Pod Insights The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe The Skeptics Guide #1085 - Apr 25 2026 About this episode What's the Word: Cryptomnesia; News Items: Belief in Unproven Health Claims, Regenerating Limbs, Suicide Hotline Seems to Work, Why is Rubber Strong; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Mythos Follow Up, Americans' Knowledge of Mexico; Science or Fiction
Transcript 21,074 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Your joints help you keep doing what you love. Give them daily support with Ancient Nutrition Multi-Collagen Protein. Two scoops deliver 20 grams of collagen from 10 types, including clinically studied eggshell membrane, plus vitamin C and probiotics to support skin, hair, nails, and joint health. Visit ancientnutrition.com/protein and use code PROTEIN for $15 off. That's ancientnutrition.com code PROTEIN.
0:30 Speaker 01 You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
0:37 Speaker 02 Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, April 23rd, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Kara Santa Maria.
0:48 Cara Santa Maria? Howdy.
0:48 Speaker 02 Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.
0:51 Speaker 04 Well, we're one short today, aren't we?
0:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, what happened to Bob?
0:54 Cara Santa Maria? It felt weird.
0:55 Speaker 02 Bob is... I was on vacation. He's going to Bermuda.
0:58 Cara Santa Maria? Nothing happened to Bob. Oh, he's going to Bermuda?
1:00 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah, but he's going to Bermuda. He'll be fine. Nothing bad ever happens there.
1:05 Speaker 02 Bob was like, you know, of course, we talked about the Bermuda Triangle. And Bob's like, it's so ridiculous. He's like, you know, you could take any... You could make any geometric shape that you want by just picking, you know, locations on the map. And I looked at him and I was like, no shit, Bob. Like, what are you... Duh.
1:25 Speaker 02 Why are you angry? And why are we even talking about it? Who cares? Would you rather like the Bermuda dodecahedron?
1:35 Cara Santa Maria? Yes, knowing Bob, he would. Yes, he would much rather that.
1:38 Speaker 04 One of my favorite Randy references to the Bermuda Triangle is in his book, Flim Flam. He offers a map and he plots, or somebody plotted, where the claims of something mysterious happened due to the Bermuda Triangle. And it's like a map of the United States with the Atlantic Ocean, and you can also see the Pacific Ocean. And there's dots all over the place. Not even, right? Some of the dots are in the Pacific Ocean. Okay, but attributed to the Bermuda Triangle. It's a great map.
2:05 Cara Santa Maria? It's like, it's like every time John Oliver talks about, you know, a country in the Middle East or a country in Eastern Europe, and then he's like, shows the map next to him, and he goes, "And you don't even know that that's not the country I'm talking about."
2:17 Speaker 02 Exactly.
2:19 Cara Santa Maria? That's not where that is at all. And you're like, mm-hmm, yeah.
2:23 Speaker 04 Yup.
2:24 Cara Santa Maria? Touche. So I have to ask you guys. So I did, I played in a poker tournament in a local card game here. I would say, I guess it's technically a casino. The laws are interesting in California. So you can play poker in casinos and I think maybe blackjack. You can play, quote, games of skill, but there are no slots, for example, unless you're at casinos on reservations. Anyway, I played in a tournament. It was really, really fun. And one of the guys at the table, his son kept coming up to talk to him. And I was like, oh, does he play? And then I was like, wait, is he old enough to be here? And then I was like, wait, how old do you have to be to gamble? And we started this whole conversation at the table. Do you guys know, first of all, actually even more interesting than gambling,
3:09 Cara Santa Maria? do you know the legal smoking age in most of the United States?
3:12 Speaker 02 Twenty one. Yeah, I thought it was like eighteen to twenty one.
3:16 Cara Santa Maria? Okay, well, this is a today I learned because I don't, I guess maybe you guys, because you have younger children. I have no idea, but I thought it was eighteen still.
3:27 Speaker 02 Huh.
3:28 Cara Santa Maria? It was eighteen the whole, it is twenty one.
3:30 Speaker 02 Okay.
3:31 Cara Santa Maria? And a recent study surveyed a bunch of people, both young people and their parents and caregivers. So adolescents aged ten to nineteen and their parents and caregivers. And they found that the percentage of people who correctly identified twenty one years as the age of the purchase was under half for cigarettes, vapes, cigarettes, and nicotine pouches, and then eighty one percent for alcohol.
3:56 Speaker 04 Wow. Okay.
3:58 Speaker 02 That's interesting because.
3:59 Cara Santa Maria? People thought it was eighteen.
4:00 Speaker 02 That's something that you have seen a million times and you just didn't register it because it's posted prominently behind every, you know, quickie mark counter over the cigarettes. You must be twenty one years old to purchase this product. It's there for everyone to see every time you go up to that counter.
4:17 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, I've never read that.
4:18 Speaker 02 But people just don't notice it, right? It just goes over the radar.
4:20 Cara Santa Maria? No, because we're just used to it. It was eighteen the whole time I, the whole time it, it was relevant to me. The age was eighteen. And when it became irrelevant to me, I stopped looking at it.
4:32 Speaker 04 That makes sense, though. I mean, I would think. Most people have a similar pattern.
4:36 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, but that could be a problem because that means that a lot of parents of children and also children themselves think that they are of legal age to buy cigarettes or to have cigarettes when they are not. So yeah, that that could be a big problem. So anyway, they're they're talking in this study about how they need to increase messaging initiatives because clearly people don't know.
4:56 Speaker 04 I guess so. Yeah. Social media?
5:01 Cara Santa Maria? I don't know. I don't even think are people still are young people still smoking anyway?
5:05 Speaker 02 They are. It is decreasing. And I remember like my daughter was like, oh, I thought we were the generation that was gonna end smoking, but then damn vaping came along and screwed up the whole thing, you know?
5:16 Cara Santa Maria? And now there's like, what, ZYN or something? There's like the weird, um, it's like a new form of like oral tobacco. ZYN, they're small pouches. Um, oh, they're nicotine pouches without tobacco.
5:30 Speaker 04 Okay.
5:31 Cara Santa Maria? But yeah, it's it's kind of like, um,
5:32 Speaker 02 What do they do?
5:34 Cara Santa Maria? Do or dip? I mean, help people. I wouldn't call this helping.
5:38 Speaker 02 But they are nicotine.
5:40 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, it gives people a nicotine hit, but they don't smoke or they don't use tobacco. God, it sounds like I'm selling this thing. That is not what I'm trying to do. It's a they make them of nicotine salt, but I think these things are huge with young people now, too.
5:52 Speaker 04 Gosh.
5:53 Cara Santa Maria? But of course, you you're probably still gonna be dealing with a lot of, you know, with the addiction component, first of all, because nicotine is really addictive and ew can cause gum recession, cardiovascular issue. Yeah. But it's really popular. 12.7 million cans. Oh, wait, that was in 2018. Hundreds of millions annually now.
6:14 Speaker 04 Hmm. Yeah, I must not have been paying attention. I don't see it all that much, but I don't, at the same time, I don't know to look for it.
6:20 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
6:22 Speaker 04 Boy, if you were alive in the 70s, woo, there were cigarettes everywhere.
6:26 Speaker 02 I know, I hated it.
6:27 Speaker 04 Ashtrays in the living room and oh my gosh, in the car, you know, the cigarette lighters.
6:33 Cara Santa Maria? Oh, you know, it's probably the biggest reason. You guys have heard that I've visited China like multiple times at this point. And after this last time, I was like, I don't need to go back, which is probably a good thing because my 10 year visa is about to expire and I doubt I'll get another one. But the biggest reason when people go like, why? I'm like, is everyone smokes in China? And I know that's an over, you know, exaggeration, but it's, it reminds me of what it was like here in the eighties and nineties.
6:58 Speaker 04 Yeah. And the seventies were worse.
7:01 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, but I wasn't alive then. But I remember in the eighties, going to the mall with my mom and people were smoking in the mall.
7:08 Speaker 04 Wait, and they didn't make people go outside yet around that?
7:11 Cara Santa Maria? No, like you couldn't smoke in the stores, but you could smoke in the like middle, like the atrium area, which is so gross because the stores, they don't have doors. It's just like this cavernous opening to the store.
7:22 Speaker 04 Oh, the airports, remember? Oh.
7:24 Speaker 02 Oh, God, I know. Oh, the worst was in restaurants. I mean, they would have a smoking and non-smoking section, but it was a fiction because they're the next table, you know, it's just technically.
7:33 Cara Santa Maria? Apparently it was like that on planes before that, right? There was a smoking section on the airplane, as if you can keep that smoke in that tiny airplane.
7:42 Speaker 02 It was crazy. That was it. What a farce. Remember they used to have those signs that were on like, like row 25, say, they would clip these signs to the back of the headrest that's like, that delineated the smoking and non-smoking section of the plane. Give me a break, please.
8:00 Speaker 04 Awful, awful.
8:01 Cara Santa Maria? Oh, man. What, what people do for their addiction. Wow. I'm glad we got wise to that.
8:07 Speaker 02 All right, Kara.
8:09 Cara Santa Maria? Yes.
8:09 Speaker 02 You're going to start us off with, what's the word?
8:11 Cara Santa Maria? I am. So I found a submission from last year from Jeff Menegay, maybe, or Menegy, I'm not sure, who wrote to us and said, I just ran across cryptomnesia and thought it was cool. Keep up the good work, everyone. So that tells us nothing about the word. So I had to, I was like, dang it, Jeff, you didn't do half my job for me. Okay. So I dug a little bit deep. What is cryptomnesia? Well, what does it sound like? Right? It's, it's one of those words that feels very portmanteau, but what it is, is actually just two roots, two Greek words, roots. So crypto means?
8:50 Speaker 02 Mysterious.
8:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
8:52 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, or or hidden, right? Mm hmm. Yeah. And then Nisha or Memory. Nissis or yeah. Yeah. Mnemonics. So it's not a mysterious memory, although you could probably say that. But it's a hidden memory or a secret memory. So what is a hidden memory? What is a secret memory? Well, this was coined in the early 1900s by a Swiss psychologist named Theodore Flornoy, who basically described what happens when a person immediately, or maybe doesn't even recognize that it's happening, remembers a memory that they forgot and they think it's a new thought because they had forgotten it.
9:33 Cara Santa Maria? And so a lot of times it's also referred to as unintentional, or the roots, I should say, of unintentional plagiarism or accidental inspiration. And so we can see lots of examples. You see it in like music publishing. You see it in literature. I mean, there are famous examples with like Nietzsche and Lord Byron and George Harrison, where they wrote something, they thought it was novel, they thought it was a brand new idea, they weren't intentionally plagiarizing at all. And then it turns out, oh, they had actually read it previously, downloaded it to their brain, forgotten it, or at least forgotten the source.
10:15 Cara Santa Maria? And then later, when they were like engaged in a creative process, it came to them and it felt like it was an original idea. And apparently, this this happens. There was a study done way back in 1989, where some psychologists gave a bunch of subjects a list of information and had them generate a bunch of categories. And then later, they asked them to do more and they found that like 10%, I think, something like that, of their lists were unintentionally plagiarized from the original source material. And they found that the unintentional plagiarism or the cryptomnesia happened more often when there was like a higher cognitive load, right?
11:00 Cara Santa Maria? So they were trying to attend to more. Things and do more at the same time, more distractions. They were less likely to, I guess, remember the source of the information or even remember that they had the information at all.
11:13 Speaker 02 I mean, I do that all the time, meaning that like I write a blog every day, basically, right? I've been doing this for 20 years. I've written thousands of blogs and I've, I've read thousands of blogs. I've read a lot of skeptical material. I've originated a lot of skeptical material. I can't always remember where phrases or terms or whatever it comes from. And so sometimes I'm using a phrase, I'm like, did I come up with that? Did I read that somewhere else? I don't remember.
11:37 Speaker 04 I am brilliant. The answer is yes.
11:40 Speaker 02 It's just part of the skeptical culture now. It's something we say as skeptics, but the, the source is just really completely lost. And the other thing is probably, it's gone through many iterations, you know?
11:50 Cara Santa Maria? Yep.
11:51 Speaker 02 There's always, there was some-
11:52 Cara Santa Maria? But sometimes it's word for word and that's when it's really interesting. When the person is like, I have zero recollection of reading this. I swear I did not intentionally. I mean, it's fascinating. And you know, the first recorded instance, which I love it, it brings us back to our, our skeptical roots here. It was in 1874, so they didn't even have a word for it yet. And it involved someone named William Stanton Moses. He was a medium. And during a séance, he said that he, there were these like two brothers and they were, uh, they had recently died in India. And he was, you know, conversing with them. And then later they were able to verify their deaths. And they were like, how could he know this medium? How could he possibly? Well, it had been in the newspaper six days before.
12:36 Cara Santa Maria? Um, and he had read it, but did not, did not remember doing so.
12:39 Speaker 02 Well, in that case, he claimed he didn't remember.
12:42 Speaker 04 Well, that's the other part of this is that, yes, you can feign sort of.
12:46 Speaker 02 But either way, either way, it's plausible, but though that, that he didn't. Yeah, that's like, I remember when Hillary Clinton was getting a lot of shade because she was lying about some episode that happened. You know, with her being under fire, she was going into a plane. But it turned out it was happened to somebody else, whatever. So yeah,
13:06 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
13:07 Speaker 02 That is a legit memory thing we all do. You know,
13:09 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, we all do it.
13:10 Speaker 02 We conflate memories, we personalize memories, we merge, you know what I mean? So this is the same thing, similar. Like we don't, and we do separate source memory from content memory and truth status memory, right? So it's like, I heard something somewhere. I don't know, remember if it's true or not, but I do remember the thing itself. And sometimes you don't even remember that it's something you heard from somewhere else as opposed to it coming from your own mind.
13:34 Cara Santa Maria? Absolutely. I mean, this is a memory bias. It's, you know, it's, it's something, as you said, that everybody deals with. And there's some good arguments that this could be one of the components of so-called, right? I'm putting this in like heavy quotes, past life regression. Like when people are like, ooh, you know, I was reincarnated and in my past life I did this, this and this. It seems to be the case that most of that information that is sourced is a mixture of, you know, just confabulations, just kind of making things up, mixed with cryptomnesia. So there's like this little whisper of a memory and they don't know where it came from.
14:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:15 Cara Santa Maria? And it feels like it's just coming to them. And then they're adding things to it to confabulate.
14:18 Speaker 02 That's a great example.
14:19 Speaker 04 Yeah.
14:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's very similar to a lot of the UFO literature, especially there was a time when it was very popular. Also, John Mack, the psychiatrist from Harvard was doing this, to essentially hypnotize people and then have them regress to a, to remember something that they forgot in the past, right? And so they, under hypnosis, people would recount a pretty standard UFO abduction scenario. And they would swear up and down. I don't, I'm not, you know, steeped in the UFO literature. I don't remember this from anywhere. It's like, yeah, but you do, right? You absorb these details from the culture, even if you don't specifically remember from
15:02 Speaker 02 where. And you're just, again, just regurgitating a standard narrative that you have heard, you know? Or when I was watching The Empire Strikes Back with my daughters for the first time, and I may have said, told this story, but they, they knew that Darth Vader was Luke's father. I'm like, how the hell, how the hell did you know that? They didn't know how they knew it. They just knew it. It was just part of the culture.
15:27 Speaker 04 Yeah. How do you just know something like that, though? Like, I mean, it's just like,
15:31 Speaker 02 Subtle things that they're hearing and watching that they're not sure they're registering.
15:35 Speaker 04 Well, even something like that's not all that subtle, frankly.
15:38 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, it's not that subtle. But yeah, it's in a meme. They heard it in passing, but they didn't have the context. So they didn't connect it to anything.
15:43 Speaker 02 They make fun of it in cartoons.
15:44 Speaker 04 Big Bang Theory talked about it, you know, that kind of thing, you know, they heard it there.
15:49 Cara Santa Maria? And especially if they don't have much contact, like, that's the other thing. If we are exposed to information, but we don't have enough context for that information and we have nothing to connect it to in our minds, it's going to be harder to access later because it's not like situated.
16:05 Speaker 02 Hmm. And our brains are not hard drives.
16:07 Cara Santa Maria? It's kind of a free-floating piece of, yeah, exactly. No, not at all. Memory is a complex entity. First, you have to attend to something, then you have to lay it down, then you have to be able to retrieve it. And there can be breakdowns all along the way. So you can have memories that aren't as kind of codified or solidified because maybe you encoded it, you encoded it, wow. But you have a retrieval failure.
16:31 Speaker 04 Right, you do. And of course, there's always other, other confounding factors. Emotions come into play that help form certain memories and can change, change details and facts, things like that.
16:42 Speaker 02 You could also look at it from an evolutionary point of view. Apparently, it wasn't that important for us to remember those sorts of things, right? We needed to remember the fact itself, but where we heard it from is, was not as important, right?
16:55 Cara Santa Maria? Absolutely.
16:56 Speaker 02 And so we just don't have a lot of brain power dedicated to that. It's just, we, we need to know the, the thing that's going to make us survive, but not things that are important in our current society, but was not important on the grasslands of Africa or whatever.
17:10 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, remember the word, cryptomnesia, because I think we've all had some understanding of this phenomenon, but I, I never knew the label for it.
17:17 Speaker 02 Hmm. All right. Thanks, Cara J. So there's a recent study looking at beliefs in unproven health claims. And I'm curious to see what the results are, especially given our recent experience with, you know, RFK.
17:34 Jay Novella? Yeah, this is interesting. I mean, it's a little, it's got some twists and turns to it. So, Nature recently ran a news piece, they published it on April 22nd, and it had a real strong headline. They used the word staggering. You know, they said, "A staggering number of people believe unproven claims about vaccines, raw milk, and other health topics." And the article says that, you know, "More than two-thirds of the public believe at least one false or unproven health claim." Now, that doesn't surprise me that much. So, this includes taking acetaminophen during pregnancy, and that would, it would cause autism. You guys remember when this came out?
18:11 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
18:12 Cara Santa Maria? Of course.
18:12 Jay Novella? So, you know, on the, on the surface, this sounds like a story about a lot of people being irrational. But that's really not what the evidence shows, and I think, I think, you know, clarifying something like this is important here. So, the first thing to get straight is that Nature was not reporting on a new peer-reviewed scientific study about misinformation. It's actually reporting on the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report called "Trust in Health." And it's a large international survey, not a biomedical paper, right? So, it's really just interviewing people to get a survey on what their beliefs are. They had 25-minute online interviews that were conducted
18:54 Jay Novella? between, you know, late February and mid-March of this year. They had 16,006 people that responded over 16 countries. So, it's a really good, you know, number of people. It's widespread around the world, which is also important, I think. And the study says that 70% of the respondents believed at least one of six divisive health claims about food, vaccines, or medicines, right? And to us, this is, you know, we, we know this. It also says belief in at least one of those claims was nearly identical to people that did or did not have a university degree. It was 69% versus 70%. So even education doesn't penetrate this for some reason.
19:40 Cara Santa Maria? Which is it really of all education levels or just those with and without a bachelor's degree? Did they look at people with PhDs?
19:46 Jay Novella? They didn't know. They didn't go specific to that. There, you know, it was either yes or no on whether or not they had.
19:53 Cara Santa Maria? I see. Okay.
19:54 Jay Novella? A university degree. And I think that's a good distinction. I mean, I would, we'd like to assume that people with education, you know, very high levels of education wouldn't fall for it and.
20:06 Speaker 02 Well, we don't have to assume that. I mean, not on these necessarily these specific questions, but previous studies of of knowledge about scientific questions like this, there's actually the most significant bump occurs when you get to the postgraduate level.
20:20 Jay Novella? Right.
20:20 Speaker 02 Which makes sense. And oftentimes, there isn't that much of a difference between, you know, undergraduate and no undergraduate training. But it's when you get into the specialty education where you start to really see the effects of education on not believing pseudoscience.
20:33 Jay Novella? It tells us what people report that they believe. And it suggests that there's confusion and mistrust around health information and it's widespread. But it doesn't by itself, it doesn't tell us why people hold those beliefs, which to me is infinitely more interesting and actionable. Right? And nature was very careful on that particular point, saying that the findings, you know, they use the word hint, they hint that that a large and a potentially growing number of people are questioning scientific evidence, but they don't say it does. And that's about as far as, as a survey can take you. And then later and later down in the study, they, they do move to a specific claim. They say that taking
21:13 Jay Novella? acetaminophen during pregnancy causes autism as, as a point of reference, like that's the claim. And, and nature cites a 2025 BMJ umbrella review that covers nine systematic reviews and 40 observational studies. And those reviews found, you know, possible to strong associations, but that it doesn't establish causation either. So the key, the key is that other factors may be creating like this appearance of a link where none has, has actually been proven. Isn't the point of doing a review like this because there should be a next step? And that we don't have to make assumptions.
21:50 Speaker 02 The, the purpose of this review was just to fi- find out what the magnitude of the problem is.
21:57 Speaker 04 Not with the dri- not necessarily with the drivers.
21:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's it. You know, finding out what's driving it is a very different study. That's, that could be a good follow-up study.
22:04 Speaker 04 It would be good.
22:05 Speaker 02 Be much more complicated and you'd have to go question.
22:07 Cara Santa Maria? Well, and this wasn't even a study. This was just a.
22:09 Speaker 02 A survey.
22:09 Speaker 04 A survey, yeah.
22:10 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was like a poll.
22:12 Speaker 02 Well, the specific question, it's because RFK Jr. was touting this. I mean, this is a specific claim that he was making. You know, he's a member, beginning of last year, like, we're gonna find the cause of autism, you know? And then, but the date, his deadline came up and he had nothing to show for it. So he just completely ginned up this nonsense about acetaminophen and autism, which the evidence does not support. Just straight up does not support.
22:39 Jay Novella? And people, that, that, that's right there, Steve, illuminates, you know, a, a key factor here. Is that they could hear a proclamation made, right? Like RFK said, you know, aspirin is, uh, is, you know, linked to autism in pregnant women. But people don't crave the, you know, explanation.
22:59 Speaker 02 Acetaminophen, not aspirin.
23:01 Jay Novella? I'm sorry.
23:02 Speaker 02 He said aspirin.
23:02 Jay Novella? I'm sorry, acetaminophen. Most people don't have the instinct to say, okay, prove it. You said that, great. But where's the evidence? What study are you talking about? Who, who actually said that, right? RFK saying it to me is, he's just a, a person standing on a podium, talking. He's not a source of information.
23:21 Cara Santa Maria? True. But I, I think that this, I'm not saying you're making this argument, Jay, but I think we have to be careful not to put too much of the onus on the consumer in this case, because people are supposed to be able to trust public health. People are supposed to be able to trust these kinds of claims when they're made by people in positions of authority who should know better. Your everyday person on the street shouldn't have to have the critical, like, the, the high level of critical thinking capacity to say, oh, you're giving me this advice about my pregnancy? I'll go dig into the research literature to double check that my physician or my public health expert is telling me
24:02 Cara Santa Maria? something that's true. The real failure here is in having people in positions of governmental power who are making fraud, basically not fraudulent, but untrue claims.
24:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, keep in mind, the FDA changed their labeling on Tylenol to add this warning.
24:20 Cara Santa Maria? Mm hmm.
24:21 Speaker 02 This is going to what Kara is saying. Yeah, I don't expect people, I mean, obviously, we want people to be critical thinkers and skeptics, et cetera. But if it's not really their quote unquote fault.
24:32 Cara Santa Maria? Or their responsibility.
24:34 Speaker 02 The CDC and the FDA are saying, are endorsing, officially endorsing pseudoscience, you know, because of Trump and RFK Junior.
24:44 Jay Novella? I don't know if I completely agree with you guys.
24:46 Speaker 02 That muddies the waters in a, in a way that, I've been saying, it's, it's hard to say.
24:50 Cara Santa Maria? It's a brave new world. You're right, Jay. Like, in a way, the onus, but it, it just reminds me of the, the same arguments we can have about like plast, the plastic industry and recycling. So much of the onus in all of a free, semi-free market is carried by the consumer. We, we expect so much of people that they have to have expertise in every field.
25:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
25:11 Cara Santa Maria? In order to navigate, you know, a, a healthy and, and safe world. And that's why consumer protections exist, so that we can take the onus away from people.
25:21 Jay Novella? I get you. I get you. But, you know, it's, it is complicated, right? First of all, like, we are here specifically to educate people on how to navigate misinformation. It's a huge thing that we talk about and something that we're trying to help people, you know, get a skill set with, right? But we're, but it's the skeptics and critical thinkers out there who end up absorbing those skills. And it's not everybody. And I get that. I totally get that. The problem is, today versus, say, 20 years ago, they do need those skills because you can't trust RFK. And you can't trust it when the president says to inject bleach in your body, right? You can't trust the people that we normally would have been trusting. You can't trust the agencies anymore either, since, since the Trump administration came in.
26:06 Jay Novella? Like, you know, there's been such a huge paradigm shift in the quality of information and, you know, scientific rigor going on in these agencies, that the average person, you know, this is factual. They can't
26:18 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
26:18 Jay Novella? trust these agencies and these people, and they do need the skills.
26:23 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, but the problem is. Is that happened overnight? We can't expect people to have developed those skills.
26:28 Jay Novella? I know. I agree with you, but they don't need to clearly start listening to this show.
26:32 Speaker 02 And Jay, it's a double edged sword because if you're basically saying, yeah, don't just listen to what the experts are saying because they can't be trusted. You know, you should, you need to be a critical thinker and evaluate these questions for yourself. That's what the global warming deniers are saying. That's what the vaccine deniers are saying.
26:50 Cara Santa Maria? That's what all the alternative medicine, I mean, I see this a lot in, I work in the cancer field and I see this a lot. This kind of, do you know how expensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments are? Look at the kind of money that these big multinational groups are making like they want me to stay sick. They want, yeah, exactly. And like, but these other people over here, it's, it's the same rhetoric. So it's, it's less about the rhetoric and more about the, the skills. And the truth of the matter is you just can't give people skills.
27:22 Jay Novella? I agree. I agree with that too. That, you know, Steve, replying to your comment.
27:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:27 Jay Novella? It's like, listen, it's not really that complicated when we, when we're talking about like heuristics here. People will understand you, you can only trust certain people. That's not that hard to wrap your head around.
27:39 Speaker 02 I disagree. It is, it is a very complicated, you know.
27:43 Jay Novella? Why? You know.
27:45 Speaker 02 Because this is why it's complicated because it's nuanced. It's very nuanced. So, and this is the hardest thing for us to communicate. It's, you should respect expertise, but not blindly follow it. You should respect, you know, institutions and organizations that are supposed to be taking a science-based, evidence-based approach to their, their professionals and their behavior. But we also have to be able to criticize them. I mean, like, look at science-based medicine. Basically, all we do is criticize how medicine is being, is being practiced, right? The scientific basis of medicine. And yet are simultaneous with saying, but we need to have a scientific basis for medicine. We're defending.
28:30 Cara Santa Maria? At the same time, you're practicing medicine.
28:32 Speaker 02 And criticizing it at the same time. And it is very nuanced to know like where the balance is between those two things.
28:41 Cara Santa Maria? And then add ideology to that. Add, you know, I want to believe these people over those people because these people are the people that I have historically believed, or they're the people that my parents taught me to believe.
28:53 Speaker 02 Or are they just agreeing with your tribe or your ideology?
28:57 Cara Santa Maria? Exactly. And then I think, I think the main thing, Jay, that like we're, we're dancing around here is the one part that's missing is a conversation about consensus.
29:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's right.
29:06 Cara Santa Maria? You know, when, when we're looking at an entire field and we see that there are certain things where there is very strong consensus when a field, we can trust the consensus over any individual expert.
29:18 Speaker 02 Right. And in this case, RFK Jr., and therefore everything he touches is outside the consensus.
29:24 Cara Santa Maria? Yep.
29:24 Speaker 02 They're the outliers. The problem is that the outliers are now in the government, right? That is the problem.
29:31 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, they're in power and they have a microphone.
29:33 Speaker 02 And then he packed the CDC with other outlier cranks. You know what I mean? And so they, they turned the system on its head, but we can't say, at least for now, like this is a blip that, you know, this, this rapidly changed. It's only been a year that this has been going on. It is a blip. And the, the hope is that once he, you know, RFK is out of office and people like him are out of office, we could get back to some level of sanity.
30:01 Cara Santa Maria? Hopefully, yeah.
30:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, hopefully.
30:02 Cara Santa Maria? We're going to have to undo the damage first.
30:05 Speaker 02 Totally. And that's generational.
30:07 Cara Santa Maria? Exactly. It's not just, the pendulum might swing, but there will be a lot of cleanup.
30:12 Speaker 02 I think.
30:12 Speaker 04 There'll be a lot of pushback.
30:14 Speaker 02 What we can say from this survey, did you go through every question? I think that might be interesting just to go through the list. It's everything.
30:20 Speaker 04 You have them in front of you, Steve?
30:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, I could do it.
30:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, go ahead.
30:23 Speaker 02 The, the difference is that these were fringe and now they're not fringe, right? That's what the difference that RFK Jr. makes. So here we go. I'm just gonna go through the questions. I'll just say the number of people who say, I believe this is true. Animal protein is healthier than plant-based protein, 32%. Fluoride in water is harmful or unhelpful to health, 32%. Risk of childhood vaccines outweigh benefits, 31%.
30:49 Speaker 02 Raw milk is healthier than pasteurized 28%. Acetaminophen used during pregnancy causes autism 25%. And here's, this one's the worst. Vaccines are used for population control 25%.
31:03 Jay Novella? I know, that one blows my mind.
31:05 Cara Santa Maria? I mean, the good news is-
31:06 Speaker 04 Well, they mean it in a negative way, right?
31:08 Cara Santa Maria? The good news is that more people say, I believe this is fault on every single one of those things. But the numbers are not promising.
31:15 Speaker 02 They're not promising.
31:16 Speaker 04 And what about the ones who I, who say, I don't know? In some of these cases, it's a third of the people who don't know.
31:22 Speaker 02 Or more, yeah.
31:23 Speaker 04 That's disconcerting as well.
31:25 Speaker 02 Right.
31:26 Cara Santa Maria? I'm actually surprised that the acetaminophen one is kind of mapping similarly to the vaccines are used for population control. I, I figured the acetaminophen one would be closer to like the fluoride.
31:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, but I think that, but that, that's one where the I don't know category is 39%. I just think that people haven't heard of that. Cause so that actually is among the lowest number of people who say, I believe this is false, only 37%.
31:49 Cara Santa Maria? And that could be a function of like just saliency. If you are pregnant or you have young children, your ears are perking up when you hear about this news. If you don't, you're like, ah, it doesn't really apply to me.
31:58 Speaker 02 Yeah. So it seems like, you know, the RFK junior effect, again, we're just inferring this from recent history, has increased these numbers recently. You know, made these fr- like raw milk, that was a fringe idea. Now it's less fringe, it's 28%. And only 43 were confident enough to say, I believe this is false, less than a half.
32:18 Cara Santa Maria? I cannot imagine if you surveyed people in like 1975, even if you surveyed people in 20, you know, 15, and you said, do you think raw milk is healthier than pasteurized? They'd be like, what?
32:30 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:30 Cara Santa Maria? No, we have pasteurization for a reason.
32:34 Speaker 02 So it is, it is a warning signal and hopefully, hopefully it is not a, a trend, but it is more of a blip. But you know, it does, and Jake, to your point though, yes, it is true that the final line of defense against all these things is teaching critical thinking and scientific literacy and media savvy. It is skepticism, it is what we are exactly, we are doing. And that is our way of counteracting this. But it is a bottom up-
33:03 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
33:03 Speaker 02 Approach, which is very, very hard. And it's hard to, it's hard to oppose a top down problem with a bottom up approach.
33:11 Cara Santa Maria? Absolutely, especially when the Department of Education is floundering.
33:14 Speaker 04 And the demarcation line shouldn't be postgraduate college, right? That should be occurring much further down the scale.
33:21 Cara Santa Maria? I agree. It should be like middle school education.
33:24 Speaker 02 I agree.
33:24 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
33:25 Speaker 02 But actually, like, you know, there are surveys that show that belief in paranormal phenomena increases with education until you get to postgraduate level of science education, where it falls off a cliff. So basically, if you're not a scientist, you, you know, education just makes you more confident in your belief in fringe ideas.
33:45 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, I could see that. And it might, in some ways, induce more open-mindedness, which is a good thing, but it has to be balanced with critical thinking.
33:54 Speaker 04 Enough information to get yourself into trouble.
33:56 Cara Santa Maria? Oh, yeah.
33:57 Speaker 02 The little knowledge being a dangerous thing, yeah. Right, it has to be balanced with critical thinking. And again, like, the big note here is, we are not teaching critical thinking enough in K through 12 education.
34:08 Speaker 04 Not nearly.
34:09 Cara Santa Maria? Oh, absolutely not.
34:10 Speaker 02 Yeah. All right, thanks, Jake. All right, guys, this is an interesting news item. This is about regenerating limbs.
34:18 Jay Novella? Wow.
34:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, what do you think about that?
34:20 Cara Santa Maria? Whole limbs?
34:21 Speaker 04 Well, some, some creatures do regenerate.
34:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
34:23 Speaker 04 What, lizards or, you know, some?
34:25 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
34:26 Speaker 02 Lizards can, but most famously salamanders. And what's the, the one animal, which is hap- for some reason is very popular among the kids these days, but what animal is like the, the poster child for the ability to regenerate?
34:38 Jay Novella? Trolls.
34:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
34:41 Speaker 02 Real animal, the, the axolotl.
34:44 Cara Santa Maria? Oh, I love them.
34:45 Jay Novella? They're so awesome.
34:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, why, well, that's just a recent phenomenon that they've become so popular.
34:50 Cara Santa Maria? It's because they're so magical looking.
34:52 Speaker 02 Yeah.
34:52 Speaker 04 Like a Gen Alpha thing?
34:54 Speaker 02 So there's, there's a type of salamander. They can regenerate entire limbs and organs as well.
35:01 Speaker 04 Ooh, handy.
35:01 Cara Santa Maria? Did you know, by the way, that we all say that word wrong?
35:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, I know, we do.
35:05 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, it's like, it's an indigenous word and like, the pronunciation is actually, I think, really difficult.
35:10 Speaker 02 It's completely different.
35:11 Cara Santa Maria? It's completely different, and if you said it, people would be like, I don't know what you're saying. And also, it's like, some of the sounds, I think, are difficult for, like, native English speakers and so. We all just say axolotl, but we, we, we acknowledge that we're saying it wrong.
35:25 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
35:26 Cara Santa Maria? It's very anglicized.
35:27 Speaker 02 It's, I think it's called the aslot.
35:30 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, something like that.
35:32 Speaker 02 Aslot.
35:32 Cara Santa Maria? But then people are like, what are you talking about?
35:34 Speaker 02 But we're just pronouncing it phonetically. I just said it that way because that's why everybody knows it.
35:38 Cara Santa Maria? Totally. Yeah.
35:39 Speaker 02 Yeah. Um, okay. But thanks for bringing that up. All right. So anyway.
35:44 Speaker 02 And we've spoken before about developing technologies to replace missing things, right? Whether it's organs or limbs. What are some of the ones that we've talked about before?
35:55 Cara Santa Maria? Just like growing organs in situ or on like other animals, like growing an ear on a mouse or.
36:00 Speaker 02 Yeah. So you, right. So you can, you can grow organs or body parts in other animals. You can, and you could do that a couple of different ways. So one is with stem cells or by genetically modifying the animals, right? So that they have parts that we can transplant to humans.
36:18 Speaker 04 Pigs.
36:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
36:19 Speaker 04 Organs.
36:20 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. So genetically modify a pig so that we can take a pig heart and transplant it into a human. Right. So that's one way to do it. You could grow the ear on the mouse kind of thing. That's another way to do it. Or you could just inject stem cells into somebody to regenerate their organ. You're not growing a whole organ out of nothing, but you might be having a liver grow new fresh liver cells, for example, or a heart grow new heart tissue.
36:41 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah. Forcing the body to do what it's already got a blueprint to do.
36:46 Speaker 02 Yeah. If you go back in time 25 years, that was the big talk, you know, that was the whole controversy. Oh, these stem cells are going to cure everything because you could just grow new organs and stuff.
36:54 Speaker 04 Can't wait.
36:55 Speaker 02 Never really came to fruition because it's really hard to do that without, you know, like causing cancer to happen and stuff.
37:01 Cara Santa Maria? But you know what? What some people are doing, and I bring this up because I've, I've been exposed to it recently in work, is forming organs out of other type of body tissue and then trying to induce those organs to operate the way you want them to.
37:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
37:16 Cara Santa Maria? So I, I know a patient who got a bladder. It's called a neobladder, which is built out of bowel tissue.
37:23 Speaker 04 Their own bowel tissue.
37:25 Cara Santa Maria? Their own bowel tissue.
37:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
37:26 Cara Santa Maria? And so for the first several months, it's really hard because it wants to do bowel things and not bladder things.
37:30 Speaker 02 Oh.
37:31 Cara Santa Maria? So there are infections and there are, you know, secretions, but eventually it kind of learns how to be a bladder.
37:36 Speaker 02 That's
37:36 Cara Santa Maria? Which is very cool. Yeah. But I know that's not what we're talking about.
37:40 Speaker 02 That's not what we're talking about. I haven't gotten to what we're talking about yet. There was also, you can have prosthetic devices like mechanical cyborg type stuff.
37:48 Cara Santa Maria? Yep.
37:48 Speaker 02 Right? So either mechanical heart or an artificial limb that you then can have
37:52 Cara Santa Maria? Of course.
37:53 Speaker 02 Brain machine interface that you can control. Right? So the cyborg approach, we'll call that.
37:58 Cara Santa Maria? And we mentioned xenotransplantation, right?
38:01 Speaker 02 And we mentioned xenotransplantation.
38:02 Cara Santa Maria? Like a baboon heart?
38:03 Speaker 02 Yeah. We mentioned that. And then the final one, before the new thing I want to tell you about, is 3D printing organs. Right? So
38:11 Cara Santa Maria? Okay.
38:11 Speaker 02 So far where that technology is like, we take the scaffold from a denuded organ, like you take a heart from a donor and let's say the heart is not transplantable or it's not a genetic match. You denude it, you take away all the cells, but you leave behind the fibrous structure. And then you 3D print stem cells from the would be recipient onto the scaffold.
38:35 Speaker 04 Science fiction.
38:36 Speaker 02 So we're making progress there.
38:38 Cara Santa Maria? Very cool.
38:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, the 3D printing organs, we'll put that, that's the category header. We're making progress on that, but it's a really tricky technology and we're not there yet. And who knows when we're going to get there.
38:46 Speaker 04 Reminds me of the scene from The Fifth Element where they, you know, like strand by strand, they reconstitute
38:52 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:52 Speaker 04 Her body, just from a hand.
38:54 Speaker 02 So of all of these technologies, I think the one, I'll say the two that I think we're making the most progress with and have the most applications for, one is the cyborg stuff and the other is genetically modifying animals so that their organs are transplantable. I think those are the two that are closest to like really breaking through to being a major, you know, medical intervention. All right. But there's a new approach now that I'm going to add to the list. And that is genetically modifying people so that they regenerate their own limbs and organs.
39:25 Speaker 04 Now, would this be in babies, like, you know, or, you know, before people
39:29 Speaker 02 In adults.
39:31 Jay Novella? In adults.
39:31 Cara Santa Maria? Oh, come on.
39:32 Jay Novella? No, you can't do that.
39:34 Speaker 02 Well, we can't do it, but this is the, this is the new research paradigm that we're looking at. And this is why the, the axolotl is, is of interest here and other, other animals that regenerate. So obviously all salamanders do to some extent, but also zebra fish will regrow their tail if it gets cut off or damaged. Mice will regrow an entire digit. And, you know, people will regrow the tips of their fingers as long as the nail bed is intact, especially if they're younger, but you can regrow a little bit of the end of your finger.
40:09 Cara Santa Maria? That's cool.
40:09 Speaker 02 So the question is, why don't we all, why do these animals re, regrow like entire limbs, entire organs? And why don't we? Right? And there has to be a genetic reason for it. Obviously, this is extremely complicated. I'm going to give you a very simplistic kind of overview of a couple of things. One is because we evolved to form scar tissue at the site of a wound, not to regrow the missing whatever. Right? That's how we deal with a, a, a problem. We, we.
40:44 Cara Santa Maria? Isn't that part of the reason that we can't, like in the peripheral nervous system, we can't regrow nerves too, because of the scarring that happens, like at the site of the ablation? Or is it, I mean, it's more complicated than that, but isn't that one of the big things we're working on trying to fix?
40:56 Speaker 02 Peripheral nerves can regrow.
40:58 Cara Santa Maria? Oh, right. Sorry. I, I said peripheral. I meant central.
41:00 Speaker 02 Essential nervous system don't. And there's actually, there was, one of my colleagues at Yale, that was his research, right? Was looking at why peripheral nerves grow and central nervous system tissue does not regenerate. And they identified what's called the go, no-go genes, where basically you, it's either on or off. If the gene is on, you regenerate. If it's off, you don't regenerate. And of course, this is, there, there may be these switches, right? These regulators which turn on or off, like the regeneration process. But, but it's part of like a whole suite of genes and processes.
41:36 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, there's no way it's that simple.
41:38 Speaker 02 Yeah. And, and generally. Speaking, if you don't regenerate, you have to do something else to, you know what I mean? So that in order to, you know, prevent infection or whatever, and that's to form scar tissue. Right? So
41:52 Cara Santa Maria? Right. And that's why we see non-healing wounds in lots of like pathological conditions like diabetes or even like advanced cancers where these wounds, they don't do anything.
42:04 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:04 Cara Santa Maria? They don't regenerate, but they also don't scar over. They don't scab. They're just non-healing.
42:08 Speaker 02 They just don't have the nutrients and the blood flow and whatever. There's things of keeping the fibrous tissue from forming the scar that should be forming.
42:15 Cara Santa Maria? And, and I mean, it's miserable.
42:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:18 Cara Santa Maria? Like you do not want to not heal.
42:20 Speaker 02 If we were going to say regrow, if I cut your hand off, you want to regrow a hand.
42:24 Cara Santa Maria? Oh, that's so complicated.
42:26 Speaker 02 That we would have to turn off all of the evolved scarring, you know, genes. And to turn on the regeneration genes.
42:35 Speaker 04 So we have the regeneration.
42:36 Speaker 02 Well, that's, that's one of the questions, right? So how far back do, do these genes go? And would it be theoretically possible to trigger regeneration in a human? The way an axolotl or a salamander triggers regeneration when they lose a limb.
42:55 Cara Santa Maria? Right. And how complicated could the regeneration be? Like, would we regrow a whole hand? Or would we just regrow like one stumpy finger?
43:01 Speaker 02 Yeah. So, well, here's some good news. The good news is that the way developmental biology works genetically is that there is like a suite of genes for building an entire arm. And then there's one regulatory gene that says, build an arm here. And that one gene creates the, the, the development of an entire arm.
43:27 Speaker 04 So there's the information.
43:29 Speaker 02 And so the information is there. And in creatures who regenerate, what they're doing is they're, say, they're going back to the developmental stage where they could say, build an arm here. And there's, and they're saying regrow, regenerate an arm here.
43:43 Speaker 04 And then
43:44 Jay Novella? Build me an arm worthy of more.
43:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, right. Okay, so the study, in the study, they were trying to identify the genes that do that, right? So they found that there are a couple of transcription factors, SP6 and SP8. They confirmed the relevance of these factors by making knockout mice that are missing SP6 and SP8, which impaired their ability to regenerate limbs, right? So at least we know that you need these genes. That doesn't mean that that's all that you need, but without these genes, SP6 and SP8, you do not regenerate. They then knocked out SP8 in an axolotl, and it also impaired his ability to regenerate. That's critical,
44:26 Speaker 02 because that means the same gene regulates regeneration in mice and a salamander, and they're very far apart evolutionarily. They're both
44:35 Cara Santa Maria? That's cool.
44:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, so that's
44:36 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, one's a mammal.
44:37 Speaker 02 One's a mammal. That's very important, because one is a mammal, and they're both vertebrates, but they're
44:44 Cara Santa Maria? Exactly.
44:44 Speaker 02 Otherwise, pretty widely separated. All right, they then took a factor from a zebrafish known to enhance regeneration, FGF8, whose gene is normally turned on by SP8, right? You follow me? So they knock out the gene SP8, which turns on the creation of FGF8. They gave the FGF8 to the mice who were missing SP8, and that partially restored their ability to regenerate.
45:16 Speaker 04 So there's something there.
45:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, so they're just putting the puzzle pieces together. So now we know the genes, we know the factors that are necessary even across fish, salamanders, and mammals that are involved in regenerating limbs, digits, limbs, fins, et cetera. So, the question is, do humans have the SP6 and SP8 genes? And the answer is?
45:43 Speaker 04 Yes.
45:43 Speaker 02 Yes, we do, because they are highly conserved genes, and they are highly conserved because they are part of developmental biology, right? As I was saying, this is how we develop. They're part of what's called the specificity protein. Sp specificity protein family of genes involved in the regulation of developing limbs, teeth, skin, and even organs. So that creates the possibility that we might be able to, with genetic tweaking, recreate the ability to regenerate a limb in a human, the same way that a salamander regrows an arm, for example. Again, we're a long way away from that. This is just finding some of the initial bits and pieces.
46:27 Speaker 04 Couple of components we've verified.
46:28 Speaker 02 And there's other things going on. As I said, scar formation, we'd have to deal with that. There's immune activity. The immune system goes in and starts eating up stuff. We'd have to go with that. And we know, like, for example, this immune reaction is actively suppressed in salamanders at the site of their regeneration. So we would have to figure out how to do that. What happens in, it's interesting to know, like, what actually is happening in an axolotl, for example, or a salamander, when they regrow a limb. What happens is they form what's called a blastoma. So at the site, you cut off their arm, at the site of the missing limb, they form this glob of cells called a blastoma, right? And these are just basically a blob of
47:08 Speaker 02 pluripotent stem cells. And that, it is that blob of pluripotent stem cells that then turns into the missing limb, regrows into a limb. So we would need to be able to cause that to happen.
47:23 Speaker 04 And not turn cancerous or something.
47:25 Speaker 02 And not become a cancer. Absolutely. That, because that's, so you, again, you could ask the question, why don't we just regenerate everything? If it exists in the animal kingdom, and we have the genes to do it, why don't we do that? Because evolution doesn't give a crap about you, right? Evolution just maximizes your ability to pass your genes into the future generation. And the trade off was, well, you know, we're a long-lived species, right? And so, you know, and we're very selected for, we're very altruistic, as opposed to precocial, as opposed to precocial. So in other words, we do not give birth to fully Independent children. We give birth to very helpless children that we have to care for
48:10 Speaker 02 and raise them for years, you know, for 10 to 15 years before they're adults that could have their own kids. And then even then, there's evolutionary advantages to have older people around. So we're a long-lived species, the short term of that. And so the trade-off of not having cancer apparently was selected for in our ancestors. So we gave up any ability to regenerate, or maybe we never fully evolved it in the first place, in favor of minimizing cancer risk and just surviving, you know? So anyway, so that's, so it is theoretically possible that we will be able to identify all the genetic changes we need to make
48:52 Speaker 02 in order to cause a human to regenerate a limb or organ. So how long do I think this is going to take? What do you guys?
49:02 Jay Novella? Five to 10 years.
49:03 Speaker 02 Five to 10 years.
49:04 Jay Novella? No, I would say, I'd say like 30-plus years.
49:06 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, 25, 30?
49:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think that's at the low end of the estimate of how long this would take. I would say definitely decades. Beyond that, I think it's hard to predict.
49:17 Speaker 04 Assuming no setbacks, when you come across information saying, oh, boy, this isn't gonna work now.
49:23 Speaker 02 Absolutely. We are with stem. Here we are 25 years, 30, almost 30 years after the stem cell hype. And not that we haven't made a lot of progress in stem cell research, but we don't have any of the promised breakthrough medical miracles that people were talking about in 2001 about stem cells. It's the same kind of thing where it's like, don't get too excited. This is like a proof-of-concept kind of thing where it's like, yeah, we do seem to have conserved the same genes that axolotls and salamanders and mice and fish have. You know, it's theoretically possible this can happen, but this is going to take decades of dedicated research. And it might be the kind of thing where like in 30 or 40 years, we're starting to play around with this. It might be 100 years, you know? It's really hard to say.
50:08 Speaker 02 It's kind of the perfect sci-fi technology because it's not impossible, but it's far in the future. And it's really cool. You know what I mean? But anyway, we add that to the list of potential technologies that could significantly cause You know, the ability, give us the ability to replace missing body parts. In its extreme, this would be probably be the most powerful of all of those technologies, if in its mature form, right? If you could wave a magic wand and say, which would you rather have? You know, the, of all these abilities that I spoke, spoke about, like the ability to transplant pig organs, or to have cyborg, you know, prosthetics, or, or to whatever. I think this is the one that you would want, right? Just the ability, I just want to regrow whatever I'm missing, or whatever organ is broken.
50:53 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, of course, because then it's like, you're not going to reject it. It's going to be your own tissue.
50:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:57 Cara Santa Maria? And if, by the time we have sophisticated enough genetic manipulation to force the regrow, we could probably turn off oncogenes and, and, you know, boost tumor suppressor genes, too.
51:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. And then tweak the immune system in any way that we need to.
51:12 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
51:13 Speaker 02 Yep. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Aura Frames.
51:18 Jay Novella? My favorite thing to do is, when I go to visit my mom, is we sit and look at the frame together, and then whenever a picture comes up, we'll talk about it. You know, who was it? Where was it? When was it? And, you know, it's, it makes incredible conversations happen, because I wouldn't think to ask questions regularly, you know, and, you know, normally I have to have the prompt of the frame to give it to me. And if you do this, I think you'll really find out that, you know, what memories are really important to your, your mom or your dad.
51:46 Cara Santa Maria? Oh, I love that so much. Yeah, remember, guys, it is Mother's Day, and an Aura Frame makes a great gift, because it's got free, unlimited storage, and of course, you can preload those photos before it ships, but then you can keep adding them from anywhere, anytime. And of course, it comes with a lovely gift box, so why not?
52:05 Speaker 04 Named number one by Wirecutter, you can save on the gifts moms love by visiting auraframes.com. For a limited time, listeners can get $25 off their bestselling Carver Matte Frame with code SKEPTICS. That's A U R A, frames.com, promo code SKEPTICS. Support the show by mentioning us at the checkout. Terms and conditions apply.
52:28 Speaker 02 All right, guys, let's get back to the show.
52:31 Speaker 02 All right, Kara, do suicide hotlines work?
52:34 Cara Santa Maria? Uh, it seems to be the case, but let's dig into the research. So there's a new research letter that was published just yesterday, as of this recording, in JAMA, that's the Journal of the American Medical Association. And it's called Suicide Mortality Among Adolescents and Young Adults After Launch of a Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Now, everybody but Steve. I always have to do this.
52:59 Speaker 04 You go first, Bob.
53:00 Cara Santa Maria? Because Steve, he reads all of these. Yeah, yeah, Bob, no.
53:04 Cara Santa Maria? What number in the United States should you call if you are struggling with thoughts of suicide?
53:12 Speaker 04 I believe it's 988?
53:15 Cara Santa Maria? Woo-hoo, go Evan.
53:16 Speaker 02 That's good, Evan.
53:17 Cara Santa Maria? Good job. So in July of 2022, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline was launched. In the past, it was a longer number. It was 1-800-273-TALK, which was a lot harder to remember. So having a three-digit line, 988, plus a $1.5 billion infusion that paid, you know, crisis center workers, increased capacity, that all went into effect in the summer of 2022. At that point, contacts, or actually, in the following three years, so up until 25, contacts to the lifeline doubled and then some. And of course, what age group do you think was the most likely to use this crisis line?
54:01 Speaker 02 Oh, I would say teens.
54:02 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, adolescents and young adults. So in this study, they actually broadened that out, and they looked at age 15 to 34. They identified this as a critical time period for suicide prevention, and they looked at the National Vital Statistics System, which is a registry of all death certificates in the United States. And they wanted to basically just count the number of documented deaths from suicide, so completed suicides, in the United States. And they basically just wanted to say, How were things before the lifeline was added, the 988 lifeline? And how were things after the 988 lifeline?
54:46 Cara Santa Maria? So I do think we need to spend a little bit of time today talking about why observational studies can be very interesting, but also don't tell the whole story.
54:55 Speaker 02 Karen, would that be an ecological study then? Is that the correct term?
54:59 Cara Santa Maria? They call it. Let me see if they actually-
55:01 Speaker 02 I mean, it's observational, but the subtype, it's either ecological or epidemiological, one of those.
55:06 Cara Santa Maria? They don't use either of those. They only call it an observational study.
55:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, ecological just means it's observational done at a population or group level, so that would-
55:13 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, okay. Then, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because they were looking at the entire United States.
55:20 Cara Santa Maria? And so basically what they wanted to do is compare, well, what were expected, what was the expected mortality from suicide versus the actual mortality from suicide between July of 2022 through December of 2024? And of course, the expected mortality is not the same as just looking at before versus after. There are trend lines there, and there are some pretty sophisticated statistical analyses. When we look at those trend lines, they were raising. You know, in the study, they publish a graph that starts in 2010 and goes to 2026. Their cutoff is right, kind of in the middle of 2022, and they show observed versus expected.
56:02 Cara Santa Maria? And even the observed suicides, completed suicides are slowly but surely rising between 2010 and 2022. So they expected them to continue to rise along that trend. But what we found is that after 988 went into effect, they actually dropped. And they dropped across the board, which was pretty interesting. And when I say across the board, I mean within this age group, okay? So again, we're talking 15 to 34 years of age. And the drops were, they can be sliced and diced a few different ways, but let's talk about one of the big ones.
56:35 Cara Santa Maria? They, they found that there were 39,901 expected suicides, but observed suicides was 35,529. So that was an 11% reduction or a total of 4,372 fewer suicides overall. Now, what could otherwise account for a drop in completed suicides?
57:02 Cara Santa Maria? Between July 2022 and December 2024. What do you guys think? Yes, we know that 988 went to effect and the authors of the study are saying.
57:12 Speaker 04 Coming out of COVID.
57:13 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, we're coming out of COVID. Right? There's a big kind of ecological thing that's happening there. A big social change that's occurring. People are reemerging from COVID. So, you know, we can't always say when we're doing observational studies, this is not a randomized control trial. You could not do a randomized control trial with this. It would be like the most unethical trial of all time.
57:34 Speaker 04 Right.
57:35 Cara Santa Maria? And really what you have to do is say, okay, how can I then look at the data in different ways and see if other stories emerge? We know that there are other variables at play here. But what about, let's say, all-cause mortality? Right? Maybe more access to health services, for example. So they looked at the before and after periods of all-cause mortality between the ages of 15 and 34, and they found that they weren't different. So, okay, that doesn't mean that, you know, coming out of COVID didn't have an effect, but it does mean that this drop of 11% couldn't be accounted for by the fact that just fewer people died in those years out of, after, you know, July 2022.
58:20 Cara Santa Maria? They also said, okay, we know that suicide risk is very high among young adults. So let's actually compare the before and after in an older adult group. So their assumption in doing that was to say, the 988 hotline may not have felt as accessible or have been used as often by adults aged 65 and older, but suicide is still a concern among this, this age cohort. And they found that, yes, there was a reduction, but it was significantly smaller in suicide mortality following that launch among adults aged 65 or older. That was a 4.5% reduction compared to the 11% reduction overall
59:04 Cara Santa Maria? in individuals aged 15 to 34. And then they said, okay, we're going to look at it in one other way, and this way hopefully gives us the best sensitivity. Here because we want to know, is this attributable at least in, in, in part, if not in whole to the 988 hotline going into effect? And they said, here's what we'll do. There are 50 states in the United States. Some states utilize 988 at higher levels. People, we can look at this as demonstrated, we can count the number of calls to the hotline and then, you know, look at it per capita. And some states, it just wasn't utilized the same. We could talk about why different rollouts, different media.
59:43 Speaker 04 Advertising.
59:43 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, advertising, exactly. Public service announcements. And so they said, we're going to look at the top 10 states that had the most use and we're going to compare it to the bottom 10 states that had the lowest use, the lowest uptake of, of utilizing 988. And they found that in the 10 states with the greatest uptake, mortality due to suicide completion dropped 18.2% before and after 988, or in the 10 states with the lowest uptake, mortality dropped 10.6%.
1:00:19 Speaker 04 So it dropped across the board everywhere.
1:00:22 Cara Santa Maria? It dropped across the board, but it did drop significantly more in states with higher uptake of 988. But again, there are confounding factors here. If a state has a higher uptake of 988, what else do you think is going on in that state?
1:00:34 Jay Novella? Well, they, they probably don't have other services for, for people that need it.
1:00:38 Cara Santa Maria? Either. Yeah, that's an interesting way to look at it. I, I actually thought about it the other way. If a state has a higher uptake of 988, they might have had more PSAs around it and they might put more money into suicide prevention overall.
1:00:50 Jay Novella? Yeah.
1:00:51 Cara Santa Maria? They might have more clinics.
1:00:52 Jay Novella? Yeah, you're right, Kara. Cause I see that way now. Yeah.
1:00:54 Cara Santa Maria? Right? Because, but you're right. Like a suicide prevention hotline, in some respects, it's a catchall. It's kind of the low hanging fruit of public health because it's easily accessible. Everyone has access to a phone. It's cheap for the user, for the end user, not, not for the maintenance of the, of the hotline. That's actually quite expensive and we need to fund it more. That's, that's another call to action in the study. But it's much easier and has fewer barriers to entry to. Pick up the phone and say, I'm in crisis right now and I don't have anybody else I can talk to than to reach out to a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a social worker, especially if you don't already have access, if you can't afford to see what, you know, there are a lot of barriers to entry there
1:01:38 Cara Santa Maria? due to our managed care system and just the, we just don't have enough mental health experts available. So obviously, this, this is not about all of the reasons that suicide risk is, um, is just, you know, a tragedy here in the United States and across the globe. But this is about a, a system that does seem to be working. Now granted, we can't say a hundred percent of the variance is due to 988. Uh, it could be due to other, you know, other things within those states, uh, other suicide prevention attempts, but it does seem to be the case that this is one in a sort of toolbox of tools that has at least some significant measurable benefit. The two concerns that are flagged by the article itself, the, the publication in JAMA,
1:02:23 Cara Santa Maria? but also by the write-ups around it are that, number one, it's expensive to maintain and there have been some concerns about the current administration continuing to maintain it, although it does look like they have pledged to increase, or not increase, but to continue funding. Number two, so unfortunately, last summer, the Trump administration chose to terminate the press three option on 988. The press three option said, if you are an LGBTQ plus caller, press three for specialized support. And so they actually put the kibosh on that, but, uh, they said that it was, so, um, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, they said they discontinued it
1:03:07 Cara Santa Maria? because they'd exhausted their, their congressional funding and that they wanted to focus on serving, quote, "all helpers" or "all help seekers." But there are some concerns because upwards of 10% of users of the program identify as LGBTQIA. And actually, there is, you know, a, a connection between the stigma, the bullying and the experience and also their depression or suicide. So.
1:03:33 Speaker 02 Yeah. And getting rid of that option doesn't mean that they're not using services. They're just not getting specialized services. They're not triaging properly. It's just making the whole thing less efficient and effective.
1:03:46 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, yeah, exactly. But let's see, at least this past Tuesday, so two days ago, RFK Junior said that the agency was planning to restore the press three option. So fingers crossed they follow through with that. Again, it's very hard to tease out all of the variance here. It's impossible to say that, you know, the the total drop is due to 988, but it does seem to to be working. And anything we can do to prevent preventable suicides in this country, whether we're talking about among older adults or among this critical age group 15 to 34, which is what they measured, I think we should be funding, you know, this is this is kind of a
1:04:29 Cara Santa Maria? no brainer because A, it works and B, it's, yes, it costs money, but it's it's accessible for everybody.
1:04:38 Speaker 02 There's another angle, Cara, and because a lot of these studies often take a binary of like, did they complete suicide or not? But there's a whole, you know, host of people who do not complete the suicide, but they're injured.
1:04:51 Cara Santa Maria? Right, right. And they didn't look at that at all because they only looked at mortality.
1:04:54 Speaker 02 Right. And that and that I've treated some of these patients and I can tell you that that the lifetime cost of treating the results of their uncompleted suicide is can be huge. Obviously, there's also the the damage done to the person and the quality of life, etc., etc. And the family, all that. There's lots of downstream.
1:05:15 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, all the mental health.
1:05:16 Speaker 02 But again, I always like to say, well, even if you're taking a cynical economic view, it's it's actually a worthwhile investment, you know, because
1:05:23 Cara Santa Maria? Absolutely.
1:05:24 Speaker 02 not only in direct healthcare costs, but also the lost productivity and all that other stuff.
1:05:29 Cara Santa Maria? And there's a whole other, like, actually, you know, purely economic argument here, which isn't covered by this study, which is that when there's a 988 line, people are less likely to dial 911 in this case, which means that they're. Less likely, yeah, to overload that system or for, you know, to die by suicide by cop or to have, you know, other kind of unintended consequences that can occur when either untrained or unspecialized personnel show up in a mental health crisis. So just across the board, having a suicide crisis line that's easily accessible is and dedicated is is a no brainer.
1:06:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, it's not enough by itself. It's not a panacea, but it is one piece to the puzzle. And it, this is what governments should be doing. This is exactly the kind of thing.
1:06:20 Cara Santa Maria? We should be funding. This is what tax dollars should go towards.
1:06:23 Speaker 02 This is what they should be. All right.
1:06:24 Cara Santa Maria? Absolutely. And, and we would usually have proceeded or closed out this session, saying that if you or anyone you know needs help, dial 988. But we did say 988 100 times during this session. So yeah, make sure that you know about this and share it with your friends and family because it can save a life.
1:06:39 Speaker 02 All right. Thanks, Kara. Evan, why is rubber so strong?
1:06:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's a great question, isn't it? And that was the question asked in the headline by SciTech Daily, what makes rubber so strong? But they answer it by saying scientists finally solve a 100 year old mystery. Ooh, a long standing mystery in materials. Science has finally been resolved, revealing how microscopic particles fundamentally alter the behavior of rubber. All right. Before we go in any further, how much do you know about rubber?
1:07:14 Cara Santa Maria? Does it come from trees?
1:07:15 Speaker 04 A couple. Well, I'll ask you a couple.
1:07:19 Speaker 04 I'll ask you a couple, a couple of basic rubber questions. You know, let's see what we got. All right. What is the natural color of rubber?
1:07:26 Speaker 02 I always imagined it as like a beige.
1:07:29 Speaker 04 I heard clear. I heard beige.
1:07:31 Speaker 02 White.
1:07:32 Speaker 04 And Jay says white. You're all sort of right. Milky white is how they describe it. Okay. So, but I think we're all the same, right? We think of rubber, you know, tires and therefore it's black or some sort of darker color. No, it's actually white. Now, the first ball of rubber used in a game, how far back do you think that dates?
1:07:52 Speaker 02 Mid 1800s.
1:07:54 Speaker 04 Okay.
1:07:55 Cara Santa Maria? No, no, like thousands of years.
1:07:58 Speaker 04 Yeah. How about over 2,000 years?
1:08:00 Jay Novella? I must be thinking of more modern like rubber.
1:08:02 Speaker 04 Yeah. The Olmec culture, they have found these little rubber balls, basically that they, that they, that they pulled, you know, and made from the plants and used it in certain games that they would play. Now of all the rubber used in world production, we're talking all rubber. What percentage of rubber is used in automotive production?
1:08:22 Jay Novella? Oh, it's a good question.
1:08:24 Speaker 04 What percent?
1:08:24 Jay Novella? All right, I'll say, uh, I mean, this is a complete shot in the dark, but I'm going to say, uh, 50%.
1:08:30 Speaker 04 Okay.
1:08:31 Cara Santa Maria? I was gonna say like 35%.
1:08:32 Jay Novella? I'll say 60%.
1:08:34 Speaker 04 Steve is closest. It's 65%. Almost two thirds of all rubber.
1:08:39 Jay Novella? Yeah, because of tires.
1:08:40 Speaker 04 Tires is the main one, not the only one, but you know, obviously that's, that's the main one. Last question, which country produces the most rubber? And what percentage of the world's rubber does it produce? So country and how much of it in percent?
1:08:55 Jay Novella? I used to know this.
1:08:56 Speaker 02 Brazil?
1:08:56 Jay Novella? Oh, man.
1:08:57 Speaker 04 That's a good guess, but it's not correct.
1:09:00 Jay Novella? I ain't the right continent. Yes, I don't know.
1:09:02 Cara Santa Maria? I have no idea.
1:09:03 Speaker 04 Thailand?
1:09:04 Cara Santa Maria? Okay.
1:09:05 Speaker 04 And it's 29% of the world's rubber.
1:09:07 Jay Novella? All right.
1:09:08 Speaker 04 Comes from Thailand. And now, although this is part, part of the news item, from what I researched, the plants from which, uh, rubber is derived, the rubber trees or there, those variants, uh, originated in South America, but found their way, I don't know artificially or somehow, or the way to, to Southeast Asia.
1:09:25 Jay Novella? Yeah, I knew they were discovered in South America. They're tropical though, right?
1:09:27 Speaker 04 Mm hmm. Yeah. And hence the Olmec, um, uh, culture from 2,000 plus years ago, using the, the old rubber balls. So yeah, good stuff. Um, you did well. Now about this 100 year old mystery being solved, that headline, that might be a bit dramatic. Not surprised there, right? Because it's not that scientists didn't know about this. Scientists have known for a long time that rubber has, uh, exceptional mechanical properties, but the microscopic reason wasn't fully clear. So when natural rubber is stretched, polymer chains align in the direction of the pole, if you can imagine that, and that would make sense. And parts of those chains then crystallize, you know, they form these tiny ordered regions.
1:10:10 Speaker 04 And those temporary crystalline zones act like reinforcing anchors that stop cracks from spreading. Strain induced crystallization. And scientists have understood that this is what's happening. They've known this a long time, decades. But this particular study goes further into figuring out at the molecular level, the explanation and figuring out why, you know, they never really were able to determine, they know it's happening, but why is it happening?
1:10:37 Speaker 02 So Evan, is what you're talking about the same as the process of vulcanizing rubber?
1:10:43 Speaker 04 You know, I didn't come across the term vulcanization or vulcanizing rubber.
1:10:47 Speaker 02 So that's what I, when you said, you know, the old issues of rubber, I was thinking of vulcanized rubber, which actually was invented in 1839. Guess by who? American inventor.
1:10:57 Speaker 04 Oh, it's Spock. Tire guy. It's probably Tire Guy. Michelin, Joey Michelin.
1:11:03 Speaker 02 Charles Goodyear.
1:11:04 Speaker 04 Oh, there you go.
1:11:06 Speaker 02 Yep. So yeah, so that's vulcanized rubber and that, but that sounds like the similar kind of process to what you're talking about.
1:11:12 Speaker 04 Yep, yeah.
1:11:13 Speaker 02 You're cross linking the rubber polymer so that it's strong, so that it's elastic and strong.
1:11:19 Speaker 04 That's right. Yeah. What's new here is not that the rubber, you know, they discovered it and got explained overnight. They figured it out. They've known about this for a while. But what's new is that the researchers have a more unified physics-based explanation that ties together several older competing theories, among which are, well, first of all, you have to understand that rubber, chemically speaking, is an elastomer, which stretches easily because its long polymer chains can uncoil and slide around. And that makes it flexible, but it's not ideal if you need to support the weight of something very heavy, like a fully loaded aircraft. You need something that is obviously stronger.
1:12:00 Speaker 04 So what do the manufacturers do, Steve? They add fillers, something called carbon black, engineered soot, as it were. And that's why most tires are black. And they've known this for a century or more, obviously, maybe back in the 1800s, Steve, that carbon black made rubber tougher, stiffer, and more durable.
1:12:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think they originally used sulfur, but then they found over the years that carbon worked better.
1:12:25 Speaker 04 Yep, but how did it make it better? They, that's been, that's been debated. Some scientists thought that it was the particles forming reinforced networks and others thought that it stiffened nearby polymer regions having a glue-like effect. And then there are others who said that, well, it simply took up space, changed how the rubber deformed, and that was the reason. But the new study says that while all of those ideas contain little pieces of truth, the dominant mechanism is something called the Poisson ratio mismatch. I think I run across that word, Poisson. It's like poison with an extra S.
1:13:02 Speaker 02 Poisson.
1:13:03 Speaker 04 Poisson, in French sounding word. And forgive me if I'm somehow pronouncing that incorrectly, but that's what I heard. So when you stretch your materials, they'll get thinner in the, in the direction that they get pulled, right? You pull a rubber band, it gets longer, it gets narrower. And that sideways thinning behavior is related to Poisson's ratio. But rubber is also incompressible, meaning it strongly resists changing its total volume. So when it stretches, it normally thins just enough to, to keep the volume constant or roughly constant. But when you add the carbon black particles into the rubber, those particles interfere
1:13:46 Speaker 04 with that thinning and they act like little tiny internal braces. So now you've got this rubber being stretched, but it can't narrow as much as it wants to because of the black particles acting like those braces. So the rubber gets longer, but it can't get thin enough and the volume would have to increase. So the rubber kind of resists that, doesn't like it, doesn't want to do that, and it resists the change. But the result is that the material becomes much stiffer and stronger under the load. And in the words of the researchers, they said, "The rubber is essentially fighting against itself." Now, to have reached this conclusion, the team of material scientists led by University of South Florida engineering professor David Simmons, he and his team-
1:14:31 Speaker 04 Conducted around 1,500 molecular dynamics simulations. And they modeled how hundreds of thousands of atoms interact inside filled rubber composites. They said this was like, if you had to put that computing power into a timeframe, it was about 15 years of a single computer working on just this one problem. If it ran for 15 years straight. So they've been working on, they've been using that much dedicated computer processing to figure this out. From the paper's abstract, the authors conclude that these results indicate that the Poisson ratio mismatch between the nanoparticle network and elastomer matrix is the dominant mechanism
1:15:12 Speaker 04 behind the enhanced occurrence here, the stiffness, the reinforcing of the rubber. And from the conclusion of the paper, they argue that this mechanism helps explain why elastomers are especially amenable to nanoparticle reinforcement compared with, say, harder plastics or concrete or something else. So in short, soft, stretchy materials gain a lot more from this trick than, say, rigid ones do. And why does all of this matter? Well, because tire makers primarily are relying on just testing things, empirical testing, trial and error formulations. But now with this understanding, they can help optimize what they call the magic triangle of tire design. Three things: durability, grip, and fuel efficiency.
1:15:58 Speaker 04 When you improve one, it hurts another, right? You can't, you know, it's a push and pull. You pull this one. But if you have a better predictive model, you can come up with something that is more optimal optimized and a better overall material. But it's not just tires. It's seals, vibration isolators, aerospace materials, obviously. You know, we can't, I don't think you can think about rubber without, you know, talking about maybe the Challenger explosion and those O-rings also made of rubber at the time. If they had, you know, maybe a better solution for those parts, perhaps we would not be talking about Challenger disasters. So although it's not a miraculous overnight discovery, but it is good,
1:16:42 Speaker 04 a good example of incremental science. And of course, science is where the rubber meets the road. Thank you.
1:16:48 Jay Novella? I knew that you were going to end with something like that.
1:16:53 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, it lends itself to it. Why wouldn't I go there? Oh, that's for, and dedicated this one to Bob, taking over the materials science segment of the show today. Thank you.
1:17:03 Jay Novella? Thank you, Evan.
1:17:05 Speaker 02 All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time.
1:17:08 Jay Novella? All right, guys, last week I played this noisy.
1:17:28 Speaker 06 Not even hot.
1:17:35 Jay Novella? That's a crazy, crazy noisy. And guys, any guesses?
1:17:39 Speaker 04 It has the, I know this isn't correct, but it's almost like a dial on a radio and you're switching, you know, you're dialing between channels and picking up a different, you know, a different program as you hit the new station. But I know that's not the correct answer. That's just the feeling I got.
1:17:56 Jay Novella? Yeah, that's a great guess, Ev. You will soon find out why I said that. A listener named Justin Fornier wrote in and said, hello, Jay, I love today's show. Anyway, I think the noisy is audio, some sort of person talking, being transferred through the use of a Tesla coil. The audio is transmitted through an electric current, which generates a magnetic field and the energy with nowhere to go ionizes the air around it, which causes sound that you can hear if you are near the coil. I think, he goes, dot, dot, dot. I think, yes, I agree. It's a great guess. You are not correct, but you're not completely in the wrong area here. So that's one incremental step. We have another listener named Kevin
1:18:38 Jay Novella? Walsh. Kevin says, hey, Jay, I'm guessing this week's noisy is some chatter from the Artemis two crew. My first thought was that it was something that made, made it past that plasma interference during reentry. But then remembered there, they were having comm issues talking to search and rescue after landing. So I'll go with that's what S and R were able to hear from Artemis after landing. Or maybe a bird. That's, it's always good to go with that one. Yeah, I mean, this is a great guess because it's recent and everything and it Has that spotty in out, in out thing. But that one point when the person clearly says it's not even hot. I don't, I mean, unless they're talking about the outside of the ship, which they would be incorrect.
1:19:18 Jay Novella? You're not correct, but not a bad guess at all, particularly taking into consideration how recent all that has happened. Visto Tuti wrote in, he took a break. I think he's been on vacation for a few months. Visto said, I hear people talking, but with low quality and different resonances to the microphones. I'm going to guess this is a distance voice recording by using a laser to track the vibrations of some object or surface within a room. He says that surfaces such as foil balloons or the foil packets for crisps can make a half decent microphone. When a laser is measuring the sound vibrations, the surface picks up. Now we've talked about this a very long time ago on the show. This is all legitimate.
1:19:57 Jay Novella? Could use a laser to interpret you the, the effect of sound waves on objects in the room and hear it. And you can hear what's happening in the room. It's real.
1:20:08 Speaker 04 Fascinating.
1:20:09 Jay Novella? And it's, it's like high end spy type material. I don't know how big of a, of a system you would need on the receiving end. Like you're going to shoot the laser and then you need what? Is it just a laptop at this point or is it something larger? I don't know. That is a really good guess because of how odd the sound is, but you are not correct, Visto. I have a listener named Ryan Skiba. He says, is this week's noise produced by holding a stick against a cable, like a grounding cable of a radio tower? I saw a video once where someone touched a radio tower with a stick or something, causing electricity to flow to the stick and burn it. The buzzing sounds made by the electricity also carries or modulates the sound being transmitted by the tower. Sounds like talk radio. Ryan, you are so close.
1:20:53 Jay Novella? And if, if I didn't have someone or multiple people guess specifically and exactly what it is, I would have given it to you. So I'm going to give you a half an SGU point for that. But the, the winner this week, first person to send in the correct guess was Gerald Schreuer. And he says, first time here. This is Jeff Gierling's video with his dad where they hold the hot dog against the radio tower. An amazing video with his dad and very educational. Stay skeptical. So what's actually happening here is that meat conducts electricity. The water inside of the of the meat, which is a hot dog, which was put on the end of a stick with a grounding line to it.
1:21:34 Jay Novella? Right. So the water inside of the hot dog is getting vaporized. And that creates a plasma arc that emits the sound as as the plasma plasma is exploding. Okay. And since the amplitude modulates, this causes the sound to effectively effectively replicate the audio. So I know that's very, you know, if you don't understand this type of thing, that's that's complicated. And I might not be 100% correct because this was actually a description that was sent in to me by the person who sent me the sound. But they're touching the hot dog to the radio tower, which is transmitting a very strong radio tower. Right. It's transmitting or broadcasting the information.
1:22:16 Jay Novella? And that power that is coming out of the radio tower, which can, I guess, I think it can kill you just like that. Like, don't touch radio towers. That's why they put fences around them.
1:22:26 Speaker 04 With high voltage signs and other warning.
1:22:29 Jay Novella? The hot dog has properties that allows the energy to partly go into the hot dog. And then it through, you know, multiple different things happening here, it vibrates. And you could hear what's going on inside of or what is being broadcast from the radio towers. I'm not going to play the whole thing. Just listen again.
1:22:59 Jay Novella? Okay, the hot dog, I believe, is cooking. And that's why you hear like that bacony cooking sound. I think that's what's happening. And at one point, the dad goes up and touches, I believe he touches the hot dog. And says it's not even hot, which I thought would be risky. I would not personally touch the hot dog, if you know what I mean. Yeah, so if you want to actually see this in action, you could go to the slow mo guys on YouTube and you'll quickly see some title about the hot dog and the radio tower and you'll find it. It's pretty cool, very cool, actually, what they did. I love quirky science experiments like this. Alright, so guys, I have a new noisy this week. This noisy was sent in by Adrian Bill, and here it is.
1:23:57 Cara Santa Maria? No.
1:24:00 Speaker 04 I mean, you know, it's not Donald Duck, sure sounds like Donald Duck, but...
1:24:04 Jay Novella? I mean, there's just so much potential in there. Like, it could be so many different weird things happening at the same time.
1:24:11 Speaker 04 Kara's not...
1:24:12 Jay Novella? Kara just shut up, okay?
1:24:14 Cara Santa Maria? I am not pleased.
1:24:17 Speaker 04 No matter what it is, it's disconcerting.
1:24:21 Jay Novella? Alright guys, if you think you know this week's noisy, or you heard something cool, you just gotta do me the favor of emailing me at [email protected] . You guys keep this segment going. Without your help, I would have to do work that I would tell Steve I refuse to do. Because I've done it so many times where I try to find a cool noisy. Just, you go and try to find a cool noisy quickly on your computer right now, and after you've done, I got, I've received 21,000 emails from people over my tenure doing, "Who's that noisy?"
1:24:52 Speaker 04 You counted?
1:24:53 Jay Novella? Probably more than that. Well, it's in my, I don't-
1:24:55 Speaker 02 You have a folder.
1:24:56 Jay Novella? I have a folder in Gmail.
1:24:58 Speaker 04 Wow.
1:24:58 Jay Novella? Okay, so a few things I gotta mention here, guys. We have a lot of conferences we're gonna be at. You've heard me say it before. The big one for us is the one that we'll be spending the most time trying to fulfill. I've been working on these, this two-week conference, you know, extravaganza we're going on. Since last August, this is the Australia and New Zealand conferences that will- We going to, the whole thing starts on July 18th in Los Angeles. So we'll be doing multiple shows in LA. Then we go to Sydney and we have Not a Con happening in Sydney. And then we go to New Zealand and we'll be doing a full day of content for the New Zealand conference as well.
1:25:41 Jay Novella? To find out more information on these conferences, you can go to skepticon.org.au or notaconcon.com. And you can go to conferences.skeptics.nz for the New Zealand conference information. And then all the other events and everything that we're doing, of course, everything that we're doing. You can go to the skepticsguide.org, go to our events page and you'll see a clean list of everything. But we have Madison, Wisconsin coming up. Now is the time to buy those tickets because that's not that far away. Again, it's the three shows that we typically do now. We have the Friday night super secret meetup. We have the live podcast recording that'll happen on Saturday, you know, early, you know, like 11, 12 ish.
1:26:26 Jay Novella? And then that night, we have the skeptical extravaganza. This is like a typical spread of shows that we do.
1:26:32 Speaker 02 And this is on May 30th.
1:26:34 Jay Novella? That's correct. It starts on May 29th. The private show and the extravaganza will be on May 30th. We will also be at Psychon, guys, and Psychon is looking really good this year. And this is, and it's in a new location and I think it's going to be a lot of fun. And I am still thinking about going to the Star Trek museum.
1:26:56 Speaker 02 I think we talked about that, didn't we?
1:26:57 Jay Novella? And then we have decided to go to Dragon Con. It's a little late in the game, but we decided to go because we haven't been in years. And a lot of people were asking if we're going and we don't like to disappoint people. Steve's like, we have to take care of our people. That's what he said, and I don't disagree. So we're going to go this year. We're going to be on a bunch of different panels. We've been actually talking a lot about the panels that we're going to be doing. And we have a special friend that will be doing.
1:27:22 Speaker 02 We can say. Yeah, we are pitching five different panels with Christian Hubicki, who's a robotics expert. So there are five different robotics themed panels in addition to doing SGU show and, you know, other skeptical content as well.
1:27:38 Jay Novella? And we haven't even talked about costuming yet, Steve.
1:27:40 Speaker 02 No, I know.
1:27:41 Jay Novella? We gotta start doing it.
1:27:42 Speaker 02 Let's talk about that.
1:27:43 Jay Novella? Anyway, guys, if you're interested, please go to the skepticsguy.org. And one final thought, Steve, if you enjoy the content of this show, or if you would like to support the work that we do, you can go become a patron of ours. You can go to patreon.com/skepticsguide. And we have different levels of support, and we would really appreciate it if you'd be willing to help us continue to do what we do.
1:28:07 Speaker 02 Thank you, Jay. Couple of emails. So, tons of people emailed us about our coverage of Mythos, you know, Claude Betos, the AI that can find bugs and exploit bugs in software.
1:28:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, and half of them were bots.
1:28:25 Speaker 02 No, I think our email reflects what's happening out there in the AI world. Because, and I've read a ton of articles about this over the last week. As I said, this is about to follow this story. This is complicated, and it's just getting more complicated. And, you know, so this definitely needs a follow-up. But, so, the articles that I've been reading, the experts, and our emails, basically fall into one of three camps. Initially, there were two camps, like immediately two camps. There was the skeptical camp, which is like, this is all hype from the corporation, just as a promotional stunt.
1:29:08 Speaker 02 The other was like, this is a serious cybersecurity concern that we have to do something about. There's a, and then a third kind of genre, if you will, a third approach emerged, which is like, it's somewhere in between. That, yes, there is hype coming from the company, but, and while this is not like, this is not a civilization-ending event, yes, we have to, this is a game changer, and we have to respond. We have to figure out what to do.
1:29:40 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, and if not now, at least in the future, we need to be ready.
1:29:42 Speaker 02 Exactly. And it's really just a matter of when. So it's a bit more of a slow roll than an immediate event. But it is like this is happening. This is a wake up call. Some people were saying this is may not be like Mythos itself may not be a problem, but it is a red flag. I found the middle of the road articles to be the most compelling. And I tried to reflect that, I think, last week. It was interesting because I said, I said almost verbatim, I said, keep in mind this information's coming from the company. What did you guys think I meant by that?
1:30:15 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, I guess maybe.
1:30:17 Jay Novella? That was a qualifier, just to say, you know, we can't completely trust everything that we're hearing.
1:30:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, take it with a grain of salt. This is coming from the company itself.
1:30:25 Speaker 04 I think you actually used those words.
1:30:27 Cara Santa Maria? I wonder too, if part of the context was lost here because your story came immediately after my story.
1:30:35 Speaker 02 Maybe.
1:30:36 Cara Santa Maria? And my story was about a lot of very legitimate concerns.
1:30:40 Speaker 02 Well, these are legitimate concerns too, but, but some people specifically.
1:30:44 Cara Santa Maria? These are much more specific.
1:30:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, but they interpreted what I said as meaning therefore you can absolutely trust the information. I'm like, how did you possibly get that interpret? I've never said anything like that. So, but it's, you know, I guess I could have, I, it was so obvious to me. I didn't explicitly spell it out like therefore take it with a grain of salt. I thought that the context was obvious. But anyway, that I did say that we were talking about the fact that, you know, yeah, we're trying to land somewhere between hype and downplaying, you know, what's going on. This is real. So I, you know, some of the articles I was reading were saying that, again, it's also not just about its ability to find bugs. It's the, there's other things. One is, one of the things I pointed out was that this is proliferating the ability of
1:31:30 Speaker 02 people to generate code. And that is, can have the potential of creating a new world for us. But here's something I didn't talk about, which I think is really significant. And the people who are taking like this middle of the road approach, like sure, you know, companies like to inflate their own importance and everything, but here's what's really important here is that Mythos can.
1:31:55 Speaker 02 Not is the first software in this thing. This is not just incremental. This is not just old news. Because Mythos can do the can find and exploit vulnerabilities from soup to nuts. And it's the first software that can really do that, that could go that could go from beginning to end by itself without human intervention. And another way to put that is, this is the first one that combines vulnerability detection with an agentic AI, right? So this is an agentic AI that could go each step of the way until you have until you have an exploit, right? Till you exploit the vulnerability.
1:32:37 Speaker 02 The effect of this is to decrease the time between detection and exploit from months to days to hours to basically nothing, right? So the old model was you identify a vulnerability, you examine it, you patch it. And then, and you have a certain amount of time in which to do that. That time has now basically collapsed to nothing. And so that's really what people are concerned. We have to change our model. This means the old model of cybersecurity is be rapidly becoming obsolete in in the face of agentic models that can go from beginning to end, from identification to exploit.
1:33:22 Speaker 02 So there's a lot of people who are on the skeptical end were making a lot about the numbers like, you know, yes, they were inflating the numbers. They were extrapolating from limited data. It was not independent. First of all, that's all legitimate, but some there is some of it is independent, actually. And there are more independent analyses coming out. And they're pretty much saying the same thing that, yeah, this is not incremental. This is a game changing advance in ability that this AI has. It is sort of this combination of the agentic AI with much improved vulnerability and exploitation detection. And this does require us to think, how are we going to respond to this? And again, even if you think it's not quite there yet, we're
1:34:05 Speaker 02 Just months away, you know, from something that's even more powerful. So the cybersecurity industry does need to respond to this. I think that that's my take again, having read everything I could find about this. So I don't buy the this is all hype, nothing to see here narrative. And, you know, I think that, yes, there was some exaggeration on the part of the company. Maybe they're exploiting this for self-promotion, sure. But there's some, there is a real change here that we do need to take seriously. Okay, one more quick email. This one is about American knowledge of Mexico. Let me read you the email. The very brief comment about not knowing there is a place in Mexico, Mexico called Chihuahua,
1:34:48 Speaker 02 a city and a state that borders Texas, famously Juarez is in that state, brought to my attention a subject that I find interesting and frustrating. Having lived in Mexico for most of my life, I noticed how American media, movies, shows, news, tend to completely ignore Mexico. It's also very striking, the level of ignorance in America regarding Mexico. Simple stuff like the capital, population size, political system, et cetera. Despite there being a very large Mexican population in the US, I don't know if this is a subject for the SG, but I feel like there is something there regarding education and how media affects a person's worldview. Keep up the good work.
1:35:23 Cara Santa Maria? Agree wholeheartedly.
1:35:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, what do you?
1:35:26 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, I could say this, yes, I agree, but also for the other 193 countries that exist, you know?
1:35:32 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, but no, no, because compare Mexico to Canada. The average American knows a lot more about Canada than Mexico.
1:35:38 Speaker 04 That's interesting. I wonder if there's a test for that.
1:35:43 Cara Santa Maria? It is true. And this is North America. And the average American thinks that America refers only to the United States of America.
1:35:50 Speaker 02 I don't know. I mean, I feel like pre-Trump, you know, I thought of Mexico as a very strong ally and friend to the United States. And personally, I do know quite a bit about Mexico because I've been there several times and I think it's a beautiful country. I love the language, you know, I have an affinity, I think, for Mexico. Okay, let me ask you a few questions. What's the population of Mexico? Oh, Christ, I mean, what do I know? What's the population of the United States?
1:36:18 Jay Novella? I mean, population, 350 million in the United States. I'd say they have like 120 million in Mexico.
1:36:23 Speaker 02 Very close, 132 million. What kind of government do they have?
1:36:26 Jay Novella? They have a, they have a, it's democratic.
1:36:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's democratic. What, get more specific?
1:36:31 Speaker 04 Is it a parliamentary democracy?
1:36:33 Speaker 02 Is it more like the UK or the US?
1:36:36 Cara Santa Maria? I think it- US. They have a president.
1:36:38 Speaker 02 They have a president. It's a federal republic.
1:36:40 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
1:36:40 Speaker 02 They have a constitution, they have a bicameral congress, they have a president with one six-year term, elected by a popular vote, they have 31 states and a federal district. It's pretty much a mirror image of the United States. In fact, the official name is the United States of Mexico. All right, but you guys have made a couple of statements that I found very interesting. So one is, do you think that Americans know less about Mexico than they do about other countries? Definitely, we know the most about Canada. I will stipulate that.
1:37:09 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, but I think that's the comparison we have to make. It's unfair to say other countries.
1:37:13 Speaker 02 Well, is it?
1:37:14 Cara Santa Maria? Yes, because Mexico and Canada border the United States.
1:37:17 Jay Novella? More likely to go to those countries than any other countries.
1:37:20 Cara Santa Maria? And they're our neighbors.
1:37:21 Speaker 04 The northern states may, may know more about Canada, less about Mexico, and vice versa.
1:37:25 Cara Santa Maria? No, that's not, I, I completely disagree with that.
1:37:27 Speaker 04 I don't know.
1:37:27 Cara Santa Maria? I grew up in, I grew up in Texas and I live in LA, and I think that people near me in the South also know more about Canada than Mexico.
1:37:35 Jay Novella? Yeah.
1:37:35 Cara Santa Maria? They have been to Mexico, but Mexico to them is where they go to drink.
1:37:39 Jay Novella? That's a really interesting question. I mean, look, I know that there is a lot of people going to and from Mexico. It's been like that for a very, very long time, from the United States, right?
1:37:47 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, but travel doesn't mean you know a lot about it. I think there is an inherent bias that Mexico is a developing country and that Canada is quote unquote, "similar to us."
1:37:56 Speaker 02 All right.
1:37:57 Cara Santa Maria? Canada's us, Mexico's other.
1:37:58 Speaker 02 Do you think that Americans have less geographic knowledge in general than, than Europeans or other parts of the world?
1:38:05 Speaker 04 I would think yes.
1:38:07 Jay Novella? Yeah, I think they do.
1:38:07 Speaker 04 That would be my, my guess.
1:38:09 Speaker 02 All right. So I'm going to challenge all of those assumptions. So first of all- Because I looked into this deeply because I found it very fat. I went down a rabbit hole. Like, all right, what, what do we know? So first of all, yes, Americans, the, the, the country that most, more Americans are able to identify and answer geo, you know, basically, basic geopolitical questions about is Canada. Number two is Mexico. It's just barely behind Canada. It is not a big difference. If you rank just countries in terms of like how much geopolitical knowledge people have, yeah, Americans do tend to, to rank very low. But interestingly, a country that consistently ranks lower than the United States is Mexico. Mexico is actually worse than the US in terms of general geopolitical
1:38:53 Speaker 02 knowledge. Not that that's really relevant to this question.
1:38:56 Cara Santa Maria? No, because I, yeah, I mean, you'd have to compare the educational systems there.
1:39:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. But there, there are other factors involved. So if you look at like, well, how much worse are, say, Americans compared to Europeans? It's negligible. It's like, on, on one specific test, Europeans scored like 57% and Americans 51%. So yeah, that's different, but that's not dramatically different in my book.
1:39:20 Cara Santa Maria? What were they comparing, though?
1:39:22 Speaker 02 There were a series of questions about like, what's the capital of this country? And blah, blah, you know, just geopolitical questions.
1:39:26 Cara Santa Maria? Which is interesting, but I think I would want to see a study where Europeans are asked about other European countries and America, Americans are asked about other American countries, south and central.
1:39:37 Speaker 02 Well, yes, I looked at that data as well. So there is something called the proximity effect, right? Some people say it's like the 500 kilometer effect. And people absolutely know more about countries that are close to them than, than countries that are more distant to them. And so that means, though-
1:39:54 Speaker 04 That's an advantage in Europe.
1:39:55 Speaker 02 That's an advantage in Europe. Because how many countries-
1:39:57 Cara Santa Maria? Exactly, because they're small countries.
1:39:58 Speaker 02 If you live in France or Germany, how many countries are within 500 kilometers of you?
1:40:02 Speaker 04 A lot of them.
1:40:03 Speaker 02 Versus, if you live in a-
1:40:04 Cara Santa Maria? It's the same thing with New England. Like, I think about, here within the US, I think about New England as this, like, there's just a lot going on up there.
1:40:11 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:40:11 Cara Santa Maria? You know? There are these, like, small states and you can drive through them all.
1:40:15 Speaker 02 That's another factor, Kara.
1:40:16 Cara Santa Maria? Whereas I've lived in California and Texas my whole life. They're huge.
1:40:18 Speaker 02 That's another factor.
1:40:19 Cara Santa Maria? I can't go anywhere. Yeah.
1:40:21 Speaker 02 Americans have a lot of geopolitical- Geographical knowledge about the states, especially around them. And in fact, states are about the same size as countries in Europe. So if you really make a direct comparison between the geopolitical boundaries around you, Americans are just as good, if not better than Europeans. But you have to include state boundaries. So it's really, you can explain that small difference entirely just by the geography of we're just, we neighbor two big countries. We know a lot about those two countries. We don't know, and our knowledge drops off with distance, just like everybody else's, but we have fewer countries next to us.
1:41:03 Speaker 02 But if you include our knowledge of states, you may have noticed that foreigners know nothing about state geography within the United States.
1:41:11 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, they know New York and Texas and California.
1:41:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, but it's like they have very little knowledge, you know, compared to our knowledge of the states. So geographic knowledge is really not different between Americans and other developed nations. It's pretty, it's explainable. The differences are small and they're explainable by just the geography itself.
1:41:31 Jay Novella? Localized.
1:41:32 Speaker 02 There's also other effects, like there's a headline effect. So when you follow things over time, whatever country's in the news, people are going to know, be more familiar with that country, be able to identify it on a map. They're going to know, like they know after the Afghan war, they know that Kabul is the capital of Afghan. Nobody knew that beforehand, or very few people did. And it's also, it's, there's a few other factors. For some reason, men have, score higher than women in the United States, like 60% to 40 something percent.
1:42:00 Cara Santa Maria? Higher than women on what?
1:42:01 Speaker 02 On this test, these standard tests of geography knowledge. Definitely, the biggest factor is education level. College educated people have scored much higher than non-college educated. And generationally, older people know a bit more than younger people.
1:42:16 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, that makes sense.
1:42:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:42:17 Jay Novella? So Steve, how did I do on my knowledge of Mexico?
1:42:21 Speaker 02 About what I expected. You were pretty good. I didn't know to the extent to which it was a federal public so much in the mold of the United States. I knew it was a democracy, that's easy, but I knew they had a president. But yeah, I didn't realize that, yeah, that bicameral Congress, you know, federal, a federalist system with states, et cetera.
1:42:39 Speaker 04 I didn't know they had 31 states. I didn't know that.
1:42:42 Speaker 02 Interesting. So I think the bias of Americans don't know anything about geography outside of the United States is not really accurate. The data does not support that narrative. It's, it's, we're pretty much the same and the differences that exist are explainable by geography itself, by these other factors, mainly the proximity effect. And the fact that we, we have to think a lot about 50 states, you know, so that uses up a lot of our geologic bandwidth, if you will. Anyway, interesting.
1:43:13 Cara Santa Maria? I do think that there's a whole side of this conversation that just we didn't have, which is about perception and stigma.
1:43:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:43:21 Cara Santa Maria? And you didn't look at any of those studies.
1:43:22 Speaker 02 I did not, that did not come up when I was looking just generically about this topic, but I didn't specifically look at that. That, that's another layer that we, that maybe I could do a deep dive on that. That is interesting.
1:43:32 Cara Santa Maria? And also, I mean, to, to the, the emailer's point, I don't remember who made the comment and I don't remember if they were joking.
1:43:41 Speaker 02 No, I think Jay legitimately did not recognize Chihuahua as a state in Mexico.
1:43:46 Cara Santa Maria? Like you didn't know that's where the name came from?
1:43:48 Speaker 04 We only know it, well, I mean, a lot of people know it as the name of the dog.
1:43:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, right. That's how we know it.
1:43:53 Speaker 04 The breed of dog.
1:43:54 Speaker 02 But I do think it's also like, when you know about something, it seems like everybody else is ignorant about it. So I think that's another, just the perception bias in the emailer, you know?
1:44:03 Cara Santa Maria? I'd be curious how many people do know that the name Chihuahua, at least here in the US, know that that comes from Mexico. But this could also be, it could also be a geographic bias. Again, I grew up in Texas and I live in LA.
1:44:13 Speaker 02 Of course, yeah.
1:44:14 Cara Santa Maria? I've always been around Mexico.
1:44:16 Speaker 02 You have the proximity bias. You were going to know more about Mexico than New Englanders. Absolutely.
1:44:20 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
1:44:20 Speaker 02 But overall, it was just like, we're scoring in the 50s, you know? So that's overall, people's knowledge of geography is pretty bad, outside of their immediate area.
1:44:31 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, that's true.
1:44:32 Speaker 04 It should be bad.
1:44:32 Cara Santa Maria? We're, we're just as bad as everyone else.
1:44:34 Speaker 02 Yay, go us. All right.
1:44:36 Speaker 04 Yay.
1:44:36 Speaker 02 Let's go on with science or fiction.
1:44:51 Speaker 02 Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics, tell me which one is the fake. I have a theme this week. The theme is in honor of Bob, since he is not here. And he very much would have wanted to be here for this particular.
1:45:08 Speaker 04 Oh, no.
1:45:08 Speaker 02 The theme is black holes.
1:45:10 Speaker 04 Of course.
1:45:13 Speaker 02 Okay. Item number one, Einstein predicted the existence of singularity, only later called black holes. But the first one was not identified until 1971, 16 years after his death. Item number two, astronomers estimate that there are about 100 million stellar mass black holes in the Milky Way galaxy, but only about 100 have been confirmed. And item number three, only two black holes have ever been directly imaged. Sagittarius A star at the center of our own galaxy and M87 star, the largest known black hole at 6.5 billion solar masses. These would all be easy for Bob. Bob would cakewalk this. All right. Evan, go first.
1:46:00 Speaker 04 Where are you, Bob? All right. Einstein predicted the existence of singularities. Yes, he did. But the first one was not identified till 1971? Is that right? The first one identified, identified as in something other than hypothesized that it was there.
1:46:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, just predicted. It's like, oh, that is, we are looking at the effects of a black hole. That's a black hole. Yeah.
1:46:23 Speaker 04 I don't know about that one. That one might be the fiction. The second one, about there being 100 million stellar mass black holes in the Milky Way galaxy in our galaxy alone, but only about 100 have been confirmed. Flip a coin with this one, one of those 50 50. Items, but only 100 have been confirmed. Okay. I don't, I don't have a problem with that ratio. That's a lot of, that's a lot of black holes, 100 million. Um, the third one, only two black holes have been directly imaged. Boy, we saw something recently. There was something recent in the news about the imaging of a black hole. But so are we, is
1:47:08 Speaker 04 it one or is it the second one? M87 at the center of our own galaxy and M87. Isn't M87 a, a galactic cluster of some kind?
1:47:19 Speaker 02 It's a galaxy.
1:47:20 Speaker 04 It is a galaxy.
1:47:21 Speaker 02 Yeah. So M87 star is the black hole in the middle of that galaxy.
1:47:25 Speaker 04 Right. How would we have directly imaged M87? I get Sagittarius A because I think that one's closer, isn't it? Um, yeah, I gotta make a guess. So I'll just, I'll go with my first instinct. I'll say the Einstein one is, uh, the fiction because I, maybe it was, uh, identified earlier than 1971.
1:47:45 Speaker 02 Okay, Kara.
1:47:46 Cara Santa Maria? I don't know what you mean by identified.
1:47:49 Speaker 02 They basically found actual evidence for the existence of a black hole.
1:47:53 Cara Santa Maria? Okay. All right.
1:47:54 Speaker 02 As opposed to it being just a theoretical thing that is predicted.
1:47:57 Cara Santa Maria? Right. So it was theory before, and then there was enough evidence for the kind of, um, the field to say, yeah, we all agree this is a black hole.
1:48:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:48:06 Cara Santa Maria? Okay. Yeah. Cause they weren't imaging them until like recently.
1:48:09 Speaker 02 Right. It's, it was indirect evidence.
1:48:11 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah. Okay. Um, okay. A hundred million stellar black hole, black mass, stellar mass black holes in the Milky Way galaxy, but only 100 have been, I don't know. There's so many numbers there. So many descriptors.
1:48:28 Speaker 04 There's actually two.
1:48:29 Cara Santa Maria? A hundred million stellar mass black hole. Like so, okay. Bigger, smaller. You mean stellar mass or bigger?
1:48:36 Speaker 02 That's a specific category of black hole.
1:48:38 Cara Santa Maria? Uh, okay. And then only two black holes have ever been directly imaged. Oh gosh, I don't know if they've done more since then, because you know how it is, once like something happens, everybody loses interest. So it could have been that since then they've like imaged a whole bunch. I think, okay, I think it's only been two. I feel like I've seen both of those pictures of the two black holes that have been imaged. So I'll stick with that one as science. So then there are about a hundred million stellar mass black holes.
1:49:12 Cara Santa Maria? That sounds like too many, or does it? I'm gonna say that's too many. I have no idea. I'll say that's the fiction, so he doesn't sweep us.
1:49:20 Speaker 04 Fair enough. I know, it's a coin flip.
1:49:23 Speaker 02 Okay, and Jay?
1:49:24 Jay Novella? Yeah, this is not my strong suit, so I'm going to
1:49:28 Cara Santa Maria? Nor mine.
1:49:28 Jay Novella? I'm gonna narrow it down to one little thing in here that I think I know the correct answer to.
1:49:35 Speaker 04 Do it.
1:49:35 Jay Novella? And since I'm last, Steve, I'm gonna, I'll say it. In the third one, where you talk about there's only been two black holes ever that have been directly imaged, you also say that the largest known black hole is M87, and that's not the largest black hole, from my understanding. So I think number three is fiction.
1:49:56 Speaker 04 Ooh, we're spread out.
1:49:57 Cara Santa Maria? Oh, good.
1:49:58 Speaker 04 Well played, Steve. We don't even need to reveal the answer.
1:50:02 Cara Santa Maria? We already won.
1:50:03 Speaker 04 You achieved what you were going for, Steve.
1:50:05 Speaker 02 Okay, what order should we take these in?
1:50:09 Cara Santa Maria? Most stressful.
1:50:11 Speaker 04 Reverse prime, yeah, reverse prime number order.
1:50:14 Jay Novella? Last one first.
1:50:14 Speaker 02 Want to do number three first?
1:50:16 Jay Novella? Yes.
1:50:16 Speaker 02 Okay, only two black holes have ever been directly imaged, size terrestri A star at the center of our own galaxy, and M87 star, the largest known black hole, at 6.5 billion solar masses. Jay, you think this one is the fiction, the rest of you think this one is science, and this one is science. Sorry, Jay, this one is science. I know that the most massive black hole changes over time, but this, certainly at the time it was imaged, it was the largest black hole, and what I'm finding is that it still is listed as the largest black hole. Which one do you think is bigger?
1:50:47 Jay Novella? Steve, there's one that's like 60 billion solar masses.
1:50:50 Cara Santa Maria? Google tells me it's Phoenix A star.
1:50:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, you're right.
1:50:53 Cara Santa Maria? 100 billion times that of our sun.
1:50:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, you're right.
1:50:57 Jay Novella? Okay, what are you gonna do about it?
1:50:58 Cara Santa Maria? Does he get half credit?
1:51:00 Speaker 02 So there's two fictions, so you're, so you are correct.
1:51:04 Jay Novella? Is this a first kind?
1:51:05 Cara Santa Maria? I don't know, that means that one of us is gonna be real embarrassed, and it's gonna be me. I know it.
1:51:11 Speaker 02 So yeah, so yeah, when I researched this, the resources I was looking at said it was M87. I always check it, and I said, what is M87, the biggest black hole? And it said, yes. And, but, but now if you just look at it the other way, what's the biggest black hole? I get Phoenix A star, which is 100 billion times, 100 billion solar masses.
1:51:30 Jay Novella? Is this the only time that this has ever happened, Steve?
1:51:32 Speaker 02 I don't think so, but it's very rare.
1:51:35 Jay Novella? Well, I would like to say that I feel, I feel the love and presence of Bob within me right now.
1:51:41 Speaker 02 And I think he would be very proud of me. I can't believe it. Proud of you. I mean, literally, I read through everything. I'm like, I have no idea. Oh, that's not the biggest black hole.
1:51:51 Cara Santa Maria? That's one thing you know.
1:51:52 Speaker 02 And I think I know the answer because of Bob. Yeah, probably.
1:51:55 Cara Santa Maria? And usually Steve, of course, wouldn't make it fiction because of that ancillary.
1:52:00 Speaker 02 Of course, I know, but I had to point it out. And I didn't even have to say it. I should have just left that out.
1:52:04 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:52:04 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
1:52:05 Speaker 02 Kara, it was my only toehold.
1:52:08 Cara Santa Maria? And you took it.
1:52:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, I know.
1:52:09 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
1:52:11 Speaker 02 I didn't go, I didn't go enough layers deep in confirming what I was being told. Okay.
1:52:16 Speaker 04 Passed this week, Jay.
1:52:17 Speaker 02 Let's go to number two. Astronomers estimate that there are about 100 million stellar mass black holes in the Milky Way galaxy, but only about 100 have been confirmed. Kara, you think this one is the fiction. Jay and Evan think this one is science. And this one is? Science. Sorry, Kara.
1:52:34 Speaker 04 It is.
1:52:34 Speaker 02 Those numbers are accurate.
1:52:35 Cara Santa Maria? It's fine.
1:52:37 Speaker 02 It's an estimate. Obviously, it's an estimate. We only, we've only confirmed 100 of them. But it's basically because we think there's a 100 billion stars or more of order of magnitude in our galaxy, but only about one in a thousand become a stellar mass black hole. So it's probably about 100 million stellar mass black holes. So there, that is a category.
1:52:58 Speaker 04 I think there's 400 billion stars in the galaxy.
1:53:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, I read different estimates, but yeah, it's 100, 200, you know, some say 300 or 400.
1:53:07 Speaker 04 300.
1:53:08 Speaker 02 So that's its order of magnitude. So what are the, what are the four categories of black holes?
1:53:13 Cara Santa Maria? Stellar mass?
1:53:14 Speaker 02 Stellar mass.
1:53:16 Cara Santa Maria? Bigger than stellar mass? Smaller than stellar mass?
1:53:19 Speaker 02 So what's M87 and Phoenix A? What are those?
1:53:22 Speaker 04 Super black holes.
1:53:23 Speaker 02 Super massive, super massive. Yeah, so there's stellar mass, there's super massive, there's two more.
1:53:29 Cara Santa Maria? Massive?
1:53:30 Speaker 02 There's intermediate.
1:53:32 Speaker 02 So in between supermassive and stellar mass.
1:53:35 Cara Santa Maria? You usually need massive if you have supermassive. That's dumb.
1:53:38 Speaker 02 And primordial.
1:53:40 Cara Santa Maria? Tiny?
1:53:40 Speaker 02 Primordial.
1:53:41 Cara Santa Maria? Teeny tiny.
1:53:41 Speaker 04 Primordial?
1:53:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, which are teeny tiny. And they're still a little bit theoretical, but yeah, because we haven't confirmed any. Yeah, so those are the four theoretical types of black holes. All right, which means that Einstein predicted the existence of singularities, only later called black holes. But the first one was not identified until 1971, 16 years after his death. Is the fiction? Evan, you think it's the fiction because you think that black holes were discovered before 1971?
1:54:05 Speaker 04 But was it after?
1:54:07 Speaker 02 That's not the reason this is the fiction.
1:54:09 Speaker 04 Oh, okay.
1:54:10 Speaker 02 So why is it the fiction?
1:54:12 Speaker 04 Well, if it wasn't that, then it was, he didn't predict the existence of
1:54:18 Speaker 02 Correct.
1:54:19 Speaker 04 Black hole of singularities.
1:54:20 Speaker 02 Einstein did not believe in black holes, in singularities. He wrote a paper saying, they do not, we will never find them. They do not exist. The laws of physics do not allow for stars to collapse into singularities. Something will stop their collapse. Even though singularities were essentially mathematically predicted by general relativity, Einstein kind of went back on his own thing, like, right? His sort of claim to fame was saying that these mathematical fixes, when it like, especially when it came to like special relativity, that's how the universe actually works. Then when it came to general relativity and mathematics predicted singularities, like, yeah, okay.
1:55:04 Speaker 02 But that's not how the universe actually exists. But it actually, but it turns out to be true. So he didn't have faith in his own math. At the end, when it came to singularities, he thought some other product. And he wrote a whole paper explaining why he does not think singularities exist. The 1971 is accurate, though. That that was when the, that was the first identified black hole, generally accepted by the scientific community by 1973. Took a couple of years for everyone to agree with the data and review it and blah, blah, blah. But technically identified in 1971.
1:55:38 Speaker 04 Well, I was right for the wrong reason.
1:55:40 Speaker 02 Right for the wrong reason.
1:55:40 Cara Santa Maria? Story of my life. Except today.
1:55:43 Speaker 04 Not today, though.
1:55:44 Cara Santa Maria? You know what? This is, I think, this was fitting, though, that I take the
1:55:49 Speaker 02 If you're gonna take a hit on something.
1:55:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, it would be this.
1:55:54 Speaker 02 All right, Evan, give us a quote.
1:55:55 Speaker 04 "Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds and fanatics. It is, for scientific folk, an unattainable ideal." And that was written by Cassius J. Kaiser, who was a mathematician from, American mathematician from the 19th century.
1:56:12 Speaker 02 Very, very true.
1:56:13 Speaker 04 Absolute certainty, yep.
1:56:14 Speaker 02 But we always have to point out, because, you know, the deniers use that, too. They would love this quote. We have to point out that you can still act on scientific conclusions even when they are less than absolute certainty. We don't deal with metaphysical certitude, but sometimes the probability, the reliability of certain scientific conclusions are so robust, it would be, as Stephen Jay Gould said, it would be perverse not to give them at least preliminary assent.
1:56:43 Speaker 04 There you go.
1:56:43 Speaker 02 And in, from a practical matter, not to act as if they are true.
1:56:48 Cara Santa Maria? We have to make probabilistic decisions all the time.
1:56:51 Speaker 02 All the time.
1:56:51 Cara Santa Maria? We cannot wait for absolute certainty before we act.
1:56:53 Speaker 04 That's the universe we live in.
1:56:55 Speaker 02 All of medicine is making decisions with imperfect information and knowledge.
1:56:58 Cara Santa Maria? All of being alive is making decisions with imperfect information.
1:57:01 Speaker 04 I mean, is it not universal? It is.
1:57:03 Speaker 02 And all of science is ultimately inference.
1:57:06 Speaker 04 Right.
1:57:07 Speaker 02 At the end of the day. But yeah, but that, again, but that doesn't mean you're paralyzed into inaction, which is what the deniers want. Therefore, we do nothing.
1:57:15 Speaker 04 You're not certain, so therefore.
1:57:16 Speaker 02 We know nothing, do nothing, yep.
1:57:18 Cara Santa Maria? Also, something that I'm constantly having to remind my patients of, choosing not to choose is a choice. An action comes with its own consequences.
1:57:27 Speaker 02 Absolutely. Doing nothing is a choice. Absolutely.
1:57:30 Cara Santa Maria? Yes.
1:57:31 Speaker 02 All right. Well, thank you, guys, for joining me this week.
1:57:33 Jay Novella? Thank you, Steve.
1:57:34 Speaker 04 Thank you.
1:57:35 Speaker 02 Bob will be back next week. And until next week, this is your skeptic's guide to the universe.
1:57:43 Speaker 02 Skeptics Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to [email protected] . And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/skepticsguide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.
1:58:20 Speaker 07 This is Jason Timp from Hoops Tonight with Jason Timp. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which can mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.
Previous The Skeptics Guide #1084 - Apr 18 2026 Next The Skeptics Guide #1086 - May 2 2026 Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated