The Skeptics Guide #1057 - Oct 11 2025

Interview with David Kyle Johnson; Quickie with Steve: Liver Xenograft; News Items: Nobel Prizes 2025 for Medicine, Physics and Chemistry, Long COVID Discovery; Who's That Noisy; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, October 9th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  And Jay Novella.

• 0:49Jay Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Evan is in phase two of tax hell. He has the late deadline in mid-October, so he's doing it. Yeah, so that's why.

• 0:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Which, like, let's be honest, I think they just furloughed, like, half the IRS staff, so.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Right, well, yeah. No, it's true. IRS is, like, woefully understaffed now. It's crazy. Yeah, so he's doing that. So you might notice we've started recording on Thursday instead of Wednesdays. This is, I think, the second week we're doing that. This is gonna be our new normal. And it's just a scheduling thing, mainly because Cara is starting a new job, and Thursday's gonna be a lot easier for her than Wednesday.

• 1:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and I'm three hours behind you guys.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's different. We're recording in the afternoon instead of the evening. So Jay's awake, right, Jay?

• 1:28Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, we go till, like, 10:30 at night, a lot of times, Eastern time. And I'm just, you know, a million times sharper at 1:00 in the afternoon.

• 1:37Cara Santa Maria?

  I love, too, that you guys are like, "We're recording in the afternoon." And I'm like, "It's 9:00 a.m."

• 1:43Cara Santa Maria?

  I just had my coffee.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Are you a morning person or an evening person, Cara?

• 1:46Cara Santa Maria?

  I, well, I used to be an evening person. I still am technically an evening person, but we've talked about this before. Because I have a sleep disorder that makes me a very sleepy girl, I take this really intense medication. And now, I just wake up in the morning. It's like, the minute that the meds are done doing their thing, I'm just awake.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how they work.

• 2:06Cara Santa Maria?

  It's amazing. Yeah. So I still, I wouldn't still call myself a morning person, but I'm much more of one than I ever was before.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  I'm solidly a morning person.

• 2:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm. You just like decline.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  Well, I'm just very alert in the morning. I get, can do a lot of work, basically from like 6:00 AM to 2 o'clock in the afternoon is sort of my most productive hours. And then I can function in the evening, but I get progressively sleepy in the evening. Yeah.

• 2:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. I'd say I have more physical energy in the morning. So that's when I love to go to the gym. That's when I love to like

• 2:35Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:35Cara Santa Maria?

  run errands. And then I have

• 2:36Bob Novella?

  Gym in the morning.

• 2:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And then I have

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Sure, the morning's good.

• 2:39Cara Santa Maria?

  more mental energy at night. I love like staying up late to write or to read or to work on crafts.

• 2:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I can go to bed at 1:00 AM. No problem. I don't do it as much as I used to, but midnight to me is just like 12:30. I'll be like, yeah, I should, I'll go up. It's 12:30.

• 2:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm exactly the same way. I usually wake up between 8 and 9. I guess that's going to change when I start seeing patients again.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  When I was working, I was, I would wake up at 6:00 pretty much every morning or a little bit before. Now, my retirement time, I wake up at 7. It's not much different. It's just I can linger in bed till about 7:00.

• 3:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Is, um, does your wife get up at the same time or do you always get up before her?

• 3:16Speaker 02

  I always get up before her, even when she's working, because she works in the evening. She teaches it and

• 3:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  she has evening classes. She has, she has meetings and stuff during the day, but she's rarely is she pressured to get up early in the morning. So I generally wake up before she does.

• 3:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah, what a life. I love it.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  So you guys know what time of year it is again.

• 3:35Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  It is.

• 3:36Bob Novella?

  Halloween time. What? No?

• 3:38Speaker 02

  The Nobel Prize time.

• 3:39Cara Santa Maria?

  That too.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. But before we get to that, I have a quickie for you guys, just because this is, I, we can't pass this by. I would absolutely be reporting on this if it weren't Nobel Prize Week. So we're just going to do a quick hit. Researchers have implanted the first pig-to-human liver xenotransplant.

• 3:57Cara Santa Maria?

  What?

• 3:58Speaker 02

  So we've been talking about this for a while, this whole idea of where do you source organ transplants from and what's the, what's the wave of the future. And I do think this is the most promising way. So this is a pig was the donor and it was genetically modified. They, they made 10 gene edits. So xeno-antigen knockouts, right? So taking out genes for antigens that would activate the human immune system and also human transgenes.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Putting in human genes for two basic reasons. One is immunity, right? Immune compatibility. And the other one is unique to the liver. It is coagulation compatibility. Ah. So the liver, you may not realize this, right? The liver is the biochemical factory of the body. It detoxifies anything you eat, right? There's always a first pass through the liver. Doesn't do everything, but that's, you know, anything it can detoxify gets done through the liver. The liver also does your glucose management, right? Stores your glycogen and does that. And the liver also produces your coagulation factors. And so, and that's a complicated, what we call coagulation cascade, right?

• 5:11Speaker 02

  So there's a complicated set of enzymes and proteins that are made in the liver that have to do with clotting your blood. So that has to be compatible too. This is what makes liver, xenoliver transplants so challenging is because you're not, it's not just the immune compatibility, you need the biochemical compatibility as well, right? The pig liver has to do all the things that a human liver would do in the way that a human liver does. And the big issue there is the coagulation compatibility. So, having said all that, this was done in China.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  The recipient was a 71-year-old man with hepatitis B-related cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma, was not eligible for a resection or a liver transplant. So they did this xeno, it's called an auxiliary graft, which I mean, I think just means it was, did not replace the liver, they just put it there in addition to the liver. And he survived for 171 days, which is Wow. A long time, right? I mean, it's obviously not a cure, but that's, for this technology, that's, that's pretty good. And the big problem was not rejection, it was the coagulation. He eventually died of GI bleeds.

• 6:35Cara Santa Maria?

  So this still isn't where it needs to be?

• 6:39Speaker 02

  It's still not where it needs to be, exactly. So, I mean, 171 days is good, but they have not dialed in all the changes they need to make yet in order to make this function. So, I mean, obviously, this is a patient who, given his liver failure and his, you know, liver cancer, you know, had a very short life expectancy anyway. So that's why you're able to do this kind of experimental treatment in somebody like that. But this is a solid advance. This is a solid step forward. And we are seeing more of this, the xenotransplant from genetically modified, mostly pigs at this point. Remember, we talked about lung. They're working on cardiac.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Cardiac's probably the easiest because it's just a pump, you know? There are some challenges with the lung because it does have a lot of immune function as well. And it's challenging with the liver because of the biochemical compatibility. I think pancreas is probably on the shortlist. That could be like a cure for some types of diabetes. And kidney, you know, kidney's a filter. That should be pretty easy to make compatible, more so than the liver or the lungs, which I think are going to be the real challenging ones.

• 7:51Cara Santa Maria?

  If you guys are interested in like reading about kind of what's on the horizon and like in a really fun way, I highly recommend Mary Roach's new book, Irreplaceable You, because she talks about this in depth in it. I had her on my podcast a couple of weeks ago. A week, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the book's fascinating. It like just came out.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Awesome. All right. Now it's time to get to our Nobel Prizes. Kara, you're going to start us off with Physiology or Medicine.

• 8:19Cara Santa Maria?

  This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Mary E. Bronko from the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Fred Ramsdell from Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, and Shimon Sakaguchi from Osaka University. They were awarded jointly the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, quote, "for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune..."

• 8:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Tolerance, the kind of long and short of it is they discovered how the immune system is kept in check by a whole second system that a lot of people believed either wasn't there, or they just didn't really, they were really skeptical about how it might work. And so this is one of those stories of decades of research. And I love this kind of science because it's like, this is how we know what we know. But before I tell you more about their discoveries, I wanted to tell you like a kind of fun fact about how they were told that they received the Nobel Prize. So the Nobel Prize Committee, they put, or nobelprize.org, they do these great videos, I don't know if you guys have seen them on YouTube, where they have an animation of the person who won, and then

• 9:32Cara Santa Maria?

  they have a phone call with somebody from nobelprize.org talking to them about like how they first found out. And usually, it's either a phone call, or you know, somehow it gets, I don't know, somebody finds out and tells them. But my favorite is that Fred Ramsdale, he was hiking with his wife up near Yellowstone and didn't have service for days after they were released. And so he only just found out about this. Like, the whole world knew before him, which I thought was absolutely hilarious. And I don't know if you guys follow on Instagram, but one of my favorite accounts, Dr. Lucky Tram, he's a science communicator, he shared this like headline that says, Nobel Committee

• 10:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Unable to Reach Prize Winner Who Is Quote "Living His Best Life Hiking Off Grid." So anyway, let's get into how they discovered this. Okay, we know that there are T cells and B cells that help us when, when we have a pathogen that enters our body and our immune system attacks those pathogens. What the researchers in this year's Physiology or Medicine Prize, what they did is they, they really identified, I don't like to say discovered, because we kind of knew the cells were there, but they identified these specific types of cells called regulatory T cells. Which are really important for peripheral immune tolerance. So let's kind of back up

• 10:59Cara Santa Maria?

  a little bit. I mentioned we have T cells and B cells. This year's prize really focuses on T cells, so that's what we're going to focus on, but B cells have somewhat similar functions. So there are T cells that are always patrolling the body and that sort of send downstream signals that say we need to attack when there's a pathogen that enters the body, a virus, you know, bacteria, anything like that. And then there's other types of T cells that actually bind to those cells and eradicate them. So they attack body cells that have been infected and sometimes they also attack tumor cells, but sometimes they don't know to attack tumor cells. All T cells have T cell receptors, right? So they're

• 11:39Cara Santa Maria?

  these little things on the surface of the cells that understand or that recognize different pathogens. And for a long time, there was a sort of one gene to one pathogen hypothesis and researchers quickly realized that there's just not enough actual DNA, there's not enough coding regions of the DNA to have all the genes we would need to map for all the different pathogens that we are exposed to. So really, researchers a while back realized that a bunch of genes are randomly combined in different orders to come up with these special T cell receptors. And the, I think the number now is that

• 12:24Cara Santa Maria?

  there's possibly like 10 to the 15 different types of T cell receptors. We're always able to recognize new pathogens.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  It's basically everything.

• 12:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Like we can combine our genes, the genes can combine in such a way to produce new receptor receptors for anything that comes into the body. And obviously, we don't recognize it at the beginning and then we mount a stronger response. We know that T cells are matured in the thymus, right? Which is, which is an endocrine organ in our body. And

• 12:58Cara Santa Maria?

  What sometimes happens is that a T cell that should be recognizing a pathogen actually attacks our own body cells. We know this happens because people have autoimmune disease. The thymus has this really cool system that helps it identify endogenous proteins, so the body's own cells, so that our T cells don't attack our own cells. Basically, the thymus, there are cells in the thymus that have endogenous protein fragments that they attach to, so that when the T cells are first matured, they sort of test them out, and they say, "Do you bind to me?" And if they bind to them, they go, "Nope, you don't pass this test. We're gonna destroy you. We're not gonna release you into the

• 13:41Cara Santa Maria?

  body to go patrol viruses and bacteria, because you're very likely gonna attack body cells." And that's not, "No, no, no, we don't want that."

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's negative selection. We make antibodies against everything and then select out the self-targeting ones.

• 13:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. And so that is that central process that we talked about, right? That is, these are the patrollers that are doing central immune tolerance. After we discovered this, researchers said, "Okay, probably there are also some that sort of are patrolled after this thymus test." And a bunch of researchers started to do research in this field, and they very quickly made a bunch of discoveries. But the problem was, they made pretty big claims. And this happens, we see this a lot in the history of science, where big claims are made, or, you know, what we know is stated, but then, okay, but

• 14:37Cara Santa Maria?

  that means, you know, X means Y, and Y doesn't pan out. And so what ended up happening with this field of peripheral immune tolerance is that it sort of died, because so many people made such big claims that they couldn't replicate, that a bunch of researchers became really skeptical of the entire idea. So Shimon Sakaguchi, who at the time was in the Aichi Cancer Center Research Institute in Nagoya, he was like, "No, no, no, I still think there's something going on here, and this is why." He did this really interesting experiment, where they removed the thymus altogether from newborn mice. And they were like, "Okay, these mice are probably going to just make fewer T cells, and their immune systems won't

• 15:21Cara Santa Maria?

  be good, right? So they'll just get infections and they'll die." But they found that if they've removed it... Like three days or later after the mice were born, the opposite happened. Their immune systems went haywire. They were way too strong and they started attacking the mice's healthy cells. They got this range of autoimmune diseases and they often died from that. And so he was like, okay, this is interesting and it tells me that something is happening beyond this. So he devised these cool experiments where he took these mice where the thymus had been removed, that had an overactive immune system. And he injected mature T cells from a healthy donor, from a mouse that had a thymus intact. And he found that they were protected.

• 16:06Cara Santa Maria?

  So he was able to put mature T cells in after the fact and they were tested. So what were these cells that he was putting in? He knew they were mature T cells, but nobody knew what types they were. So he was able to recognize that, and maybe this requires going back, but remember how I said that the patrolling T cells, those have a protein called CD4? And killer T cells, the ones that actually do the attacking, they have a protein on them called CD8. Well, he identified a protein called CD25. And he found that those patrolling T cells, they had both CD4 and CD25 on their surface.

• 16:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And he realized that if he added the CD25 cells to the CD4 cells that were already in existence in the ultra kind of immune angry, you know, the hyperactive immune system cells, that's when they got healthy again. So there was something about these CD25 receptors that was preventing these mice from attacking their own tissues. And this was not only happening in the thymus, it was happening in somewhere in the periphery. And so he was able to identify this new class of T cells. They called them regulatory T cells. And then this research sort of continued.

• 17:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so here's where the story switches over to the other two researchers. So now cut to a little bit later. This was in the 90s that this research was happening. So now we're going to cut to research that continued into the early 2000s. At the time, Bronco and Ramsdale. Bronco, just to, as an aside, it's important to remember that she is...

• 17:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Whoa, only the 13th woman to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, only the 66th woman overall to receive the Nobel Prize. So we're talking teeny tiny percentages there. So at the time Bronco and Ramstel were working together, they were in a lab, they were at a biotech company called Celtech Chiroscience in Bothell, Washington. They were really interested in the specific mutation called the scurphy mutation. Scurphy. They were using a model organism. It was a mouse that was developed actually out of the Manhattan Project research.

• 18:39Cara Santa Maria?

  So they were interested in how radiation sickness caused autoimmune problems. So some of these mice that had this genetic mutation were born with scaly and flaky skin, large spleens, large lymph glands. They lived for only a few weeks and they just were unhealthy. And they were only male. So people realize, researchers realized this had to be an X-linked chromosome. So only male mice got it because when female mice had the two X chromosomes, one of them could be healthy, but men of course, or male mice of course only had one X chromosome. And so if they carried the gene at all, they, they got really sick and they died. So they started to go like, okay, what's going on with these mice?

• 19:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Why are they so sick? And they realized that these T cells were attacking the tissues of these mice. So Bronco and Ramstel, this is where they enter because that was known. They were like, okay, what's going on with these scurphy mice? What is the mechanism underlying their disease? Like really, like we know it's something with the T cells, but we want to understand. Exactly where on the genome this mutation is occurring. And we've got to remember that this was before any of the modern technology that we have. So they had to do all of this kind of coding manually. In order to understand where this gene was, they had to dig through like 170 million base pair nucleotides to figure this out.

• 20:09Cara Santa Maria?

  It was bananas. So they narrowed it down to about 500,000 nucleotides. They mapped that whole area of the X chromosome and they ultimately narrowed it down to 20 different potential genes. And don't you love this, like your keys are always in the last place you look? They looked through 20 genes and they found the mutation on the 20th one.

• 20:29Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God. Classic.

• 20:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it was a lot of work.

• 20:32Bob Novella?

  Love to have heard them when they found it on the 20th.

• 20:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, seriously.

• 20:35Bob Novella?

  Few curse words.

• 20:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Probably, yeah, more than a few. So they find this scurfy mutation and they name it Fox P3 because it was similar to previously identified genes called four-ked box genes. So they called them Fox genes. So Fox P3, they found, here's a kind of an interesting aside, but also very important for their, for their prize. They realized that there was a human variant that was very similar to scurfy in presentation, but they weren't sure if it was genetically similar. But once they did this research, they realized the human equivalent of Fox P3 was responsible for a rare genetic disease called IPEC syndrome, which is immune dysregulation, polyendocrinopathy, enteropathy, X-linked syndrome.

• 21:19Cara Santa Maria?

  So this is an inherited immunodeficiency where, again, only male individuals develop early onset autoimmune disease that's just really intense. It presents with diabetes, enteropathy, so attack on the GI tract and a lot of kind of gut issues, rashes like eczema and psoriasis and thyroid disease. And these children often die very, very young. So they were able to identify the actual gene responsible, which we now know with the tools that we have, we can start solving these, these problems where there's a specific genetic mutation.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  There was a clinical trial underway using CRISPR to treat IPEC.

• 21:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Amazing, yeah, amazing. And so, so not only did they identify that, but they were able to basically look at the research that was previously done, you know, across the board, all the research that was done, but also the research that was done in Japan. And everybody now was able to say, I mean, it wasn't just Shimon Sakaguchi at this point, but because he had done all of the work leading up to it, he was able to take that discovery of the Fox P3 gene and say, wait, that is what is actually controlling the development of those regulatory T cells that I identified. So I was able to find their function through these really interesting experimental techniques. Now that I know

• 22:40Cara Santa Maria?

  where the gene is that controls it, we can, you know, do a lot of interesting things. We can knock it out, we can boost it, we can, you know, try and understand exactly what's happening. And so all of this research together tells the story of this secondary immune tolerance, peripheral immune tolerance. So not just this pathway that occurs within the thymus where the cells that are attacking healthy body tissue are sort of knocked out, but this whole secondary pathway where our body recognizes cells that attack healthy body tissue and potentially either gets rid of them or, you know, weakens them. Like

• 23:22Cara Santa Maria?

  there are so many different things we can do with autoimmune disease, right? So let's say, for example, that there's a disease where the body's own immune system is in hyperdrive, an autoimmune disease. Like I have an autoimmune disease. I have psoriasis. That's my own body attacking my skin cells and it causes these like, you know, scaly patches and I have to take medicine for that in order to not have these patches on my elbows. Some people have it severely over their whole body. And there are a ton of autoimmune diseases. If we can dial down those regulatory T cells so that they're not attacking healthy disease, or we can knock them out altogether, that would prevent autoimmune disease. On the flip side of that,

• 24:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Cancer cells, tumors are especially good at recruiting. Oh, no, they just recruit the T cells themselves.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, the T regulatory cells to suppress, to protect themselves from the immune.

• 24:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly, so they recruit the cells themselves. And again, these T regulatory cells, this whole system are what was discovered, or at least identified by the people who, the three individuals who won the Nobel Prize. So tumor cells are really good. That's how they're able to cloak themselves within the body, right? They're able to say like, we're just healthy body tissue, don't attack us. And then they grow and grow and grow. And so there's so much potential therapeutic benefit of continuing to develop drugs or treatments for these regulatory T cells to maybe be suppressed or turned off in the presence of tumors. And we actually do have some pilot studies on that where patients are getting interleukin-2.

• 24:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Interleukin-2 makes regulatory T cells thrive, so that's helping with the autoimmune disease and possibly even organ rejection after transplantation. But then, as I mentioned, when it comes to the tumors, some researchers are like modifying the T cells, adding different antibodies on their surface so that they can be better recognized, or they can send out these sort of T cells to transplanted liver or kidney to help take care of them. And of course, dialing it down instead of, or sorry, dialing it up instead of down. In cancer, in tumor biology, it would be a whole other application and probably so many more that we haven't even thought about.

• 25:40Cara Santa Maria?

  So, once again, congratulations to Doctors Mary E. Brucknow from Seattle, or who is in Seattle now, Fred Ramsdell in San Francisco, and Shimon Sakaguchi in Osaka for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  It's another example also of how international, like global collaboration is involved in modern scientific research. Like, whenever you read about any of these Nobel Prizes, but also just any story like this, it's always multiple labs in different countries contributing different components to how things, you know, unravel.

• 26:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, which has-

• 26:19Bob Novella?

  Almost without, yeah, almost without fail. I mean, that's what I'm constantly reading. Multinational groups of researchers and labs and, oh my god.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  If you're doing research at this level, it's like almost unavoidable.

• 26:28Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like you have to. And that not only has implications just for better science happening globally, but also it does have diplomatic implications. Like, science diplomacy is so important because we see this all the time where countries that are having geopolitical conflicts still come together with their scientific collaborators.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  And yet, the Trump administration just canceled all NIH subgrants to international collaborators.

• 26:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because he, it's like he wants us to be an island.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  It's so short-sighted.

• 26:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And you know what? When you're an island, everything gets weird, as we know from an evolutionary perspective, but also, yeah, from a collaborative perspective. Like, our science is going to wither. It's not going to grow if we cut ourselves off from the rest of the world.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  All right, Bob, you're, you're gonna go on and tell us about the prize in physics.

• 27:20Bob Novella?

  Yes, sir. This year's Nobel Prize in Physics went to researchers who showed that the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics that I love so much, don't quit when things get big. Two hallmark quantum effects, tunneling and energy quantization, show up even in macroscopic circuits that you can literally see. This year's prize went to John Clark, Michael Dvore and John Martinez for their foundational work in 1984 and 85. And that's right around the time, if you remember, right around the time that The Mind Flayer was terrorizing those poor kids from Stranger Things, right? Sorry, I've just, I've been bitching that show. John Clark was professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley at the time. Now he's a professor emeritus

• 28:04Bob Novella?

  at the university's graduate school. Dvore and Martinez are both professors- Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. If you're rusty, I haven't talked about it in a little while. Quantum mechanics describes that the counterintuitive and famously weird behavior of microscopic objects like atoms and electrons. That weirdness of the quantum realm is not visible in the macroscopic world that we inhabit. Those effects are still there, though, but they just kind of get averaged out by all the trillions of interactions that are happening in these huge messy systems. Like even like relativistic effects. The time that your head feels compared to the time that your feet are experiencing are

• 28:46Bob Novella?

  slightly different, but it's so small not even notice it. So what these guys did back in the 80s was to create electronic circuits made of superconducting loops where there's no resistance to flow. And within these circuits, they saw these two iconic quantum phenomena. The first was quantum tunneling. We've talked about that a little bit before. This happens when a particle appears to move through a barrier, like an energy barrier, even when it doesn't have enough energy to do so. I came across theoretical physicist Steven Gerben's take on this. He likens this to, he uses an analogy comparing quantum tunneling to a car in neutral. So imagine you're in neutral and you're approaching a hill. If you don't have enough energy, you're not going to make it over that hill. You just go up a bit, right?

• 29:30Bob Novella?

  Then you just kind of slow down, stop and head back down. Imagine that this is the case, but you still make it to the other side using this process called quantum tunneling. It's about the analogy is there's a tunnel going through the hill rather than having to go all the way over the top of it? I guess, yeah, yeah, you could, yeah, think of it that way, but it's just, yeah. But it's a metaphor, right? We're not saying that that's what's actually happening, but it's just. Right, right. You could think of it, yeah, think of it that way. If you're interested in that, please read, you know, go online, just millions, billions of websites talking about it, lots of ways to actually approach these topics. Now, this has been shown to exist in the micro world, and it's actually so important that stars could not shine without engaging in quantum tunneling.

• 30:11Bob Novella?

  And many of the technologies that we use today just wouldn't happen without this, without this effect. So, yeah, it's there and it's. critically important to life as we know it. But quantum tunneling was never seen in the macro world in the way that Clark and de Vorey did in their experiment. Now, they did it specifically, in this case, by adding these, what they call Josephson junctions in their circuits, like an insulator that require tunneling to get passed. That's how they kind of, that's what they did to the circuits to spot this. The second quantum behavior was mainly fleshed out by Martinez. This behavior is referred to as the quantization of energy. It first to the fact that subatomic particles can only gain or lose energy in fixed, discrete amounts, right? You guys have heard of that before.

• 30:56Bob Novella?

  In our world, energy is generally comparable to, say, a dial that can be turned by any amount, no matter how small. It's continuous. The quantum realm, however, only deals in very specific energies, more akin to a channel selector than a continuous dial. So you can think of it that way. Now, this was shown to happen in these large circuits by sending microwave photons into them and seeing how that energy was absorbed. Specifically, they were looking at the absorption spectrum. They saw that the energy was absorbed only at very specific frequencies, and these frequencies were specifically predicted by theory, but it also had the bonus of actually being solid proof that even these large-scale circuits were experiencing this quantum energy quantization

• 31:38Bob Novella?

  that we see in the quantum realm all the time, but not in the macro-scale world that we live in day to day. All right, to sum up here, what these researchers proved is that quantum behaviors can happen in things that are large enough for us to see. It's not a phenomenon only for individual atoms or particles. In a real sense, these large circuits as a whole were behaving like atom-sized objects. That means that the laws of quantum mechanics can also apply to macroscopic technologies. That's the key right there. But also, these weren't just some cool but obscure experiments that happened decades ago. These discoveries that these gentlemen made, this was the foundation of a host of technologies

• 32:21Bob Novella?

  that turned quantum physics essentially into engineering, right? Allowing the creation of devices that were practical and Controllable. So this includes some things you might probably predict. This includes some modern quantum computer platforms that are out there today. Made by, I think it was like Google and IBM, but there's also quantum sensors and there's quantum amplifiers. And also there's, there's I think even newer than those things, there's these super precise measuring technologies like superconducting gravimeters. And the list goes on and on, all essentially flowing from, from this foundational research from decades ago. So, so who knows? And also, I love to extrapolate a bit into the future. So who knows what amazing technology in the future can be traced back to this research

• 33:06Bob Novella?

  from the time of the mind flayer in the 1980s.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 33:09Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that was so many, so many layers to this, but.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, with quantum mechanics.

• 33:14Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God. It's just, it's, yeah, it's, it's nasty to cover because there's so many, like, well, you can't say that because that's misleading. And no, that, that creates a, you know, a mental image that's probably not.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  It's a minefield of.

• 33:25Bob Novella?

  It is. Minefield is a great way to describe it.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  All right, let's finish up with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This one goes to, again, three researchers. Susumu Kirigawa from Kyoto, Japan, Richard Robson from the University of Melbourne in Australia, and Omar Yagi from the University of California, Berkeley in the USA. So again, international researchers contributing to this story. And this has to do with something called metal organic frameworks, which we have definitely talked about on the show previously. But I'm going to go back to 1974 is where, at least conceptually, this all begins. But I'm going to first, Bob, ask you a question. Do you remember back in high school when you, and I believe it was Aaron, but you and

• 34:12Speaker 02

  somebody else got caught red-handed by Mr. Koshan playing catch with those molecule models in the chemistry classroom?

• 34:20Bob Novella?

  Absolutely. And I haven't thought about that in probably two decades. So thank you for that.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  I remember that. That guy had radar. He did. He had absolute radar. Now, I was an innocent bystander because I had nothing to do with this, but Bob was my ride home. And so I had to stay behind and help you reorganize all the drawers of rubber stoppers before we could go home as punishment. Do you remember that?

• 34:42Bob Novella?

  I do. Wow. The rubber stopper thing was even more deeply buried than the throwing around the atoms and molecules. Wow.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  So I was reminded of that because this story begins with Robson, who in 1974 also was playing with these model molecules. But that set him on a pathway not to reorganizing the rubber stopper drawers in the chemistry classroom, but the Nobel Prize.

• 35:11Bob Novella?

  Oh, if only we could have traveled that same path, Steve.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so as a teacher back in the day, he would use, you know, but like the wooden ball and dowel kind of models that you build atoms out of. And he would have to have the wood shop drill the holes in the wooden balls. And he had to tell them the specific angle at which to drill those holes. Because that's the angle of the bonds that those atoms make.

• 35:39Bob Novella?

  Accurate.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then he realized that once you do that, like, once you put the bonds at the correct angles, the molecules sort of automatically build themselves in the correct way. Right? The structure of the molecules sort of are automatic because it's built into how many bonds like a carbon atom make and what angle are those bonds at, etc. So he's like, huh, that's interesting. I wonder if there's something there. 10 years later, right? So this idea percolates with him for 10 years. Every year, he's teaching his class, like, looking at these chemical models, like, there's something here. And what he thought of is, I wonder if we can take this up one hierarchical level. If the structure, right,

• 36:25Speaker 02

  the structure, three dimensional structure of these molecules derives from the types of bonds that these atoms make, I wonder if we could use bigger molecules to do the same thing. Right? So essentially, if you have a molecule that also has specific binding sites, could you use it kind of like a tanker toy to build bigger structures out of? And so he combined copper ions, also copper ions like to make four bonds, right? And he combined that with a four armed molecule, organic molecule. You know, don't worry about what the long name is.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Right, so then you have also a very similar tetrahedral type of structure, right? For D and D players, it's like a D4, right? So, in the end, with four, the copper ions each able to make a bond. And he's like, "Duh, this should behave kind of like a carbon atom, this giant molecule," right? So he tried to build these bigger structures out of it, and it basically worked the exact same way. He could build these larger structures out of these metal, organic sort of compounds that he had made. Again, kind of like a chemistry tinkering toy set. Interestingly, because these were so big, the structure contained these large cavities.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  If you could imagine that, like, these are these big molecules, you stick them together, and it forms this bigger structure, but there's big voids, there's big empty areas in the structure, just because of the gangly molecules that you're connecting together. So then he further thought, "Huh, I wonder what we could do with this," right? So what kind of function would this serve? Again, initially, he just wanted to see if he could do it. But he started to play around with different structures to see if he could get them to do different things. And he realized one thing is that gas could flow into and out of these voids. And you could also fill them with different kinds of ions.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  And maybe they could serve as sort of a catalyst to drive chemical reactions. And he started playing around, building different structures that would do different things. But there was a big problem with this technology, and that is, these structures were fragile. They were not resilient, they would break down very quickly, and they could not resist high temperatures. And so they just weren't very practical or useful because of that, they just weren't stable enough. So now enter Kirigawa and Yagi. They were not working together, they were working completely independently, right?

• 39:19Speaker 02

  But they were sort of picking up from Robson's basic building blocks idea. And experimenting with different ways of, again, not necessarily with any outcome in mind. In fact, Kirigawa has a famous quote about the usefulness of useless, right? Things which seem to be useless can turn out to have incredibly useful applications. So you just never know. So just following your interest and the kind of just thinking outside the box and saying, "Huh, this is interesting, I wonder if this would work," you know? And then worry about applications later yields incredibly useful things.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  The quick version is, is that Kirigawa and Yagi independently experimenting with this organic metal combination, these meta-structures that you're making using big molecules as building blocks, were able to make much more versions of them and found out how to make them much more stable. And I think it was Yagi, in fact, in one of his papers, that coined the term metal-organic framework for these kinds of structures. That's basically the story. At the end of the day, these three people were critical for the development of this chemistry technology of developing these metal-organic frameworks, making them more

• 40:46Speaker 02

  stable, but also making them more flexible. The reporting on this brings up the point that there were already other kinds of technologies like silicon dioxide and zeolites, right, that where you could have similar functions. So there wasn't a lot of interest in these early on. It's like, eh, we can already do that with these other things, these are fragile, who cares, right? But the researchers kept pushing and they found out that, well, first of all, we can make them stable, and secondly, we could make them do something that the zeolites can't do, and that is that they're flexible. And what that means is, they can change shape.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  From when they're empty of stuff, whether it's a gas or other chemicals or whatever, to when they're full. And that just expands the number of potential applications that they could potentially be used for. So, fast forward to today, where are we? There are literally tens of thousands of metal-organic frameworks that have been created, and they have a wide range of potential applications. We talked recently about harvesting water from the air in deserts. Those were metal-organic frameworks. There's a lot of research looking at pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, right? Carbon capture. Those are metal-organic frameworks. Oh, cool.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  There's a lot of metal-organic frameworks that are catalysts. They make... Because you're bringing different molecules together, you could then catalyze reactions. You can make them happen more quickly. The thing about the metal-organic frameworks, and it's a framework, they're essentially programmable in a way. Like, you can design the structure so that the voids are specific to whatever kind of molecules you want to fill them. And now, with artificial intelligence, they can explore the potential design space of millions of metal-organic frameworks and say, "Yeah, find one for me that does this." You know?

• 42:53Speaker 02

  So I think we're sort of poised for this technology to take off even more. Cool. One specific thing I thought of was, can this be used as a hydrogen storage medium? Oh. Right? Because we're desperately looking for something that would store hydrogen. And the short answer is, it is being researched. It is being researched, but it's not very promising. And the reason for that is volumetrics, is that while... You can make metal organic frameworks that store hydrogen and they can be very mass efficient, have a low mass for the amount of hydrogen that you're storing. They don't compress the hydrogen very well, so they take up a lot of volume. So that may be useful

• 43:35Speaker 02

  in some contexts, like any static storage need, but wouldn't be good in a hydrogen fuel cell car. You need to keep the weight and the volume under control for your hydrogen storage. Doesn't mean that they won't eventually crack this problem, but that's where it is right now. There's some major challenges. That's probably not going to be an early and maybe even a never application for MOFs, but there's so many other ones. So this is just one of those technologies that facilitate other technologies. It's also, this is the technology that's often behind the news item, right? Like we were talking about the harvesting water from the air, the technology behind that is the metal organic frameworks. So

• 44:19Speaker 02

  keep your eye on this. This will keep popping up in a lot of the news items that we talk about.

• 44:24Bob Novella?

  Cool, man.

• 44:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  All right. I think there's three awesome Nobel Prizes for this year in the sciences.

• 44:30Cara Santa Maria?

  And like is often the case with the Nobel, I guess, announcements, when you first read it, you're like, oh. And then you dig into it and you're like, whoa, this is such a big deal.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. All right. We have one non-Nobel news item. Jay, tell us about some recent discoveries with long COVID.

• 44:52Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so many people with long COVID report this brain fog thing. I mean, I think it's been in the news a lot. It's definitely a term that has gotten out there. A lot of people know about it. But, you know, is it legitimate? You know, what could potentially be causing it? So a research team in Japan asked those questions, you know, is there a measurable change in the brain chemistry that lines up with those that think they have these problems? So they did. They looked into it and they used a brain scan that can see one kind of communication receptor on neurons, and it's called the AMPA receptor. Think of these receptors as tiny volume knobs that help neurons pass signals. So the team

• 45:33Jay Novella?

  scanned 30 adults that claimed to have long COVID symptoms who had ongoing cognitive complaints. And what they did was they compared them with 80 healthy volunteers from a previous data set. So What they found on average was that people with long COVID showed a stronger AMPA signal across large parts of their brain. And in simple terms, more of those volume knobs were visible on neuron surfaces. They measured the test subject's brains with a PET scan. And the tracer that they used, right? This is the thing that they typically will inject into somebody that will stick to the things that they're looking for and they're able to locate that them sticking onto that whatever it is they're looking for.

• 46:16Jay Novella?

  So in this case, they want to find the receptors. So they they used something called carbon 11 K2, and this binds to the AMPA receptors. And after the injection, researchers were able to collect images during a 30 to 50 minute window. I guess that's how long it was able to be traced. And then they calculated a standard ratio that tells you how strong the tracer signal is in each brain region. And they they compared this against typical white matter as the reference. Prior work from the same group supports the idea that this signal mainly reflects receptors on neurons, not on support cells. And that matters because it ties the signal to synapses, where this is where, of course, neurons talk to each other.

• 47:01Jay Novella?

  They also gave standard thinking tests to the people. And when they checked whether higher AMPA signal matched worse scores, two tests stood out. And Steve, I'd like to hear what you have to say about this. People with higher signal did worse on picture naming and on visual memory tasks that ask you to recall a figure. And those links showed up in the same brain areas that had the biggest group differences. That connects the scan results to the real world problems like finding the right word or remembering what you just saw.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  This is, yeah, this is really interesting. The AMPA receptors are excitatory, but they're also excitotoxic. So what that means is that they increase the firing of neurons. And they also cause some metabolic stress to those neurons, right? They actually could kill them if there's enough of that stress. So what they think is happening is that it's just messing with the balance of signaling in these networks. Right, just throwing off the network by, you know, having excess excitatory signaling, too much excitation, and also too much stress on those neurons.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  And it can affect people's overall ability to maintain their focus and to think. What's interesting is that this is probably a global effect, right? This is not affecting one part of the brain. But when there are global effects on the brain, there are certain canaries in the coal mine, if you will. There are certain symptoms that tend to be the first thing people notice. And one of those is that just your ability to maintain concentration. Because that, you take it for granted, but that's a very high-energy functioning state of the brain, the ability to focus your attention, maintain your attention, divert your attention, filter out things you don't want to pay attention to. We're all constantly doing that. And when that's even a little sluggish, you really notice it.

• 48:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and a lot of people kind of experience it as something called brain fog.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, brain fog.

• 49:02Cara Santa Maria?

  They just can't think. So, sorry if I missed this. Are these people producing too much glutamate?

• 49:08Speaker 02

  They didn't mention that as far as what I read. This was a very, very long study.

• 49:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, just, I'm wondering why.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  I don't think they know. These receptors are more active. I don't think they've figured out why they're more active.

• 49:18Cara Santa Maria?

  But AMPA receptors are glutamate receptors, right? So either they're making too much, or too much is being left in the synapse. There's something excitotoxic going on.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, okay.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  They also conducted blood tests, and they found that there were two immune system signals, you know, moved with the brain scan result. The blood tests don't prove cause and effect, though. It's a pattern that suggests the immune system and synapses might be linked in these patients. An important question here is, could this scan that they've created identify patients, right? They were able to identify nine out of 10 people who don't have it. I know it seems backwards, but that's the way that their scan was working. And these are, you know, these are early numbers. It's a very small study, and these tests aren't even ready for clinical use.

• 50:07Jay Novella?

  They'd have to do much larger studies and really dig into that.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's part of the process of going from a clinical diagnosis to a mechanistic diagnosis, right? Your diagnosis is, I have brain fog, right? Like, it's just a symptom. And maybe we could say, you have brain fog and you don't have any abnormalities in your neurological exam that would explain it, right? So that's typically how we make a clinical diagnosis. You have some symptom and there's no obvious explanation. That's when, so we're left with this syndrome. Anytime we can go from that and say, this subset of those people have this physiological thing going on, that not only helps us do more research, but design treatments for that subset of people, right?

• 50:52Speaker 02

  Because usually, there's more than one thing going on when we have just a vague clinical diagnostic category. You know what I mean? Unless it's really, really specific, which brain fog is not. It's very, very not specific.

• 51:04Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's like feeling dizzy.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:06Jay Novella?

  This study is a really good example of the scientific process and the difficulty with a lack of funding in science. So, for example, this is a good study. You know, they found something that is actionable. They need to look deeper in and they need to do more horizontal studies to add up the body of knowledge, right? It's, you know, it's from a small data set. You know, it needs to be replicated by other labs. This is just the beginning of something that could take, what, Steve? 10, 20 years to like really get into, get to the point where you might even be able to treat it?

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, with every one of these Nobel Prizes, when you look back, like, when was the first kind of insight made about this? It's usually like a 30-year delay to, now we're having, we're researching actual applications. Yeah, translating basic science to applicable science is 20 to 30 years is typical.

• 52:05Jay Novella?

  But it's important, guys. It's very important and we need to... The skeptic community, I think, needs to, we need to know this and we need to, you know, I don't know, what can I even say here?

• 52:15Speaker 02

  It's good to be able to advocate for basic science research with good arguments because it's the first, one of the first things to get attacked, you know, politically or when, when, so it's easy to make fun of, for example, basic science research that has no obvious applications, like, "We're wasting money on doing researching," like, always like, "The sex live of French frogs," or whatever. But then when you trace, "Yeah, but that research led to curing this disease," you know, 20 years later, the examples they choose are, you know, if you actually trace that research, almost always lead to, like, really interesting discoveries and sometimes monumental applications. It's important to know that connection and why you cannot use that argument, like, "There's

• 53:00Speaker 02

  no obvious, immediate, direct application of this research, therefore, it's useless." That's a dumb argument and it's ahistorical. It's not true. So, we have to just be patient and continue to sort basic science because we know that is the fuel that drives, you know, the engine of change, of progress of our economy. You know what I mean? It's just, it's so short-sighted to undermine the-

• 53:24Bob Novella?

  Totally, and this is a point that has been made for how many decades? This was obvious decades ago, but no, we still have to remind people, like, "Duh, basic science is critically important." Oh, my god.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Quince.

• 53:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Fall is upon us, and I can't even believe I'm saying this, but even in LA this morning, I took my dog out and it was chilly outside, so I was excited to reach for my favorite hoodie. It's 100% Mongolian cashmere from Quince. It was affordable, it's held up over a long time. They have so many pieces, from bedding to cookware. I have an entire bed made of bamboo and it's so soft, it keeps me cool at night, I love it so much. And Jay, you've gotten, what, jewelry from Quince before?

• 54:15Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I told you, like, my wife, we got her gold earrings. And real quick, you know, she lost one of them, contacted Quince, and they, they sent her a new pair. Like ridiculously. This company is like, just their, their customer support is freaking fantastic.

• 54:29Bob Novella?

  Layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they look. Go to quince.com slash SGU for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada, too. That's Q U I N C E dot com slash SGU. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash SGU.

• 54:49Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. All right, Jay, you're gonna, you're gonna keep going with who's that noisy?

• 54:55Speaker 02

  All right, guys, last week I played this noisy.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  So what do you guys think that is?

• 55:04Jay Novella?

  Well, it's definitely an animal, right?

• 55:06Speaker 02

  Bob, Kara?

• 55:07Jay Novella?

  Like a...

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah.

• 55:09Jay Novella?

  I would guess like a frog or something like that.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  It's an animal or a toy?

• 55:14Jay Novella?

  Well, a listener named Michael Blaney wrote in. He writes in quite a bit. He says, hi, Jay, I'm guessing it's a duck. That is all. Yeah, it does have a little duck kinda situation there. Another listener named Amanda Lee wrote in, hi, Jay, I'm so excited to see you guys in Sydney next year. Yes, we are going to Sydney and I'm very excited. I'm pushing that ball forward every day. It's a lot of work and I cannot wait until we get to go. So she continues, I'm going to add my vote to what I'm sure must be an absolute legion of listeners all identifying this week's noisy as some deep sea diver sucking on a regulator connected to a tank with lots of nitrogen in it and then laughing at how silly they sound.

• 55:51Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, don't think you're crazy. That's not, that's not that bad of a guess if you think about it because it has like a, a human kinda laughing rhythm to it and it definitely is a higher pitched thing. So I like that one. Chelsea B. wrote in. I think Chelsea B. is gonna start a rap group. You know, Chelsea B. Yo.

• 56:10Jay Novella?

  Hey Jay, it's Seewee from Buffalo, New York. First time writing in to say this week's noisy is another effing bird.

• 56:17Jay Novella?

  I included that one because it's not just funny, but it's just emblematic of the whole thing, right? Because almost everything can be a bird. Like, birds make every noise you can imagine. So it's always an okay guess to guess a bird. I like that she didn't even like pick a bird. She's like, "It's just a bird." Gordy Swam said, "Hey guys, this week's noisy sounds like an evil mechanical duck doing his evil laugh." Right, so there you have it. This is the guess that a ton of people wrote in. Thanks so much for doing what you do. And then, guys, we actually have two winners this week. They both submitted within a minute of each other, so I definitely wanted to give them both a shout out. So the first one is Duncan Shaw. Duncan said, "Hey Jay, Duncan Shaw from South Africa.

• 57:00Jay Novella?

  I've been listening since 2018 about my third time guessing. The noise from this week's episode is a barking gecko, and it was newly discovered. I heard it on Reddit, so I'm guessing one of many to get the correct answer this week." And then the next person is Rachel Griffin. She says, "Hello, my guess for who's that noisy this week is the newly identified species of barking gecko recently found in the Namib Desert." Is that Namib?

• 57:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Namib, yeah.

• 57:25Jay Novella?

  Namib?

• 57:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Like Namibia.

• 57:26Jay Novella?

  Namibia, okay, so Namib Desert, yeah, very cool. So yes, this is a newly identified species, and... I knew we were in the herpetology zone somewhere. So listen again.

• 57:44Jay Novella?

  The thing I find adorable, I did read this, I'm not 100% true that the information is correct, but the person said, "This is basically the gecko saying, 'Hey, like, get away from here. I live here, like, stop bothering me.'" Get away from me, kid, you're bothering me. You're bothering me, yeah. Alright guys, I've got a new noisy this week from a listener named Von Contreras. Contreras, Contreras.

• 58:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, Contreras, it's Contreras, oh, okay, yeah.

• 58:09Jay Novella?

  Alright, I have to say this, I almost didn't play it. Because this is really weird, but I love it. And I think if you listen to it a couple of times, you'll love it too. Check it out.

• 58:34Jay Novella?

  And when you listen to it again, I notice that this sounds a lot like Tormann? No, it sounds like a song on Pink Floyd, "The Wall." I can't remember the song. Yeah. But it definitely has that progression going on there. So if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something really cool, you gotta email me at [email protected]. Steve? Yes. We have things happening. We do. We've made some excellent progress on the Political Reality Podcast. We filmed a bunch of TikToks. We did. To tease the show. And we basically have all of the elements now decided on, and we're just waiting

• 59:15Jay Novella?

  on one thing to begin, and it's nothing that is within our control. But it's all good, because this is what it takes to do what we're about to do. Very excited, it's all there, and we will probably be launching this within a couple of weeks, or three weeks, I think. We'll need to get the first episode out. We are all going on an epic adventure. And this adventure will include, we will all be going to LA, and we will be doing a private show, and we will be doing an extravaganza. And then we're gonna fly to Sydney, and we'll be doing an extravaganza, and probably a private show.

• 59:58Jay Novella?

  And we're gonna be doing a three-day conference in Sydney. It's going to be not a con in Sydney, and we're working, of course, with the Australian Skeptics. We're super excited. This will be their 47th conference, but we are taking over the conference, because it's gonna be 100% content that we create, and it's gonna be awesome, because we've run this conference twice before, we know exactly what we're doing, it's gonna be a ton of fun, we have some awesome people joining us, like Dr. Carl, he will be there. I'm going to be hopefully communicating with him soon to see how, you know, how far in can I rope him, Steve?

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36Jay Novella?

  I want him to, I want him to do-

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  Will you juggle for us?

• 1:00:39Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I know, I just want him, I want him to do like, everything, basically. If you can get him to, to sit in with us for two days, that would be fantastic. Then, guys, we are going to be going to New Zealand, and we have, I can say it now that we will be having a conference in New Zealand. I can't give you any details, it'll be the weekend after the conference in Sydney. This is all happening, by the way, the weekend of July 23rd of 2026, and then the following weekend will be the New Zealand conference. I'll be giving you guys more details as they come out. We're going to be selling tickets, hopefully, I mean, if I get my way, I'd like us to be selling tickets within a week or two.

• 1:01:21Jay Novella?

  I think it's possible, but, you know, I'm pushing very hard, it'll happen, and then, of course, all the details will have been completely finalized. Bottom line is, we'd love to have you guys. This is a really, you know, really big deal, because, first of all, we're going to be, you know, going to two awesome countries that we love. We're going to get to perform to a lot of people in the US and over in New Zealand and Australia. We're hoping that we can bring Nauticon to Australia and, and just absolutely blow them away, Steve. Aren't you going to sing this time?

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  Uh, there's, there's a small possibility that might happen, like, point oh, 3%.

• 1:01:56Jay Novella?

  It's, it's low, it's getting lower, by the way.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  And dropping, dropping fast.

• 1:02:02Jay Novella?

  Guys, if you appreciate the work that we do, and you want to help us keep this going, and, and again, like, help us increase our footprint, which is what we're doing right now, you can become a patron. You can go to patreon.com/skepticsguide. Any contribution is absolutely welcome, and we would really appreciate it.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Thank you, Jay. All right, we have a great interview coming up with Professor David Kyle Johnson, so let's go to that interview now.

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  We are joined now by David Kyle Johnson. Kyle, welcome back to the SGU.

• 1:02:44Speaker 06

  Hey, thanks, Steve. It's great to be here.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  And you are a professor of philosophy at King's College.

• 1:02:50Speaker 06

  That is correct.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  And you are on our Rolodex, as we say, the, you know, virtual one, I guess, as our philosopher that we can turn to when we need to talk to a philosopher. But you contacted us this time.

• 1:03:00Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Because we had a very quick, it wasn't really like a formal part of the show, but we, I think it was because of Evan

• 1:03:08Speaker 07

  It was the quote, yes.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  It was the quote.

• 1:03:10Speaker 07

  The Joseph

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had a brief conversation about inductive and deductive reasoning.

• 1:03:16Speaker 07

  And I brought up Einstein, which was sort of a, I guess, an example of a scientist who maybe had some, you know, issues in the past with inductive reasoning.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  And of course, the real story is way more complicated than our brief discussion. And since this is where the SGU and this is logic, we're like, let's, let's, let's do it. Let's do a deep dive on deductive and inductive reasoning. So that's why you're here.

• 1:03:40Speaker 06

  Awesome. I am very glad to do that. I've been thinking about it like all day prepping and I'm like trying to think about different ways like to approach it and explain it all. So.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  All right. So what's your, what's your elevator pitch, kind of quickie version that you want people to walk away with? What's the difference between those types of reasoning?

• 1:03:55Speaker 06

  Okay, okay. So here's the elevator pitch is, is commonly thought that deductive and inductive reasoning are, can define the following way. Deduction is reasoning that goes from the universal to the particular and induction goes from the particular to the universal. That is incorrect. That is a misconception that is borrowed from Aristotle, that comes from Aristotle. And it's not even a complete accurate representation of what Aristotle thought, but the way that modern logicians understand deductive and inductive reasoning.

• 1:04:26Speaker 06

  Is deductive reasoning is reasoning that guarantees its conclusion. And inductive reasoning is reasoning that makes the conclusion probable. It raises the probability or makes it more likely that the conclusion is true. And that's how modern logicians understand those terms. And all arguments fall under one of those two categories.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  Okay, I get that. So, but when you say that the general to the specific and specific to the general is not true. Do you mean it's incomplete or it really is just absolutely wrong?

• 1:04:58Speaker 06

  As an understanding of what deduction and induction is, even as Aristotle understood it, it is inaccurate. It's also incomplete in that like, obviously, there's more arguments than just those two kinds of arguments. But it is also the case that like, as Aristotle understood it and then as modern logicians understand it, that's not quite an accurate understanding of what deduction and induction is.

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  But would you agree, because this is, I get that, I get all that, I knew that. But I also thought that, well, the part of the reason why that that's the quickie summary is because if you do have, like, if you take as a premise a general rule, you can make an absolutely must be true conclusion about that using deduction. So that's where that relationship comes from. Whereas induction, you can't, it's more about generating a hypothesis. So you cannot make a this 100% has to be true. So there is still that relationship, right?

• 1:05:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, kind of, except for when you said that induction's about generating a hypothesis. That is not necessarily the case either. Like, it can.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  It can, but not necessarily.

• 1:06:02Speaker 06

  But not necessarily, right?

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  All right, so give us, give us some more examples then. Let's just talk about deductive reasoning. So what would be some really good examples of deductive reasoning to help everybody understand what it is in its essence?

• 1:06:16Speaker 06

  Okay, so Aristotle kind of captures this when he says that he wants deductive reasoning to capture what he called syllogistic reasoning, which he defined as a discourse in which certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from them. So he has kind of that in mind. He has that idea of an argument whose premises guarantee its conclusion.

• 1:06:42Speaker 02

  So if A equals B and B equals C, A must equal C.

• 1:06:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's an example. That's an example of one, right? So the problem is that whenever he, like he says, that's what deduction is. All of the examples he give are just categorical, universal to particular arguments. They're all, if, if all As are Bs and X is an A, so X is a B, like, you know, all men are mortal. Socrates is a man, Socrates is mortal. Like, those are the only kinds of, you know, examples he gives. But as what you're asking for, right, there's lots of other examples of arguments that, that guarantee their conclusion. So classic example is modus ponens. If P, then Q, P therefore Q. Right? And we can, you know, an argument can follow that form without following the universal to particular, you know.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 1:07:25Speaker 06

  Right? Like, so, you know, if Biden won, then there'd be a male president. Biden did win, therefore there's a male president. Like, that's modus ponens. That those premises, if true, would guarantee that conclusion. So that's a deductive argument, right? Either A or B, not A, therefore B. That's called a disjunctive syllogism, right? That is a deductive argument because if the premises were true, the conclusion would have to follow, right? Um, there's also like axiomatic or definitional arguments.

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Speaker 06

  Um, like that, you know, like all bachelors are unmarried or whatever. That follows necessarily from the definition of bachelor. All mathematical arguments are deductive in this way, right?

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say that it feels like math, like deduction is basically math.

• 1:08:05Speaker 06

  Yes, very much so, right? Uh, and in fact, so, uh, uh, this is one of like, so one of the kind of important things to realize about this and why understanding this distinction is important or whatever, is it like, understanding that, that under, that that understanding or articulation of what deduction is, is incorrect. That of the original understanding of universal to particular is incorrect. Led to the modern understanding and that modern understanding led to like sentential and propositional logic. And, uh, that eventually led to predicate calculus. And it is upon that groundwork that like all modern computing is based on. Right? So like, you can't make logic gates with universal to particular logic, right?

• 1:08:48Speaker 06

  Like you, you've got to have propositional logic and predicate calculus and that kind of. Kind of stuff or whatever. So it was like that development, that realization of updating or changing, however you define it, Aristotle's old understanding of deduction to this new understanding, which led to the development of the kind of formal logic is what makes like all of computing possible. So like it's really under it's like it wasn't just a semantic, oh, we need to define it a different kind of way, kind of issue. It was like really philosophically and scientifically important in that kind of way.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  It allowed for the kind of logical thinking that is necessary when programming a computer.

• 1:09:22Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  So computers essentially follow deductive reasoning.

• 1:09:26Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  That's a fair statement?

• 1:09:28Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Okay. And then now let's tick over to inductive logic. So give us some core examples of that.

• 1:09:36Speaker 06

  Okay. So inductive logic again is any kind of argument which raises the probability of its conclusion, right? And so of course Aristotle's example of going from a particular to a universal, right, would fit under that category, right? He would be like, I'm trying to forget, I forget what the exact names were, but like, you know, he had arguments like, I think I've got it here. Person A is experienced and wise and person B is experienced and wise and person C is experienced and wise, therefore all experienced people are wise, right? Like that obviously follows that kind of classic articulation, right? But there are a lot more ways to raise the probability of conclusions without engaging in that kind of particular

• 1:10:18Speaker 06

  to universal logic, right? So analogies do this, right? Thing one has properties A, B, and C. Thing two has properties A and B. So thing two probably has property C as well, right? That's not particular to universal or anything like that, but clearly, right? If in the right conditions, that kind of logic.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  It's a pattern.

• 1:10:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a pattern, right? It's an analogy, right? You find similarities, you derive further similarities, right? Inference to the best explanation, where you consider multiple hypotheses, compare them according to criteria that determine, you know, what good explanations should do, and you pick the best one, right? You favor the best one. That clearly does not always involve inference, you know, from particulars to universals. And certainly it is the case that those kinds of conclusions aren't guaranteed, but they certainly raise the probability of, that raise the probability of the conclusion. In fact,

• 1:11:11Speaker 06

  Something that I think most philosophers of science agree with this and something that I argue for in my book that I'm working on right now, which is called How, Why and When to Think Scientifically, argues that all of science is inductive. No conclusion in science is ever 100% proven, 100% guaranteed. Scientific arguments certainly can put the conclusions that they argue for beyond any possible reasonable doubt, right? Like you'd have to be crazy in numerous ways to reject them and you'd have to make ad hoc excuses and, you know, yada, yada, yada, but they'll never guarantee anything 100%. And so all scientific reasoning is inductive. In fact, in the book, I agree with Ernest McMullin

• 1:11:55Speaker 06

  that all scientific reasoning is actually inference to the best explanation.

• 1:11:58Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:11:59Speaker 06

  You can do other kinds of reasoning in service to that kind of like inference to the best explanation. You can even use deduction when doing that and you can use different kinds of induction when doing an analogy and statistics and, you know, obviously a hypothetical, inductive reasoning, right? Like there's all different kinds of stuff that you can do, but it's all in service to trying to find the best explanation, which is an inductive form of reasoning.

• 1:12:22Speaker 07

  And it sounds like that you can introduce new information when it's discovered into that and make a better conclusion as it, as it reveals itself.

• 1:12:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, right? So this is something that was, kind of was getting at your quote, Evan, where they were talking about like induction was guesswork, right? And then when you mentioned Einstein, Einstein was kind of talking about, well, how do we derive the theories upon which science is based, right? Is it this, you know, particular to universal kind of thing that we're doing? Or are we doing something else? And what makes it even more confusing is Einstein said it's not inductive. And he was, by inductive, he meant the Aristotelian sense from, you know, general to, from, from specific to, to, to general, right? From specific to universal. He said it's deductive, but when he said deductive, he didn't mean it in the Aristotelian way or in the modern logical way.

• 1:13:13Speaker 07

  Oh, so he conflated kind of two different things from two different eras of understanding. How dare he?

• 1:13:20Speaker 06

  Well, that's what he says in his paper. In his paper, he defines what he means by deductive reasoning. And what he says is what I, what I mean deduction, what I mean is making up hypotheses. We don't get it from looking at particulars or observations. We like literally create them through artwork. And then we deduce what would also be true if that hypothesis were true. So you make a predictive inference, right? And then you go off and test it to see if that, you know, if that prediction comes out to be true. Right?

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  So he wasn't using the jargon the way that philosophers use the jargon.

• 1:13:56Speaker 06

  Correct, correct. And in fact, technically speaking, what he's talking about there, you hypothesize, you make a prediction, you see if the prediction pans out. That is actually inductive reasoning, right? If you, if P, like, if my hypothesis is true, then I would expect this result. If H, then R. I do the experiment, I get R. Therefore, the conclude, the hypothesis is true. That's, that's inductive reasoning, or if it is deductive, it's invalid. That's another kind of issue here. But let me, let me articulate that a little bit. So something that's really interesting about this distinction is that we can't, modern logicians recognize that we can't simply say that an argument's deductive if the premises guarantee the conclusion.

• 1:14:40Speaker 06

  Because if we say that, then there can't be invalid deductive arguments. Right? If the, if the premises fail to, you know, guarantee the conclusion, well, then it's just automatically not deduction. But we recognize that there are invalid deductive arguments, right? Affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent are all examples of invalid deductive arguments. So what, um, modern logicians usually do is say that, well, whether we count it as deductive or inductive depends on the intentions of the speaker. If they think their premises guarantee their conclusion, then we consider it deductive. And then we bring the appropriate logical, you know, apparatus to bear to figure out whether it actually does guarantee the conclusion. And if they think it doesn't guarantee it, but it only provides support for it, well, then we treat it as inductive and bring a different, you know,

• 1:15:25Speaker 06

  logical apparatus to bear, right? So what's interesting is that in some circumstances, if P then Q, Q therefore P, can be invalid deductive reasoning, right? If Biden is elected, yeah, Biden is elected, then we'll have a male president. We do have a male president, therefore Biden was elected. Obviously, that argument doesn't work. It's obviously deductive, but obviously it doesn't work. But Einstein's reasoning, if my hypothesis is true, I would expect this result. I did get this result, therefore my hypothesis is true, follows the same logical form. But I wouldn't call that deductive, and I certainly wouldn't say that it's like, you know, it's invalid, or I would dismiss, I wouldn't dismiss it because it's technically invalid, right?

• 1:16:06Speaker 06

  He recognizes, as all good scientists should, that seeing that result in the experiment is not a guarantee that the hypothesis is true. But if the experiment's done correctly, there's pretty good evidence that the hypothesis is true, right? And the more you do that kind of reasoning, the more experiments you kind of mount up, or whatever, that's more and more reasoning that the hypothesis is true. None of it guarantees it, but it all, you know, provides good support. And that's all inductive.

• 1:16:30Speaker 07

  It's all inductive. Science is inductive.

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right. I have a couple of questions.

• 1:16:33Speaker 06

  Sure, sure.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  The first is, it seems, therefore, that formal logical fallacies deal with deductive reasoning, and informal logical fallacies deal with inductive reasoning. Is that accurate?

• 1:16:47Speaker 06

  The former, I believe, is accurate. All formal logical fallacies are going to be dealing with deductive arguments.

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:16:53Speaker 06

  They're going to be invalid because they don't guarantee their conclusion they're supposed to, and yada, yada. Informal logical fallacies, I don't think necessarily only deal with inductive arguments. Probably it would be safe to say that they usually do, but it would be like begging the question, I would consider to be an informal logical fallacy, assuming the truth of what you're trying to prove. And you could definitely do that with a deductive argument.

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  Okay. But the symmetry is that formal logical fallacies, if you are committing them, your conclusion must be false. Whereas with informal logical fallacies, if you're committing them, your conclusion does not have to be false. It could still be true. It's just not a good argument. Is that fair?

• 1:17:40Speaker 06

  Not quite. So here's just a little distinction. I don't know where you're coming from. There's a little distinction here. If you commit a law, if you commit a formal logical fallacy, what that means is that your premise, your premises don't guarantee your conclusion. The conclusion might still be true, right? I could give you a bad argument for anything. I could give you an invalid argument for anything, even if it happens to be true, right? But it just means that the argument doesn't work to get you to that conclusion, right?

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  All right. So like, an example I was thinking of is that, well, you say if A equals B, and B equals C, then A does not equal C. That has to be wrong. Right, because that's a formal logical fallacy. So, but you're saying you could construct a formal logical fallacy that doesn't guarantee your conclusion is wrong?

• 1:18:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, right, so, yeah, I could definitely do it where it doesn't guarantee your conclusion is wrong. So, see if I can come up with an example off the top of my head. Oh, yeah, okay, here we go. If I am in Denver, then I am in Colorado. I am in Colorado, therefore, I'm in Denver.

• 1:18:47Speaker 07

  I see.

• 1:18:48Speaker 06

  That argument is invalid.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  But you might be in Denver.

• 1:18:51Speaker 06

  But if I give it while I'm in Denver, the premise is true, the conclusion, you know, the premises are true and the conclusion is true.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  Even though the logic is not valid.

• 1:18:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I've given you an invalid logical argument.

• 1:19:00Speaker 02

  Got you.

• 1:19:00Speaker 06

  An argument that's deductive and it's invalid, but it happens at the premise.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  Alright, that helps.

• 1:19:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  But is it true that informal logical fallacies never prove that the conclusion is false?

• 1:19:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, they know, the informal logical fallacies will always, an argument that commits an informal logical fallacy will always fail to provide adequate support for the conclusion.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  But doesn't mean the conclusion must be false.

• 1:19:24Speaker 06

  Right, doesn't mean the conclusion must be false.

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  Alright.

• 1:19:27Speaker 06

  Again, I could give you a bad argument for anything.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, got you, okay, that's good to know. Alright, my next question is this, because I took, you know, a course on Sherlock Holmes and logic and how that applied to actually medical diagnosis, it was a very good course. And one of the things I remember from that was that the kind of logic that Sherlock Holmes used in, you know, the literature is neither purely deductive or inductive and that it's this, his own kind of Holmesian induction.

• 1:19:58Speaker 07

  A hybrid.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  So, but it does sound like what he was doing was inference to the best explanation.

• 1:20:04Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  Right, so isn't that it, so that, so maybe, again, that my teacher was probably using an outdated version of what induction or deduction is. It, yeah, it is just inference to the best explanation, the most probable explanation.

• 1:20:17Speaker 06

  Yes, so let me, let me, let me talk about this. So this is great.

• 1:20:20Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:20:20Speaker 06

  I'm so glad you brought this up. So first of all, right, like, you know, I was wondering if the quote from Star Trek, where Data is pretending to be Sherlock Holmes, and he talks about like, "I did deduction from, you know, from the general to the specific," or whatever, like,

• 1:20:36Speaker 06

  that's the kind of like definition that floats around all the time, right?

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:39Speaker 06

  And most people consider, they call what Holmes did deduction. But it's not. You're right, Steve. It's inference to the best explanation, which can involve both inductive and deductive. But at its core, it is inductive, because the conclusions, the conclusion of his whole argument is never going to be guaranteed.

• 1:20:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:20:59Speaker 06

  And one of, I teach a class on science, pseudoscience and medical reasoning.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:21:06Speaker 06

  And it is inspired by a paper that I wrote, where I argue that what leads to medical, one of the things that leads to medical misdiagnosis is doctors misunderstanding what the nature of scientific reasoning is and the nature of diagnostic reasoning is. They usually classify it as either system one or system two reasoning. And if instead, they recognize that it was inference to the best explanation, that would provide them a better understanding of what it is. And then that would actually help them, not guarantee, but help them avoid diagnostics, you know, diagnostic errors.

• 1:21:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I agree. And, and the inference to the best explanation can use both system one and system two thinking.

• 1:21:47Speaker 06

  Yes, 100%.

• 1:21:48Speaker 02

  And, and for the audience, system one, I can't, I always forget which is which. I think system one is in, is an intuition.

• 1:21:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay, so system one is basically like pattern recognition?

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:57Speaker 06

  Like a kind of intuitive pattern recognition? And the system two reasoning is more like what people classically call the scientific method, which is you form a hypothesis, you make a prediction, you perform, you know, you do a test to see if a prediction turns out to be right. And then you revise or reject based on the results, which that's often called the scientific method.

• 1:22:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:22:15Speaker 06

  I think that's better understood as the experimental method, and the scientific method is inference of best explanation.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  Right. And we call that, in medicine, we call that system two analytical thinking.

• 1:22:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  And system one is the pattern recognition or intuitive, meaning it's like, "I've seen this before. I recognize it, you know, I just have a gut feeling that this is what it is." But you have to back that up with analytical, like I did a test and the test has this probability, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, then you do like real, you're crunching the numbers.

• 1:22:41Speaker 06

  Right, but even that is, it's inductive, right?

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

  It's inductive.

• 1:22:44Speaker 06

  Analytical, but it's all inference.

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's all inference. We never know anything for sure in medicine.

• 1:22:49Speaker 06

  Right, but if we understood, if doctors better understood, like you do, that it's inference of the best explanation. I think diagnostic errors would be reduced, right? Well, one of the things that I love the Holmes connection is that my understanding is that Sherlock Holmes was based on a medical doctor.

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:23:07Speaker 06

  That Arthur Conan Doyle knew, and he saw how he reasoned. So he modeled Holmes reasoning after this doctor, and then ultimately, House M.D.'s reasoning is based on Holmes, because House is just a medical version of Sherlock Holmes.

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 1:23:25Speaker 06

  Comes full circle, right? I love that. I love it.

• 1:23:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Watson, of course, is a doctor. He's an actual doctor. Yeah, the character.

• 1:23:31Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:23:32Speaker 02

  Okay, any nuance here that we haven't talked about yet?

• 1:23:35Speaker 06

  So a couple of nuances here. One is the reason I think it's important to understand this. Like, it's not just semantic to get the definition of induction and deduction right. Especially the point about, like, we need to understand that science is inductive. Because one of the most common arguments of pseudoscientists, right, is that, like, they'll say, like, well, you can't 100% prove my pseudoscience false, therefore it's true. Or they'll say, like, can science 100% prove that global warming is really hot, whatever? And then they'll use that as a reason to think that it's false. Now, obviously, we all know that's an appeal to ignorance, right?

• 1:24:16Speaker 06

  But what understanding the nature, the inductive nature of scientific reasoning allows us to do is really fully understand why that is a fallacy, why appealing to ignorance is not a good reason to dismiss science or accept pseudoscience. Because when they are, you know, refusing to accept something because it hasn't been 100% proven, they're asking science to do something that by definition, by its very nature, it cannot and does not do. Right? You're right. Since it is inductive and doesn't prove anything 100%, when we're thinking about what we should accept based on scientific reasoning, we have to do what Carl Sagan said, right? And numerous others have said this, right? We have to proportion our belief to the evidence. Exactly.

• 1:25:01Speaker 06

  Not hold out for 100% certainty. Mm-hmm. Right? And so this also, and what this also lets us do when it's related to pseudoscience, is make us realize how widely applicable scientific reasoning is. If it is inference to the best explanation, then it's not just experiment. Experiment is extremely important in science, obviously, but it's not just, it's just not, it's not just scientific experiment. When you're doing inference to the best explanation, you compare hypotheses according to criteria that, you know, that determine what good explanation should be. And some of those explanations are simplicity or parsimony, right? Scope or explanatory power? Conservatism? Does it align with things that we already have good reason to believe? Right?

• 1:25:45Speaker 06

  And I can think scientifically and weigh those, by weighing those criteria, even if I can't conduct an experiment. So for example, if someone just tells me they saw a ghost in their room last night, I can't perform an experiment to like disprove or prove that hypothesis true, right? But I can consider other possible explanations, like it was a waking dream, their perception fooled them or whatever, and realize, well, that's the much simpler, wider scoping, conservative explanation. The Locke's razor there. That as the more likely explanation for what they saw. And I'm doing what I'm doing, so I'm thinking scientifically, even though I can't perform an experiment. So when, once we realize that this is the nature of science and that science is inference to the best explanation,

• 1:26:29Speaker 06

  science becomes a lot more widely applicable because you don't have to run an experiment to think scientifically. Right. And most people think that you have to do an experiment. You're not doing experiment, you're not thinking scientifically. And you can definitely do that.

• 1:26:44Speaker 02

  Kyle, I also learned the term in medical school abduction. Is that used by philosophers?

• 1:26:50Speaker 06

  Yes, so I'm so glad you asked, Steve. Um, I love this stuff. So, okay, so here's the deal with abduction. Abduction in its original form was, it's a, it's a term that was coined by C.S. Purse. And what he meant it to mean was hypothesis generation. So abduction is the process by which we come up with hypotheses to then compare and figure out which one is the best. Right? Um, later, other people kind of adopt that term and use it as a shorthand for inference to the best explanation. So in one of my favorite textbooks, Ted Schick's How to Think About Weird Things, he uses the term that way.

• 1:27:34Speaker 06

  Abduction is just the same thing as inference to the best explanation. So by that understanding, abduction is a kind of induction.

• 1:27:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Speaker 06

  Right? Um, but technically speaking, abduction in its original form is the production of hypotheses, which I disagree with Einstein. I love saying that.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  He got it all wrong, that guy.

• 1:27:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, we tried to get him on the show, but...

• 1:27:58Speaker 06

  So I think that he is wrong that classical Aristotelian induction, going from, you know, from specific, from particular to universal, can't generate hypotheses. I think sometimes that can, but I also think he's right that sometimes that's not necessary. You can just come up with them, right? In a kind of artistic way, you get inspired or whatever, right? And you can come up with them. Of course, as you pointed out when you guys were talking about this before, you always just have, you have to test them. It doesn't matter where they come from or how you generate them, you have to test them, right? To get good, to get good confirmation for them. But that's essentially what abduction is. It's originally the production of hypotheses. It kind of comes to be known as inference to the best explanation. I tried not to use it that way. Um, but that's, that's basically what it is.

• 1:28:41Speaker 02

  Gotcha. Okay.

• 1:28:43Speaker 06

  All right. So one more thing for you, Steve.

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:28:46Speaker 06

  You can cut this out if you want to, but I know you love Bayes' theorem.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  Yes, I do.

• 1:28:49Speaker 06

  Right? So a really interesting philosophical problem is whether or not Bayes should be classified as deductive or inductive.

• 1:28:59Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah, which, which, which vessel does it pour?

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  I mean, my initial response was inductive, just because it is a probabilistic statement. It's just like, how much does this data change the probability of the hypothesis being true? It all sounds inductive to me.

• 1:29:14Speaker 06

  Exactly. Right? The only, the only, and that's, that's kind of what I think too.

• 1:29:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:20Speaker 06

  But the other side of the coin is, it's all mathematical.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true. If all you're saying is this is the probability, that could be a deduction.

• 1:29:28Speaker 06

  Exactly, right? If I say, well, if the probability of A is 0.5 and the probability is B of B is 0.5, then it follows necessarily that the probability of A and B being true together is 0.25, right? Like, that follows, like, right? That's mathematical, right? So it's, I don't know. I would classify it as inductive, but it's kind of a

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  Can it be both at the same time? Yeah, I was gonna say, I think it's deduction in service to induction.

• 1:29:52Speaker 06

  I like that. I like that.

• 1:29:53Speaker 02

  All right, good.

• 1:29:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's an interesting problem. I just like, yeah. I don't know if anybody spilled any ink on that, whether how it should be classified.

• 1:30:01Speaker 02

  I get the feeling there's like three people in the world who care about that problem. Now, subduction, two of them are on this podcast right now. Subduction is something totally different, right? We don't talk about that. We'll talk about that on the Geologic podcast. Right. All right, Kyle, thank you so much for joining us and straightening us all out on logic. Yeah, that was good.

• 1:30:24Speaker 06

  Oh, thank you very much. It's always a pleasure. Anytime.

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:30:39Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items, or facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panelists, guys, to tell me which one is the fake. Three regular news items. Y'all ready? Yep. Here we go. Item number one, a recent analysis finds that oil and gas companies hold about 20% of the world's renewable energy assets. All right, number two, a new research finds that quitting smoking after a cancer diagnosis leads to improved survival, more than doubling survival time in patients with advanced-stage cancer. And item number three, a study of a backpack designed to increase airflow

• 1:31:19Speaker 02

  without supplemental oxygen increased avalanche burial survival time by at least fivefold. Bob, go first.

• 1:31:28Bob Novella?

  Oil and gas companies hold 20% of the world's renewable energy assets. Let's see, I'm gonna jump to three. Backpack that increases airflow, supplemental oxygen, five times, fivefold, that's a lot, too. But what's getting me, though, is quitting smoking improves survival, more than doubling survival time. That's just too huge to ignore right there. I mean, If they can increase survival time by like five or 10%, that's dramatic. I mean, doubling survival time is just way, it's just an outlier. So I'm just gonna have to say that that one's fiction.

• 1:32:04Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara?

• 1:32:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, that's the one that feels the most like science to me.

• 1:32:10Bob Novella?

  Oh, your instincts, mine suck.

• 1:32:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, like, um, you get a small cell, well, and it just says a cancer diagnosis. It doesn't even necessarily

• 1:32:20Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:32:21Cara Santa Maria?

  mean small cell lung. Yeah, so it could be any cancer that if you continue to smoke after your cancer diagnosis, you're just going to massively shorten your, your survival time there. So I, I don't know, I think that that one is, um, is science, but it makes me wonder what the, well, yeah, more than doubling survival time, but like, what's the baseline there? I guess it depends if we're talking about advanced stage, different, for different cancers. I don't understand how a, an avalanche backpack could increase your airflow without supplemental oxygen unless it like, I don't know, gives you like a tunnel to the outside world when you're buried somehow? I don't know, that sounds cool though.

• 1:33:06Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't really understand it. And then oil and gas companies hold about 20% of the world's renewable assets. I don't think I believe that. I think that oil and gas companies have doubled down on oil and gas. I think we do see greenwashing and we see a lot of talk about them entering the renewable space, but I think that probably other companies that are like renewable only companies are, are dominating that space. So yeah, I think that one might be the fiction. I bet you it's, they don't have 20, I don't think they have a fifth of the holdings.

• 1:33:36Speaker 02

  Okay, and Jay?

• 1:33:38Jay Novella?

  Steve, with the last one with the backpack.

• 1:33:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:41Jay Novella?

  So it said it's, it's designed to increase airflow.

• 1:33:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:33:45Jay Novella?

  But I'm not clear what that means, like is it?

• 1:33:47Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think he's gonna tell us that.

• 1:33:49Jay Novella?

  Airflow to, I mean airflow to the person's mouth?

• 1:33:52Speaker 02

  Uh, so there's nothing in their mouth, right? It's not like there's a tube in their mouth, there's no mask or anything, and there's no supplemental oxygen. It's just Increasing flow to like the area of their front of their head.

• 1:34:07Jay Novella?

  Okay, so maybe, maybe this is like the kind of backpack. It's like the instant release like a, like in a car, like the airbag, like it could create a breathable space around the person's face. Okay, that's the only thing I can think of. And this technology exists, so I'm gonna say that's science. Second one is the one about if you quit smoking after a cancer diagnosis, this leads to improved survival. I mean, I'd say that seems pretty obvious, yeah. I think that one, that one is definitely science. I mean, quitting, if you're not, if you're not going to die specifically from lung cancer, say. You know, then they're gonna give you surgery or do something to help mitigate the cancer, then sure, quitting smoking is going to help you. So I think that one is science as well.

• 1:34:52Jay Novella?

  So I'm agreeing with what Kara said, like I don't think the oil and gas companies. I mean, 20% of the world's renewable energy assets is a lot, and if anybody would have the money to do it, it would be them. But again, for some reason, I just don't see these companies buying those assets because it's actually too smart of a thing to do. Because they could have just slowly become these new sources of energy. Particularly in the US, like we are like, the United States now is rejecting green energy. So what Kara said is very, very true. In my mind, I'm gonna say that one's a fiction.

• 1:35:29Speaker 02

  Okay, so you all agree with the third one, so we'll start there. A study of a backpack designed to increase airflow without supplemental oxygen increased avalanche burial survival time by at least fivefold. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science. This is science. Oh, neat. Yeah. So this is like, can you wear a backpack and then you just activate it, I guess, after you get buried in snow? And it just takes advantage of the natural porosity of snow. So again, this is, this is assuming somebody, they're trying to simulate an avalanche condition. Right, where I guess where there's a lot of debris and stuff. In that condition, it just cir-

• 1:36:13Speaker 02

  Reculates the air to the front of the person. And they tested it, so they had people with the backpack that wasn't working, compared to people with the backpack that was working. They measured their pulse ox, right? Basically, their oxygen in their blood. And the people could tap out whenever they wanted. So if their pulse ox hit eighty or lower, or if the person tapped out, they ended it. And the study was for thirty-five minutes. Basically, they would auto-end it at thirty-five minutes, even though the backpack is designed to last for ninety minutes. In the treatment group, none of the subjects went below eighty percent or tapped out.

• 1:36:56Speaker 02

  So they basically all made it to the thirty-five minutes, which was the end of the study. And the people who did not have a functioning backpack lasted six to seven minutes. And they were pulled, some because their oxygen dropped below eighty percent, and some because they just couldn't take it anymore. They tapped out. So it might have been more than five times, right? But that's when the study ended, right? They didn't keep going. And this is, you know, this is being presented as a potential way to increase survivability in, you know, in an avalanche situation. If you have five minutes to dig yourself out versus thirty-five minutes or whatever to dig yourself out,

• 1:37:41Speaker 02

  or it increases the amount of time until you can be found and rescued. And so, and most people who die, they die of asphyxia, right? They just, the CO2 builds up in front of their face. They have, their oxygen tension drops, and they pass out and they die, right? They go to cardiac arrest. That's the most likely reason to die in that kind of situation. So, yeah, it seems like a simple idea. Let's just move the air around, and just so that they have less CO2 building up in front of their face and more oxygen, and see if that allows them to survive longer. And it does, works pretty well. According to this one study, anyway. All right, let's go backwards, I guess. New research finds that quitting smoking after a cancer diagnosis leads to improve

• 1:38:24Speaker 02

  survival more than doubling survival time in patients with advanced-stage cancer. Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Jay and Carrie, you think this one is science. So I guess the question here is, the advanced-stage cancer. Is it possible that people are basically too far gone at that point to significantly increase their survival time through lifestyle measures like quitting smoking? Or is there still room to alter their survival time, even if they're advanced? Or maybe it was beneficial, but only if you caught the cancer early enough? Or maybe it wasn't beneficial at all? What do you think? Bob, you're the one who thought this one is fiction. What do you think?

• 1:39:06Bob Novella?

  I think, yeah. I think at late-stage, the fact that it's late-stage and that it was such a dramatic improvement just seems like a non-start to me.

• 1:39:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:15Cara Santa Maria?

  I also think that if you're, okay, so, advanced-stage, if you're talking stage three or four, survival times are already, depending on the cancer, but they can be already low. So when we're doubling an already-low survival time, it may not be that big of a difference. We could be talking six months versus 12 months, or three months versus six months.

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  All right, well, this one is science. This one is science. It was surprising that the effect was most pronounced in the late-stage, the advanced-stage cancers in this study. They looked at a bunch of different cancers, that's why I just said with cancer diagnosis. They didn't want to look at any one specific. They wanted to see just in general, how do people do? What they found was, in the late-stage cancer, stage three or four, those who kept smoking despite their diagnosis, 85% of them were alive after 210 days. In the group that quit, 85% were still alive after 540 days.

• 1:40:19Cara Santa Maria?

  And this is all cancers combined?

• 1:40:21Speaker 02

  Yes, this is all cancers. But this is the stage three and four cancers.

• 1:40:24Cara Santa Maria?

  This doesn't surprise me because, I mean, other than like radiation, like intense radiation, cigarettes are like one of the worst carcinogens we know about. Like by far, it's just like a, if your body, if your cancer is already doing all the things cancer tries to do, spreading, recruiting blood vessel, doing all of that, and you just keep smoking on top of it, it's just gonna do it faster, more intensely, more successfully.

• 1:40:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this isn't look at mechanism, this is just seeing how long do they survive? So that's one question. It's also maybe people who don't smoke, whether they're chemo better, you know?

• 1:41:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, for sure. Yeah, if you're smoking, you're also probably getting more like lung infections.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  Exactly. The complications of all that is bad. And it also might be a marker for, because again, this is not a controlled trial. They didn't say you smoke and you don't smoke. Yeah, they couldn't do that. So people who stop smoking may take care of themselves in other ways better as well. So there's potential confounding factors.

• 1:41:21Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure.

• 1:41:22Speaker 02

  But from a practical point of view, and this is why this study was done, because about, like, what percentage of people do you think are smoking at the time of their diagnosis?

• 1:41:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I mean, that's-

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  It's in the US, let's say US.

• 1:41:35Jay Novella?

  Seventy-five percent?

• 1:41:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Right now? No, no, no, no. At the time of any cancer diagnosis?

• 1:41:40Jay Novella?

  Oh, any, any cancer, not just lung cancer?

• 1:41:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Five to 10%?

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  Twenty-five percent.

• 1:41:45Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's a lot.

• 1:41:46Speaker 02

  Twenty-five percent, so a little bit more than the background population, right? Which makes sense, because it's a risk factor for cancer. And half of them about continue to smoke despite the, despite the diagnosis.

• 1:41:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Because they think what a lot of people think. It's like, well, it doesn't matter.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  It's too late now, yeah. And in fact, unfortunately, some physicians might think that too. They might think, well, I'm like gonna really focus my efforts on trying to get them to quit after they get the cancer, like closing the barn door after the horse is gone. But what, so they said, well, but should we, should we be ignoring this as a lifestyle intervention as part of their overall cancer treatment? And this study supports the idea that, no, even, you know, even in late stage, you're, it still will improve your quality of life and your survival time if you quit smoking as part of the overall cancer treatment. And this is not insignificant. This is like almost a year of life. You know, that's huge. If you're

• 1:42:40Cara Santa Maria?

  That's better than some treatments.

• 1:42:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:42:43Cara Santa Maria?

  And so it would be really interesting to compare. Like, this might be the single best thing you can do to increase survival.

• 1:42:49Bob Novella?

  Right to me, man.

• 1:42:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Or it may be right there on par. So imagine it combined with like, you know, first or at this point, you're probably on second, third, fourth line.

• 1:42:58Speaker 02

  So I should point out that there were previous studies which did not show much of a benefit. But again, they were looking at specific cancers and like, and focusing on earlier stages. And so this was a more comprehensive study, looked at more different kinds of cancers and later stages. And that's again, where the benefit was really the largest. So that's probably why it was missed in the earlier studies. But at the, at the very least, this means don't neglect your smoking cessation intervention as part of cancer treatment. Because it, there's a good reason to think that it may have a significant benefit. All right. All of this means that a recent analysis finds that oil and gas companies hold about 20% of the world's renewable energy assets is the fiction. So what's the percentage? Because you're right. They talk a big game.

• 1:43:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Lower.

• 1:43:43Speaker 02

  They talk a big game. 7%.

• 1:43:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I don't know. 5%, something like that.

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  1.42%. It's negligible. It's almost nothing.

• 1:43:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:43:51Speaker 02

  They've basically given up on this. And again, they talk a big game, but they're not doing it. They're nothing significant. 1.42% of renewable energy projects worldwide. Okay. So what do you think that means? They're just not, they're not investing in wind and solar, even though they're like, you know, we're going to invest this money into the new green energy economy, whatever. They're just not doing it.

• 1:44:10Cara Santa Maria?

  They're investing in press.

• 1:44:13Bob Novella?

  How stupid and short sighted is that? What the hell?

• 1:44:16Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. They're gonna, yeah. Well, because they, they're still making money on oil and gas.

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  So this included direct ownership also through subsidiaries or via acquisitions. This is counting everything, not just like under Exxon. This is like a subsidiary or an acquisition would still count. It's still only 1.42%.

• 1:44:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Did they, um, what was I gonna say? Did they include natural gas as oil and gas?

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely not great. But they do that a lot, too. They love talking about how that's clean energy.

• 1:44:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. Right. But that doesn't count as renewable. Now, 20% of the companies they studied had some renewable energy assets, but the, the total assets was only the 1.4%. Yeah. So only 20% are doing anything. Eighty percent don't have any renewable assets. Yeah, I would suspect this would get worse in the current climate, you know. Yeah.

• 1:45:06Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, the current climate, absolutely. But geez.

• 1:45:08Speaker 02

  You know, the Biden era policies, you know, he passed two acts that made, you know, gave billions of dollars to develop renewable energy, was supposed to really turn the ship around, but now Trump is clawing a lot of that money back, you know? Yeah, it's terrible. Well, good job, Jay and Kara. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, Jay. Jay, you're gonna give us a quote this week.

• 1:45:32Jay Novella?

  I am. "Science is the great equalizing force in the world. Smart people, talented people, skilled people exist everywhere. That's why we really should focus on unleashing their potential through providing them with opportunity." You know who this is, Steve?

• 1:45:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:48Jay Novella?

  Omar Yagi!

• 1:45:49Speaker 02

  That's the, uh, one of the chemistry Nobel laureates from this year. Yeah, that's a great quote. I agree with that. That's one of the things I like about science in academia, is that nothing's perfect, but it is, it is pretty much a meritocracy, and it is sort of a great equalizer, like everyone's on the same footing. It's just a matter of how good is your ideas, how good is your scholarship, how good is the work that you do? That's really the ninety percenter, you know what I mean? It is very powerful, you know, and something that we absolutely should be support, not only supporting, but making sure that everybody does have the opportunity, you know, to participate, because anyone could be a great scientist, you know? Yep. Why limit our talent pool?

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

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

• 1:46:37Jay Novella?

  You got it, brother.

• 1:46:37Speaker 02

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

• 1:46:45Speaker 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.

• 1:47:22Speaker 08

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