? They are just, aren't, think about that. They are amazing. These are massive vessels.

• 1:02:19Speaker 04

  Nuclear vessels.

• 1:02:21Bob Novella?

  I'm glad somebody said that. These guys can operate for a quarter of a century without refueling. And on top of that, they have amazing safety records. And then there's another one. What's another example? There's one other one that I think that should be on this list. And that's the Russians' famous nuclear-powered icebreakers. And that's kind of it. There's other examples, you know, maybe a commercial ship here in Russia or maybe even some other Russian projects. But they're kind of more footnotes than anything else in my mind. It's really just the subs, nuclear subs, aircraft carriers and the icebreakers. But that's it. I mean, it's a little frustrating for me as a sci-fi geek. Because that's the only really three types that we have.

• 1:03:06Bob Novella?

  Of course, I have to throw in nuclear rockets there because that is absolutely changing. They are working on nuclear-powered rockets now. It seems inevitable that this is going to happen. But they don't exist yet. They don't exist yet. So one recent advance, though, I think is going to change, make a big change in that. This is something we've mentioned a few times on the show. Small modulate reactors, SMRs. So this is a class of small fission reactors that could be many different types. It could be Gen 4 reactors. It could be pressurized water reactors. It could be molten salt. Doesn't matter really. The type, the specific tech doesn't matter. But they're all basically small fission reactors. And they're also built, the idea is that they will be built at a factory

• 1:03:50Bob Novella?

  and then shipped to a location to power things. Many different things. Could be microgrids, communities, you know, remote communities, buildings, data centers. I'm sure we're going to be seeing these in data centers. Their power output is typically 10 to 300 megawatts compared to the real big boy reactors. They can range from 700 megawatts to 1,600 megawatts, 1.6 gigawatts. And right now, where do you think the actual small modular reactors are right now that are actually working and doing stuff right now?

• 1:04:23Jay Novella?

  For the military, right?

• 1:04:24Bob Novella?

  No, it's like China and Russia. And they have like four. So we're kind of at the precipice. Of this really, really ticking off. There's really not many right now. And it's, you know, it's not hard to predict, right? And maybe I should have predicted it at the beginning of the year. The number of these, these types of reactors are going to explode worldwide, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah, there's, there's at least 80, 80 SMR designs being developed now across 19 countries. And they're being considered, seriously considered for tons and tons of applications. So I mean, it's kind of obvious that these, some of these designs were almost surely proliferating in their future. And some I hope will be used to move ships.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  Well, Bob, we have to say though.

• 1:05:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah, there's lots of stuff we have to say, but go ahead.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  I appreciate your optimism, but you know what the big deal killer is for SMRs?

• 1:05:14Bob Novella?

  Um, yeah, the, the expense.

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  The expense. They are more expensive per unit energy than the big reactors.

• 1:05:22Bob Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:05:23Bob Novella?

  That's a problem.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  A lot more to ship their products. It's more than a problem. It could be a deal killer because why would you spend, you know, you know, already nuclear power is at the high end of the cost per unit energy. And if now you go even higher cost, uh, why would you do that? When you, if you're just having something stationary attached to the grid, why not build a big boy and have it's been, it's more cost effective.

• 1:05:44Bob Novella?

  Oh, absolutely. That, that's, yeah, that, that's definitely a good point. I was going to segue to that at some point. Um, after I got over a little bit of my techno optimism here, but yeah, that's a potential problem. And I think Steve, I think if that, if that proves to be almost a deal killer, essentially a deal killer. I think that, that, uh, cheaper microreactors, which are out of scope of this news item. Microreactors, I think will probably proliferate.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  But this dovetails with your news item, with your point because. So if you're just attaching it to the grid and making electricity. You have to compare it to all the other ways to make electricity in terms of cost effectiveness. But if you design an SMR with a specific purpose. That is worth the trade off. Then it can become cost effective. Like the military uses it because the strategic advantage is worth the higher expense.

• 1:06:37Bob Novella?

  Absolutely. Absolutely.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  But what you're going to talk about is for cargo ships and that's, they are designing it to purpose. So that it's not just again, connected to the grid and that also can be cost effective. You also mentioned data centers. So there's a company that's designing them for specifically for data centers. That again, because it's designed for purpose, it can be cost effective. So I think that's the direction that the SMRs are going to go. Not just hooking them up to the grid, but for specific purposes where the advantages make it cost effective.

• 1:07:14Bob Novella?

  Right, and that's why I mentioned 80, there's 80 of these designs being developed by 19 countries. All of them are similar, but also kind of distinct. And in my opening statement, I made a, I made a specific point to say that, that this idea, this new idea is to use a small modular reactor coupled with the, this innovative propulsion system, which is critical, which is critical to their, to their plan because it brings in efficiencies that are, that, that, that make it a better cargo ship in terms of space, in terms of safety, in terms of a lot of stuff. So let me, let me go through some of the ideas.

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  There's one other thing that makes, that can make an SMR cost effective is if, if, you build it in a location where the waste heat can be utilized for a specific purpose.

• 1:08:00Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  Then you like double their efficiency.

• 1:08:03Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  So that's like with the data center thing, that you have to build it with the data center, you know, and then you could use the waste heat to cool the data center and suddenly it's twice as cost effective as it was.

• 1:08:14Bob Novella?

  Yeah. So, yeah, so, so all that said, I think, I still think that, that SMRs are going to have a future. And, and from what I could tell, doing the, the research for this specific application for cargo vessels, it sounds, it sounds very promising. Of course, it's got to be vetted and the information, a lot of the information that I've seen is coming from this, this company, and the company is South Korea's HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering. And they're, they're a big player in the movement and they're, and they're, they are what this news item is about. They recently announced that plans for a nuclear powered cargo vessel capable of carrying 15,000 20 foot containers, which is a massive commercial transport ship. It's, it's definitely the bigger end of the, of the spectrum.

• 1:08:58Bob Novella?

  Their, their release, their, the information that I've come across so far is, it seems to focus on three things and it makes, it makes a lot of sense. They're focusing on regulations, safety and efficiency. Right, those things I can't, I mean, those are the top three. It seems, I can't think of anything else that would really be, you know, more important than no. So that's a little bit encouraging. So to illustrate what they're doing with the regulations, I'll quote Park Sangman. He's the head of the company's green energy research lab. He said, "HD Casell is strengthening cooperation not only with major classification societies, but also with international regulatory bodies to establish international regulations necessary for the commercialization of nuclear powered vessels." Okay, so what are classification societies?

• 1:09:39Bob Novella?

  These are organizations that set and enforce technical and safety standards for ships, including nuclear powered vessels. So safety, okay, safety is the second, is the second critical focus here. Their ships are really, their plan is really taken seriously. They're using, they're planning a double shielding system where you've got stainless steel and light, light water working together to shield and protect against, you know, the things you need to shield against, ionizing radiation, gamma rays, neutrons, and it also dissipates heat very, very well. So the steel absorbs gamma radiation and gives structural integrity to the system, and the light water moderates the neutrons and absorbs radiation as well and dissipates the heat. Then they also plan to create a facility in South Korea specifically for testing and validating their design.

• 1:10:24Bob Novella?

  So that's, you know, that sounds good. Those words sound good. So in terms of the company's final focus, efficiency, I think this is where their design could have some impact. I found, I found really fascinating as hell. So, so critical to this, this efficiency that they, they, they talk about is the partnership of the fission reactor with the propulsion system. Having a small modular reactor on the ship is, is not only an efficient source of heat, right? Because nuclear energy is much more dense than chemical energy. But it also means that you think about what you can get rid of. Now you can get rid of the exhaust system, the engine exhaust system. You can get rid of the fuel tanks. That, because you have this reactor, you don't need those things. So you can just pull them right out of the ship.

• 1:11:05Bob Novella?

  And now you have a lot of extra space where more of those 20 foot cargo, cargo containers can now go where this other stuff was. So the, the more cargo you can carry, the more, the better, the more efficient, you know, The whole enterprise is and the better the bottom line, the bottom line. So that's one. That's one boost in efficiency. The next boost comes from what the ship actually does with the reactor's heat. Right? Because the heat, the nuclear reactor, that's just a source of heat, whether if you're burning fossil fuels. Or if you have any other type of reactor, you're really just like, we need to create a source of heat that that's efficient. So that's it. You got, you got your heat source. So traditionally ships use their heat source to heat water to make steam.

• 1:11:45Bob Novella?

  Right? You make the steam, that drives the turbines and that generates the electricity for the propulsion. That's kind of how, how the flow goes for a lot of ships. So this propulsion design though is different. It does away with the steam and it replaces it with supercritical carbon dioxide. And this is the kind of like a secret sauce. It's such a, it's such a really cool idea. So the bottom line is that why CO2? Why are we using CO2? Why not just use water? One of the main reasons that CO2 expands more efficiently than steam. Bam, right there. It's just like, it's just flat out more, more efficient. And it's because of the supercritical state. So how efficient, how efficient is it? A traditional steam cycle is 30 to 40% efficient. The supercritical CO2 cycle is up to 50% efficient.

• 1:12:27Bob Novella?

  And if you, if you look at the numbers they're talking about, they typically say that their, their, their design is going to be about 5% more efficient. And 5%, eh, it might not sound like a lot, but that could be huge for, if you, for lots of ships traveling the seas. 5% increase efficiency could be, could be pretty awesome. And so not only is it more efficient, but it's smaller and it's lighter than steam turbines. There's no water or steam. And so that means that there's less corrosion and no emissions as well, which of course is a, is a wonderful addition there. So this, this is kind of, I see it as like a, a nice one-two punch. You got the small modular reactor and you've got the, the CO2 replacing water. And it makes such a potent combination.

• 1:13:08Bob Novella?

  Bottom, you know, bottom line, there's less fuel waste, there's more cargo space, there's lower maintenance, there's zero emissions. And that's nothing to sneeze at. The shipping industry consumes about 350 million tons of fossil fuel annually. So decarbonizing shipping could really, really help in our, you know, our damn climate crisis. It's not something that's going to make a huge. Dramatic difference because I think shipping accounts for three only 3% of worldwide emissions like that, but uh but any any you know, any little bit helps. And this is, I think, a pretty cool idea. So uh, so yeah, so a lot of industries are looking into SMRs and hopefully they're going to pan out here and become cost effective. It's it seems like we're, I think it seems like we're on the edge of of this stuff taken off. It's not just SMRs and microreactors.

• 1:13:51Bob Novella?

  I hope, I hope, you know, maybe I'm being too positive, but I hope that that it takes off and it's more than just little niches here and there. So do all of these developments and all these advances and improvements in our technology, does that mean that the Ford Nucleon may be closer to reality, closer to reality? It can be if you're OK with five feet of steel or concrete shielding in your car. Otherwise, it's not going to happen. It's just like, you know, can you imagine the car? It'd be far, far worse than the car that that Homer Simpson made up in that famous episode of The Simpsons where it was just a car that uses a nuclear reactor like this would just be ridiculous. So that we're not going to see anything like that. I think battery technology is more than

• 1:14:34Bob Novella?

  enough for small applications like cars, but bigger stuff, bigger stuff, I think reactors will be will be in the mix.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  Well, the hope is too, Bob, that with there these niche applications like data centers and cargo ships and things like that, that will cause an economy of scale. Like I said, if you have factories cranking out SMRs, then they might become cost effective for more general applications like just plugging into the grid.

• 1:14:59Bob Novella?

  Creating these, the hope in the beginning, Steve Wright, was that if you create enough of these, it could really help, you know, decarbonize worldwide economy. But even, you know, powerful big SMRs, you know, 500 to 300 megawatts, they calculated you would need tens of thousands of them to really start making a difference. And I'm not sure, you know, how long it's going to, I think it will be probably well past 2050 by the time, if ever, we could start making them and get some economies of scale like for that. I mean, it's scary to think, but it's still the idea. It's just fascinating.

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  Doesn't have to be the solo solution, but you know,

• 1:15:36Bob Novella?

  No.

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  Decarbonizing shipping and yeah, take a chunk out of, out of the grid, that would be nice.

• 1:15:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, it'd be hundreds of pieces to this puzzle.

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44Jay Novella?

  Jay, it's Who's That Noisy Time? Alright guys, last week I played this noisy.

• 1:16:21Speaker 04

  I know what that is.

• 1:16:22Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so that, there's a lot going on there.

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  There's a lot going on there.

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  I know what that is. That is the world's first popcorn machine, built in 1884.

• 1:16:29Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:30Speaker 04

  Which you had to start up with, you know, with diesel fuel, or whale oil, or something. And it popped like eight kernels. Like, at the end there, it sounded like kernels of corn.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  I thought that, that was the sound of, that's what happens after I put my quarters into the candy machine and waiting for the candy to drop.

• 1:16:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:45Jay Novella?

  Well, we had some guesses, so Visto Tuti wrote in. This guy's very busy, and I feel very lucky when he, when he emails me. So he said, "This one sounds like an ice maker. The mechanical part of the refrigerator that cracks ice cubes into a receptacle for drinks and such." Man, if you had that in your kitchen, I'd be pissed, right? That's a noisy frickin' ice maker. That is not an ice maker, but they do make noise, so I hear what you're saying. Cooper Parish wrote in and said, "Howdy. Here's my guess: coin-operated mechanism, two beeps of selection interface, a motor whirs, pushing a ball down a long metal track on display inside a box." So he says it's a vending machine. I thought that was a good guess, because...

• 1:17:24Speaker 04

  That's basically what Steve said.

• 1:17:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah, there's lots of noises. There's, you know, you're putting the coin in, and it'll, you know, the thing turns, and then the thing falls, and then maybe an arm grabs, whatever, right? There's all these different things. It's not a vending machine, but that was a good guess. A listener named Derek Dunsmore wrote in, and he said, "Hi, I may finally know this one. As a hobbyist 3D designer, I recall watching a video of a man producing a small but functionally manned bumper car-sized tank out of 3D-printed materials. I believe this is the sound that vehicle made when the tank treads were moving over terrain during a trial run." I thought that was cool. I, you know, I like, um, I didn't know that someone, you know, 3D printed a, a tank that could move. I'm sure they had to put some type of motor in

• 1:18:07Jay Novella?

  there. But anyway, um, this is not correct, but I would like to see the tank. And we have a couple of closer guesses. So Gerard Steenbeck wrote, first time guessing. That sounds like a plotter printer, a massive printer that uses pens or something to draw blueprints on big sheets of paper. So I, I think I've been around one of these and they definitely make lots of different kinds of noises and everything. Um, this is not a plotter printer though, but that was an interesting guess. Dan Tenhove said, I'm guessing that this is a recording of the inside of a VCR. And I know you have to be kind of older to know what a VCR is. Kara, do you know what a VCR is?

• 1:18:44Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm not that, come on. Of course I know what a VCR is.

• 1:18:48Speaker 04

  I was gonna ask if you knew what a vending machine.

• 1:18:50Cara Santa Maria?

  I was born in 1983, you guys. My entire like upbringing was with the VCR.

• 1:18:55Speaker 04

  You're a millennial.

• 1:18:56Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm, I'm an elder millennial. I'm two years away from the millennial cutoff.

• 1:19:00Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:19:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm an elder millennial.

• 1:19:02Speaker 04

  Elder millennial.

• 1:19:03Jay Novella?

  So I remember when we were kids that Bob actually could repair VCRs. Mm hmm. You know, the tape got caught in there, whatever. Bob would like, was always, you know, tinkering around or whatever, because he was really obsessed with taping Star Trek and Bruce Lee and Spider-Man, um, which I was a hundred percent behind. Um, so yeah, they make different noises. There's things happening in a VCR. There's a lot, there's moving parts, you know, there's things that grab the tape and there's things that are happening. So I could see that. I think that was a good guess, but that wasn't correct. I do have a winner. And there were actually two people that, that guessed pretty quickly. There were a lot of other guessers, but I'm going to tell you who the first two are. Uh, the, the person who won and who submitted it first is Travis Warburton. And he said,

• 1:19:47Jay Novella?

  this is a hundred percent a canister being sent down a pneumatic tube system. Oh. He says the beeps are probably the destination station being typed in. I'm a nurse at a hospital and use these every day. Oh. And Madeline Love also guessed correctly on that. These are two new names to who's that noisy. So yeah, that's basically what it is. I will remind you that a young listener named Gertie sent this noisy in, so I wanted to thank her personally for doing that. Thank you so much. And yeah, essentially, that's what it is. I mean, the person who's, the people who recorded this, there was, you know, different, different use of the, of this whole thing, but that's basically what's going on. Pneumatic systems are pretty cool.

• 1:20:29Jay Novella?

  I remember that one of the banks that I used to, used to use, had one of the canisters get stuck, I guess the tube went underground for this one, and it got stuck in there because somebody put in like $20 worth of coins.

• 1:20:43Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's too heavy?

• 1:20:45Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they had to dig it out. And that was that for that pneumatic system. But Costco

• 1:20:50Speaker 04

  Like took a backhoe and dug it out?

• 1:20:51Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they had to dig it out. Yeah.

• 1:20:53Speaker 04

  Holy moly.

• 1:20:54Jay Novella?

  Costco uses a pneumatic system, and there's, there's pretty extensive ones out there, especially today, you know, with the modern technology, they can make them pretty interesting.

• 1:21:02Speaker 02

  We still use them in the hospital for sending blood samples to the lab.

• 1:21:05Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's it. There you go.

• 1:21:07Bob Novella?

  I thought that tech was dead.

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  No, when you, when you still have to physically move stuff around.

• 1:21:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, if it's not broken, don't fix it.

• 1:21:14Jay Novella?

  Yeah, like when you need blood immediately, you put it in the, in the pneumatic system.

• 1:21:17Speaker 04

  In a tube in the pneumatic system.

• 1:21:19Jay Novella?

  Oh, I thought you was opening your vein.

• 1:21:22Speaker 04

  No, you don't just, yeah.

• 1:21:23Jay Novella?

  You know, suck the blood. No, it doesn't work that way.

• 1:21:25Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:21:25Jay Novella?

  I have a new noisy, guys. This one was sent in by a listener named Ed Barrett.

• 1:21:48Speaker 04

  Those all sound like wrong numbers.

• 1:21:50Jay Novella?

  Yeah, there is a pranking kind of vibe to that. Guys, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at [email protected]. Not a con 2025, guys, is coming. We have a couple of months. We're very excited. And in fact, the person that we're interviewing this week is, is a special guest that we're going to have at Not a Con, so listen to the interview. And please do consider coming because you're going to miss out on one hell of a good time with lots of music, lots of fun things that we're going to do. There are surprises. There are jigs and jags. Steve is going to teach someone how to do Kung Fu. It's going to be awesome. Don't miss it.

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  Nauticon Con, Evan. Nauticon Con.

• 1:22:31Speaker 04

  That's the website.

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  That's the website.

• 1:22:33Speaker 04

  Nauticon Con.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  Alright, thanks Jay. Alright, well, let's go to that interview now.

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  We are joined now by Adam Russell. Adam, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.

• 1:22:50Speaker 07

  Hello there. Good to be here.

• 1:22:51Speaker 02

  Now, Adam, you are a musician, the bassist for the group Story of the Year. I also understand you have a Star Wars podcast called Thank the Maker. But we wanted to chat with you because you're going to be joining us at Nauticon. But tell us a little bit about yourself first. You tell us about your career.

• 1:23:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, I've been of, we were just talking about this offline, been with this band and this group of guys the majority of my life. I mean, going back to the late 90s when I first started playing music. St. Louis is a small scene, so we all kind of played in bands together. Ended up as this lineup, plus one other who's no longer with us, and released our first album in 2003. It's a big debut. You know, it was the, just like, perfect alignment of stars. We were so lucky to have the success we had then. And over these years, these, you know, 25 years, almost since then, we're riding the wave of the 20-year cycle, the resurgence, and our music kind of came back into, into the public consciousness, and we're on to, you know,

• 1:23:52Speaker 07

  another generation of fans, and things are, are in a, a really fun, exciting place where we're lucky enough to have another chance. We've kind of threaded the needle down into this, the small group of bands who are still around and can still pull it off. And I'm a lucky guy. I'm happy to be here.

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's so many sub, subgenres of music these days. You don't need to have, like, it's not like there's just this one bucket of musicians. It's, you could survive in a really small niche.

• 1:24:18Speaker 07

  I mean, there's so, you look at that with anything. There's so many subcultures. You go onto social media and see people who have literally millions of followers that I've never heard of. I have no idea what they do. They just, but they have these communities, whether it's, you know, just on social media or somebody on reality TV or any kind of artist. And it's wild to think that there are that many people. On earth that each of us can succeed well enough with our little niche.

• 1:24:42Jay Novella?

  Yeah, well, it's more than eight billion people on the planet.

• 1:24:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, that'll do. It'll work.

• 1:24:47Jay Novella?

  Adam, what is the style of the band?

• 1:24:48Speaker 07

  I think we would describe ourselves most accurately as post hardcore. A lot of punk influence emo, I think is the most like mainstream, most known title for this subgenre. But we have influences of just, you know, 90s rock, metal, punk, everything. Uh, good music. I'll call it good music.

• 1:25:10Speaker 04

  It does touch on emo, although I would not necessarily peg it as such. However, in the early 2000s, that was kind of the, uh, the wave that carried a lot of groups, uh, forward into, into the mainstream.

• 1:25:25Speaker 07

  For sure. If you know the, the Van's Warp Tour.

• 1:25:28Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:28Speaker 07

  That sort of like moving window of that, uh, Venn diagram of, of genres. That's what we fit into.

• 1:25:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, perfect.

• 1:25:35Jay Novella?

  How does skepticism and your music, you know, connect to each other?

• 1:25:38Speaker 07

  I grew, I mean, science was my first passion. I grew up on science like a, any kid, pretty much. It was dinosaurs and then the space shuttle and the, everything, you know, and in the 90s, especially like all of that was front and center. I went to space camp, you know, I was always at the science center and stuff like that in St. Louis. And friendships were always kind of adjacent to those things and music just happened to overlap. But, you know, our guitar player and I are big Star Wars nerds. We all, we're all kind of into similar things and into science. And I, I've always tried to make it part of anything that I do, whether it be like the Star Wars podcast or the band.

• 1:26:15Speaker 07

  And on our third album, actually, we got pretty political and kind of got into social and other, other kind of topics in our second, third album lyrically. And we had a song, we had a few songs that were inspired by Carl Sagan, uh, pale blue dot specifically. And we ended up using an excerpt from The Pale Blue Dot as sort of an interlude. Cut it together, it got the old audio tape and ran it into Pro Tools and chopped it up. And we actually had to, we had, you know, we had to get permission from the estate. So Andrea had to approve it and sent us an email back, which was, I still have, you know, buried somewhere in an inbox. It, it was like the peak of my life, you know? She wished us luck.

• 1:26:57Speaker 07

  She said, you know, I hope the album climbs the charts like a rocket into space or something like that. It was, it was amazing. So we've touched on that stuff here or there, but it's, it's always been more like personal stuff that you try to inject wherever you can, you know?

• 1:27:10Jay Novella?

  Yeah, we, we've worked with her in the past and like she is just amazingly generous that way. So I'm not surprised that you say that.

• 1:27:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, she's an angel.

• 1:27:20Speaker 04

  And how did you stumble across the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe?

• 1:27:23Speaker 07

  Like I said, I, I've always been into science, but when I really got into music in high school and went from being this like, you know, fairly intelligent kid who kind of coasted through elementary school, got into high school, discovered music, and then my grades just tanked and I felt, I got so off track. Music was the only thing that mattered to me. But once that mission was sort of accomplished, once we got signed and we, you know, it was happening, I found myself with all this free time and the spark kind of reignited my, my passion for science. And I just, I just went headfirst into reading and finding podcasts and everything. It was also about the time that, you know, at the end of high school, around teenage

• 1:28:06Speaker 07

  years, I, I realized my beliefs didn't align with what I was raised on. I was raised Catholic and realized I didn't, I didn't believe in God or any, any kind of metaphysical stuff like that. So I leaned into science and then found, you know, through the, the new atheist movement and those folks that, you know, many of which are questionable people at this point, but uh. You know, listening to Dawkins interviews and things like that on Point of Inquiry and things like that, in discovering podcasts, found you guys. I want to say it was maybe less than a year after Perry died. I was working on a DVD that we were editing and I had this long process of censoring. I had to go through frame by frame and do all this

• 1:28:50Speaker 07

  stuff. So I spent a month solid at my desk with just visual stuff and I needed something to listen to. So I ended up listening through your entire back catalog and got fully caught up and just, you know, I don't think I've missed an episode since then, since 2007 probably.

• 1:29:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, 2007. Yeah, that's when Perry left us.

• 1:29:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:29:11Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:29:12Speaker 07

  So, yeah, that was the beginning.

• 1:29:13Jay Novella?

  That's amazing. You know, you must experience this, like, you know, when you find out that people are into the work that you create and then they sustain it, right? Like what you just said, like, it really surprises me that people can do that with podcasts because they can go on for a very long time, which, you know, at this point, there's a lot of them out there. So it's really, you know, it means a lot to me to think that people are like just into the show to the point where they're going to, they're going to keep going with this.

• 1:29:43Speaker 07

  Like we were saying before we started, what you guys feel about what you've accomplished with your podcast, I feel so similarly about our music and our band. I feel very lucky to have people still with us after all these years.

• 1:29:54Jay Novella?

  Adam, have you ever been to a live Skeptical Conference before?

• 1:29:58Speaker 07

  Not a conference, but pardon the pun. I did, you know, I was at one of the live recordings in, what was it, Phoenix?

• 1:30:07Speaker 04

  Phoenix.

• 1:30:07Jay Novella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:08Speaker 07

  So that's about as close as I've come.

• 1:30:10Jay Novella?

  All right. Okay. Well, you're not going to get laid when you come to Nicon just to let you know.

• 1:30:13Speaker 07

  Well, my wife's going to be there. So, I mean.

• 1:30:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Jay, that's none of your business whether or not he gets laid.

• 1:30:20Jay Novella?

  Adam, tell us about LA Strikes Back.

• 1:30:22Speaker 07

  Yes, LA Strikes Back is, it's a fundraising initiative for the, to support victims of the LA fires, started with a handful of other folks who I know through the Star Wars community. Mike Forrester, one of the co-hosts of Thank The Maker, and some other prop makers and folks who are members of the 501st Legion, the costuming group. A few of, a few of the folks live in LA and have been directly affected by the fires. Actually, our producer and editor, Jason, is, he and his wife are living in a rental house right now. They, they were in Altadena. They didn't lose their house, but the whole place is uninhabitable. So, we have a direct connection to people in LA who've been affected.

• 1:31:05Speaker 07

  And we, of course, as we like to do in the community, in the Star Wars community, is band together to try to help folks out. So, we're, we're combining Star Wars and music. You know, I'm kind of bringing in the music side of it, trying to get donations from friends. It's a lot of, you know, custom-designed helmets and different props and things and collectibles, anything we can, we can put on auction to raise money. I'm donating a base, some old Star Wars figures that I have from years ago, some kind of rare collectibles.

• 1:31:33Speaker 04

  The original Kenner Boba Fett, maybe?

• 1:31:36Speaker 07

  I don't have that, unfortunately, but...

• 1:31:39Speaker 04

  Ah, it's too bad. What's that worth these days? Oh, is that a million bucks?

• 1:31:42Jay Novella?

  Well, there's different kinds. The one that's super expensive was this...

• 1:31:46Speaker 04

  The prototype?

• 1:31:47Jay Novella?

  It wasn't, yeah, it was just a prototype that shot a little red missile out of the back. Like, if you get one of those, you, you have a lot of money in your hands.

• 1:31:54Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, I digressed there.

• 1:31:56Speaker 07

  Harmful of swallowed, the rocket.

• 1:31:58Speaker 04

  That's right, always.

• 1:32:00Speaker 07

  It's mostly props and things, because, again, the 501st Legion and other makers are contributing some really, really cool stuff. So, we're doing the auction at the end of March. We pushed it back a little bit, because we just want to give it some more time, but it's, it's already going very well. The stuff we have lined up is gonna, I think it's gonna, it's gonna pull some considerable funds. Obviously, we're not gonna solve the problem, but we're gonna do our part.

• 1:32:25Speaker 04

  And you mentioned Thank The Maker podcasts. How did that come about? And what's, what is that about?

• 1:32:30Speaker 07

  A, it was a pandemic project. We were all, actually a friend, so Ryan Key, the singer of Yellow Card and I, Yellow Card and Story of the Year toured together off and on for years. We connected over Star Wars. And at some point, I, I realized I wanted to do a podcast. You know, I've been listening to you guys forever. I've listened to so many podcasts. I wanted to do something. And I was thinking, you know, a movie podcast, kind of a pop culture thing, do all the classics that we grew up on. And then literally the night before, we were about to record our first episode, Ryan and I, he said, and called me up and said, look, man, you're gonna kill me, but I have an idea. I kind of want to change up this idea. What if it's just about Star Wars? I was skeptical at first, but we ended up going with it.

• 1:33:14Speaker 07

  And it ended up being perfect because there's this kind of, you know, there's a built in listening base. And it ended up being something that we could, you know, find the slice of the Venn diagram where people who grew up on our music and people who grew up on Star Wars, especially the prequels, that actually lines up perfectly, you know? We just crossed 250 episodes recently, our fifth anniversary. And it's, you know, it's, it's not our full time job, but it's a, it's a paid hobby that works and it's, it's worth our time.

• 1:33:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah, you know that.

• 1:33:45Speaker 07

  The main thing is that we've created this community around what we love about Star Wars.

• 1:33:50Jay Novella?

  Uh, but you know, what do you think about Kathleen Kennedy supposedly not being a part of the brand anymore?

• 1:33:56Speaker 07

  I'm excited to see what the next chapter is gonna be, but I'm already, I'm already just worn out by all, all the, the bullshit negative celebration of her, of her retirement. Cause she's a legend. I mean, she, she's been producing some of the best films of all time, literally our entire lives. We're all in our mid 40s. I mean, starting with Poltergeist and E.T., like she's been at the helm of all these incredible films. Maybe she wasn't the best studio head per se, who, who can say? None of us have that skill set. Who are we to say that? But like, she's a legend. She should be praised for her, her long illustrious career. And I have nothing but respect for her.

• 1:34:37Jay Novella?

  I don't know if I agree with that, but I can respect your perspective on it. I mean, I get the whole, let's not focus on the negativity. And I have, you know, done what I think you have, which is like completely not be a part of any of it. Cause I don't, I don't want to focus on that. And without getting into the whole thing, cause there's, there is a lot to talk about. I mean, the bottom line is I'm a, I'm a episode four, five and six guy.

• 1:35:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:35:01Jay Novella?

  Um, and I probably won't be happy with much that comes after that. It is what it is. Like I, you know, I liked, I liked a couple of the movies. I liked, you know, uh, Andor, and that's good enough. Like, and I think, you know, I recommend to people, just watch the things that you like and let the other stuff, you know, just ignore it.

• 1:35:17Speaker 07

  Exactly. Let, let people enjoy stuff, you know, just leave, leave the negativity out of it. Yeah.

• 1:35:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I agree as well. There should be something someone can find somewhere in the Star Wars universe that they can enjoy and just concentrate on that.

• 1:35:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 1:35:31Speaker 04

  For what it is.

• 1:35:35Speaker 07

  Except Kara. Everybody except Kara.

• 1:35:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Except me, yeah.

• 1:35:38Jay Novella?

  Kara knows a little bit more about Star Wars now because of us.

• 1:35:41Cara Santa Maria?

  I live, I know a little bit more about Star Wars than I ever wanted to.

• 1:35:45Speaker 04

  That's called osmosis.

• 1:35:46Speaker 07

  And some Star Trek.

• 1:35:47Cara Santa Maria?

  But see, but the difference is I'm not one of these like Star Wars fans that's obsessed with Star Wars and then just shits all over it. I just don't care about Star Wars. I feel like that's different.

• 1:35:57Speaker 07

  I much prefer that too.

• 1:36:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:36:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's a different take. We don't have to all be all about everything all the time.

• 1:36:06Jay Novella?

  Of course not.

• 1:36:07Speaker 04

  No, no, but again, Venn diagram, it's a good example. You know how science skepticism, Star Wars, you know, those, those three circles definitely are here in this, in this family. So.

• 1:36:18Speaker 07

  Yeah. Well, Jay, I'll, I'll, I'll re-ask you officially right now. I'll put you on the spot on, on the, the air, so to speak. Would you like to, uh, join us on Thank The Maker perhaps for an episode?

• 1:36:28Jay Novella?

  Oh my God. How many times can I be on the show? Yeah. A hundred percent. Just email me. I mean, I will make myself available. I would love to do that.

• 1:36:36Speaker 07

  Awesome. I have some ideas.

• 1:36:37Jay Novella?

  So you're going to come to Nauticon. You know, we've been very selective about who we let on that stage. Cause we have a, you know, a core group of, of people that, that we were. Work with, that we love to work with. But I mean, it's been, it was a pretty easy decision to have you do it because first of all, Evan came out swinging about how awesome you are. But I mean, after I found out about the Star Wars thing, I'm like, this guy's awesome. I go, you know, like, he's in, 100%.

• 1:37:02Speaker 04

  Cinched it.

• 1:37:04Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so we're gonna have you join us for a few of the bits that we're doing. I will give you a couple of reveals right now. We haven't really gone into much detail, but we're doing something, George changed the name, didn't he? We used to call it Wu-Tank.

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  It's Pitching Wu.

• 1:37:19Jay Novella?

  Pitching Wu, okay. So the idea is that we are going to have the audience pitch to us things that revolve around pseudoscience, as if they're like, they could be products, it could be a, you know, a cult.

• 1:37:32Speaker 02

  A pseudoscientific business, yeah.

• 1:37:34Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and we're gonna judge it on whether or not we think it would work and everything, like, we'll be, we're gonna be very critical about it. And we think that this is gonna be funny because, you know, the audience is gonna come up with some really, really crazy stuff, I'm sure. So, you know, there's gonna be a lot of the judges talking to each other, and we're gonna be, you know, doing the whole thing that like the show does, and I think that's gonna be a lot of fun. And then we're gonna do a bit called Never Seen It, which is a improv comedy bit where you find out movies that people haven't seen, that most people know about, and then you make them do a live read of a scene with somebody else.

• 1:38:07Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:38:08Jay Novella?

  And you have to, you know, you have to be-

• 1:38:11Speaker 02

  With no context.

• 1:38:12Jay Novella?

  No context, but you have to be 100% committed, like, you're doing this as if you're in the movie. You have to be dramatic, and you have to have total buy-in.

• 1:38:20Speaker 07

  Oh, I love this. I love this so much.

• 1:38:23Jay Novella?

  Yes, I think that one is gonna be, people are gonna really love it, because it's gonna go off the rails immediately.

• 1:38:28Speaker 04

  Hilarity will ensue.

• 1:38:30Speaker 07

  Yes, this is great.

• 1:38:31Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so Adam, I think you're gonna love this stuff. We're gonna have a great time. You know, I'm really happy to welcome you to White Plains, New York. I mean, god, this is one of the cultural hubs of the United States.

• 1:38:41Speaker 04

  Adam's familiar with many, many White Plains-ish types of towns throughout America.

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. Basically, it's a airport, a train station, and some hotels.

• 1:38:53Jay Novella?

  And a huge mall, one of the biggest malls in here.

• 1:38:55Speaker 04

  That is a big mall.

• 1:38:56Speaker 07

  Hey, I'm a child of the 80s and 90s, I love malls.

• 1:38:58Jay Novella?

  Yeah, we did, oh, we did the food court last time, and it was great. So-

• 1:39:03Speaker 02

  So we did the 2023 Nauticon there. It was awesome. The hotel was awesome. We basically took over the entire hotel. So I think this year is going to be even better than last time. So we're really excited that you're coming. And I just want you to be prepared because you're going to have to do improv comedy with us.

• 1:39:21Speaker 07

  I'm ready. I'm prepared.

• 1:39:22Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:39:23Speaker 04

  Can Adam tell us where we can find you and all your endeavors that you do so our audience can easily find you?

• 1:39:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, find the band at Story of the Year on all the socials. I think we're still on Twitter, X, whatever the hell it's called, unfortunately.

• 1:39:36Bob Novella?

  Shit.

• 1:39:37Speaker 07

  Thank the Maker Pod, at Thank the Maker Pod on Instagram, TikTok for now, Blue Sky, I think we're on there maybe. At Adam the Skull on all the things. ThankTheMakerPod.com, StoryofTheYear.net, and so on and so forth.

• 1:39:53Speaker 02

  All right. We look forward to seeing you in May, Adam.

• 1:39:56Speaker 07

  Same to you guys. Thanks again for having me.

• 1:39:58Speaker 02

  Yep. Good night, Adam, man.

• 1:39:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Night.

• 1:40:12Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, and then I challenge my panelists, Scott, Dix, that's you guys, to tell me which one is the fake. Got three exciting news items this week. You ready?

• 1:40:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:40:28Speaker 02

  Okay, here we go. Item number one, researchers successfully used mRNA which produces a tardigrade protein to protect surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment. Item number two, studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct deal classification, what time of day they are active. And item number three, a new analysis finds that the vast majority of rogue planetary mass objects form as ejected planets rather than failed stars.

• 1:41:07Speaker 02

  Jay made a noise. Who did? Jay did. Jay gets to go first.

• 1:41:11Jay Novella?

  All right, the first one here, these researchers, they successfully used mRNA, which produces a tardigrade protein to protect surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment. I have a lot to say about that one, Steve. Because I remember, I did specifically, I did a news item where they tracked tardigrades that were attached to rockets that went into outer space.

• 1:41:34Speaker 04

  I remember that news item.

• 1:41:35Jay Novella?

  Yeah, me too. And I remember talking about this protein that they have that's covering their DNA and protects it from radiation coming in and messing it up. And this is exactly the kind of thing that I think you would make up. And, man, if we could do that, though. They successfully use mRNA to produce, but who did they successfully use it on, Steve?

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  Well, since you're going first, I'll tell you. This is a mouse study, not that it matters.

• 1:42:00Jay Novella?

  Wait, so there are anti-radiation mice running around this planet now?

• 1:42:05Speaker 04

  Well, not running around a laboratory.

• 1:42:07Speaker 02

  And of course, the cancer treatment is radiation therapy, right? I hope that was obvious.

• 1:42:12Jay Novella?

  All right, so this is how supervillains are made, by the way. Okay, so I'm gonna put that one on the back burner for a second. The second one here, you're saying, studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 million species, found that only 39% had correct deal classification, what time of day they are active. So only 39% were correct in saying when they're active during the day?

• 1:42:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in other words, like if an animal is categorized as nocturnal, this study found that 61% of the time, they were not nocturnal.

• 1:42:48Jay Novella?

  That's crazy. If that's real, if that's legitimate, then it really, you know, what are these scientists and researchers doing? Like, they're falling asleep at the wheel here while they're doing, they made 8.9 million observations of 445 species, and 30, and they were that wrong? That's a big mistake there, right? That's bad. I don't like that, and I hope that one is not science. The last one, a new analysis finds that the vast majority of rogue planetary mass objects form

• 1:43:17Speaker 04

  Has ejected planets rather than failed stars.

• 1:43:20Jay Novella?

  Okay, I mean, I just.

• 1:43:21Bob Novella?

  Could you expand on that one, Steve?

• 1:43:23Speaker 02

  A little. So you know what a rogue planet.

• 1:43:25Jay Novella?

  Rogue? Yeah, of course.

• 1:43:27Speaker 02

  Rogue thing. It's roaming between the stars. It's not in orbit around a star.

• 1:43:30Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:43:31Speaker 02

  Right? So rogue planetary mass objects, right? So these are not stars. They're big, but they're planetary mass. They're not stars. And so the question is, do these planetary mass objects that are rogue, do they form as failed stars? Or do they form as planets that then get ejected from their solar system? This analysis says that the, that most of them are ejected planets, not failed stars.

• 1:43:56Bob Novella?

  But you said that they're planetary mass, so they, by definition, they would have to be planetary and not stellar.

• 1:44:02Speaker 02

  No, because they're.

• 1:44:03Bob Novella?

  Why?

• 1:44:04Speaker 02

  Planetary mass objects.

• 1:44:05Cara Santa Maria?

  The mass of planets.

• 1:44:06Speaker 02

  They're big, but they're not stars. Right? So are they too small to be a star, or are they just big planets?

• 1:44:13Bob Novella?

  Okay, so you're talking like Neptune-type Jupiter.

• 1:44:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, even bigger than Jupiter, but just not big enough to be a star.

• 1:44:20Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:44:21Cara Santa Maria?

  But not in orbit.

• 1:44:23Speaker 02

  They're rogue. They're.

• 1:44:24Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they're floating around.

• 1:44:25Jay Novella?

  So the question is, you know, how does a planet get out of its own solar system? Right? That's because it needs, it needs to be, you know, I think the planets need that type, you know, need to be around a star to form, or at least that's, you know. Oh, boy, this is not an easy one, Steve, and nothing is sticking out. I am going to say, you know, the, the first one about the mRNA that produces the tardigrade protein. I mean, this is exactly what we were saying we hoped would happen, right? They, you know, and I could see them doing this. It makes sense. So I'm going to say that one is science. I'm going to say that the 39% here, you know, the, the 8.9 million observations that were made of these 445 mammalian species, like if they were that wrong, then something is really wrong.

• 1:45:09Jay Novella?

  I don't think the number is 39%. I think it's a lot lower than that.

• 1:45:12Speaker 02

  Or you mean higher?

• 1:45:13Jay Novella?

  You know what I'm talking about.

• 1:45:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:14Jay Novella?

  That's the fiction.

• 1:45:16Speaker 02

  Okay, Evan.

• 1:45:17Speaker 04

  Oh, boy, I want this tardigrade protein one to be science. Oh, gosh, right, Jay?

• 1:45:23Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:45:24Speaker 04

  This is too good. Tardigrades are amazing little buggers, aren't they? Can't, can't kill them.

• 1:45:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Inevitable. Steve's favorite word.

• 1:45:36Speaker 04

  Again, that's the one that can trap you, right? You want it to be true, you don't kind of care, but at the same time, you'll lose the game. And then the 445 million species, 39% correct deal classification. Um, I suppose that could be right. You know, it's more refined, you know, you know, make observations and over time you make more and more and more observations and then you start concentrating on, you can realize you were pretty far off the mark to begin with. I don't think there's a problem with that one per se. The last one about the rogue planetary planetary mass objects, the rogue ones, ejected planets rather than failed stars. Okay, I believe that. Oh, what the heck.

• 1:46:18Speaker 04

  I'll go with the tardigrade one because as fiction because when it's not, if it turns out to be science, then I my sadness from losing the game will be overridden by my happiness in that it was a fact.

• 1:46:32Speaker 02

  All right, Bob.

• 1:46:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, Bob's going before me.

• 1:46:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was hoping you'd go before me. Jesus, tardigrade protein, huh? I guess, why wouldn't they use the the code from, what's the name of that bacteria? Radiodurans. This is a bacteria that could have its genome obliterated by radiation and then it just like puts itself back together. I think it's even harder, it's heartier than even a tardigrade. But, uh, but tardigrades have some amazing, famously amazing resilience. So sure, I want that to be true too, so so badly. Let's see, so 45, so 8.9 million observations of only 445 species. That's 20,000 observations per species. That's a lot and they still were that wrong?

• 1:47:19Speaker 04

  That's pretty dramatic.

• 1:47:21Speaker 02

  No, that's the database they used to figure out that the older classifications were wrong, right? You understand what that says?

• 1:47:29Speaker 04

  I think so.

• 1:47:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, you made it sound like, and they're still wrong after eight, no, 8.9 million observations is what led them to, you know, based upon those observations, the existing deal classifications were only correct 39% of the time.

• 1:47:43Speaker 04

  All right, that's not encouraging. Let me look at this.

• 1:47:45Bob Novella?

  This third one here. Alright, so this one's interesting. Um, so you've got, I mean, we've, Steve, you, we've believed for years that there's more rogue planets ejected from solar systems than there are planets in orbit around a star, right? Isn't that kind of like many billions of these rogue planets? For years, that that's kind of been the consensus. He's not even, he's not agreeing with me, but I know you would agree with me.

• 1:48:09Cara Santa Maria?

  He's not done it.

• 1:48:09Bob Novella?

  So you're saying here that potentially these, some of these could be failed stars. Uh, I don't like, I don't like that. Um, I like the idea of these, these rogue planets, just like, you know, I don't need a star.

• 1:48:21Speaker 02

  It says they're ejected planets, not rogue stars, not failed stars.

• 1:48:27Bob Novella?

  Just the idea of potentially thinking that these were failed stars is, is like, I like the idea of the rogue planets. It makes, it makes sense. Like, you know, you know, screw those billionaire stars. I don't need them. I'm out on my own. I don't, I don't need those guys. And imagine the life forms that could have evolved on a exoplanet with no, with no star, no, with no, you know, no stellar.

• 1:48:51Cara Santa Maria?

  In what universe could anything live off of a, okay, sorry.

• 1:48:55Bob Novella?

  Plenty, plenty, plenty. Uh, first off, you've got, you know, uh, microbes living under the ground because of the, the heat of nuclear decay. That's, that's like, yeah, that absolutely can happen. But yeah, surface life, yeah, that's going to be, that's going to be difficult for sure. But there still could definitely be life on those. I mean, we, you know, there's still plenty of heat inside the earth. So this one, that one makes sense to me. Alright, I'm going to say that the, um, 39% correct one, something, yeah, I'll just, whatever, throw my coin down on that and say, that's fiction. I don't know. Any of these could potentially be, except the third one.

• 1:49:30Cara Santa Maria?

  The brothers are saying it's the mammalian classification.

• 1:49:34Speaker 02

  Evan, the tardigrade.

• 1:49:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I went with tardigrades for my own selfish.

• 1:49:38Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Who do I go with?

• 1:49:39Speaker 02

  All right, Kara.

• 1:49:40Bob Novella?

  Don't just try to suss it out.

• 1:49:42Speaker 04

  Or the rogue planets. You could do the rogue planets.

• 1:49:45Cara Santa Maria?

  I could?

• 1:49:46Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:47Speaker 04

  Prevent the sweep.

• 1:49:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Let's see, let's see. The tardigrade one I think could be true. At least somebody probably researched that. They were like, oh, these are radiation resistant. Maybe we can take something from them and put it in tissue. And it doesn't say in people. It says in tissue. So this could have been in vitro.

• 1:50:04Speaker 02

  I said it was a mice, right?

• 1:50:05Bob Novella?

  Rice.

• 1:50:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, in mice. Okay, yeah. Yeah, totally happened in mice. I don't, I don't know why everybody is as bothered by this database one, though. Like, I'm not bothered by any of them. Okay, so what you're saying is that a new database where they had tons of observations. What I'm reading this as, as the first time they did a big data analysis of this, they realized that all of their boots on the ground, you know, non-comparison data was kind of wrong. And like, that doesn't, like, naturalistic data is just, oh, I'm standing out in the forest and I'm writing down how many of these creatures I see. But if they were using like camera traps or like CCTV or some way or like satellite footage or something.

• 1:50:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, thermal imaging to get like big data, I could see them being way off. You know, animals are famously very good at evading human observation. So this one doesn't bother me at all. Now, the rogue planet one, I have no idea.

• 1:51:05Speaker 04

  Then must be the fiction by process of elimination.

• 1:51:08Cara Santa Maria?

  I want, I mean, the other two don't bother me. This one, but Bob says this one doesn't bother him. And I have to use Bob as a proxy for my own brain. So I don't know anything about. So, okay, I guess in an attempt not to sweep Steve, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna use strategery here. And I'm gonna say it was, it's that they're not rogue planetary, or they're not ejected planets. They are failed stars or something different.

• 1:51:36Speaker 02

  Just to screw me out of it.

• 1:51:41Speaker 02

  That's your strategy. Okay, I got you. All right, well, you're spread out, which means I did my job this week. And well, it means I'll take them in order. Take them in order.

• 1:51:53Bob Novella?

  But you didn't do the job as good as you could have.

• 1:51:55Speaker 02

  Please. All right. You guys were confused and befuddled. Here we go. I don't remember one. Researchers successfully used mRNA which produces a tardigrade protein to protect surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment. You all want this one to be correct, but Evan thinks it's the fiction.

• 1:52:15Bob Novella?

  And I still want it to be correct.

• 1:52:16Speaker 02

  And this one is. Say it. Science. This is science.

• 1:52:21Bob Novella?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:52:23Speaker 02

  This is super cool.

• 1:52:23Bob Novella?

  I lose.

• 1:52:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so. Well, I'll tell you. So, yeah, so it's pretty much what it says. They use, they, they identify the protein that binds to DNA and protects the DNA from breaking apart due to radiation. They made, you know, the mRNA that produces that protein, they injected it into the tissue of mice. They then gave them radiation therapy for their cancer because they actually had cancer, the mice that they were studying. And the mRNA produced tardigrade, tardigrade protein protected the surrounding tissue from radiation damage. They did not get as much DNA damage from the radiation. The idea here is that the mRNA is only going to last for a short amount of time. So it'll produce a bunch of the tardigrade protein.

• 1:53:08Speaker 02

  You give the radiation therapy and then within a couple of weeks it's gone. You know, so it doesn't have any long lasting effects. And that's basically what they found. So the research was successful. Obviously, this is a long way away from human treatments, you know.

• 1:53:24Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but extrapolate that, that's pretty, could be potentially pretty awesome.

• 1:53:27Speaker 02

  But it could be. Hell, yeah. Absolutely. So this is a good proof of concept, you know, in an animal model and very, very encouraging. Radio protection of healthy tissue via nanoparticle delivered mRNA encoding for a damage suppressor protein found in tardigrades. Cool study.

• 1:53:46Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:53:47Speaker 02

  All right, let's go on to number two. Studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct deal classification, what time of day they are active. Bob and Jay, you think this one is the fiction. Kara and Evan thinks this one is science. And this one is.

• 1:54:09Speaker 02

  Science, sorry guys.

• 1:54:11Speaker 04

  Hey!

• 1:54:12Bob Novella?

  Hey!

• 1:54:13Speaker 02

  Kara's strategy, unfortunately.

• 1:54:16Speaker 04

  Oh, it worked, yeah!

• 1:54:18Bob Novella?

  Failed stars, that sucks.

• 1:54:20Speaker 02

  Well, hang on Bob, hang on. Hold your horses.

• 1:54:25Bob Novella?

  Hold your fire.

• 1:54:26Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:54:27Bob Novella?

  Hurry up.

• 1:54:28Speaker 02

  So, as I was saying.

• 1:54:30Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah, mammals, next.

• 1:54:31Speaker 02

  Kara, you pretty much are correct. You know, a lot of the classifications were based on field observations and a lot of them were just too few field observations. So, can anyone name the four most common deal classifications?

• 1:54:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Nocturnal, diurnal, crepuscular, and the one I don't know.

• 1:54:49Speaker 02

  The one you don't know. Cathemeral.

• 1:54:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that the opposite? Once on, once off?

• 1:54:54Bob Novella?

  I never heard of that one.

• 1:54:55Speaker 02

  Cathemeral means that they're active during multiple phases throughout the day.

• 1:55:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay, okay, so it's a catch-all.

• 1:55:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's kind of a catch-all. And what they found was a couple of things. One was that a lot of the classifications that we had were not correct. But also that there's a lot more variability than we previously assumed. So, in other words, like a quote-unquote nocturnal animal is active during the day quite a bit. So, a lot more of the animals were cathemeral than strictly nocturnal or strictly diurnal.

• 1:55:27Bob Novella?

  Oh, that makes more sense.

• 1:55:28Cara Santa Maria?

  That doesn't surprise me.

• 1:55:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, interesting. And it was a massive database, you know, which of course, that's, as Kara was saying, that's, of course, they would revise the less, you know, accurate information. This was a global network representing 38 countries, leveraged 8.9 million observations. So, they updated our deal classifications. Quite a deal. Okay, that means that a new analysis finds that the vast majority of rogue planetary mass objects form as ejected planets rather than failed stars is the fiction.

• 1:56:06Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 1:56:07Speaker 02

  But...

• 1:56:09Speaker 02

  They're not failed stars either. This is kind of a trick. It's neither.

• 1:56:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:56:13Speaker 04

  What? What are we talking about?

• 1:56:16Cara Santa Maria?

  So what are they?

• 1:56:17Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:56:18Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:56:18Bob Novella?

  Specify, please.

• 1:56:19Cara Santa Maria?

  What else is there? Are they comets? What? I'm confused.

• 1:56:22Speaker 02

  Right. So, basically, there's two main ways that stuff gets made, right? You either get made as a star, meaning a collapsing disk of material, or you you form as a planet, which is an accretion of material around a star, right? Those are the two basic ways that worlds get made. And the question was always that these for these rogue planetary mass objects, which PMOs are generally like bigger than Jupiter, but small, but not big enough to become a star, right? And there's a lot of them out there. And so that and Bob, you're right, a lot of, a lot, there's a, there's probably more rogue planets than there are planets around stars.

• 1:57:04Bob Novella?

  Oh, they they still believe that?

• 1:57:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. This is this does not impact that. This because these are like in a, these are not just anything that's a planet. This is the planetary mass objects are a specific range. Again, they're they tend to be large, but not suns. What they found was that they form by a third newly discovered mechanism. That's neither like stars or planets. And it's complicated. But what they found was they found a bunch of them forming in the same location. What they, what seems to be happening is that it's an interaction between two planetary discs that are forming these, like a tidal bridge, as they say. It was like a tidal bridge between these two encountering

• 1:57:49Speaker 02

  circumstellar discs that then produce these highly productive clusters of material that

• 1:57:56Bob Novella?

  And spits it out?

• 1:57:57Speaker 02

  That spits out these PMOs, these free floaters.

• 1:57:59Bob Novella?

  Oh, like a baseball going through a pitching machine kind of thing. You got these two wheels

• 1:58:03Speaker 02

  I guess so.

• 1:58:04Bob Novella?

  That thing going.

• 1:58:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good analogy, I guess.

• 1:58:06Bob Novella?

  So two, two circumstellar discs around one star?

• 1:58:10Speaker 02

  No, I think, no, no, in a, like a, in a cluster, like in a cloud of, a star forming region.

• 1:58:17Bob Novella?

  Neat.

• 1:58:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:18Bob Novella?

  But if it's a circumstellar disk, then there is a star there already, right?

• 1:58:22Speaker 02

  But it's not around a star. It's not in orbit around a star. It's a, it's a young star cluster.

• 1:58:28Cara Santa Maria?

  So is it like a binary system? I'm confused.

• 1:58:31Bob Novella?

  Prodo star?

• 1:58:31Speaker 02

  No, no, it's, so you have a star, a cluster of stars, right? So a star forming cluster. So there's a lot of young stars in, forming in this one region. Cause there's a giant, you know, cloud of gas there and lots of stars are forming. But in that cloud, there can also be these circumstellar discs that are like, you know, forming stars. But if they get close together, they form these tidal bridges that then spit out a bunch of these PMOs. Does that make sense?

• 1:59:01Bob Novella?

  Fascinating, yeah.

• 1:59:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but I think circumstellar is kind of just like not a good word for this.

• 1:59:06Speaker 02

  That's the name of the discs. But that's the, so this is, this would be a, this is a new, a new mechanism by which these kinds of objects can be formed. It's not formed as a sun or as a planet. It's its own thing, which is weird. Um, but cool.

• 1:59:24Speaker 04

  Bob, we learned something here.

• 1:59:26Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's, that's really a third way. It sounds, uh, that's really cool. I want to read up on that one. That's, that's fascinating.

• 1:59:32Speaker 04

  And Kara figured it all out.

• 1:59:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Sure thing.

• 1:59:36Speaker 04

  Without AI.

• 1:59:37Speaker 02

  Kara backed into that one.

• 1:59:39Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm totally not still confused.

• 1:59:40Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no, no. She took the reins and commanded her way to victory.

• 1:59:45Speaker 02

  All right. Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:59:47Speaker 04

  "One of the few universal characteristics is a healthy skepticism towards unverified speculations. These are regarded as topics for conversation until tests can be devised. Only then do they attain the dignity of subjects for investigation." That was written by Edwin Hubble in an article called "The Realm of the Nebula," 1936. Edwin Hubble, right? He's one of the-

• 2:00:15Bob Novella?

  He was awesome, man.

• 2:00:16Cara Santa Maria?

  I saw his locker.

• 2:00:17Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 2:00:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's, it's here at Mount Wilson.

• 2:00:21Speaker 02

  At Mount Wilson?

• 2:00:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Like if you go and, yeah, if you go and, and observe at the telescope at Mount Wilson, Hubble's locker is like still down in the bottom.

• 2:00:27Speaker 04

  Holy moly.

• 2:00:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was there. Yeah, I saw it. There was also like his telescope, his microscope or something was there. I don't know.

• 2:00:33Speaker 04

  And his lunch.

• 2:00:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, there's like some stuff inside of his locker.

• 2:00:36Speaker 04

  It's kind of old now.

• 2:00:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's like an old apple.

• 2:00:37Speaker 02

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

• 2:00:43Bob Novella?

  Sure, man.

• 2:00:44Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 2:00:44Bob Novella?

  Thanks, doctor.

• 2:00:45Speaker 02

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

• 2:00:52Speaker 02

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

• 2:01:29Jay Novella?

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