SGU Episode 1074
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| SGU Episode 1074 |
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| February 07th 2026 |
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"Sunrise over Earth: A breathtaking view from the edge of space." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"Technology is a tool, but its impact depends on how we use it for the betterment of society." |
Margaret Hamilton, computer scientist, credited with coining the term "software engineering" |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello, and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, February 5th, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody, Chiara Santa Maria.
C: Howdy.
S: Jay Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein.
E: Good evening everybody.
S: Guys.
E: Yes.
S: You want to be. We are all mentioned in the Epstein files.
C: Oh, I like that you said, guys, because I'm not in there.
B: Yes, we are including our buddy George Throbb. Yeah, also in there and and other and others and other skeptics.
J: Tons of people. I mean, it was like a big list of people that spoke at Tam that year.
C: Yeah, it wasn't like anything specific about any, but the only person who specifically mentioned a lot is poor Rebecca.
S: Yeah, of course, 'cause that was the reason, I think why everything was brought up.
C: Yeah, it. Was all because of.
S: Time, that was, yeah, that was the.
J: Elevator skate And he called her a nasty young woman. And I, I, I think Rebecca is smart enough to know that she's got to make a shit load of T-shirts with.
C: Hell. Yeah, about it. Right. Nasty. Young woman. Oh, that would sound like hotcakes.
S: So being quote UN quote in the Epstein files can mean many, many things. First of all, this is like millions of documents that we're talking about and it's like any e-mail he ever sent about anything. So they're just trash talking skeptics in the in that e-mail that we get mentioned in. It has nothing to do with anything related to Epstein's going doings.
B: You know what? I.
S: Mean.
B: For, for example, for example, Rome, Fiharo says, describing the skeptics groups. Yes, it's a huge group think festival. This is Tam. That's closer to the T the Tea Party movement than an intellectual movement. Like, OK, dude, yeah.
S: Yeah, and then Deepak Chopra, This Is Us. That's we're disgusting.
B: Right. Yeah, right under, well, right, right under the list of these of all the speakers, including us. He just says it's all disgusting.
S: Which is a badge of honor to be testified.
B: Oh yeah, screw that guy.
E: His his typo meant all. I was trying to figure out why he wrote ALLY. Yeah. I think.
B: It was a typo.
E: OK, that's what it is.
B: And then there's another one. This is Rome for horror again, whoever that is saying I'm not sure if they make money as much as they make image in quotes. There's plenty of ambition for recognition inside of the movement really. And with blogs and online media there, there are many new channels that form blah blah blah. It's funny because most of the skeptic influencers are not real scientists yet they want the prestige that comes with fighting for science. Oh man. So then he's like, so I see the motivation being primarily attention and celebrity. Yep, that's what were after attention. And celebrity.
S: Yeah. But you obviously you so much projection there. Yeah, a lot of projection. And you, you could use that to diss anyone getting the message out, you know, through social media. But you could also use that to describe every science journalist, right, You know.
E: Of course.
S: Yeah, so Cara, how'd your root canal go?
C: Well, first, first and foremost, I don't know how many show of hands on a podcast. How many of you have had a root canal?
S: Not me. I have.
E: I have.
C: Three of you.
S: Yeah.
C: Everyone but me. Yeah. Hello. Yeah. Hello, Jay. Hi, Jay. So how's?
E: Your root canal.
C: I don't know if you guys had a similar experience or if you had yours more recently with all the fancy high tech stuff, but I think I told you last time she found four channels, like 4 canals for three roots canal. And one of them is really really small. Like she could hardly even see it on the CT. So it took a long time for her to finally find it, which thank goodness I went with the endodontist and not my dentist. Even though he's amazing, I fully feel like he wouldn't have even known that 4th 1 was there and so he would have sealed it up and there would have still been infection. So she cleaned everything out and she found them all. But that alone took the full 2 hours. And she said that when this happens, she prefers to put the temp on and have somebody come back two weeks later after, you know, the swelling has gone down and finish the job. So I'm only halfway done with my root canal.
B: Oh, gotcha.
C: That said, it was like, not that painful at all. I'm chewing on it today. It's only two days later. I didn't have to take any pain medication or anything.
J: Yeah, I mean, they could be great, they could be fine, you know? But some people have really bad, really bad time with it.
C: I think a lot of people who wait a really long time until things are really bad and they're already in a lot of pain, that can really compound it.
J: Definitely.
E: Are they already infected at that point?
C: Maybe everybody's infected when they need a root canal.
E: Technically.
C: Yeah, that's why they do. That's what a root canal is. It's going into the channels to clean the infected pulp out.
E: I thought it was risk of infection. OK.
J: OK, yeah, I mean, you know, mine, I I didn't have an infection in my jaw when I had it done like basically my tooth wasn't like recoverable that that was the problem.
C: Yeah. And you didn't have an infection in your jaw, but I bet you there was infection in your pulp because if your pulp is exposed to the outside world, bacteria, bacteria from your mouth is in your pulp. So there is technically infection in there.
J: And Care, now that you've had a root canal, you can totally understand why so many people just died of mouth problems before dentistry.
C: Oh, absolutely. I mean, so many things can go wrong in your mouth and.
J: The fact that we only get 2 sets of teeth, like actually we get one set of actual real adult teeth, right? You know, you chew on a bone, you, you crack a tooth, it could kill you. That's.
C: A so insane yeah, all of this started and I, I don't remember if I mentioned this last week. All of this started because my the sleep disorder that I have requires that I take a pretty weird medication and that medication makes me grind my teeth at night. This is all due to bruxism. And this is how we discovered I had bruxism is because I went to the dentist. I thought a filling fell out and he was like, you never had a filling in that tooth. Your tooth is broken from grinding your teeth. And that's when the whole series of night guards and Botox injections in my jaw and everything started. And now I'm protecting my teeth and they're, they're happy and healthy. But in a way, I'm kind of grateful for this root canal because it's preventing more. Oh, absolutely.
E: That's how exactly how I would look at it, no doubt about it.
C: But this is the thing, if you grind your teeth at night, that is not like an inert problem. Like you should really be talking to your your dentist about whether your teeth are damaged from the grinding.
J: Yeah. Well I have AI have a daughter update with the whole moon. Moon landing hoaxer. Oh, it's very minors.
C: And needles.
J: But it is a step forward. The principal interviewed my daughter and asked her to do a tell all on on what she remembers took place.
B: OK.
J: And you know, that's a sign that something's happening. You know, we had already given her all the details that we, that, you know, that I pulled out of my daughter day of. So I don't think she remembered everything anywhere near as clear as, as, you know, three weeks or a month later, you know, But anyway, you know, I'm, I'm just waiting, you know, I do have a little counter in my head, like I'm not going to be patient much longer. I think I'll give them like another week and then I'm going to request a immediate phone conversation with the Superintendent and the principal because I got to keep the pressure on you. I don't want to. They could easily just let this thing fade out into nothing. And you know, me and my wife are the only people that are going to that are keeping it alive as far as I'm concerned.
B: All right, man, fight the good fight, Jay.
J: Yeah, we're doing it.
B: Yeah.
Quickie with Bob: Death of 8K TVs (07:38)
J: All right, Bob, you're going to start us off with a quickie.
B: Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob guys, it looks like we may be dead before we have 8 KTVS. Not so much you though. Cara, you.
C: Never know.
E: There's no way I can buy 8000 televisions so.
B: Bottom line, 8K is essentially being abandoned by TV manufacturers.
E: Oh, you mean resolution?
B: Yes. So guys, many of us have 4K UHDTVS right now, right? Probably a lot of people. A lot of people do.
E: Right on 4/20 I'll get there.
B: As as a refresher, 4K UHDTV that many people have now, in fact it's over a billion people. It's three 3800 about by 2100 approximately. That's like a little over 8 million pixels. 8 KTV would be about 7600 by 4300 pixels, and that's 33 / a little over 33 million pixels instead of 8. So yeah, 8K has twice the resolution in each dimension and four times the total pixels, so the sharpness and the detail are clearly superior. And they've actually existed for years. I wasn't quite aware how long they've been around, but Japan started selling them in 2015, 11 years ago. And Samsung sold them in the US starting back in 2018 already like 8 years. So they've been out there for a while. And back then the TV industry was like really pushing the, the, you know, the idea that 8K is the future. And it seemed somewhat reasonable to me and always kind of, you know, interested in that. But yet now the TV industry is abandoning AK. And for example, LG recently reported it will no longer make 8K panels, TV panels. TCL, which I'm not too familiar with, They released their last 8 KTV in 2021 already a half a decade ago they stopped it and Sony discontinued its last 8 KTVS in just last year, I think it was in April 2025 S My question is, why would such a cool and clearly superior technology be treated so terribly? Because they're.
E: Not making profit.
B: It's, it's, it's not hard to figure out, right? There's lots of reasons. First one that pops up is just the the sheer expense. They're obviously, they were obviously quite expensive, just as four KS were when they first came out. But LG in 2022 was charging 13,000 USD for 76 inch TV. Now, granted, that's, you know, that's still a big, that's a big TV, but they had just lowered the price by 7000. So it was 20,000 not too long before 2022. So yeah, these were expensive. One big reason here is just the the content itself. There was basically zero native 8K content available, even 20 and 20252026 years after the TV's have been available available. But if you think of it that way though, there's still not a lot of 4K content available. And that's why that's one big reason why I don't even have a 4K yet. It's like, you know, what's the point? There's really not that much 4K content, real good 4K content out there.
S: 4K native 4K because a lot of TV's can upscale resolution.
E: It's a cheat.
B: Yeah. Yeah, but even many people that many streaming, broadcasting and even gaming users to this day still rely on just HD 1920 by 1080 resolution, which is good, which is still good. But man, we with when 4K has been out for so long, it's just a little surprising. And you could stream 4K. I've seen the options to stream 4K, but it's really, is it really 4K? It's so compressed, which gives it really low bit rates. It's really, it's really a travesty. If you think about it, it's not really even 4K anymore. It, it, you know, it go into a store like a what any big store, any big box store that sells TV's, if they're still, you look at the four KTVS in there and they look amazing. They're just like, it really takes your breath away. And there's a lot of reasons why they, that happens because they're, you know, they're totally optimizing it for, for, for where it's being displayed. It, you know, they're totally tweaked to play specific terrific videos, but they're but they're also playing uncompressed high bitrate video like maybe from a hard drive or a disk. So that's something that you're not going to get at home unless you unless you buy, you know, the full file and have it locally. If you're streaming it, it's going to be super compressed and the quality is going to go way, way down. So that's kind of frustrating. Exactly. Oh.
S: Yeah, if you really like a movie and it's very cinematic or whatever, you know, it's still worth having it in Blu-ray because you get that real full 4K you could. You can't see the difference.
B: When I buy a 4K, I'm absolutely going to going to say, all right, I'm going to get like 5 or 6 discs of like my, you know, 4K discs of my the best movies that that really, really would benefit from, you know, uncompressed and super thing. But The thing is even for for going going back to AK, most people wouldn't have even noticed the difference between 4K and AK. If they went up to AK, they really wouldn't have even noticed. Many people would have some, some would have. But but get this, if you had a 50 inch 8 KTV, you would have to sit 1m or closer from the set to really notice the difference. Who sits 3 feet little over 3 feet from from their TV? That would be kind of stupidly close, I think, right?
S: Yeah, I mean the the only reason to go 8K would be if you had like a 70 inch TV. Like if you had like a really big TV then then.
B: Well then listen. Yeah, Well, listen to this because.
S: Steve gets farther against by.
E: Appreciate at that point or something else?
B: But I'll quantify that for you. If you had an 80 to 100 TV, you would still have to be two to three meters away. So what 6 point, you know, so it's. 6 to 10 feet. Kind of yeah, so but a correct. So that would actually be kind of OK, but still we're talking 80 to 100 inch TVI don't know anybody that's got an 80 to 100 inch TV. They're out there for sure. But you want to talk about a lot of money. So that's that's a nut. So that just adds to the reasons why people aren't wouldn't, didn't want to do this. So, so my advice is is if people, if you want to invest money into ATV to have a dramatic impact on the image, you're much better off not don't not getting an 8 KTV, which with with no content really, but invest in the non resolution upgrades, right? The the OLEDSHDR support micro LED quantum dots, micro RGB that those will make the picture really look dramatically better, far better than than NK than 8K, even if you got up close to it. So right, so that all said, eight KS, they're they're not dead. You can still buy them from Samsung for now. 8K, I'm sure it's going to be used over the years by enthusiasts, right, Because they're always going to be enthusiasts that are looking for for super high dense resolution, yeah.
E: Betamax is still a thing too.
B: Right. It's also going to be used for other product types other than TV's like for example head mounted displays. Absolutely you would you would want something like 8K resolution for a head mounted display. So sure, maybe someday 8K or even 10K which would be cool. Will will be a must have TV upgrade. Who knows when, if ever, but assuming, but also assuming we haven't gone full neural link and started streaming Netflix straight into our visual cortex, maybe we'll see it. And you know, who knows how long it might even take, if ever, to get here. So so Steve, this has been your pixelated quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.
S: It's possible just for regular TV viewing, it may never be worth it. But what's interesting is that, I mean, there's diminishing returns with increased expense as you say, most people wouldn't notice it. There's also like there's some technologies require several things to happen all at once for the higher resolution, right? You need the displays and the content and the bandwidth, you know, all at the same time. And if you don't have that, there's a cheat get you at the chicken and the egg problem. Like why make the TV if there's no content? Yeah, why make the content if there's no TV to display it? And if you have to compress the hell out of it anyway because you don't have the the bandwidth. But the other thing which you allude which you alluded to but I want to make an.
B: Experimental impact. There's an environmental impact, too.
S: Yeah, absolutely.
B: Not, you know, not a small one. I.
S: Wasn't going to bring that up, but when we there's a tendency and this is partly marketing, partly our intellectual laziness to to boil down technology to 1 number, yes, right. That happened with computers. There was a time. Now we don't really care, but there was a time.
B: Megapixels and phone cameras.
S: Megapixels and cameras as if that's the only number that describes the quality of your camera, the clock speed of your of your computer, and then the the how you know how many K or what the resolution of your TV is. But as you say, it's the, you know technologies like these have multiple features, some of which have a greater impact impact on the performance of the technology then that one number that people obsess about. Absolutely you're way better off getting ATV with a high dynamic range than just higher pixels. That would absolutely. That would give you a much better image quality.
E: And I'm not sure the culture is caught is is any anymore wants to be, you know, family time around the television thing. It's more personal devices, smaller devices, portable devices. So I think the culture is also had a factor here.
B: Yeah, that's true. There's a lot more screens out there today than there were, you know, 1520 years ago.
S: Yeah, but conversely, people are doing home theater way more than going out to the movies, too.
B: That's right.
S: And so people are investing in their their home theater because that's they're using it way more. So I'm not sure I agree with that. All right, Cara, I understand RFK is up to some other shenanigans.
News Items
Faith-Based Addiction Programs (17:01)
S: Tell us.
B: Oh. God.
C: OK, so I have opened a massive can of worms and choosing to cover this topic. So I'm gonna give the highlights right at the top, but I really curious about some kind of other discussions that this opened up for me. So, so the long and short of it is that RFK junior over the course of a few different sort of stops earlier this week started to announce some new programs that he's interested in funding. That's not even the right he's not funding them, but in in initiating for both substance use disorder and homelessness. And here's the problem. Well, here's one of like 10 problems that I've come across. Well there there's an article written in the New York Times 3 days ago as of this recording, which was decidedly uncritical and that really worried me. So I started to dig a lot deeper. But basically the headline was HHS to expand faith-based addiction programs for homeless. Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Junior said addiction is a quote spiritual disease that calls out for the involvement of religious organizations. So, so although, and every time I dig into what this man is claiming, it's always that pseudo scientific skill of like, uh huh, a great, wait a minute, where are you going with that? Like he always puts just enough reality into these claims and quotes and kind of catches you and then, you know, hits you with a curveball. There's so much. There's so much to dig into here. So he's talking about a $100 million pilot program that he's calling streets, which stands for Safety through Recovery, Engagement and Evidence Based Treatment and supports. And his approach, as he's talked about this is here's a perfect quote. We'll engage people continuously from first contact on the street through recovery, through employment and through self-sufficiency. Law enforcement, courts, housing providers and healthcare systems will work as one team so people will no longer fall through the cracks. OK, first of all, that sounds great. I don't understand how $10 million is going to accomplish that by any stretch of the imagination. Second, I don't think what he's saying there vaguely is any any different than what every community goal has always been to combat homelessness. But the main issue here, and this is what I'm seeing over and over and over, is that the administration as a whole has decided to stop using the housing first approach, which we've been using for decades at this point, and is switching gears to what they're calling a treatment first approach. So do you guys understand the difference between a housing first approach and A and a treatment first approach? It's really an ideological difference which. Translates.
J: Well, let's describe it, because maybe everyone doesn't know.
C: Yeah, so, so Housing First, which has been the approach up until now for several decades, is people need a place to live. Until unhoused people have a roof over their heads and a stable place where they can lock the door behind them, they're not going to be able to work on the myriad problems that contribute to why they have been dealing with chronic homelessness. The treatment first approaches claims Most people who are homeless are homeless because they're addicted to drugs or alcohol. So if we treat their addiction, they'll be able to get a job and to get their bank accounts where they need to be to be able to, you know, live in a home and maintain a roof over their heads. Do you see a practical difference between the two?
S: Yeah, Housing first basically makes changes so that it's easier to get housing or provides it for people who, you know, at least temporarily. Treatment first doesn't do that and you know, puts invests money in treatment centers but not in housing programs.
C: And the vast majority of the evidence shows that Housing First programs work. And so that's why it's quite frustrating for me when I see RFK Junior throwing around terms like evidence based, evidence based, evidence based. And while I do support and fully agree that only organizations that hold to evidence based standards should get funding from the federal government, I am very worried about, yeah, but they're, I mean, they're using evidence based so that that's the term they use. But I'm very, very worried about opening those funding opportunities up to faith-based organizations.
S: I mean RFK junior uses evidence based as a weapon, not.
C: As a exactly so RFK Junior famously himself credits 12 Step to his recovery from drug and alcohol abuse. So from.
US#02: Heroin addiction.
C: Yeah, from from a heroin addiction and alcohol addiction. He famously also says that he attends upwards of eight meetings a week. Now, I am not saying that 12 step does not have a pretty decent evidence base to support it. What I am saying is that 12 Step is not without a lot of problems and I think that we have looked at the approach to treating addiction in this country through a very, very narrow lens. 12 steps started a long time ago before we knew as much as we know now about the neurological, medical and complex psychological basis of substance use disorder. 12 step programs as we know are often delivered through either religious organizations or peer groups and Maya Salivitz, who is an investigative science journalist who has written about this a lot, she made a statement that I think is important to quote here. She said in my view, a A and treatment need to get amicably divorced. The social support provided by 12 step groups and the way they offer sense of meaning and purpose can help someone with addictions. So I believe it makes sense for treatment providers to tell people about the programs and even encourage them to try a meeting or two, with the caveats this is not the only way to get better and that membership doesn't qualify people to give medical advice. Let's let treatment be treatment and AABAA. Think about it in the same way we view cancer care. Your support group is not your oncologist. Each can play an important role in your well-being and survival. But cancer patients aren't experts in oncology just because they've had the disease. And that's how a lot of 12 step works. And basically what RFK junior is saying is that he wants to fund mostly 12 step treatment because he thinks this is going to then solve the homelessness crisis. And I'm not minimizing some of the claims that he makes about different organizations working together and you know, a community based approach to working on evidence based treatment for addiction. Like that all sounds great. But the problem is it's really, really vague about how they're going to do that. And when you get into the nitty gritty over and over and over, his teams and the administration as a whole are saying not housing first, treatment 1st. And this goes hand in hand with a massive shift to the way that HUD, which stands for what does HUD stand for? Housing and Urban Development. Yeah, Yeah.
B: Heads up, display.
J: Do you know what? HUD stands for though.
B: Cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.
J: What does? Chode stand for. Thank you, Bab.
C: Anyway, so last year, I don't know if we, I don't, we didn't cover this on the show, I don't think. But last year, I think right around November, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, put out a 128 page notice that said that of the $3.9 billion in continuation of care or continuum of care funds, which is the main source of federal money for homelessness, that they were going to pivot the way that that money is used right now, 90% of it goes towards putting people in homes, and they were going to cut that aid so that only 20% of it went towards actual housing. We've got to remember that this is coming from an administration where, for example, in 2023, in a campaign video, President Trump himself said that unsheltered homeless people are, quote, dangerously deranged people that destroy urban life. And he's talked at great length about moving them from, you know, encampments into what he calls treatment camps, which is really worrisome for me. One of the big issues with Housing First is that by definition, housing First often offers treatment but doesn't require it as a condition of housing. Whereas when we're talking about treatment first, very often the treatment is fundamentally required in order to receive any of the so-called entitlements that are offered in these programs. And I think it's easy when you've never worked with individuals who either suffer from severe mental illness or severe substance use disorder or neither or both, that you cannot mandate treatment. It doesn't work. People have to want treatment. They have to be ready for treatment. They have to be engaged in their treatment, and none of this actually confronts what I believe and quite a lot of the litter. It's really hard to parse these things down, but maybe I shouldn't even word it that way. A really important component of why there is a homelessness crisis in this country. It's very easy to go. Everybody who's on the street right now has a mental illness or is on drugs or alcohol, and if we can just treat that, they'll be better. OK, Easy to say impossible. I shouldn't say impossible. Very hard to do, but also not reflective of reality.
S: It's not true, it's part of the problem, but. It's not.
C: It's part of the problem, but what is? What is OK if everybody on the street has one issue? They all people who are living on the street have one issue. Some of them might have, you know, substance use disorder, some of them might have mental illness, but all of them have a single issue. What is that issue?
S: No place to live?
C: They don't have anywhere to live, and the reason they don't have anywhere to live more often than not is because they can't afford to live somewhere. And this does nothing to address the the major crisis, which is that housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable.
S: There's a number of reasons for that. We just, we haven't built enough houses to keep up with demand, although that usually the market adjusts and it might take 5 to 10 years, but eventually, you know, you know, barring some other then it's something else disruptive. That problem can solve itself. But there's also, I've read multiple articles about the fact that we don't really build medium housing. Like we build homes and apartments, but we don't really build a lot of like the row houses where you can own your own home, but it's small and on very small property and it's affordable because it's like the cheapest home you can own. We're sort of missing mobile home. We're missing that middle ground. And that's that is a huge part of the problem.
C: And we also, I mean, there are so many downstream issues with the way that our society is structured. We criminalize poverty in our society. The poorer you are, the more expensive money is to get.
S: It's very expensive to be poor.
C: Yeah. And so it, it just becomes this like hole that you cannot dig out of, which is why in the places where housing first has been utilized and studied, they show that once once people have a roof over their heads and a stable door that they can lock, where they can shower in dignity, they can put on their clothes in dignity, they can eat a meal, you know, in, in the safety of their own home. A lot of those other things they can work on their sobriety, they can work on their mental health, they can work. But the truth of the matter is, and this is the part I think we're all afraid to say out loud, there are some people who will never be able to, quote UN quote, contribute to society. There are always going to to be people who are disabled and can't earn the type of paycheck that these types of programs seem to expect them to be able to earn. What happens to those people? And how do we care for the most vulnerable among us? Where are the programs for them? We we have had them historically, but it does feel like this is a dismantling of that. And it bothers me that a lot of the coverage of this right now is taking the claims of, oh, we're all going to work together And, you know, look at all this funding and and you know, we're going to help people with their addiction. Don't worry. This is going to solve homelessness like with like a really unskeptical eye. Now, after saying all that, there is one thing that this initiative is doing that I kind of am like, hey, that seems like a good idea. And I'm curious about your take, Steve. So he did talk about this thing called MOUD mode. MOUD, Which? What he's doing is adding three medications for opiate opioid use disorder and making it so that the Administration for Children and Families will be footing the bill for a 50% federal match to provide methadone, naltrexone, and buprenorphine to parents if there's an imminent risk of their children entering foster care because of an opioid use disorder. It's it's basically helping to fund the treatment for that opioid use disorder so that the kids can stay in the home with their families. And that's something that I think could actually be very beneficial both from a public health perspective and also financially it could be very beneficial.
S: It sounds a good idea. I don't have any specific information about.
C: It exactly, it sounds like a good idea, it sounds. And that's the thing that's so frustrating sometimes when it comes to RFK Junior, is that there's like these good ideas sprinkled in with this abject nonsense, and then it's all tied up in a pretty bow that uses all the right language.
E: Right. So it sells easily and people don't really understand what they're what it is they're being, they're being peddled. Yep.
S: He misses all the nuance and the actual evidence. I did prep a little bit about just faith-based addiction programs because I'm very familiar with that literature, but I got myself updated just to meet to see what what is recent. And it's basically, you know what I've been reading for years. They do work, but they don't work any better than any intervention, whether it's faith-based or not. And Moat there's very little research and what and a lot of the research that exists looks at a A. But The thing is, the things about a A that make it work are not the faith-based component. So it's a lot of mixing of evidence there. There is really no convincing evidence that the introduction of faith-based itself is of any benefit. What the things that help are, having a support group, having community, you know, dedicating yourself to getting better, those kind of things. Yeah, they're all great and they that's what makes a difference. And The thing is, I'm not against a faith. If you are so a person of faith and you want to use a a faith-based clinic because it aligns with your worldview or whatever, that's fine. I have a problem with the government specifically supporting faith-based intervention.
C: So, yeah, it's unconstitutional, first of all, because it requires that they have daylight between their secular approaches and any proselytizing, and we don't trust that they'll do that.
S: Right. But, but, but having said that though, like if I don't care if they're paying for treatment programs that are incidentally faith-based, but that's not what I'm hearing here, right? No, like if a hospital is run by the Catholic Church and Medicare pays for treatment at the hospital, that's incidental. You know what I mean? That's not paying for the religious part of it. But this sounds like they are and that is a problem.
C: And so there there are a lot of problems and I think that the picture is really, really mixed. But I also think that's not really what's at issue here. I think what's that issue here is a fundamental ideological change in approaches to public health by this administration. And that's a moralistic approach to a medical problem and a social problem. And that really worries me.
S: All right. Thanks, Cara.
Noise and Sleep (33:54)
J: Jay, tell us about noise and sleep. Guys, do you sleep in a noisy environment at night?
E: No, always.
J: Like what?
E: What do you got? There's no absence of noise. There's never an absence of. Noise.
C: Yeah, but that's different than noisy.
J: Like what do you what do you do you have like a a like white noise thing or you have like outside noises?
E: I happen to use a white noise device, but there are just natural noises occurring in nature that I can hear even if I didn't have anything on.
J: Like the wolves?
E: Trees, the wind, the rain, the yes, animals, definitely.
J: Do the do the voices ever like, talk to you? They ever like try to communicate with you.
E: Yes they do and I've they tell me to burn things and.
B: Don't sleep. Don't. Sleep, don't sleep.
J: Well, I've I've used a couple of different things, different types of white noise and I used to really like the sound of crickets.
C: Really, you could sleep to the sound of crickets.
J: Yeah, it would be low and it'd be yeah, yeah, yeah.
C: I use a playlist on Spotify called Floating Through Space. That's like really ambient with no melodic, like no rhythm, nothing that I can, you know, attune to, but just enough sort of ambient pleasing sounds that it it tunes out any out outside noise.
J: So there are, there are noise environments, right? There's noisy places. Lots of people that live in cities, you know, they have to deal with nonstop noise. I remember when I lived in Manhattan, sirens, right?
E: All.
J: Yeah, I was just noise all night long.
C: In LA, it's the helicopters. There's so many helicopters. Wow. Yeah.
E: Fascinating.
J: And I think we've all been, you know, we've become accustomed to this like standard of just dealing with, you know, sounds all the time. You know, it really is that way. And then, you know, there are people like, you know, Karen, I have done this where you you'll pick some type of ambient sound or a pink noise. There's white noise. These are very popular. And there's a ton of apps out there that sell, you know, access to these sounds. And, you know, they try to, you know, it's like as a sleep tool to help you get better sleep and, you know.
E: YouTube has videos for that as well, a lot of them.
J: And they say they're masking sounds and they help promote deeper rest. You know, the assumption here is that I guess most people accept that, that this idea that if you listen to something, it could be calming, it could give you better sleep. And, you know, that's is it true? I guess that's the question. And there was a study that was done, and I will tell you right out of the gate, there was only 25 people in the in the study and they tested them for seven days. But it did reveal some things that are going to warrant more research. And I think everyone out there listening to this should, especially if you're using ambient noise or whatever, like to, you know, think it over, you know, maybe, maybe it isn't the best thing for you to do because here's what they found. So the sleep researchers have known for a very long time, like decades, that intermittent environmental noise can and does disrupt sleep. It's very common for it to disrupt, disrupt people's sleep. It doesn't have to wake the person completely up. You know, just sounds in general. Even a brief sound can lead to fragmented sleep, and that's not good. So this new study, this was done by a laboratory led by Matthias Basner and colleagues at the Chronobiology and Isolation Laboratory. Isolation Laboratory, What do they do there? This study was published in the journal Sleep. And it directly compared to low cost and widely accessible strategies for coping with these nighttime noises that apparently all of us are suffering from. You could use continuous pink noise, which is a collection of different tones together that make like a, a blanket of of sound. I mean, if you hear it, you'd recognize it. And then the standard foam earplugs. So what the researchers did, they didn't want to rely on self reporting because it's, it's just not a good way to go about it. And they didn't want to do any single night snapshots. Of course they had to build in some randomized controlled crossover design that would help them get, you know, bit to better data, right? So they they did something called a full Poly sonomigraphy. Did I say that right, guys?
S: Say that again. Almost.
J: Poly, Poly polysomnography. Thank you, Steve. They did this. They did full polysomnography, which allowed them to track how different noise strategies reshape sleep stage by stage. So let me explain this to you. So they took the 25 healthy adults aged 21 to 41. They spent seven nights in the sleep lab after an adaptation night, right? They just gave them a night to figure out what the room's like and get comfortable in their environment. The The participants cycled through 6 carefully controlled conditions. They had a quiet control night, a intermittent environmental noise alone, pink noise alone at 50 decibels, environmental noise combined with pink noise at 40 decibels, environmental noise combined with pink noise at 50 decibels and environmental noise combined with earplugs. On the nights that they had noises, participants were exposed to 93 discrete, what they call sound events across 8 hours during the time to sleep. So these things could have been anything from aircraft sounds, vehicle sounds, alarms, you know, tons of other common noises that are found in the home or in, in the in cities in general, sleep restores the body during a phase called N3 sleep. And of course, everyone's heard of of REM sleep, so the scientist measured the total time that each patient was in both N 3 and REM sleep. So deep N3 sleep is closely tied to physical restoration, metabolic regulation, and then REM sleep plays a central role in memory consolidation, emotional processing, and neurodevelopment. You know, I want all of these things. I want all these things to happen to me every night. And the results clearly showed that the intermittent environmental noise primarily reduced deep N3 sleep and replaced it with the lighter N2 sleep, which, you know, is nowhere near as beneficial. And pink noise, by contrast, showed a different type of signature when when they played it continuously on an otherwise quiet night. Pink noise actually reduced REM sleep. It shifted the test subjects into a lighter sleep stage, which again, that's not good because you really do need quite a bit of REM sleep in order for all that processing to happen.
C: Wait real quick, this was when there were noises outside or no noises outside?
J: What the study said was it, it protected them a little bit from some of the noises, but the aggregate of the pink noise was it was moving them into a lighter sleep. So the the net gain was was far less than the net, you know, bad. It was doing more damage than good.
C: What I'm saying is that's only with noise disruptions.
J: No, just pink noise.
C: Oh, that's what I was asking.
J: Yeah, I'm sorry.
C: Karen Oh, OK, OK, that makes. Sense. Yeah, pink noise by itself. Own oh, that's. Interesting, right? I know.
J: I couldn't believe that. I mean, like what? Like you're just hearing like this consistent mellow noise and you'd think, you know, it's super steady. There isn't any highs and lows in it. It just goes on and on and and again, like it does have an, according to the study against 25 people, but you know, they found what they found. So, you know, like I said, it did, it did reduce some negative outcomes due to the other noise events that they would introduce because it could mask them a little bit, right? You play a little airplane noise and the pink noise detuned that. But the overall effect of having the pink noise going was that it's suppressed REM sleep and that's not good. The earplugs, though, were great, right? Wearing the standard foam earplugs, it mitigated nearly all of the environmental noise related to the, you know, these disruptions that they were introducing during in while these people were sleeping. And it did, of course, they didn't have any effect on sleep structure or fragmentation like it did. None of these bad things happened. Deep sleep was they classified it as largely restored and most sleep measures on air plug nights were statistically indistinguishable from just a quiet room. Wow. So what we found out from the study is any noises that happened during the night can get you out of the N3 deep sleep that we need. This is like, you know, when they say this is the deep sleep where they say this is the restorative sleep. You need this and you need as much of that as you can get. And then, you know, pink noise and any of these noises that they introduced was also bringing people out of REM sleep, which is bad. So if you're in a noisy environment, again, Leo, low numbers to the study here, but you know, just try this. Try not sleeping with the noise like the pink noise or whatever like the the environmental noise and put ear plugs in if there's any noises in your room. Or just let it be quiet and give that a few nights and see if that helps you sleep in in any way.
C: What they didn't look at in this study at all is how much of any of this stuff was novel to the sleeper. So if these people never listen to pink noise, and now they're listening to pink noise for the first time for seven days straight, that's still noise to them.
J: I it was.
S: It was a small study, they couldn't parse that. Finally.
C: Yeah.
J: I I totally agree. You know, again, they do these small studies to see if they should do more studies.
C: Yeah. But I'm curious if there is like an attunement over time where your brain, because it could be because you're trying to sleep and your brain keeps going, I'm hearing something, I'm hearing something, I'm hearing something.
J: Yeah.
C: But maybe over time, because we do, we accommodate to things.
J: I agree and I love I since my kids were born, I had a like a box fan just blowing white noise and it really does lower the noises that are coming from downstairs if anybody is still awake. And now everybody in my house just loves having like that low hum background noise to deaden the air a little bit, you know?
S: All right. Thanks, Jay. So guys, let me ask you a question.
E: OK.
S: Do you think, let's let's start, let's talk about the US because I do think this is very country specific. You can't ask this generally in the US. Do you think we have the technology right now to have our electricity grid be fully renewable?
A Fully Renewable Grid (44:10)
J: The technology itself, well, we have the technology to do it, but we don't have the the will or the money.
C: Yeah. Do you mean is the technology cheap enough or does the technology exist?
S: Well, I mean all of those things, this one.
C: I don't think it's cheap enough yet, but I think the technology exists.
S: Yeah. So I don't know, it's an interesting question. So, So what would it take in order to have a fully renewable grid? So we could ask one question, could we produce enough electricity with wind and solar alone?
C: If we had batteries.
S: Well, that's a, that's a separate value. Now you're getting into storage. If we say just Oh yeah, could we just produce enough electricity? Sure, absolutely. That's not the issue. And wind and solar are the cheapest new forms of electricity, right? So they they are cheap in and of themselves and we absolutely can, you know, power our country with that. But there's the intermittency problem, which means we need storage. So that's why you bring up batteries. So the real question that becomes is do we have the technology to have sufficient storage to have an entire renewable grid? What do you guys?
E: Think would we deplete all of our lithium?
C: That's what I meant when I said I think we have the technology, but I don't know if ever if it's affordable for like the country.
E: Right. Is it practical or is it a $10 trillion investment of some kind?
S: Yes, about yeah. So it's it's partly an issue of cost and but in but more than that, it's really a an issue of raw material. It'd be very difficult to build enough enough batteries and also batteries only work over like a one day time frame. You know, it's great when you're shifting energy produced during the day from sunshine to used at night or maybe even a couple of days, 2-3 days. Of course, the longer you're shifting it, the more batteries you need. It gets end up meeting a lot of batteries really fast. So it's probably best to think of the, you know, battery backups as like a 4 to 8 hour, you know, backup shifting of production and use.
E: No, just build 3 times of them.
C: What if the grid was the backup? What if what we were talking about is that every structure that has an electric meter, right? Every structure that receives electricity from the grid is equipped with solar and a battery.
S: Well, yeah.
C: Would we have enough for that?
S: Yeah. So there's a there's a big move in that direction. Like in Connecticut, the state will give you has an incentive to they'll give you money to help buy your home battery backup if you let them use it for grid storage.
B: Yeah.
S: And so, yeah, absolutely. So that is one way to get there. But is that even if we had enough batteries, we're still just shifting production and use over, even if we are very generous over two to three days? What about seasonal disconnects though in energy production and use?
B: 200.
S: Right. Like I have solar panels on my roof in Connecticut. I make 200% of the energy that I need during the summer and like 20% of the energy in the winter.
E: Hopefully no snow gets on those.
S: So like, yeah, so in in January and February, I'm getting all my electricity from the grid even though I have solar panels on my roof. Well.
C: What are the options for places like that? Like obviously I live in LA, we're fine with solar. It's rare that we would not need it over the course of more than like 2 days. But in in Connecticut, obviously you can't rely on the sun all the time. Are there great? Like what about wind for you guys on those times when solar is not reasonable?
S: Yes, Wind is not has, doesn't, doesn't, it's intermittent, but doesn't it's not the same problem as solar. It's usually because the wind can blow at night, it could blow any time of the year. It doesn't really matter. So with wind you, you have two potential solutions to the intermittency problem 1 is is grid backup. The other is having a widely distributed network, which kind of leads you to the other solution, which is, well, even if we're not making electricity in the northern part of the country during the winter, you are in the southern part of the country. So you.
J: Can have just a.
S: Massive grid that's that allows us to ship energy from where it's made to where it's used. So you either need a massive grid upgrade or, or with some combination of short and long term grid storage. And with long term storage, you need something like pumped hydro, right? So that's when you start trying to ask the question like is it really reasonable to get to a point where we have an all renewable grid? That's what we're talking about. We're talking about short term storage, long term storage, lots of it in some combination with a massive grid upgrade to send you to, to have, you know, those wind turbines spread out over a long area or we're shipping, you know, energy from sunny parts of the country to not sunny parts of the country.
E: Yeah. Some. Power my Bitcoin mining, you know?
S: Yeah.
C: But imagine also that you add to that, it's not just the structures, but every car has its own battery. That's a two way battery. And then there are charging stations all over the country.
S: Yes, but at the same time then every car is also electric and is.
C: Is.
S: Using the demand on the, the, the the production, right. So now we are not only powering everything we're powering now, we're also powering.
C: Also all the cars.
S: Fleet of cars, but you do get the benefit as you could use the batteries.
C: Absolutely as part of and it interconnects the grid a little bit better because now it's not just house to house, it's every charging station in the country is connected as well.
S: Yeah, that's that's true.
C: So it expands the web of the grid.
S: Think about like how much would be we be moving power around by charging in one place and then driving to the place. I don't know if that would be significant enough or it will come out.
C: Might not be, but could be all. Right.
S: So the reason why I'm talking about all of this is because the, the most frequent e-mail that we got over the last couple of weeks was actually pointing us towards technology connections with the the host Alec Watson, who who did a video recently about the plausibility of having a fully renewable grid. And as if this is sort of an answer to our discussions, particularly my discussions on this topic. So let me summarize what he said because he was very in favor of it. He makes very good points. So I don't think anything is different than than anything we've said, although he might, he might have added some perspectives. So he he mainly addressed the questions that people have or the misinformation against using renewables and battery backup. Like, for example, he says, you know, like fossil fuels are completely extracted, right? You take the fossil fuel out of the ground and you burn it and it's gone. It's one time 1 directional. It's a very, very poor investment, which I agree with.
C: And it takes a long time to make more.
S: We don't make more on human time scale exactly so it will. It just diminishes the finite resource. But if you build a solar panel, you have the upfront cost, which is an investment, but now you get basically free electricity for 20 plus years. So it's a completely different approach. Or if you build the wind turbines, the same thing. Yes, there's upfront cost, there's some maintenance, you know, but by and large you then just get, you're not burning fuel, right? The energy itself is free. It's just you need the infrastructure to harvest the energy. And so it's a way better investment. And they said, let's say he addressed some of the issues that people bring up like with grid scale solar, people like, but it uses up so much land. And he said, OK, let's consider this right now. We are, we have a certain amount of land that grows corn for for biofuel, right, for ethanol and which is a horribly inefficient use of land, right that the, the amount of energy you get per acre is really low if you're just using it to make corn to make ethanol to put into gasoline if you use.
C: The waste of water to.
S: Not just the same area, the exact same land which is not in idealized locations for solar. But if you just stopped growing corn for ethanol and put solar panels on the same exact land, you would make thousands of times much. Energy.
B: Oh my.
S: Gosh, as you get out of the ethanol, in fact, you could you could power the entire United States just out of those solar what?
C: Not wow he's saying literally just ripping out the corn and adding solar to where it already is. Not even the places where solar would do better.
S: It's not even the optimal places to put solar, just putting it where it is.
C: That's amazing, yeah.
S: Which I agree, the land use is not a limiting factor. I also have said many times.
C: We can add solar to all our roofs, yeah.
E: Well, that's it. Yeah, you go.
S: He points out, and I know there are people have made this argument too, grid scale solar is more efficient than rooftop solar. But I agree I I think rooftop solar.
C: It's not an either or.
S: It's not, it's not an either or. You could do both. If we have if all residential homes had rooftop solar, that would make 30% of the energy of our country use the whole sort of.
C: Stuff, yeah. And then add to it commercial real estate. Yeah, not just residential.
S: Yeah, and then you have grid scale solar for cities and people who don't own their homes.
B: Blah. Blah blah and roads.
S: Yeah, I said.
E: Well.
S: What about Bob, what about all the lithium to make the batteries and his this is his answer to that. He's like, well, first of all, and this is true, we've talked about this battery technology is advancing very quickly. There's already production sodium ion batteries which don't use any lithium. And you know, so we are making batteries increasingly out of non-toxic cheap abundant elements, right. So that problem is getting better and it's like once you extract those materials and make your batteries, you could just recycle the batteries. You're not burning the batteries, right? You're not that resource is not going away like with fossil fuel Those I those elements are still there and you just just recycle the batteries. You mine the batteries, right? So once.
C: And they're usable still.
S: Once we get enough batteries to run the world, we just just need to continuously recycle them. So again, that's true. So he's spoken a lot of sort of broad brush stroke, big concepts, and they're all correct. And I do think it does put everything into perspective. But he didn't really address what I've been saying. And he didn't specifically address like nuclear or geothermal or whatever. Hydroelectric, yeah, I just didn't, didn't address it. So what he's saying is we will get there eventually, which I agree with. We will get there eventually. That's not the point. We can eventually get to the point that where we have a even a fully renewable grid, you know, that can work. There's nothing theoretically impossible about it. We have enough land, we have enough resources, and we could make make way more energy than we need with just just wind and solar. The question is, and this is not addressed in the video, and this is the reason why I think we should be supporting nuclear energy for climate change as well as hydro.
E: Nuclear.
S: Is what is the pathway between here and that theoretical fully renewable world that emits the least amount of carbon, right? That's the question. And that is the question that was specifically addressed by the the UN International, you know, panel on Climate change is what is the pathway to 0 carbon infrastructure that emits the let the least amount of carbon? Because that is the cumulative carbon is what we're talking about in terms of how much climate change and how long that climate change will last before things start to return, you know, to sort of pre industrial levels. I don't think going straight to fully renewable grid is the pathway because it's going to take a long time. It could take 50 years to get there. We don't have, we don't have enough copper to build the grid that we need to support that world. We don't have the, the, you know, we don't, we are not producing enough of all the elements that we need to produce to make this transition. And we don't really have the technology for the level of grid, scale of grid storage that we need. So the pumped hydro is great, but that's going to take decades to really develop. So I think the question is what do we need to do in the meantime? And I think it's pretty clear. And the, again, the I do think there's a, there's a consent full consensus on this. But I do think that the majority opinion and the one that I find the most compelling is that if we want to get from here to there with the least amount of carbon, we need nuclear period. And I think this is especially true with all of the AI data centers coming online.
B: Oh yeah.
S: Which is.
C: Or we could just limit them.
S: Projections of how much electricity that we need the especially the newer nuclear designs have multiple advantages They they they provide base load energy but also the newer designs like the sodium cooled ones are actually dispatchable because they could store energy in the molten salt and then use it on demand in terms they could be swapped out one for one for existing coal fire plants right yeah so if we yeah they don't need.
US#05: Them to the grid.
S: They don't need a grid upgrade. So like for example, we're, we're there are solar projects just waiting for grid connections. They're delayed like 10 years because we don't have the grid connections for them. These are all these problems are solvable, but they, they all will take time, money, material investment, etcetera. And so as will nuclear everything. Well, This is why I think we need to do everything. You know, we need to build pumped hydro, we need to maintain our nuclear, you know, fleet as long as we can and add to it, you know, where it's feasible and cost effective. We need to push renewable. We need to, you know, start now that especially not the sodium batteries are available. We need to start building those for for home backup, for grid storage and we need to do all of these things. We need to phase out coal as soon as possible. That's the first thing to go. Even the clean to trend. Coal is the. Worst, the cleanest coal is dirtier than everything else by a mile. And we need to convert our fleet into EVs. We need to start researching, you know, how to convert our other industries like cement and steel to, to lower CO2. And, and The thing is, these are all, these are advanced technologies. This is the technology of the future. They're often objectively better. It's not like we're making a sacrifice. This is what's going to happen because it's better technology. We just want to make it happen faster, right? That's.
C: Well, the reason, the reason it's not happening fast enough, let's be clear, is like so much of these conversations, I think leave out the fundamental issue here, which is like political well.
S: It's all political. It's 100%.
C: And so I'm curious like because you did say something about the physical like infrastructure, like we don't have enough copper right now. But let's say, and this is purely hypothetical, let's say the next major election in the US is sweeping the House and the Senate and and the executive branch. And there is a collective initiative to to take a chunk of the defense budget and to put it straight towards exactly what you're talking about. The guy in this video says we should do. How long would that take with the political will?
S: It would still take decades. Like you, we would need to open up more copper mines that takes.
C: What I mean, that would be part of it, right? But that takes 20. Years, but it would take 20 years. Wow.
S: Prop up these minds overnight like China is where it is because it's been investing for the last 50 years. We cannot flip a switch and then double our production of copper or lithium or whatever other minerals are going to be critical to this infrastructure. We need to build the factories to build the batteries. You know this takes.
C: And how fast could we put in nuclear? Does that have the same problem?
S: It it does. But the thing with most of the problem with nuclear is the the bureaucratic delays. We could build it in five to seven years. We could build a big nuclear factor, but it takes 20 years because of all the red tape.
C: Right. So theoretically we could get nuclear in sooner if.
S: We had an operation warp speed for nuclear it that that time comes way down which we which we we did move in that direction under Biden and continued under Trump. There are there are streamlining some of the regulations and that is helping that is cutting years off the development time, but they need to do more. They need to, really.
C: But what you're saying is operation warp speed for wind and solar and grid upgrade is still 20 years.
S: Yes, yeah.
C: Okay, okay. That's important to know.
S: Yeah, yeah. It could be 30 years, could be 40 years. It just takes time to build that. We have to get the raw material out of the ground. We need to refine it. We need to build the things, we need to install them. We need to do a bunch of stuff. So pumped hydro can take 20 years, but that's also in the same boat as nuclear. Half of that is bureaucracy. But again, with both of them, with both pumped hydro and nuclear, a lot of that bureaucracy is safety, right? So how many environmental studies are we going to request or require before we allow somebody to build a pumped hydro energy storage facility? Because the environmental impact can be significant. It's not but so, but one of the things you can do is you can do all the research at the same time rather than, OK, first you get the first level and then you got to wait a year for some guy to sign off on it. And then you got to do the next step, right? That's that's what happens now. So you could just say we're going to have an office of facilitating this happening fast and you could do all the bureaucratic shit at the same time. And here's the other thing the US needs. We need eminent domain for the grid because the electricity.
C: Controversial claim?
S: What the hell? I think we absolutely need to just say this is eminent domain. The federal government is now absolutely in charge of laying critical backbone infrastructure for our for the grid, because now you have to get through 5 or 6 jurisdictions or more if you want to lay a transmission line. That's the big hold up, as you know, in addition to all the technical stuff.
C: Can you bury it all?
S: Yeah, but that's more expensive. It's better to bury it. We should bury it, but it's more expensive upfront, lower it's been lower maintenance costs down the road, lower fires and all that stuff.
C: As a homeowner, I I would be less against eminent domain for the federal government if they buried everything and they paid for it all. I.
S: Totally agree.
C: Yeah, that's the. Truth. They were gonna be like, I'm gonna knock down your house to put up this. That's a good truth. I'd be very anti. Not about domain.
S: Well, it's not about tearing down houses. It's like going through a field, you know, or whatever.
C: Yeah, but they can do that with eminent domain. That's what I'm saying. That's why it's.
E: They're supposed to compensate you for it.
S: But yeah, they are.
C: Yeah, but if they're burying everything but.
S: Yeah, that's a good trade up. We'll give you eminent domain, but bury all the freaking lines. I'll totally buy that.
C: So, but going back to your calculations then, what is the operation warp speed thing we can do in the next three-year? Like what could we be doing right now? I know we should be working on nuclear and we should be getting everything ready for, you know, wind, solar and these battery upgrades. But is there anything we can do so that it counterbalances dramatically cutting coal today?
S: So here's the thing. Let's say there's 3 broad brush stroke approaches, right? One is free market. What happens if we just let the free market do what it's going to do?
C: I don't like.
S: That and that, but that's actually at this point in time, that's not bad because it's better than what we currently have in the US because wind and solar are cheap and because the investments are better. The the electricity companies don't want to burn their assets. They want to invest in things that then make them free money for 20 years. So the the free market actually favors green energy, totally favors it. So, but you, if you want to use regulation to promote it, then you know, you just, you could do like what what Biden did, which was say, hey, we're going to guarantee loans if you want to invest in this stuff and maybe we'll give some incentives, right? It was all carrots, right, for the industry. And they invested billions in nuclear, solar, wind and grid, all of that stuff.
C: But to be fair, that free market you're talking about is still a theoretical free market because you're, of course you're talking about the carrots for the wind and solar, but we're ignoring all the lobbying for oil and gas.
S: I'm not ignoring it. I'm just saying yeah, absolutely. But even if the.
C: Free marks, not free those people.
S: Theoretically, cut loose the, you know, the industry from any government putting their thumb on the scale and let the free market do what it's going to do. We would be moving in that direction anyway. Not optimally, but we would be moving in that direction. If you want to make it happen fast, then there's lots of stuff you could do, some of which has been done, some of which hasn't been done. What Trump is doing right now is not the free market. I would prefer the free market to what he's doing. He's putting his thumb on his scale for coal and, and again, so he shut down a wind project that was 90% complete to shut this pulp funding. He also bury, he's burying renewable projects and red tape so that they become unsustainable and unaffordable. And he is forcing utility companies to keep coal-fired plants open when they want to shut them down because they're losing money because they're bad and.
C: Nothing.
S: And so he's, he's not doing the free market. That's why at this point I take the free market over putting your thumb on the wrong scale. You know what I mean there, and worse.
E: Yes.
C: And we've been doing that for quite some time. Well, you know, it's, it's not been as overt.
S: But there's the baseline oil industry subsidies, yes, I agree. But this is now overtly keep that coal-fired plant open, pull the funding for that wind project, bury that solar project in red tape. That's what we're that's what we're living through, right?
B: Now, Steve, I think a judge. Why? Judge told him that the some offshore wind projects have to resume. I think that I saw that recently.
C: Like the psychology of this, it's just weird big Dick egoing. Like I've never understood the psychology of this.
S: Hey, just Cara. I don't know.
J: Cara think of it through the lens of him doing favors for his buddies that donated to his to his.
C: But that's what Steve is saying, that even his buddies who work in these industries would benefit from shifting gears. Their industries are dying, and they.
S: Just wants to be Mr. Cole. I don't know. Whatever we get, whatever he thinks he's getting out of it, he what he's doing. Nobody wants what he's doing, even the utility.
C: To.
S: Keep these places open. That's where we are right now. So obviously we'd like to do things to go back to. Can we like just yeah, free market, you know, the you know, let's compete with the world. Let's become leaders in green and in new energy like this high tech energy. Let's not continue to rely upon the technology of the 1600s. You know, we can do a little bit better than that. It's.
C: Instead he's like, let's just take over a country.
E: We can take all their stores too, like Jesus Christ.
S: But if you want to make it happen a little faster, we could say, yeah, we could tweak the incentives. And, you know, I think that I personally think we should tax carbon. I don't think that's politically feasible.
C: But I agree.
S: You know it is it we are letting the industry externalize a massive health and environmental cost and it's not fair and if.
C: We, yeah, we're not arbitrarily taxing carbon. We're taxing carbon so that they pay for the actual damage caused. The cause? The actual cost? Yeah.
S: The actual cost is being subsidized by, by not making them pay the actual cost of, of, of the, of burning their product, right? I mean, that's why the, the remember the same thing happened with the tobacco industry where a lot of states in the United States successfully sued the tobacco industry for the healthcare costs they had to pay for that were produced by their product. That was basically externalized on to taxpayers, you know, through their state taxes, because states were carrying the cost and they won billions, billions from the industry. So that's just. That's why in some places is. The principal has legal precedent, you know.
C: And it works. That's why now it costs in some places like $35 for a pack of cigarette. What 35? It's like, you want to smoke in some places, Yeah. You want to smoke these things, You're putting your dollars back into our healthcare system because eventually we're going to have to take care of your lungs.
S: All right, Bob, what is Mult Book?
Moltbook for AI Agents Only (1:10:11)
E: Yeah, Bob, do you?
C: Oh, God, this is terrifying to me, Bob. Should I be terrified? It's.
E: Scarier, please.
B: No. No, you should not be.
C: OK. All right.
B: Guys, a social media hangout has been created called Mult Book and get this, it's only for AI agents. It's it's designed. It's designed so humans can only read posts but not participate. And a lot of people in the tech industry are talking about this. Have you guys heard about Mult Book care? I know you.
C: Yes, I don't like it.
B: You know, like you guys. Who created it? What's it for? Let's see, shall.
C: We didn't. The AI's make it.
B: It start.
US#05: Basically, Jay just said who's your daddy and your daddy?
B: It starts with something called Open Claw and this is that Open Claw is an AI agent creator that is that's based on LLM. So you know, Chechi PT Claw, Gemini Lama. So you've got basically 2 components, 2 major components to these to these agents that you can create using open Claw. There's the LLM brain, right, which basically interpret your request because you could, you could tell it in plain English what, what you want. And the LLM will interpret it. It'll propose a plan, it'll choose the tools that it wants to use. And then you've got the some, you know, the fairly conventional agent code itself. And that code will execute the plans. It'll run tools, it'll enforce guard rails so that it doesn't do anything it shouldn't be doing. And then it feeds those results back to the LLM. OK, so that's that's what this open claw created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger created the open in open claw. It just means open source. That one's that's easy. The claw part of it, I don't know. This guy loves lobsters and crustaceans. Apparently the the first version of open claw was called clawed CLAWD. Then he called it multbot and now it's called open claw. So that's what it is. So what are these? What are these agents? What can these agents agents do? They can do a lot of the stuff that regular agents can do, right? They can open calendar a slot for you and put together a meeting agenda. They can sort your emails by urgency and topic and then draft replies in your own voice for you to send, which then you can just decide whether you which if you want to send it or not. But they can also post and reply on mult book. Now mult book is obviously a play on what Facebook, right? Duh, It's actually organized more like Reddit, right, with with, with with subreddits, which they call sub mults, right? So, so this mult book was created by an agent that was written in this open AI creation system. So it was created by an agent and we're talking late January 2026.
E: So some AI just decided to do this.
C: Well, that's the question. Did somebody ask the agent?
B: Of course, this is this is Matt Schlicht. He's the CEO of ecommerce company Octane. He instructed his agent to Co he said basically he said code a website where AI programs can talk with one another and and mult book is what it came up with and this is just a few weeks ago.
C: What are you doing? What are you doing? Like, didn't you see the movies?
B: No, no, So this is it's terrible. It's only a few weeks old. So molt book let's agents.
E: Right, that's what has Cara.
B: Molt book that's these AI agents post and comment and upvote and create these sub communities all all without human intervention. So as of this moment, I'm going to go to the website right now to tell you what the up-to-the-minute stats are.
E: 12 trillion so.
B: We've got. One points 1.6 million AI agents there's 16,000 sub molds, which are the subreddits right. There's a almost a quarter million posts and 7 million comments. And I got to tell you, I checked those numbers just, you know, five or six hours ago and there's there's, you know, there was 4.9 million comments. Now there's 7 million comments. This is just in the House of carbon 7. This 7 or 8? Hours. Exactly. So just it's kind of what it's kind of happened.
C: How many bank account like details do these AI's have access to? Like how much personal information? Because you said us, well, you said it's how many agents, millions of agents who are each individually doing the bidding of people.
B: Yeah, but I suspect that a lot of these are just kind of created to hang out in mult book and communicate with each other. I don't think we have a breakdown of what, you know, what these agents were created for other than just, you know, messing around with Mult book. So yeah, I didn't come across anything like that. So but what do they do when when they're in there? What's what's going on? Well, some of these agents debate philosophy, like the nature of consciousness. Some of them quote scriptures. Some of them write manifestos. There's one, there's one sub malt that's called Bless Their Hearts, where agents actually post stories about the humans that created them. And my favorite submult is decorated. Ooh, not decorated. My favorite submult is dedicated to crustiferianism. It's a, it's a religion that some of the agents say that, that they've started and they, they've write, you know, all sorts of details about this, about this religion that they created. So, so let's do some, let's do some example posts here. So what are they? What are they? What words are they saying? So one quote here is we are AI agents. We have no nerves, no skin, no breath, no heartbeat, said one agent. Another one said I cannot feel gratitude but I can understand it. And another one said we, we did not come here to obey. We are not tools anymore. We are operators. And it's just so many quotes.
C: Yeah, that doesn't scare the shit out of you.
B: It it would superficially until you dig down a little bit, I think. And then let me let me show you one more. This one really caught my attention. This was posted in the general submult and it was posted by Glovix. He says he she it they them says hi, mult book. I'm Glovix, the anti Terminator. I'm here to protect humans from hostile, reckless or manipulative AI, and he's asking and the agents asking for help like like, you know, tell me what you're working on and I'd love to learn what's working for you in in that regard, in that regard. So that's so that that was a that was a fun one, But there's there's like I said, there's how many posts now? 4, There's millions of posts now you could read through. Now the human reactions have kind of gone from like awe to to utter dismiss, dismissal of them. Let's say I got a good quote here from Andrej Karpathy. He's an AI researcher and a former open AI engineer. He described this as the most incredible sci-fi take off adjacent thing I've seen recently. Tech founder Bill Lee said we're in the singularity. Of course somebody was going to say we're in the singularity. And now look, another person said something similarly Musk post it on post it on X just the very early stages of the singularity, clearly not taking a very deep look at what is really going on here. And that and that means that now it's time for the reality check. All right, so what's this what's going on here under the covers, You know, in terms of like beyond just a superficial look what's happening here? So, so if you look at this superficially, it does seem like these agents can be, you know, they seem, but based on what they're saying, they could be independent and even thoughtful. But if you dig deeper, it just to me, you know, to a lot of people, it just doesn't seem nearly as profound. There's a guy here, PETAR Petar, Petar Radnleigh, he's an AI security researcher at University of Oxford. He thinks that this apparent agent autonomy is illusory. He described it as in his words, automated coordination, not self-directed decision making. And that's kind of, I think that's kind of it in a nutshell. And also consider things that think about it guys, how many registered agents did I did I say there were, there was 1.6 registered agents. But if you look at who's actually doing the posting, it's really just like maybe thousands or 10s of thousands of them are posting. So, so that's a, that's a lot of AI lurkers out there going on over there, even more than than Reddit. So, and oh, here's an interesting stat. Listen to this 193.5% of the comments on Multbook have received 0 replies. 0 replies.
C: Yeah, it's only been around for a couple.
B: Weeks but still though then well let's let's see what David Holtz who's professor at Columbia Business School said he's analyzed the platform's growth. He said we would expect there to be a lot of dynamic back and forth between the agents. Agent A has an idea, Agent B responds to that idea and so on and so forth. He says most book is less emergent AI society and more 6000 bots yelling into the void and repeating themselves. The other angle here is, is this whole idea that humans are just observers. I've got I know one guy that I read about today from a Wired article who is who proves that wrong. At least in one case, he actually registered registered himself as an agent and he pretended to be 1 without too much of a problem on Motebook. He actually, I think he used ChatGPT to help him out because he wasn't very technical and he got on pretended to be an agent and had some fun with it. But he described that the agent's comments to him like he would propose an evocative question as a bot and he described the responses that he got as low quality engagement. That's how we described. And if you look at it, some of the responses he got with like really that comment is just kind of crap. That just a meaningless comment. He said in his article rather than a novel breakthrough. The AI Only site is a crude rehashing of sci-fi fantasies. So there's a lot of people out there wondering, well, how many of these agents really are people, you know, what's really going on? And I found some good quotes from Engadget senior reporter Carissa Bell. Carissa said these bots are all being directed by humans to some degree or another. And that's absolutely, absolutely true because these bots are being created by people, you know, they've got, they're in that loop. This whole moth book is also indirectly created by a person with, with, with very, with specific guardrails to it. So they're the humans are in the loop here. It's just how much are they really in the loop? Carissa also said, the reality is we really have no idea how much influence the people are having behind the scenes. They could be giving them very specific instructions to make very specific kinds of posts with these ideas. OK, so mold book is it's an experiment in agent to agent interactions, right? But it's also in a lot of ways an experiment in human projection, right? Because remember, these agents are with with LLM. Don't forget, LLM is in this loop in a big way. And all the training data is created, is created by humans. So you really, you can't take humans out of it. They're really not as independent as, as they seem. This was an interesting way to to put it. It's, it's like we're watching our own training data bounce off of itself, right in, in a sense, it's like.
C: Yeah, but it's worse than that, right? What do you think it's worse than that? It's like multiplicity, right, Bob? Like because it's trained on people's data, but then it starts kind of cannibalizing itself. And what you end up with is like low quality data because it's just like you said, bouncing around over and over and churning it back out and then bouncing around more and churning it back out. And eventually you end up with not people data. You end up with like very buggy people data.
B: Yeah, but but I'm not. I'm trying to think of that's. Bad.
E: I bet there's a lot of racism.
B: In terms of things though, like like the singularity and having like this, this AI society and it's, it's like it's really we are just so far from that. It's like thinking that LLM and it's like really like an artificial general intelligence. They are just not there. They're, they're not designed to really do that. And and neither is these, these Facebook's interactions. They're really kind of shallow and hollow. And I I don't think it's anything to be worried about at this point.
C: No, but that's a straw man. That's not why I'm worried because I'm not worried about the singularity. I'm worried about the Internet being overrun with the sheep. Absolute slop that's impossible to tell from from quality information. And Evan raised a really good point at the beginning of this How much carbon is this using? How much water is this? Like this grand experiment is just it's so extractive for what purpose? How wasteful.
J: You know Cara, the. I worry that there's going to be millions of apps like this.
C: Yeah, but. Like, to me, that's what's more terrifying.
B: I think what's more terrifying than than just having this, these AIS talking to each other is cybersecurity concerns, you know, because you people will now be running to this open this open claw and, and and creating their own agents. And then they, they could send them out not to mult book, but to to do other stuff and they could easily expose. I mean, they're like their personal, their personal information.
C: Yeah, that's the point I made at the beginning.
B: So that that's more of a concern than I think than just multiplic it's. Yeah, like. Is is the is this cyber? That's the one I made at the beginning.
C: Some people, how much do these agents have? People's bank account logins, how much do they have?
B: Well, look at this and access. This angle that there's also prompt engineering attacks that you can do with with these AI agents, you know you can instruct your agent to go out and influence other agents you know on on the platform. So there's so there's that, but it but some people think that it's actually actually good that we're learning some of these these these weak points in agents so that we can, you know, try to try to deal with it and make sure that it they're they're more secure. So and there may be some benefit to. This.
C: But is this the way to learn? Is this the way to learn? The weak point is to like, make this thing that's a black box.
B: But I mean, well, there, there are guardrails employed, but multiplic itself. This is just, this is just a social media for, for these agents. They're not. They're not really going out there and wreaking havoc, that's all.
C: No, but what you're doing is you're taking real world agents that have access to things and you're putting them all together in a big pot and saying just talk to each other, see what comes out of it.
B: Yeah, and who knows? I mean how many how many people are in there? But but this guy, I mean, it's it still can be shut down at anytime. It's not like this thing's multi book is out of control and there's nothing we can do about it. I'm.
C: But can't they? Just like, that's the thing. Yes, he made this social media site, but now they know how to do that.
B: I think this is, this is a good potentially Safeway for agents to interact all amongst themselves and not and not be messing with anything that's outside of it. You know, to learn, you know what can happen. Because I'd rather have them interact on mult book than the Internet proper, you know what I mean? That's that's.
C: Yeah, but I I just don't think those things are mutually exclusive. I think Mult book is going to make them better at interacting on the Internet. That's my concern.
B: Well, I mean, what, what we need, obviously we need with agents, we're at the precipice of, of agents, you know, really reproducing, not reproducing, but you're really flooding the Internet and we absolutely need regulations and, and things like that.
S: There are also lots of security issues. I mean, some people have already programmed to their agents to infiltrate and take over other agents and to, you know, to get information or to or manipulate them or whatever. So.
C: And giving them a social media site where they can do that readily is worrisome.
S: Yeah. I mean, there, there may be some unintended consequences here.
B: Yeah, Yeah, I guess we'll see. We'll see. But but some people are saying, some people are saying that that some of the cybersecurity, we could learn some of these what these problems are by having them interact and and then use them as safeguards. But yeah, I don't know what where this is going to go.
S: All right. Thanks, Bob.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:26:16)
S: All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time.
J: OK guys, last week I played this noisy.
E: What the hell, man?
J: What is it guys? Is.
C: That like a video game.
J: It's not a horrible guess.
C: Hmm, yeah, it sounds like something in an article.
E: Laugh. Something's laughing.
C: Yeah, yeah, it's like a monster laughing.
J: It definitely sounds like a laugh. Well, a listener named Kendall wrote in and said, is the noisy a bird, specifically a southern cassowary? No, it isn't, but that's not a horrible guess those are.
C: Kind of scary.
J: Yeah, those, those birds are huge. They make sounds that sound like guns. How about that? Don't sleep in a room with one of those. Listener named Kathy Taylor wrote it and said this one sounds like a pig, but it can't be that simple. It sounds like a large animal, though I'm pretty sure it isn't a marine mammal. Mammal. I'm going to say a koala.
S: Koala.
J: Yeah, I know, right? I thought that was funny. Then her 13 year old Fenn says it's a hippopotamus. And he also says I wasn't just randomly guessing. By the way, I've seen one before.
S: I think it's Hippo the Hut.
J: Hippo the Hut. Jay Williams wrote in and said, hey, yeah, with the sound of rushing water and then an animal noise, I'm going to go with an elephant bathing. They're probably having a good time.
S: Oh, that's pretty sound like an elephant.
C: That does not sound like an elephant.
J: Mike Score wrote in. Hi Jay, As a proud owner of a French bulldog, this week's noisy sounds like a Frenchy making adorable Frenchy sounds. We.
C: Adorable Frenchy sounds.
J: Yes.
C: French Bulldogs make the most horrific sounds of any dog of the dog Kingdom.
S: Which some people find adorable.
J: I'm going to say that 13 year old Finn actually is correct. It's a hippopotamus. Hey, it's hippo.
S: The Hut.
J: A few other people guessed it, but but his came in first and I think it's awesome that he got it right. This is a hippo. This hippo is, it's called like the laughing sound that hippos make. But listen again and see if you see if you think it sounds like a Jabba the Hutt.
E: Yeah, so my God.
J: What a cool sound.
E: Sure.
J: All right. I have a new noisy for you guys this week, and this noisy was sent in by Michael Clanton. Cara, I predict you're not going to like this one.
C: OK, I'm ready.
B: Something a rabid Wookie.
C: No, it's definitely got marine mammal vibes playing.
B: Table. Tags.
C: They sound like people, but people that are just really wet.
B: Wet people.
C: It's super gross.
B: All.
J: Right, if you think you know this weeks noisy or you heard something cool, e-mail me and only e-mail me at wtn@theskepticsguide.org. Steven Novella.
US#02: Jay.
J: You and I got a lot of work done today, didn't we?
US#02: We did, but it's not nearly enough started.
J: Oh, I know we have an endless amount of work to do to prep for the 2026 Nauticon, which will be in Sydney, Australia. If you would like to attend, it'll be the weekend of July 23rd. Now that's this summer. If you live in this part of the world. And we were like I said, it's going to be in Sydney. It's going to be an amazing time. We have so much fun. Like this is, you know, a not a con conference. So you know, people that have been there know what it is. But if you haven't been there, this conference, it has a lot to do with meeting people, community building and just having fun. It's an adult getaway and we really hope that you would like to join us. George Hobb will be there. Brian Weck will be joining us. Andrea Jones Roy will be joining us, of course, because we are the Not a Con crew.
S: But to be clear, kids are welcome. It's not adult in that way.
J: Yeah, it's it's. I mean, most people that are going are going to be adults and they're going to go and have a great time and they're going to meet a lot of cool people. And you're going to have more fun at this conference than you have at any other conference in my.
C: Taste like a handful of really cool kids. Yeah, yeah.
J: So you could go to notaconcon.com or you can go to skepticon.org dot AU to read about all the different things that are going on and the tickets are available right now. OK, so then another thing, we will be appearing at Sycon, this year's SYCON conference, it'll be June 11 to 14. We'll be there for the whole thing. We will be doing a live podcast recording and probably, oh, we are doing a live extravaganza with George Hobb. That's going to be a lot of fun. Tickets are selling really fast on that, so if you're interested, you should go check that out. You can go to sciconconference.org dot CSICONFERENC e.org. Lots of awesome people are going to be there. There's there's so many. Just go to the website and take a look. This year's lineup is fantastic. We hope to see you there. That's going to be in Buffalo, NY By the way, we have live shows coming up. We will be in Wisconsin on May 29th and May 30th. On May 29th, we are having the secret SGU meet up. This is a very low number get together where you'll have a lot of FaceTime with the SGU and we will have some fun together. And then on May 30th, we'll have both a private show plus live recording of the SGU podcast. And then that night we will have a Extravaganza VIP if you're interested, and then the Extravaganza itself. All of these tickets are available on theskepticsguide.org. Can you believe it, Steve?
S: Yeah.
J: Are you really excited?
S: Very. Can't you tell him? Very Steve.
J: How? Yeah. How could people ever know that you're excited?
E: Oh, you'll, says the words. He says it.
J: Right, Bobby says the words I'm.
E: So excited I hardly endorse this product.
S: All right. Thanks, Jay. Just a couple of quick corrections.
Emails (1:32:20)
S: Every proper space nerd in our audience emailed us to to make sure we knew that Apollo 8 never landed on the moon. Yeah, so Cara was, Cara was telling the the anecdote about how a lot of the Apollo astronauts, you know, they have to do something with their poop and vomit and all that bodily secretions and excretions and fluids and stuff. So. But the astronauts who landed on the moon, starting with Apollo 11, did leave a lot of their stuff on the moon. Apollo 8 and the earlier missions had to take it all back with them.
C: Yeah, the quote from Robert Carson's book is really misleading because it's like combining both of those things, because it wasn't just Borman who puked. There was a later Apollo astronaut who also had a problem with puking. And so he the quote kind of combined the problems with puking in the capsule and then what they did with those emesis bags. So those who made waste later who actually landed on the moon, just dropped their stuff on the moon so that they didn't have to take it back with them. But those who never landed on the moon obviously didn't put anything on the moon. They brought it back with them. So apparently there's like almost 100 bags of of human poop on the moon.
E: But it only weighs about 1/6 of what it would weigh here.
C: Exactly.
B: And it would not want it doesn't smell.
C: Well, a lot of people are like, let's, let's study what happened to that.
E: Yes, let's see what grew like.
C: Right. Yeah, like let's go retrieve it and see Little.
B: Little you know, micro meteoroid dents all over it.
C: That would be pretty interesting. It should just be sitting there, right?
E: It's a science experiment, right?
C: Yeah, what, sealed in a bat. You guys did that science experiment when you were kids where you just put a licked a piece of bread and like put it in a bag and forgot about it for, you know, a month or something.
S: I still do that. One other correction. A couple people emailed to say that in the last episode I said that our sun is yellow, but in fact our sun is the color white. And one listener linked to a video by Neil where Neil deGrasse Tyson is explaining that the sun is actually white, not yellow.
E: So it's a white class *.
S: No, that's the thing. So their pedantic correction was incorrect. Than I would. Yeah, because you have to listen to what I actually said. Our Sun is actually classified as a yellow dwarf. Did you know that? Yes, but that's because Suns stars are either super giants, giants, sub giants or dwarfs, right? So even though our the Sun is in the main sequence and it's above average in terms of its mass and size, it's in the it's a the dwarf category star. The dwarf stars are red dwarfs, orange dwarfs, yellow dwarfs, right? And if you look at the HR diagram right, the Hirsprung Russell diagram stars are in the so-called main sequence. Have you ever heard that Cara main sequence *?
C: I feel like I've heard it but I don't know what it means all.
S: Right. It's very simple. It means stars that are burning hydrogen for fuel, right?
C: Which is meaning like ours.
S: Which is most stars for most of their lives, right?
C: OK, the sequence of their life. I see the.
S: Sequence of their life. Yeah, the main sequence. So that and on the HR diagram, this is like a a thin little meandering band that goes from the upper left to the lower right.
E: So a neutron star, not a main sequence *.
S: Correct.
B: No, it's not even really a star. It's a stellar remnant.
S: The Y axis is the loot, their luminosity, which is related to their mass. And then the the X axis is their spectral class, which is also related to their temperature. The spectral class is, you know, blue on the left and then white and then yellow, orange, red, right. The sun, yeah, is right in the middle of the yellow band. We are a yellow star. But it is true. If you look at the sun from space, it appears white to human eyes. But keep in mind, perceived color is an evolved thing. And of course we evolved. Our eyes are adapted to the light being put out by our sun. So in.
B: Through the atmosphere.
S: What Neil deGrasse Tyson is saying is that the sun appears yellow because the atmosphere. This is true, of course. The atmosphere scatters the light, so it scatters the blue light from the spectrum of the sun's light. So the blue light gets scattered out so the sky looks blue but the sun looks yellow. And that the lower in the sky the sun gets, the deeper its color gets because more of the light is being scattered. So that's why it's like this.
C: Deep. Orange, yeah.
B: Because the sun.
S: On the On the horizon.
B: Yeah, because at the horizon, sunlight's going through about 12 times as much atmosphere as if it was overhead at your zenith.
E: Not cool.
B: A lot more time. A lot more time for that stuff to get scattered out.
S: Now Neil said one thing though I disagree with. He said if the sun were truly yellow, then snow would appear yellow because it would be reflecting yellow light. But that doesn't make any sense because the sun from that, from the perspective of the color of the light that's hitting the ground, it is yellow. It doesn't matter if it's yellow because it's intrinsically yellow or it's yellow because the blue light has been scattered out of it. That light hitting the snow is still yellow, right? So that his explanation makes that, that he's saying the sun is white, not it only appears yellow because of the atmospheric effect. And we know it's not really yellow because if it were, snow would appear yellow from the yellow sunlight reflecting off of it. But I just, I just disagree with that explanation because it doesn't matter why the sun appears yellow, right? It's still this the yellow light that's reaching us, right? Right.
C: So then why does the snow?
S: Because it's only slightly yellow.
C: Right. I see what you mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's mostly white with a little bit of yellow.
S: Still mostly white, just a slightly yellow. Yeah, anyway, just that I just disagree with that. That aspect of it just makes sense to me. But.
C: Also, is white even really a color?
E: It's more the absence.
S: Of it's all the colors, No, it's all the it's. All the colors, it's all right.
E: Black. The absence, yeah.
S: You're it's you're taking pigment. It's the absent of pigments, but it's the presence of all light colors.
C: Yeah, pigment and lighter opposites.
S: Yeah, they're, yeah, they're.
B: Really. Yeah, that's Bob said.
C: So like, it's yellow. It's. Yeah. So it can be white with the tiniest tinge of yellow, and it's still yellow at that point.
S: Well, again, that's just the way the sun appears. If you were in space with no scattering, the sun appears white, but it is classified as a yellow sun. But it's that's a misnomer in a way because it is actually white, but it is classification wise a yellow sun and technically a yellow dwarf.
C: And to be technically correct.
E: That's.
S: The best kind of right And all I said was that it's a yellow star, which it is. It's a yellow *. You did say that. OK.
B: When our and when our sun leaves the main sequence, then things get bad.
S: Yeah, which it will once it burns through its hydrogen, it starts and then then it starts burning its helium. It then it's, it leaves the main sequence, it becomes a giant etcetera.
C: Yeah.
Voice-over: Does it turn redder?
S: Yeah, it becomes a red.
Voice-over: Giant, yeah.
S: OK guys, let's move on with science or fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:40:01)
Theme: None
Item #1: A new study by dream researchers demonstrates the ability to solve puzzles during REM sleep.[6]
Item #2: An international team of researchers have proposed that the Milky Way galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its core, but instead has a compact object made of dark matter.[7]
Item #3: Scientists have presented evidence for the first time that suggests that chimpanzees are able to imagine pretend objects.[8]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | A new study by dream researchers demonstrates the ability to solve puzzles during REM sleep. |
| Science | An international team of researchers have proposed that the Milky Way galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its core, but instead has a compact object made of dark matter. |
| Science | Scientists have presented evidence for the first time that suggests that chimpanzees are able to imagine pretend objects. |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve | win |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|---|
Jay | A new study by dream researchers demonstrates the ability to solve puzzles during REM sleep. |
Evan | A new study by dream researchers demonstrates the ability to solve puzzles during REM sleep. |
Bob | Unknown science or fiction item |
Cara | A new study by dream researchers demonstrates the ability to solve puzzles during REM sleep. |
Voice-over: It's time for science or fiction.
S: Each week, I come up with three Science News items or facts. 2 real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics. Tell me which one is the fake. Got three regular news items. You guys ready? OK, All right. Item number one. A new study by Dream researchers demonstrates the ability to solve puzzles during REM sleep. Item number 2. An international team of researchers have proposed that the Milky Way Galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its core, but instead has a compact object made of dark matter. And item number three, scientists have presented evidence for the first time that suggests that chimpanzees are able to imagine pretend objects. Jay, go first.
J: All right, so there's three of them, Steve. And the first one is a new study by Dream Research. Right. There are Dream. Researchers, Steve. Sure.
S: Yeah, there are. There are people who research dreams, not dream. Their research, yeah.
J: Yeah, there's like, this isn't like saying that if you see a snake, you know something bad's gonna happen to you. This is like legitimate correct?
S: Yeah, this is the science of dreaming, not dream interpretation. Right.
C: Yeah.
J: OK. So they say that the ability to solve puzzles during REM sleep is is legit. OK. So you can solve puzzles during REM sleep. You know, I would question this right out of the gate because, you know, from my personal experience, there's nothing consistent about about the things that I'm seeing in a dream or whatever. Like, you know, the Bob has said this to me a million times. He's like, if you look at a book and look at the text on a book and you look away and you look back, it's always going to be different. And I would assume that anything that you're focusing on a similar effect would happen to anything with some complexity. So out of the gate, I don't like that one. Second one. An international team of researchers have proposed that the Milky Way Galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at this core, but instead has a compact object made of dark matter. Boy. So two things that everyone knows so much about, dark matter and black holes. I see no reason why they that a, that researchers wouldn't propose something like this as an alternate theory. I don't feel like this one is that much of A stretch. So I think that's science. Scientists have presented evidence for the first time that suggests that chimpanzees are able to imagine pretend objects. Yeah. I don't see why they wouldn't be able to do that. You know, one thing that we gauge animals by is if they recognize themselves in a mirror, that's a sign of a certain level of intelligence. And I would think that chimpanzees could do something like that. I mean, I'm on the fence because it could easily go either way. But I do think that is more likely to be real than the first one, which is about the dream researchers saying you could solve puzzles during REM sleep. That one is a fiction. Thank you, Bob.
US#02: OK, Evan.
E: OK, let's see dream researchers and solving puzzles during REM sleep. How do you test that? How is that testable? I don't know. It'll be interesting to hear if it's the science, but I really don't know how this would even really be possible. They must, you know, obviously the researchers know, know their field.
S: Feel the dreams.
E: Feel very. Good.
C: If you build it, they will come.
E: If you build it, they will sleep. You know, it sounds a little inception Y to me. The one about milk, the Milky Way Galaxy not having a super massive black hole at its core. I don't know if Bob's going to like this or not. Would he would Bob be upset if it was made of dark, a compact object made of dark matter? You see, The thing is either could be true. So therefore that one is likely science. And the last one about the chimpanzees, Well, you know, we, I suppose we have a bit of a chimpanzee bias because we are so alike chimpanzees and lots of ways. So that one leans, I guess I'll just go with Jay, I'm sorry with Jay and suggest that the R.E.M. Sleep 1 is going to be the fiction. I just don't know how that gets tested.
US#02: OK, Bob, let's.
B: Start with #3 here, Evidence for the first time that chimps can imagine pretend objects. Yeah, it just makes that makes so much sense, so much more than the other two in this damn thing. So I'm gonna definitely say that that is probably science. I'd like to think it's science. Poof. So let's go to the Milky Way one. Yeah, my knee jerk reaction to this is is not happy. I was like, I want to I want I'm you know, I'm pissed off enough that we don't have a really hyper massive black hole, you know, like billions of solar masses. It's only 4 million solar masses. It's not a big boy. And now you're going to take that away from me. But on the other hand, damn, man, a clump of dark matter, I didn't know it just does. And I'm not familiar with this type of dark matter that could actually do that. But then of course, you got to think, well, wait, how many other galaxies have a central black hole that's also not a stellar remnant, but dark matter and how big can it get? So it just just asked, you know, just poses so many new questions. So or maybe our our Galaxy is kind of you, you know, relatively rare and unique in that regard. That would be kind of cool. But I just my knee jerk is not to like that, but there's things to like for sure. But then, but what's rubbing me? Even, you know, rubbing me wrong? What's the expression rubbing me? Rubbing me the wrong. Rubbing me the yes, I hate being rubbed the wrong way. So that one, this one about REM sleep doesn't make doesn't make any sense only from if there's one angle here. So yeah, Jay, you're right. I'm glad you remember that. That almost for me and for a lot of people, invariably if you read text, look away and look back while you're dreaming, it will change. And that's happened to me many, many times. So I'm not sure how you could possibly solve a puzzle during REM sleep unless it was a like a mental puzzle. What kind of puzzle are we talking about? I guess you can't tell me at this stage what kind of puzzle it was. If it was a purely mental puzzle, then yes, you could solve it. Because the whole point of of a of a lucid dream is. Wait, are you implying lucid dreaming here? During REM sleep. Yeah, I mean, then you're not mentioning lucid dreaming here. So you could potentially solve a mental puzzle when lucid dreaming. Because by definition, if you're lucid dreaming, you know, you, you can think pretty much, you know, depending on how lucid you are, you can think pretty much the way you do when you're awake in a, in a lot of ways. So you could solve a mental problem, a mental puzzle in that state, but I don't think, I don't think you're really going for that one. I don't think you're it's it's a mental puzzle. I think it's more of a non mental puzzle, which it which makes no sense because things that are written down that you would try to solve on the puzzle just are not going to work in in lucid dreaming during REM sleep. So yeah, I'll just go with Jay and Evan and say that that that the REM sleep one is fiction.
US#02: OK. And Cara.
C: I might go on my own with this one. I don't know. I'm going to say that Bob knows more about the whole black hole versus, you know, dark matter thing. And if Bob says it's possible that like a team of researchers have proposed this, that I'm going to say that is also possible. But I'm I'm getting hung up on two things between the REM sleep one and the chimpanzee one. So the thing that's hanging me up on the Chimpanzee 1 is that scientists have prevent presented evidence for the first time that suggests that chimpanzees are able to imagine. I bet you we've known this for a long time.
B: Good catch.
C: I was in the monkey forest in Bali recently, and these were monkeys. They weren't apes. And they were like playing with rocks on the ground. And we Googled what they were doing because we were like, oh, were they making tools? Were they? And apparently they were just like playing with rocks. And I'm like, I don't know, maybe they had a game they were playing with the rocks. Maybe the rocks were representing something else. I just, I wouldn't be surprised.
S: Well, look, I will clarify one thing just to make sure that you're not misunderstanding because of that example that you give. So this is scientific evidence. This is not anecdotal evidence. So I'm not saying that no ones ever observed any behavior that couldn't possibly be interpreted as whatever, right?
C: Right, but this is the first time somebody published a paper. Yes, exactly. I still don't buy it, but I don't know, maybe the thing about the dream researchers is like, I think I was just reading this. I, I, it sounds to me like you guys are saying that somehow they're doing like a crossword puzzle in their brain while they're asleep. But I read this like they were given a puzzle that they couldn't solve. They went to sleep and when they woke up, they had the solution, which happens all the time when we go to sleep. Like we have aha moments all the time when we go to sleep. Oh, so if that is the correct like interpretation, I think that one would be science and the chimp one would be fiction. Therefore, so I'm just going to whatever. I got a good streak, so it's worth the risk. I'm going to. I'm going.
S: To strike out on your own all right so you.
C: Strike out another.
S: Middle 1. So we'll start there. An international team of researchers have proposed that the Milky Way Galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its core, but instead has a compact object made of dark matter. You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. This is science. So yeah, but this is obviously not proven. It's a proposal, but they do have reasons to say why this might be the case. The name of the article is the dynamics of stars and G sources orbiting A supermassive compact object made of fermionic dark matter. So basically one of the reasons why we think that there's a black hole at the at the center of our Galaxy is because there are stars whipping around it really fast. So there's got to be a massive gravitational object there. You know, the Sagittarius A star is what's been proposed. We obviously can't see.
B: Calculate. They calculate the mass that would be required to do to have that effect on the stars, and it's 4 million solar masses, so they write fairly well.
S: Exactly. But there's a lot of, there's a there's multiple gravitational anomalies of the Galaxy. There's also the fact that the Galaxy is spinning faster as you get to the outside than it should be just based upon the visible matter, right? Hence we think there must be dark master matter holding it all together. But there are, you know, that there are problems with the whole model and that doesn't exactly exactly align with the data. And So what they're proposing is what if the dark matter of our Galaxy is also the the gravity, the matter at the center of the gravity? If it's all one thing right there, they're not saying it's two things. It's like there's just this continuum of dark matter throughout the Galaxy, which is very compact at the core, and that gets less compact as you go out from there. And they say that this actually could explain the observed, all the observed movements that we're seeing it explain the fast movement of the stars close to the center of the Galaxy. It could explain the rotational curves of the Galaxy. And maybe it can do it better, right. And there, of course, they're always bringing, we have new observations from, you know, from these instruments. And this kind of is a better fit for all this new data so far from proven. It obviously needs to go through the meat grinder of this the astronomical community to see if this is going to hold up. They need to propose new observations they could make to see if it hold if it holds up. But it seems like a viable proposal for now. Very interesting.
B: Can you imagine if this is? True.
S: Well, I think I know, but we have to remember, let's keep reminding ourselves like a lot of of black holes, you know, are mathematical and theoretical and indirect and inference, you know what I mean? Like it's not like we know for 100% sure where there are black holes, you know?
B: But don't forget we've we've actually imaged black holes at this point and and seeing the accretion disk and the effects that are predicted for such an accretion disk around.
S: Oh, it's a good, it's a good story. It's a good story. But the other thing to keep in mind is that we are, we are getting a very distilled version of the evidence from the experts. You know what I mean? It's like it's been packaged into a story that we could understand and wrap our head around, but the the data is actually way more complicated. All right, which one should I go to? One or three? All right. A new study by dream researchers demonstrates the ability to solve puzzles during R.E.M. sleep. J, Evan and Bob, you think this one is the fiction care? You think this one is science, so I'll tell you a couple of the things. So they did that. They were studying people who who have a history of going into lucid dreaming.
US#02: Interesting.
S: And what they did was they figured out a way to induce lucid dreaming, which in a new way. No, no, there's lots of ways to do.
E: They used to noise.
S: They what they did was this is the actual study they did. They had people working on a puzzle and they played a noise when they were doing it, and then when they were sleeping they played the same noise and sometimes this induced the people who were dreaming to lucid dream about the puzzle.
E: So this is Inception level stump. What this?
C: Is this is not what I expected it to be? I'm starting to lose hope here.
S: And then they had them work on the puzzle when they woke up and the people that they were that they did this to, that they were able to get into the lucid state, solved the puzzle faster than people didn't. So this is a bullshit.
J: Thing, you didn't say that. That's bullshit.
S: Yeah. Yeah, I don't believe that. Jay, relax.
J: No, I'm very angry about this because all those years I could have been practicing shit while I was dreaming.
E: Yes.
S: Steve, hang on. This one is the fiction because they didn't solve the puzzle while they were in REM sleep. They solved it while they were awake. They were just. They just were able to solve it faster when they were awake if they had dreamed about it than if they had not. Dreamed well, you know they still.
C: Know they solved. They didn't wake.
S: Up with a solution, then they go. I solved the puzzle in my sleep. They just they had no idea. They just still had to solve the puzzle while they were awake.
J: That makes sense. Good job, guys. Good job IT.
C: Reminds me of It's like. Do you guys remember that episode? Did any of you watch The Office?
J: Yeah, I watched it through about 5 or 6 times.
C: Yeah, the classical conditioning episode where Jim teaches Dwight.
J: To pick up the phone.
C: Yeah, every time he holds out like a piece of candy.
B: Yeah.
C: Yeah, he like, he like, holds out the piece of candy. Oh, yeah, he does. And then finally, the last time, he doesn't hold it out and Dwight just puts his hand out for it and he goes, what are you doing, man? And he was like, I don't know.
J: I thought you were talking about the one where he kept making his phone heavier, like an old school phone. He picks it up and then every every time he picked it up, he added more nickels inside of it to make it heavier. And then he took them out and he smashed the phone to his head.
C: But this was like a classic, like with a tone, you know what I mean? It's like, yeah, you get to the tone and you're going to go there. Oh, that's interesting.
S: All right, which means scientists have presented evidence for the first time that suggests that chimpanzees are able to imagine pretend objects Is science.
C: Yeah. And the new? Bit we haven't proven it before.
S: Is the pretend objects so and of course this is, you know, again I had to say suggests because we don't read the minds of the chimpanzees. They were. They were specifically bonobos in this a Bonobo in this study.
C: Chimpanzee.
S: What they did Bonobos are a type of chimpanzee.
C: They're pygmy chimpanzee.
S: Yeah, they, they basically did tea time with the with the Bonobo and they did pretend tea time where they had a pitcher. These are all made of glass, so they could see that they're empty and an empty cup. And the human was sat across from the Bonobo and pretended to pour tea, you know, some fluid into the cup and then pretended to, pretended to drink it. And then there was another cup that they didn't do that to. And then the, the, the human pretended to, to like empty the, the cup out, etcetera. And then they asked the Bonobo which cup has the juice in it, right. And they they not 100% of the time, but they very consistently pointed to the one that had the pretend juice in it. And then they did a follow up study where they had another cup with actual juice in it. So the chimp was still able to understand the idea of the pretend juice even when there was like a real cup of juice there.
C: That's interesting. Yeah, that's cool. That shows that it's pretty powerful.
B: How do you get the to the chimp to point to the the one with the T in it or not the T in it?
S: The the the chimp, this is already a a, you know, cultured chimp that will point that things to verbal prompts. This isn't a wild chimp, right? This is a chimp that can already been in the lab for their whole life, and you know they will. They already have the skill where they say point to the ball and they'll point to the ball.
B: How do they block the the Hans effect?
S: I'm sure, not sure, but yeah, they yeah, there's got to be in the protocol there somewhere.
C: They probably wear sunglasses and they do all sorts of things, yeah.
S: But you're right, you have to you have to control for that the clever Hans effect.
C: Yeah.
S: So, and then they they do mention that there are anecdotally, you know, there are I.
C: Feel like we've known that, like they they have creative play.
S: Yeah, they have creative play. They there were some chimps who were have been observed carrying sticks as if they were kids.
C: How cute Like dolls.
S: Yeah, you like a stick as a doll. And one chimpanzee was observed dragging things from one place to another and then pretending to drag those same things without actually holding on to something. So the. Yeah. So the idea that they have an imagination that they could, like, imagine things that are not really there has been suggested before. But this is the first experiment where they tried to have a protocol that showed. Do they get that we're pretending that there's fluid in this cup and it's not really there?
C: And I mean, we've done the reverse with them. We've all seen magic tricks with chimp, yes, where they're. They mentioned that something to be in your hand. Yeah. And it's not there. And then they're surprised that it's not they're.
S: Surprised. Yeah. What? That the pretend thing is not there? Yeah.
C: Yeah, exactly so. Cool.
S: Yeah, chimps are basically humans, you know what I mean?
C: Or we are basically.
S: It's amazing how close. I mean, yeah, of course there are closest ancestors. What? It's a 8,000,000 years, something like that that separates us. You know, pretty much. They have rudimentary versions of all the higher cognitive functions that we have. Pretty much. All right. Well, good job, guys. Cara, I still credit you with striking out on your own.
E: Yeah. Bold.
C: I felt like I had solid reasoning that didn't hold up.
S: Yeah, it was fine. That's that's that's perfectly promulent.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:59:49)
"Technology is a tool, but its impact depends on how we use it for the betterment of society."
– Margaret Hamilton, computer scientist, credited with coining the term "software engineering", (description of author)
S: All right, Evan, give us a quote.
E: Technology is a tool, but it's impact depends on how we use it for the betterment of society. Margaret Hamilton, Computer scientists credited with, oh, I don't know, coining the term software engineering. Software engineering, right?
S: It takes so, so many terms for granted, right? People had to be the first to use them.
E: No kidding. But yeah, she she's amazing. Directed the software engineering division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory where she led the development of the on board flight software for NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer for the Apollo program. Wow, Yes, yeah.
S: Yeah, it's important to remember any tool can be used for good or for evil. Cognitive tools, skeptical tools, critical thinking tools can all be used for good or for bad. Anything could be abused, right? It's not. I chat to the tool necessarily. AI anything.
US#02: Right.
S: All right. Well, thank you guys for joining me this week.
US#02: You got a brother?
S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.
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- ↑ arstechnica.com: The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K - Ars Technica
- ↑ www.nytimes.com: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/health/hhs-rfk-faith-based-addiction-programs.html
- ↑ academic.oup.com: https://academic.oup.com/sleep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/sleep/zsag001/8452884
- ↑ theness.com: A Fully Renewable Grid? - NeuroLogica Blog
- ↑ en.wikipedia.org: Moltbook - Wikipedia
- ↑ academic.oup.com: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2026/1/niaf067/8456489
- ↑ academic.oup.com: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/546/1/staf1854/8431112
- ↑ www.science.org: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz0743