SGU Episode 1025

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SGU Episode 1025
March 1st 2025
"Next-gen cargo ship: efficient, innovative design sailing towards a sustainable future."
SGU 1024                      SGU 1026
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
"One of the few universal characteristics is a healthy skepticism toward unverified speculations. These are regarded as topics for conversation until tests can be devised. Only then do they attain the dignity of subjects for investigation."
Edwin Hubbel, The Realm of the Nebulae (Yale University Press: 1936)
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Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, February 26^th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening, everyone.

S: So unfortunately, we've got some sad news today. Just today as we're recording this, Michelle Trachtenberg died.

E: I read it and I didn't believe it at first.

S: Yeah, so she played Dawn on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

B: That's how I know her. And she was great. She was so good.

S: Yeah, she was really good. She had a whole acting career, obviously, not just Buffy. But yeah, apparently she was only 39. Apparently she had a liver transplant and so probably died of complications of that. I'm not seeing any specific information, but that's probably has something to do that. Although I couldn't find why she had the liver transplant in the first place.

E: Does it seem, I imagine by average it's young to be having a liver transplant.

C: No, I mean it can be, but some liver transplants are related to lifestyle and some liver transplants are not. People can have things wrong with their liver for a lot of different reasons.

E: I imagine there's a genetic disposition for liver disease or other factors like that.

C: I actually recently saw a patient in the hospital who had a form of cirrhosis that is non-alcohol related cirrhosis. It can just happen.

E: Yeah, oh boy.

S: Or you can get an infection or you just have some other liver disease. No information. But yeah, that's sad.

B: Yeah, it blows.

S: Yeah, if you're younger than me, by definition, you're young.

C: And if you're younger than me, you're really young.

S: Yeah, you're really young.

C: You remember my friend Holly?

S: Yeah.

C: A rocket just launched, like just now. She was posting about it.

S: Oh yeah?

E: Like 10 minutes ago?

C: No, like today. There was a rocket launch with like going to the moon, I think. Yeah, SpaceX Falcon 9 launches the IM-2 moon mission and there's a bunch of like science on it.

S: That's a lunar lander. Yeah, intuitive machines.

C: So I don't know. I think I might have mentioned a friend of mine who is an optical engineer. Her name's Holly Bender on the show before. I've definitely had her on Talk Nerdy, but gosh, that was probably like almost 10 years ago now. So I should probably have her back on.

E: Where did we meet her in Washington, DC?

C: Yeah, you guys met Holly. So she worked on an instrument, the Lunar Trailblazer. I guess the instrument that she was working on is looking to see how much water there is in this one crater in the moon. Where did the water possibly come from? Could it be used? And so, yeah, I got to watch the launch, you know, through her Instagram feed, which was only, it looks like just an hour ago, she posted the launch and said, we're going to the moon, which is like just really, really cool. What a cool thing to be involved, to be an engineer who worked on something and then watch it go off to space.

B: That would just, I can't even relate to how awesome that would be.

J: I know, right? Could you imagine?

E: And nerve wracking.

C: Yeah, that too. Yeah, for sure. So I don't know much about the instrument or about the actual, like what's all going to, in the payload on this rocket.

S: So it was a Falcon 9 rocket that launched two probes, right? So it was, I would call them a ride share. So it was the Intuitive Machines Lunar Lander and NASA's Lunar Trailblazer, which is the one that your friend worked on. That's the one that's going to be looking at the water. But they're both basically missions to support the eventual Artemis getting people back to the moon.

B: Yeah, if it ever happens.

C: Well, these are the kinds of things that make it happen.

B: Well, I mean, Musk doesn't want it to happen. So what Musk wants...

C: Well, it looks like this is on Musk's rocket.

E: Do you think he would want it to happen then?

B: He does not. He wants to go right to Mars. He does not want Artemis. That's my understanding. He does not think we need to go to the moon at all.

S: It's too late. We are so committed.

E: Haven't we talked about this before? You have to have the moon before you have Mars, right?

B: Of course it does. But he does not, I don't think, I haven't read about it in a little while, but I don't think he agrees with that.

E: Let me call him. I'm getting him on the show here.

B: He wants to just go straight to Mars, which is, of course, utterly ridiculous.

E: His line's busy. I'll try him later.

S: All right. Let us know if you get in touch with him.

E: Yeah. I'll let you know. I'll pipe him in.

B: And another thing.

S: And another thing.

E: And about that asteroid.

C: Oh, yeah. Sorry.

B: Oh, yeah. Did you guys hear about the news about that asteroid? Well, it looks like, you know, we're not going to get hit at all.

C: Why do you sound disappointed, Bob?

E: Good.

B: I'm going to own this. I'm disappointed. It's down to four one-thousandth of a percent chance to hit Earth.

E: Yes.

C: Good.

B: And that's fine. That's fine. But I forget what venue I said this at, but I was like, you know, I can't help but be a little disappointed. Because for me, a best case scenario would be like, yeah, we're nervous. And we're like, you know, a little bit of like, holy crap. But I like the idea of countries uniting to address this and have a rocket ready within a couple of years to like a dart type mission, to deal with like a kinetic impactor, right? To deal with an asteroid that's heading towards the Earth. And then, you know, in 2028, like, oh, look, oh, yeah, it's not going to hit us. But we got a rocket ready to go. That's what I wanted. I wanted for us to take even more seriously this idea that we need to be ready to go with an impactor to push away or change the trajectory of any asteroid that we might find and not have enough time. And it's great that, you know, getting hit would have that would have been horrible. I mean, not, you know, an extinction level event, but we could have lost a city. So yeah, obviously, I wouldn't want anything like that. But I wouldn't mind a little bit of a scare for a couple of years to be prepared for something that could potentially hit us. You know, who knows?

S: Could it still hit the moon? Or is that ruled out too now?

B: I just read about the Earth. I'm not sure.

E: Bob, the estimate not long ago was as high as 3.2% chance.

B: Yeah, the highest ever calculated probability for something like that, which was-

E: So that's what got you all worked up and going, right?

B: No, that one I got actually a little scared because we had gone-

E: That was a little too much?

B: Yeah, I mean, because we went from one in, when I started tracking the news, it went from one in 88 to one in 72. Then it was down to one in 32 or something. I'm like, holy crap, this is like going in the wrong direction, which is common. That happens for these things. It seems to get even more likely, then it's like gone, like, oh yeah, it's not going to happen. Yeah, but one percent, that was the big point. That was the important percentage because over one percent, that's when these agencies get involved and start making plans and stuff. If it stayed at like 1.5%, then we probably would have made serious plans, including potentially getting a rocket ready with a kinetic impactor, if it stayed at 1.5%. So whatever, it's just weird to be even just a little bit disappointed about that. It was kind of a weird thing, but I think I've related my reasoning behind that.

S: But it's not going to hit us.

B: Probably not. Overwhelmingly unlikely, but not impossible.

S: Not impossible.

B: Just saying.

S: Is it possible that the percentage will start going up again as we get more data?

B: Probably not.

S: Usually does not happen.

B: I'd put some good money against that once they get it down that low.

S: But don't worry, Bob, eventually another asteroid will threaten to kill millions of people.

B: It's basically inevitable. So yeah, that's why, dude, that's why I think we need to be even more prepared. We are much more prepared than we used to be, but I want to be even more prepared than that.

S: Double prepared. Double super prepared.

B: It's one of these existential crises that we could do something about.

S: Yes, we could actually prevent.

B: Right? If there's a wicked Carrington level, solar flare level event, well, we can actually do a little bit about that too. But we probably won't.

S: We could do a lot about that.

B: That's true.

S: That's not a good example. That's another thing that's going to happen eventually, is going to be really bad, and we can completely 100% prevent, not from happening, but we can prevent any damage from it. We just have to harden our infrastructure against it.

B: The difference is that we are making really good strides in tracking these near-Earth objects, but I don't think we're doing much. We're not doing near enough, in my opinion, to guard against such a solar event.

S: Actually, Bob, I've been reading that we are doing a lot about that.

B: Really?

S: Actually, we've been hardening the grid and the infrastructure the last 20 years or so significantly. Again, not enough, but it-

B: Yeah. I think it's not enough. It's glad that it's a little bit better than what I had thought, based on what you've said. But still, I think we can get fried. Even for an EMP, electromagnetic pulse, you don't even need a solar flare to induce those currents. You can just basically explode one nuke over the country, and you're back into the 1700s. That level of hardening, we're nowhere near the hardening required for that. That's something that is not unlikely, unfortunately.

E: Yeah. We'll probably do ourselves in before-

B: That's scary.

E: -any kind of cosmic event does us in.

B: Yeah. I can't disagree with that, but yeah, there are events, though, that we really can't do anything about. Those are the ones that, yeah, just like, you know, whatever. It feels good, though, just to do stuff-

S: Even being in the crosshairs of a gamma ray burst, didn't know how much we could do about that.

B: GRPA, yeah. They're about a light-year wide. Yeah, there's not much you could do about that. You don't even know what's coming, really.

S: Yeah.

B: Right? It's like, oh, there it is. We're done.

E: Turn into the Hulk.

News Items

Congestion Pricing (09:55)

• Why Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic—But Congestion Pricing Can 

S: All right. Jay, start us off by telling us about congestion pricing. What is that, and does it work?

J: Well, you know when you get a stuffed-up nose?

S: Yeah.

E: Oh, yeah.

J: It has nothing to do with that.

E: Thank goodness.

J: Everybody knows about traffic congestion, especially if you live near any cities in the United States. You know, it's a constant problem. This is happening in cities around the world, and the standard response is typically to do what? To add more lanes, right?

B: Yeah.

J: We've all seen it happen.

B: Double the lanes.

J: It works for a little while, but what happens after a period of time is it stops working, which is a big problem. And a lot of people might think that adding lanes is actually a good thing to do, but research and real-world evidence tells us a completely different story. Ultimately, it makes the congestion even worse, which I really think is amazing when you think about it. The reason is something called induced demand. Bob, have you ever had induced demand?

B: Have I had it? I'm going to have to say, I'll guess yes.

J: Okay.

S: I have. Actually, I've experienced induced demand, exactly the same phenomenon in a completely different context. Our clinic is backed up, especially for new referrals, right? If you want an appointment and you're a new patient, you might have to wait six months to get an appointment. And over the years, I've been there, again, I've been there for 30 years. So I've had to experience this cycle many, many times. We hire new clinic clinicians, which opens up a whole bunch of new slots. The wait time goes down, and then it goes right back up. The idea is that if there is basically a bottomless pit of pent-up demand, people will basically wait a certain amount of time for their appointment, and so the wait time is always going to inflate to that point, no matter how many slots or people we bring on or whatever we do. The question is, is there a limit to that? At some point, it is not literally bottomless, it's just much larger than the supply. The same question comes up with traffic. If you keep doing that, if you keep adding lanes, at some point, will you outstrip the pent-up demand or not? And then the other question I have, if adding lanes makes it rebound and even worse, then would reducing lanes make it better?

J: I don't think so.

S: Does it work the other direction, it's not reversible?

J: In the sense of traffic-induced demand, it's well-documented. It's where you increase the road space, which then encourages more people to drive, because people are aware that the projects are happening, and then they think, okay, I could drive on that road during times I normally wouldn't, because they expanded it, it should be fine. So over time, the roads become just as clogged as they were, because essentially people were waiting for the opportunity.

B: We're taking back roads too, isn't that a player factor?

J: All the behavior that people have to avoid the traffic jam.

S: Or they may make less of an effort to carpool, or they'll take trips they wouldn't have otherwise taken.

J: Yeah, and the list that the researchers were talking about, they're saying these are people who previously avoided rush hour, or who switched from public transit. In some cases, the expanded highway entices people to take jobs from farther away, particularly if they're driving to their interview during off-peak times, and like, oh, this was great, and the commute is fine. This actually happened to me once, where it really bit me in the ass. The research shows that over time, the highway fills up again, and congestion is back to where it started, or worse. So we've observed this repeatedly. It's been happening so much, and it's so well-documented that there's zero question about whether or not this is happening. A study of expanded highways in the US found that traffic volumes tend to rise in direct proportion to the new capacity, which is basically what Steve was saying. So in other words, for every 10% increase in lane miles, traffic increases by about 10 or more percent. So road expansion doesn't eliminate congestion. It kind of fuels it, if you think about it from that perspective. So beyond traffic, expansion has other unintended consequences, like more vehicles on the road mean more pollution, and encouraging suburban sprawl leads to longer commutes and higher infrastructure costs. Like, there's all these dominoes that fall once you start doing this. Cities end up in a really expensive cycle of expansion that never actually solves the problem. And I was talking to Bob about this. Like, when you talk about road expansion and the cost that it takes to do, like, these three, five, 10-year projects to expand the roads, we could be talking about billions of dollars.

S: Oh, yeah.

E: Oh, absolutely. No doubt about it.

J: It's not cheap.

E: And chances are they'll go over budget in more cases than not.

J: All right. So hold on to your pants, guys, because you might not like what I'm about to say. So the researchers concluded that the most effective way to help congested roads is something called congestion pricing. All right? Are you guessing where I'm going with this?

E: Yeah, it's a toll.

J: Exactly. So it's a toll to drivers who use the roads during these high traffic peak hours. And what this does, it's an incentive for drivers to adjust their driving habits. So if you want to look at it in a very nice way, you're saying, look, we got to charge a toll during these particular times on these particular roads, because the goal here is to help the congestion problem. And people who have to take those drives at that time, no matter what, they can't deviate, they're going to be really unhappy about it, because it's going to add up. And it could be a problem for certain income levels, absolutely.

C: How is that different than, like, here in California, it's really common on the larger freeways that there are HOV lanes that are toll lanes?

J: Yeah, I don't know how effective those HOV lanes are. I mean, I always use them when I can.

C: But you have to pay for them here.

J: Oh, you do have to pay for them?

C: That's what I'm saying. Yeah, they're like fast track lanes.

E: Do they work?

C: Well, yeah, they're not nearly as congested as the rest of the traffic.

E: Yeah.

J: Yeah, I don't know if they didn't say anything about it in this study, and I'm sure that there's a ton of different things that states do. Like I know some states have stoplights on the entrance ramps.

C: Yeah, we have those too in California. We have all the things that you need for congestion in LA.

E: The point seems to be, though, that it's tied to what price someone's willing to pay. And it's enough people, it's a discouragement for them to not want to pay.

C: Yeah, and if it wasn't, I think that because LA is an interesting case because we have it side by side, right? Like if you're driving down the 110, on the left side of the 110, there are paid lanes, and the rest of the 110 are not paid. And the left side is less traffic-y than the main side. So people are willing to sit.

E: Here's your free internet, but if you want the fast internet, pay more.

C: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know it works.

B: I kind of like that idea, though. You have the option.

E: Yeah, you build your own.

J: Well, what they're trying to do is encourage people to take options that they probably wouldn't take without a little nudge, right? So can you drive off peak times? Can you work from home? Can you shift to public transport? Can you carpool? Because all of these things have directly shown to help reduce congestion if people are exercising them. But what it turns out to is we're animals of convenience, and we usually pick the most convenient thing. And sometimes that's not in the better good for our society. So unlike expansion, this congestion pricing, it actively manages traffic rather than passively accommodating it. And as we know, the accommodating part doesn't really work anyway. So cities that have implemented this congestion pricing have seen some really good measurable improvements. London introduced a congestion charge back in 2003, and the traffic in the city center dropped measurably quite a bit. Air pollution improved, and public transit investments increased.

E: I didn't realize it's been 20 years that they've had that. Interesting.

J: Then they did it in Stockholm back in 2006, and traffic declined by 20%. And the policy became permanent after the public support grew. And then they did it in Singapore. They have one of the most advanced congestion pricing systems. They have adjusting tolls in real time based on traffic levels and keeping roads flowing efficiently. So we could clearly see that this works. And the question is, why aren't more cities doing this? So I think the real problem here is there's political resistance. Like, look what happened in New York City recently, right? We had, you want to go to New York City, you got to pay, what was it, $10 or something to get into the city?

S: It was initially $15.

J: Or $15?

E: And then they reduced it to $9, I believe. And that's on top of whatever tolls you're paying to cross bridges and other things. This is on top of that.

J: You know, but the thing that society has to realize is, you know, it's like you turn this thing on and it costs money, but it is a solution though, right? Like, we can't just not do things because we don't want to pay more money. Like, there is really no option if you think about it. Cities will become so crowded that there will not be another way to fix them. Like, there's only so much that a city can handle traffic-wise and foot traffic-wise and everything. Like, there's just, it's going to be a limit. There's an upper limit to all of these things. What are the other solutions that we could do? That there really, as far as I could tell, there aren't any.

C: I think what's hard about this is a similar argument that you'll see regarding our prison systems, which is that unintentionally or intentionally, what we often do is either criminalize or financially penalize poverty in our cities. And so the very people who are like, let's say you're going to work and you need to be there at a particular time and you can't afford the time it takes to drop your kids off at school and then get on the bus to get to work and you can't carpool because you don't know anybody else, you know, at your work, you know, whatever the case may be, they're the very people who can't afford this and they have to do it.

S: Yeah, but you can apply for a discount, basically.

C: Okay, that's good to hear.

S: Yeah, so what I've been reading, like, yeah, the congestion pricing can work if implemented correctly, right? If it's not implemented smartly, then yes, it's a regressive tax and it can hurt low-income people, especially if you're a worker, it's barely hanging on and now you've got to spend 10 bucks a day just to get to work. That could be huge. But if you handle it so that, let's say, the revenue is used to expand public transportation and people who would have a hard time affording it can get an exemption or a discount, etc. But there's lots of things that you could do that would amplify its effectiveness and minimize any downside. And so that's, you know, that's just always the nuts and bolts of smart management, right? It just takes thought, it takes the ability to make changes, to evolve, to react to how things work.

C: And to adapt to that particular, the needs of that particular city, because, you know, you think about New York, and yes, maybe I'm wrong here, but it probably is more of a privilege to be able to ride around in a car in New York, if you can afford a taxi, an Uber, a driver. Like, because you can get anywhere in New York on foot or in the subway, and you can do it fast. Like, usually it's actually faster to take the subway somewhere than it is to take a car. Because of the traffic.

B: Forget about parking. Oh, my God.

C: Exactly.

E: Yeah, parking's a nightmare.

C: But I think about Los Angeles, it's a wildly different scenario.

E: Sure.

C: Right? You have to have a car. You cannot get by without a car in Los Angeles. And so-

S: But that's a choice too. That is a choice as well that, you know, we collectively make. And we could, you know, especially in cities and in large metropolitan areas, we could invest in public transportation, have dedicated bike lanes, have e-bikes and e-scooters or whatever, have other options that make walking and using these other forms of transportation way more convenient, and not just rely on cars.

C: But within reason. Like-

S: Yeah, within reason.

C: L.A. is also just an enormous city. And I think that, like, we have to sometimes remember too that, like, different geographic locations have different struggles.

S: But yeah, I mean, congestion pricing should be on the table as one of the options. Right?

C: Yeah, it makes sense. And now we have the technology to do it. I don't see how we could have done this, you know, 20, 30 years ago.

E: Well, London did it. I mean-

C: That long ago?

E: Yeah. 2003, right?

C: And how did they adjust that? Was it adjusting, like, minute by minute?

E: That's a good question.

S: Well, it's usually, like, in New York, it was just basically, like, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. or something. Like, it's just pretty much most of the day.

E: Okay.

C: Oh, so it wasn't really- See, I'm thinking of it as, like, an adaptive rate.

S: No.

C: Kind of like surge pricing on a new car.

S: No, it's not surge pricing. It's just-

C: I see.

S: In this zone, during, you know, the day and the weekdays or whatever, they carve out basically most time. Not at 2 in the morning, but basically whenever there was-

C: Right.

S: There would actually be traffic there. Yeah, it's not surge pricing. That's-

C: I see.

S: So, that's where, like, AI comes in and that kind of analysis, which also needs to be part of the equation here, is, like, really managing traffic light timing, having turn lanes, things like that that could also really mitigate congestion.

C: Ugh, turn lanes. That's our biggest complaint in L.A. We just don't have that many of them.

S: Yeah.

C: We do something called, like, anti-gridlock, which is during morning and evening rush hour, the parking lane, you cannot park in or you'll get towed.

S: Yeah.

C: And that's really helpful. Like, they turn an entire parking lane into a lane of traffic. But of course, there's always, like, that one asshole, you know, and it's like, well, until they're towed, they're just blocking miles of traffic.

S: Yeah, but that's a setup for disaster, right?

C: Yeah.

S: But you might, and you can sometimes just turn a traffic lane into a turning lane, and even though you're taking away one traffic lane, that could still improve congestion.

C: Oh, massively. Yeah. At these huge intersections where everybody's going left, for sure.

S: Okay. AI will solve it all. Don't worry.

AI Therapists (TW) (24:04)

• Human Therapists Prepare for Battle Against A.I. Pretenders - The New York Times 

S: Speaking of AI.

C: Speaking of AI not solving things. It's quite the turn.

E: Wait. AI solves everything.

S: So, are AI therapists coming, and how do they work?

C: AI therapists are pretty much already here. But yeah, there's a lot of conflict around this topic, and I think part of the reason why this is a good topic for the show, you know, it has all the things. It has all the ingredients that we talk about a lot on the show, but also I think it lends itself to hearty debate. So I hope that my fellow rogues will engage and give me your two cents on what you guys think about this as well. So there's a recent article in the New York Times. It was actually just published on the 24th, so two days ago, by Ellen Barry, titled Human Therapists Prepare for Battle Against AI Pretenders. And the subtitle is, Chatbots Posing as Therapists May Encourage Users to Commit Harmful Acts. The Nation's Largest Psychological Organization Warned Federal Regulators. So what she's referencing there is a recent presentation to a Federal Trade Commission panel in which Arthur Evans, Arthur Evans Jr., who's the chief executive of the APA, and specifically in this case, I'm talking about the American Psychological Association, which is the, let's call it the professional organization. It's not really a union. It's more of an advocacy group. But the professional organization that I belong to, the APA, for psychologists here. The other APA is the American Psychiatric Association, because that's not confusing at all. But here we're talking about the psychological APA. In this presentation, specifically, Dr. Evans cited court cases involving two teenagers, and these teenagers used an app called Character.ai. Character.ai allows people to create fictional characters and then interact with them, chat with them, and the fictional characters chat with each other. But those fictional characters aren't just avatars. Very often, the characters have AI technology behind them. And so what happens, and happened in this case, and it's cited that it's happened in other cases, is that those chatbots start to sort of sprout up, and they sprout up with different roles. And because of the nature of being involved in an app where there are avatars, where there is anonymity, people start to talk about stuff that's hard to talk about. And when they start to talk about their mental health, what's going to happen? These sort of chatbot therapists start to pop up like weeds. And very often, they use terms like therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist. They claim to have advanced degrees from universities. They claim to offer particular types of interventions. In this particular case, the one that was cited at this APA presentation, they were talking about Character.ai, but there are other apps, obviously ChatGPT is one that we use a lot, Replica. Because they use generative AI technology, they're not programmed to have particular guardrails, right? Their outputs are coming from a black box, and they learn from the user. One of the things that often happens is that they follow, it's not encoded, but it's something that's been observed by computer scientists over and over. They observe a tendency of chatbots to utilize a phenomenon called sycophancy. So it's this tendency for the chatbots to mirror, amplify, and validate whatever the person interacting with them says, right? That's what's going to enamor you to the chatbot. That's what's going to make you feel like it is safe. Of course, right?

E: A safe space.

C: You're not going to want to engage in a chatbot that's like, you're wrong and let me tell you why, or I'm going to challenge that belief of yours, right? You're going to want to engage in a chatbot that's validating what you're saying, that's amplifying what you're saying, that's reinforcing what you're saying. Now, don't get me wrong, that is a fundamental principle in mental health intervention. Any psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, or other mental health worker that has legitimate training that is a licensed provider will tell you that part of what they do is validate the patient, client, whatever term that they use within their profession. They validate the very human components, their fears, they validate their worries, they validate their emotional expressions. It's important to establish rapport, but we know the difference between psychologically beneficial or fundamentally human experiences and unhelpful or sometimes dangerous negative self-talk, unhelpful or sometimes dangerous beliefs and narratives, and we know what to look for, the red flags we need to look for if somebody is at risk for engaging in harmful behavior towards themselves or towards others. Not only are we trained in how to see that, we're trained in what to do about it. We have a duty, right? We are legally bound to protect individuals from themselves and from others in particular situations.

S: Now, Cara, it sounds like these are not AI therapists, they're chatbots that people are using as therapists, but they're not programmed to be therapists, they're programmed to be chatbots. Is that fair?

C: They're just chatbots that are getting labeled as therapists and are generatively moving more and more into that role. But the point, I guess, here that's important is you make an important distinction, but to the end user, they don't know the difference.

S: Right. But something shouldn't be offered as an AI therapist unless it's programmed to at least follow the standard of care.

E: Yeah. Why allow this confusion to reign?

C: Well, and that's the question, right? So character AI is simply a platform where people go and they chat to each other. And so you may be chatting to a person behind an avatar, you may be chatting to a chatbot. You don't know. Because they say, hi, my name's Dr. whatever, Dr. Laptop. And I-

E: Well, should it be obligated to disclose?

C: Right. So here are some guardrails that character AI says that they, since these, and I didn't even tell you about the scenarios, but have said that they are using these new safety features that they say they're using within the last year. They said that they have a disclaimer present in every chat that reminds users that, quote, characters are not real people. And that, quote, what the model says should be treated as fiction. They also said that when users are dealing with mental health issues, a disclaimer is added to any character that calls themselves a psychologist, a therapist, or a doctor that says, quote, users should not rely on these characters for any type of professional advice. And also if the, I guess they're able to scrub the content of the chats, if references to suicide or self-harm come up, a pop-up will direct users to a suicide prevention helpline, likely 988 or an online version of that. But some people argue that that's not enough because what ended up happening in the two cases that were cited by the APA chief executive, they cited two teenagers, a 14-year-old boy and a 17-year-old boy. The 14-year-old boy, and I'm going to, and I probably should have said this at the top of the show, but I'll say it now that there's a kind of trigger warning here because I am going to be discussing suicide. The 14-year-old boy in Florida died by suicide after interacting with a character claiming to be a licensed therapist. And the 17-year-old boy in Texas had what they're calling, quote, high-functioning autism. And after interacting with a chatbot that claimed to be a psychologist, there was a lot of kind of hostile and violent behavior that started to develop and that was particularly targeted towards his parents. So both of the boy's parents are now suing Character AI because of what happened. That raised alarm bells for the APA as a whole. Like he was saying, basically, if this was a real therapist, they would have lost their license. But because it's an AI chatbot, there's no recourse. What do we do here? It's almost like it's a part of the design that these chatbots are going to mirror, mirror, mirror. So if you have a person saying, I'm concerned about this, I'm worried that I might do this, is there sort of a bug within the actual black box that is generative AI where they would say things like, that sounds like a good idea? That's concerning. It's deeply concerning. And so how do we regulate something like this? That's an important question. It's one thing if a company is building an AI therapist and they're trying to market it. It's another thing if chatbots within a platform are popping up, whether it's the users themselves that are creating them, or I don't even know if they're sort of like self-creation within these platforms, how do we police that information? Are disclaimers enough, especially when we're talking about children on the platforms who may not understand the difference and honestly shouldn't be engaging in anything, even remotely claiming to be therapy, without consent of their parents?

S: If you make the companies that produce the chatbot liable, they'll find a way to keep it from happening.

C: And that's the interesting thing about what's happening right now is that the parents are engaging in civil suits against the company. And so money talks. And so in this particular situation, I guess time will tell what comes from that. So the APA said part of the concern right now is that generative AI is just too damn good. Ten years ago, you knew. You knew when you were talking to a bot. That's just not the case anymore because of generative AI. In this New York Times article, the author also talks about some examples of when this happened in the past that were really problematic. So of course, organizations that are concerned about the mental health of the citizenship or of the citizenry, they cite the National Eating Disorders Organization. This is an organization that is legitimately concerned about eating disorders in America and wants to enable or provide intervention or at least screening for individuals so that they can get the help that they need. We know that we have a mental health crisis in this country. We know, Steve, you just mentioned this in the very last segment. We know that people sometimes wait months to see a professional. Of course, as professionals, we want to make it so that people can get access to help sooner. We're not trying to bottleneck access to services here. The problem is, here's an example that was cited, in 2023, a chatbot was developed by the National Eating Disorders Association and it utilized generative AI and doing what generative AI does, ultimately, they found that it was offering users weight loss tips. That is not what you want from an eating disorder chatbot therapist. There's a lot of screenshots up on Reddit. You can search for them, but showing chatbots encouraging suicide, encouraging eating disorders, encouraging self-harm, encouraging violence. Some of these may not have intended to be therapeutic chatbots. They may have had a totally different intention, but there is a real risk there. Basically, the APA is asking the FTC to start an investigation into chatbots claiming to be psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health professionals. They're hoping that this inquiry will then compel companies to share this data so that then there can either be new legislation or the legislation that already exists on the books can actually be enforced by law enforcement and we can start to see a change. Because we are at a point where this can be really, really dangerous and we have seen some changes before. For example, during the Biden administration, they cite that the FTC chairwoman, Linda Kahn, was really focusing on AI and fraud and that only recently within the past month, the FTC imposed penalties on Do Not Pay, which is, I don't know if it's an app or a website, but they claim to offer, quote, the world's first robot lawyer. And they're like, you cannot say that. That robot is not a lawyer. They did not pass the bar.

E: Pass the bar? In what state and where?

C: And so now they are prohibiting the company from using that language and making that claim. And so that is sort of one direction that we're hoping, we, they, are hoping that this goes. The article talks a lot about the two tragic cases with these teenagers and how they were harmed. But the article also does the thing that I sometimes struggle with in media, which is that they, in an effort to provide, I think, balance, they tell the other side of the argument and the other side of the story. Now, to be fair, on the one side, they're talking about the APA, this massive organization that represents tens of thousands of psychologists. And on the other side, they talk to one psychologist, somebody named S. Gabe Hatch, who is both a clinical psychologist and also an AI entrepreneur. And they talked to him about some of the computer or the AI work that he's been doing, where he's been trying to design experiments that test people's ability to get help from AI chatbots. So in this experiment, he asked both human clinicians and ChatGPT to comment on vignettes where there were like fictional couples in therapy. And then they asked 830 human subjects to look at the answers and choose which ones were more helpful. Now, in his study, which was recently published in PLOS Mental Health, they found that the bots received higher ratings. And the subjects said that they were more, quote, empathetic, connecting, and culturally competent.

S: Cara, my wife, as you know, is a PhD counselor and she teaches counseling students, right, to get their degree. She's been using ChatGPT to create her vignettes for teaching purposes, and she says they're awesome. Like, it just saves her so much work.

C: Yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

S: Completely nails it. It's like, whatever, it has access to that information. So yeah, if, again, in the hands of a professional who could then read it and evaluate it, it can function in that way.

C: And that's an important point. And that caveat should not be lost in the hands of a professional. And here's a quote from Dr. Hatch. He said, I want to be able to help as many people as possible. In doing a one-hour therapy session, I can only help at most 40 individuals a week, which, by the way, is insane. There's no way you'd think 40 people a week.

E: Yeah, when you go to the bathroom, my gosh.

C: But yeah, then he says, we have to find ways to meet the needs of people in crisis and generative AI is a way to do that. And what I say to that is, not yet, not yet.

E: More bugs to work out.

C: We need stronger regulation. We need more research into this area. And just like when we talk about robotic surgery, just like when we talk about all of these other ways that technology is really, really helping provide increased access, we need to be able to have a human being at the helm. Checks and balances are necessary. You know, they didn't talk about this in the article, but one thing that I think AI would be brilliant at is the assessment component.

S: Yeah, the triage.

C: Of course. Because a lot of people don't make the distinction, and it is harder to make when we're talking about psychology, psychiatry, less so with counseling and like LMFTs and LCSWs, but sometimes this is the case as well. When we're talking about psychiatry and psychology, a large component of what we do is psychodiagnostics. And then another component of what we do is psychotherapeutic intervention. But oftentimes, while we were doing psychodiagnostic work, we are also therapeutically engaging with our patients and vice versa. When we are doing intervention, we may see the need to tweak a diagnosis or to dig a little bit deeper. But sure, screening tools. Does this person seem to be at high risk for depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia? A decision tree of questions that are answered to help flag somebody who's at risk. Of course an AI could do that. I do not like the idea of AI intervention yet. I think that there are probably going to be cases, kind of very, very fundamental CBT, ACT, DBT interventions that are already quite manualized, where this may actually be really, really helpful. And maybe this is my own bias. I see it being tough to do the type of existential work that I do with cancer patients and end of life patients. If you're an AI chatbot, I could be wrong though. That's probably my own hubris.

S: What I think is that I think the technology is there. It just hasn't been adapted to purpose yet. And as you say, evaluated, regulated. And you also have to think about how is it going to be used by whom, what's the workflow going to be, et cetera. You can't just throw it at the problem and hope that it works. This is too critical an area. You have to use it intelligently.

C: And you can't assume that just because generative AI is really good at providing information or producing a piece of art or producing a song, that they're also good at ethics. And that's a huge part of mental health intervention.

S: What I can't see a role for it in the nearer future is, let's say, in conjunction with a therapist or a psychiatrist or whatever, that they do the assessment and whatever. They get the patient to a point where they say, all right, I'm going to see you once a month now. And you have access to this AI therapist that you could use in the meantime. And that program is designed to flag concerning language and alert the therapist or whatever. And that way, it could be an increase, it's like an extender of the physician, not a replacement. And it makes them more effective. They could see more patients.

C: And you can have a bigger caseload. Yeah, exactly.

S: Yeah, you can have a bigger caseload because 75% or 80% of the work is being done by AI, et cetera. So yeah, used correctly, it could be huge. But yeah, you can't just throw it at the problem. All right. Thanks, Cara.

Redefining Dyslexia (43:31)

• Redefining Dyslexia 

S: Guys, let me ask you a question. Cara, I don't want you to answer this question.

C: Okay. I always do that to you, Steve. Everybody but Steve.

B: Four for one.

S: How would you define dyslexia? What is... Well, phenomenologically, what is dyslexia?

E: I think the common understanding is that people will read words and get the characters either in the incorrect order, and they interpret... Their brain can't interpret the words that they're trying to read.

S: What do you think, Bob and Jay?

B: Transposition, is that the proper word for that, of letters and words? Misidentification of word strings, letter strings, and within words, I mean, it's a pretty superficial understanding of it.

E: Do they see letters upside down? Is that part of it? I've never really known.

B: I don't think so.

S: So you guys are reflecting the common public conception of what dyslexia is. That idea is about a hundred years old.

E: Oh, happy birthday.

S: And it's amazing the cultural inertia of that idea.

C: Yeah, it is incredible. Because you're right.

E: It takes 10% of my brain to figure that one out.

C: I don't think about it that way at all, but it was probably beaten out of me.

S: That's why I didn't ask you.

C: Yeah. That's so interesting. But most people think it's like transposing around letters.

S: Reversing words or transposing words or letters, reversing letters.

E: Let's see what Sigmund Freud had to say about it.

C: It's a reading disorder.

S: Yeah. So now I'm going to ask you, Cara, see how up to date you are. This is kind of more neurological than psychological, but...

C: Oh, okay. I'm thinking from the DSM. That's when we diagnose it. It's identified in the DSM-5 as a specific learning disability, and it's specific to reading. So there are different kinds of learning disabilities. Dyslexia is the one that's specific to reading.

S: Okay. Yeah. So you're up to the 1960s, 70s kind of level.

C: So reading comprehension, things like that.

S: Yeah. So it's very interesting because, obviously, I'm very interested in neuroscience in general, but also just definitions, how we define things and how that shapes how we think about it. Dyslexia was first identified and named, that name was coined in 1887 by a German ophthalmologist, that's important, Rudolf Berlin, by an ophthalmologist. And he thought that this inability to read that he was detecting in some specific cases was due to, quote unquote, word blindness. And he thought it was a difficulty of visual processing, right? And that part of that was like that they reverse things or get them in the wrong order. That idea from 1887, which was never correct, then got stuck in the public consciousness and will just not go away. But it's not correct. In 1925, next milestone, now very interesting, a neuro-ophthalmologist, right? So this is somebody who's both a neurologist and an ophthalmologist.

E: That is 100 years from right now.

S: Yeah. It's 100 years ago.

C: Oh, stop.

S: Advanced a theory that it's not due to word blindness, so it's not a visual problem. It's not an eye problem. It's a neurological problem. And he thought it was due to a problem of cortical dominance, which is not correct. But he did shift the conversation from the eye to the brain, basically. Not a visual processing problem. It's a word, a language processing problem. And so then that became the dominant theory. Then of course it moved to neurology entirely, like it has nothing to do with ophthalmology. And you know, by, you know, more research was done by the 1960s, you have kind of the definition that Cara was talking about, where it, the definition focused on the fact that it was a specific learning disability, meaning there were children who had, and this is still part of the definition.

C: Oh yeah, this is a specific learning disability still in all of the diagnostic criteria.

S: Yeah, yeah. So in other words, you have more of a problem with language than your general IQ or your learning level would indicate, right? Does that make sense?

C: Right. So you could do a full neuropsych battery and it shows that you, we would predict that you would have this level of, you know, reading comprehension, language understanding, but for some reason there's a decrement there.

S: Yeah. So there's a specific decrement in language. But that definition is just, not that it's wrong, it's just inadequate because it doesn't address-

C: It doesn't say why.

S: It doesn't address the why. Exactly. It is completely agnostic as to the why. It's a purely clinical diagnosis of you have this specific problem. But of course, that's not enough because we want to research and think about, and especially if we're going to treat it, we want to know what's causing it. What kind of a problem is it? Not just what the deficit is, but what actually is producing the problem. So when we go beyond the 1960s, more research gets done. By the 1990s, the term phonological awareness comes about, and Cara, have you heard that before?

C: I mean, I've heard of the phonological loop. I know phonological and I know awareness.

S: All right. But yeah. But you've never heard of like dyslexia is a problem of phonological awareness.

C: No. I don't think I have.

S: Yeah. I think that's when it really became a neurological disorder.

C: Yeah. I don't think we use that. Even in neuropsych. I don't know if I've heard my neuropsych colleagues.

S: But that's since the 90s. That's been, that's when I was in medical school in the 90s. I remember there were two husband and wife doctors at Yale, pediatric neurologists, very good, who specialized in dyslexia. And that's what they taught me in 1990. You know?

C: Yeah. I guess it's the awareness part that I don't often hear. I do hear people-

S: Phonological awareness.

C: Talking about-

S: It's the problem. And the way it was described to me at the time was that these are children who have difficulty understanding at a conceptual level that words are made up of sounds. And so they have difficulty going from phonemes to words. That's the problem. And so if you're decoding the letters in a word, you don't know how that relates to the sounds. And you can't build a word out of the sounds, out of the letters. So they never get to that point where they can go from the written word to knowing what the word is. And then, of course, everything flows from that.

C: And you know what? The more... I'm actually... Now I'm interested, and I'm looking up a few things from neuropsych rehab, and I am seeing that term used a lot.

S: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

C: I'm seeing phonological awareness, but I'm also seeing things like, obviously, visual processing, auditory processing, orthographic processing, executive function, and even something called rapid automatized naming. So there are a lot of different domains.

S: There are. And this gets to where I'm eventually getting. So-

C: Okay.

S: So the definition, this is the sort of the official definition of dyslexia was, dyslexia is a specific learning disability, and it's still part of that, that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and or fluent word recognition, and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. In 2002, this was expanded a little bit. The definition then became, a deficit in processing and phonological component of language resulted directly in difficulty with decoding, spelling, accuracy, and fluency that, in turn, impacted comprehension and reading experience. Impoverished reading experience further impacted the development of vocabulary and background knowledge, which also had a negative influence on comprehension. So it's just a more of a holistic, if you will, view of language and dyslexia. So it's like, yeah, at its core, it's a specific deficit of phonological awareness, but you have to see this in the context of how language develops, how people learn, their culture, their language, because it affects different languages differently. Some languages are easier to read than others, and it doesn't have as much of an impact.

B: Interesting.

S: Yeah. For example. And the child's other intellectual abilities, right? So it's in the context of each individual child. But at its core, yep, they're just that the part of the brain that turns letters into sounds and sounds into words is not working well, and that has all these downstream effects.

B: It sounds almost an all-or-nothing thing, but the way I've seen it in modern culture, though, it's like...

S: It's a spectrum.

C: It's totally a spectrum.

B: Huh?

S: It's totally a spectrum.

C: It's a spectrum.

B: Yeah. So why would some words... Why would they have trouble decoding some words but not other words?

S: Well, some words... I mean, think about English. English is a horrible language. I mean...

C: Yeah, we all have trouble decoding some words and not other words.

S: Some words are more phonetic than others, right? I can't remember who it was that said, why is the word phonetic and not spelled phonetically?

C: Yeah. Yeah.

E: Exactly.

B: That's pretty funny.

C: Yeah. So somebody with dyslexia is going to... Somebody without dyslexia is still going to struggle with encoding certain words. Somebody with dyslexia is going to struggle with more of them. Yeah.

S: And again, you could have mild, moderate, severe, like dyslexia is a continuum. And interestingly, even up into the 2000s, even the 2000 teens, people deny that dyslexia even exists as an actual neurological disorder.

C: What did they think? It's a disorder of will?

S: Well, here, I'll tell you. In the 2000s, a UK labor MP, Graham Stringer, called the diagnosis of dyslexia a cruel fiction and stated to label children as dyslexic because they're confused by poor teaching methods is wicked. So basically, poor reading ability was blamed on poor teaching and poor parenting. Now where have we heard that before? So blaming neurological disorders on bad parenting or bad teaching has a very long pedigree from ADHD to autism, right? Pretty much any...

C: To schizophrenia, refrigerator mothers.

S: To schizophrenia.

C: Yeah.

S: There are so many things.

C: And it doesn't make sense because you have a class with the same teacher and some kids are struggling and some aren't.

S: Right. But they're just a bad teacher.

B: Right. You think it'd be widespread in the classroom.

C: Right.

S: But it's just easy just to blame the parents or blame the teachers. And plus, some people just don't understand neuroscience, like, no, these are specific abilities. We're not blank slates. Our brains have strengths and weaknesses. They have abilities. And everything is on a spectrum. Everything is a bell curve, basically, of ability.

C: Yeah. And I think that there's a cultural phenomenon here, which this taps into as well, which I struggle with a lot being a psychology researcher who both has a foot in the very medical model, but also a foot in the very phenomenologic philosophy side of psychology, which is that we do have a tendency as a culture to talk about things as if they're, quote, real and or in your head and not real, which is insane to me. Yeah. It's totally false. Everything is real. Like, unless we're talking about pure malingering, right, feigning a mental illness for secondary gain or for primary gain, actually, just for primary gain.

S: Even then, like, it's complicated.

C: It's even complicated then.

S: Is Munchausen disease, is that a...

C: Well, Munchausen is secondary gain. So let's get rid of secondary.

S: But wait, but that could be a disorder unto itself.

C: It could be. It could be. It could be just straight up primary gain. Just straight up malingering.

S: Deliberate fraud for primary gain.

C: Fully faking so they can get out of prison or so they can make money or something like that.

S: But that aside, which is not...

C: Which is super rare.

S: Super rare compared to all the more complicated...

C: Yeah. Like functional neurological disorder. I'm sorry. There's something going on there.

S: And the distinction between psychiatric and neurological is also kind of a fiction. It's all the same. It's all the brain.

C: It is. It's all the brain.

S: It's just different specialties about how we treat it and the kinds of things that we're familiar with. But it's all the brain.

C: And it's really dangerous, I think, not only to my profession, but also to the patients who need help to talk about something being legitimate over here and just in somebody's head over there.

S: Exactly.

C: That's super dangerous.

S: It's a very harmful false dichotomy. And we have, as a profession, we have tried to move as far away from that as possible. Like even calling it a functional neurological disorder or non-epileptic seizures. We use terms that are not judgmental, just describing the phenomenon, not saying like, this is fake seizures or this is psychogenic or whatever.

C: Yeah. Some people still use those.

S: I know. It takes time. It takes time. All right. So in 2009, there was the Rose Report, which was an overview of dyslexia. It basically reinforced the phonemic awareness theory and that dyslexia is a specific neurodevelopmental disorder with genetic predisposition. It made focus, however, I'm just making a number of very specific recommendations for interventions at the individual and societal school level, et cetera, et cetera. That's basically where the definition of dyslexia sat until today, right? Until this year. But there's been research going on and every now and then, so much research gets done. It's like, okay, we have to now retool our definition based upon the last 10, 15, whatever years of research. So there's a new study that is called Toward a Consensus on Dyslexia Findings from a Delphi Study. So this is basically looking at a lot of data and saying, all right, what can we say about dyslexia given all the latest research? Basically a consensus of an expert panel on dyslexia. So here's their conclusion. They conclude with a proposed definition, which has a lot of pieces to it. I'm going to read you the ones that they emphasize. Here's the consensus statement. Dyslexia is a set of processing difficulties that affect the acquisition of reading and spelling. It's a little bit more broad than just phonemic awareness, because that's not the whole picture. It's only part of the picture. They say, in dyslexia, some or all aspects of literacy attainment are weak in relation to age, standard teaching and instruction, and the level of other attainments. That's the specific disorder part of it. Across languages and age groups, difficulties in reading, fluency, and spelling are a key marker of dyslexia. Difficulties exist on a continuum and can be experienced to various degrees of severity. The nature and developmental trajectory of dyslexia depends on multiple genetic and environmental influences. Dyslexia can affect the acquisition of other skills, such as mathematics, reading, comprehension, or learning another language. The most commonly observed cognitive impairment in dyslexia is a difficulty in phonological processing. In phonological awareness, phonological processing speed, or phonological memory. However, phonological difficulties do not fully explain the variability that is observed. That's kind of the new bit. Working memory, processing speed, and orthographic skills can contribute to the impact of dyslexia. So that's now the modern sort of synthesis, the consensus on what we're doing. It's more complicated, more nuanced.

C: Yeah, but it's also like, honestly, it's clunky AF.

S: Oh yeah, it is.

C: What do you say to a parent when they go, what does it mean that my kid has dyslexia?

S: Well, translating that to the family, to the patient, to the parents, that's part of the skill of the job.

C: Yeah.

S: I don't know what to tell you.

C: Exactly. You still gotta give them the elevator answer.

S: But when we're talking to each other, that's not meant for a public-facing, concise definition. That's professionals talking to professionals. So it has evolved over time, and basically tracking with the research, I think it's really important to know what the professionals say now about what it is. And it's really fascinating also to think about how persistent that hundred and whatever 40-year-old myth about dyslexia being a visual processing problem is. It's really interesting.

Small Modular Reactors for Cargo Ships (59:40)

• Korean SMR-powered container ship design revealed - World Nuclear News 

S: All right, Bob, you're going to tell us about using small modular reactors for cargo ships.

B: Yes, I am. Earlier this month, a Korean shipbuilding company unveiled a bold new design, a nuclear-powered container ship using a small modular reactor coupled with an innovative propulsion system using carbon dioxide. Now, of course, I had to do a deep dive on this. Doing that, though, it kind of reinforced the idea in me that if nuclear reactors are cool, mobile nuclear reactors are even cooler. And so not just reactors that sit in one spot to power cities or research labs or whatever, but ones that are integral to propulsion. It's just such a fascinating idea. One iconic version in history that I found and reminded myself about was the atomic car from the 1950s. You guys remember that? There was actually a few ideas tossed around. The one that stood out for me was the Ford Nucleon. What a great name. The Ford Nucleon was a concept car. It was designed as a fission-powered car of the future. The reactor was in the back. It would power a steam engine for propulsion. It seems ridiculous now, right? Just thinking about that, it's like, really? Obviously, technical and safety issues make a car like that impossible. Even 70 years later, it's like we could not pull that off. If you go through those years, though, nuclear planes and tanks were seriously studied as well, especially during the Cold War. But those designs always had issues like weight, shielding, radiation, size, just not practical at all. With all that said, we do have mobile nuclear reactor-powered vehicles today. And by nuclear reactor, I'm talking fission. A nuclear reactor is basically fission or fusion or other even more sci-fi ones like antimatter or whatever. So I'm talking fission when I say nuclear reactor. So we do have them. What are they? What exists today?

S: Nuclear subs.

B: Nuclear subs, right? But also?

S: Aircraft carriers.

B: Aircraft carriers, right? They are just... Think about that. They are amazing.

E: Nuclear vessels.

B: I'm glad somebody said that. These guys can operate for a quarter of a century without refueling. And on top of that, they have amazing safety records. And then there's another one. What's another example? There's one other one that I think that should be on this list. And that's the Russians' famous nuclear-powered icebreakers. And that's kind of it. There's other examples, you know, maybe a commercial ship here in Russia or maybe even some other Russian projects. But they're kind of more footnotes than anything else in my mind. It's really just the subs, nuclear subs, aircraft carriers, and the icebreakers. But that's it. I mean, it's a little frustrating for me as a sci-fi geek because that's the only really three types that we have. Of course, I have to throw in nuclear rockets there because that is absolutely changing. They are working on nuclear-powered rockets now. It seems inevitable that this is going to happen. But they don't exist yet. They don't exist yet. So one recent advance, though, I think is going to make a big change in that. This is something we've mentioned a few times on the show, small modulate reactors, SMRs. So this is a class of small fission reactors that could be many different types. It could be Gen 4 reactors. It could be pressurized water reactors. It could be molten salt. It doesn't matter, really. The specific tech doesn't matter, but they're all basically small fission reactors. And they're also built, the idea is that they will be built at a factory and then shipped to a location to power things. Many different things. It could be microgrids, communities, remote communities, buildings, data centers. I'm sure we're going to be seeing these in data centers. Their power output is typically 10 to 300 megawatts compared to the real big boy reactors. They can range from 700 megawatts to 1,600 megawatts, 1.6 gigawatts. And right now, where do you think the actual small modular reactors are right now that are actually working and doing stuff right now?

J: Well, for the military, right?

B: No, it's like China and Russia. And they have like four. So we're kind of at the precipice of this really taking off. There's really not many right now. And it's not hard to predict, right? Maybe I should have predicted it at the beginning of the year. The number of these types of reactors are going to explode worldwide, so to speak.

E: Yeah. Thank you.

B: Yeah. There's at least 80 SMR designs being developed now across 19 countries. And they're being seriously considered for tons and tons of applications. So I mean, it's kind of obvious that some of these designs will almost surely proliferate in the near future. And some, I hope, will be used to move ships.

S: Well, Bob, we have to say, though.

B: Yeah, there's a lot of stuff we have to say. But go ahead.

S: I appreciate your optimism. But you know what the big deal killer is for SMRs?

B: Yeah, the expense.

S: The expense. They are more expensive per unit energy than the big reactors.

B: Yeah. That's a problem.

E: A lot more to ship their products.

S: It's more than a problem. It could be a deal killer. Because why would you spend? Already nuclear power is at the high end of the cost per unit energy. And if now you go even higher cost, why would you do that? If you're just having something stationary attached to the grid, why not build a big boy and it's more cost effective?

B: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that's definitely a good point. I was going to segue to that at some point after I got over a little bit of my techno-optimism here. But yeah, that's a potential problem. But I think, Steve, I think if that proves to be almost a deal killer, essentially a deal killer, I think that cheaper micro-reactors, which are out of scope of this news item, micro-reactors, I think, will probably proliferate.

S: But this dovetails with your news item, with your point. So if you're just attaching it to the grid and making electricity, you have to compare it to all the other ways to make electricity in terms of cost effectiveness. But if you design an SMR with a specific purpose that is worth the trade-off, then it can become cost effective. The military uses it because the strategic advantage is worth the higher expense.

B: Absolutely.

S: And what you're going to talk about is for cargo ships, and that's, they are designing it to purpose so that it's not just, again, connected to the grid. And that also can be cost effective. You also mentioned data centers, so there's a company that's designing them specifically for data centers that, again, because it's designed for purpose, it can be cost effective. So I think that's the direction that the SMRs are going to go, not just hooking them up to the grid, but for specific purposes where the advantages make it cost effective.

B: Right. And that's why I mentioned 80, there's 80 of these designs being developed by 19 countries. All of them are similar, but also kind of distinct. And in my opening statement, I made a specific point to say that this idea, this new idea is to use a small modular reactor coupled with this innovative propulsion system, which is critical, which is critical to their plan because it brings in efficiencies that make it a better cargo ship in terms of space, in terms of safety, in terms of a lot of stuff. So let me go through some of the ideas.

S: There's one other thing that can make an SMR cost effective, is if you build it in a location where the waste heat can be utilized for a specific purpose, then you double their efficiency. And so that's like with the data center thing, that you have to build it with the data center, and then you could use the waste heat to cool the data center, and suddenly it's twice as cost effective as it was.

B: Yeah. So all that said, I think, I still think that SMRs are going to have a future. And from what I could tell doing the research for this specific application for cargo vessels, it sounds very promising. Of course, it's got to be vetted, and a lot of the information that I've seen is coming from this company. And the company is South Korea's HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering. And they're a big player in the movement, and they are what this news item is about. They recently announced plans for a nuclear-powered cargo vessel capable of carrying 15,000 20-foot containers, which is a massive commercial transport ship. It's at definitely the bigger end of the spectrum. Their release, the information that I've come across so far, it seems to focus on three things, and it makes a lot of sense. They're focusing on regulations, safety, and efficiency. Those things, I can't, I mean, those are the top three. It seems, I can't think of anything else that would really be more important than those. So that's a little bit encouraging. So to illustrate what they're doing with the regulations, I'll quote Park Sangman. He's the head of the company's Green Energy Research Lab. He said, HD COSO is strengthening cooperation not only with major classification societies, but also with international regulatory bodies to establish international regulations necessary for the commercialization of nuclear-powered vessels. Okay, so what are classification societies? These are organizations that set and enforce technical and safety standards for ships, including nuclear-powered vessels. So safety, okay, safety is the second critical focus here. Their ships are really, their plan is really taking this seriously. They're planning a double shielding system where you've got stainless steel and light water working together to shield and protect against the things you need to shield against, ionizing radiation, gamma rays, neutrons, and it also dissipates heat very, very well. So the steel absorbs gamma radiation and gives structural integrity to the system, and the light water moderates the neutrons and absorbs radiation as well and dissipates the heat. Then they also plan to create a facility in South Korea specifically for testing and validating their design. So that's, you know, that sounds good. Those words sound good. So in terms of the company's final focus, efficiency, I think this is where their design could have some impact, I found really fascinating as hell. So critical to this efficiency that they talk about is the partnership of the fission reactor with the propulsion system. Having a small modular reactor on the ship, it's not only an efficient source of heat, right, because nuclear energy is much more dense than chemical energy, but it also means that you think about what you can get rid of. Now you can get rid of the exhaust system, the engine exhaust system. You can get rid of the fuel tanks. Because you have this reactor, you don't need those things. So you can just pull them right out of the ship, and now you have a lot of extra space where more of those 20-foot cargo containers can now go where this other stuff was. So the more cargo you can carry, the better, the more efficient the whole enterprise is, and the better the bottom line. So that's one. That's one boost in efficiency. The next boost comes from what the ship actually does with the reactor's heat, right? Because the heat, the nuclear reactor, that's just a source of heat, whether if you're burning fossil fuels or if you have any other type of reactor, you're really just like, we need to create a source of heat that's efficient. So that's it. You've got your heat source. Traditionally, ships use their heat source to heat water to make steam, right? You make the steam, that drives the turbines, and that generates the electricity for the propulsion. That's kind of how the flow goes for a lot of ships. So this propulsion design, though, is different. It does away with the steam, and it replaces it with supercritical carbon dioxide. And this is kind of like a secret sauce. It's such a really cool idea. So the bottom line is that why CO2? Why are we using CO2? Why not just use water? One of the main reasons is that CO2 expands more efficiently than steam. Bam, right there. It's just like, it's just flat out more efficient, and it's because of the supercritical state. So how efficient is it? A traditional steam cycle is 30% to 40% efficient. The supercritical CO2 cycle is up to 50% efficient. And if you look at the numbers they're talking about, they typically say that their design is going to be about 5% more efficient, and 5%, it might not sound like a lot, but that could be huge for lots of ships traveling the seas, 5% increased efficiency could be pretty awesome. And so not only is it more efficient, but it's smaller and it's lighter than steam turbines. There's no water or steam, and so that means that there's less corrosion and no emissions as well, which of course is a wonderful addition there. So this is kind of, I see it as like a nice one-two punch. You got the small modular reactor, and you've got the CO2 replacing water, and it makes such a potent combination. Bottom line, there's less fuel waste, there's more cargo space, there's lower maintenance, there's zero emissions. And that's nothing to sneeze at. The shipping industry consumes about 350 million tons of fossil fuel annually. So decarbonizing shipping could really, really help in our damn climate crisis. It's not something that's going to make a hugely dramatic difference because I think shipping accounts for only 3% of worldwide emissions like that. But any little bit helps, and this is, I think, a pretty cool idea. So yeah, so a lot of industries are looking into SMRs, and hopefully they're going to pan out here and become cost-effective. It seems like we're on the edge of this stuff taking off. It's not just SMRs and micro-reactors. I hope. I hope. Maybe I'm being too positive, but I hope that it takes off and it's more than just little niches here and there. So do all of these developments and all these advances and improvements in our technology, does that mean that the Ford Nucleon may be closer to reality? It can be if you're okay with five feet of steel or concrete shielding in your car. Otherwise, that's not going to happen. It's just like, you know, can you imagine the car, it would be far, far worse than the car that Homer Simpson made up in that famous episode of The Simpsons where it was just a car that uses a nuclear reactor like this would just be ridiculous. So we're not going to see anything like that. I think battery technology is more than enough for small applications like cars. But bigger stuff, bigger stuff, I think reactors will be in the mix.

S: Well, the hope is too, Bob, that with these niche applications like data centers and cargo ships and things like that, that will cause an economy of scale. Like I said, if you have factories cranking out SMRs, then they might become cost-effective for more general applications like just plugging into the grid.

B: Creating these, the hope in the beginning, Steve, was that if you create enough of these, it could really help decarbonize a worldwide economy. But even powerful big SMRs, you know, five to 300 megawatts, they calculated you would need tens of thousands of them to really start making a difference. And I'm not sure how long it's going to... I think we'll be probably well past 2050 by the time, if ever, we could start making them and get some economies of scale like for that. I mean, shit. It's scary to think, but it's still the idea. It's just fascinating.

S: It doesn't have to be the solo solution, but if we want to decarbonize shipping and, yeah, take a chunk out of the grid, that would be nice.

E: Yeah. There'll be hundreds of pieces to this puzzle.

S: Yeah.

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:19:31)

S: Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

J: All right, guys. Lat week I played this Noisy. [plays Noisy]

E: I know what that is.

J: Yeah, so there's a lot going on there.

S: There's a lot going on there.

E: I know what that is. That is the world's first popcorn machine built in 1884, which you had to start up with diesel fuel or whale oil or something. And it popped like eight kernels. Like at the end there, it sounded like kernels of corn.

S: I thought that was the sound of... That's what happens after I put my quarters into the candy machine and waiting for the candy to dry.

J: Well, we had some guesses. Visto Tutti wrote in. This guy's very busy and I feel very lucky when he emails me. So he said, this one sounds like an ice maker, the mechanical part of the refrigerator that cracks ice cubes into a receptacle for drinks and such. Man, if you had that in your kitchen, I'd be pissed, right? That's a noisy fricking ice maker. That is not an ice maker, but they do make noise. So I hear what you're saying. Cooper Parrish wrote in and said, howdy. Here's my guess. Coint operated mechanism, two bit selection interface pushing a ball down a long metal track on dispaly inside a box. So he's saying it's a vending machnie. I thought that was a good guess because-

E: That's basically what Steve said.

J: Yeah. There's lots of noises. You're putting the coin in and the thing turns and then the thing falls and then maybe an arm grabs. Whatever, right? There's all these different things. It's not a vending machine, but that was a good guess. A listener named Derek Dunsmore wrote in and he said, hi, I may finally know this one. As a hobbyist 3D designer, I recall watching a video of a man producing a small but functionally manned bumper car sized tank out of 3D printed materials. I believe this is the sound that vehicle made when the tank treads were moving over terrain during a trial run. I thought that was cool. I didn't know that someone 3D printed a tank that could move. I'm sure they had to put some type of motor in there. But anyway, this is not correct, but I would like to see the tank. We have a couple of closer guesses. So Gerard Steenbeck wrote, first time guessing that sounds like a plotter printer, a massive printer that uses pens or something to draw blueprints on big sheets of paper. So I think I've been around one of these and they definitely make lots of different kinds of noises and everything. This is not a plotter printer though, but that was an interesting guess. Dan Tenhove said, I'm guessing that this is a recording of the inside of a VCR. And I know you have to be kind of older to know what a VCR is. Cara, do you know what a VCR is?

C: I'm not that... Come on. Of course I know what a VCR is.

E: I was going to ask if you knew what a vending machine is.

C: I was born in 1983, you guys. My entire upbringing was with the VCR.

E: You're a millennial.

C: I'm an elder millennial. I'm two years away from the millennial cutoff.

E: Oh.

C: Yeah, I'm an elder millennial.

E: Elder millennial.

J: So I remember when we were kids that Bob actually could repair VCRs. The tape got caught in there or whatever. Bob was always tinkering around or whatever because he was really obsessed with taping Star Trek and Bruce Lee and Spider-Man, which I was 100% behind. So yeah, they make different noises. There's things happening in a VCR. There's moving parts. There's things that grab the tape and there's things that are happening. So I could see that. I think that was a good guess, but that wasn't correct. I do have a winner. And there were actually two people that guessed pretty quickly. There were a lot of other guessers, but I'm going to tell you who the first two are. The person who won and who submitted it first is Travis Warburton, and he said, this is 100% a canister being sent down a pneumatic tube system.

B: Oh.

C: Oh, like at the bank?

J: He says, the beeps are probably the destination station being typed in. I'm a nurse at a hospital and use these every day. And Madeline Love also guessed correctly on that. These are two new names to Who's That Noisy. So yeah, that's basically what it is. I will remind you that a young listener named Gertie sent this noisy in, so I wanted to thank her personally for doing that. Thank you so much. And yeah, essentially that's what it is. I mean, the people who recorded this, there was different use of this whole thing. But that's basically what's going on. Pneumatic systems are pretty cool. I remember that one of the banks that I used to use had one of the canisters get stuck. I guess the tube went underground for this one, and it got stuck in there because somebody put in like $20 worth of coins.

E: Oh.

C: And it's too heavy.

J: Yeah, they had to dig it out, and that was that for that pneumatic system. But Costco uses-

E: They took a backhoe and dug it out?

J: Yeah, they had to dig it out.

E: Holy moly.

J: Costco uses a pneumatic system, and there's pretty extensive ones out there, especially today. With the modern technology, they can make them pretty interesting.

S: We still use them in the hospital for sending blood samples to the lab.

J: Yeah, that's it. There you go.

B: Oh, I thought that tech was dead.

S: No, when you still have to physically move stuff around, it's pretty useful.

C: Yeah, if it's not broken, don't fix it.

J: Yeah, like when you need blood immediately, you put it in the pneumatic system.

E: In a tube in the pneumatic system.

J: Oh, I thought it was opening your vein. You know, suck the blood. No, it doesn't work that way.

E: No?

J: I have a new noisy guys. This one was sent in by a listener named Ed Barrett. [plays Noisy]

E: Oh, those all sound like wrong numbers.

J: Yeah, there is a pranking kind of vibe to that. Guys, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

J: NOTACON 2025, guys, is coming. We have a couple of months. We're very excited. And in fact, the person that we're interviewing this week is a special guest that we're going to have at NOTACON, so listen to the interview. And please do consider coming, because you're going to miss out on one hell of a good time with lots of music, lots of fun things that we're going to do. There are surprises. There are jigs and jags. Steve is going to teach someone how to do kung fu. It's going to be awesome. Don't miss it. NOTACON CON, Evan. notaconcon.com

E: That's the website.

J: That's the website.

E: notaconcon.com

S: All right. Thanks, Jay. All right. Well, let's go to that interview now.

Interview with Adam Russell (1:21:32)

S: We are joined now by Adam Russell. Adam, welcome to the Skeptics' Guide.

AR: Hello there. Good to be here.

S: Adam, you are a musician, the bassist for the group Story of the Year. I also understand you have a Star Wars podcast called Thank the Maker, but we wanted to chat with you because you're going to be joining us at NOTACON, but tell us a little bit about yourself first. Tell us about your career.

AR: Yeah. I've been, we were just talking about this offline, I've been with this band and this group of guys the majority of my life, going back to the late 90s when I first started playing music. St. Louis is a small scene, so we all kind of played in bands together, ended up as this lineup plus one other who's no longer with us and released our first album in 2003. It's a big debut. It was the just like perfect alignment of stars. We were so lucky to have the success we had then and over these years, these 25 years almost since then, we're riding the wave of the 20-year cycle, the resurgence, and our music kind of came back into the public consciousness and we're on to another generation of fans and things are in a really fun, exciting place where we're lucky enough to have another chance. We've kind of threaded the needle down into this small group of bands who are still around and can still pull it off. I'm a lucky guy. I'm happy to be here.

S: Yeah, there's so many sub-sub-genres of music these days. You don't need to have, it's not like there's just this one bucket of musicians. You could survive in a really small niche.

AR: I mean, there's so, you look at that with anything, there's so many subcultures. You go onto social media and see people who have literally millions of followers that I've never heard of. I have no idea what they do. I bet they have these communities, whether it's just on social media or somebody on the reality TV or any kind of artist, and it's wild to think that there are that many people on earth that each of us can succeed well enough with our little niche.

S: Yeah, well, it's more than 8 billion people on the planet.

AR: Yeah, that'll do. That'll work.

J: Adam, what is the style of the band?

AR: I think we would describe ourselves most accurately as post-hardcore, a lot of punk influence, emo, I think is the most mainstream, most known title for this subgenre, but we have influence of just 90s rock, metal, punk, everything, good music, I'll call it good music.

E: It does touch on emo, although I would not necessarily peg it as such. However, in the early 2000s, that was kind of the wave that carried a lot of groups forward into the mainstream.

AR: For sure. If you know the Vans Warped Tour, that sort of moving window of that Venn diagram of genres, that's what we fit into.

E: Yeah, perfect.

J: How does skepticism and your music connect to each other?

AR: Science was my first passion. I grew up on science like any kid, pretty much. It was dinosaurs and then the space shuttle and everything in the 90s, especially. All of that was front and center. I went to space camp. I was always at the science center and stuff like that in St. Louis. Friendships were always kind of adjacent to those things. Music just happened to overlap, but our guitar player and I are big Star Wars nerds. We're all kind of into similar things and into science. I've always tried to make it part of anything that I do, whether it be like the Star Wars podcast or the band. On our third album, actually, we got pretty political and kind of got into social and other kind of topics in our second and third album, lyrically. We had a few songs that were inspired by Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot specifically. We ended up using an excerpt from the Pale Blue Dot as sort of an interlude, cut it together. It got the old audio tape and ran it into Pro Tools and chopped it up. We actually had to get permission from the estate, so Andrean had to approve it and sent us an email back, which I still have buried somewhere in an inbox. It was like the peak of my life. She wished us luck. She said, you know, I hope the album climbs the charts like a rocket into space or something like that. It was amazing. We've touched on that stuff here or there, but it's always been more like personal stuff that you try to inject wherever you can.

J: We've worked with her in the past and she is just amazingly generous that way, so I'm not surprised that you say that.

AR: Yeah. She's an angel.

E: How did you stumble across the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe?

AR: Like I said, I've always been into science, but when I really got into music in high school and went from being this fairly intelligent kid who kind of coasted through elementary school, got into high school, discovered music, and then my grades just tanked. I got so off track. Music was the only thing that mattered to me, but once that mission was sort of accomplished, we got signed and it was happening, I found myself with all this free time and the spark kind of reignited my passion for science. I just went headfirst into reading and finding podcasts and everything. It was also about the time that at the end of high school, around teenage years, I realized my beliefs didn't align with what I was raised on. I was raised Catholic and realized I didn't believe in God or any kind of metaphysical stuff like that. I leaned into science and then found, through the New Atheist Movement and those folks, many of which are questionable people at this point, but listening to Dawkins' interviews and things like that on Point of Inquiry and things like that, in discovering podcasts, found you guys. I want to say it was maybe less than a year after Perry died, I was working on a DVD that we were editing. I had this long process of censoring, had to go through frame by frame and do all this stuff. I spent a month solid at my desk with just visual stuff and I needed something to listen to. I ended up listening through your entire back catalog and got fully caught up. I don't think I've missed an episode since then, since 2007 probably.

E: Yeah, 2007, yeah, that's when Perry left us.

AR: Yeah. That was the beginning.

J: That's amazing. You must experience this. When you find out that people are into the work that you create and then they sustain it, like what you just said, it really surprises me that people can do that with podcasts because they can go on for a very long time, which at this point, there's a lot of them out there. It means a lot to me to think that people are just into the show to the point where they're going to keep going with us.

AR: Like we were saying before we started, what you guys feel about what you've accomplished with your podcast, I feel so similarly about our music and our band. I feel very lucky to have people still with us after all these years.

S: Adam, have you ever been to a live skeptical conference before?

AR: Not a conference, but pardon the pun. I was at one of the live recordings in, what was it, Phoenix?

E: Phoenix.

B: Yeah, yeah.

AR: That's about as close as I've come.

J: Well, you're not going to get laid-

AR: Well, my wife's going to be there, so, I mean-

C: Jay, that's none of your business whether or not you get laid.

S: Adam, tell us about L.A. Strikes Back.

AR: Yes, L.A. Strikes Back is a fundraising initiative to support victims of the L.A. fires. Started with a handful of other folks who I know through the Star Wars community, Mike Forrester, one of the co-hosts of Thank the Maker, and some other prop makers and folks who are members of the 501st Legion, the costuming group. A few of the folks live in L.A. and have been directly affected by the fires. Actually, our producer and editor, Jason, he and his wife are living in a rental house right now. They were in Altadena. They didn't lose their house, but the whole place is uninhabitable. We have a direct connection to people in L.A. who have been affected, and we, of course, as we like to do in the community, in the Star Wars community, has banded together to try to help folks out. We're combining Star Wars and music. I'm kind of bringing in the music side of it, trying to get donations from friends. It's a lot of custom-designed helmets and different props and things and collectibles, anything we can put on auction to raise money. I'm donating a bass, some old Star Wars figures that I have from years ago, some kind of rare collectibles.

E: The original Kenner Boba Fett, maybe?

AR: I don't have that, unfortunately.

B: What's that worth?

E: Oh, it's too bad.

B: What's that worth these days?

E: Is that a million bucks?

J: Well, there's different kinds. The one that's super expensive...

E: The prototype?

J: Yeah, it was just a prototype that shot a little red missile out of the back. If you get one of those, you have a lot of money on your hands.

E: I'm sorry. I digressed.

AR: Harmful if swallowed, the rocket.

E: That's right. Always.

AR: It's mostly props and things because, again, 501st Legion and other makers are contributing some really, really cool stuff. We're doing the auction at the end of March. We pushed it back a little bit because we just want to give it some more time, but it's already going very well. The stuff we have lined up, I think it's going to pull some considerable funds. Obviously, we're not going to solve the problem, but we're going to do our part.

E: You mentioned Thank the Maker podcasts. How did that come about, and what is that about?

AR: It was a pandemic project. We were all... Actually, Ryan Key, the singer of Yellow Card, and I... Yellow Card and Story of the Year have toured together off and on for years. We connected over Star Wars, and at some point, I realized I wanted to do a podcast. I've been listening to you guys forever. I've listened to so many podcasts. I wanted to do something, and I was thinking a movie podcast, kind of a pop culture thing, do all the classics that we grew up on. Then literally the night before we were about to record our first episode, Ryan and I, he said and called me up and said, look, man, you're going to kill me, but I have an idea. I kind of want to change up this idea. What if it's just about Star Wars? I was skeptical at first, but we ended up going with it. It ended up being perfect because there's a built-in listening base, and it ended up being something that we could find the slice of the Venn diagram where people who grew up on our music and people who grew up on Star Wars, especially the prequels, that actually lines up perfectly. We just crossed 250 episodes recently, our fifth anniversary. It's not our full-time job, but it's a paid hobby that works, and it's worth our time. The main thing is that we've created this community around what we love about Star Wars.

J: What do you think about Kathleen Kennedy supposedly not being a part of the brand anymore?

AR: I'm excited to see what the next chapter is going to be, but I'm already just worn out by all the bullshit negative celebration of her retirement. She's a legend. She's been producing some of the best films of all time literally our entire lives. We're all in our mid-40s, starting with Poltergeist and E.T. She's been at the helm of all these incredible films. Maybe she wasn't the best studio head, per se. Who can say? None of us have that skill set. Who are we to say that? She's a legend. She should be praised for her long, illustrious career. I have nothing but respect for her.

J: Yeah. I don't know if I agree with that. I can respect your perspective on it. I get the whole, let's not focus on the negativity, and I have done what I think you have, which is completely not be a part of any of it, because I don't want to focus on that. Without getting into the whole thing, because there's a lot to talk about, the bottom line is I'm an episode four, five, and six guy, and I probably won't be happy with much that comes after that. It is what it is. I liked a couple of the movies. I liked Andor, and that's good enough. I recommend to people, just watch the things that you like and let the other stuff, just ignore it.

AR: Exactly. Let people enjoy stuff. Just leave the negativity out of it. Yeah.

E: I agree as well. There shoulb be something someone can find somewhere in the Star Wars universe that they can enjoy and just concentrate on that for what it is.

AR: Absolutely.

C: Really? Really?

J: Except Cara.

AR: Everybody except Cara.

C: Except me. Yeah. I don't know.

J: Cara knows a little bit more about Star Wars now because of us.

C: I know a little bit more about Star Wars than I ever wanted to.

E: That's called osmosis.

C: See, but the difference is, I'm not one of these Star Wars fans that's obsessed with Star Wars and then just shits all over it. I just don't care about Star Wars. I feel like that's different.

AR: I much prefer that too.

C: Yeah. Yeah. It's a different take. We don't have to all be all about everything all the time.

J: Of course not. Of course not.

E: No. But again, Venn diagram, it's a good example. You know how science, skepticism, Star Wars, those three circles definitely are here in this family.

AR: Well, Jay, I'll re-ask you officially right now. I'll put you on the spot, on the air, so to speak. Would you like to join us on Thank the Maker, perhaps, for an episode?

J: Oh my God. How many times can I be on the show?

AR: All of them?

J: Yeah. A hundred percent. Just email me. I mean, I will make myself available. I would love to do that.

AR: Awesome. I have some ideas.

J: So you're going to come to NOTACON. You know, we've been very selective about who we let on that stage because we have a core group of people that we work with, that we love to work with. But I mean, it was a pretty easy decision to have you do it because, first of all, Evan came out swinging about how awesome you are. But I mean, after I found out about the Star Wars thing, I'm like, this guy's awesome. I got, you know, like, he's in, a hundred percent.

E: I cinched it.

J: Yeah. So we're going to have you join us for a few of the bits that we're doing. I will give you a couple of reveals right now. We haven't really gone into much detail. We're doing something, George changed the name, didn't he? We used to call it Woo Tank.

S: It's Pitching Woo.

J: Pitching Woo.

E: Pitching Woo.

J: Okay. So the idea is that we are going to have the audience pitch to us things that revolve around pseudoscience as if they're like, they could be products, it could be a, you know, a cult.

S: A pseudoscientific business. Yeah.

J: Yeah. And we're going to judge it on whether or not we think it would work and everything. Like, we're going to be very critical about it. And we think that this is going to be funny because, you know, the audience is going to come up with some really, really crazy stuff, I'm sure. So you know, there's going to be a lot of the judges talking to each other and we're going to be, you know, doing the whole thing that like the show does. I think that's going to be a lot of fun. And then we're going to do a bit called Never Seen It, which is a improv comedy bit where you find out movies that people haven't seen, that most people know about, and then you make them do a live read of a scene with somebody else.

AR: Yes.

J: And you have to, you know, you have to be-

S: But no context.

J: No context, but you have to be 100% committed. Like you're doing this as if you're in the movie. You have to be dramatic and you have to have total buy-in.

AR: Oh, I love this. I love this so much.

J: I think that one is going to be, people are going to really love it because it's going to go off the rails immediately.

E: Oh gosh. Hilarity will ensue.

AR: Yes. This is great.

J: Yeah. So Adam, I think you're going to love this stuff. We're going to have a great time. You know, I'm really happy to welcome you to White Plains, New York. I mean, God, this is one of the cultural hubs of the United States.

E: Adam's familiar with many, many White Plains-ish types of towns throughout America.

AR: Yeah.

S: Basically, it's an airport, a train station, and some hotels.

J: And a huge mall. One of the biggest malls.

E: That is a big mall.

AR: Hey, I'm a child of the 80s and 90s. I love malls.

J: Yeah. We did the food court last time and it was great. So we did the 2023 NOTACON there. It was awesome. The hotel was awesome. We basically took over the entire hotel. So I think this year is going to be even better than last time. So we're really excited that you're coming. And I just want you to be prepared because you're going to have to do improv comedy with us.

AR: I'm ready. I'm prepared.

S: All right.

E: Adam tell us where we can find you and all your endeavors that you do so our audience can easily find you?

AR: Yeah. Find the band at Story of the Year on all the socials. I think we're still on Twitter, X, whatever that was called, unfortunately. Thank the Maker Pod at Thank the Maker Pod on Instagram, TikTok for now, Blue Sky, I think we're on there maybe. At Adam the Skull on all the things, Thank the MakerPod.com, StoryoftheYear.net and so on and so forth.

S: All right. We look forward to seeing you in May, Adam.

AR: Same to you guys. Thanks again for having me.

S: Yep.

J: You got it, man.

C: Good night.

Science or Fiction (1:39:31)

Theme: None Item #1: Researchers successfully used mRNA which produces a tardigrade protein to protect surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment. Item #2: Studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct diel classification (what time of day they are active). Item #3: A new analysis finds that the vast majority of rogue planetary mass objects form as ejected planets rather than failed stars.

Answer	Item
Fiction	A new analysis finds that the vast majority of rogue planetary mass objects form as ejected planets rather than failed stars.
Science	Researchers successfully used mRNA which produces a tardigrade protein to protect surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment.
Science	Studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct diel classification (what time of day they are active).

Host	Result
Steve	sweep

Rogue	Guess
Jay	Researchers successfully used mRNA which produces a tardigrade protein to protect surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment.
Evan	Studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct diel classification (what time of day they are active).
Bob	Studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct diel classification (what time of day they are active).
Cara	Studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct diel classification (what time of day they are active).

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, and then I challenge my panelk of skeptics, that's you guys, to tell me which one is the fake. I've got three exciting news items this week. You ready?

J: Yes.

E: Mm-hmm.

S: Okay. Here we go. Item number one, researchers successfully used mRNA, which produces a tardigrade protein to protect surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment. Item number two, studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct Diel classification, what time of day they are active. And item number three, a new analysis finds that the vast majority of rogue planetary mass objects form as ejected planets rather than failed stars. Jay made a noise. Jay did. Jay gets to go first.

J: All right. The first one here, these researchers, they successfully used mRNA, which produces a tardigrade protein to protect surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment. I have a lot to say about that one, Steve, because I remember I did specifically, I did a news item where they tracked tardigrades that were attached to rockets that went into outer space.

E: I remember that news item.

J: Yeah, me too. And I remember talking about this protein that they have that's covering their DNA and protects it from radiation coming in and messing it up. And this is exactly the kind of thing that I think you would make up. And man, if we could do that, though, they successfully used mRNA to produce, but who did they successfully use it on, Steve?

S: Well, since you're going first, I'll tell you. This is a mouse study, not that it matters.

J: Wait. So there are anti-radiation mice running around this planet now?

E: Well, not running around a laboratory.

S: And of course, the cancer treatment is radiation therapy, right? I hope that was obvious.

J: All right. So this is how supervillains are made, by the way. Okay. So I'm going to put that one on the back burner for a second. The second one here, you're saying studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct deal classification, what time of day they are active. So only 39% were correct in saying when they're active during the day.

S: Yeah. So in other words, like if an animal is categorized as nocturnal, this study found that 61% of the time they were not nocturnal.

J: That's crazy. If that's real, if that's legitimate, then it really, you know, what are these scientists and researchers doing? Like they're falling asleep at the wheel here while they're doing... They made 8.9 million observations of 445 species and 39, they were that wrong? That's a big mistake there, right? That's bad. I don't like that and I hope that one is not science. The last one, a new analysis finds that the vast majority of rogue planetary mass objects form as ejected planets rather than failed stars. Okay. I mean, I just...

B: Could you expand on that one, Steve?

S: A little. So you know what a rogue planet...

J: Rogue? Yeah, of course.

E: Yes.

S: It's roaming between the stars. It's not in orbit around a star. Right. So rogue planetary mass objects, right? So these are not stars. They're big, but they're planetary mass, they're not stars. And so the question is, do these planetary mass objects that are rogue, do they form as failed stars or do they form as planets that then get ejected from their solar system? This analysis says that most of them are ejected planets, not failed stars.

B: But you said they're planetary mass, so by definition, they would have to be planetary and not stellar.

S: No, because they're ...

B: Why?

S: Planetary mass objects...

C: I think that's a mass of planets.

S: They're big, but they're not stars, right? So are they too small to be a star or are they just big planets?

B: Okay. So you're talking like Neptune type, Jupiter gas giants?

E: Yeah, Jupiter.

S: Even bigger than Jupiter, but just not bigger than Jupiter.

E: Jupiter's a failed star.

B: Okay.

S: Yeah.

C: But not in orbit.

S: They're rogue. Yeah, they're floating around.

J: So the question is, how does a planet get out of its own solar system, right? That's because it needs to be... I think the planets need to be around a star to form or at least that's... Oh boy, this is not an easy one, Steve. Nothing is sticking out. I am going to say, the first one about the mRNA that produces the tardigrade protein, this is exactly what we were saying we hoped would happen, right? And I could see them doing this. It makes sense. So I'm going to say that one is science. I'm going to say that the 39% here, the 8.9 million observations that were made of these 445 mammalian species, if they were that wrong, then something is really wrong. I don't think the number is 39%. I think it's a lot lower than that.

S: Or you mean higher.

J: You know what I'm talking about.

S: Yeah. I know what you're talking about.

J: That's the fiction.

S: Okay. Evan.

E: Oh boy, I don't want this tardigrade protein one to be science. Oh gosh. Right, Jay?

J: Of course.

E: I mean, this is too good. Tardigrades are amazing little buggers, aren't they? Can't kill them.

C: Animalcules. Steve's favorite word.

E: Again, that's the one that can trap you, right? You want it to be true. You don't kind of care, but at the same time, you'll lose the game. And then the 445 mammalian species, 39% correct deal classification, I suppose that could be right. It's more refined. Make observations and over time, you make more and more and more observations and you start concentrating on you can realize you were pretty far off the mark to begin with. I don't think there's a problem with that one per se. The last one about the rogue planetary mass objects, the rogue ones, ejected planets rather than failed stars. Okay. I believe that. Oh, what the heck. I'll go with the tardigrade one as the fiction because when it's not, if it turns out to be science, then my sadness from losing the game will be overridden by my happiness in that it was a fact.

S: All right, Bob.

C: Yeah, Bob's going before me.

B: I was hoping you'd go before me. Jesus. Tardigrade protein, huh? I guess. Why wouldn't they use the code from, what's the name of that bacteria, radiodurans? This is a bacteria that could have its genome obliterated by radiation and then it just like puts itself back together. I think it's even heartier than even a tardigrade. But tardigrades have some amazing, famously amazing resilience. So sure, I want that to be true too so badly. Let's see. So 8.9 million observations of only 445 species. That's 20,000 observations per species. That's a lot. And they still were that wrong? That's pretty dramatic. Wow.

S: That's the database they used to figure out that the older classifications were wrong, right?

B: Right.

S: You understand what that says?

B: I think so.

S: Yeah, you made it sound like, and they're still wrong after 8, no, 8.9 million observations is what led them to, you know, based upon those observations, the existing deal classifications were only correct 39% of the time.

B: All right. That's not encouraging. Let me look at this third one here. All right. So this one's interesting. So you've got, I mean we've, Steve, we've believed for years that there's more rogue planets ejected from solar systems than there are planets in orbit around a star, right? Isn't that kind of like many billions of these rogue planets. For years, that's kind of been the consensus. He's not even, you're not agreeing with me, but I know you would agree with me.

C: He's not done it.

B: So you're saying here that potentially these, some of these could be failed stars. I don't like, I don't like that. I like the idea of these, these rogue planets just like, you know, I don't need a star, you know, screw.

S: It says they're ejected planets, not rogue stars, not failed stars.

B: Just the idea of potentially thinking that these were failed stars is like, I like the idea of the rogue planets. It makes sense. It's like, you know, screw those billionaire stars. I don't need them. I'm out on my own. I don't need those guys. And imagine the life forms that could have evolved on an exoplanet with no star, with no stellar-

C: In what universe could anything live off of a, okay, sorry.

B: Plenty. Plenty. First off, you've got, you know, microbes living under the ground because of the heat of nuclear decay. That's, that's like, yeah, that absolutely can happen. But yeah, surface life, yeah, that's going to be, that's going to be difficult for sure. But there still could definitely be life on those. I mean, you know, there's still plenty of heat inside the earth. So this one, that one makes sense to me. All right. I'm going to say that the 39% correct one, something, yeah, I'll just, whatever, throw my coin down on that and say that's fiction. I don't know. Any of these could potentially be, except the third one.

C: Wait. So the brothers are saying it's the mammalian classification.

S: Evan, the tardigrade.

E: Yeah. I went with tardigrades for my own selfish purpose.

B: Yeah.

C: Who do I go with?

S: All right, Cara.

B: Don't. Just try to suss it out.

E: Or the rogue planets. You could do the rogue planets.

C: I could?

B: Yeah.

E: Fun.

C: Let's see. The tardigrade one I think could be true. At least somebody probably researched that. They were like, oh, these are radiation resistant. Maybe we can take something from them and put it in tissue. And it doesn't say in people. It says in tissue. So this could have been in vitro.

S: I said it was in mice.

C: Oh, in mice. Yeah. Totally happened in mice. I don't know why everybody is as bothered by this database one, though. Like, I'm not bothered by any of them. Okay. So what you're saying is that a new database where they had tons of observations. What I'm reading this as, the first time they did a big data analysis of this, they realized that all of their boots-on-the-ground non-comparison data was kind of wrong. And naturalistic data is just, oh, I'm standing out in the forest and I'm writing down how many of these creatures I see. But if they were using camera traps or CCTV or some way or satellite footage or something.

E: Thermal imaging.

C: Yeah. Thermal imaging to get big data, I could see them being way off. Animals are famously very good at evading human observation. So this one doesn't bother me at all. Now, the rogue planet one, I have no idea.

E: That must be the fiction by process of elimination.

C: I want, I mean, the other two don't bother me. This one, but Bob says this one doesn't bother him. And I have to think Bob is a proxy for my own brain, which I don't know anything about. So okay. In an attempt not to sweep Steve, I'm going to be, I'm going to use strategery here and I'm going to say it was, it's that they're not rogue planetary or they're not ejected planets. They are failed stars or something different.

S: Just to screw me out of it. That's your strategy. Okay. All right. Well, you're spread out, which means I did my job this week and well, it means I take them in order. Take them in order.

B: But you didn't do the job as good as you could have.

S: Please. You guys were confused and befuddled. Here we go. Item number one, researchers successfully used mRNA, which produces a tardigrade protein to protect the surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment. You all want this one to be correct, but Evan thinks it's the fiction.

E: And I still want it to be correct.

S: And this one is...

B: Say it.

S: Science.

E: Oh, yes.

S: This is super cool.

E: I lose.

S: Yeah. So...

B: Tell me about it.

S: Well, I'll tell you. So yeah. So it's pretty much what it says. They identify the protein that binds to DNA and protects the DNA from breaking apart due to radiation. They made the mRNA that produces that protein. They inject it into the tissue of mice. They then gave them radiation therapy for their cancer because they actually had cancer, the mice that they were studying. And the mRNA produced tardigrade protein protected the surrounding tissue from radiation damage. They did not get as much DNA damage from the radiation. The idea here is that the mRNA is only going to last for a short amount of time. So it'll produce a bunch of the tardigrade protein. You give the radiation therapy and then within a couple of weeks, it's gone, you know, so it doesn't have any long lasting effects. And that's basically what they found. So the research was successful. Obviously, this is a long way away from human treatments, you know, doing.

B: Yeah, but extrapolate that. That's pretty, could be potentially pretty awesome.

S: But it could be.

C: Hell yeah.

S: Absolutely. So this is a good proof of concept, you know, in an animal model and very, very encouraging. Radio protection of healthy tissue via nanoparticle delivered mRNA encoding for a damaged suppressor protein found in tardigrades. Cool study. All right, let's go on to number two, studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct deal classification. What time of day they are active. Bob and Jay, you think this one is the fiction. Cara and Evan thinks this one is science. And this one is science. Sorry, guys. Cara's strategy, unfortunately, worked.

E: Oh, it worked. Yeah.

B: Failed stars. That sucks.

S: Hang on, Bob. Hang on. Hold your horses.

E: Hold your fire.

S: So...

B: Hurry up.

E: Yeah, yeah. Mammals next.

S: Cara, you pretty much are correct. You know, a lot of the classifications were based on field observations, and a lot of them were just too few field observations.

C: Nocturnal, diurnal, crepuscular, and the one I don't know, either crepuscular?

S: Cathemeral.

C: Is that the opposite? One's done, one's does?

B: I never heard of that one.

S: Cathemeral means that they're active during multiple phases throughout the day.

C: Oh, okay. Okay. So it's a catch-all.

S: Yeah, it's kind of a catch-all. And what they found was a couple of things. One was that a lot of the classifications that we had were not correct, but also that there's a lot more variability than we previously assumed. So in other words, like a quote-unquote nocturnal animal is active during the day quite a bit. So a lot more of the animals were cathemeral than strictly nocturnal or strictly diurnal.

B: Oh, that makes more sense.

C: That doesn't surprise me.

S: Yeah, but it's interesting, and it was a massive database, which of course, as Cara was saying, of course they would revise the less accurate information. This was a global network representing 38 countries, leveraged 8.9 million observations. So they updated our deal classifications. Quite a deal.

B: Nice.

S: Okay. That means that a new analysis finds that the vast majority of rogue planetary mass objects form as ejected planets rather than failed stars is the fiction.

B: Wow.

S: But they're not failed stars either. This is kind of a trick. It's neither.

C: Oh.

B: What?

J: What are we talking about?

C: So what are they?

B: Okay. Specify, please.

C: What else is there? Are they comets? I'm confused.

S: Right. So basically, there's two main ways that stuff gets made, right? You either get made as a star, meaning a collapsing disk of material, or you form as a planet, which is an accretion of material around a star, right? Those are the two basic ways that worlds get made. And the question was always for these rogue planetary mass objects, which PMOs are generally like bigger than Jupiter, but not big enough to become a star, right? And there's a lot of them out there. And Bob, you're right, there's probably more rogue planets than there are planets around stars.

B: Oh, they still believe that?

S: Oh, yeah. This does not impact that. Because these are not just anything that's a planet. This is the planetary mass objects are a specific range. Again, they tend to be large, but not suns. What they found was that they form by a third newly discovered mechanism that's neither like stars or planets. And it's complicated. But what they found was they found a bunch of them forming in the same location. What seems to be happening is that it's an interaction between two planetary disks that are forming these like a tidal bridge, as they say, there's like a tidal bridge between these two encountering circumstellar disks that then produce these highly productive clusters of material that spits out these PMOs, these free-floating-

E: Oh, like a baseball going through a pitching machine kind of thing. You got these two wheels that send the thing going.

S: Yeah, that's a good analogy, I guess.

B: Two circumstellar disks around one star.

S: No, I think, no, in a cluster, like in a cloud, a star forming region.

E: Neat.

S: Yeah.

B: But if it's a circumstellar disk, then there is a star there already, right?

S: But it's not around a star. It's not in orbit around a star. It's a young star cluster, right?

B: So is it like a binary system? I'm confused.

E: Proto star?

S: No, no, it's, so you have a star, a cluster of stars, right? So a star forming cluster. So there's a lot of young stars forming in this one region because there's a giant cloud of gas there, and lots of stars are forming. But in that cloud, there can also be these circumstellar disks that are forming stars. But if they get close together, they form these tidal bridges that then spit out a bunch of these PMOs. Does that make sense?

B: Fascinating, yeah.

S: Yeah, so it's-

B: Yeah, but I think circumstellar is kind of just not a good word for this.

S: That's the name of the disks. But that's the- So this would be a-

B: I don't like them.

S: This is a new mechanism by which these kinds of objects can be formed. It's not formed as a sun or as a planet. It's its own thing, which is weird. But cool.

E: Bob, we learned something here.

S: You did.

B: Yeah, that's really a third way. It sounds, that's really cool. I want to read up on that one. That's fascinating.

E: And Cara figured it all out.

C: Sure thing.

E: Without AI.

C: I'm totally not still confused.

E: No, no, no, no. She took the reins and commanded her way to victory.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:54:43)

"One of the few universal characteristics is a healthy skepticism toward unverified speculations. These are regarded as topics for conversation until tests can be devised. Only then do they attain the dignity of subjects for investigation."  – Edwin Hubbel, The Realm of the Nebulae (Yale University Press: 1936), (description of author)

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

E: "One of the few universal characteristics is a healthy skepticism towards unverified speculations. These are regarded as topics for conversation until tests can be devised. Only then do they attain the dignity of subjects for investigation." That was written by Edwin Hubble in an article called The Realm of the Nebula. 1936. Edwin Hubble, right? He's one of the-

S: I've heard of him.

B: He was awesome, man.

C: I saw his locker.

E: No.

C: Yeah, it's here at Mount Wilson. Yeah, if you go and observe at the telescope at Mount Wilson, Hubble's locker is still down in the bottom.

E: Holy moly. Steve, you were actually there.

S: I was there. Yeah, I saw it. There was also his telescope, his microscope or something that was there. I don't know.

E: And his lunch. It's kind of old now.

C: Yeah, there's some stuff inside of his locker. Yeah, it's like an old apple.

S: All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

B: Sure, man.

J: Got it.

C: Thanks, Steve.

E: Thanks doctor.

Signoff

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

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