SGU Episode 1076

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SGU Episode 1076
February 21st 2026
"Exploring the future of technology with advanced prosthetic limbs and enhanced motion."
SGU 1075                      SGU 1077
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
"Astrology is a disease, not a science. It is a tree under the shadow of which all sorts of superstitions thrive. Only fools and charlatans lend value to it."
Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon Maimonides (1138–1204), philosopher, jurist, and physician of the Middle Ages, authored ten influential medical works covering topics like asthma, diabetes, and hygiene. A practitioner of the "natural sciences" who championed empirical observation over blind reliance on ancient authority.
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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 Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, February 19th, 2020 Sixes, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody. Cara Santa Maria.

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening everyone.

S: So, Bob, your your predictions about the quint. We didn't really make a prediction, but Ilya Malinin crashed and burned. Man, that was I don't.

E: Know. I don't want to talk about it. Don't wait.

C: I don't know anything that you just said. You just said a bunch of words that was.

E: This from last week. Maybe Cara was.

S: So, yeah, you were, you know, so this is about the Olympics time. If you're watching. Let's read Winter Olympics.

E: Yeah.

S: But Bob's piece was about whether Ilya Malinin, who was the lead American female figure skater, Yeah, was going to do a quint. He's the quad God. So he's the only guy and he's the only one in competition who's doing quad axles, which is like a foreign.

B: Yeah, nobody on the planet can do it. Except.

S: And he's he's claims to have done a quint to quint quintuple in. Practice in.

B: Practice like 5-5 rotations. Wow.

C: I see.

B: It was possible. It was possible for him to actually do it and and make history and I'm watching it so excited and it was a it was just horrible. He fell apart, didn't recover. It was so sad. I felt so bad for him. Like a whole league he. Came in eighth.

S: He didn't even meddle. It was shocking. Everyone was stunned.

B: Cara, he was basically he was a shoe in for the gold. He really just almost just had to show up and he would have and not fall and he would have gotten the gold that that's how much of A shoe in he was. Nothing is guaranteed, but it was everyone. I would have bet damn. I would have bet a lot of money that he would have at least medal, but he couldn't even do that because it just one of those sad things I. I have to.

S: That was the first time. That was the first time I've seen him escape. I'm like, all right, let me see this quad got in action.

J: Yeah, let's see so much about this.

S: And it was, it was just a terrible performance. So my set, I 'cause I don't know this guy. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but just my sense of what was on the screen was that he was pretty cocky. He came off as cocky. And which, of course, you know, he, if anyone could be, deserves to be cocky. He does, but he was very humbled afterwards and I think he was very sportsman like afterwards.

B: He was but. I think he shook the winner's hand.

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah, very.

B: That guy. No.

S: No, but he, I just think that the whole Olympic thing got to his head. It's just my, my theory. It's possible.

C: I also think that sometimes the most elite athletes have, they have the farthest to fall and so, you know, small errors can really screw up their game.

S: I know it's a very unforgiving sport.

C: You.

S: Know he had a great short program.

B: Yeah. And he brought his he brought his team to A to a medal in the short program.

S: You have a short program and a long program and it's very unforgiving. One mistake and you basically you're out of medal contention most of the time. It's not like you get multiple tries or mulligans or whatever. No, that's it.

C: You have a bad fight. You're out so much pressure, you know, so much pressure and you you get off your game it it probably just infects the whole routine I.

S: Also, I kind of don't like the way the media hypes up into individual players. I mean, I know they're doing it for the drama and for and for viewers or whatever, but they kind of set people up to fail like this and.

C: They do, I agree.

S: I mean, he's like a. 2020 year old kid and he's getting all this attention and all this pressure and and.

C: Once you do, well, like there's, there's a female athlete. Oh gosh. And I, I reposted it on Instagram. She was being interviewed and she she silvered, but the interviewer was like, you know, do you feel like this was a, was the silver a gain or was it really a loss of gold? And she was like, you know what? That is the most ludicrous question I've ever heard. She was like, I have medal five times in the Olympics. Do you know how hard that is? I am, you know, considered the best, you know, female athlete in the sport, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Every single time I win a medal, it's a massive game. Like who are you to ask me if that was a loss to come in second in the world? Are you? Kidding, I. Know it's like it's just crazy yeah she was like the the amount of pressure yeah that you put on these athletes because she's like for me every time I show up to compete it's equally hard but for you guys you just expect more and more and more yeah I.

B: Mean just going to the Olympics, just going to me, it would be a major, major win. That says I wouldn't even need to do anything else, not even come close to come in. Last place I was at the Olympics. Oh, it'd be amazing. I was good enough to go to the Olympics and that's.

S: And in many of these sports, these are people who are training 8 hours a day for years. I mean, this is exactly the dedication. To get to that level of competition is just absolutely amazing.

C: When you when you did mention to Bob this, you know Ilya, what's his last name?

B: Malanin.

C: Malanin. The first thing that came into my head was Ilya Rosenhoff and anybody else who's listening to the show who was obsessed with heated rivalry like I am. That's probably their first thought, dude. They're like, oh, Elia Rosenau. You guys might not know what that means, but you should watch the show and check that again.

E: Heated rival?

C: Rival. I'm fanning myself off right now.

E: Oh, OK.

C: Then it's just a very, it's a very steamy gay love story on HBO right now. And it's, it's based on a book, but it, you know, people just fell in love with it. And, and it's just one of those shows where, thank goodness, the writers and directors and everybody chose to take it the way that they took it. Because I would put it maybe on the shelf with like, Shits Creek and Ted Lasso. Not because it's as funny, but it's just one of those shows where you're like, I needed that. That was just good.

S: Yeah.

C: You know, like I, I needed something that just was good and made my heart swell. So yeah, I loved it.

S: This is the first Winter Olympics that I'm really into curling. Have you guys been watching curling at all?

E: Curling controversies and curling.

B: It was damn fingers, man. Like a fist.

S: Fight.

B: What the I know is going on?

E: Is that cheating I mean?

B: It absolutely is against the rules. Well, it is.

E: But they don't get called out for it.

S: They don't get called out for it. I mean, it was amazing was that they the teams actually had words with each other and they fought over it. But I've seen other times when something happened, like somebody was in the women's curling, the American team and the Japanese, the, the one of the American players, you know, they have to sweep in front of the in front of the stone and the sweeper got stuck and she actually change the course of the stone with oh, what?

J: Oh my God.

S: Only say that happened at one time and it's you obviously it's you can't do that it's well they the two teams just talked politely with each other you know about what to do about it so the other team has the ultimate right to decide what to do right right. But it was like the most polite discussion about, OK, well, yeah. Like she's like, Oh yeah, it might be happens. You know, it was not like she was hiding it or there was accusations or it clearly wasn't deliberate. So you just sort it out and they say, alright, we'll just put the stone back to where it was over here.

C: Like that, I'm going to say that's because this is a quintessentially Canadian sport. Yeah, we could learn a lot from our neighbors.

S: But it is very, it's very, very tactical. You know, it's almost like chess on ice. It really is. When once you learn what they're doing, you know why they're doing it, it's really fascinating.

B: Yeah, sometimes they thread that needle and like Oh my God, you made that between those 2 stones. Wow.

S: Well, the Olympics, the skill level is very high, but because it's so high, it's not like you win because the other person missed, you know what I mean? Like it's the the winning team wins because strategically they placed their, their stone, you know, where it needed to be in order to set, set up a, you know, a situation that they needed, etcetera.

J: Did you see anything like interesting happen, Steve?

S: Well, there was the broom incident and the boop, you know, those are the where the guy touched the stone after he released it and he like walked out of an interview. That, that guy, he was, he was a Canadian actually, and he was, he was nasty about it.

E: Yeah, I call him Touchstone now.

S: But he said, listen, you know, basically his attitude was no one does it, it happens. No one does it intentionally. It's not cheating. It just happens. It's for just why you why you keep asking me about this? You know, again, they're under a lot of pressure and, and, and imagine getting 20 interviews and everyone's like, what about the boop? You know, what about you touching their sound? Please can you ask me something else?

E: What do your teammates think about the boop?

B: To be a little fair, I don't know that much about it, but I did hear other teams saying like they do it all the time. Yeah. And finally we're like, come on. Yeah, That's that's all. That's what I heard. I haven't done a deep dive on. Yeah, I've heard. This.

S: I heard that interview too.

E: The other but is it louder? Not that's.

S: The thing is it is illegal, but the but the refs don't do anything. I don't, you know what I mean? Like they don't, they didn't do anything about.

E: It it's not enforced.

S: Yeah, they don't really enforce that kind, that level of thing.

E: OK, well if you're not gonna enforce it, then do it and. Then maybe other.

S: But guys, there is a place in Connecticut where you can do curling, and I think we're gonna go give it a try. What? Do you say we?

E: What do you mean? Yeah, What? Huh.

S: My wife and I are going. You guys are invited.

E: Oh. Who's sweeping? Who's curling?

B: Is it like a same type of stone and all in corn, what they call it?

S: Yeah.

B: Nice.

S: I just want now that I've watched so much I just want to see what it's like. I'm sure it's so freaking hard compared.

C: To how comfortable are you guys on the ice? Like can you? I wish dated.

B: You have to bend down like that. You gotta be.

S: Flex kinetic cutions we were comfortable on.

C: Yeah, I am not like I never was exposed to ice skating as a kid. It's so foreign to me.

S: Yeah, you got to get your sea legs. Definitely, Steve.

B: My question is how are those like those sweeper dudes? How are they so nimble without? They're not on skates, they're just like, wearing.

S: They have special shoes, Yeah. So that they.

B: Figure they must have had special.

S: Shoes, yeah, 'cause they have to, they have to have grip on some parts and slide on other parts, you know, So they, I think in some people it looked like they were wearing two different shoes on each foot. I don't know the details, but they definitely are special shoes so that they can scamper and slide over the ice as they're sweeping. And different people have different styles. Like there's this one American curler on the woman's team who does this hop like she does the two late footed hop as she does it. It's kind of funny to watch rather than more of the scamper that other people are doing.

E: When rabbits do it, it's hair curling, yeah.

News Items

Gene That Provides Resistance for Bananas (10:44)

• Scientists discover gene that could save bananas from deadly Panama disease 

S: All right, Jay, tell us about efforts to save the banana.

J: My God, Steve, when I found this, I'm like Steve is going to do a backflip because this is actually some some good news. It's not all the way there, but let me tell you, like the ups and downs of what is going on here. So first of all, as most of the listeners out there know, we are banana fans here on the SGU. Steve's nickname is actually the Big Banana. Yeah. It just, it just occurred to me. It just occurred to me how that could be easily misinterpreted. Anyway, alright, so we go back to the Cavendish. What's the Cavendish?

S: This is, yeah, the top banana.

J: The top banana. So, all right, so the Cavendish banana dominates the global markets, meaning that this is the most common banana that you're going to find out there. This is the one that you're likely to be purchasing. You know, if you have easy access to other kinds of bananas, you're super lucky. Send me a sample of each one of them. Thank you. But unfortunately, most banana varieties have this horrible weakness. And if nothing is done to save the bananas, we'll be we'll see a steady global decline in availability. Prices will go up. It's just not a good situation for both, you know, both economically and agriculturally. It's pretty damn serious, particularly for countries that depend on that, depend on banana exports or you know, really need bananas as a staple food. This isn't an extinction level scenario for the species, but it would be very bad. So what is actually the problem? There's a soil fungus called Fusarium. It's got a long scientific name, but I'm just going to call it that. It's also known as Panama Disease and one of the strains of this fungus called Subtropical Race 4. It infects the banana plants through the roots and it moves into the plants vascular tissue. And then, you know, the all this internal plumbing that transports water and nutrients, you know, the fungus, basically, it just clogs up that system. And once a plant has it, you know, their leaves begin to yellow, it Wilts, the plant collapses, and of course, the all fruit production stops. It's bad.

S: And clarify a couple of things. Yeah, 'cause you know, I'm all over this story.

J: Well, of course you are so.

S: Just just for historical purposes, you know, the grow Michelle, that was like the good banana that got wiped out before the Cavendish. Yeah, that was wiped out by by race 1.

J: Yeah, that was a bad one.

S: Yeah, now we're up to race 4. But you said subtropical Race 4. The disease that's actually harrowing the Cavendish is tropical Race 4, but the subtropical race four that the study is on is a related disease, just to clarify that. And it if it made the subtropical race 4 effects mainly an area of Australia which is where this research was done, whereas tropical race 4 is more worldwide.

J: So it's even worse than we thought.

S: Well, I knew how bad it was.

J: So all. Right. So once these symptoms are visible, the plants basically dead the plants dead the plants.

S: Dead.

J: You know, it's, it's infected Sylvia Bran. Yeah, right. They die. These plants die within weeks to a few months. There's virtually no cure. They, they cannot find anything to mitigate the fungus because you know, the fungus is down in the soil and that fungus, once it, once it infests the soil, it could be there for decades. Like, you know, there just isn't anything that can wipe it out and, and fix this problem. Commercial production depends heavily on the genetically uniform varieties. Uniformity simplifies the large scale farming, but it creates A vulnerability, right? So as Steve said many times, all the bananas that we eat, they're all essentially clones of each other. And this means that the virtually every banana that's a Cavendish out there is genetically the same and they're all 100% vulnerable. And like we said, you know, the Panama disease, you know, we already earlier version of it wiped out the grow Michelle banana. We know none of us have ever even gotten a chance to try it. We hear they're fantastic. Let's say that the Cavendish goes, you know, the next banana is probably not going to be as good. So we want to hold on to the Cavendish. So let me get to the study now because this is where some good news happened. So this study addresses this threat and it it's looking at things on, on adna level. So the study was led by Andrew Chen and his colleagues at the University of Queensland and they identified A genetic region that's linked to resistance in wild banana relatives known as the Calcutta 4. So this cousin of the the Cavendish has a resistance to the fungus. And you know, unlike all these commercial bananas, or at least most of them, this wild plant shows a really strong natural resistance to tropical race four. And the question here is, you know, what is the what in the genome specifically provides the protection? And this is where their work started, right? They have to figure out what DNA is involved in this fungus resistance. So the team across the resistant wild plant with a susceptible banana line. So they had a, you know, they had a hybrid there. It's a hybrid. The offspring show DNA variations. Of course, some of the children plants resisted the infection, others didn't. You know, they died. And the resistant variations are the actual entry point for genetic mapping. And this is where all the magic happens. So they compared the DNA of the resistant plants with that of the susceptible ones. And researchers can now look for a specific DNA region or regions that are only in the plants that survived. Right. This narrows it way down to just a few places where they think that the actual DNA that is coding for the resistance could be. So now of course they want to find it. They want to get down to the exact thing. So they use genome sequencing and they identified a specific region on one chromosome linked to resistance and the study. They didn't yet isolate the a single confirmed region or the actual snippet that is it to.

S: Clarify. They got it down to a 5 to 10 megabyte region of the short arm of chromosome 5. And I know a lot of the reporting said that they identified the quote UN quote gene, but they have not identified the gene. They got it down to that region, but there's probably a few genes in that region. So now they need to get it down to the specific gene. Level, yeah.

J: And the Breeders that are doing this, they can screen seedlings for the specific DNA markers that are associated with this resistance before the actual disease testing. So this approach, it's known as a marker assisted selection. This dramatically accelerates the development of more resilient varieties and the study, you know, significantly improves their chances of developing resistant banana varieties. And that's exactly what we need right now in the end, that they have more work to do, but they seem to be on the right path. I mean, the, the, the awesome thing is that there was a variety out there that just was resistant. And, you know, their job now is to narrow it down, figure out what it is, and then they can, you know, use. I guess they'd use. CRISPR, Steve to to do this?

S: No, no, no, no. This is all breeding.

J: It's all just done through breeding.

S: Yeah. So let me just tell you again, back up a little bit. There's actually, there's multiple, multiple programs out there trying to develop these race resistant bananas, right? And there's, they're mainly using three different methods. Actually, there's already a GMO Cavendish banana that is resistant to Tropical Race 4.

J: So they're planting it everywhere, right?

S: Well, no, it, but I didn't think so. It does have a regulatory approval in Australia. So it can be commercially cultivated and can be consumed in Australia. And this was approved I think in 2020, 24, so just about a year ago.

B: Really.

S: Yeah, this is yeah, there's a GMO race, you know, for resistant, you know, Cavendish banana. They're, but they're keeping this in this on the sidelines as kind of a a backup safety. It's a safety net as they're calling it, in case this really becomes a problem. There are two other programs. So the big, the CRISPR is sort of the newest one. They're starting to use CRISPR again. The and the reason to do that is because not only because CRISPR is an awesome research tool, but if you're modifying existing genes without, you know, introducing new genes and it's yet in most countries now, it's technically not GMO. It's just genetically engineered, not genetically modified. And then so it's the regulations are, are easier, you know, they're not as draconian, but also there's breeding programs, right? And that's what this is this, this research is part of the attempts at breeding using hybrids in order to create resistant, resistant bananas. So they're, this is not like on the track to GMOs. They've already done that. We've got the GMO resistant bananas. This is just trying to do it through breeding. Now, another sort of layer here is that the there's first of all, there's multiple resistant wild bananas. This is not the only one. But they're completely inedible, right? So they're, they're diploid, which means they have seeds, but it also means they flower and produce seeds and you can breed them, right? You can hybrid them. Commercial bananas are triploid. They don't have seeds, but they also can't reproduce. That's why they're all clones of each other. You take cuttings from them and then replant them, which is actually easy to do. I've done it myself. It's actually not that hard. But they're all, that's why they're all such a monoculture of clones, because that's how they, that's how you propagate them, right? They, you don't breed them, you don't hybrid them 'cause they don't have seeds. They're because they're, they're made, they were made triploid basically so that they would be seedless. So the what they want to do is, is continue to make these hybrids to either get the the race resistance into a commercial banana or to make a resistant banana into a commercial banana, You know what I mean? So by some breeding, you know, some, you know, hybridization program, breeding cultivation program, they want to get a resistant commercializable banana. This could still take years, maybe even decades to do that with with a breeding program, but this will accelerate it. This information like knowing 'cause otherwise you have to wait 12 months before you could test a banana plant to see if it's resistant. This way they could check the markers right away. And so it just sort of accelerates the process. So hopefully this will with this will proceed. But the thing that I find a little annoying is that they've already freaking done it. You know, we already have a resistant banana. The whole purpose of this is to do one that isn't GMO for the anti GMO idiots right?

E: Really, we're accommodating them.

C: Of course.

E: That's what this. Is.

S: Yeah, that's basically what this is.

E: Gosh.

S: I mean, it's good to have options, right? It's good to do it in different ways. Everyone take your, you know, do it. You know, again, I I'm all all in favor of spreading out your chips. You know what I mean? So that's fine. But I don't know why they're keeping the GMO one as a backup rather than just planting it already. Because it's it freaking works.

B: But Steve, I want another option. I want a commercial, easily available grow. Michelle.

S: Yeah. They're working on that too.

E: Where's that?

S: I've heard about that years ago. They're they've done that too.

B: So did I. Heard nothing since?

S: Yeah.

E: And how many of you consumed BOB0?

B: Zero. None.

S: But The thing is that I don't know if how that one did in field testing the the cat, the GMO Cavendish that's resistant has gotten through the field testing with flying colors. That's they're like 98% resistant to the race for the tropical race for so and The thing is, the other way to look at this also guys like we're we, we will never win. We are in an endless fight here. And so we are going to continuously need to do cultivation programs and genetic engineering and modification to keep one step ahead of these, you know, fungi, right? This arms race is never going to end, not with, you know, existing any projection of existing technology.

B: It'll end. It'll end when we have the power of illusion like those Talos 4 or Talos 5 aliens from Star Trek. When we can. When we can eat dirt and never taste like Gros Michelle bananas. So that's what I'm waiting for.

S: A nourishing protein complex. I just saw that episode.

B: OK. That's that's how you knew 4-5, whatever.

S: All right. Thanks, Jay. Cara.

C: Yes.

Drug Advertising (23:44)

• https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/health/drug-advertisements-consumers.html 

S: Do you think that drug advertising is a good thing or a bad thing?

C: Oh, that's a tough question. I think if you had asked me that question while I was like, distracted and not really listening and hadn't done a deep dive, I might be like, bad advertisements bad. And I still think that there's a part of me that has that gut reaction and that can actually defend, Oh, this would be such a good debate, Steve.

S: It would be like you. Could be defend because you're right, you have to defend. It's it cuts both.

C: Ways, it cuts both ways and so I want to really get into that, but I think that one of the best ways to do that is to ask the guys who maybe haven't done a deep dive like you or I have, Steve, what are some reasons that maybe advertisement, advertising pharmaceuticals like we do here in the United States and also like they do in New Zealand is a bad thing. What are the risks of advertising pharmaceuticals direct to consumer? So like in television ads and magazine print ads and things like that?

E: Risks.

B: Well, I mean the advertisement itself. I know my mom sees some ads and she reads the fine print. She's like, I'm not taking that drug, you know, it's like.

E: Wait, because they spend a lot of time on the side effects and.

C: How interesting. So you're, you're worried about the ad maybe turning off the person from using the drug, which I do not think is what the drug company thinks is happening. I don't think they'd be paying billions of dollars in advertising fees. They do that because that is a regulation and they're required to do that of.

B: Course, but my mom still freaks out. Like what? Some people died on this. Well, yeah, I'm not taking that. Why would I take that?

C: What are some other reasons that maybe for example, the AMA which opposes direct to consumer advertising and has a policy statement on it, why do you think they oppose direct to consumer advertising?

E: Getting people anxious, nervous, stress.

C: This is fascinating that that you guys are like having to dig for answers here.

E: Is there an obvious one?

C: Well, I think a lot of people would say it's not good for a consumer to be making decisions about the drugs they need.

E: That's not like they can go get.

C: It no, but they do go ask for it.

B: Yeah, they ask for it. I mean, they have to have a level of trust in their doctor. If the doctor says yes, this is a good drug, but it's not for you, I assume that they would trust their doctor to to and be OK.

C: Absolutely. And that's what.

E: And I think the commercials reinforce that idea.

C: Well, that's what we all hope that a functional system would do. But I think there's a lot of fear that anybody can find a Doctor Who will write them a prescription for anything. Like we've, I mean, just look back at the Sackler fiasco, right? And so I think that a lot of the concern around direct to consumer advertising is putting way too much, I don't want to say power, but way too much choice in the hands of not as educated consumers. And what a lot of studies have shown, and this is these are some other critiques are that very often why do you think a pharmaceutical company is advertising a drug like which drugs do you see ads for? That may be a better way to frame that question. What do you guys think? Do you? See.

E: Well, they're not not opiates.

C: Well, do you see ads for generic amoxicillin? No, no, you see ads for brand name formulary new drugs.

E: And then in parentheses is the technical term for it that no one can pronounce.

S: But it's it's on patent.

C: It's on patent. Expensive. Exactly. There is no generic form.

E: Yeah. So they have to, right?

B: Recouping their so it's pushing people away from cheaper generics, which well, but the. Interesting.

C: That's the concern. That's the concern. But the interesting thing is that the research actually shows that advertising brand name drugs actually can result in more people taking generic drugs for the same condition. So there is OK, it kind of can cut both ways. Yes, there is a concern and I think it's a legitimate concern because we know that this happens in drug manufacturing. In order for a drug to remain kind of financially viable for a pharmaceutical company, once something kind of lives its life, they lose the patent. There's now competition in the marketplace. There are cheap generic alternatives. There will be some sort of formulary change, some sort of update to the drug. Well, now we do it in an easier to swallow pill or now we've added this secondary drug so that you know it satisfies. Extended release is the big thing. That's a huge one, right? And sometimes that is a legitimate benefit to the patient. And sometimes, and actually a lot of studies have shown that when there's a sampling of which drugs are being advertised indirect to consumer marketing, that the, a large proportion we, we should say of the drugs being advertised are no better than their previous or generic iterations. So they don't confer any like demonstrable benefit to the consumer. And, you know, right there, I think that there's a concern just about fairness, there's a concern about consumer safety if people are seeking out a new fancy shiny drug and actually end up choosing it over another form and, and are, you know, paying so much money for this drug when something else would have been just as beneficial to them. So I think that's also a concern. There's also a concern that they're, even though it is required that drug companies based on legislation, it's required that drug companies, if they're going to do a direct to consumer advertisement, do disclose serious risks. Very often drug companies will use loopholes where they won't list them all or they'll, they'll direct somebody to a website or they'll do it very fast in, in fine print so people can't even read them. And so there is some concern about sort of false advertising in these direct to consumer drugs because maybe the real risk benefit is not laid out in an appropriate way. I mean, and we've all seen this. I it blows my mind when I'm watching TV and I see drugs that I know my patients take that are for metastatic cancer that has, is like resistant to certain other types of treatment. And they'll show the people in the ads like riding roller coasters and like running through fields. And I'm like that that patient does not have, has not had metastatic cancer for five years. Yeah. Like it's, it's sometimes they're just really kind of airbrushed. Yeah. They're like, are you in, you know, are you in heart failure? Well, this drug is going to help you, blah, blah, blah. And it's like that patient is not in heart failure, Right. Right, the patient in this advertising.

S: Riding horses and.

C: Exactly, Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so there is a a concern there about about misleading also just like the sheer amount of money that these pharmaceutical industries are are spending in order to try and convince you, persuade you to buy this drug over that drug. I think for for a lot of people. And I think that's where my sort of knee jerk reaction comes in is I just don't like advertising. I don't like the culture of, you know, constantly trying to sell everybody next big thing and everything is based on what are we buying? And if you're not buying this, you're not going to be happy and you're not going to be healthy and you're not going to live a long life. That concerns me as well. What do you think some of the benefits of advertising drugs are?

E: Well, I'm, you know, just awareness that these the drug actually does exist in case somebody.

B: Yeah, they could go to the doctor. They had any access. To they might assume that what I have is not really fixable when they see a drug that specifically addresses it like then they could seek it out and otherwise they might not have.

C: Absolutely, yeah. I think that's one of the biggest arguments for why direct to consumer advertising continues to exist. And there are a lot of studies that show that in places where there are more direct to consumer advertisements, people are, you know, go to the doctor more and people get treatment for certain conditions more often.

S: And have better drug adherence.

C: And now we know that they're targeted. We've seen bumps in the kind of utilization or actually we've seen bumps in, first of all, just the amount of the quantity of direct to consumer advertisements at different times. We saw a bump obviously when historical prohibitions were repealed and I think that was back in like 19 like the late 1990s. We saw another bump when Medicare Part D came on the scene. Medicare Part D if you if you don't know all the different parts of Medicare, that's the part that covers prescription drugs, like pharmacy prescription drugs. And so we did see that once Part D came onto the scene, there was a huge boom in drug advertisements and that specifically targets older adults. We also see that in markets where there are more older adults living, there are more pharmaceutical drug ads. And so obviously there is a, you know, obviously they're using advertising science here. But I think it's really interesting when you start to dig into the literature and things get a lot more complicated that direct to consumer advertising can have a huge and actually does seem to have a huge effect on physician prescribing. It also can at the same time avert underuse, but it can also promote overuse.

S: Yep, both of which are about an equal problem.

C: Yeah, yeah. And so it's like, is the answer to this removing them all together? Like both The Trump administration has begun to push a little more firmly. And you know, to be honest, this has historically, I think been a sometimes bipartisan, but definitely a more left-leaning policy agenda. And so like Bernie Sanders put a bill, put in a bill recently, but also it's a bipartisan bill. So the question is if we were to just ban it outright, which is actually what the American Medical Association calls for, they support a ban on direct to consumer advertising. And then they say until or unless a ban is in place, we oppose any sort of ads that don't do all of. And they have a laundry list of things that they think ads should do to to be as safe and and yeah, consumer friendly as possible, which is, you know, of course, have a good balance between benefit and risk. Don't, don't show the, you know, a person doing something that they couldn't do on this drug. Be clear about warnings and adverse effects. Don't make claims about the product or compare it to other products when it doesn't confer a significant benefit to that other product. Don't say it can do things it can't do, which it is a problem.

S: Yeah. So if they were more aggressively regulated and like really dialed in, they wouldn't be that bad. You know, they probably upside may be greater than the downside. The other option, what I sort of have recommended is that should allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise, hey, if you have asthma, there's new treatments available for asthma. You should go to your doctor and ask them about them. And just to raise the number of people who are seeking treatment for diseases for which they have drugs. Now, it wouldn't give them as much bang for the buck, but it's sort of a halfway compromise. They would, they would still, it would still send money to into their coffers, but maybe again, maybe not as much, but without any really of the downside, right? You get the increased awareness of the disease, getting people off their, you know, to the doctor, increased adherence, decreased stigma of the disease itself, all those things that we want to get out of advertising, but without the pushing the latest expensive drug, even if it's no better than older, cheaper drugs.

C: Absolutely, and there's a large body of evidence and there are a lot of op eds online talking about that very thing. Instead of advertising a specific drug, why don't we do PSA style? And they can still be glossy consumer education ads about, hey, if you have we all remember when restless legs that there was like a whole it became the butt of a lot of jokes right when it was like, do you have are your legs restless? You need this drug. And people were like, what? A pharma will push anything. Well, I'm sorry, but that's a legitimate, you know, syndrome, and it can cause massive lifestyle problems for a lot of people.

S: Yeah, there's a lot of misinformation at the time that the diagnosis was invented by the Pharmaceutical industry, which is not true, that it was they they did it to repurpose drugs that were failed for other reasons, which is not true. And when I wrote about it on my blog, I actually looked through my textbooks. I found references to restless leg syndrome by name from the 1940s.

C: Exactly.

S: This diagnosis has been around for decades.

C: And if you've known anybody who struggles with this, it it's debilitating for them. It really, really disrupts their sleep. It it's, they're miserable at night and you know, I think there were probably a lot of people for whom because somebody said the word out loud, they were like, Oh my God, I think that's what's happening to me. I, I, I actually maybe should talk to somebody about this. That, that can be a, a life changing thing for individuals who are struggling. So I agree, Steve, I would like to see a transition from advertising specific drugs, especially. We see this all the time in, in US advertisements. Ask your doctor if blah, blah, blah, Quill is right for you. No description of what disease it cures, no description of why. It's just like, look, look how happy you'll be with this drug. And and that's, I think that that's shady personally, but it, it is really interesting when you dig into the literature that there do seem to be big benefits and, and you know, big problems with the way that we advertise drugs now, right now. One of the issues, Steve, is that even though, you know, we can be a little bit, I guess Pollyanna about it and say, hey, why not just do this? And, or even, you know, Sanders ET al, who put to get who put forward this bill is like, let's just ban it. And, and you know, we can kind of talk about alternatives. A lot of the literature that I'm reading says, well, Citizens United is probably going to be the reason that they can't pass that bill. Or even if they do pass that bill, you know, somebody's going to sue. One of the pharmaceutical companies are going to sue and they have a good chance of winning because Citizens United said that this is, you know, corporations have free speech.

S: Oh, that's true.

C: And so long as they are not saying anything that's not true, which, you know, I, I can't think of a single drug advertisement that I've ever seen that just straight up lied. I think it's more that they don't always tell you it's spin. It's spin. It's not lying. Yeah. Exactly. So a lot of a lot of the things that I'm reading are like good luck because I think you're in for a fight.

E: Isn't all of advertising somehow spin in a way?

S: Of course it's.

E: The nature of the beast.

S: I don't know.

C: But it's different when we're talking about public health, Yeah.

E: Of course, yes, health is of most.

C: Important.

S: I think that that's the thing. The public health angle may may trump the free speech angle.

C: No pun intended.

B: Word anymore. I know that.

C: It's the RFK influence on sort of mainstream medicine and the the pharmaphobia.

S: Well, I think one way to look at it, yeah, he has definite pharmaphobia. But one way to look at it is that the net effect, you know, looking through the literature, the net effect of drug advertising is that it increases the effectiveness and the cost of medical, of medicine, right, Overall, Yeah. So it's not harming people, but it is increasing the cost of healthcare.

C: Which does harm people.

S: Which does harm people indirectly. So it depends on, you know, what you've how your goal is. Yeah, Well, yeah, what your goals are and how that you think that all comes out in the wash. There's not necessarily any right or wrong answer there. But yeah, we should just, we should just get the best of both worlds, you know?

C: Yeah, let's hope. And you, you could say the same thing when you look at the literature that shows that it does actually increase doctor's visit and as you said, adherence to treatment and it increases prescribing even generic medications. But with that also comes sometimes over prescribing medications, which is, which is a problem in and of itself. So, you know, I, I just wish that there that we, I think this is part of a scattered managed care system, but I wish that there was some way that individual consumers had access to clean and easy information about if I have this diagnosis, These are all of the treatments that are available. And, and the hope is that that's what your physician is supposed to do. But it would be nice if there were some sort of federal program or some sort of community effort where individuals could go and they could say, oh, OK, I have type 1 narcolepsy. These are all the treatments that have ever been used. These are the risks. These are but you know.

S: That involves a lot of talking to patients, which insurance companies don't like to pay for.

C: It's true. You're absolutely right. They don't.

E: I see.

C: And there are gatekeepers here. We have to remember that just because somebody reads or sees an advertisement, says I want that drug, doesn't mean they're going to get it. Yeah, because the insurance company could prevent them from getting it and the doctor could say I'm not prescribing it. The problem is we know that, you know, there have been historically pill mills. We know that there are people who doctor shop and we know that there are, you know, the healthcare system is overburdened and there are times when somebody says I want to try this and a physician might say, OK.

S: Yeah.

E: Just to check the box and. Move on.

S: But that's one of the one of the the points that the AMA has that it causes tension between the patient and the doctor because they don't want them fighting over. But I saw this and I've been there. I've had patients come in and ask for drugs by name and I have to like go over again all the options. But sometimes, like they are, they are fixed man. They want what they want and that it does become a problem.

C: Absolutely.

S: Yeah, OK. Interesting nuanced question. I love.

C: Those, Yeah, alright.

AI Powered Prosthetics (42:19)

• The Future of AI-Powered Prosthetics - NeuroLogica Blog 

S: Guys, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about prosthetics. You know, robotic brain machine interface controlled prosthetics, right? So I've been following this for 20 years. I've been talking about a lot on the show in the last few years. The introduction of the latest crop of artificial intelligence technology has really changed the landscape here. So now we have a basically AI powered prosthetics with or without a brain machine interface, right? Because just AI, we're we're getting better at training AI to control robots and that includes prosthetics, right because that's basically like if you have a robotic prosthetic arm, it's a robotic arm, right Yep. So what I was not really aware of until I saw this recent study that I want to talk about there's there's an interesting downside to the AI control. So the AI control can produce a lot more exquisite precise movement. Like if you're talking about a robotic hand, the ability to grab a glass, you know, without breaking it or dropping it, right? Like there's you need that specific amount of pressure and to be able to use it dexterously, you know, to either brush your teeth or bring it to your lips or whatever. So AI helps with that a lot, right? Because it's just really good at that level of control. What do you think the downside is though?

B: Well, probably the weird feeling, you know, Like what? Hey, is this thing? Is this even mine now anymore?

S: Exactly, it's it creates a quote UN quote weird feeling It it it breaks the illusion of ownership and can agency and control right. So you want to feel we want people to feel as if an artificial limb, especially one that's under their control, that it's part of them, right. They own it and they control it. They have agency over it. So those are sort of the three parts that we want them. And that's all things that your brain does that you're not aware of, right? Your brain has circuits that make you feel that you're inside your body, that you own your body parts, they're part of you and that you control them. And when those?

B: Part of your homunculus Homunculus.

E: Thank goodness.

B: Right, Steve?

S: Yeah. When those circuits are disrupted, you feel like you're disconnected from your body, right? Or that this body part does not belong to me. It's like attached to me, but it isn't me. Or you could have what's called alien hand syndrome right where you're you feel as if your hand is doing things on its own, not under your control.

J: Steve, what about if it's AI controlled? I mean is it happening just in the device or is it connected to the Internet?

S: It's just, I think it's just in a device.

J: Because there's a, there's a bad circumstance there. No Bluetooth. Connection.

C: Yeah, you don't want your your prosthetic limb to be hacked.

S: To be hackable, yeah.

C: Oh gosh.

S: But there is a it can learn is the thing, right? So especially if you're controlling it, then you learn to control the limb and the limb learns what you want to do. And with AI, that training period has gone from months to days. It's made a dramatic difference in the ability to like really nicely control an arm. All right. The downside is, though, the degree to which the AI is controlling the limb sort of breaks the illusion of control, right? Because now it's doing stuff on its own, literally, and so people don't like it. So what the study was looking at was just one aspect of that was the effect of the speed at which AI controlled prosthetic limbs move and how that influence people's acceptance of it, like their sense of ownership and agency and what they found not surprising, but it's. It's a sweet spot.

B: I'm.

S: Sure, there's a sweet spot, there's a Goldilocks zone right where it's not too fast, it's not too slow, it's just right, right. And the farther away you get from the the Goldilocks zone, the more people feel weird and don't like it. But the the closer you get to that sweet spot of like a, you know, a moderate sort of of speed, then the more people felt comfortable with it and it didn't break in their illusion of of ownership of or control. But we say illusion. But keep in mind your sense of ownership and control is also an illusion in the exact. Same way. It's the same, it's the same circuitry, right? It's, it's not we, we tend to have this unstated assumption. We most people think, just don't think about it. But I think if you ask, it's like, well, yeah, I feel like I control my hand 'cause I do, you know, or yeah, this is part, it's my hand. If it's part of me, that's what it feels like. But that's not.

B: It's my name on.

S: It it's not a passive effect of the reality, it's an active neurological constructed experience. That's the key thing. You have to understand the good news, which can break but also can be hacked. It could also be created. That's the point. That's the upside of that is that we can give you that same illusion with prosthetic limb. So this is just now, now that we created a problem by introducing AI and now we're looking to get to get the benefits of AI control, you know, improved control of these limbs without this downside. And so that's what this study was getting against one study. It's looking at one aspect of it, but it's nice to know that we could really reduce that problem, that downside just by fine tuning the, you know, the, the rate at which the limb moves. The other angle here that I want to talk about just 'cause I'm a neurologist, right, is that our brains are very finely attuned to how people move, right, Visually speaking.

B: Oh yeah, man.

E: Which is why uncanny valley videos upset. Exactly.

S: It's partly. Or even. The the, the uncanny movement is part of the uncanny valley. It's also just, you know how they look physically, but like the it's got dead eyes, like doll's eyes, but a lot what a.

B: Lot, but even someone's gait, just the way they.

S: Walk exactly so distinctive you could ride. We've all had this experience where you recognize somebody from behind just by the way they're walking. It's also true that there are movement disorders that could be diagnosed at a glance because of the way people move. Yeah, the so-called across the room diagnosis, probably the most obvious one is Parkinson's disease. If people are even slightly hypokinetic or hyperkinetic, your brain immediately registers to something is wrong. This is not within normal parameters, right. Even though you you don't, you're not maybe consciously aware that you know what those parameters are. So it's not surprising that like the the your limb moving a little bit too fast is like your brain immediately registers. Like that's that's not normal, that's not biological. There's something uncanny about that. So yeah, you have to get it just within that sweet spot that our brains are so sensitive to in order for it to to be optimal. So cool 1 little incremental, you know, progress on this very interesting technology.

E: They'll they'll get this one, they'll eventually figure this one out. It sounds like it's get it right. It's.

S: Progressing wonderfully and it's again, it's 10 to 20 years further along than I thought it would be because of AI.

E: Nice, I.

B: Love when that happens doesn't happen often enough all.

S: Right, Bob, tell us about this glass storage.

Laser Written Glass Storage (49:37)

• Laser-written glass can store data for millennia, Microsoft says 

S: You know what I thought of when you when you sent me this news item was the original super and with Christopher Reeve.

B: Yes, yeah, with the crystal.

S: Yeah, with the crystal storage, there's something, there's something about like storing data on crystals that resonates, you know what I mean? That feels right. So tell us about.

B: This, yeah, yeah. OK. So this was this is from a Microsoft Research project and they've essentially completed this research and this project is called Silica. Its goal was to use a glass like material to arcade to archive like insane amounts of digital information at high density that also needs basically no maintenance and can also just you know, last for 10,000 plus years. So this is what they've been working on for I think 6 to 8 years I've been working on this. There's a paper and nature on it's called laser writing and glass for dense, fast and efficient archival data storage. The silica project can be seen as an attempt to deal with a couple of problems, and one of them is the data explosion that we are currently living in. That I did that is I think is massively underappreciated. Global data increases at 23% per year, which is a lot, right? 23% a year is pretty damn huge. And but storage density increases at only 7% a year. So the disparity between those two numbers, that gap actually has a name. It's called the storage Cliff. And this is, this is going to be actually a huge infrastructural problem for computers in the next 10 or 15 years. You're going to be hearing more and more about this. I, I would say. So now I look, I tried to look up some interesting numbers that's related to this. One of this, one of them was the total data that's archived. This is archived data globally and that's that's been pegged at say 10 to 15 Zeta bytes zetabytes. Zetabyte is a billion terabytes. So it's huge. It's fragging huge. So it's 10 to 15. But the number gets bigger when you consider the total data sphere. And this is data that just created and stored just for a little while briefly. It's not meant to be archived at all. It could it could exist for moments even, but it's but it is created and it is captured, it is consumed, it's stored and that number is 200 zetabytes in 2025. I think it for 20261 estimate, I came across as 226 zetabytes, something like that. They're projecting. So yeah. So this is a lot, a huge, a ridiculously huge amount of information. And the other part of this problem is the the current storage limitations that we that we all experience with just with our our personal computers. But these limitations are hurting this storage Cliff problem. And that's conventional storage. I'm talking magnetic based media like hard disk drives and magnetic tape. And then there's charge based storage. It's flash, right? solid-state drives, USB drives, SD cards, they're all charge based. And there's also optical storage, CDs and DVDs. And there's many more types. That's only like maybe 1/3 of the types I came across that that actually exist. The problem with them is that their lifetimes are just not, they're not, they're not meant for archival storage. Bottom line, they're designed to last and function well from anywhere from a year to maybe 20, 20 or 30 years I think. I think magnetic tape, if it's stored perfectly, can last about 30 years. But that's only with perfect storage. So they don't. They're not meant to last a long time and and work reliably.

S: Bob, aren't there C DS that are rated at 100 years?

B: There might be some specialty C DS, conventional 1C DS and DV DS optical storage. No regular regular C DS are are not great. I mean I didn't get those numbers specifically but my memory is telling me 10 years. I mean, if you have something on the CD, you, you, you can't put it on the shelf and forget about it for, for a generation or whatever 10-15 years necessarily. There's bit rod and stuff. Yeah, there's definitely, definitely not not ideal, but there there's other types that may be more optimized for some type of longer term storage, but conventional stuff that we use everyday is just not meant for, for the long term. So what happens with these devices is that the physical thing that represents the bit like the magnetic orientation or the trapped electric charge. The problem with that happens when it drifts or it leaks or the chemically breaks down, it gets damaged by heat or mechanical wear and on and on. There's so many ways that they that they so many things that that impact their lifetime. Eventually the ones and zeros just can't be read well, well enough, not reliably enough. So they just don't last long is the bottom line here. So this new technique uses material, not just regular glass. It's borosilicate glass and I, I basically guarantee most of you are have used it and have it in your kitchen right now. This is a type of glass that has silica and boron trioxide in it. It's hardier than regular gas, especially in glass, especially in high temperature. You may know it as Pyrex or even your the the glass doors in your oven is made of this stuff. So it's it's cheap, it's easily available, which is also one of the the benefits of this material is that it's not something that's a special element that only a certain countries even have access to. This is at this stuff is easily created and and cheap. So now the idea is the question here is OK, how do we write to this borosilicate glass? How do we write to it and how do we read from it? Those are the key questions. And that this is what they've been working on. So to write to it, they use femtosecond lasers, right? Quadrillionth of a second bursts of laser light, femtosecond lasers. And they use essentially one of the improvements they've made is they use one pulse. It's just one pulse for essentially 1 storage element in in the glass. And what the, what the laser does is it creates these 3D patterns in the glass and it's, it's based on the polarization of the light itself, the laser light and, and these, these 3D structures written into the glass are called the voxels. And they actually another benefit today, another advance that they recently made is they can take this one laser beam and they could create a four independent modulated beams from the one beam. And they so they can get a throughput of approximately and maybe 66 megabits per second, which is not super fast, but it's not super slow either. It's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's what it is. It's not, it's not bad. And the glass that they're using, they, they can use even regular. I mean, this is like, this is not thick glass, but there's hundreds of layers that they that they could then put these voxels inside these different layers. And So what what they end up with with their research is they 4.8 terabytes in a 120mm square, 2mm thick piece of glass. So 120mm square piece of glass with 4.8 terabytes. That's pretty good. That's about two million books. Or it could be 1,000,000 of our first SGU book plus one million of our second book, Skeptics Guide to the Future. But that's kind of silly. Why? Why would you have so many? Why would you have so many of the same book? But you could if you wanted, or it could have 5004 K movies in this 120MM wear piece of glass essentially. That's very high density and that's pretty impressive. Now reading it, this is what it takes to read about it. And I'm not even going to go in any detail because it was complicated. They're essentially are using for most of these reads they're doing. It's an automated microscope that reads each layer. They can go to each layer, each of the 100 and how many layers did I say 100 layers or something? It goes to each layer and can read the voxels in each layer. And this software then decodes that image that it, that it sees in the glass and it can determine it into, into the, you know, the, the bits that it can then translate. So, but it's, it's so complicated. It's, it's really, and, and I'll come back to that, that actually because reading it is not something that's not easy, which is kind of an interesting for software that's being archived. But then, then they, they talked about testing it as well in the paper and they, they essentially did accelerated aging tests and they, they put it through their paces and they determined, you know, they extrapolated because you can't wait thousands of years to see how long it, how stable it is. But their tests show that it should be stable for 10,000 plus years at room to at room temperature and it can survive some nasty environments.

S: Didn't it say 10,000 years at 290°C, which means probably a lot longer at room temperature?

B: I've read a couple of different things, so it was a little confusing actually what what they meant, what what Microsoft said on their website was that they were throwing out numbers. They were saying 10,000 to 100,000 years, so let's just let's just go with 10,000 plus.

S: Years 2000 plus.

B: Even in, you know, nasty environments. But that's the good point, Steve, is that they also show that this glass is chemically and thermally stable. It's not bothered by by moisture or electromagnetic interference the way lots of conventional media can be. So that's that's a huge, huge bonus here. I mean, this is something what did they say? A lot of the companies that they interviewed, they said what kind of storage media do you want? And basically it's, it's characterized by two words, benign neglect. They want to be able to put their media on the shelf and just kind of ignore it for, for a decade or more. With this, there's no maintenance cost. All of that are just a huge, huge bonuses for this kind of storage. But clearly though, right? Is it, It's obvious this is archival storage. This is for things like cultural records. I mean, and, and that could be almost anything, movies. And when I think cultural records, I'm thinking movies and TV shows, put them all on there. Also, Library of Congress, scientific data sets, legal archives, so much stuff can go on there.

S: Wikipedia.

B: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. This is not something that's going to be for everyday computing, if it even if it even takes off. So you're not going to be seeing this on your desk really at all because it's just like you have a, do you have a femtosecond laser to write this out or do you have these specialized microscopes to, to read it? I don't think so.

S: But Bob, that could be a good service. Imagine like, hey, you could upload terabytes of data and we will archive it on this crystal, you know, so it'll last for 10,000 years that.

B: 'D be great I mean you could and the other that and that points to another benefit Steve is that once this is this is like a worm media write once read many nobody can change that data nobody can hack that data so this is static and this is that's another benefit if that's what and which is perfect of course for our carbon storage. So one thing though is that that was disappointing a little bit to me was that this is this is not meant for a far future civilization to get this and read and learn our culture based on all of this densely stored information. It's good and it's bad. So the good thing is that a future civilization could see these voxels because all it is is really it's advanced, but it's fundamental optics. This is rediscoverable if there's like an apocalypse, eventually, you know, if it, if human civilization survives, it could rediscover these fundamental laws of optics and they could be able to see these voxels if they find this material. But the bad thing is the other side of that coin is that interpreting those voxels to do that would take Oh my God, it might be impossible. You would need to know things like this, the symbol alphabet, the symbol to bit mapping, the error correction methods that are that are being used. So for them to be able to divine or determine how to interpret what those voxels mean would probably be, you know, would require a major endeavour beyond anything we would be willing to. I mean, it could take generations to actually understand what they're seeing If if it if it's even possible, would it be?

S: Possible, I wonder, to develop like a sort of key that would make it like designed to make it as easy as possible to then learn the code.

B: That's what they would need. They would need some sort of like self describing Rosetta layer, right? So they could have things like pictograms, they could have math, they could have basic symbols with instructions and the encoding conventions that that were being used. They could, they could also, yeah, they could also have multiple encodings, right? They could have one encoding they can put on there would be simple to decode, but it would be low density archival, right? And then they could also have another encoding that's high density but but very difficult to decode. So they could do that as well. But I love the idea this this self describing Rosetta layer. I don't know if anyone would do that because it's not really designed for for something that would be far future, but it would be, it would be something that shouldn't be that hard to include. And also from what I read, this was interesting. Microsoft said that this research phase for this technology is complete. They're done. They're essentially, it seemed to me with this wiping their hands of this and they're what they're going to do now is not really develop it further because you know that in their opinion, the research is done. They want to encourage other organizations to explore turning this research into a practical product. So let's see if anybody takes it up. I think if, if there's not much interest now, I think there will be interest in five or ten years considering this Cliff we're on of, you know, of, of, of data that we're, that we're creating so fast and not having anywhere to put it. It's, you know, it could become increasingly important over over the next 5 or 10 years. So we'll see what happens. But interesting tech either way.

S: All right. Thanks, Bob. Well everyone, we're taking a quick break from our show to talk about our ad this week, Aura Frames.

J: Guys, Aura Frames, we've been talking about it a lot. It's because we love it. This is a fantastic digital picture frame. It's an amazing present because who doesn't actually want to see the pictures that they take on their iPhone and they get locked in there and you really don't get to see ones from last year or five years ago or 10 years ago. It's so easy. I have, I got one for myself. I have it at my desk and you know, I just pick all my favorite images, load it up, and now I'm seeing pictures of me and my wife in Italy.

C: Oh, I love that. It's such a great gift for yourself or for someone you love, partially because you can add a message before it even gets there. It comes in a really lovely gift box, and you can even preload those photos before it ships so that the gift recipient doesn't have to do any work.

E: Named number one by Wirecutter, you can save on the perfect gift by visiting Aura frames.com. For a limited time, listeners can get $35 off their best selling Carver mat frame with code Skeptics. That's AURA frames.com promo code skeptics. Support the show by mentioning us a check out. Terms and conditions apply.

S: All right, guys, let's get back to the show.

UFO Balloons (1:04:32)

• F-16s Find Balloons, Not UFOs, After Sunday Scramble: NORAD 

S: All right, Evan, I, I understand there's been some UFO shenanigans going on.

E: Well, a little bit. Enough to scramble some fighter jets to go up there and take a look at what's going on. Just not a few days ago, February 15th, NORAD, which is the North American Aerospace Defense Command, scrambled 2F16 fighter jets from an air base in California after radar detected unidentified objects over Nevada and Northern California. Air traffic controllers in the Oakland Center region had picked up unusual radar tracks, and at least one civilian cargo pilot reported seeing a strange object described as glowing and dimming in the vicinity. The tracks were slow moving and at high altitude, and because the objects could not immediately be identified, NORAD launches fighters to visually inspect them. They later confirmed that the objects were not extraterrestrial or unknown craft, but were weather balloons.

B: Wait, weather balloons or party balloons?

E: Good question, Bob, but these happen to be weather balloons. That's the news. But I have a couple questions and I want to pose a few things to all of you. Who here has heard of Arrow? That's a ARO.

J: Sounds very familiar.

E: It does sound familiar. We may have touched on this before. ARROW stands for All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, a ARO, which is an official office within the US Department of Defense, the Pentagon, and it was recently established in 2022 to specifically investigate unidentified anomalous phenomena. UA PS That's our country's central hub for analyzing UAP sightings by military personnel and provide reports to Congress on such activity. But here's a question and let's see how close you can get to the answer. And this data comes from a ARO ARROW.

S: 98.

E: In a. In a 13 month span, basically from May 2023 through June 2024, how many individual UAP reports were logged? In other words? In other words, these are instances that were not duplicated. These were individual instances.

S: OK, if 100 people reported the same thing, it's one event.

E: Correct.

S: Yeah. And this is over what? How long is that period of time?

E: Roughly 13 months. May 23 through part of June 2024.

S: You know, I'll stick with my original answer.

E: You said 98. Anyone else want to venture a guess?

C: 200.

E: Higher 99 Higher.

C: Higher than 200. Higher 500. Higher 900.

E: Not quite 757, roughly 2 every day for just over a full year. All right, Part 2. Of those five 757 reports which were all deemed to have been investigated, how many turned out to be something other than a mundane sighting or object? Other than mundane? How many of those 757?

S: But does that include things they could not identify? Right, that's the question.

E: Yes, that includes things they could not identify.

S: Probably 20.

E: 00 They identified them all. Here's the breakdown. Here's the breakdown. I'm going to give it to you in reverse. Percentage order from lowest to highest. Of those 757 reports, 2% of them fell under the category commercial aircraft, 4% fell under the category of satellites. You know, misidentifying satellites as, yeah, Uaps, 8% birds, 16% drones, and that leaves 70% balloons.

S: Balloons.

E: Balloons are 70% of these things.

S: Wow.

E: I looked up what CBS had to say about this. The CBS News party balloons? No, very there. There are lots of different kinds of balloons. There's the weather balloons. There are party balloons.

S: Mylar balloons we are 'cause they look, they look weird.

C: Oh yeah, 'cause they're like metal.

E: Yeah, Yeah, we're going to. We're going to get to that in the kind of the second part of what I'm going to bring up as far as being able to detect these things. But as of late 2024, Arrow has found zero evidence of extraterrestrial activity or breakthrough technologies in any of their resolved cases. Absolutely no surprise there whatsoever. Now, they're still, they're apparently still crunching the 2025 data, but I'm going to guess that outcome will be the same. So they have these kinds of data sets at their disposal. Why can't the military figure out if a UAP is a balloon before having to do things like scramble jets or use any other costly sorts of assets? Well, it turns out they actually do. They they are trying to figure it out ahead of time, but it's not easy. It's not as easy as it seems. Some of the reasons why is that there is there are inherent limitations in radar technology. There are also limitations in the way they censor the filtering and they do it intentionally and I'll explain why in a second. And Steve, as you brought up or suggested, the physical characteristics of balloons make them challenging for our systems to detect. NORAD uses gates, GATES to filter out slow moving or small objects like birds, weather events and balloons to avoid overwhelming operators with clutter. That way they can focus on high speed threats, missiles, jets, you know, real things that are that are a problem. The high altitude balloons are inherently stealthy because they lack those sharp metal edges and engines resulting in engine signatures and therefore you get a tiny radar cross section that with almost no infrared signature. So the physical characteristics of balloons just make them hard for our radars to detect and then we limit it again because you can't have the clutter for stationary and slow moving objects that appear to be moving at high speed, alls at high speeds when viewed from fast moving fighter jets. That leads to misidentification as well. So those are environmental factors, but the other aspect of this is that the military sensors are designed for combat missions. They're not optimized for identifying non traditional aircraft. And when you have these things come up you it necessitates sending a pilot for up for visual, visual confirmation. It's the most reliable way of doing it. And I think we can thank maybe the, the Chinese in a sense for our recent spate of, of scrambling jets to, to go up to find, find balloons, right? In 2023, the Chinese spy balloon incident or incidents and NORAD therefore adjusted their radar parameters to detect smaller, slower objects. And that leads to an increase in sightings and subsequent scrambles. We had to broaden the, the framework in which we're detecting these things. And there's definitely a, a point right there where boop the graph goes up and there are going to be more of these going forward. So thank you, Chinese government. But my question why can't the Pentagon or NORAD develop a ground based system that looks for balloons? I thought perhaps that could be simpler or less expensive, less intrusive, but apparently after doing some number crunching and some research on that, that's not necessarily the truth here. But at the same time, they are trying to develop better systems that can look for things which would include identifying balloons. But again, it's not without a certain cost. Large scale space, space based as well. Satellites, right? Why can't we point our satellites down and, and, and try to help with this as well? Well, this is also something that they are working on, but that is also obviously very expensive. But here's the math as far as what it is to, to when you compare scrambling jets versus building a system that will detect balloons, you have to go back to 2022. This was before the Chinese balloon intrusions. The Pentagon received 247 UAP reports and 50% of those were attributed to balloons. If the military scrambled jets for 10% of those cases, OK, 25 times the annual cost would be about $12.5 million. That assumes a maximum of 500,000 permission and it's, it's usually 300 between between 300,000 and 500 permission, but call it 500,000 permission over 20 years, that's $250 million. But a dedicated radar network for just the US, this isn't even NORAD, which is all of North America, just the United States to develop it, to detect these balloons and other things similar would cost up to 50 million annually for operations and maintenance. Over 20 years, you're at a billion dollars. So it's, it's about four times as expensive to develop a system that was going to detect those those balloons. Now NORAD is still doing it and they're, they have incentives. The Army is, is involved as well with projects like launching ground based tethered balloons at strategic points around the United States, Alaska, as well to as an early warning detection system. They're they're working on it, but it still is an expensive proposition. And until then, until you get something that's going to be more cost effective. Right now the cost effective way is in fact to scramble The Jets to go up and see what the balloons are doing. So that's where we are.

S: Interesting, but they still haven't found any alien spacecraft.

E: They have found none.

S: Zero and this makes a zero difference to the true believers because they're like, oh right, weather balloon. We've heard that one since Roswell, right. I mean, that's almost a cliche. So that's because there's a lot of weather balloons up there and they're easy to misidentify.

E: Correct.

S: All right. Thanks, Evan.

E: You're welcome.

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:14:48)

S: Jay, get us up to date on who's that noisy?

J: All right guys, last week I played this noisy. Do you guys have any ideas?

S: Well, it had that pattern where it gets increasingly frequent, Yeah. Which suggests some kind of like stone skipping kind of phenomenon. You know what I mean?

J: Yes. Yep, you're on something there, Steve.

E: On water or on ice?

J: That's a good question.

S: Sound like ice if I.

E: Had Oh, maybe it's the skater who fell and tried the the Oh, sorry, Bob.

J: OK, well a listener named Bradford W wrote in and said Ciao Jay, maybe I have skating on the brain thanks to everyone talking about the Olympics. But in this week's noisy I hear what may be skate skates breaking. The other element is the pinging sound, similar to a Thunder sheet or a long cable being whacked, which I believe is the sound of ice fixing to break. So skating outdoors and maybe on ice. OK, moving on to the next one. This is from Josh. I hear wind noise on a mic and metal wire wiping increasing in frequency. I'm going to go with a power line whipping in the wind. That is incorrect. I will continue here with Evil Eye. You guys may have heard of of him, he says. I imagine the sound of curling happening, but recorded from the perspective of the ice, He says. You hear the sweeping and the stone. That's an interesting guess, but not correct. But there are some elements through all of these that that are are are near it. We have Bart in Ireland, and Bart says I'm often sure and equally often wrong. But this time I really think I got it. A stone skinned on frozen ice at the As the hops get shorter, the sound gets closer and ice reverberates amazingly, giving the otherworldly sound O this was your guest, Eve. Basically, Yeah, incorrect, but really close. Oi do have a winner for this week. The winner's name is Emily. Emily says. Hey, Jay, first time writer and listener for years. My guest for this week is a golf ball bouncing on a frozen lake. And this, indeed is a golf ball which has been hit by a Golf Club going out onto the frozen ice and then bouncing and bouncing and bouncing and bouncing and doing that thing that probably had. There has to be a scientific term for that. Yeah. That increase in speed as the, you know, the space gets smaller and smaller. Let me play it for you again. I think that has a like the sound of a golf ball and the sound of ice to me are very present in there. But good job everyone. I got tons of guesses this week. Thank you all for sending me those guesses in. All right guys, I have a new noisy for you this week. It was sent in by a listener named Claire. All right, guys, I have a huge annoying sound warning for this week. It's a little shrill, so prepare yourself. I warned you. You asked me to warn you. I'm warning you. But it's still fun, so let's listen to it. All right guys, if you heard something cool this week or you want to e-mail me a guest, e-mail me at wtn@theskepticsguide.org. Steve, I got tons of things to talk about, but I'm going to do it very quickly. All right, first, if you like the work that we do and you want to support us, you could become a patron of the SGU. You can go to patreon.com/skeptics Guide. Let's face it, the world needs help. The SGU has been here for 20 years. We intend to educate as many people on critical thinking as we can, and you could be a part of that effort. So please consider supporting us. Our new podcast called Political Reality Podcast hosted by Steve Novella and Andrea Jones. Roy, we have launched, we have many podcasts out now. This is a video podcast and an audio podcast, whatever you prefer. And then we have lots of tickets for sale. May 29th, we have the secret SDU meet up. This is a very low number, high exposure event where you'll have plenty of time to talk to all of us here at the SDU. May 29th. This is happening in Madison, WI. You can get tickets on our website. We also have the an extravaganza that we're doing on May 30th also in Madison, WI. Tickets are available on our website and we will have a private show plus which will be happening on May 30th. 3 shows all happening in Madison, WI. Just go to theskepticsguide.org for more details. Guys, we're we are going to be at 2 conferences in July of this year. One of them is going to be in Sydney, Australia. That's going to be Nauticon 2026, also Co hosted by the Australian Skeptics. You can go to skepticon.org.auornauticoncon.com For more information and all the all the tickets and everything. It's going to be a ton of fun. Doctor Carl will be there. You guys know who he is, right?

E: Yes, love, Doctor Carl.

J: Yeah, he is actually pretty awesome. I really do like him a lot. He's going to be joining us for all of the stuff that we do at Nauticon. If you've been to 1, you know what I'm talking about. He's going to be on stage doing almost everything with us, if not everything. So please consider joining us there. We're going to be at SYCON 2026. This is June 11th, the 14th in Buffalo, NY. And we're also going to be in New Zealand. Go to conference dot Skeptics dot NZ. This conference is going to be at the end of July. All the details are on the website. We will be doing a couple of different things at this conference. Basically the Saturday of that conference, we are we are going to be delivering all the content and we will also be there for the Friday night dinner. Just go to the website, see everything and we hope to see you guys at one or all of these events.

S: All right, Thanks Jay. All right guys, we have a an interesting question. I was going to do this last week, but I wanted Cara to be here for this. This comes from Derek and he writes Hey y'all, Since there is both a neurologist and a psychologist on the show, I figured you would be a good place to ask this if you didn't see the entertainment news. Kanye West recently put out an open letter apologizing for his past behavior and explaining it is a manifestation of untreated bipolar disorder. This opened up a chain of comments on Reddit dismissing it by saying bigotry is learned, it's not a side effect of mental illness. Others are trying to explain that they witnessed people in their own lives slip into destructive chains of thought due to mental illnesses like bipolar disorder. A similar thing happens when it comes to dementia or drug alcohol intoxication. People say things like alcohol only reveals a person's true thoughts, as if it's some kind of truth serum. People with dementia can suffer dramatic personality changes, including developing bigoted views they never held before, at least openly. I feel like this idea is misguided. My understanding of modern neuropsychology is that we are all awash with intrusive thoughts or flashes of ideas that go against our values, but those with a healthy mind and psyche are able to quash them before they take root, sometimes before we're even aware of them. And yes, while this inhibition can sometimes reveal thoughts behold true, but seek to suppress, I feel like there's a point where it's just plain delusion and not an automatic representation of who we are or what we stand for. What are your thoughts on? I imagine the full explanation is complex and situational, and I'd love to hear more. Derek, Cara, you want to get started?

C: Sure. And I think I appreciate the thoroughness of Derek's e-mail because I think in some ways he's answering his own questions with some of his examples.

S: That's why I read the whole thing.

C: Yeah, it's it's, yeah. Usually we wouldn't write get into all of it, but it is complex and situational. And there is a difference between, let's say, I think Tourette's is a very good example of what he's talking about, where it's an impulse control issue. And there are these kind of unconscious or subconscious ticks, right? These these words. Sometimes when people's Tourette, when people's Tourette's are dominated by ticks, sometimes people will say inappropriate things or they'll curse. When people have frontal lobe disorder or frontal lobe damage, very often there's a disinhibition and there will be inappropriate sexual advances or there will be very inappropriate things that are said in conversation. And, you know, I think it's really unfair and actually not representative of what we understand about neuroscience or neurobiology or neuropsychology to say, oh, it's, it's that person's true thoughts and feelings. We are all awash with all sorts of, you know, just things happening in our head and part of frontal lobe, you know, executive function is suppressing some of them and allowing others to come out. That said, I think that it's much more complex when we talk about somebody who has struggled for many years with bipolar disorder but has publicly held, you know, over, let's say, racist or sexist or politically expedient, you know, views and after the fact says, well, I was undiagnosed and that's why I, you know, had this kind of consistent thread. I think that's really the telltale sign there is that. Yes, there probably were. We could probably point to specific examples in Kanye's behaviour that said that was happening during a manic episode or that was clearly probably directly linked to an experience that had a psychotic experience maybe that he was having, if he has bipolar one with psychotic features. I don't know his diagnosis, but the consistent thread of specific ideologies and views I think does require a little bit more investigation. Because it's somewhere in the middle, right? You can't just say because I have a mental illness, everything I ever say and do is not actually me.

S: Right.

C: That's completely unfair.

S: Yeah, yeah. So I think there's a couple things we could say about this. We, so we, the, it's easy to talk about, I think, and this is super complicated, but relatively easy to talk about disease states, right, 'cause we know. And what's interesting is that disease states don't just exacerbate your baseline. That's only one type of thing that can happen. We often talk, I don't know if you ever use this term in psychology, but in neurology, we'll ask, We'll talk about the premorbid personality.

C: 100%, yeah.

S: What was that person's premorbid personality 'cause I think that's our baseline. And then we then we see how it changed and that gives us insight into what kind of process is going on. And sometimes it completely flips. I'll never forget this one patient. I just, it's a little anecdote. This old guy who was apparently, you know, normal nice guy, and then he became demented, a certain type of dementia, and he became, in a word, evil. Like he looked at you like he wanted to rip your head off, like with so much drip you could feel and it was palpable. It was really interesting. That was all the morbidity. That was not his premorbid personality.

C: Yeah, at all. Famously, he had a railroad spike go through his head and all the sudden he was a jerk.

J: Yeah.

C: Remember, like that's like how people were like what happened?

J: Yeah, actually, Cara, he had lots of different things change, like he became super infatuated or he had an affinity with nature. All these different behaviors came out from that.

C: Yeah, 'cause he had a massive brain injury and it changed his personality.

S: But the question is in the non pathological people, you know, at the other end of the spectrum, like how much are people really responsible for their neurology? Right. We all have. We're born with personalities. We're born with our we're given our brain. We don't, you know, create our brain and there, there we've had people on the show and there there is a definitely a movement, the naturalism movement that says that we are not at all responsible for our behaviour from the perspective that we don't really have free will, you know, that we are just playing out the brain we were born with, you know, 'cause.

C: It's such an extreme.

S: View I As I said, that is the extreme view. I do not take that view. I think even if you have a kind of a philosophical point to make, I get it, but it we still have to act as if we make decisions and we have to be held responsible to those decisions 100%.

C: And so the other, and I think there's there's an extreme on the other side of that argument too, which I don't like, which is that. So you've got on the one hand, there's this kind of core personality, what we would say in psychology is a is a trait versus a state. But I also do believe that those things are, I don't think they're fixed first of all, but even beyond web how fixed they are, they are heavily influenced by all sorts of structural and cultural and experiential things in life. I think that we can, we can have both things be true at the same time. We are products of our environments and we also are are responsible for our actions.

S: Exactly. And, and the degree to which our personality, our behaviour, our thoughts or whatever our cultural versus we've to some extent taken control of our own parenting, of our own development and just a slave to our neurology or whatever. It's a continuum and, and it's a multifaceted continuity of multiple layers interacting in complicated ways. And so with yeah, I, I get, I don't think you could make one blanket statement about everybody. I know you agree with that, that you have to sort of individually look at people. Or if you're within, you know, just to use a phrase like if you're within 2 standard deviations of a typical, like neurotypical person, you basically have to be held responsible for the decisions that you make, even if you have more challenges than somebody else. So you may have a little bit less inhibition or a little bit more anger or whatever it is you're still helping.

C: Like severe bipolar disorder, it you may be two standard deviations.

S: Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And and even though it may seem like racism is something that is learned and it's just, you know what I mean, It's it, it absolutely can be a neurological disorder. You know, people can become paranoid and have feelings of persecution, which absolutely could play into racist narratives.

C: Yeah, bipolar has it for some people who have a bipolar one disorder. Some people have psychotic features. I mean, that's a diagnosable portion of the of the disorder.

S: And that's a continuum too, right? I mean, you could have, So what if you're just a little psychotic? I mean, at what point? At what point are you like not responsible for your actions? So and you know, from philosophically, medically, we could talk about this and all the nuance of it legally is interesting. I think, you know, my understanding is that legally you they sort of recognize the continuum. It's like.

C: They do and and it's a capacity question, right and there's.

S: Mitigating factors. There's sort of the reasonable person standard and then there were there mitigating factors. Is this the kind of situation where, oh, well, OK, you were struggling with bipolar disorder, That's a mitigating factor. Does it completely absolve you of responsibility? No, but we'll consider it in sentencing or whatever.

C: You know, and here's the thing that a lot of people don't recognize about capacity, because capacity, something I deal with a lot at the hospital, it because I'm a psychologist at a hospital, capacity is not fixed. Capacity can change day-to-day and hour to hour.

S: You could have a bad day.

C: Yeah, you could have, you know, you could be experiencing acute psychosis, you could be having a moment, you could be having whatever. And so The thing is when we talk about, and I know that the question was specific about Kanye, but like, you know, we can apply it to general things. My view very often with mental illness is to take a longer view and say, well, how long was their consistent behaviour occurring? How much fluctuation in that behaviour occurred? And how many opportunities did this individual have to seek treatment? Now there is a feature of bipolar for some individuals where when you are manic, you by definition don't want treatment because you feel really, really good. And it's like one of the diagnosis where it's kind of harder sometimes, so hurts some treatment. Yeah, exactly. But that said, we're not talking about a single acute event or a handful of things that he did. We're talking about something that was consistent over, I mean, was it years?

S: Yeah, again, I'm not willing, I don't like to, to diagnose celebrities. Long, of course I know.

C: You're not doing that. Yeah.

S: So we have to emphasize, we don't know. There's so many details of it, so many questions I would want to ask and to know to really have a judgement about this individual. That's why I would want to just keep our comments broad just in general that this is like in theory, The the bottom line is I think it's complicated. It applies to everybody. We're all on multiple spectrums and you have to individualize decisions. Culpability, like responsibility, is a complicated question. Philosophically, ethically. Legally. Neurologically, psychologically, it's complicated. Don't. But don't just resist any kind of moralizing, simplistic judgmental opinion like people are should be responsible. And it's no excuse, you know, It's not that simple.

C: Or like because that person was drunk, everything that they said was what they really felt or.

S: Because don't think anything simplistic like that.

C: Disinhibition doesn't mean, you know, excavating true feeling, it can mean that, but I wouldn't assume that that's what it means. There are a lot of things that happen in all of our brains that we would not want to allow other people to access, right, right.

S: And that is true.

C: And the responsibility comes in that inhibit in, you know, the inhibiting portion and those of us have I think various level of skill in that area.

S: Yeah, it's not, Yeah, it's not all just oh, that was there and it was inhibited and now it's disinhibited. Like, you know, I had another patient who had a psychiatric illness, I think it was bipolar disorder. When she was manic, she became hypersexual like she was. She's not using all the residents. So you know, Yeah. Like, yeah. Yeah. Like that doesn't mean she was. It was latent that she was always that way and it was inhibited.

C: I. Mean she was disinhibited in that moment, but the thing that she was not inhibiting was not something that's always in the background.

S: Yeah, but it was also that it was that hypersexuality was being positively created by the disease, not just disinhibited.

C: And that's, that's something that we always take into consideration during diagnostics. You know, part of the DSM is actually, is there a physiologic or a even a, you know, syndrome that's harder to tease out that we know is causal of certain types of behaviour. Yeah.

S: All right, we could talk about this for hours, obviously, but it's yeah, it's interesting. Quick, name out logical files. They're really going to make this great. This also comes it's a questions comes from Hendrick, who writes. I was playing a a game of cribbage with my sister, and a situation arose where the rules were unclear and a discussion broke out about whether or not I had legally scored two points. The details were at a point, but the discussion took an interesting turn and I'm wondering about which particular fallacy was at play, He says. I laid out my arguments that my sister laid out hers. Then several bystanders contributed opinions. The crux of the discussion came when my mother declared that if roles were reversed, I would be arguing for the other side. I admitted that yes, I was indeed playing lawyer. Because of my admission, the jury declared that my reasoning invalid and ruled in my sister's favor. So he wants to know if there's any logical fallacy at play there. What do you guys think?

C: Oh, this is a tough one because I I think yes, but I also think that he is committing A fallacy fallacy.

S: Well, I think that's the fallacy.

C: Oh, OK. All right. We're on the same page there. Yeah, yeah.

S: Yeah, Yeah, you hit it. I think that's.

C: What that's?

S: That's what the whole thing is. It's because you were engaged in motivated reasoning. Your argument is incorrect, but that is not true. You, you, you could be motivated to have the correct opinion about something, right? So both sides, I mean, if we assume in this case that both people were defending, were playing lawyer and defending their position, I don't get the, the particular details are not important for the for the illustration, but you know, it's possible that neither of them were correct. There's no objective answer. Or one was right and the other was wrong, Whatever. That's determined by the specific details of the case, yes, not the motivations of the person making the point.

C: And just because you commit an informal logical fallacy, that doesn't mean that you have flawed logic. And I think we have to remember that, too. Yeah, they're informal for that reason. Yeah, that's.

B: Critical there.

Emails (1:36:01)

S: Yeah, I know somebody else sent us an e-mail saying that's their professor or somebody had made the case that you shouldn't even teach the informal logical fallacy because they fallacies, because they do more harm than good. I disagree, obviously.

C: Yeah, I disagree with that.

S: But it was because of the fallacy fallacy, right? It's because that's too many people use them as the fallacy fallacy, which basically means dismissing an argument because you can frame it as a fallacy.

C: Yeah. I mean, it just leaves out all the Gray air. It's like, I think the most common thing I say in therapy with my patients is, you know, a behavior is helpful until it's not. A thing is good until it's not. And I think you could say the same thing about discussing informal logical fallacies. Like, it can be really helpful to to really dig deep into the logic of your arguments. Yeah. But once you become so obsessed with only having logical arguments and you leave, I don't know, empathy and, you know, like all of these other features out of the conversation, that's not healthy anymore.

S: Yeah, and not only that. And then what? The way I approach the fallacy fallacy problem is to recommend listen, you should be using your understanding of the informal logical fallacies to police your own thinking, right?

E: Your own. Argument as a cudgel against.

S: Right, not as a weapon against somebody else. As soon as it becomes a weapon, then you're committing a fallacy. Basically agree.

E: That's not what. It's for Hendrick, if you're listening, the next time you're playing cribbage, I happen to be a passionate cribbage player. Just ask me what about the rule? I hope you. Decide whether. There was a legal 2 points or not.

S: That's right, appeal.

C: To authority.

S: You can accept the appeal to authority for the All right, let's move on with science or fiction.

Name That Logical Fallacy (1:37:42)

Topic: I've been listening to the show for about 7 years, this is my first time writing in! Your discussion of motivated reasoning last week reminded me of a situation I found myself in a while ago, and I'd be interested to hear an experienced skeptic's take on it. I was playing a game of cribbage with my sister, and a situation arose where the rules were unclear, and a "discussion" broke out about whether or not I had legally scored two points. The details are unimportant, but the discussion took an interesting turn, and I'm wondering about which particular fallacy was at play, if one was even present at all. The discussion proceeded as follows: I laid out my arguments, then my sister laid out hers, then several bystanders (who were functioning as a makeshift jury) contributed opinions. The crux of the discussion came when my mother declared that if roles were reversed, I would be arguing for the other side. I admitted that yes, I was indeed playing lawyer. Because of my admission, the jury declared my reasoning invalid, and ruled in my sister's favor. Clearly, both my sister and I could be accused of motivated reasoning, but I'm more interested in which fallacy the jury committed. It seems to me that the jury cannot rightfully dismiss an argument solely due to the fact that it came from a biased source. Having a biased source should be a warning flag to apply extra scrutiny, but the argument still ought to be ultimately judged on its merits. My best guess is that this is some sort of ad hominem? Anyway, love the show, thank you for all that you do! Best, Hendrik

Voice-over: It's time for. Science. Or fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:37:52)

Theme: Biology Item #1: A new study finds that living at high altitude significantly reduces the risk for diabetes. Item #2: Researchers demonstrate that mouse-derived brain organoids are able to learn and remember tasks often used to train AI, using reinforcement learning. Item #3: A recent review of research finds that animal behavior, such as vigilance and foraging, has a variable response to interactions with humans, with fear-driven behavior increasing, changing little, or even decreasing.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Researchers demonstrate that mouse-derived brain organoids are able to learn and remember tasks often used to train AI, using reinforcement learning.
Science	A new study finds that living at high altitude significantly reduces the risk for diabetes.
Science	A recent review of research finds that animal behavior, such as vigilance and foraging, has a variable response to interactions with humans, with fear-driven behavior increasing, changing little, or even decreasing.

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Jay	A new study finds that living at high altitude significantly reduces the risk for diabetes.
Evan	Researchers demonstrate that mouse-derived brain organoids are able to learn and remember tasks often used to train AI, using reinforcement learning.
Cara	Researchers demonstrate that mouse-derived brain organoids are able to learn and remember tasks often used to train AI, using reinforcement learning.
Bob	Researchers demonstrate that mouse-derived brain organoids are able to learn and remember tasks often used to train AI, using reinforcement learning.

S: Each week, I come up with three Science News items or facts. 2 real and one fake. Then I challenge my panelist. Skeptics tell me which one is the fake. It's a sort of a theme. These are all just regular news items, but they're kind of all within the biological realm, if you will. You guys ready? Sure. All right, here we go. Item number one. A new study finds that living at high altitude significantly reduces the risk for diabetes. IR #2 researchers demonstrate that mouse derived brain organoids are able to learn and remember tasks often used to train AI using reinforcement learning and I #3 A recent review of research finds that animal behavior such as vigilance and foraging has a variable response to interaction with humans, with fear driven behavior increasing, changing little, or even decreasing. That's obviously in different situations, right? Jay, go first.

J: All right.

S: Have you guys noticed, by the way, that I'm doing a strict rotation this year?

J: No, I haven't. I haven't actually.

S: Interesting.

B: Thank you, Steve.

J: Steve, the first one about the living at high altitude will reduce the risk for diabetes. You know, at first blush, you know, I mean, yeah, if you've ever been to high altitude. I mean, what are you talking like Colorado? Like 4005 thousand feet?

S: Yeah, pretty high.

J: Yeah, that's pretty high. Yeah. I mean, there are physiological changes, without a doubt. You know, most of them your body can get used to and everything. So I'm trying to think like, what would be the mechanism here to affect diabetes, which essentially is blood sugar management? What would be that? What would that pressure do or lack of pressure do? God, that's cool, though. I mean, it's intriguing. I don't know. I just don't know about that one. Let me switch to the other two, see if I have any strong opinions. All right, so the second one about the the researchers that demonstrate the mouse derived brain organoids, they're able to to learn and remember tasks often used to train AI. So, Steve, how are they training these organoids?

S: With reinforcement learning.

J: But I mean clear clarify the what an organoid is right? It's a mouse derived brain. Organoid. It's just a piece of brain.

S: Yeah, it's not a piece. Well, it's not really a piece of brain. They aren't. They're not taking a piece out of a mouse brain. They're using derived stem cells from a mouse, turning them into neurons and then growing some brain cells with it to create not a brain, but like in a clump of cells that have some properties of a brain, right? As as we've talked about this before on the show, it's kind of a way as another, as a research tool. So you could study how not just a not it's somewhere between a single neuron and a brain, right? It's a clump of neurons interacting with each other. So we could ask questions about those interactions. And this is 1 like can that actually function? Can it process information and learn to do stuff? You're right.

J: So in your professional opinion, Steve, is this the beginning of, like, you know, these brains taking over the world or not?

S: We'll talk about it after you give me your answer to all.

J: Right. I think this one is science, you know, I mean brain cells, you know, neurons are incredibly refined cells that do that do incredible lift as far as I'm concerned. They're they're amazing. I would not put this past any kind of of a mammalian brain cell. So that one is definitely science to me. The third one is a recent review of research about animal behavior. And you're saying vigilance and foraging has a variable response to interactions with humans with fear driven behavior increasing, changing little or even decreasing. OK.

S: Yeah. So you have to clarify because there's a lot of information to put into one sentence. But this is a review of 30 years of research and they were looking at lots of different types of interactions with humans, and in some situations animals were more fearful and some that didn't see much of a difference, and in other situations they were even. Less fearful.

J: Yeah. So like, you know, for example, if a human has a piece of steak in their hands that they're willing to give up, I would imagine that a lot of animals would be pretty damn psyched about that. I know my dog is, you know.

S: Yeah, this is wild animals.

J: Even more they, they, they to them, it's even better, you know, OK, I mean, it's between the first one, you know, about the you know, about the diabetes and altitude and this one, this one just seems like there's just so many variables in here that it it's you know, it's hard to summarize it in one sentence and really get it my head wrapped around and enough to to talk about it. But I would think, sure, there's variability. Of course there would be variability. Therefore the first one about the diabetes and altitude has to be the fiction.

S: OK, Evan.

E: Yeah, I'm having a hard time figuring out why high altitude would significantly reduce the risk of diabetes unless significantly is the keyword here. Statistically significant, I imagine is what we're talking about here. Some measures, that is, other than noise, but I don't know why. I can't figure out why that would be the case. Altitude has an impact on the bloods somehow. Is that right? Yeah. Doesn't it? I don't know. All right, next one, the the brainish thing. The organoids able to learn and remember tasks. Oh gosh, I don't I don't mouse derived. I don't know, I don't know. Can they get it to do this? A clump of cells turn it into something that is a able. Then you can train AI on it. I don't know, maybe just a training tool. Boy, that could be the case because it's just kind of like a training pathway and as in effect just a, a, a blueprint as it were, maybe.

S: Yeah. So to to clarify, they weren't using this to train AI, right, Right, right. They were using similar methods that are used to train AI. They basically treated the organoid as an AI to see if it actually could also had the reinforcement learning would also work on the organoid.

E: I don't. Know that's that's a. That seems far fetched. I'm having a hard time. I'm having a hard time with that one. I think of the three the last one about. Yeah, there's a lot of words here and about the animal behavior, beer driven behavior increasing, changing little or even decreasing. There is a variable response. That's the point. Well, yeah, I'm having, I'm not having as big a problem with this one. It's the it's the brain organoids one that I'm having the the trouble with, and it's probably I admit it's my own limit, limits in understanding exactly how an organoid like this could really does function. But I'm just having a feeling that this one's going to be the fiction. Having a very hard time wrapping my own organoid around it, so I'll say I'll just say it's the fiction.

S: OK, Cara.

C: Yeah, this one's tough because I feel like they could all be science. Like that's it's, there's not one thing where I'm like, that doesn't seem real. They all just seem like sure, why not? So I don't really understand the mechanism with the diabetes risk, but obviously it's going to have something to do with either insulin production or blood sugar and high altitude, you know, lower is lower oxygen, but that would affect a lot in your blood. So I could see there's some weird relationship with blood sugar there, but I can't for the life of me like hypothesize what that what that kind of connection is, except that you're saying it reduces the risk of diabetes. So if somehow low oxygen environments may be reduced blood sugar or increase insulin, which downstream would reduce blood sugar? Let's see. And then the mouse derived brain organoids like this one I think requires more. I feel like this one is the vaguest of them and that's why it's also bothering me. Like they are able to learn and remember tasks well. An organoid can't really do anything.

S: It's just processing information like you're.

C: Exactly. There has to be some sort of output that is being measured that's like hooked into it.

S: They're using it as if it was a circuit, you know, as if it were.

C: Yeah. And and that makes sense, right. So if the organoid is fed information and then there's some sort of output that is measured, like we used to do MEA research and we would have these little cell like monolayer cell cultures and we could literally just read the electric electrical activity of them. So we add a drug or we change the environment and the electrical activity changes. And then we could draw inferences on what was happening based on, you know, are they firing more frequently? Are they firing? Are they firing in unison? And so I could see doing something like that and actually using enforcement learning. It doesn't seem far fetched at all to me. It's the whole like using the same training model as an AI, don't even see why that matters. It's like OK, just do enforcement learning. Like you don't need AI for that. And also organoid research is still pretty new. Like a lot of what we've looked at with organized organoids historically has been like I think like self assembly stuff like what do they naturally do? I'm not sure how much we can use them as circuits yet, or we can use them as sort of like like detectors on chips, for example. And then the last one is this animal behavior such as vigilance and foraging. OK. So either like perking up their ears and being like, don't come at me or I'm comfortable enough to eat or to pick marries. Yeah. So that has a variable response with fear driven behavior increasing, changing little or even decreasing. Yeah, of course, because it's going to be variable to how the people are. Like Jay said, if you're shooting at them, I think they're going to be afraid. But like, we, we managed to domesticate dogs. Like, I don't see why a study wouldn't show that raccoons and bears are not as afraid of people or coyotes, for example, than animals that we hunt and kill. So that one seems reasonable to me too. So I think honestly, they could all be science, but the one I just don't feel like something's missing is the organoid one as well. So I'll go with them, Evan. But this one's tough, Steve.

B: OK. And Bob? Yeah, it's tough. And I as everyone else, I can't see the connection between the altitude and risk of debt for diabetes as well. I can only, it can barely even speculate on one what that could be. I'm thinking maybe you want us to push us in that direction potentially. Who the hell knows though, the the organoid 1 is. The problem I have with that is that I mean, a mouse can learn and remember tasks. So you're saying that this organoid can do some of the most sophisticated behavior that rats already do? That makes me a little bit skeptical. And then the third one, Steve, was this. The interactions change with the same animal, with different people or different animals.

S: Like if you're looking at the same person, how are animals in this area behaving and what kind of interactions do they have with humans, Right? That's basically the kind of question they're asking.

B: Yeah, I mean that that's not bothering me nearly as much as the organoid one. I'm going to, I'm going to go with. Is it just me and Cara then? And Devin? Evans. And Devin, yes, the three of us, yeah, I'm going to have to go with them and say that that's fiction. Everyone's rubbing me the wrong way a little bit. I mean, still wouldn't surprise me either way, but that's the my best shot. Here all. Right.

S: So you guys all agree on the third one. So we'll start there. A recent review of research finds that animal behavior such as vigilance and foraging has a variable response to interaction with humans, with fear driven behavior increasing, changing little, or even decreasing. So the question was is you know, humans are basically considered the top super predator of.

J: Apex.

S: Predator, right?

C: Yeah. We are threatening.

S: And we are threatening and generally wildlife likes to keep a wide berth away from humanity. So the researchers were interested to, to They reviewed the past 30 years of research to see what does the actual data say about wild animal behavior and specific behaviors like vigilance and forging. Like as exactly you said, are they like constantly worried and looking over their shoulder and perking up? Or do they feel comfortable enough that they could feed? Cause those two, those two things do have like an inverse relationship. And that's the, the downside of hyper vigilance in animals, that they have less time to to forage, right? Adaptively, the evolutionary pressures would want them to have exactly as much vigilance as they need, but no more. Right. That makes sense 'cause there's a cost. There's a cost to that vigilance. All right. So what they found was that the effect of interactions with humans was highly variable. This one is science. Yeah. So the, and Kerry, you actually, you, you were very good. You hit up on it if in areas where there's hunting their their fear driven behavior goes way up.

C: Of course, smart. That shots in dead. Animals in.

S: Other areas where there wasn't direct hunting going on there, they didn't detect any, you know, significant change. But in some locations, their wild animals felt more comfortable as a result of their overlap with humans. And why do you think that is?

C: Well, there, like we change a.

B: Positive experience like getting food and stuff.

C: Yeah, I would think it's probably either like food being nearby or like the the way that we change the landscape affected them positively.

S: So the way that we change the landscape is 1 because like we clear areas that then become good for foraging, right? It's like near roads, for example.

B: They tie that to people.

S: Well, yeah, like we.

C: We're the ones clearing those areas.

S: We clear, we clear those areas and then animals in those. But so that so like being near roads is considered interactions with humans. It's more they counted that as passive as a passive interaction.

C: Animals will take paths in a National Park. They will take a footpath that was made by humans because it's easier to walk along a foot back.

E: We need more of those animal bridges and.

C: Tunnels A wildlife cross.

S: But here's a big one. A big one is where there are humans, there are far fewer predators and so.

C: That makes sense.

S: Yeah, scare.

E: We scare away.

S: We scare the predators.

C: Wolves and yeah.

S: So they like hanging out in human areas because they could. They could forage and be comfortable. They don't have to worry about as many predators. So that was interesting. I guess we'll take the we'll keep going backwards #2 researchers demonstrate that mouse derived brain organoids are able to learn and remember tasks often used to train AI using reinforcement learning. Evan, Cara and Bob, you think this one is the fiction? J you think this one is science? I'd give you a little bit more detail before I do the reveal 'cause if there was a study, obviously the title of the study is Goal Directed Learning in Cortical Organoids. And the specific task that they used was the cart pole task. So basically the cart pole. Imagine you have a cart like on a rail, and there's a you're balancing a pole in the middle and you have to move the cart back and forth to keep the pole balanced. That's it. That's the task. And we and programmers use that to to as to train AI with reinforcement learning. So they just said, all right, let's just do the same thing but with this clump of cells and see if it works. And it was able to learn the task, but it couldn't remember the task. So this is the fiction.

E: We couldn't.

C: Remember. Oh, and remember is. And remember, we didn't. Even think about that.

E: Oh, I. Missed. I missed.

S: Remember it, it does work as a circuit, but it has no mechanism by which it could remember, you know. So after 45 minutes, whatever training it it did completely fades away. There's no long term memory. Yeah, that was the key in this one. I almost flipped 2 and three in terms of which one was the fiction, but I thought that would be work All right. And then that means that a new study finds that living at high altitude significantly reduces the risk for diabetes is science. And this study was was not the first one to show this. This is actually been known for a long time. It did support that conclusion. It was. But this study was trying to ask why it reduces the risk for diabetes. You guys all because.

C: That's what we all want to know.

S: We all keyed in on that. Yeah. Which of course is like, there doesn't. There's no intuitive answer to that. They did find an answer. And I'll tell you, Cara, you came the closest. Obviously, you're the biologist in the group, so you, you know, how to think about these sorts of things. It does have to do with oxygen and it.

C: Has to do with blood sugar.

S: And it has to do with blood sugar.

C: How though?

S: Yeah, How So what they found, that's the question. What they found is that in low oxygen environments that red blood cells absorb blood sugar because it helps them deliver oxygen more efficiently and so it becomes a significant glucose sink when otherwise they are not a significant glucose sink. So it lowers blood sugar, which reduces the risk the, you know, the strain on insulin and insulin resistance and it reduces the risk of diabetes, so.

C: But it doesn't negatively affect the red blood cells. Them carrying that excess sugar around. Oh, that's really cool. Yeah, I guess 'cause you poop out your red blood cells a lot.

S: Yeah, yeah, they only live for like whatever 120 days or something anyway makes.

C: Sense.

B: They they don't even have a damn nucleus.

S: Right.

C: But they're good at carrying, so yeah, they were.

B: They're still cells.

S: The the people were really puzzled by this, like where's the what's happening here? That why is the why is altitude doing this? They just had no idea that red cells could become a significant glucose sink and just happens. It's just a side effect that they're doing it to for the oxygen delivery. It's just a side effect that it.

C: I wonder if that could be like a treatment for diabetes.

B: Yeah. Right. Who knows? Go live on on a mountain.

C: Or not just just some sort of like oxygen reduction. Yeah, I mean it's. Clearly significant.

S: I mean, I don't know how else you want to characterize it. It could be a treatment, anything that would lower blood sugar to this degree, you know, could that's cool, could be another option. I don't know, you know, but I don't think you'd want to make people hypoxic to do it.

C: No, you'd want. Yeah, it would need to be mildly.

S: But if you could find a way to leverage this mechanism without the hypoxia, maybe that there's a drug target in there or something, I don't know. It's interesting to think about. Yeah. I thought that was really fascinating. Yeah, that is cool.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:56:56)

"Astrology is a disease, not a science. It is a tree under the shadow of which all sorts of superstitions thrive. Only fools and charlatans lend value to it."  – Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon Maimonides (1138–1204), philosopher, jurist, and physician of the Middle Ages, authored ten influential medical works covering topics like asthma, diabetes, and hygiene. A practitioner of the "natural sciences" who championed empirical observation over blind reliance on ancient authority., (description of author)

S: All right, Evan, give us a quote.

E: Astrology is a disease, not a science. It is a tree under the shadow of which all sorts of superstitions thrive. Only fools and charlatans lend value to it. And that was written by Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon. Maimonides, who was born in 1138, died in 12O Four so 12th century philosopher, jurist and physician of the Middle Ages who also authored 10 influential medical works covering topics like asthma, diabetes and hygiene. He was considered a practice practitioner of the natural sciences who championed empirical observation over blind reliance on ancient authority. Wow, He must have been a standout in his time, right?

B: What? What did he say about diabetes and living adaptivity?

E: Right. Yeah, No kidding. How about that? I didn't even know Steve was going to come up with a diabetes.

S: Topic tonight, but but it it is it is always fascinating to read bits of wisdom from people from 1000. Oh my God, years ago. It's like, wow, I knew that's relevant today. Yeah. But The thing is, the ancient philosophers did sort out most of the basic stuff, you know what I mean? Like everything we're thinking about, they pretty much did that 1000.

B: They knew what happened.

C: All the mechanisms.

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The the roots of most of what we would might consider modern enlightened ideas. Whatever our philosophy goes, goes way back to basically the first time people started thinking about things systematically. You know, it's interesting. All right. Well, thank you guys for joining me this week.

E: Thank you, Steve. You're welcome.

S: And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.