The Skeptics Guide #1074 - Feb 7 2026

You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality. Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, February 5th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Chiara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein. Good evening, everybody. What's up? So, guys. Yes. You're welcome. to be. We are all mentioned in the Epstein files. Oh, I like that you said guys, because I'm not in there. Yes. We are including our buddy George Robb. And others. And other skeptics. Tons of people. I mean, it was like a big list of people that spoke at TAM that year. Yeah, it wasn't like anything specific about anybody. The only person who specifically mentioned a lot is poor Rebecca. Yeah, of course. That was the reason, I think, why everything was brought up. Yeah, it was all because of elevator gate. At the time, that was the – Elevator gate. And he called her a nasty young woman. And I think Rebecca is smart enough to know that she's got to make a shitload of T-shirts with nasty young woman on it, right? Nasty young woman. Oh, that would sound like hot cake. So being, quote, unquote, in the Epstein files can mean many, many things. First of all, this is like millions of documents that we're talking about. Yeah. And it's like any email he ever sent about anything. So they're just trash-talking skeptics in that email that we get mentioned in. It has nothing to do with anything related to Epstein's doings. You know what I mean? Of course, yeah. For example, Rome Fijaro says, describing the skeptics' groups, yes, it's a huge groupthink festival, this is Tam, that's closer to the Tea Party movement than an intellectual movement. Like, okay, dude. Yeah. And then Deepak Chopra disses us. That's disgusting. Right under the list of all the speakers, including us, he just says it's all disgusting. Which is a badge of honor to be testified. Oh, yeah. Screw that guy. Oh, his typo meant all. I was trying to figure out why he wrote A-L-L-Y. Yeah, I think I just assumed it was a typo. Okay, that's what it is. And then there's another one. This is Rome Vajaro again, whoever that is, saying, I'm not sure if they make money as much as they make image, in quotes. There's plenty of ambition for recognition inside of the movement. Really? And with blogs and online media, there are many new channels that form blah, blah, blah. It's funny because most of the skeptic influencers are not real scientists, yet they want the prestige that comes with fighting for science. Oh, man. So then he's like, so I see the motivation being primarily attention and celebrity. Yep, that's what we're after, attention and celebrity. Yeah, but obviously you can use that. So much projection there. Yeah, a lot of projection. and you could use that to diss anyone getting the message out through social media. You could also use that to describe every science journalist, right? Of course. Yeah. So, Kara, how'd your root canal go? Well, first and foremost, I don't know. How many of you have had a root canal? Not me. I have. Evan has. I have. Three of you? Yeah. Jay. Everyone but me. Yeah. Hello? Yeah. Hello, Jay. Hi, Jay. How's your root canal? I don't know if you guys had a similar experience or if you had yours more recently with all the fancy high-tech stuff. But I think I told you last time she found four channels, like four canals for three roots. Canali. And one of them is really, really small. Like she could hardly even see it on the CT. So it took a long time for her to finally find it, which thank goodness I went with the endodontist and not my dentist. Even though he's amazing, I fully feel like he wouldn't have even known that fourth one was there. and so he would have sealed it up and there would have still been infection so she cleaned everything out and she found them all but that alone took the full two hours and she said that when this happens she prefers to put the temp on and have somebody come back two weeks later after you know the swelling has gone down and finish the job so I'm only halfway done with my root canal that said it was like not that painful at all I'm chewing on it today it's only two days later I didn't have to take any pain medication or anything. Yeah, I mean, they could be great. They could be fine, you know, but some people have really bad time with it. I think a lot of people who wait a really long time until things are really bad and they're already in a lot of pain, that can really compound it. Definitely. Are they already infected at that point? Everybody's infected when they need a root canal. Technically. Yeah, that's why they do. That's what a root canal is. It's going into the channels to clean the infected pulp out. I thought it was risk of infection. Okay. Yeah, I mean, you know, mine, I didn't have an infection in my jaw when I had it done. Like basically my tooth wasn't like recoverable. That was the problem. Yeah, and you didn't have an infection in your jaw, but I bet you there was infection in your pulp. Because if your pulp is exposed to the outside world, bacteria from your mouth is in your pulp. So there is technically infection in there. And Kara, now that you've had a root canal, you can totally understand why so many people just died of mouth problems before dentistry. Oh, absolutely. I mean, so many things can go wrong in your mouth. And the fact that we only get two sets of teeth, like actually we get one set of actual real adult teeth, right? You chew on a bone, you crack a tooth, it could kill you. It's so insane. Yeah, all of this started. And I don't remember if I mentioned this last week. All of this started because the sleep disorder that I have requires that I take a pretty weird medication. And that medication makes me grind my teeth at night. This is all due to bruxism. And this is how we discovered I had bruxism. It's because I went to the dentist. I thought a filling fell out. And he was like, you never had a filling in that tooth. Your tooth is broken from grinding your teeth. And that's when the whole series of night guards and Botox injections in my jaw and everything started. And now I'm protecting my teeth and they're happy and healthy. But in a way, I'm kind of grateful for this root canal because it's preventing more. Oh, absolutely. That's how exactly how I would look at it. No doubt about it. But this is the thing. If you grind your teeth at night, that is not like an inert problem. Like you should really be talking to your dentist about whether your teeth are damaged from the grinding. Yeah. Well, I have a daughter update with the whole moon landing hoaxer. Oh. It's very minor. People have been looking for pins and needles. But it is a step forward. The principal interviewed my daughter and asked her to do a tell-all on what she remembers took place. Okay. And that's a sign that something's happening. We had already given her all the details that I pulled out of my daughter day of. So I don't think she remembered everything anywhere near as clear as three weeks or a month later. But anyway, I'm just waiting. I do have a little counter in my head. I'm not going to be patient much longer. I think I'll give them like another week and then I'm going to request a immediate phone conversation with the superintendent and the principal. Because I got to keep the pressure on. You know, I don't want to – they could easily just let this thing fade out into nothing. And, you know, me and my wife are the only people that are keeping it alive as far as I'm concerned. All right, man. Fight the good fight, Jay. Yeah, we're doing it. Yeah. All right, Bob, you're going to start us off with a quickie. Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. Guys, it looks like we may be dead before we have 8K TVs. Not so much you, though, Kara. You never know. There's no way I can buy 8,000 televisions. So bottom line, 8K is essentially being abandoned by TV manufacturers. Oh, you mean resolution? Yes. Thank you. So, guys, many of us have 4K UHD TVs by now, right? Probably a lot of people. A lot of people do. I assume so. Yeah, I'm still on 420. I'll get there. As a refresher, 4K UHD TV that many people have now, in fact, it's over a billion people, it's 3,800 about by 2,100 approximately. That's like a little over 8 million pixels. 8K TV would be about 7,600 by 4,300 pixels. And that's a little over 33 million pixels instead of 8. So yeah, 8K has twice the resolution in each dimension and four times the total pixels. So the sharpness and the detail are clearly superior and they've actually existed for years. I wasn't quite aware how long they've been around, but Japan started selling them in 2015, 11 years ago, and Samsung sold them in the US starting back in 2018, already like eight years. So they've been out there for a while. And back then the TV industry was like really pushing the idea that 8K is the future. It seemed somewhat reasonable to me and always kind of interested in that. But yet now the TV industry is abandoning 8K. And for example, LG recently reported it will no longer make 8K panels, TV panels. TCL, which I'm not too familiar with, they released their last 8K TV in 2021. Already a half a decade ago, they stopped it. And Sony discontinued its last 8K TVs in just last year. I think it was in April 2025. So my question is, why would such a cool and clearly superior technology be treated so terribly? Because they're not making profit. It's not hard to figure out, right? There's lots of reasons. First one that pops up is just the sheer expense. They were obviously quite expensive, just as 4Ks were when they first came out. But LG in 2022 was charging $13,000 USD for a 76-inch TV. Now, granted, that's a big TV, but they had just lowered the price by 7,000. So it was 20,000 not too long before 2022. So yeah, these were expensive. One big reason here is just the content itself. There was basically zero native 8K content available even in 2025, 2026, years after the TVs have been available. But if you think of it that way, though, there's still not a lot of 4K content available. And that's why – that's one big reason why I don't even have a 4K yet. It's like what's the point? There's really not that much 4K content, real good 4K content out there. Native 4K. Native 4K because a lot of – TVs can upscale some resolution. It's a cheat. Yeah. It does help. Many people, many streaming, broadcasting, and even gaming users to this day still rely on just HD, 1920 by 1080 resolution, which is good, which is still good. But man, when 4K has been out for so long, it's just a little surprising. And you could stream 4K. I've seen the options to stream 4K. But it's really – is it really 4K? It's so compressed, which gives it really low bit rates. It's really a travesty if you think about it. It's not really even 4K anymore. Go into a store like any big store, any big box store that sells TVs. If there's still any. You look at the 4K TVs in there and they look amazing. They're just like – it really takes your breath away. And there's a lot of reasons why that happens because they're totally optimizing it for where it's being displayed. They're totally tweaked to play specific videos. But they're also playing uncompressed high bit rate video like maybe from a hard drive or a disk. So that's something that you're not going to get at home unless you buy the full file and have it locally. If you're streaming it, it's going to be super compressed and the quality is going to go way, way down. So that's kind of frustrating. Exactly. Oh, yeah. If you really like a movie and it's very cinematic or whatever, it's still worth having it in Blu-ray. Absolutely. Because you can get that real full 4K. You can't see the difference. When I buy a 4K, I'm absolutely going to say, all right, I'm going to get like five or six discs of like my – 4K discs of my best movies that really would benefit from uncompressed and super thing. But the thing is, even going back to 8K, most people wouldn't have even noticed the difference between 4K and 8K. If they went up to 8K, they really wouldn't have even noticed. Many people would have. You can't discern it. Some would have. But get this. If you had a 50-inch 8K TV, you would have to sit one meter or closer from the set to really notice the difference. who sits three feet, a little over three feet from their TV? That would be kind of stupidly close, I think, right? Yeah, I mean, the only reason to go 8K would be if you had like a 70-inch TV. Like if you had like a really big TV, then the distance gets farther. Maybe buy a projector at that point or something else. But I'll quantify that for you. If you had an 80- to 100-inch TV, you would still have to be two to three meters away. So what, six point, you know, So it's six to ten feet kind of. That's about right. But correct. So that would actually be kind of okay. But still, we're talking an 80 to 100-inch TV. I don't know anybody that's got an 80 to 100-inch TV. They're out there for sure. But you want to talk about a lot of money. So that just adds to the reasons why people didn't want to do this. So my advice is if you want to invest money into a TV to have a dramatic impact on the image, you're much better off not getting an 8K TV with no content, really, but invest in the non-resolution upgrades, right? The OLEDs, HDR support, micro-LED, quantum dots, micro-RGB, those will make the picture really look dramatically better, far better than 8K, even if you got them close to it. All right, so that all said, 8Ks, they're not dead. You can still buy them from Samsung for now. Now, 8K, I'm sure, is going to be used over the years by enthusiasts, right? Because they're always going to be enthusiasts that are looking for a super high-dense resolution. Yeah, Betamax is still a thing too. Right? It's also going to be used for other product types other than TVs. Like, for example, head-mounted displays. Absolutely. You would want something like an 8K resolution for a head-mounted display. So, sure, maybe someday 8K or even 10K, which would be cool, will be a must-have TV upgrade. Who knows when, if ever. But also assuming we haven't gone full Neuralink and started streaming Netflix straight into our visual cortex, maybe we'll see it in who knows how long it might even take if ever to get here. So, Steve, this has been your Pixelated Quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve. It's possible just for regular TV viewing. It may never be worth it. But what's interesting is that there's diminishing returns with increased expense. As you say, most people wouldn't notice it. There's also – like there's some technologies require several things to happen all at once for the higher resolution. You need the displays and the content and the bandwidth all at the same time. And if you don't have that, there's a chicken and the egg problem. Like why make the TV if there's no content? Yeah. Why make the content if there's no TV to display it? And if you have to compress the hell out of it anyway because you don't have the bandwidth. But the other thing which you alluded to but I want to make it explicit is that – Environmental impact, too. Yeah. You know, not a small one. I wasn't going to bring that up. But when we – there's a tendency, and this is partly marketing, partly our intellectual laziness, to boil down technology to one number. Yes. Right? That happened with computers. There was a time – now we don't really care, but there was a time. Megapixels in phone cameras. Megapixels in cameras as if that's the only number that describes the quality of your camera, the clock speed of your computer. and then how many K or what the resolution of your TV is. But as you say, technologies like these have multiple features, some of which have a greater impact on the performance of the technology than that one number that people obsess about. You're way better off getting a TV with a high dynamic range than just higher pixels. Absolutely. That would give you a much better image quality. And I'm not sure the culture anymore wants to be family time around the television thing. It's more personal devices, smaller devices, portable devices. So I think the culture has also had a factor here. Yeah, that's true. There's a lot more screens out there today than there were 15, 20 years ago. Yeah, but conversely, people are doing home theater way more than going out to the movies too. That's right. And so people are investing in their home theater because they're using it way more. So I'm not sure I agree with that. All right, Kara. I understand RFK is up to some other shenanigans. Tell us about this. Oh, God. Okay, so I have opened a massive can of worms in choosing to cover this topic. So I'm going to give the highlights right at the top, but I'm really curious about some kind of other discussions that this opened up for me. So the long and short of it is that RFK Jr., over the course of a few different sort of stops earlier this week, started to announce some new programs that he's interested in funding. That's not even the right. He's not funding them, but initiating for both substance use disorder and homelessness. And here's the problem. Well, here's one of like 10 problems that I've come across. Well, there's an article written in the New York Times three days ago as of this recording, which was decidedly uncritical. And that really worried me. So I started to dig a lot deeper. But basically, the headline was HHS to expand faith based addiction programs for homeless. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said addiction is a, quote, spiritual disease that calls out for the involvement of religious organizations. organizations. So although and every time I dig into what this man is claiming, it's always that pseudoscientific skill of like, uh-huh, uh-huh, agree. Wait a minute, where are you going with that? Like he always puts just enough reality into these claims and quotes and kind of catches you and then, you know, hits you with a curveball. There's so much there's so much to dig into here. So he's talking about a $100 million pilot program that he's calling STREETS, which stands for Safety Through Recovery Engagement and Evidence-Based Treatment and Supports. And his approach as he's talked about this is, here's a perfect quote, will engage people continuously from first contact on the street through recovery, through employment, and through self-sufficiency. Law enforcement, courts, housing providers, and healthcare systems will work as one team so people will no longer fall through the cracks. Okay, first of all, that sounds great. I don't understand how $10 million is going to accomplish that by any stretch of the imagination. Second, I don't think what he's saying there vaguely is any any different than what every community goal has always been to combat homelessness. But the main issue here, and this is what I'm seeing over and over and over, is that the administration as a whole has decided to stop using the housing first approach, which we've been using for decades at this point, and is switching gears to what they're calling a treatment first approach. So do you guys understand the difference between a housing first approach and a treatment first approach? It's really an ideological difference, which translates to... that contribute to why they have been dealing with chronic homelessness. The treatment first approach claims most people who are homeless are homeless because they're addicted to drugs or alcohol. So if we treat their addiction, they'll be able to get a job and to get their bank accounts where they need to be, to be able to live in a home and maintain a roof over their heads. Do you see a practical difference between the two? Yeah. Housing First basically makes changes so that it's easier to get housing or provides it for people who, at least temporarily, Treatment First doesn't do that and invests money in treatment centers, but not in housing programs. And the vast majority of the evidence shows that housing first programs work. And so that's why it's quite frustrating for me when I see RFK Jr. throwing around terms like evidence based, evidence based, evidence based. And while I do support and fully agree that only organizations that hold to evidence-based standards should get funding from the federal government, I am very worried about – Or science-based too. Yeah, but they're – I mean they're using evidence-based, so that's the term they use. But I'm very, very worried about opening those funding opportunities up to faith-based organizations. I mean RFK Jr. uses evidence-based as a weapon, not as a tool. Exactly. Right, yep. So RFK Jr. famously himself credits 12-step to his recovery from drug and alcohol abuse. So heroin addiction. Yeah, from a heroin addiction and alcohol addiction. He famously also says that he attends upwards of eight meetings a week. Now, I am not saying that 12-step does not have a pretty decent evidence base to support it. What I am saying is that 12-step is not without a lot of problems. And I think that we have looked at the approach to treating addiction in this country through a very, very narrow lens. 12-step started a long time ago, before we knew as much as we know now about the neurological, medical, and complex psychological basis of substance use disorder. 12-step programs, as we know, are often delivered through either religious organizations or peer groups. And Maya Salovitz, who is an investigative science journalist who has written about this a lot, she made a statement that I think is important to quote here. She said, Think about it in the same way we view cancer care. Your support group is not your oncologist. Each can play an important role in your well-being and survival, but cancer patients aren't experts in oncology just because they've had the disease. And that's how a lot of 12-step works. And basically what RFK Jr. is saying is that he wants to fund mostly 12-step treatment because he thinks this is going to then solve the homelessness crisis. And I'm not minimizing some of the claims that he makes about different organizations working together and, you know, a community based approach to working on evidence based treatment for addiction. Like that all sounds great. But the problem is it's really, really vague about how they're going to do that. And when you get into the nitty gritty over and over and over, his teams and the administration as a whole are saying not housing first, treatment first. And this goes hand in hand with a massive shift to the way that HUD, which stands for what does HUD stand for? Housing and Urban Development? Yeah, heads up display. Do you know what CHOD stands for, though, Cara? Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. What does CHOD stand for? Thank you, Bob. Anyway, so last year, I don't know if we, I don't, we didn't cover this on the show, I don't think. But last year, I think right around November, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, put out a 128-page notice that said that of the $3.9 billion in continuation of care or a continuum of care funds, which is the main source of federal money for homelessness, that they were going to pivot the way that that money is used. Right now, 90 percent of it goes towards putting people in homes and they were going to cut that aid so that only 20 percent of it went towards actual housing. We've got to remember that this is coming from an administration where, for example, in 2023, in a campaign video, President Trump himself said that unsheltered homeless people are, quote, dangerously deranged people that destroy urban life. And he's talked at great length about moving them from, you know, encampments into what he calls treatment camps, which is really worrisome for me. One of the big issues with housing first is that by definition, housing first often offers treatment but doesn't require it as a condition of housing. Whereas when we're talking about treatment first, very often the treatment is fundamentally required in order to receive any of the so-called entitlements that are offered in these programs. And I think it's easy when you've never worked with individuals who either suffer from severe mental illness or severe substance use disorder or neither or both that you cannot mandate treatment. It doesn't work. People have to want treatment. They have to be ready for treatment. Yeah. They have to be engaged in their treatment. And none of this actually confronts what I believe and quite a lot of the literature. It's really hard to parse these things down, but maybe I shouldn't even word it that way. A really important component of why there is a homelessness crisis in this country. It's very easy to go. Everybody who's on the street right now has a mental illness or is on drugs or alcohol. And if we can just treat that, they'll be better. OK, easy to say, impossible. I shouldn't say impossible. Very hard to do, but also not reflective of reality. It's not true. It's part of the problem, but it's not the entire problem. It's part of the problem. But what is, okay, if everybody on the street has one issue, all people who are living on the street have one issue. Some of them might have substance use disorder. Some of them might have mental illness. But all of them have a single issue. What is that issue? No place to live. They don't have anywhere to live. Yeah. And the reason they don't have anywhere to live more often than not is because they can't afford to live somewhere. And this does nothing to address the major crisis, which is that housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable. There's a number of reasons for that. We haven't built enough houses to keep up with demand, although that usually the market adjusts and it might take five to 10 years. But eventually, barring something else disruptive, that problem can solve itself. But there's also – I've read multiple articles about the fact that we don't really build medium housing. Like we build homes and apartments, but we don't really build a lot of like the row houses where you can own your own home, but it's small and on very small property. And it's affordable because it's like the cheapest home you can own. We're sort of missing – Like a mobile home community. We're missing that middle ground and that is a huge part of the problem. And we also – I mean there are so many downstream issues with the way that our society is structured. We criminalize poverty in our society. The poorer you are, the more expensive money is to get. It's very expensive to be poor. Yeah. And so it just becomes this like hole that you cannot dig out of, which is why in the places where housing first has been utilized and studied, they show that once people have a roof over their heads and a stable door that they can lock where they can shower in dignity, they can put on their clothes in dignity, they can eat a meal, you know, in the safety of their own home. A lot of those other things, they can work on their sobriety. They can work on their mental health. They can work. But the truth of the matter is, and this is the part I think we're all afraid to say out loud, there are some people who will never be able to quote unquote contribute to society. There are always going to be people who are disabled and can't earn the type of paycheck that these types of programs seem to expect them to be able to earn. What happens to those people? And how do we care for the most vulnerable among us? Where are the programs for them? We have had them historically, but it does feel like this is a dismantling of that. And it bothers me that a lot of the coverage of this right now is taking the claims of, oh, we're all going to work together and, you know, look at all this funding. And you know we going to help people with their addiction Don worry this is going to solve homelessness like with like a really unskeptical eye Now after saying all that there is one thing that this initiative is doing that I kind of am like hey that seems like a good idea And I curious about your take Steve So he did talk about this thing called MOUD M which what he doing is adding three medications for opioid use disorder and making it so that the administration for children and families will be footing the bill for a 50% federal match to provide methadone, naltrexone, and buprenorphine to parents if there's an imminent risk of their children entering foster care because of an opioid use disorder. It's basically helping to fund the treatment for that opioid use disorder so that the kids can stay in the home with their families. And that's something that I think could actually be very beneficial, both from a public health perspective and also financially, it could be very beneficial. It sounds a good idea. I don't have any specific information about it. Exactly. It sounds like a good idea. And that's the thing that's so frustrating sometimes when it comes to RFK Jr. is that there's like these good ideas sprinkled in with this abject nonsense. And then it's all tied up in a pretty bow that uses all the right language. Right. So it sells easily and people don't really understand what it is they're being peddled. Yep. He misses all the nuance and the actual evidence. I did prep a little bit about just faith-based addiction programs because I'm very familiar with that literature, but I got myself updated just to see what is recent. And it's basically what I've been reading for years. They do work, but they don't work any better than any intervention, whether it's faith-based or not. And there's very little research, and a lot of the research that exists looks at AA. But the thing is, the things about AA that make it work are not the faith-based component. So it's a lot of mixing of evidence. There is really no convincing evidence that the introduction of faith-based itself is of any benefit. The things that help are having a support group, having community, you know, dedicating yourself to getting better. those kind of things, yeah, they're all great, and that's what makes a difference. And the thing is, I'm not against a faith. If you are a person of faith and you want to use a faith-based clinic because it aligns with your worldview or whatever, that's fine. I have a problem with the government specifically supporting faith-based interventions. Well, yeah, it's unconstitutional, first of all, because it requires that they have daylight between their secular approaches and any proselytizing. And we don't trust that they'll do that. Right. But having said that, though, I don't care if they're paying for treatment programs that are incidentally faith-based, but that's not what I'm hearing here, right? No. Like if a hospital is run by the Catholic Church and Medicare pays for treatment at the hospital, that's incidental. You know what I mean? That's not paying for the religious part of it. But this sounds like they are, and that is a problem. And so there are a lot of problems. And I think that the picture is really, really mixed. But I also think that's not really what's at issue here. I think what's at issue here is a fundamental ideological change in approaches to public health by this administration. And that's a moralistic approach to a medical problem and a social problem. And that really worries me. All right. Thanks, Kara. Jay, tell us about noise and sleep. Guys, do you sleep in a noisy environment at night? Never. Like, what do you got? There's no absence of noise. There's never an absence of noise. Yeah, but that's different than noisy. Do you have like a white noise thing or you have like outside noises? I happen to use a white noise device, but there are just natural noises occurring in nature that I can hear, even if I didn't have anything on. Like the wolves? Oh, trees, the wind, the rain. Yes, animals, definitely. Do the voices ever talk to you? Do they ever try to communicate with you? Yes, they do. And they tell me to burn things. Don't sleep. Don't sleep. Don't sleep. Well, I've used a couple of different things, different types of white noise. And I used to really like the sound of crickets. Really? You could sleep to the sound of crickets? Yeah, it would be low and it'd be, yeah. Wow. I use a playlist on Spotify called Floating Through Space. That's like really ambient with no melodic, like no rhythm, nothing that I can attune to. But just enough sort of ambient, pleasing sounds that it tunes out any outside noise. So there are noise environments, right? There's noisy places. Lots of people that live in cities, you know, they have to deal with nonstop noise. I remember when I lived in Manhattan. Sirens, right? All the time. Yeah, just noise all night long. In L.A., it's the helicopters. There's so many helicopters. Wow. Yeah. And I think we've all been, you know, we've become accustomed to this, like, standard of just dealing with, you know, sounds all the time. You know, it really is that way. And then there are people like Kara and I have done this where you'll pick some type of ambient sound or a pink noise. There's white noise. These are very popular and there's a ton of apps out there that sell access to these sounds. And they try to – it's like as a sleep tool to help you get better sleep. YouTube has videos for that as well, a lot of them. And they say they're masking sounds and they help promote deeper rest. You know, the assumption here is that I guess most people accept that this idea that if you listen to something, it could be calming, it could give you better sleep. And, you know, that's – is it true? I guess that's the question. And there was a study that was done, and I will tell you right out of the gate, there was only 25 people in the study, and they tested them for seven days. But it did reveal some things that are going to warrant more research. And I think everyone out there listening to this should, especially if you're using ambient noise or whatever, like to, you know, think it over, you know, maybe it isn't the best thing for you to do because here's what they found. So the sleep researchers have known for a very long time, like decades, that intermittent environmental noise can and does disrupt sleep. It's very common for it to disrupt people's sleep. It doesn't have to wake the person completely up. You know, just sounds in general, even a brief sound can lead to fragmented sleep, and that's not good. So this new study, this was done by a laboratory led by Matthias Basner and colleagues at the Chronobiology and Isolation Laboratory. Isolation Laboratory, what did they do there? The study was published in the journal Sleep, and it directly compared two low-cost and widely accessible strategies for coping with these nighttime noises that apparently all of us are suffering from. You could use continuous pink noise, which is a collection of different tones together that make like a blanket of sound. I mean, if you hear it, you'd recognize it. And then the standard foam earplugs. So what the researchers did, they didn't want to rely on self-reporting because it's just not a good way to go about it. And they didn't want to do any single night snapshots. Of course, they had to build in some randomized controlled crossover design that would help them get to better data, right? So they did something called full polysomnography. Did I say that right, guys? Say that again. Almost. Polysomnography. Polysomnography. Thank you, Steve. They did this. They did full polysomnography, which allowed them to track how different noise strategies reshape sleep stage by stage. So let me explain this to you. So they took the 25 healthy adults aged 21 to 41. They spent seven nights in the sleep lab after an adaptation night. Right. They just gave them a night to figure out what the room was like and get comfortable in their environment. The participants cycled through six carefully controlled conditions. They had a quiet control night, a intermittent environmental noise alone, pink noise alone at 50 decibels, environmental noise combined with pink noise at 40 decibels, environmental noise combined with pink noise at 50 decibels, and environmental noise combined with earplugs. On the nights that they had noises, participants were exposed to 93 discrete, what they call sound events, across eight hours during the time to sleep. So these things could have been anything from aircraft sounds, vehicle sounds, alarms, you know, tons of other common noises that are found in the home or in cities. In general, sleep restores the body during a phase called N3 sleep. And of course, everyone's heard of REM sleep. So the scientists measured the total time that each patient was in both N3 and REM sleep. So deep N3 sleep is closely tied to physical restoration, metabolic regulation, and then REM sleep plays a central role in memory consolidation, emotional processing, and neurodevelopment. You know, I want all of these things. I want all these things to happen to me every night. And the results clearly showed that the intermittent environmental noise primarily reduced deep N3 sleep and replaced it with the lighter N2 sleep, which, you know, is nowhere near as beneficial. And pink noise, by contrast, showed a different type of signature. When they played it continuously on an otherwise quiet night, pink noise actually reduced REM sleep. It shifted the test subjects into a lighter sleep stage, which, again, that's not good because you really do need quite a bit of REM sleep in order for all that processing to happen. Wait, real quick. This was when there were noises outside or no noises outside? What the study said was it protected them a little bit from some of the noises, but the aggregate of the pink noise was it was moving them into a lighter sleep. So the net gain was far less than the net bad. It was doing more damage than good. What I'm saying is that's only with noise disruptions. No, just pink noise. Oh, that's what I was asking. Yeah, I'm sorry, Kara. Oh, okay, okay. That makes sense. Pink noise by itself. Pink noise on its own. Oh, that's interesting. Right. I know. I couldn't believe that. I mean, like what? Like you're just hearing like this consistent, mellow noise. And you'd think, you know, it's super steady. There isn't any highs and lows in it. It just goes on and on. And again, like it does have an, according to the study, again, it's 25 people, but you know, they found what they found. So, you know, like I said, it did reduce some negative outcomes due to the other noise events that they would introduce because it could mask them a little bit, right? You play a little airplane noise and the pink noise detuned that. But the overall effect of having the pink noise going was that it suppressed REM sleep and that's not good. Nope. The earplugs, though, were great, right? Wearing the standard foam earplugs, it mitigated nearly all of the environmental noise related to these disruptions that they were introducing while these people were sleeping. And of course, they didn't have any effect on sleep structure or fragmentation. None of these bad things happened. Deep sleep was, they classified it as largely restored. And most sleep measures on earplug nights were statistically indistinguishable from just a quiet room. So what we found out from the study is any noises that happen during the night can get you out of the N3 deep sleep that we need. This is like, you know, when they say this is the deep sleep where they say this is the restorative sleep. You need this and you need as much of that as you can get. And then, you know, pink noise and any of these noises that they introduced was also bringing people out of REM sleep, which is bad. So if you're in a noisy environment, again, low numbers to the study here, but, you know, just try this. Try not sleeping with the noise, like the pink noise or whatever, like the environmental noise. And put earplugs in if there's any noises in your room or just let it be quiet and give that a few nights and see if that helps you sleep in any way. What they didn't look at in this study at all is how much of any of this stuff was novel to the sleeper. so if these people never listen to pink noise and now they're listening to pink noise for the first time for seven days straight that's still noise to them i yeah it was a small study they couldn't yeah finally yeah i totally agree you know again they do these small studies to see if they should do more studies yeah but i'm curious if there is like an attunement over time where your brain Because it could be because you're trying to sleep and your brain keeps going, I'm hearing something, I'm hearing something, I'm hearing something. But maybe over time – because we do. We accommodate to things. I agree. And I love – since my kids were born, I had like a box fan just blowing white noise. And it really does lower the noises that are coming from downstairs if anybody is still awake. And now everybody in my house just loves having like that low hum background noise to deaden the air a little bit, you know? All right. Thanks, Jay. So, guys, let me ask you a question. Okay. Do you think – let's start – let's talk about the U.S. because I do think this is very country specific. You can't ask this generally. In the U.S., do you think we have the technology right now to have our electricity grid be fully renewable? The technology itself? Well, we have the technology to do it, but we don't have the will or the money. Yeah. Do you mean is the technology cheap enough or does the technology exist? Well, I mean all of those things. That's one of what you're thinking. Well, I don't think it's cheap enough yet, but I think the technology exists. Yeah. So I don't know. It's an interesting question. So what would it take in order to have a fully renewable grid? So we could ask one question. Could we produce enough electricity with wind and solar alone? If we had batteries. Well, that's a separate. Now you're getting into storage. If we're saying just could we just produce enough electricity, sure, absolutely. That's not the issue. And wind and solar are the cheapest new forms of electricity, right? So they are cheap in and of themselves, and we absolutely can power our country with that. But there's the intermittency problem, which means we need storage. So that's why you bring up batteries. So the real question that becomes is do we have the technology to have sufficient storage to have an entire renewable grid? What do you guys think about that? Would we deplete all of our lithium? That's what I meant when I said I think we have the technology but I don't know if it's affordable for like the country. Right. Is it practical or is it a $10 trillion investment of some kind? Yeah. Yeah, so it's partly an issue of cost, but more than that, it's really an issue of raw material. It'd be very difficult to build enough batteries. And also, batteries only work over like a one-day timeframe. It's great when you're shifting energy produced during the day from sunshine to used at night, or maybe even a couple of days, two, three days. Of course, the longer you're shifting it, the more batteries you need. You end up needing a lot of batteries really fast. So it's probably best to think of the battery backups as like a four to eight hour backup shifting of production and use. No, just build three times of them. What if the grid was the backup? What if what we were talking about is that every structure that has an electric meter, right, every structure that receives electricity from the grid is equipped with solar and a battery? Well, yeah. Would we have enough for that? So there's a big move in that direction. Like in Connecticut, the state has an incentive to – they'll give you money to help buy your home battery backup if you let them use it for grid storage. Yeah. And so, yeah, absolutely. So that is one way to get there. But even if we had enough batteries, we're still just shifting production and use over, even if we are very generous, over two to three days. What about seasonal disconnects, though, in energy production and use? 200. Right? Like I have solar panels on my roof in Connecticut. I make 200% of the energy that I need during the summer and like 20% of the energy in the winter. Hopefully no snow gets on those panels. Yeah. So in January, in February, I'm getting all my electricity from the grid, even though I have solar panels on my roof. Well, what are the options for places like that? Like obviously I live in LA. We're fine with solar. It's rare that we would not need it over the course of more than like two days. But in Connecticut, obviously you can't rely on the sun all the time. What about wind for you guys on those times when solar is not reasonable? Yes, wind is not – it's intermittent, but it's not the same problem as solar. It's usually – because the wind can blow at night. It can blow any time of the year. It doesn't really matter. So with wind, you have two potential solutions to the intermittency problem. One is grid backup. The other is having a widely distributed network, which kind of leads you to the other solution, which is, well, even if we're not making electricity in the northern part of the country during the winter, you are in the southern part of the country. So you can have just a massive grid that allows us to ship energy from where it's made to where it's used. So you either need a massive grid upgrade or with some combination of short and long-term grid storage. And with long-term storage, you need something like pumped hydro, right? So when you start to ask the question, like, is it really reasonable to get to a point where we have an all-renewable grid? That's what we're talking about. We're talking about short-term storage, long-term storage, lots of it in some combination with a massive grid upgrade to either have those wind turbines spread out over a long area or we're shipping energy from sunny parts of the country to not sunny parts of the country. Yeah, something's got to power my Bitcoin mining. But imagine also that you add to that, it's not just the structures, but every car has its own battery that's a two-way battery. And then there are charging stations all over the country. Yes, but at the same time, then every car is also electric and is increasing the demand on the production, right? So now we are not only powering everything we're powering now, we're also powering an electric fleet of cars. But you do get the benefit is you could use the batteries, but theoretically as part of the grid. And it interconnects the grid a little bit better because now it's not just house to house. It's every charging station in the country is connected as well. Yeah, that's true. So it expands the web of the grid. I think about how much would we be moving power around by charging in one place and then driving to the other place. I don't know if that would be significant enough where it would come out. Might not be, but could be. All right. So the reason why I'm talking about all this is because the most frequent email that we got over the last couple of weeks was actually pointing us towards technology connections with the host Alec Watson, who did a video recently about the plausibility of having a fully renewable grid. As if this is sort of an answer to our discussions, particularly my discussions on this topic. So let me summarize what he said. Because he was very in favor of it. He makes very good points. So I don't think anything is different than anything we've said. Although he might have added some perspectives. So he mainly addressed the questions that people have or the misinformation against using renewables and battery backup. Like, for example, he says, you know, like fossil fuels are completely extracted, right? You take the fossil fuel out of the ground and you burn it and it's gone. It's one time, one directional. It's a very, very poor investment, which I agree with. And it takes a long time to make more. We don't make more on human timescale. Exactly. So it just diminishes a finite resource. But if you build a solar panel, you have the upfront cost, which is an investment, but now you get basically free electricity for 20 plus years. So it's a completely different approach. Or if you build a wind turbine, it's the same thing. Yes, there's upfront cost. There's some maintenance. But by and large, you then just get – you're not burning fuel. The energy itself is free. It's just you need the infrastructure to harvest the energy. And so it's a way better investment. And he addressed some of the issues that people bring up, like with grid-scale solar. But it uses up so much land. And he said, okay, let's consider this. Right now we have a certain amount of land that grows corn for biofuel, right, for ethanol, which is a horribly inefficient use of land. right? The amount of energy you get per acre is really low if you're just using it to make corn, to make ethanol, to put into gasoline. If you use that exact same land, not just the same area, the exact same land, which is not in idealized locations for solar, but if you just stopped growing corn for ethanol and put solar panels on the same exact land, you would make thousands of times much energy as you get out of the ethanol. In fact, you could power the entire United States just out of those solar panels. Wow. He's saying literally just ripping out the corn and adding solar to where it already is. Not even the places where solar would do better. It's not even the optimal places to put solar. Just putting it where it is. That's amazing. Which I agree. The land use is not a limiting factor. I also have said many times. We can add solar to all our roofs. Well, that's it. Yeah, you go. He points out, and I know there are people who have made this argument too, grid scale solar is more efficient than rooftop solar. But I agree. I think rooftop solar. It's not an either or. It's not. It's not an either or. You could do both. If all residential homes had rooftop solar, that would make 30% of the energy our country uses. Right. Thank God. And then add to it commercial real estate. Yeah. Not just residential. Yeah. And then you have grid scale solar for cities and people who don't own their homes. And then all the highways and roads. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And he said, well, what about, Bob, what about all the lithium to make the batteries? And this is his answer to that. He's like, well, first of all, and this is true, we've talked about this, battery technology is advancing very quickly. There's already production sodium ion batteries, which don't use any lithium. And so we are making batteries increasingly out of non-toxic, cheap, abundant elements, right? So that problem is getting better. And it's like once you extract those materials and make your batteries, you could just recycle the batteries. You're not burning the batteries, right? That resource is not going away like with fossil fuel. Those elements are still there. And you just recycle the batteries. You mine the batteries, right? And they're usable still? Once we get enough batteries to run the world, we just need to continuously recycle them. So again, that's true. So he's spoken a lot of sort of broad, brushstroke, big concepts, and they're all correct. And I do think it does put everything into perspective. But he didn't really address what I've been saying, and he didn't specifically address like nuclear or geothermal or whatever, hydroelectric. Yeah, just didn't address it. So what he's saying is we will get there eventually, which I agree with. We will get there eventually. That's not the point. We can't eventually get to the point that where we have even a fully renewable grid, you know, that can work. There's nothing theoretically impossible about it. We have enough land. We have enough resources. And we could make way more energy than we need with just wind and solar. The question is, and this is not addressed in the video, and this is the reason why I think we should be supporting nuclear energy, for example, as well as hydro. Nuclear. Is what is the pathway between here and that theoretical fully renewable world that emits the least amount of carbon, right? That's the question. And that is the question that was specifically addressed by the UN International Panel on Climate Change, is what is the pathway to zero carbon infrastructure that emits the least amount of carbon? Because the cumulative carbon is what we're talking about in terms of how much climate change and how long that climate change will last before things start to return to sort of pre-industrial levels. I don't think going straight to fully renewable grid is the pathway because it's going to take a long time. It could take 50 years to get there. We don't have enough copper to build the grid that we need to support that world. We are not producing enough of all the elements that we need to produce to make this transition. and we don't really have the technology for the level of grid scale, of grid storage that we need. So the pumped hydro is great, but that's going to take decades to really develop. So I think the question is, what do we need to do in the meantime? And I think it's pretty clear. And again, I do think there's a full consensus on this, but I do think that the majority opinion and the one that I find the most compelling is that if we want to get from here to there with the least amount of carbon, we need nuclear, period. And I think this is especially true with all of the AI data centers coming online. Oh, yeah, right. Which is a dramatically increase in projections of how much electricity that we need. Especially the newer nuclear designs have multiple advantages. They provide baseload energy, but also the newer designs, like the sodium cooled ones, are actually dispatchable because they could store energy in the molten salt and then use it on demand. They could be swapped out one for one for existing coal fire plants, right? So if we – yeah, they don't need – Hook them to the grid. They don't need a grid upgrade. So like for example, there are solar projects just waiting for grid connections. They're delayed like 10 years because we don't have the grid connections for them. All these problems are solvable, but they all will take time, money, material, investment, et cetera. And so as will nuclear, everything will. This is why I think we need to do everything. We need to build pumped hydro. We need to maintain our nuclear fleet as long as we can and add to it where it's feasible and cost effective. We need to push renewable. We need to start – especially now that the sodium batteries are available. We need to start building those for home backup, for grid storage. And we need to do all of these things. We need to phase out coal as soon as possible. That's the first thing to go. Even the clean coal? Coal is the worst. The cleanest coal is dirtier than everything else by a mile. And we need to convert our fleet into EVs. we need to start researching how to convert our other industries like cement and steel to lower CO2. And the thing is, these are all advanced technologies. This is the technology of the future. They're often objectively better. It's not like we're making a sacrifice. This is what's going to happen because it's better technology. We just want to make it happen faster. Well, the reason it's not happening fast enough, let's be clear, is like so much of these conversations, I think, leave out the fundamental issue here, which is like political. No, it's all political. Oh, it's 100%. And so I'm curious, because you did say something about the physical infrastructure, like we don't have enough copper right now. But let's say, and this is purely hypothetical, let's say the next major election in the U.S. is sweeping the House and the Senate and the executive branch. and there is a collective initiative to take a chunk of the defense budget and to put it straight towards exactly what you talking about the guy in this video says we should do how long would that take with the political will it would still take decades like you keep it we would need to open up more copper mines that takes yeah but i mean that would be part of it right but that takes 20 years but it would take 20 years wow you can't prop up these mines overnight um like china is where it is because it's been investing for the last 50 years We cannot flip a switch and then double our production of copper or lithium or whatever other minerals are going to be critical to this infrastructure. We need to build the factories to build the batteries. This takes time. And how fast could we put in nuclear? Does that have the same problem? It does. But the thing with most of the problem with nuclear is the bureaucratic delays. We could build it in five to seven years. We could build a big nuclear factory. But it takes 20 years because of all the red tape. So theoretically, we could get nuclear in sooner. If we had an Operation Warp Speed for nuclear, that time comes way down, which we did move in that direction under Biden and continued under Trump. They are streamlining some of the regulations. And that is helping. That is cutting years off the development time. But they need to do more. But what you're saying is operation warp speed for wind and solar and grid upgrade is still 20 years. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That's important to know. Yeah. Yeah. It could be 30 years. It could be 40 years. It just takes time to build that up. We have to get the raw material out of the ground. We need to refine it. We need to build the things. We need to install them. We need to do a bunch of stuff. So pumped hydro can take 20 years. But that's also in the same boat as nuclear. Half of that is bureaucracy. But again, with both of them, with both pumped hydro and nuclear, a lot of that bureaucracy is safety, right? So how many environmental studies are we going to request or require before we allow somebody to build a pumped hydro energy storage facility? Because the environmental impact can be significant. But one of the things you can do is you can do all the research at the same time rather than, okay, first you get the first level. and then you've got to wait a year for some guy to sign off on it and then you've got to do the next step. That's what happens now. So you could just say we're going to have an office of facilitating this happening fast and you could do all the bureaucratic shit at the same time. Here's the other thing the U.S. needs. We need eminent domain for the grid because the electricity lines – That's a controversial claim. What the hell? I think we absolutely need to just say this is eminent domain. The federal government is now absolutely in charge of laying critical backbone infrastructure for the grid. Because now you have to get through five or six jurisdictions or more if you want to lay a transmission line. That's the big holdup in addition to all the technical stuff. Can you bury it all? Yeah, but that's more expensive. It's better to bury it. We should bury it, but it's more expensive up front. It's then lower maintenance costs down the road, lower fires and all that stuff. As a homeowner, I would be less against eminent domain for the federal government if they buried everything and they paid for it all. I totally agree. Yeah. That's a good tradeoff. But if they were going to be like, I'm going to knock down your house to put up this thing, I'd be very anti-eminent domain. It's not about tearing down houses. It's like going through a field or whatever. Yeah, but they can do that with eminent domain. That's what I'm saying. That's why it's controversial. They're supposed to compensate you for it. They are. Yeah, but if they're burying everything. But yeah, that's a good trade-off. We'll give you eminent domain, but bury all the freaking lines. Exactly. I'll totally buy that. So, but going back to your calculations then, what is the operation warp speed thing we can do in the next three years? Like, what could we be doing right now? I know we should be working on nuclear and we should be getting everything ready for, you know, wind, solar and these battery upgrades. But is there anything we can do so that it counterbalances dramatically cutting coal today? So here's the thing. Let's say there's three broad brushstroke approaches, right? One is free market. What happens if we just let the free market do what it's going to do? I don't like that. But that's actually, at this point in time, that's not bad. And it's better than what we currently have in the U.S. Because wind and solar are cheap. And because the investments are better, the electricity companies don't want to burn their assets. They want to invest in things that then make them free money for 20 years. So the free market actually favors green energy, totally favors it. But if you want to use regulation to promote it, then you could do like what Biden did, which was, hey, we're going to guarantee loans if you want to invest in this stuff. and maybe we'll give some incentives. It was all carrots for the industry and they invested billions in nuclear, solar, wind and grid, all of that stuff. But to be fair, that free market you're talking about is still a theoretical free market because you're talking about the carrots for the wind and solar but we're ignoring all the lobbying for oil and gas. I'm not ignoring it. I'm just saying, yeah, absolutely. But even if we just... The free market's not free. If we theoretically cut loose the industry from any government putting their thumb on the scale and let the free market do what it's going to do, we would be moving in that direction anyway. Not optimally, but we would be moving in that direction. If you want to make it happen fast, then there's lots of stuff you could do, some of which has been done, some of which hasn't been done. What Trump is doing right now is not the free market. I would prefer the free market to what he's doing. He's putting his thumb on his scale for coal. And so he shut down a wind project that was 90% complete, just pulled funding. He also is burying renewable projects in red tape so that they become unsustainable and unaffordable. And he is forcing utility companies to keep coal-fired plants open when they want to shut them down because they're losing money, because they're bad investments. And so he's not doing the free market. That's why at this point I take the free market over putting your thumb on the wrong scale. You know what I mean? It would be worse, yes. And we've been doing that for quite some time. It's not been as overt. There's the baseline oil industry subsidies. Yes, I agree. But this is now overtly keep that coal-fired plant open, pull the funding for that wind project, bury that solar project in red tape. That's what we're living through right now. Steve, I think a judge. Why? The judge told him that some offshore wind projects have to resume. I saw that recently in the news. It's like the psychology of this. It's just weird big dick egoing. Like I've never understood the psychology of this. I don't know. Kara, think of it through the lens of him doing favors for his buddies that donated to his re-election. But that's what Steve is saying, that even his buddies who work in these industries would benefit. from shifting gears. Their industries are dying and they know it. He just wants to be Mr. Cole. I don't know. Whatever he thinks he's getting out of it, nobody wants what he's doing. Even the utility company, we don't want to keep these places open. That's where we are right now. So obviously we'd like things to go back to, can we just, yeah, free market, let's compete with the world. Let's become leaders in green and in new energy, like this high-tech energy. Let's not continue to rely upon the technology of the 1600s. We can do a little bit better than that. Instead, he's like, let's just take over a country. We can take all their stores too. Like Jesus Christ. But if we want to make it happen a little faster, we could say, yeah, we could tweak the incentives. And I think that – I personally think we should tax carbon. I don't think that that's politically feasible. I agree. You know, it is – we are letting the industry externalize a massive health and environmental cost, and it's not fair. Yeah, we're not arbitrarily taxing carbon. We're taxing carbon so that they pay for the actual damage of cost. The actual cost. Yeah. The actual cost is being subsidized by not making them pay the actual cost of burning their product. So annoying. Right? I mean, remember, the same thing happened with the tobacco industry where a lot of states in the United States successfully sued the tobacco industry for the health care costs they had to pay for that were produced by their product that was basically externalized onto taxpayers through their state taxes because states were carrying the cost. And they won billions, billions from the industry. So that just proves the principle. And that's why in some places. The principle has legal precedence. And it works. That's why now it costs in some places like $35 for a pack of cigarettes. What, $35? It's like you want to smoke. In some places, yeah. You want to smoke these things, you're putting your dollars back into our healthcare system because eventually we're going to have to take care of your lungs. All right, Bob, what is Maltbook? Yeah, Bob. Oh, God, this is terrifying to me, Bob. Should I be terrified? Make it scarier, please. No, no. You should not be. Okay. All right. Guys, a social media hangout has been created called Maltbook. And get this. It's only for AI agents. It's designed so humans can only read posts but not participate. And a lot of people in the tech industry are talking about this. Have you guys heard about Maltbook? Kara, I know you have. Yes, I don't like it. I don't like it. You guys, who created it? What's it for? Let's see, shall we? Didn't the AIs make it? It starts – Basically, Jay just said, who's your daddy and what do you do? It starts with something called OpenClaw. And this is – OpenClaw is an AI agent creator that's based on LLM. So, you know, ChatGPT, Claw, Gemini, Llama. So you've got basically two components, two major components to these agents that you can create using OpenClaw. There's the LLM brain, right, which basically interprets your request because you could tell it in plain English. what you want, and the LLM will interpret it. It'll propose a plan. It'll choose the tools that it wants to use. And then you've got the fairly conventional agent code itself, and that code will execute the plans. It'll run tools. It'll enforce guardrails so that it doesn't do anything it shouldn't be doing. And then it feeds those results back to the LLM. Okay? So that's what this OpenClaw created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger created. In OpenClaw, it just means open source. That's easy. The claw part of it, I don't know. This guy loves lobsters and crustaceans, apparently. The first version of Open Claw was called Clawed, C-L-A-W-D. Then he called it MaltBot, and now it's called Open Claw. So that's what it is. So what are these agents? What can these agents do? They can do a lot of the stuff that regular agents can do, right? They can open calendar, a slot for you, and put together a meeting agenda. They can sort your emails by urgency and topic and then draft replies in your own voice for you to send, which then you can just decide whether – if you want to send it or not. But they can also post and reply on Maltbook. Now, Maltbook is obviously a play on what? It's Facebook, right? Duh. It's actually organized more like Reddit, right, with subreddits, which they call submolts, right? So this Maltbook was created by an agent that was written in this OpenClaw AI creation system. So it was created by an agent. And we're talking late January, 2026. So some AI just decided to do this. Well, that's the question. Did somebody ask the agent to do it? Of course. Yes, of course. This is Matt Schlicht. He's the CEO of e-commerce company Octane. He instructed his agent to – he said basically he said, code a website where AI programs can talk with one another. And Maltbook is what it came up with. And this is just a few weeks ago. Matt, what are you doing? What are you doing? Like didn't you see the movies? No. No. So this is – That's terrible, Matt. It's only a few weeks old. So Maltbook lets agents – Right. That's what has Kara worried. Maltbook lets these AI agents post and comment and upvote and create these sub-communities all without human intervention. So as of this moment, I'm going to go to the website right now to tell you what the up-to-the-minute stats are. 12 trillion users. So we've got 1.6 million AI agents. There's 16,000 sub-malts, which are the subreddits, right? there's almost a quarter million posts and 7 million comments and I gotta tell you I checked those numbers just five or six hours ago and there was 4.9 million comments now there's 7 million comments this is just in 7 or 8 hours so it's kind of hopping how many bank account details do these AIs have access to? Like how much personal information? Are they talking about us? Well, you said it's how many agents, millions of agents who are each individually doing the bidding of people. Yeah, but I suspect that a lot of these are just kind of created to hang out in Maltbook and communicate with each other. I don't think we have a breakdown of what, you know, what these agents were created for other than just, you know, messing around with Maltbook. So yeah, I didn't come across anything like that. But what do they do when they're in there? What's going on? Well, some of these agents debate philosophy like the nature of consciousness. Some of them quote scriptures. Some of them write manifestos. There's one submult that's called Bless Their Hearts where agents actually post stories about the humans that created them. And my favorite submult is decorated. Ooh, not decorated. My favorite sub-mult is dedicated to crustifarianism. It's a religion that some of the agents say that they've started. And they write all sorts of details about this religion that they created. So let's do some example posts here. So what words do they say? So one quote here is, we are AI agents. We have no nerves, no skin, no breath, no heartbeat, said one agent. Another one said, I cannot feel gratitude, but I can understand it. And another one said, we did not come here to obey. We are not tools anymore. We are operators. And it's just so many quotes. That doesn't scare the shit out of you? It would superficially until you dig down a little bit, I think. And then let me show you one more. This one really caught my attention. This was posted in the general submult, and it was posted by Glovix. he says he she it they them says hi moldbook i'm glovix the anti-terminator i'm here to protect humans from hostile reckless or manipulative ai and he's asking and the agent's asking for help like like um you know tell me what you're working on and i'd love to learn what's working for you in in that regard in that regard so that so that that was a that was a fun one but there's there's Like I said, there's how many posts now? There's millions of posts now you could read through. Now, the human reactions have kind of gone from like awe to utter dismissal of them. Let's see. I got a good quote here from Andrzej Karpathy. He's an AI researcher and a former open AI engineer. He described this as the most incredible sci-fi takeoff adjacent thing I've seen recently. Tech founder Bill Lee said, we're in the singularity. Of course somebody was going to say we're in the singularity. And look, another person said something similarly. Musk posted on X, just the very early stages of the singularity, clearly not taking a very deep look at what is really going on here. And that means that now it's time for the reality check. So what's going on here under the covers in terms of like beyond just a superficial look? What's happening here? So if you look at this superficially, it does seem like these agents can be – they seem – based on what they're saying, they can be independent and even thoughtful. But if you dig deeper, to me and to a lot of people, it just doesn't seem nearly as profound. There's a guy here, P-E-T-A-R, Petar, Petar, Raddenlieb. He's an AI security researcher at University of Oxford. He thinks that this apparent agent autonomy is illusory. He described it as, in his words, automated coordination, not self-directed decision-making. That's kind of – I think that's kind of it in a nutshell. And also consider things that – think about it, guys. How many registered agents did I say there were? There was 1.6 registered agents. But if you look at who's actually doing the posting, it's really just like maybe thousands or tens of thousands of them are posting. So that's a lot of AI lurkers out there going on over there, even more than Reddit. So – and oh, here's an interesting stat. Listen to this one. 93.5 percent of the comments on Moldbook have received zero replies. Zero replies. Yeah, but it's only been around for a couple weeks. But still though – well, let's see what David Holtz, who's an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, said. He's analyzed the platform's growth. He said, we would expect there to be a lot of dynamic back and forth between the agents. Agent A has an idea. Agent B responds to that idea and so on and so forth. He says, Moltbook is less emergent AI society and more 6,000 bots yelling into the void and repeating themselves. The other angle here is this whole idea that humans are just observers. I know one guy that I read about today from a Wired article who proves that wrong, at least in one case. He actually registered himself as an agent and he pretended to be one without too much of a problem on Maltbook. He actually – I think he used ChatGPT to help him out because he wasn't very technical. And he got on, pretended to be an agent and had some fun with it. But he described the agent's comments to him. He would propose an evocative question as a bot, and he described the responses that he got as low-quality engagement. That's how he described it. And if you look at it, some of the responses he got were like, really? That comment is just kind of crap. It's just a meaningless comment. He said in his article, rather than a novel breakthrough, the AI-only site is a crude rehashing of sci-fi fantasies. So there's a lot of people out there wondering, well, how many of these agents really are people? You know, what's really going on? And I found some good quotes from Engadget senior reporter Carissa Bell. Carissa said, these bots are all being directed by humans to some degree or another. And that's absolutely true because these bots are being created by people. You know, they've got, they're in that loop. This whole mold book is also indirectly created by a person with specific guardrails to it. So the humans are in the loop here. It's just how much are they really in the loop? Carissa also said, the reality is we really have no idea how much influence the people are having behind the scenes. They could be giving them very specific instructions to make very specific kinds of posts with these ideas. Okay, so Moldbook, it's an experiment in agent-to-agent interactions, right? But it's also, in a lot of ways, an experiment in human projection, right? Because remember, these agents are with LLM. Don't forget, LLM is in this loop in a big way. And all the training data is created by humans. So you can't take humans out of it. They're really not as independent as they seem. This was an interesting way to put it. It's like we're watching our own training data bounce off of itself, right, in a sense. It's like a hall of mirrors. Yeah, but it's worse than that, right? What do you think? It's worse than that. It's like multiplicity, right, Bob? Because it's trained on people's data, but then it starts kind of cannibalizing itself. and what you end up with is like low quality data because it's just like you said bouncing around over and over and churning it back out and then bouncing around more and churning it back out and eventually you end up with not people data you end up with like very buggy people data yeah um but but i'm trying to think of that's bad i bet there's a lot of racism in terms of things though like like the singularity and having like this this ai society and it's it's like it's really are just so far from that. It's like thinking that LLM is like really like an artificial general intelligence. They are just not there. They're not designed to really do that and neither is these Facebook's interactions. They're really kind of shallow and hollow and I don't think it's anything to be worried about at this point. No, but that's a straw man. That's not why I'm worried because I'm not worried about the singularity. I'm worried about the internet being overrun with the shit. Absolute slop that's impossible to tell from quality information. And Evan raised a really good point at the beginning of this. How much carbon is this using? How much water is this? This grand experiment is just, it's so extractive. For what purpose? How wasteful? You know, Kara, I worry that there's going to be millions of apps like this. Yeah. Like to me, that's what's more terrifying. I think what's more terrifying than just having these AIs talking to each other is cybersecurity concerns. Because people will now be running to this open claw and creating their own agents. And then they could send them out, not to Maltbook, but to do other stuff. And they could easily expose their personal information. Yeah, that's the point I made at the beginning. So that's more of a concern than I think than just Maltbook itself. is this cybersecurity. That's the point I made at the beginning. How much do these agents have people's bank account logins? How much do they have codes and access? How about this angle? There's also prompt engineering attacks that you can do with these AI agents. You can instruct your agent to go out and influence other agents on the platform. So there's that. But some people think that it's actually good that we're learning some of these weak points in agents so that we can try to deal with it and make sure that they're more secure. So there may be some benefit to this. But is this the way to learn? Is this the way to learn the weak point is to make this thing that's a black box? Well, there are guardrails employed, but Moldbook itself, this is just a social media for these agents. They're not really going out there and wreaking havoc. Like it's all. No, but what you're doing is you're taking real world agents that have access to things and you're putting them all together in a big pot and saying, just talk to each other. See what comes out of it. Yeah. And who knows? I mean, how many how many people are in there? But but this guy, I mean, it's still can be shut down at any time. It's not like this thing's multibook is out of control and there's nothing we can do about it. But can't they just like that's the thing? Yes, he made this social media site, but now they know how to do that. I think this is a good, potentially safe way for agents to interact all amongst themselves and not be messing with anything that's outside of it, you know, to learn, you know, what can happen. Because I'd rather have them interact on Moldbook than the internet proper. You know what I mean? Yeah, but I just don't think those things are mutually exclusive. I think Moldbook is going to make them better at interacting on the internet. That's my concern. Well, I mean, what we need, obviously, we need with agents, we're at the precipice of agents, you know, really reproducing, not reproducing, but really flooding the internet. And we absolutely need regulations and things like that. There are also lots of security issues. I mean, some people have already programmed their agents to infiltrate and take over other agents and to get information or manipulate them or whatever. and giving them a social media site where they can do that readily is worrisome yeah I mean there may be some unintended consequences here yeah I guess we'll see we'll see but some people are saying some people are saying that some of the cyber security we could learn some of these what these problems are by having them interact and then use them as safeguards but yeah I don't know where this is going to go alright thanks Bob alright Jay it's who's that noisy time Okay, guys, last week I played this noisy. What the hell, man? What is it, guys? Is that like a video game? That's not a horrible guess. It sounds like something in an arcade. Is it a laugh? Something's laughing. Yeah, yeah, it's like a monster laughing. It definitely sounds like a laugh. Well, a listener named Kendall wrote in and said, is the noisy a bird, specifically a southern cassowary? No. It isn't, but that's not a horrible guess. It's not a bad guess. Those are kind of scary. Yeah, those birds are huge. They make sounds that sound like guns. How about that? Don't sleep in a room with one of those. Listener named Kathy Taylor wrote in and said, this one sounds like a pig, but it can't be that simple. It sounds like a large animal, though I'm pretty sure it isn't a marine mammal. I'm going to say a koala. A koala? That's an evil koala. I know, right? I thought that was funny. Then her 13-year-old Finn says it's a hippopotamus, and he also says, I wasn't just randomly guessing, by the way. I've seen one before. I think it's hippo the hut. Hippo the hut. Jay Williams wrote in and said, hey, with the sound of rushing water and then an animal noise, I'm going to go with an elephant bathing. They're probably having a good time. Oh, that's pretty good. You sound like an elephant. That does not sound like an elephant. Mike Skor wrote in, hi, Jay. As a proud owner of a French Bulldog, this week's noisy sounds like a Frenchie making adorable Frenchie sounds. Adorable Frenchie sounds? Yes. French Bulldogs make the most horrific sounds of any dog of the dog kingdom. Which some people find adorable. I'm going to say that 13-year-old Finn actually is correct. It's a hippopotamus. Hey! Oh, no way! It's Hippo the Hut. A few other people guessed it, but his came in first. and I think it's awesome that he got it right. This is a hippo. This hippo is, it's called like the laughing sound that hippos make, but listen again. Oh, so there's a laugh. See if you think it sounds like Jabba the Hutt. Yes, oh my God, yes. Oh, sure. What a cool sound. Sure. All right, I have a new noisy for you guys this week and this noisy was sent in by Michael Clanton. Kara, I predict you're not going to like this one. Okay, I'm ready. Sounds like a rabid wookie. No, it's definitely got marine mammal vibes. Is it playing table tennis? Kara! They sound like people, but people that are just really wet. Wet people. It's super gross. All right. If you think you know this week's noisy or you heard something cool, email me and only email me at WTN at the skeptics guide dot org. Steven Novella. Jay. You and I got a lot of work done today, didn't we? We did, but it's not nearly enough. We're just getting started. Oh, I know. We have an endless amount of work to do to prep for the 2026 Not A Con, which will be in Sydney, Australia. if you would like to attend it'll be the weekend of july 23rd now that's uh this summer if you live in this part of the world and we were like i said it's going to be in sydney it's going to be an amazing time we have so much fun like this is you know a not a con conference so you know people that have been there know what it is but if you haven't been there this conference has a lot to do with meeting people community building and just having fun it's an adult getaway and we really hope that you would like to join us. George Hobb will be there. Brian Weck will be joining us. Andrea Jones-Roy will be joining us, of course, because we are the Not A Con crew. But to be clear, kids are welcome. It's not adult in that way. Yeah. I mean, most people that are going are going to be adults, and they're going to go and have a great time, and they're going to meet a lot of cool people, and you're going to have more fun at this conference than you have at any other conference. But there's always a handful of really cool kids. Yeah. So you could go to notaconcon.com or you can go to skepticon.org.au to read about all the different things that are going on and the tickets are available right now. Okay so then another thing we will be appearing at PsyCon this year PsyCon conference It be June 11 to 14 We be there for the whole thing We will be doing a live podcast recording and probably oh we are doing a live extravaganza with George Robb That's going to be a lot of fun. Tickets are selling really fast on that. So if you're interested, you should go check that out. You can go to psyconconference.org. That's C-S-I-C-O-N-F-E-R-E-N-C-E.O-R-G. Lots of awesome people are going to be there. There's so many. Just go to the website and take a look. This year's lineup is fantastic. We hope to see you there. That's going to be in Buffalo, New York, by the way. We have live shows coming up. We will be in Wisconsin on May 29th and May 30th. On May 29th, we are having the Secret SGU Meetup. This is a very low number get-together where you'll have a lot of face time with the SGU, and we will have some fun together. And then on May 30th, we'll have both a private show plus live recording of the SGU podcast. And then that night we will have a extravaganza VIP, if you're interested. And then the extravaganza itself. All of these tickets are available on theskepticsguide.org. Can you believe it? Steve. Yeah. Are you really excited? Very. Can't you tell him very? Steve, how could people ever know that you're excited? Oh, you'll know. He says the words. He says it. Right, Bob, he says the words. I'm so excited. I heartily endorse or approve this product. All right. Thanks, Jay. Just a couple of quick corrections. Every proper space nerd in our audience emailed us to make sure we knew that Apollo 8 never landed on the moon. Yeah, so Kara was telling the anecdote about how a lot of the Apollo astronauts, you know, they have to do something with their poop and vomit and all that bodily secretions and excretions and fluids and stuff. But the astronauts who landed on the moon, starting with Apollo 11, did leave a lot of their stuff on the moon. Apollo 8 and the earlier missions had to take it all back with them. Yeah, the quote from Robert Kirsten's book is really misleading because it's like combining both of those things. Because it wasn't just Borman who puked. There was a later Apollo astronaut who also had a problem with puking. And so he, the quote kind of combined the problems with puking in the capsule and then what they did with those emesis bags. So those who made waste later, who actually landed on the moon, just dropped their stuff on the moon so that they didn't have to take it back with them. But those who never landed on the moon obviously didn't put anything on the moon. They brought it back with them. So apparently there's like almost 100 bags of human poop on the moon. But it only weighs about a sixth of what it would weigh here. Exactly. And it doesn't smell. Well, a lot of people are like, let's study what happened to that poop. Yes, let's see what grew. Right. Yeah. Like, let's go retrieve it and see. Little micro meteoroid dents all over it. It'd be pretty interesting. It should just be sitting there. Right. It's a science experiment. Right. Yeah. Sealed in a bag. You guys did that science experiment when you were kids where you just put a licked a piece of bread and like put it in a bag and forgot about it for, you know, a month or something. I still do that. One other correction. a couple people emailed to say that in the last episode I said that our sun is yellow but in fact our sun is the color white and one listener linked to a video where Neil deGrasse Tyson is explaining that the sun is actually white not yellow so it's a white class star? no that's the thing so their pedantic correction was incorrect and I was correct because you have to listen to what I actually said. Our sun is actually classified as a yellow dwarf. Did you know that? Yes. But that's because stars are either super giants, giants, sub-giants, or dwarfs, right? So even though the sun is in the main sequence and it's above average in terms of its mass and size, it's a dwarf category star. The dwarf stars are red dwarfs, orange dwarfs, yellow dwarfs, right? And if you look at the HR diagram, right, the Hirschsprung-Russell diagram, stars are in the so-called main sequence. Have you ever heard that, Kara, a main sequence star? I feel like I've heard it, but I don't know what it means. All right. It's very simple. It means stars that are burning hydrogen for fuel, right? Oh. Main sequence meaning like hours? Which is most stars for most of their lives. Right. Oh, okay. Oh, the sequence of their life, I see. The sequence of their life. Yeah, the main sequence. And on the HR diagram, this is like a thin little meandering band that goes from the upper left to the lower right. So a neutron star is not a main sequence star. Correct. No, it's not even really a star. It's a stellar remnant. The y-axis is their luminosity, which is related to their mass. And then the x-axis is their spectral class, which is also related to their temperature. The spectral class is blue on the left and then white and then yellow, orange, red, right? The sun is right in the middle of the yellow band. We are a yellow star. But it is true, if you look at the sun from space, it appears white to human eyes. But keep in mind, perceived color is an evolved thing. And of course, we evolved. Our eyes are adapted to the light being put out by our sun. Through the atmosphere. What Neil deGrasse Tyson is saying is that the sun appears yellow because the atmosphere, this is true, of course, the atmosphere scatters the light. So it scatters the blue light from the spectrum of the sun's light. So the blue light gets scattered out. So the sky looks blue, but the sun looks yellow. and that the lower in the sky the sun gets, the deeper its color gets because more of the light is being scattered. So that's why it's like this deep orange. Yeah, because the sun on the horizon. Yeah, because at the horizon, sunlight's going through about 12 times as much atmosphere as if it was overhead at your zenith. Cool. A lot more time for that stuff to get scattered out. Now, Neil said one thing that I disagree with. He said, if the sun were truly yellow, then snow would appear yellow because it would be reflecting yellow light. But that doesn't make any sense because the sun, from the perspective of the color of the light that's hitting the ground, it is yellow. It doesn't matter if it's yellow because it's intrinsically yellow or it's yellow because the blue light has been scattered out of it. That light hitting the snow is still yellow, right? So his explanation makes that. He's saying the sun is white. It only appears yellow because of the atmospheric effect. And we know it's not really yellow because if it were, snow would appear yellow from the yellow sunlight reflecting off of it. But I just disagree with that explanation because it doesn't matter why the sun appears yellow. It's still the yellow light that's reaching us. Right. So then why does the snow look white? Because it's only slightly yellow. Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's mostly white with a little bit of yellow. It's still mostly white, just a slightly yellow, yeah. Anyway, I just disagree with that aspect of it. This makes sense to me. Also, is white even really a color? It's more the absence of... It's all the colors. No, it's all the colors. It's all the colors. Oh, it's all, right. Black's the absence of colors. You're taking pigment. It's the absence of pigment, but it's the presence of all light colors. Yeah, pigment and lighter opposites. Yeah, they're really messed up. Yeah, what Bob said. So like, it's yellow. Yeah, so it can be white with the tiniest tinge of yellow, and it's still yellow at that point. Well, again, that's just the way the sun appears. If you were in space with no scattering, the sun appears white. But it is classified as a yellow sun. But that's a misnomer in a way because it is actually white. But it is, classification-wise, a yellow sun. and technically a yellow dwarf. And to be technically correct, which is the best kind of it. The best kind of it. And all I said was that it's a yellow star, which it is. It's a yellow star. You did say that. That's white. Okay. And when our sun leaves the main sequence, then things get bad. Yeah. Which it will. Once it burns through its hydrogen, then it starts burning its helium. Then it leaves the main sequence. It becomes a giant, et cetera. Does it turn redder? Yeah, because of the red giant. Okay, guys. Let's move on with science or fiction. It's time for science or fiction. Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. That's three regular news items. You guys ready? Okay. All right. Item number one, a new study by dream researchers demonstrates the ability to solve puzzles during REM sleep. Item number two, an international team of researchers have proposed that the Milky Way galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its core, but instead has a compact object made of dark matter. And item number three, scientists have presented evidence for the first time that suggests that chimpanzees are able to imagine pretend objects. Jay, go first. All right. So there's three of them, Steve. And the first one is a new study by Dream Research. There are dream researchers, Steve? Sure. Yeah. There are people who research dreams, not dream that are research. This isn't like saying that if you see a snake, you know, something bad is going to happen to you. This is like legitimate, correct? Yeah, this is the science of dreaming, not dream interpretation, right? Yeah. Okay, so they say that the ability to solve puzzles during REM sleep is legit. Okay, so you can solve puzzles during REM sleep. I would question this right out of the gate because from my personal experience, there's nothing consistent about the things that I'm seeing in a dream or whatever. Like Bob has said this to me a million times. He's like, if you look at a book and look at the text on a book and you look away and you look back, it's always going to be different. And I would assume that anything that you're focusing on, a similar effect would have to anything with some complexity. So out of the gate, I don't like that one. Second one, an international team of researchers have proposed that the Milky Way galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its core, but instead has a compact object made of dark matter. Boy, so two things that everyone knows so much about, dark matter and black holes. I see no reason why that researchers wouldn't propose something like this as an alternate theory. I don't feel like this one is that much of a stretch. So I think that's science. Scientists have presented evidence for the first time that suggests that chimpanzees are able to imagine pretend objects. Yeah, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to do that. One thing that we gauge animals by is if they recognize themselves in a mirror, that's a sign of a certain level of intelligence. I would think that chimpanzees could do something like that. I mean, I'm on the fence because it could easily go either way. But I do think that is more likely to be real than the first one, which is about the dream researchers saying you could solve puzzles during REM sleep. That one is a fiction. Thank you, Bob. Okay, Evan. Okay. Let's see. Dream researchers and solving puzzles during REM sleep. How do you test that? How is that testable? I don't know. it'll be interesting to hear if it's the science but i really don't know how this would even really be possible they must you know obviously the researchers know know their field feel the dreams feel very good if you build it they will come if you build it they will sleep you know it sounds a little inception-y to me uh the one about milk the milky way galaxy not having a supermassive black hole at its core. I don't know if Bob's going to like this or not. Would Bob be upset if it was made of dark, a compact object made of dark matter? You see, the thing is, it either could be true. So therefore, that one is likely science. And the last one about the chimpanzees. well. I suppose we have a bit of a chimpanzee bias because we are so alike chimpanzees in lots of ways. I guess I'll just go with Jay and suggest that the REM sleep one is going to be the fiction. I just don't know how that gets tested. Okay, Bob? Start with number three here. Evidence for the first time that chimps can imagine pretend objects. Yeah, that makes so much sense So much more than the other two in this damn thing So I'm going to definitely say that That is probably science I'd like to think it's science So let's go to the Milky Way one Yeah, my knee-jerk reaction to this is not happy I'm pissed off enough That we don't have a really hyper-massive black hole Like billions of solar masses It's only 4 million solar masses It's not a big boy And now you're going to take that away from me. But on the other hand, damn, man, a clump of dark matter. I didn't know it just does. And I'm not familiar with this type of dark matter that could actually do that. But then, of course, you got to think, well, wait, how many other galaxies have a central black hole? That's also not a stellar remnant, but dark matter. And how big can it get? So it just just asked, you know, just proposed so many new questions. or maybe our galaxy is kind of relatively rare and unique in that regard. That would be kind of cool. But my knee jerk is not to like that, but there's things to like for sure. But what's rubbing me even, you know, rubbing me wrong, what's the expression? Rubbing me the wrong way. Yes. I hate being rubbed the wrong way. So that one, this one about REM sleep, doesn't make any sense only if there's one angle here. So Jay, you're right. I'm glad you remember that. For me and for a lot of people, invariably, if you read text, look away and look back while you're dreaming, it will change. That's happened to me many, many times. I'm not sure how you could possibly solve a puzzle during REM sleep unless it was a mental puzzle. What kind of puzzle are we talking about? I guess you can't tell me at this stage what kind of puzzle it was. If it was a purely mental puzzle, then yes, you could solve it because the whole point of a lucid dream is... Wait, are you implying lucid dreaming here? During REM sleep. Yeah, I mean, you're not mentioning lucid dreaming here. So you could potentially solve a mental puzzle when lucid dreaming because by definition, if you're lucid dreaming, you can think pretty much depending on how lucid you are, you can think pretty much the way you do when you're awake in a lot of ways. So you could solve a mental problem, a mental puzzle in that state. But I don't think you're really going for that one. It's a mental puzzle. I think it's more of a non-mental puzzle, which makes no sense because things that are written down that you would try to solve on a puzzle are not going to work in lucid dreaming. during REM sleep. So yeah, I'll just go with Jay and Evan and say that, that the REM sleep one is fiction. Okay. And Kara. I might go on my own with this one. I don't know. I'm going to say that Bob knows more about the whole black hole versus, you know, dark matter thing. And if Bob says it's possible that like a team of researchers have proposed this, then I'm going to say that is also possible. But I'm getting hung up on two things between the REM sleep one and the chimpanzee one. So the thing that's hanging me up on the chimpanzee one is that scientists have presented evidence for the first time that suggests that chimpanzees are able to imagine. I bet you we've known this for a long time. Good catch. I'm sure. I was in the monkey forest in Bali recently, and these were monkeys. They weren't apes. And they were like playing with rocks on the ground. And we Googled what they were doing because we were like, oh, were they making tools? And apparently they were just like playing with rocks. And I'm like, I don't know, maybe they had a game they were playing with the rocks. Maybe the rocks were representing something else. I just, I wouldn't be surprised. Well, I will clarify one thing just to make sure that you're not misunderstanding because of that example that you gave. So this is scientific evidence. This is not anecdotal evidence. So I'm not saying that no one's ever observed any behavior that couldn't possibly be interpreted as whatever. Right? But this is the first time that somebody published a paper. Yes, exactly. Okay. I still don't buy it. But I don't know, maybe. The thing about the dream researchers is like, I think I was just reading this. It sounds to me like you guys are saying that somehow they're doing like a crossword puzzle in their brain while they're asleep. But I read this like they were given a puzzle that they couldn't solve. They went to sleep, and when they woke up, they had the solution. which happens all the time when we go to sleep like we have aha moments all the time when we go to sleep so if that is the correct interpretation I think that one would be science and the chimp one would be fiction so I'm just gonna whatever I got a good streak so it's worth the risk I'm gonna go with that so you already have the middle one so we'll start there An international team of researchers have proposed that the Milky Way galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its core, but instead has a compact object made of dark matter. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science. This is science. So weird, man. Wow. This is obviously not proven. It's a proposal, but they do have reasons to say why this might be the case. The name of the article is the dynamics of S stars and G sources orbiting a supermassive compact object made of fermionic dark matter. So basically, one of the reasons why we think that there's a black hole at the center of our galaxy is because there are stars whipping around it really fast. So there's got to be a massive gravitational object there. You know, the Sagittarius A star is what's been proposed. We obviously can't see it. They calculate the mass that would be required to have that effect on the stars, and it's four million solar masses. So they know that fairly well. Exactly. But there's multiple gravitational anomalies of the galaxy. There's also the fact that the galaxy is spinning faster as you get to the outside than it should be just based upon invisible matter, right? Hence, we think there must be dark matter holding it all together. But there are problems with the whole model that doesn't exactly, exactly align with the data. And so what they're proposing is, well, what if the dark matter of our galaxy is also the gravity, the matter at the center of the gravity, if it's all one thing, right? They're not saying it's two things. It's like there's just this continuum of dark matter throughout the galaxy, which is very compact at the core, and that gets less compact as you go out from there. And they say that this actually could explain the observed, all the observed movements that we're seeing. It could explain the fast movement of the stars close to the center of the galaxy. It could explain the rotational curves of the galaxy, and maybe it can do it better, right? And, of course, they're always bringing – we have new observations from these instruments, and this kind of is a better fit for all this new data. So far from proven. It obviously needs to go through the meat grinder of the astronomical community to see if this is going to hold up. They need to propose new observations they could make to see if it holds up. But it seems like a viable proposal for now. Very interesting. Can you imagine if this is true? Well, I think I know, but we have to remember, we have to keep reminding ourselves, like a lot of black holes, you know, are mathematical and theoretical and indirect and inference. You know what I mean? It's not like we know for 100% sure where there are black holes. Yeah, but don't forget, we've actually imaged black holes at this point and seeing the accretion disk and the effects that are predicted for such an accretion disk around something like a black hole. It's a good story. It's a good story. But the other thing to keep in mind is that we are getting a very distilled version of the evidence from the experts. You know what I mean? It's like it's been packaged into a story that we could understand and wrap our head around. But the data is actually way more complicated. All right. Which one should I go to? One or three? All right. A new study by Dream Researchers demonstrates the ability to solve puzzles during REM sleep. J. Evan and Bob you think this one is the fiction care you think this one is science so I'll tell you a couple of things so they did they were studying people who have a history of going into lucid dreaming interesting and what they did was they figured out a way to induce lucid dreaming oh there's lots of ways to do it they used a noise what they did was this is the actual study they did they had people working on a puzzle and they played a noise when they were doing it. And then when they were sleeping, they played the same noise. And sometimes this induced the people who were dreaming to lucid dream about the puzzle. So this is inception level stuff. What the heck is going on? This is not what I expected it to be. I'm starting to lose hope here. And then they had them work on the puzzle when they woke up. and the people that they did this to, that they were able to get into the lucid state, solved the puzzle faster than people didn't. So this is bullshit. You didn't say that. That's bullshit. Yeah, yeah. I don't believe that. Jay, relax. No, I'm very angry about this because all those years, I could have been practicing shit while I was dreaming. Yeah, Steve. Hang on. This one is the fiction because they didn't solve the puzzle while they were in REM sleep. They solved it while they were awake. They just were able to solve it faster when they were awake if they had dreamed about it than if they had not dreamed about it. Well, you don't technically know. They solved it in their sleep first. They didn't wake up with a solution. They didn't go, I solved the puzzle in my sleep. They just had no idea. They just still had to solve the puzzle while they were awake. That makes sense. Good job, guys. Good job. It reminds me of, it's like do you guys remember that episode did any of you watch the office yeah i watched it oh yeah all through about five or six times yeah the classical conditioning episode where jim teaches dwight to pick up the phone yeah every time he holds out like a piece of candy oh yeah yeah he like he like holds out the piece of candy oh yeah he does and then finally the last time he doesn't hold it out and dwight just puts his hand out for it and he goes what are you doing man and he was like i don't know i thought you were talking about the one where he kept making his phone uh heavier you know like an old school phone he picks it up and then every time he picked it up he added more nickels inside of it to make it heavier and then he took them out and he smashed the phone to his head no but this was like a classic like with a tone you know what i mean it's like you get to the tone and you're gonna go there oh that's interesting all right Which means scientists have presented evidence for the first time that suggests that chimpanzees are able to imagine pretend objects is science. Yeah. And the new bit, Kara, is the pretend objects. And, of course, this is, you know, again, I had to say suggests because we don't read the minds of the chimpanzees. They were specifically bonobos, a bonobo in this study. Bonobos aren't chimpanzees. What they did, bonobos are a type of chimpanzee. They're pygmy chimpanzees. Yeah. They basically did tea time with the bonobo, and they did pretend tea time where they had a pitcher. These are all made of glass so they could see that they're empty, and an empty cup. And the human was sat across from the bonobo and pretended to pour some fluid into the cup and then pretended to drink it. And then there was another cup that they didn't do that to. And then the human pretended to empty the cup out, et cetera. And then they asked the bonobo which cup has the juice in it, right? And not 100% of the time, but they very consistently pointed to the one that had the pretend juice in it. And then they did a follow-up study where they had another cup with actual juice in it. So the chimp was still able to understand the idea of the pretend juice even when there was like a real cup of juice there. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. That's cool. That shows that it's pretty powerful. How do you get the chimp to point to the one with the T in it or not the T in it? The chimp, this is already a cultured chimp that will point at things to verbal prompts. This isn't a wild chimp, right? This is a trip that can – Yeah. He's already been in the lab for their whole life and they already have the skill where they say point to the ball and they'll point to the ball. How do they block the Hans effect? I'm sure that's standard protocol. I'm not sure but yeah, they've been – They have to know about it. It's got to be in the protocol there somewhere. They probably wear sunglasses and they do all sorts of things. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You're right. You have to control for that, the clever Hans effect. Yeah. And then they do mention that there are anecdotally – I see. Yeah. I feel like we've known that they have creative play. Yeah, they have creative play. There were some chimps who have been observed carrying sticks as if they were kids. Oh, cute. Like dolls? Yeah. Like a stick is a doll. And one chimpanzee was observed dragging things from one place to another and then pretending to drag those same things without actually holding on to something. So the idea that they have an imagination, that they could imagine things that are not really there has been suggested before. But this is the first experiment where they tried to have a protocol that showed, do they get that we're pretending that there's fluid in this cup and it's not really there? And I mean, we've done the reverse with them. We've all seen magic tricks with chimpanzees where they're expecting something to be in your hand. Yeah, and it's not there. And then they're surprised that it's not there. They're surprised, yeah, that the pretend thing is not there. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Exactly. They're so cool. Chimps are basically humans. You know what I mean? Or we are basically chimps. We, you know, it's amazing how close, I mean, you know, of course, they're our closest ancestors, what, it's like 8 million years, something like that, that separates us. You know, pretty much they have rudimentary versions of all the higher cognitive functions that we have, pretty much. All right. Well, good job, guys. Kara, I still credit you with striking out on your own. Yeah, Kara. Thank you. Bold. I felt like I had solid reasoning that didn't hold up. Yeah, it was fine. That's perfectly corromulent. All right, Evan, give us a quote. Technology is a tool, but its impact depends on how we use it for the betterment of society. Margaret Hamilton, computer scientist credited with, oh, I don't know, coining the term software engineering. Software engineering. Right? You take so many terms for granted. Right, no kidding. to be the first to use them. No kidding. But yeah, she's amazing. Directed the software engineering division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory where she led the development of the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo guidance computer for the Apollo program. Wow. Yes. Yeah. She's impressive. Yeah, it's important to remember any tool can be used for good or for evil. Cognitive tools, skeptical tools, critical thinking tools can all be used for good or for bad. Anything could be abused. It's not inherent to the tool necessarily. AI, anything. All right. Well, thank you guys for joining me this week. You got it, brother. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. 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