The Skeptics Guide #1031 - Apr 12 2025

TikTok Flat Earthers; News Items: De-extincting the Dire Wolf, What Experts Think About AI, Planned Obsolescence, VR Touch Sensory; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: SNPs vs Sequencing; 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, April 9, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella,

• 0:49Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:55Speaker 03

  Good evening, folks.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  Evan, you're one week away from being out of tax hell, huh?

• 1:01Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm so looking forward to that moment. It's a great moment.

• 1:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Is any of this even going to matter? Didn't they just fire the IRS? Just all of it?

• 1:12Speaker 03

  Well, maybe 25%, but no, it's causing problems. It's going to be, yeah. So, you know, maybe another time we can talk a little bit more about it in detail when we see what really the final fallout of this is. But it, look, it's two things, generally speaking. Yes, there's going to be fewer employees at the IRS, which means things like audits will go down, enforcement will go down, among other things, which, hey, that sounds great, right? Yeah. But what that also means is that, okay, there's going to be less revenue

• 1:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we need that money.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  And the people, and it's, and it kind of shifts the burden unfairly to those who are, you know, doing what they're supposed to be doing and playing by the law and versus those who are going to skirt the law with these holes that are going to open up. So it's, it's a problem overall.

• 1:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I have decided to dissociate completely and leave the country for a month.

• 2:04Speaker 03

  Bye bye.

• 2:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Bye.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  See ya.

• 2:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Because I'm in between, right? As you guys know, I recently finished all of the requirement. I finished my fellowship and I finished all the requirements towards licensure and I can't get hired now by the hospital until the license comes in and until all these other kind of pieces come into place credentialing, all that good stuff. So, uh, yeah, so I'm traveling a little bit.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  Oh, where are you? Are you in San Diego? Are you in Thousand Oaks?

• 2:28Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm in Hong Kong right now.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  Hong Kong?

• 2:30Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm in Hong Kong.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  Hong Kong, California?

• 2:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Hong Kong. Ooh, I don't want to get too political here.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  Oh, well.

• 2:36Cara Santa Maria?

  What is it? Special administrative region of China?

• 2:39Speaker 03

  District, maybe?

• 2:40Cara Santa Maria?

  The legal thing I think I'm supposed to say.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so that's contentious. No, but I'm in Hong Kong right now and then, um, I go to mainland China and then I go to Vietnam. So you will be hearing from me from different parts of the world over the next several weeks.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Neat.

• 2:57Cara Santa Maria?

  And let me say, the internet here in Hong Kong is fast. Let me see where I'm at. One of, will, will you guys do a speed test where you're at so we can compare?

• 3:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 3:08Cara Santa Maria?

  I just did one. I'm 624 megs down and 501 megs up.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  I'm a gig down and a gig up, but I have fiber optic.

• 3:18Cara Santa Maria?

  You're a gig up?

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, see, I'm not at home when I'm, even if I'm like 900 megs down, I'm barely 100 megs up. Like, it's so throttled.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm on the T6 backbone, so, uh, mine's infinitely fast. No, I'm not.

• 3:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, I, I have fiber optic at home too, but I feel like the companies just throttle the upload speeds like crazy. Am I wrong?

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, fiber optic doesn't have that problem, though.

• 3:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but I thought I was also on fiber.

• 3:42Bob Novella?

  I'm at, I'm at 155 megabit per second down and it looks like under 20 megabit per second up.

• 3:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's a bit different there.

• 3:50Bob Novella?

  That's kind of shit, but I don't really need a big upload, but, um...

• 3:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, but it is annoying when we finish a record, you know, like a file. We just want to get it up and it's just taking ages. But yeah, it's true. Most people are not uploading, like, a lot of data regularly. Most people are, are streaming, right? They're downloading data.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Should we invite the listeners to send us their upload and download speeds?

• 4:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that'll be a-

• 4:10Speaker 03

  So we can get 24,000 emails?

• 4:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Great flood of emails, yeah.

• 4:16Cara Santa Maria?

  But yeah, I am slightly concerned about when I am in mainland China, right? About the Great Firewall, but I do have, um, I have a VPN. I, I'm wondering, should I be more concerned about, about my data? Or should I be more concerned about the massive mounting trade war and getting stuck in the middle of it?

• 4:35Speaker 03

  That's hard to know. We're in uncharted territory.

• 4:38Cara Santa Maria?

  We really are. I'm, I think the good news, and I didn't do this intentionally, and maybe it doesn't really matter, is that my portion of the trip where I'm in China is not buttressed by travel back home. You know what I mean? So like, I'm going to China from Hong Kong and I'm going to Vietnam from China. So like my in and out of the US will not be to or from China. I don't know if that matters now. Does that matter?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  Kara, it was not lost on me that you mentioned the Great Firewall of China.

• 5:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it is what they call it.

• 5:08Bob Novella?

  I'm actually quite jealous. Not only are you going to be visiting some beautiful countries, but you, two of those countries that you will be in have a Disney park that's on my bucket list.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh.

• 5:22Bob Novella?

  I'm so.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Hong Kong Disney?

• 5:25Cara Santa Maria?

  And I probably will not go to either of them.

• 5:28Bob Novella?

  No, nope. But, um, but I will someday.

• 5:33Cara Santa Maria?

  But maybe I can find, I could probably find some trinkets here, some, um, Disney.

• 5:38Bob Novella?

  Merch?

• 5:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Not products. Yeah, merch. There's a word though. Some licensed characters and things like that, that are Hong Kong or China specific.

• 5:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah, probably.

• 5:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Also, where I'm going in China, Sichuan region, A, the food is amazing, but it's also home to pandas. So I definitely need to go see some pandas.

• 5:55Bob Novella?

  That's awesome.

• 5:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that would be really great.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  Sneezing pandas?

• 5:58Speaker 02

  You're gonna see them, Kara?

• 5:59Cara Santa Maria?

  I hope so. I should. I should go attempt to.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  You probably have to go to see them, right? They're not gonna be like wandering on the side of the street.

• 6:06Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but there may be some, you know, wildlife reserves or something where I can go, yeah, observe them in their natural environment, not just like in a zoo. So that's pretty cool.

• 6:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Eat my body weight in hot pot.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 6:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Heck, yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  Is that a weakness?

• 6:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my god. Hot pot is such a weakness of mine. It's hot pot is where my friends and I go in L.A. After a breakup, when somebody is ill, when somebody has a loss in their life. It's like a bonding, kind of very emotional meal for us. Oh, I just love it so much. It's also first thing in the morning here, so you guys get me fresh as a daisy.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Nice. Yeah.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. You're a day ahead of us.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  So we did our, we did our live stream today, our Wednesday live stream. Bob is joining us for this. It was me, Bob and Jay. And one of the things we did was we go over some TikTok videos. And I wanted to talk about a couple of them here. There was a real crop of crazy nonsense for this. Crop of crap. It was, yeah, it's amazing.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  On TikTok, never.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Well, there's two in particular I want to talk about. They're astronomically related, both by different, two different people. I think, now, the thing is, this is a running thing for TikTok videos. It's the po or no. Is it, is this guy for real? Or is this all performance? And it's, you can't tell. It's indistinguishable, right? I mean, you can't know if the person actually believes what they're saying or if they're just playing a character. Sometimes there's a tell, but often there isn't. But if you read the comments, I think most of the people in the comments think it's real. So it, whatever, it doesn't matter. Right, right. So there were two that were, they both had to do with Venus. One guy was, you know, was saying that if Mercury and Venus are between the earth and the sun,

• 7:51Speaker 02

  how come they never cause an eclipse? How come we never, they never block out even part of the sun by passing in front of it?

• 8:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Do they mean transiting?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. They mean transit of Venus?

• 8:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they do transit.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  We talk about that often. I think the guy.

• 8:08Cara Santa Maria?

  They realize they're tiny, right? Like comparatively, like, or not tiny, far away, yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Again, taking this guy face value, I think he doesn't, he has a massive misconception of scale. I think, I think he looks at those like maps of the solar system and thinks it's to scale.

• 8:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Or something, I don't know.

• 8:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  What? It's like, yeah, like, it wasn't that long ago. Yeah, I mean, it's probably 10 years ago now, whatever. The last time Venus like transited in front of the sun that you could see it. I remember doing it with my daughters. We got out the little pinhole things and you could see Venus crossing over the face of the sun. It does block out the sun, just a really tiny piece of it.

• 8:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And now you can, yeah, there, there are just literally images taken from telescopes online. You can look at them. There's some beautiful ones where like the ISS is also transiting at the same time, or like, you know, like cool things in the pictures.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  You also said, how can we see Venus or Mercury if at night, the night side of the Earth, you know, the Venus and Mercury should be blocked by the Earth itself. So, again, just missing the point that, you know, as you learn this in grade school, you know, that you can see Mercury and Venus only right before sunset and right after sun, and right, right before sunrise. Because they, they basically cling to the sun, right? They hover around the sun because they are closer to the sun than we are.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yes, but you can't see them.

• 9:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, what's, what's the argument? Is he saying they're not real?

• 9:33Speaker 02

  That, no, the Earth is flat.

• 9:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that the Earth is flat?

• 9:36Speaker 02

  The globe, the globe, the globists don't know what they're talking about. I mean, we should, you know, if the globe model is correct, you know. The other guy showed a picture of the moon. Now, it was a crescent moon with earth shine, sort of faintly illuminating the rest of the moon. Yeah.

• 9:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, wait, did you just say earth shine?

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay. No, no, I know, but it sounded like you said earthstein.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Earthstein.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  Weltstein.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Um, Frankenstein. So he, he was saying, this is a picture of the moon, and then there's a, there's a bright dot, you know, in front of the moon. He said, why is Venus in front of the moon? Either the moon is transparent and you're seeing Venus behind the moon, or Venus is in front of the moon.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  And very, very small.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Those are the only two options he gave.

• 10:28Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Dude, false dichotomy, dichotomy alert.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, like, no, there's a third option, there's actually a fourth option too. The third option is that's not Venus.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  It's something else. Or the fourth option is that's a fake picture. It's a Photoshop or whatever. Uh, but it's probably was just like the ISS or something bright, passing in front of the moon.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Heck, right. It could have been an airplane that, with the sun hitting the airplane.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  It's like, why is nobody talking about this? Because you're an idiot, that's why.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Why is nobody talking about this?

• 11:04Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  But then the comments always fill up with these flat earthers.

• 11:09Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God, man.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Have a very distorted view of reality. Let me just say that. It is unbelievable.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  We could come up with, we could come up with better fake examples of things that would be a little more convincing than that, that could get the flat earthers going. But we don't do that.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  No, we don't do fakes.

• 11:24Bob Novella?

  Here's an example, 423 of what Musk could do with his money, much better than what he's doing with it now. I would, I would, if I had $400 billion, I would at least consider renting out a plane and taking plane loads or boat loads of people, flat earthers, where I need, where I need to go in the Antarctic, whatever, to prove to them. And over the course of like, say, maybe five years, you could basically decimate the flat earther population. Because for, I mean, I'm sure there'd be a bunch of them that even wouldn't believe it if they would see it with their, you know, their, their, their eyes. This recently happened, where a couple of famous flat earthers, right, were brought down there and they saw,

• 12:06Bob Novella?

  they saw the 24 hour sun, which is basically refutes most, you know, most versions of earthism that I'm aware of. If the sun just doesn't set, then you, you know, your whole idea is kind of messed up. Imagine getting rid of flat eartherism. And I know they're kind of goofy and harmless. And if you, you know, the money could be put to much better use. But imagine just getting rid of like 99% of flat earthers, because you proved to all of them that it's baloney.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  Well, just last week, what there was, the, the dragon spacecraft went up and they were taking photos and videos of, of the earth. And here's the headline from last week. Flat earthers in shambles after astronauts release new footage of our planet, you know, clearly showing the curvature of the earth.

• 12:51Bob Novella?

  Well, I'm skeptical that any of them were in shambles, but yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  All evidence is fake. That's all. They just declare it fake.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Well, that's the whole point of that movement, isn't it? Is it's just anti authoritarianism and you know, you can't trust anyone for anything.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the ultimate conspiracy theory. If that's fake, then everything is fake.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Which is what they want. And they certainly seem to love their position, too.

• 13:15Bob Novella?

  It's comforting. They're special. They're in on the big secret. They're in on it and everyone and most of the entirety of the human population are just being duped, but they see past it. So they're very special. They're very special.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  They're very, they are very special. We could say.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Oh, they're special.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  I agree with that. All right. So we got about a million emails to asking us to talk about the extinct thing, the dire wolf.

• 13:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Three of the rogues asked to take the lead on this news item.

• 13:45Bob Novella?

  I didn't.

• 13:46Cara Santa Maria?

  You know what that means?

• 13:47Speaker 03

  That was my guess.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  But Kara asked first, so Kara, go.

• 13:50Cara Santa Maria?

  That means I expect all of you to contribute to this.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:53Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm not just going to be, yeah, the only one talking about this. Okay.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  I'll start.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Vurfy.

• 13:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Vurfy. So as everyone has seen all over the news right now, headlines everywhere from the return of the dire wolf. 12,000 years later, dire wolves are back. Game of Thrones just got real. Scientists brought back actual dire wolves using ancient DNA.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  How could you not bring Game of Thrones into the whole thing?

• 14:18Cara Santa Maria?

  I have to say, I'm struggling with the media coverage of this, so I'm excited to dive into it in in a nice skeptical manner. So, so there's a company called Colossal Biosciences. Some of you may have heard of one of its co-founders, the one and only George Church, who is often in the news, a preeminent geneticist, who's often in the news talking about de-extinction, something he's been. Very interested in for a long time. So Colossal Biosciences, Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences primarily does focus on de-extinction, conservation, biotechnology.

• 14:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And they have multiple species that are, they sort of have zeroed in on as points of interest for them. The woolly mammoth, the thylacine, the dodo, and the dire wolf. And you guys may remember only just a few weeks ago, coverage of the woolly mouse, which was a mouse that had woolly mammoth DNA inserted into it. So the big news here is exactly what I said. A lot of these media outlets are saying the dire wolf is back. The dire wolf has been brought back. The dire wolf is now de-extinct. And what really happened is that Colossal Biosciences, so they were able to take DNA from a tooth

• 15:41Cara Santa Maria?

  that's 13,000 years old and a skull that is 72,000 years old. And they basically engineered this DNA across 14 different genes. They picked 20 different loci, different sites across these genes. They emptied out the nucleus of a cell. They injected this DNA with these engineered changes into that cell. And they used a dog as a surrogate. They did this twice. So the first time, they made twins, I guess you could call them. They made two males, Romulus and Remus. And then the second time, they produced a female named

• 16:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Khaleesi. And the Romulus and Remus are six months old. Actually, Romulus and Remus is quite clever as well. The naming is a bit clever. But Romulus and Remus are now six months old. Khaleesi is now three months old. And they are kept in a wildlife reserve. And if you go to colossal.com, where you can learn about this research, they do talk. Quite a lot about the welfare, the animal welfare and sort of their goals and how they're caring for these animals and what they hope to do in the future. So let's talk a little bit about the difference between, oh yeah, because did I say that? I probably didn't even say that. I said that they were, the surrogate was a dog, a modern dog, obviously,

• 17:09Cara Santa Maria?

  but that the DNA from these dire wolves, this genetically engineered DNA was added to the genome of a gray wolf, right? A modern living gray wolf. So gray wolves are Canis lupus. Dire wolves, I wrote down the pronunciation, Inachyon, Inachyon dirus. When extinct, I don't know the actual date of the last one, but they were Pleistocene, early Holocene, so 125,000 to 10,000 years ago, give or take. How old was the tooth? 7,000? No, 13,000.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  13,000.

• 17:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, yeah, 13,000. 125 to 10,000 years ago is when these animals lived. If you, you've probably, or you may have seen a dire wolf, if you've visited a museum that has collections from, most of them come from the La Brea Tar Pits, which is literally down the street from where I live. They have a very recognizable coloring to the bones because they were preserved in tar. So the bones are really, really dark brown. And there's this gorgeous installation. If you ever visit LA, I highly recommend you go to the La Brea Tar Pits. There's a gorgeous installation in one of the halls of dire wolf skulls. And they're all sort of mounted on this large orange wall that's backlit. And so you can see, because there's

• 18:29Cara Santa Maria?

  so many preserved specimens, you can see all of the morphologic variation amongst the different skulls, you know, different sizes and shapes, which is really neat.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  They have it at the Peabody in New Haven, so I've seen it.

• 18:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, fun. Okay, that's great. Yeah. So, so these would have lived contemporaneously with some horses, some pronghorns, those giant ground slots, bison, camels.

• 18:52Cara Santa Maria?

  The tar pits also features some of our, you know, like woolly mammoths, saber toothed cats, like some of these different species that are, I guess, more recent, like we're contemporaneous with human beings, but are still long extinct. Do you know off the top of your head, Steve, how big like a modern gray wolf is compared to?

• 19:15Speaker 02

  The diorows are 20% bigger is what I heard.

• 19:17Cara Santa Maria?

  20%, okay, all right, great. Yeah, and so I think what they did is they made sure that the surrogate was just a really, really large dog, just to make sure. And obviously, we see this a lot, I mean, and this is where this conversation is really going, and when the back and forth that I would like to have with you guys, and that I hope the listeners have as well, is what is a species? How do we define it? Are we categorizing this de-extinction appropriately? Like, when we think about modern dogs, right? And modern dogs can technically breed with wolves, and they are, because they have a subspecies as well, right?

• 19:59Cara Santa Maria?

  So they are Canis familiaris or Canis lupus familiaris, whereas, obviously, a gray wolf, as I mentioned before, is Canis lupus. Think about the massive morphological variation in a modern dog. Think about the tiniest chihuahua you've ever seen, and like a Newfoundland. Like, that's technically the same species.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:22Cara Santa Maria?

  So when we think about the historical way that we define species, which was purely based on morphology, you know, like a hip shape, or size, or different kinds of measurements, that has drastically changed, obviously with the advent of modern genetic techniques. And so now, yes, it is still a categorization issue. Yes, a lot of these lines between this species versus that species are wiggly, but can you guys think of some of the ways that we now define species? Like, how different does something have to be to be considered a different species? What's one of the ways that we often

• 20:59Speaker 03

  They can't interbreed.

• 21:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right. So can they breed?

• 21:02Speaker 03

  That's a classic, right?

• 21:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, or, or if they can breed, can they produce viable offspring? Or, or

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Fertile, fertile offspring.

• 21:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Fertile, thank you. Fertile offspring. The question here is if you take an extinct animal that is not only a different genus, but also, or sorry, not only a different species, but also a different genus, and you insert that DNA into the functional genome of, again, a different genus and species, they're only the same once we get up to the family level. They are both family candidate. Is that, is de-extinction an appropriate term to be using? Can we say the dire wolf was brought back? Because that is the headline we're seeing.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  This is a version of the dire wolf.

• 21:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it a version of the dire wolf, or is it a version of a gray wolf?

• 21:58Speaker 03

  No, right.

• 21:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Because did we take dire wolf DNA and insert a few gray wolf genes, or did we take gray wolf DNA and insert a few dire wolf genes?

• 22:07Speaker 02

  I thought they modified the gray wolf.

• 22:08Jay Novella?

  The former, the latter.

• 22:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So they modified a gray wolf to give it some dire wolf morphologic features. And they specifically focused on things that would make it look like a dire wolf, right? They specifically chose these gene loci to change the, the, the size, the shape, the coat, the coloring, all of that.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  I mean, I think the best way to characterize it is as the hybrid, right?

• 22:27Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's how some people are. Yeah, some people are calling it a hybrid.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Between a gray wolf and a, and a dire wolf, but it's a genetically engineered hybrid. And they, as you say, they tried to make it look as much like a dire wolf as they could, given the, the technology. It's not perfect, but it's

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Is it technically de-extinction?

• 22:44Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, Yeah, is it technically de-extinction? Did they technically bring back the dire wolf?

• 22:48Speaker 02

  I guess it depends on what you mean.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  How many characteristics you bring back?

• 22:51Cara Santa Maria?

  And here's a question, and I think this, this might clarify, or maybe it just confuses more. When you think about the woolly mouse, right? The one that was, uh, that was shown just, uh, several weeks ago, would you call that a hybrid?

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Uh, it's a genetically engineered organism.

• 23:07Cara Santa Maria?

  So, but they did the exact same thing.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  But they just did one gene, right?

• 23:11Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think so. I don't think that was.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  They just put the, I think it was just a proof of concept of the wooliness gene. Yeah, they just wanted to know if they could make a wool and mammal woolly.

• 23:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Eight genetic alterations spread across seven genes. So it's not that different. If we think about it, it's really not that different. It's just that because they put it in a source organism that is wildly different, it's so obvious to us, oh, they made this mouse woolly. Why did they not make this gray wolf diary? Why is that not the same thing?

• 23:38Speaker 02

  I mean, it's semantics. It's semantics.

• 23:40Cara Santa Maria?

  It's semantics, but semantics matter.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  But sometimes it's arbitrary.

• 23:44Cara Santa Maria?

  It is arbitrary.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  The line between, it's, I mean, I think it is a hybrid. You have two closely related species, even though they're in different genuses. They could interbreed and you're basically doing it through genetic engineering. You're putting, uh, there's 14 genes, 20 loci, you know, from one to the other. And you get something which is part gray wolf and part dire wolf. It may be mostly gray wolf, although gray wolves and dire wolves are 99.5% genetically identical.

• 24:13Cara Santa Maria?

  And we actually know that because of interesting research that Colossal did.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's where we're starting from.

• 24:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so there is, there is a really interesting publication where they sequenced that, that gene. I guess there's an interesting quote in, uh, in a Scientific American article that covered this somewhat skeptically where they, they cited both Shapiro, who is a scientist speaking for Colossal, um, for Colossal, saying, if, if we can look at this animal and see what it's doing and it looks like a dire wolf and it acts like a dire wolf, I'm going to call it a dire wolf. But then they quote, uh, a researcher who is not involved in the research, Jacqueline Gill of the University of Maine. And she said, "I have more than 14 Neanderthal genes in me. We wouldn't call me a Neanderthal."

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. Yeah, but hu, but homo, modern Homo sapiens are a hybrid between ancient humans and ancient Neanderthals.

• 25:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Right? But we, but anyway, it's, it's all fuzzy. That's my point.

• 25:08Cara Santa Maria?

  And, and they bring up. That's my point too.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  They bring, they bring up a good point.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  It's all woolly.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Because that was about what I was going to say is, are you saying, is it genetically a dire wolf? Is it morphologically a dire wolf? Is it behaviorally a dire wolf? Will it fill the dire wolf niche in the environment? Those are different questions that are all related. It's clearly not 100% cloned from 100% ancient DNA dire wolf.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, this isn't Dolly the Sheep.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is not the dire wolves that were running around 13,000 years ago. But this is as close as we can currently get to a morphological and maybe behaviorally dire wolf.

• 25:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and some people argue that that may not be the case at all. And I think this is an interesting side note that I do want to bring up because I would be remiss if I left it out. So we talked about the colossal research, but there was, so Beth Shapiro, the one who I referenced, the evolutionary biologist, co-authored a study in 2021 where they sequenced the complete genome of the dire wolf from some newly analyzed DNA, used that research to engineer Romulus Remus and Calisi. Or her team's research contradicts a study, a 2021 genetic analysis that was published in Nature, where the researchers claim that based on their genetic analysis, the dire

• 26:36Cara Santa Maria?

  wolf may not have even been a wolf. Because when they started to dig deep into the genetic sequence, it looked like it was more closely related to the African jackal, and it may have looked more like a giant kind of red coyote. And so there's still some controversy within scientific circles about whether dire wolves and gray wolves do share 99.5% of their DNA, which is the newest claim from colossal, which, you know, we need to replicate these findings.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 27:09Cara Santa Maria?

  But the thing that's important is the company hasn't published these findings. Nothing that the company is presenting is peer reviewed. And that right there gives me massive cause for just taking a breath. It doesn't mean I believe that there's fraud involved. It doesn't mean I believe that they're lying.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they did what they said they did.

• 27:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Totally, but they need to publish.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree.

• 27:31Cara Santa Maria?

  And they need to, and part of the publishing process, which I know becomes difficult when you are a private company that it has commercial interests, but part of the publishing process is giving people access to your data.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 27:43Cara Santa Maria?

  So that they can then use that data and see if they get the same results. Other people need to be able to do what colossal did to make sure that colossal did what colossal is saying that they did, because right now we do have to take their word for it. And yes, we see the proof. We see these really cute, kind of white, fuzzy canines, but we don't know that those are dire wolves.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. What's funny is this is all, this was all covered in the Jurassic Park movies. It really was. Especially the later movies where they were like.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Everything I know about.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  No, they said, these are not the dinosaurs that were running around 65 million years ago.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  Right, they used frogs.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they, these are dinosaur-ish. They're, they're the pieces of the dino DNA that we put in, in, yeah, modern genomes to get close to what they were, but they're different. That was also how they explained away why they didn't have feathers, you know, why velociraptor didn't have feathers. Like, these are not the same velociraptors as were, were running around 65 million years ago.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Fair enough.

• 28:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they wanted them to be, we wanted them to be scarier. But no, yay.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 28:44Cara Santa Maria?

  I agree. The problem is I don't think that that is colossal's language. When I look at their website, I don't think that they are as careful as they could be. And I definitely think that the media coverage then took that and ran with it.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Oh, as always.

• 28:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And this is why we see these headlines.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Which we've discussed before too, often the hype begins at the, the scientist or the,

• 29:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  the media outlet, the media, uh, the, um, PR, the PR office.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Game of Thrones into this thing. I mean, come on.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  And then, and then the media runs wild with the worst possible version of it.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 29:16Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's not, and it's not like an example of, oh, I was misquoted. Oh, the media, you know, didn't understand what I was saying. Like, go, go to colossal's website.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:23Cara Santa Maria?

  It's, it's polished.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 29:25Cara Santa Maria?

  They have professionals working on this.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  I'm just so used to ignoring the hype and seeing what actually happened. I just went straight to that, like, what actually happened here?

• 29:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, totally.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  And the hype didn't bother me as much because I'm just so used to it, but.

• 29:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And what happened is fundamentally interesting, and I do think we're gonna see continued work in this area. I think my guess is that thylacines are gonna be next. Thylacines and dodos from a lot of the media coverage, the skeptical media coverage that I've been reading. Thylacines and dodos from a kind of ethical perspective, it do appear to be number one, ecologically more feasible. They also went extinct more recently.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Yes, and due to people.

• 30:05Cara Santa Maria?

  And due to people, directly due to people. Yeah. And so, you know, is there a moral or an ethical obligation to undo some of that damage? Or have we kind of engineered the planet now into a place where there is no more an ecological niche? Because I think that that's an interesting question.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, where are they gonna go? Thylacines again? Thylacines were in Tasmania, right?

• 30:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Tasmanian tigers.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  So my, my understanding is from just watching Lost Tasmania, you know, but whatever. My, that Tasmania is still mostly like wild and the, you know, there's plenty of, there's plenty of spaces there. That's the same ecosystem as it was 100 years ago. And same thing with Mauritius, which is the island that the dodos come from. It's mostly wild and like the, the human populations are concentrated. What I think you need, you might need to do is what, what they did in New Zealand with Zealandia is create an eco sanctuary. Right. And then put them in the eco sanctuary so that our, the rats and stuff don't kill them. Yeah.

• 31:05Cara Santa Maria?

  When we talk about wild spaces on the planet, that is kind of a misnomer. And I'm not saying that there aren't places where there is a lot of range for organisms. But the larger the charismatic megafauna, the more critically endangered, the more likely it is that there are teams of people who know the name of that organism. That organism is tagged and collared, its range is well established. We do not have that much earth left that is not actively managed, if at all. We manage wildlife actively. And so when we talk about Tasmania having like a really good range, that's wonderful. It would be actively managed.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  Pristine, you know, wilderness.

• 31:49Cara Santa Maria?

  This idea of like.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  There's not much of the world that's still that way.

• 31:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Wild spaces. Yeah, that, that's, it's a myth. That's a myth. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, plus what doesn't have plastic in it, right?

• 31:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, there's that too.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Coming to effect.

• 32:01Cara Santa Maria?

  As an ecologic and conservation effort, there are so many incredible people who are dedicated to maintaining that important balance, right? And, um, you know, so that question of what would we do with these organisms? To me, that's a less interesting que-- it's an interesting question if we're talking about like a woolly mammoth, for example, where they have the potential to drastically change the landscape? Or if we're talking about large numbers of these species? But to me, it's, it's a less interesting question only because we're already doing it.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  But an eco-sanctuary goes beyond a managed area to like an isolated area where you've literally wall it off so that no invasive species can get in.

• 32:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and so, well, the climate is now different. So if these organisms were adapted to an earlier climate, but then again, we're not actually talking about pure de-extinction. This is not a dire wolf come back from the dead. This is a hybrid, as you mentioned, of a gray wolf, which is adapted to our environment right now. And so it may have a better chance at survival, but we don't know. Without management, we don't know if this would become an invasive species. We don't know if this would become a pest. We don't know if it would--

• 33:17Speaker 02

  I don't think anyone's talking about releasing the dire wolf into the wild.

• 33:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly, yeah, exactly.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  That's not gonna happen. Dodo, sure, the, the dire wolf, I don't see that happening. I think the best use of this technology is probably increasing, and they've done this, increasing the genetic diversity in endangered species.

• 33:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Or even, yeah, or, yeah, or even species that just have pressure on them. I think about the Florida panther, for example. I think about subpopulations of organisms that have been cut off due to human behavior, like, you know, building freeways and, and urban areas. And then there's all this intermixing and they start to get really, really sick. And that threatens the species. Yeah, if you can increase genetic diversity, or think about this, there are species that are not extinct, but only exist in sanctuaries and zoos right now.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that's so sad.

• 34:04Cara Santa Maria?

  We could proliferate those species. We could do more, but the problem is, we, we already have the technology to do that and we're not really doing that.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  But I, I question the whole premise, like, yeah, I would love to see these extinct animals and all that, but what? I don't think we should bring them back.

• 34:21Cara Santa Maria?

  And why, do you think that that is, because that's a common argument, and I'm not saying you're wrong, because I think that there's a lot of value in having these real conversations. But I guess my question is, is it a knee jerk reaction because it just doesn't feel right? Or do you think that there is a valid argument there for this being an, I don't know, unethical or immoral act?

• 34:44Jay Novella?

  It's complicated, but I mean, first of all, you know, what would their habitat be? What would they displace?

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Again, like the dire wolves, there's no, I don't think there's any plan to put them anywhere. They're, right now, they're in a sanctuary, like a, what do they say, 2,000 or 200 acre sanctuary. That's where they're gonna be, in spaces like that. They're gonna be in protected spaces where they could be researched and people could look at it.

• 35:09Jay Novella?

  I read an article, you know, guys, of course, the internet is full of BS, but somebody was saying that like the ultra rich could buy these creatures.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Well, that probably need regulation to keep that from them.

• 35:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because then what happens?

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Just like the tiger king, yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  That kind of stuff.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, like the tiger king thing, yeah.

• 35:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, people, yeah, people, people are gonna do what people do. And yeah, we gotta, we gotta be smart about that. But the idea here, and I guess we didn't mention this, Steve, is that, yes, they are in a reserve right now, and they want to produce more of these organisms so that they can study pack behavior, which is interesting. But I guess every article that I've read always has that same kind of cautionary tale of like, just because we can, should we? Right? And is the knowledge that we gain from it, like, what's, what's the risk benefit analysis? That's really what all of this comes down to.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  I think it's worth it. Plus, even just to just to perfect the technology, because we can't put the technology to good use. This may not be the optimal use of that technology, but the technology itself is important.

• 36:07Bob Novella?

  Plus, I want to go to a de-extinction park. I need to go. I want to go to one. I mean, sure, they needed to be taken care of, and their habitats need to be, you know, obviously not like a cage, but that, how, I would love to see animals that I never could see otherwise. I mean, isn't that part of the attraction here is is to be able to just see a living creature that had disappeared?

• 36:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but that's, you know, there are people who really struggle with the idea of zoos. Legitimate animal ethicists who really struggle with the idea of zoos.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  I like the idea, though, that if the science helps keep existing, helps to keep existing animals who are endangered alive longer, then that's good.

• 36:47Jay Novella?

  I want to say two more things before we move on. One, did you guys see pictures of the puppies? They are freaking adorable.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  Well, yeah.

• 36:53Jay Novella?

  They are adorable.

• 36:54Bob Novella?

  No, they're cute.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  They're not AI pictures, right? We're sure of that?

• 36:57Cara Santa Maria?

  No, they're tons.

• 36:57Jay Novella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:58Bob Novella?

  They're all over the web, man.

• 37:00Jay Novella?

  And the second thing, if you're gonna name one of them after the Game of Thrones, because that's where the direwolves are, why would you name it Khaleesi? That character has nothing to do with how stark or direwolves. Why not name it after one of the actual direwolves?

• 37:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, are any of them female?

• 37:16Jay Novella?

  Yes, there were multiple male and multiple female direwolves, all of which had names. And anyway.

• 37:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and that's why I do like the the Romulus and Remus names. I think those are.

• 37:26Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that was fun. The Khaleesi one was kind of like, wait.

• 37:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Do you think it's just because that's the most recognizable?

• 37:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 37:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's probably why.

• 37:36Jay Novella?

  Okay, Jay, tell us what experts really think about AI.

• 37:41Bob Novella?

  Oh, boy. Another AI talk?

• 37:43Jay Novella?

  Well, I'm curious. Yeah, I mean, Bob, it's like, you know, it is the hottest technology out there, endless stream of stuff happening. I mean, you love AI.

• 37:52Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I use it every day, man. We talk about it a lot.

• 37:54Jay Novella?

  We talk about it every day. So what do you guys think about artificial intelligence in the sense that is it a net positive or net negative for humanity?

• 38:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's, we can't know that yet.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  Too early to know. How about that? Too early?

• 38:10Jay Novella?

  I think that's probably the best answer.

• 38:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 38:13Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but there are a lot of people online who, you know, they're saying it's horrible, right? Look, and I'm not even gonna disagree at this point. You know, unregulated technology, you know, incredibly fast changes. It's it's a scary environment. But, you know, this this study that was done is finding out what what the researchers and the developers, you know, what do they think about it? What's their opinion? So there was a new study out of the University College London, and they came up with a detailed look into what over 4,000 AI researchers think about the future of their own field, which is a lot of people. I was really surprised to see that they came, they were able to find that many. I guess there's a ton of AI researchers out there.

• 38:56Bob Novella?

  Jay, did they classify them? Because AI is such a broad, broad term these days.

• 39:01Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's like any computer scientist.

• 39:03Bob Novella?

  Right. They, I mean, they all like language, you know, large language model AI guys?

• 39:07Jay Novella?

  They're calling them researchers, Bob, which I think it's, you know, rando people in the field. Like, it doesn't necessarily specifically mean developers or analysts or anything. It's just people that are in the field that are working on developing AI. There's probably dozens and dozens of job titles that go into that.

• 39:25Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 39:26Jay Novella?

  So according to the survey, eighty per seven, eighty per seven, guys.

• 39:31Bob Novella?

  Write that one down.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  I'm adding that to the list. That's a new number.

• 39:35Jay Novella?

  Eighty per seven. Oh, my God. That's notable. All right, let's start again. I love that, though. All right, so eighty-seven percent of AI researchers say AI's benefits outweigh or balance the risks that AI presents. Fifty-seven percent of the UK public who were quizzed agree with the AI researchers, that, you know, AI benefits are going to outweigh any of the risks that would come with it. So that means, guys, that about forty-three percent of the public disagree with researchers, you know, with their overall optimism. And nearly a third, about thirty percent, believe that AI's risks outweigh its benefits compared to nine percent of the researchers.

• 40:19Jay Novella?

  Now, I was surprised to read this stat, that only thirty percent believe that the risks are going to outweigh its benefits, because that doesn't, that doesn't track with what I'm reading online in my, you know, my anecdotal experience with talking to people and everything. I, I thought that the, um, the risks were much, much more feared by much more people. Now, this isn't just technologists that are cheerleading their own work, of course, right? You know, of course, they're going to do that. But they, um, you know, these researchers expressed their deep concerns about disinformation, cybercrime, which AI is, just the beginnings of it are happening, and it's going to be a big problem. Also, the unauthorized use of personal data, that's a big deal.

• 41:01Jay Novella?

  Concerns that, you know, that align closely with people like us, right? I don't want... Want AI to run rampant with my personal data. I already feel like it's happening. And I feel like it's it's something that's getting worse and worse as time goes on and AI is going to make the use, the gathering of it, the cross, you know, the cross of databases to figure out even more information and the use of that and the selling of that, it's it's it's already crazy and it's going to get orders of magnitude worse with AI making it much easier. Now, also, twenty nine percent of researchers researchers think AI should be developed as fast as possible, which I think is interesting when you think that, you know, these are the people that are getting paid to do this. And they, most of them, don't agree that it should be done as fast as possible.

• 41:45Jay Novella?

  You know, and of course, you talk to people, you know, that own these companies in Silicon Valley. You know, their narrative is extraordinary urgencies and massive inevitability. You know, there are other countries that are competing against us and whoever gets that brass ring first is going to have the prize. So how about that? You know, the researchers are not as jazzed as their bosses are about developing this at breakneck speeds. Of course, I I agree with that, but I also do understand that, you know, there's a other countries out there that are competing with each other and if anybody wants to stay relevant or be at the front of that pack, they have to they have to spend the billions of dollars of investment money they're getting. Also, AI researchers are split on the future of artificial general intelligence.

• 42:30Jay Novella?

  Now, this is something we've talked about a lot. I'll give you a quick brief on what it is. This is the idea that machines could one day match or surpass human cognitive abilities. I think also to add to that definition that they would think like people, that they would have human qualities. It's not just a narrow AI that can do a handful of things really well. It's it's almost like a real brain there, right?

• 42:52Bob Novella?

  Yeah, like the versatility of a human brain. That's not specialized.

• 42:56Jay Novella?

  And possibly achieve consciousness. You know, we just don't know. We don't know what what that's going to bring. So half the researchers think that AGI is likely to happen eventually, but only one in five. Are confident that it's inevitable, which I think, you know, when you, and this was taken right from the study, and I think that's a little vague. I mean, half the researchers think AGI is likely to happen.

• 43:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah, what the hell?

• 43:17Jay Novella?

  But then one in five are saying it's absolutely gonna happen. Okay, I mean, I guess so. I guess there's a slight difference there in, you know, in the way you define that and who thinks what.

• 43:26Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 43:27Jay Novella?

  Among those who believe that AGI is coming, most place their trust in scientists and private companies to manage the risks that it will bring. In contrast to that, researchers who are skeptical about AGI's future, they're more likely to support independent regulators and stronger public oversight. Now, this is another thing, guys. I actually don't know. What do you guys think? I just don't know what the right way to handle that is. You know, my opinion on the government in the last like 10 years of my adult life is they can't handle this. They, not only do they move glacially slow, but they've shown zero interest in really getting involved on the, for the most part. And they're just not intelligent enough. You know, the people who I think could handle making these decisions would

• 44:12Jay Novella?

  be the scientists, but then they have their compromise because they're involved with these companies. They're getting paid to do this. I just don't know. What do you guys think?

• 44:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it's also not their area of expertise either. I think it's the ethicists, right?

• 44:26Jay Novella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:27Cara Santa Maria?

  I guess that's the consultants. That's who has to weigh in on this. But we can't self-regulate. I mean, we should always self-regulate, but there also have to be laws.

• 44:35Jay Novella?

  I guess there'd have to be a combination of the two, and then there'd have to be like an extraordinary level of, this department in the government is gonna be very well-funded, and it's gonna be filled with really smart people. They're not gonna have a dual interest here. Like, their job is only to be critical and to make the best decisions that they can about how to regulate this stuff. I don't know. So, what I'm, as I read between the lines here, I'm seeing that AGI, it's still very poorly defined. Nobody knows what it's gonna be, how it's gonna roll out. What are the first, you know, evidence that it's starting to happen gonna be? Nobody really can wrap their head around this. So, it's all speculation and very little actual evidence. So, you know, it's hard to discuss because we're just

• 45:18Jay Novella?

  essentially making guesses, which is troubling, but, you know, I hope that we're 50 to 100 years away from AGI. You know, that's my hope, just to save humanity. You know, it shouldn't happen soon, or that would be devastating if it happened within the next 15, 20 years.

• 45:31Bob Novella?

  I wanna see it.

• 45:34Jay Novella?

  The researchers were more aligned with their opinions about data privacy. This is fantastic to hear. So fewer than 25% support the idea that AI companies, you know, they should be able to scrape publicly available content without permission. Nearly half of the developers think that people should have to explicitly opt in. So there's a few things going on here, right? One of them is, should AI just have free access willy-nilly to use anything that's on the web and co-opt it in any way it sees fit? And then there is the sharing of data. You know, people should say, I could opt in. I could say, hey, I don't mind if this company, you know, reads all of the SDU podcast back catalog and uses the data for X, Y, and Z.

• 46:19Jay Novella?

  Beyond that, no good, but here's what I'm allowing, right? I don't think we're ever going to get that level of granularity. I think that is just a complete pipe dream. I think they're going to keep doing what they're doing and people, because they're lazy and they want convenience, they're just not going to push hard enough to make anything change about all of those privacy issues.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I've, you know, read and heard several interviews recently with tech Silicon Valley CEOs and bigwigs. And I was not impressed, man. My overall impression is, these guys are full of it, man. They are full of themselves. They think that they're, they want no regulation. They think that they could be trusted to do whatever they think is best, and the only thing that matters is that they have unfettered opportunity to innovate. And without any consideration, these are not a group of people, in my opinion, that I would feel comfortable with this kind of technology.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Like, the move-fast-break-things is now culture. Like, that is now embedded culture, in my opinion. And not in a good way, in a very bad way.

• 47:34Jay Novella?

  You know, Steve, in Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum's character straight up said it. You know, they were so patting themselves on the back so hard and celebrating what they could do that they never thought, should we do it?

• 47:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Should we do it? Yeah, and this directly relates to the conversation we just had about the extinction.

• 47:51Jay Novella?

  And Kara, this is why all the guys on this podcast desperately want you to sink deep into science fiction, because I'm serious in a way, you know, of course, I would love to discuss Star Wars in detail with you at some day. But the idea is that there is a lot of philosophy happening in science fiction that talks about a lot of this stuff. That's why to some of us, Kara, you might not feel this, but I'll guarantee you that the rest of us do, we've already lived through this. We've already seen it.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  It's a giant thought experiment.

• 48:20Jay Novella?

  Right.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  None of this is new.

• 48:22Cara Santa Maria?

  And that is why I sometimes, I do enjoy aspects of sci-fi. I'm about to read an Octavia, my first Octavia Butler book, but I think about the type of sci-fi that really grapples with these like social justice issues and these like larger issues. I just struggle with sci-fi that feels very like gadgety, like, ooh, look at these gadgets. And like, I struggle with the world building. Anyway, that's, that's a non sequitur.

• 48:46Jay Novella?

  So the final thing I'll say here is...

• 48:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Some gadgets are awesome.

• 48:51Jay Novella?

  The final thing I'll say about this, guys, is the idea of should the public be involved in regulation and the policies and everything? So the AI researchers in the survey, they support public involvement in shaping AI, but they only think that the public should be involved in the late stages of development. So about 80% believe the public should have a say in the regulations and policy, but only 30% support involving the public in early development. This is like decisions about training, the data and the model design and all that.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  They want to wait until it's too late.

• 49:23Jay Novella?

  I guess so. I mean, it's complicated again, because you know, what is the average person going to really understand about this stuff? I mean, I watched videos about artificial intelligence and how the software functions, and it lost me at the one-minute mark. It's super complicated. This is like...

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Listen, but yeah, so is IVF, right? I mean, if you get down to the real technical details. So I listen, I get, I'm a technophile, and I don't like people pushing back against technology simply because it sounds scary and icky or whatever, which happens a lot in biology, you know? No animal proteins in people, like every... Every major innovation in medicine has been met with people with placards saying this is not natural and we shouldn't do it. So I'm not, I'm not that person, right? But, but I do think we need to think about like cloning people. Is this something that we should do? Genetically modifying, you know, genes that will get out into the population. Are some things that we need to have a conversation about?

• 50:24Speaker 02

  And not just do it, not just trust companies to do it right. Yeah. But please have the conversation so we can do it. AI is scary powerful in a great way and a scary way. And, you know, even things that seem innocuous, again, you could rewind the clock 20 years. And make all these same statements about social media, but nobody perceived the risk. And so we just did it. We just let companies do social media without really any oversight. Oops, we're screwed. I don't think anyone anticipated the consequences of what happened. And I don't know that anybody really wants it, except for the people who are making billions of dollars off of it.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  I think we're facing the same thing with AI where, but now people are saying, you know, this could completely destroy any notion of fact or truth. And this is going to happen really quickly and it's going to destroy democracy. We, we need to take that seriously and think very carefully about it. And about how we want to proceed, not to slow down the progress or retard progress, but to just proceed in a thoughtful way. And I do think that unfortunately what we need are educated regulators and I don't know that we have that.

• 51:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and, and I mean, we need a little bit of deep futurism here. Like there's some stuff that's just unknowable. And we talk about it often in a silo, like how is this going to affect democracy? Or how is this going to affect, but it affects us, it affects identity, it affects psychology. Like the social fabric of our existence. And social media does too. Like the Gen Alpha kids are just, they're fundamentally different. Because of how, because of their exposures, right? And

• 52:16Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 52:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Can you imagine the next like Gen Beta, Gen, I don't know, like being exposed? Too powerful AI from the time they're born.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh. Yeah, yeah, there's generating. People will be born are born now, and that's all they will know is the AI world.

• 52:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Fascinating.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  Well, just like there are people, the generation as Cara is saying, they only know the social media world. I just wrote about this on Science Based Medicine, a recent, you know, study. Basically finding that the youngest generation are more gullible. They are less able to identify true from fake headlines.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  Compared to the age of when compared to prior studies of the same age groups.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  They're living. Well, this, I don't know how old this model has been around.

• 52:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, but we used to think it was always like the oldest of adults that were the most gullible, but it's just, that's not the case anymore.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  No.

• 53:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  No, no. They're living in the, they're living in a post-truth world. You know, where it's just truth is, eh, you know, it's what, it's whatever gets clicks, you know, it's that.

• 53:11Cara Santa Maria?

  So scary.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is scary. All right. Let's move on. All right, guys. So what do you think about planned obsolescence? I think it absolutely sucks. It's bullshit.

• 53:22Cara Santa Maria?

  It's infuriating.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  It needs good planning.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  So personally, you think it's real? Do you really, do you think that it actually exists as a?

• 53:28Speaker 03

  I think it exists.

• 53:29Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it exists.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Of course it does. Steve, they used to make refrigerators in the 40s that still operate today. So you think that stuff was built better in the past? Yes.

• 53:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, but also I think that there is a probably cognitive error that's happening here where as things become more complicated, things are more likely to break. And that's why you can drive an old, old car where everything was mechanical. And it can still be working right now, but a lot of things in newer cars, because they are so much more sophisticated, don't last as long.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  One potential feature is complexity. Jay, why do you think things don't last as long today as they did before? Well, personal experience, you know. But I mean, why, why do you think that that the industry does that? To make more money.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  Money.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  To resell you the same product over and over. I mean, look at how quickly we cycle through iPhones.

• 54:20Jay Novella?

  You know, like the shiny new one and everything, you know, you get it and it doesn't, you know, other than maybe the camera being better, it's like, you know, it's not like a, it's not worth another thousand, fifteen hundred bucks. I bought a Samsung refrigerator. It was the biggest POS of any kitchen appliance I've ever owned.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  That's a bad brand. That's a, that's a particularly notoriously bad brand.

• 54:39Jay Novella?

  Yep. Well, I mean, they make good electronics, but do not buy any of their kitchen stuff, like nothing from them that, in that way. And they have terrible customer support. I mean, you know, it, there was a time when customer support in general, in my opinion, used to be a lot better than it is now.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  So it sounds like you're bitter.

• 54:54Jay Novella?

  Well, I mean, you know, combining that with the fact that a third of my retirement is gone, yeah, I'm freaking bitter.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  So there is, there was a study.

• 55:03Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  And since you bring up refrigerators, that's very apropos because it was a study of large appliances, large home appliances. And the question was, is the lifespan of large home appliances decreasing over time? Let's say, starting in the 1950s. And what do you think they found?

• 55:23Jay Novella?

  I mean, you know, I think I know where you're going with this and I call bullshit.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  You're, you're pre-bullshitting it even before I tell you what the results were.

• 55:33Speaker 03

  You have to answer Steve's question, Jake.

• 55:35Jay Novella?

  I mean, okay, I mean, I gotta be honest to myself. I think that they found that, that planned obsolescence is happening, that overall quality in, in many different types of, of items that are purchased is definitely, is definitely lower.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  All right. So I think that a lot of people share your attitude. Now, just keep in mind, no one is saying that planned obsolescence doesn't exist and sometimes isn't a specifically designed feature in order to maximize profit. That exists. The, the most notorious example of it goes back to 1924. There was literally an international meeting of light bulb manufacturers, right, of incandescent light bulb manufacturers, and they decided what the lifespan of light bulbs would be.

• 56:18Speaker 03

  I got a bright idea.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  1,000 hours. And because you, as you know, as you may know, like there are, there are incandescent bulbs that are still around from a hundred years ago. Still, still lighting.

• 56:29Speaker 03

  Still burning.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  You, you basically can design the bulb to last as long as you want to. But of course, that affects, what, one of the things that determines that is how bright it is, right? The brighter you want it, the shorter its lifespan is going to be. But they basically decided, we're going to engineer these things to a 1,000 hour lifespan and everyone was going to do the same thing. So they're kind of fixing the quality. Which, which is an

• 56:50Speaker 03

  They call that collusion.

• 56:51Speaker 02

  An anti-competitive kind of behavior.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  And that was just, and the reason they came up with that is because that would be about what customers would, would be okay with replacing, you know what I mean? They would replace the bulbs, uh, on a con- uh, constantly replace the bulbs, but that would be something they would accept. That artificial limitation didn't end until CFLs and LED light bulbs essentially replaced incandescent bulbs.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  Wow, man. I love my LEDs.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  But, let's get back now to the study, right? This is a study that was done, it was a Norwegian study, which I don't think matters, but, uh, they, what they found was for most large appliances, there was no decrease in lifespan over the time period from the 1950s to 2020. So over that 70-year period, there was no decrease in lifespan for large appliances. Um, however, there were two exceptions, and, and one of them was not the refrigerator.

• 57:48Speaker 03

  Washing machine.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  Washing machines.

• 57:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  And ovens. Those are the two exceptions.

• 57:54Cara Santa Maria?

  That's interesting. It's like a gas oven?

• 57:57Speaker 02

  For wash, or could be electric, but yes. So for washing machines, the researchers found that the lifespan decreased from 19.2 years to 10.6 years, a decrease of 45%. However, they also-

• 58:13Speaker 03

  Number of loads, number of washes.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly, Evan. However, they also found that over that same period of time, the average number of, of loads per, for a household of four people, increased from two per week to eight per week.

• 58:28Speaker 03

  There it is. That's it. There's your difference.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  So, if you think about the lifespan in terms of number of loads, it actually doubled, doubled the number of loads, even though it was 45% decrease in the number of years. So that seems like an adequate explanation for that. What I suspect happened is that if you go back to 1950, you know, people weren't used to having washing machines. They were used to not doing laundry any more often than they absolutely had to, because it was the worst possible drudgery in, of, of housework that had to be done. And right, I mean, it was terrible. They spent most of their time doing laundry and it was terrible. So they didn't do it any more often than they had to. But then, once they got used to the convenience of a washing machine,

• 59:13Speaker 02

  then our threshold for doing laundry went down over time, right? You would wear a shirt a couple of times instead of two weeks or whatever, you know, you'd wear much, you would wash it much more quickly because it's, you're just throwing it in the wash. You're not like using a washing board and scrubbing it or whatever. Um, so that seems to be the explanation there. So again, not really a decrease in lifespan if you, if you're going by number of loads.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you, yeah, you can't judge it by years. You judge it by

• 59:41Speaker 02

  For that particular appliance.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  By operations, number of operations.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  Now, for the oven, they found that the answer was probably more complicated than that. But one of the things they found was what you said, Cara, is that ovens have become a lot more complex over the decades. A 1950s oven was really a very simple piece of machinery. And it was just a heat box. It's just a heat box. Yeah, yeah. It's like an ice box, you know, but this is a heat box. But yeah, but now we have all kinds of, uh, Convection and fans.

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  Timing mechanisms, cleaning mechanisms.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, self-cleaning and all the electronics and everything. So, and of course, you know, complex, you could be simple and durable or complex and fragile, right? And so that's a trade-off. And that really gets to, I think, how we should be thinking about plant obsolescence. It's not, it's not, it's, sometimes it is like the light bulbs, but it's often not a deliberate money grab. It's often a deliberate engineering trade-off decision that's, that's completely rational. So, for example, you talk about iPhones. Yeah, that's the big one.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if you, any technology where there is expected to be a, you know, progress in that technology, where you think, all right, the average user's gonna wanna upgrade after maybe four years, let's say. So why engineer the device to last longer than the average user is gonna wanna use it? You're gonna make it unnecessarily expensive.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  Right? Or you could say, we're going to engineer it to last as long as people are going to use it, and then they'll upgrade. Or if like you know, there's a limiting factor like battery life, why engineer the rest of the phone to last 10 times longer than the thing that's going to make you replace it anyway? Now, you know, there's a lot of complexity in there. We talked about the replaceability of batteries, you know, the right to repair, all that kind of stuff comes into it as well. But essentially, companies design products to last as long as it makes sense from a marketing point of view, from a end user point of view, to last, not longer, right? There's no reason to make something last

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  super long. Let's take, let's go back to refrigerators, for example. There's an advantage to upgrading your technology. There's a lot of advantages, but one advantage is energy efficiency. And if the energy efficiency experts, I mean, the modern appliances are way more energy efficient than older ones. You probably should upgrade your refrigerator every 10 years. If you don't, you are probably using an energy hog, and you are wasting a lot of electricity. So that's another factor that has to be taken into account. It's also like driving a car. At some point, as the car gets older and older, it's a, you

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  know, a gas guzzler compared to newer, newer vehicles at the same size. We have to say that. So engineering a car to last longer than the person should use it, you know, is, is another way to look at it, or longer than most people are going to use it. Although cars actually do last a long time. The average life, like the average age of a car is 11 years on the road.

• 1:03:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that also makes me wonder, like, are we, what parameters are we calculating in? You know, we talk a lot about like externalized costs, like, okay, a 15 year old refrigerator is like a massive energy suck, but how bad for the environment is it to actually build and then dispose of a refrigerator?

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  I know. When I was writing about this, I'm like, that's another rabbit hole entirely. Where's the payback line of replacement versus using the old clunker? And that's

• 1:03:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And can we do better at like our, our stream where we take those parts and reuse them or change them?

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  Exactly. If, if, if we have more of a circular economy where we're, we're recycling better,

• 1:03:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  then that lowers the environmental and material cost for replacing, upgrading better technology, more energy efficient, whatever. So we have to think about all those things. So I think we can't think of plant obsolescence in isolation. And we certainly shouldn't look at it through the solo lens of this is just companies making stuff cheap so they could make more money. I really do strongly disagree with that. It's part of a complex web of decisions about how the technology is meant to be used, how, how long it is likely to be used and not over engineering or making something more expensive than it has to be or than it should be. And it's, it's, it's a, it's really one of many trade offs.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  That's the best way to look at it. And again, our gut feeling about things like, oh yeah, the, you know, big appliances in the past lasted forever. It's actually not true. A lot of the, a lot of, yeah, that subjective perception is not true. And the ones where it was true, like in this study, had, had interesting and complicated explanations for them that had nothing to do with just making things cheaper today than they were made in the past. So anyway, it's a, it's, it's one of the, I love this topic because it's a great example of the maxim in skepticism of it's more complicated than you think it is. Yeah. And just don't fall for a simplistic narrative because that, simplistic narratives are almost never true.

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  Right? It's, it is helpful to step back and think of things in a more complicated way. All right, let's move on. Bob, tell us about lifelike virtual reality touch sensors.

• 1:05:22Bob Novella?

  Oh boy. Haptics in the news, people. This is a new and improved type of wearables that have been created that can more realistically create the sense of touch on, on human skin. This could finally bring the, the sense of touch in virtual reality up to par with the other senses that are well covered already. Uh, like, uh, like, you know, imagery and, and the sound. And there's, and there's potentially many more applications for this type of technology as well. If you want to read about this, this was recently published in the journal Science. The title of the paper is "Full Freedom of Motion Actuators as Advanced Haptic Interfaces." I'm going to start by discussing the distinction between the words "haptic" and "tactile", which I thought were roughly, you know, quite similar, but they're not.

• 1:06:04Bob Novella?

  Haptic feedback provides sensations that simulate touch-related experience. So that's what haptic is. Tactile feedback is more related to the real physical touch experiences, like pressing buttons. So if you were designing the interior of a car and what people actually touched inside the car, you'd be more working on tactile design and not really haptics. Okay. So that was an interesting distinction I wanted to talk about. So this news item obviously deals with haptics. And haptics is used a lot. This was surprising. Over a billion devices each year are made with haptics and associated technology that goes along with it. I read an estimate that the haptics industry was estimated to be around $20 billion this

• 1:06:49Bob Novella?

  year. So yeah, 20 billion is a lot. There's other industries far, far bigger, but I think this is probably going up. And I think if this tech pans out, I think it could go way up. So I'm curious. So guys, what are your experiences with haptics and technology in the past few years? What do you experience most often with haptics?

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  My cellphone. My VR controllers had haptic feedback in them.

• 1:07:18Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but are you asking the quality of the haptics?

• 1:07:20Bob Novella?

  Well, yeah. Or just when do we have it? Yeah. What kind? In what technology are you using that has the haptics?

• 1:07:28Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I agree with Steve.

• 1:07:29Bob Novella?

  Vibrations on the phone?

• 1:07:30Jay Novella?

  Cell phones.

• 1:07:31Bob Novella?

  Game controllers?

• 1:07:32Jay Novella?

  VR game controller.

• 1:07:33Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Steve, what kind of... So you're just getting like vibration feedback and stuff?

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, they just vibrate. But the vibration also could give you resistance to movement, right? Because like if you have anything, if you have a rotating or a vibrating piece in there, when you try to move it or rotate it, it actually gives you resistance. And so that actually, combined with what you're seeing, you know, happening in the game world, can be fairly convincing as terms of sensory feedback.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  Can make you feel like you're actually moving something with weight and heft to it.

• 1:08:09Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, for me, it's mostly vibrations, phone, smartwatch, even even car steering wheels. And vibrations are fine. I mean, it's, but it's been only vibrations, really, for the most part. The vast majority, I think, of the of a haptic feedback is going to be this vibration based stuff. And that's true, that's changing and will improve. But it's still, I think it's primarily the vibration aspect. Vibrations activate primarily only one of the mechanoreceptors in your skin, though. And so you might be asking.

• 1:08:42Cara Santa Maria?

  What are mechanoreceptors?

• 1:08:43Bob Novella?

  Oh, thanks for asking, Karen.

• 1:08:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:47Bob Novella?

  These are, these are, not only is this a great word, but these are specialized cells, mechanoreceptors, specialized cells in your skin and throughout your body, organs and everything. And the receptors near the surface of your skin tell your brain what your skin is experiencing, essentially, as it interacts with the many surfaces and things around it. It starts with a mechanical stimulus to your skin. This is purely mechanical. And so it, you know, you basically press on the skin, move the skin, and that's going to, that's going to stretch or change the mechanoreceptor within the skin, right? And that skin movement that moves the receptor will then cause the receptor to send an electrical signal to the brain

• 1:09:30Bob Novella?

  to interpret and bam, you've got, you've got your, your perception of, you know, what your skin is dealing with here. So we've got four main receptor types in our hands and feet, many in our feet as well. There's Merkel's discs, which detect sustained pressure. These are best for determining your shape and texture of objects. Here's one that, that I was familiar with, Meisner's corpuscles. They, these corpuscles sense movement between the skin and another surface. So this also tells us about texture, but it also lets us know if an object is sliding past the skin, which is critical for what? Maintaining grip, right? Things, it's, your,

• 1:10:10Bob Novella?

  your brain can instantly detect when something is sliding across your skin like that and losing your grip, which is something you often do not want to. Lose at all. Then there's Pacinian corpuscles. And these are specialized in detecting vibrations. And these are the ones that I think most of these haptic devices are engaging is these Pacinian corpuscles. We think perhaps the vibrations are, they're caused when the hand grasps objects. And we think that it might be important for tool use. So that's why these are, these evolved to do what they do. And then finally, there's Ruffini's endings. What an odd name. I wonder why they call them endings. I'm sure some guy, Ruffini, discovered them.

• 1:10:53Bob Novella?

  But these receptors are poorly understood. But they seem to respond to skin stretching caused by finger movement. So they think that perhaps this helps us determine finger and/or hand orientation, right? Proprioception of the hands, which, you know, what directions and based on this stretching, you know, where the fingers are pointed without even looking at it. So like I said, the typical haptic devices that you encounter today activates primarily these Pacinian corpuscles, it seems to me. And, you know, we can have vibrations with different patterns and intensities. But it's been the goal for years for haptics to activate not just one or two receptors, but all of the receptors that are, that are under, under the skin, specifically, of course, the hands.

• 1:11:37Bob Novella?

  And they're also at various depths. As, as the researchers from the Northwestern University in Everston say in their paper, they say, "An unfulfilled challenge lies in haptic interface technologies that can engage all the various mechanoreceptors in a programmable, spatiotemporal fashion across large areas of the body." So yeah, so that's basically what I was, what I was saying, that they want a way to, to engage all of these receptors in the skin in a way that can be controlled by a computer. And that's, and that seems to be what they, this is what they at least claim that they have created. Specifically, they created these wearables for your fingers. They slide onto your fingers. They've got batteries in them. And they're based on a new type of actuator.

• 1:12:21Bob Novella?

  It has full freedom of, of motion. It has Bluetooth connectivity and an accelerometer, so it knows how fast your hands or your, your fingers ...are moving depending on where the accelerometers are. So with it, they say they can simulate not only complex vibrations, but also stretching, pressure, sliding, twisting, basically all the movements that can engage the one, two, three, four different receptors that are found under the skin, specifically in your hands and feet. All right, so John A. Rogers describes what they did in a better way than I did. He's a professor of material science and engineering at the university who led the device design. He said, "Almost all haptic actuators really just poke at the skin, but skin is receptive

• 1:13:04Bob Novella?

  to much more sophisticated senses of touch. We built a tiny actuator that can push the skin in any direction and in any combination of directions. With it, we can finely control the complex sensation of touch in a fully programmable way." I cannot wait to test this.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 1:13:21Bob Novella?

  Sounds so frickin' cool. All right, so what are the applications? Now, the no-brainer, of course, is this could give us a much more immersive experience haptically in virtual reality and augmented reality. To me, this always seemed to be a major flaw in immersive VR, right? For games, the visuals and the sound effects are obviously the most important, most of the time, right? That's the key stuff. If you don't nail the visuals and the sound in a VR game, then you've got nothing. It's just like, don't even market that crap. So those are absolutely the low-hanging fruit. But for a non-game virtual reality or AR application, I think haptics would be critically

• 1:14:06Bob Novella?

  important. And I mean, just imagine having a touch sensation in VR that's just as advanced as the high-res visuals that you're seeing and the high-fidelity sound that you're hearing. The three working together, I think, is going to be such a next level of VR/AR. I really hope I get to see something like that soon.

• 1:14:26Speaker 02

  But Bob, I think you're missing the most obvious application of this technology.

• 1:14:30Bob Novella?

  Tele-dil-donics, what? What are you talking about?

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  Tell me, what? The orgasmatron.

• 1:14:35Bob Novella?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a little dorky. Exactly. Yeah, there was no talk about that in any of the research I did, unfortunately.

• 1:14:42Jay Novella?

  Talk about science fiction anticipating reality.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  You didn't go deep enough, Bob.

• 1:14:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Hi-o. So what are some of the novel applications? John A. Rogers again describes this. He said, "If you run your fingers along a piece of silk, it will have less friction and slide faster than when touching corduroy or burlap. You can imagine shopping for clothes or fabric online and wanting to feel the texture." So that's really cool. I mean, I've bought a lot of, you know, a decent amount of clothing online here and there, mainly just t-shirts, but I could see how adding this, you know, this haptic feedback online when purchasing a shirt, I could see how that would definitely make it, you know, could make the decision if you really wanted to buy it. I don't know, I think for lots of other purchases, perhaps, the haptics could be helpful. Oh, this one was even more interesting.

• 1:15:30Bob Novella?

  They described another example where the sound of music was converted into something that could be touched, so the user could feel the music and distinguish between the tones and the instruments by the directions of the vibrations. So that sounded really, really interesting. There's also, there were so many other possibilities for medical simulations, for rehabilitation tools, remote surgery, and just lots of different options. And I'm sure there's things that we're just not even really even thinking about now, so I'm really excited to try this. I hope this does, you know, become available, even if it's just a demo. I'd love to just experience it. I remember my first experience in VR and just being just blown away. I would love to add this haptic aspect to it.

• 1:16:13Bob Novella?

  So I'll leave you with my quote, "Feel the future, people." And you notice how I put a pause between "future" and "people" because "feel the future, people," this doesn't sound right when you're mixing it together. You don't want to feel future people. But yeah, so this is cool. Check it out, online. Cool read.

• 1:16:30Jay Novella?

  Thanks, Bob. Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time? All right, guys. Last week, I played This Noisy.

• 1:16:51Speaker 03

  It's like something being shrink wrapped or something, right? Has that elasticity, sound to it, quality.

• 1:16:59Jay Novella?

  So I, I have been sent in this noisy several times. You know, I would say on average, probably once every other month for the last like five years. I usually wait, you know, like I, I try to do some timely noisies that I hear, you know, that are kind of trending just because they're fun. People are talking about it. And I also try to do noisies that people want to hear, but I wait till they become, kind of like fall out of, of, out of people's minds and everything. So there can still be a challenge. But this one, I was like thinking to myself, I'm going to get like 50 people guessing this correctly. And, and nobody guessed it correctly. I couldn't believe it. Yeah. So let me read to you some of the guesses. Stavis Maples wrote in, said, "Love you all. Props from Memphis.

• 1:17:44Jay Novella?

  This week's noisy sounds like a pressure relief valve for a steam engine." I thought that was a really good guess. I mean, I can kind of hear that in there. That's not correct, but definitely, definitely landed on something close to that sound. Listener named Sharon Tender wrote in, "I'm very confident on this guess. It sounds like what you would hear if you had a microphone set close to a record player needle on a spinning dusty record that is also warped." Very specific. I, I can't say I've ever heard that. I've definitely heard the sound that the needle makes without amplification. You could hear a record being played if you have, if the speakers are turned off, but the turntable is spinning. You could actually hear the music and it has a real tinny sound to it.

• 1:18:25Jay Novella?

  Listener named Zachary Dormus wrote in, said, "I hear the Star Wars laser noises you get from throwing ice onto a frozen lake, but I believe that's already been a previous noisy. So I'll guess it is the noise of drilling an ice hole into a frozen lake." Again, that is not correct. Listener named Scott Wesley wrote in saying, "Recording of an icebreaker vessel, but from under the water." So, okay, so anybody that-

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  They call you an ice hole?

• 1:18:48Jay Novella?

  Anybody that had ice in their guess, you were on to something. But, this is the sound that's made when you take, say, a steel ball bearing, and you heat it up till it's red hot, and then you put one or many of them into a block of ice.

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:19:08Jay Novella?

  Let me play it again.

• 1:19:08Speaker 03

  Oh, I've seen that video.

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  I've seen it.

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:19:10Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, I can't tell you how many people have sent this in to me. Listen again and tell me what you think.

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  Has a little bit of everything, the sizzle, the crack, the pop.

• 1:19:34Jay Novella?

  What a cool sound. There's so many layers to that sound. I really have to humble myself to the fact that my guessing, after commandeering this from Evan all those years ago, and, you know, I've really learned a lot throughout the years of doing this, and I've come to recognize lots of sounds and everything, I can't guess what people are gonna do. I can't guess what noisies are gonna pop, which ones are. I mean, I think I have a better understanding than most people, but it really, it's still kinda random noise to me. So, anyway, let's get to the new noisy this week. The new noisy was sent in by a listener named Hunter Richards.

• 1:20:11Speaker 07

  ...assess our social requirements and what we can do about them through our present machinery, or other similar to it. Gordon stressed the need for a reconstruction of society as a basic cause.

• 1:20:32Jay Novella?

  If you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, please email me at [email protected].

• 1:20:41Jay Novella?

  Steve, we got Not a Con coming up. Let me see, check the date. By the time you guys hear this, we're going to be just about a month away.

• 1:20:49Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 1:20:50Jay Novella?

  Yeah, a month and a few days away.

• 1:20:51Speaker 03

  I can't believe it.

• 1:20:52Jay Novella?

  Still not too late. We would really love it if you came because we're going to have a wonderful conference. It's going to be really, really awesome. I mean, with all the different things that we're doing this year, I think, I think it could be a lot more fun than last time. But who knows? I could be wrong, right? Because I don't know anything about who's that noisy.

• 1:21:08Speaker 03

  There's only one way to know, though. You have to show up and experience it.

• 1:21:11Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, in the end, it's a great place to meet people. There's a lot of time for socializing, way more time than your average conference. There's going to be just a ton of different things that we're going to be doing on stage that are going to be a lot of fun and entertaining. You'll have time to hang out. We're going to sign books. We'll have a bunch of swag. There's going to be laughing and George playing music and people singing and Steve's going to get wasted on Saturday night. You can't miss it. Kara, you're always good for that laugh. Thank you so much.

• 1:21:39Speaker 02

  Because she knows it's not going to happen.

• 1:21:41Jay Novella?

  It's Not a Con 2025. You can go to notaconcon.com or you can go to the skepticsguy.org. Both of those have information that you want. You know, the homepage on the Skeptic's Guide has a button there you can click. It'll take you to notaconcon.com. All roads lead to the same place.

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  Thanks, Jay. One super quick email. We got a number of emails actually responding to Kara's discussion of 23andMe. Just want to make one clarification, and that is the distinction between different types of genetic testing that you can get done.

• 1:22:21Cara Santa Maria?

  So, yeah, I got two specific emails talking about the differences between SNPs and sequencing. SNPs, single nucleotide polymorphisms versus like whole genome sequencing. And I did, I think erroneously say that 23andMe specifically does sequence the whole genome. They do now offer a whole, I don't want to say whole, but exome sequencing, which is much more inclusive than simply focusing on the SNPs.

• 1:22:51Cara Santa Maria?

  But they do, even the SNPs that they sequence are not only the SNPs that are then mapped to the analysis of those SNPs. There's a lot more raw data that 23andMe can give you than they actually use in their analytics telling you, you're likely to have a widow's peak, or you're likely to snore, or whatever they tell you, or like, this is where your ancestry is from. But of course, they do use SNPs for their main sequencing technology, and then there is an exome option. So it is important to remember that. It's not your entire genome that they do give you, but the raw data does include significantly more

• 1:23:35Cara Santa Maria?

  SNPs that can be then used with other software programs to determine ancestry or phenotype across different gene loci.

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, just to summarize, so yeah, the SNPs are single mutations, basically, single nucleotide polymorphisms.

• 1:23:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Polymorphisms, yeah.

• 1:23:56Speaker 02

  Polymorphisms. And so just mapping those out can tell you which SNPs you share with other populations, and therefore what your populations are likely to be in your ancestry. The exome sequencing just looks at the genes, and the genome sequencing looks at the non-coding DNA as well. That's everything.

• 1:24:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exomes is just the coding portion.

• 1:24:18Speaker 02

  That's really just for research.

• 1:24:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:24:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, we do exome sequencing even clinically, just for like, we have patients with some mystery genetic disease, like, let's just do an exome, just see if there's anything that we could find. It's like a fishing expedition, but we never do the whole genome.

• 1:24:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, yeah, because there's no reason. And the point I was trying to make when I was saying things like, they have all your genetic material, or they've got your genome, is that if you want to delete this information from 23andMe before it is sold off,

• 1:24:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Download it, and it takes a while, but like, get access. You, you paid for this. So, download everything that they have because they don't just have the snips that directly map to the handful of features that they tell you about on the site. There's a lot more data there than is actively being used. Like, they're using it for research right now. Get your data.

• 1:25:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Even if it's not your entire genome.

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  Right, right. Alright, thanks. Alright, guys, let's move on with science or fiction.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:25:32Speaker 02

  Each week, I come up with three science news items, or facts, two real and one fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We've got three news items this week. You guys ready? Ready, Captain. Item number one, a recent study finds that unlike modern rhinos, which are mostly solitary, a North American species of rhinoceros from 12 million, 12 million years ago, Telios cerus major, lived in vast herds. Item number two, scientists have used AI to develop a complete digital twin of a mouse brain, which is able to predict responses to novel stimuli. And item number three, a study of over 1,700 people found a correlation between

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  moderate, heavy, or former drinking, a type of brain damage called arteriole sclerosis, and impaired cognitive ability. Just to clarify that one, they correlated, on the one hand, either moderate, heavy, or former drinking. So, all of those correlated with this type of brain damage and impaired cognitive ability. Bob, go first.

• 1:26:44Bob Novella?

  Bastard.

• 1:26:47Speaker 03

  Every fourth week, Bob.

• 1:26:49Bob Novella?

  Let's see.

• 1:26:51Speaker 03

  Roughly.

• 1:26:52Bob Novella?

  Yeah, very roughly. Alright, so we got, um, so modern ri- so, North American rhinos from millions of years ago were in big herds. Man, imagine that. I'd love to see that. We need to de-extinct a herd of them, so I could see that. Then we got the second one here, using AI to develop a complete digital twin of a mouse brain predicting responses from novel stimuli. Hmm, complete, huh? I don't know about that one. Let's see, we got a study of over 1,700 people found a core, blah, blah, I'm not even gonna worry about three. I, it's just two, a complete digital twin of a mouse brain. I think it's a little bit much. I would think that even though they're small brains, still, a complete duplicate, I don't think we're there yet.

• 1:27:38Bob Novella?

  I hope we are. I hope I'm wrong here. I just think that's a little bit much for right now. So I'll say that one is fiction.

• 1:27:43Jay Novella?

  All right, Jay. I mean, I tend to agree with Bob about the, the complete digital mouse brain.

• 1:27:50Bob Novella?

  You were quite perspicacious, Jay.

• 1:27:52Jay Novella?

  Scientists have used AI to develop a complete digital twin of a mouse brain,

• 1:27:58Jay Novella?

  which is able to predict responses to novel stimuli. I can't imagine that that's true. I can't imagine it. That's, brains, we don't even understand how brains fully function. Let me, Bob, there might be tricky words in here. Hold on. Scientists have used AI to develop a complete digital twin.

• 1:28:17Bob Novella?

  Smart move.

• 1:28:18Jay Novella?

  A twin, like a mirror version of the mouse brain, Bob. That's how I'm interpreting the word twin. That's gotta be the fiction. I'd even put money on it.

• 1:28:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, money.

• 1:28:28Jay Novella?

  Okay, Evan.

• 1:28:29Speaker 03

  Oh, boy. Well, I'm inclined certainly to agree. Haven't we talked about brains and like, digital brains and how it's, we're so far away from that. This, if this happened now, wouldn't this have been like some major, major piece of news right now? Now, I know we've talked about that being a fallacy in its own right, okay. But still, this, that is huge.

• 1:28:54Bob Novella?

  Well, mouse brains are, are small, to be fair.

• 1:28:57Speaker 03

  Well, sure. I mean, maybe if you went with fruit fly or something. Do fruit flies have brains? But yeah, I'll, I'll join the guy.

• 1:29:05Bob Novella?

  Fruit flies got like, what, 13 neurons?

• 1:29:07Speaker 03

  I'll join the guys and say, that one's fiction.

• 1:29:10Jay Novella?

  Okay, and Kara?

• 1:29:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I guess I can't go alone now. I mean, the arteriosclerosis one is interesting. The correlation between moderate heavy or former drinking and arteriosclerosis.

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  Arterioleukosclerosis.

• 1:29:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, sorry, arterioleukosclerosis. I can ima- so it's the arterioles, not the arteries.

• 1:29:30Speaker 02

  Right. The small, it's the small ones.

• 1:29:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the small ones. Um, I can imagine that that is true, that like, not any amount, but that moderate drinking plus would, uh, increase your risk, I suppose. But I, I would also imagine that there is, um, a dose response in there, uh, but that's not what you said here. Uh, but you also did not say that that's not true. Uh, the rhinos, well, yeah, they're probably wildly different. The North American rhinos, it's like our camels, like they're probably completely different organisms, so sure, their behavior might've been different. That one doesn't bother me that much. And the digital mouse brain, it actually doesn't bother me that much either.

• 1:30:11Cara Santa Maria?

  So I guess my assumption here, because I know that we have a mouse connectome. I think that we have largely kind of mapped the mouse brain in all the different ways that we know how at this point. So it's really just a function then of sort of coding it. But, uh, maybe we don't have the whole mouse brain. That would be my guess. Maybe we only have one level of the mouse brain coded. Um, cause usually you do say, you know, this is the fiction, but the real headline is. So I'm curious if there's something in there where we did do something really cool with a digital twin, but it's maybe not a complete brain or something. Or maybe, uh, was that you, Evan, that said maybe it was the fruit fly?

• 1:30:53Speaker 03

  Uh, yes, that was my suggestion.

• 1:30:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, maybe it was a different organism. Um, so I'll go with the guys and say that that's the fiction.

• 1:30:59Speaker 02

  All right. Well, let's take these in order. We'll start with number one. A recent study finds that unlike modern rhinos, which are mostly solitary, a North American species of rhinoceros from 12 million years ago, Teliosseris major, lived in vast herds. You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. This one is science.

• 1:31:19Speaker 03

  That's what I heard.

• 1:31:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. So no reaction, Evan.

• 1:31:24Speaker 03

  No, no, the audience is laughing, I know that.

• 1:31:29Speaker 02

  Um, you, how do they, how did they figure this out? You might ask. How could they know? Herd prints? Herd prints is a good guess. So this is, there, there was a find, uh, a while ago of essentially a hundred of these things that were killed pretty much at the same time. Not necessarily the same instant, but over a very short period of time due to a volcanic eruption. Probably they breathed in the ash and they died of starvation and dehydration. So maybe over a matter of days. Um, so, you know, finding a hundred, like you would never find a hundred rhinoceroses in one spot, you know? Yeah. So they, they thinking is, well, maybe they, they, this was a one herd, you know?

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  Or, or a part of a, of even bigger herd, but it was near a watering hole. So the alternative hypothesis was, well, maybe they were just congregating here at the water hole. Right. So how did they distinguish those two situations? They looked at the bones. They looked at the isotopes. Look at the bones. The isotopes in different layers of different bones in order to, the ratios of isotopes in order to figure out where they were moving over time. Uh, because you can map out the different, uh, isotope ratios based upon where they would have been feeding.

• 1:32:55Speaker 02

  Right? Cause the soil from like one region to the next has different isotopes of minerals. And they could look at the pattern of isotopes, say, okay, this, they were feeding in this fairly precise location in, in order to have, like at this layer of whatever of bone that was being laid down. They basically found that these rhinos were not moving. They were not migrating seasonally. And they were not real, they were basically staying in this one place the whole time. So that means this was one vast herd of rhinoceroses. They weren't just congregating here. It seemed pretty rigorous, the study, but they get into a lot of super technical details that I didn't.

• 1:33:38Speaker 02

  Quite grasp. So, you know, we'll see, you know, how well it holds up. I mean, it was peer reviewed, but you know, these things have to go through the meat grinder of having a bunch of experts pick over it. But it seemed pretty solid from what I was reading. But again, it's inferential, right? This was, the hypothesis was if this was one herd, the evidence should be that they don't migrate and that that's what the evidence showed. Okay, let's go to number two. Scientists have used AI to develop a complete digital twin of a mouse brain, which is able to predict responses to novel stimuli. You guys all think this one is the fiction because you think we aren't there yet. But the critical new bit here, guys, is using AI. You know, you know how they did it?

• 1:34:23Speaker 02

  So this is science?

• 1:34:25Speaker 03

  Using AI.

• 1:34:26Speaker 02

  I didn't say that.

• 1:34:27Bob Novella?

  I don't care. I don't care. You're not going to make a digital twin. I mean, how are you going to map?

• 1:34:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you are. I think we can.

• 1:34:32Bob Novella?

  All of those connections for a speci- not a generic mouse, but a specific mouse and make that twin.

• 1:34:38Speaker 02

  They, well, I'll tell you what they did. They used a large language model and they fed it data essentially from looking at a mouse brain functioning. And then, so they basically trained the the large language model type of AI on data from mouse brain activity. And it was able to predict the response to novel stimuli, right? So it basically, in other words, they was able to predict what the mouse brain's response would be to a new stimuli that it wasn't trained on.

• 1:35:19Speaker 03

  That's a twin?

• 1:35:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a digital twin. It's twinning the activity of the mouse brain. However-

• 1:35:25Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a digital version of a real brain.

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

  This is a fiction because they only did the visual cortex.

• 1:35:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay. So that, but they did do a part of the brain.

• 1:35:32Speaker 02

  They did part of the brain.

• 1:35:33Speaker 03

  That's what you said, Kara.

• 1:35:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:35Cara Santa Maria?

  And is it, is it, um, are they doing a lot of reliability testing on it?

• 1:35:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Like so far it seems to work the right way?

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  I think they're going to get to a whole mouse brain pretty quickly. I think so too. Yeah. They have the.

• 1:35:47Bob Novella?

  Not today, my friend.

• 1:35:49Speaker 02

  Not, but not today. Yeah. I saw I was, the thing is, a lot of the headlines didn't quite distinguish those things. I was hoping I was gonna get somebody on the headlines.

• 1:35:56Speaker 03

  Oh, I didn't even know.

• 1:35:58Speaker 02

  There's a digital twin of mouse brain, but it's like, when you read it, it's like, oh, it was only visual, it was the visual cortex only. Which makes sense, because then, of course, the stimuli was visual stimuli. So previous iterations of this, they would make a digital twin of the visual cortex, but it only worked on this stimuli it was trained on. So that's why now they're using AI.

• 1:36:19Bob Novella?

  Right, couldn't infer the new novel.

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, once it was trained on enough data, it was like able to predict responses to stimuli it wasn't explicitly trained on. So it's basically functioning like the visual cortex of the mouse brain. So I think you start with the visual cortex, because it's the easiest one to test, right?

• 1:36:37Bob Novella?

  Right, low hanging fruit.

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  Give it visual stimuli. But this, it basically is a proof of concept for this method, right?

• 1:36:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's pretty slick. But what kind of testing, you know, would you have to do to be confident that you could then reproduce a novel? You know, you could mimic a novel stimuli.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  But if it's behaving exactly like the mouse brain behaves.

• 1:36:58Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but you, you have to train it though, right?

• 1:36:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:00Bob Novella?

  How many data points do you need to train a visual cortex in order to do that? That's my question.

• 1:37:05Speaker 02

  A lot.

• 1:37:06Bob Novella?

  It seems like you would need to do a lot of training.

• 1:37:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. But that's what AI is good at. That's what, that's the idea.

• 1:37:11Speaker 03

  Very large.

• 1:37:12Bob Novella?

  Right. So, so I'm just, I'm just thinking, you know.

• 1:37:15Speaker 02

  I was thinking, how much training do you need to do on an LLM to get ChatGPT? A shit ton.

• 1:37:20Bob Novella?

  A shit ton.

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:21Bob Novella?

  So, so the question is, you said the, the vision, of course, the visual cortex is a low hanging fruit, but.

• 1:37:26Speaker 02

  All right, so you want, here's, here's what they did. They used.

• 1:37:28Bob Novella?

  What about the other pieces of the brain? Wouldn't that be exponentially harder?

• 1:37:32Speaker 02

  Why would it be exponentially harder?

• 1:37:33Bob Novella?

  Because it's easy to, to.

• 1:37:35Speaker 02

  That's easy.

• 1:37:37Bob Novella?

  To do the visual cortex, because you're just like, hey, hey, mouse, look over here, look at this.

• 1:37:40Speaker 02

  It is a little bit of low, low hanging fruit, but you're right. But we'll see. So what they, they actually explained how much training they did. Nine hundred minutes of brain activity from eight mice watching clips of action packed movies such as Mad Max.

• 1:37:56Bob Novella?

  What?

• 1:37:57Speaker 02

  That was the training data. What the hell is that?

• 1:38:01Speaker 03

  Mad Max.

• 1:38:02Bob Novella?

  Really? But, wait, so this is not a twin. This is a amalgam of nine mice.

• 1:38:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course it is. I thought it was one mouse.

• 1:38:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's always, a twin is never gonna be of a single, when they say digital twin, it's gonna be of a model.

• 1:38:16Speaker 02

  I got news for you, Bob. That's all fMRI data, right? You're not looking at an individual brain. It's always aggregated data.

• 1:38:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:38:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, that, yeah, that was obvious to me.

• 1:38:27Cara Santa Maria?

  And it wouldn't be useful, it wouldn't be useful to twin a single brain, because that would, there would be no reliability there. That would just tell you what this one organism would do.

• 1:38:36Speaker 02

  That's not what they're after, anyway. They're after a generic mouse brain.

• 1:38:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they wanna know how the mouse brain works. They don't wanna know how Joe works.

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  All right, well, you know, how long, therefore, before we have the human?

• 1:38:48Speaker 02

  I don't know. Oh, a human brain?

• 1:38:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, very long time.

• 1:38:51Speaker 02

  I would say a couple of things.

• 1:38:53Speaker 03

  This is as the slope, how far into the future?

• 1:38:55Speaker 02

  It's still a long way off, but not nearly as long as I thought it was before this started happening.

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting, because, yeah, you've talked about this being like distant future technology.

• 1:39:04Speaker 02

  I think, I think we've gone from decades to maybe a single decade or years.

• 1:39:11Cara Santa Maria?

  What? No, the whole human brain?

• 1:39:13Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, to a certain, again, it's to a certain level of resolution. I can't trust you anymore.

• 1:39:18Bob Novella?

  Fidelity, yeah.

• 1:39:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:39:20Speaker 02

  You know, because this, again, AI is really good at analyzing massive amounts of data and, and finding patterns and, and replicating it. It's like, how close are we to being able to make an AI-generated movie you can't tell from the real thing?

• 1:39:39Bob Novella?

  Not too far.

• 1:39:40Speaker 02

  Well, how much data is in that, you know?

• 1:39:43Speaker 03

  Tons.

• 1:39:44Speaker 02

  So I don't know, obviously. I'm just saying, it's, it's not as long as I, I've revised my estimate based upon this, using this type of AI technology in neuroscience with our, our modern mechanisms of, of imaging brain activity. And this is, this is ahead of schedule, guys. You know, I would not have imagined this five years ago, but...

• 1:40:10Cara Santa Maria?

  But we don't have... I mean, I'm curious your take on this, Steve. We don't have a full human connectome.

• 1:40:16Speaker 02

  No, no, we don't.

• 1:40:17Cara Santa Maria?

  So don't we need that before we can?

• 1:40:20Speaker 02

  Uh, that's a good question.

• 1:40:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:23Speaker 02

  You know, I don't know, because I think this is partly doing that. If it's not creating the connectome, it's twinning it, right? It's replicating.

• 1:40:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but I think because we already have them.

• 1:40:33Speaker 02

  The function of the connectome.

• 1:40:34Cara Santa Maria?

  But I think because we already have a mouse connectome structurally.

• 1:40:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:37Cara Santa Maria?

  It's easier than to twin function. I could be wrong. I could be talking out of my ass, but.

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  No, it's an interesting question. I think I would have to do a deeper dive.

• 1:40:45Speaker 03

  It's reasonable.

• 1:40:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:46Speaker 03

  Ooh, maybe the AI will help fill in those blanks for us.

• 1:40:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Maybe. But yeah, I think we're still pretty far away.

• 1:40:53Speaker 03

  And boom.

• 1:40:53Speaker 02

  So the thing is, AI is accelerating the connectome projects too.

• 1:40:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  So it's how long until we do have a full human connectome? And then how long before that connectome is a functional digital twin of a human brain?

• 1:41:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:41:12Speaker 02

  Um, I don't know, but it's the, but the progress has accelerated significantly once you threw AI into the mix. Let me just say that. So we'll see, you know? It wouldn't surprise me. Like, I'm just throwing numbers out there. Five years ago, if you asked me, I probably would have said 50 years. Now I might say, I don't know, 10, 20 years, you know, it's.

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:35Speaker 02

  Not as.

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  I thought it was beyond our lifetime.

• 1:41:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cool. All right. Let's go on. Number three, a study of over 1,700 people found a correlation between moderate, heavy, or former drinking, a type of brain damage called arteriosclerosis, and impaired cognitive ability. This, of course, is science. So again, I thought that some of you might think, oh, I thought moderate alcohol use wasn't bad. Uh, but in.

• 1:41:57Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  This, yeah. So moderate in this study was one to seven drinks per week. So that could be as little as one drink per week. Heavy was eight or more per week.

• 1:42:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, so drinking more than one drink every day.

• 1:42:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this is compared to non-drinkers. There's non-drinkers, moderate drinkers, heavy drinkers, and former drinkers. Uh, the former drinkers also had the damage. Now, the, the most damage was in the heavy drinker group. It was a dose response.

• 1:42:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  Not that huge, though. It was, it was, um...

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  Wow, what the hell?

• 1:42:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:28Speaker 03

  It doesn't take much, huh?

• 1:42:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So just the regular alcohol use. Again, this is, they're, they're keen to point out this is a correlational study. That's why I said correlates. This doesn't prove cause and effect. This is a autopsy study, right? So these were just, they looked, they did, they autopsied and the brains of people who died. Um, and then got this data historically from the family and then looked to see if they had signs of damage. So the, and the, the, they were actually, the other type of damage they were looking for is neurofibrillary tangles, which is an age-related Alzheimer's type of thing that we see. And then also this damage to the small arter- arteries, the arterioles. They basically clot off and that causes, you know, brain damage.

• 1:43:14Speaker 02

  So anyway, so this is a perfect study, but it was, you know, it was the study they were able to do. It is very interesting data. It does strongly suggest that, you know, regular alcohol use over years is not good for the brain.

• 1:43:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Can I ask, though, Stephen? You may not be able to answer this because I don't know how in-depth you went. But the non-drinkers, like clearly there was a significant difference there. But it's not like they didn't have any age-related damage, right?

• 1:43:37Speaker 02

  They had, of course, yeah. No, absolutely. They didn't have pristine brains. It was just, there was, it was increased. It was just increased.

• 1:43:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think sometimes we, not we like you, but like we as science communicators have to be careful when we talk about things like, um, correlational studies or even, even causative studies, that what we're talking about are differences and not, I don't know. I, I feel like there's an assumption sometimes when we talk about these things that it's like, oh, these were pristine and those were diseased. Or these were pristine and those were damaged. And it's like, but no brain is pristine.

• 1:44:09Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:44:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Right?

• 1:44:10Speaker 02

  Well...

• 1:44:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:10Speaker 02

  Mostly no. There are, there are super agers whose brains look great. They just don't develop tangles and plaques and stuff as they get older. It's like one, 2% of the population. That's just all genetic. You know, so if you had somebody who was like, "Oh, my grandmother was sharp at 100." Good for you. You probably got those good genes.

• 1:44:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, I know, that's like my mother, my, that's my, my wife's family. Her mother is 98 and working and, you know, she's definitely showing her age, but she is sharp as a tack for a 98-year-old. She's a superager, 100%. And that's her whole side of the family. They're all in late 90s, early hundreds, you know?

• 1:44:51Cara Santa Maria?

  That's nuts, man. Wow.

• 1:44:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. They also, just one other little note here. They said that the impaired cognitive abilities, uh, was fully mediated by the arteriole sclerosis. So those, in other words, that marker of brain injury explained any observed decline in cognitive ability.

• 1:45:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay. Wow. That's interesting.

• 1:45:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 1:45:16Cara Santa Maria?

  That's good to know.

• 1:45:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. That's actually maybe one of the more interesting outcomes, I think.

• 1:45:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I brought it up. All right. Good job, everyone. It's three weeks in a row. I thought I was gonna get somebody this week on that tricky, the tricky one. All right. Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  All right. This week's quote was suggested by a listener, Ethan. Doesn't say where Ethan is from, but Ethan, thank you for suggesting this quote. "Science is not just a collection of techniques or strategies for producing knowledge. It is an ethical stance of commitment to the truth. The good scientist knows that honestly following the evidence is a form of respect for nature and honestly communicating one's findings is a form of respect for others." And that's a quote by Santiago Ramon Icaha.

• 1:46:03Speaker 02

  That's interesting timing on that quote, purely by coincidence. I was just, you know, in the comments to my blog this week, talking about that very thing in, meaning the idea that there is no system so robust that it is completely independent from the people who are operating it, right? You know, you still need good people acting in good faith.

• 1:46:28Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:29Speaker 02

  No system can completely control for that. You know what I'm saying?

• 1:46:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, that's the whole, in order for the forest to be green, all the trees need to be green. In order for science to function, for it to be honest, right? The scientists have to be honest, the people have to be honest and operating in good faith. And the same is true, I think, of any institution. It's only as good as the people in it.

• 1:46:54Speaker 03

  Here, here. I agree with that.

• 1:46:56Speaker 02

  Well, thank you guys for joining me this week. Roger that, Steve. Thanks to you. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 1:47:08Speaker 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.

• 1:47:46Speaker 07

  What's that? My fresh detector. Uh, your what? There it is. What is it detecting? Fresh produce, fresh meat. Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 1:48:00Speaker 07

  Apparently, we celebrate.

• 1:48:02Speaker 08

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices. When your fresh detector is going off, head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.