The Skeptics Guide #1041 - Jun 21 2025

You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe: Your Escape to Reality.

Hello, and welcome to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

Today is Wednesday, June 18th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

Hey, everybody.

Kara Santa Maria.

Howdy.

Jay Novella.

Hey, guys.

Evan Bernstein.

Good evening, everyone.

And we have a special guest rogue on this show, Justin Dobb.

Justin, welcome to the SGU.

Well, thank you so much.

I've been listening for almost the entire time you've been doing it, so this is actually pretty crazy.

Awesome.

Welcome, Justin.

Thank you.

So, Justin, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Sure.

So, I spent a lot of time in a former career doing everything from brand strategy to innovation consulting and future casting.

So helping companies figure out what they wanted to be when they grew up.

Last year, I spent a year in a fellowship at the University of Chicago trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.

And in that fellowship, I actually developed a kind of a graduate-level course on how to do innovation with generative AI tools.

That's nice.

We'll see if I can actually get an adjunct position teaching that.

The wheels of academia seem to turn pretty slowly these days.

All right, and you're going to talk to us a little bit later in the show about an artificial intelligence-related news item.

I am.

Yeah, guys, Justin is on here.

Why?

Because he is a patron of the SGU.

He's at the Luxotic level.

And

we let Luxotic members join us after they've been a Luxotic for six months.

And anyway, we really appreciate your patronage and your support for the SGU.

And thanks for listening to us from the beginning.

I think you get it.

You know why we're here.

I do.

And, you know, it's a ton of work, but we're all very happy to be doing it.

And we just want to make sure our patrons know how much we can't really do this without them.

Well, like I said, I've been listening a very, very long time.

And,

you know, my children are actually, they're older now.

They're 22 and 21.

But they have gone through many of science or fiction on-road trips.

They grew up with the SCU, huh?

They totally did.

That is good parenting.

Those poor kids.

So we should mention that tomorrow, after not, tomorrow night when the show goes up, tomorrow after this recording is Juneteenth.

Oh, yeah.

That's right.

Yeah.

Which is now a holiday, which means no work.

This is the last, I guess, holiday I'll have off.

Oh, wow.

Steve's final.

I'm milking the hell out of that.

I'm milking it, yeah, I'm milking it.

So, yeah, so Juneteenth is amazing.

That's the officially the last, the end of slavery because Union soldiers marched into Galveston, Texas, and said no slaves, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

So, we're going to start off with a

quick item from TikTok.

Just a chock full of nonsense.

Oh, my my God.

This one comes from Phil's Pixel.

He has a video talking about how the moon is hollow and probably because it's fake.

I mean it was like constructed by aliens or something.

And what he does, I can't go over everything he says because he gives this gish gallop of

just

mystery mongering about the moon.

Some of it is true but irrelevant or it's true but who cares?

Is he presenting someone else's theory or this is his own theory, Steve?

No, this is definitely somebody else's theory.

Okay.

He's just sort of pulling it all together.

I see.

He's connecting the dots for us.

But there's a couple of things I wanted to point out.

A couple of things he says, which are flat out wrong, but it's a good example of how you can twist bits of information into a conspiracy or like anomaly hunt.

So he says that the moon is only 25% the size of the earth, but it only

has 1% of the mass of the Earth.

Isn't that wrong and wrong?

Well, it's misleading and misleading, is what it is.

So, when he says it's 25% the size, size is a vague term.

It is.

What does he mean by that?

Right.

Mass, diameter.

Right.

He doesn't mean the one thing that matters, and that's volume.

Right?

Because the volume of the moon

is about 1.3% the volume of the Earth.

And it does have about 1% of the mass of the Earth.

But see, that doesn't sound quite as impressive as 25% and 1%, does it?

No.

No.

Right.

So, what's he mean by 25%?

I think diameter, but not volume.

But in any case, he uses that discrepancy, that apparent discrepancy, which he is incorrectly stating, to say that the moon doesn't have nearly as much mass as it should for its side because it's hollow, right?

That's how he's getting to its hollow.

But of course, the moon is just a little bit less dense than the earth because, of course, it is, because it's smaller than the earth and because of gravity, right?

Gravity squishes the earth into a more dense orb than the moon.

We have more iron at our core.

The substance of the earth is compressed more by gravity, so the earth is more dense than the moon.

Of course, it is.

No mystery at all.

The numbers are not even that impressive.

But he, you know, by saying this sort of true but misleading bits of information, he makes it seem like there's this deep, dark mystery that nobody, scientists are baffled, you know, kind of thing.

He also says things like, well, you know, the apparent size of the moon is the same as the sun.

And people think that's just a cosmic coincidence.

Like, well, yeah, it kind of is just a cosmic coincidence.

You know, what else can you say about it?

Yeah, well, there is more you could say about it.

I mean, he actually mentions tidal locking, where the one face of the moon is always

looking at the Earth.

It's a different point,

but he's familiar with tidal locking, but he ignores tidal acceleration, which explains that the moon is moving away from the Earth because of tidal acceleration, that the moon actually steals rotational energy from the Earth and

transfer it to the Moon's orbital speed, which gets it into a higher orbit.

So it's moving away at like a few centimeters a year.

We used to have six-hour days on this planet.

I think it was 10 hours.

But that's the shortest day I've read about.

But he doesn't mention that, you know, because that just kind of ruins his cool point.

Right.

The moon will be smaller than the sun at some point in the future, and eventually it'll stop moving away.

But I think the Earth-Moon system will be burned to a crisp before that happens.

Yeah, so basically, we talked about this before on the show.

It's not the same size.

Both are variable in size, because the Earth's orbit around the Sun is a little bit eccentric, and the Moon's orbit around the Earth is a little bit eccentric, and their variable apparent sizes overlap.

Right?

So, not the same size, they have overlapping apparent sizes.

And there's a period of the Earth's history where that is going to be the case.

We're very lucky, and it is a cool coincidence.

Yeah, we just happen to be in that period of history when that is the case.

And we're allowed.

But it sounds less cosmic-y than saying they're the same apparent size, you know.

But that's the kind of stuff that he's pulling.

right?

Right.

You know, some things are just not true, like all craters are the same depth.

No, it's not true.

What?

Yeah.

You're trying to, and again, the point you're trying to build to this point that that's because there's like an artificial subsurface.

Oh, yes, the 3D print craters can't one depth much deeper.

Yeah, so what's his great conspiracy?

Like, what is he trying to promote here?

The

hollow moon.

The hollow moon, because it's actually a constructed artifact by aliens, and NASA's hiding it from us.

I see.

Yeah, it's a little mini-dyson sphere.

But he figured it out, Kara.

This guy has seen past the veil.

He's connected all the dots.

He has partial misconstrued information that he has woven together.

And actually, somebody else has woven it for him, and he's repeating it on TikTok as if he's a genius.

And it's always so amazing when people have the hubris to think that they have special knowledge that literally no one else has.

Yeah.

Here's a comment from one of the observers on his particular video.

He calls it the hollow head theory.

Right.

Well, Kara, I think that's part of the allure.

Yeah, definitely.

You know, once you've jockeied yourself into thinking of things that way,

it's exciting.

You know, it's exciting.

I have inside knowledge.

Nobody really knows it.

But he did miss the obvious conclusion, though, is that the moon is actually made of Ozempic.

Ozempic.

Oh, it's so obvious now.

Yeah.

How modern.

These people need a fantasy life, right?

Because they're just

playing some video games.

Or they need better Google Foo.

Or just throwing this out there, critical thinking skills.

That too.

Probably number one.

All that fantastical stuff.

That's a lot of work.

All right.

Tara,

it's kind of an important anniversary this year.

It is.

So can anybody tell me what happened from July 10th to July 21st, 1925?

Yes.

You can.

Anybody else?

Well, I.

Evan, you can.

Had you asked me this, say, yesterday, I might have fumbled for this answer.

Isn't that when Cthulhu attacked New York City?

That is when the state of Tennessee versus John Thomas Scopes was heard.

Yeah.

Ooh, the Scopes monkey trial.

Yeah, otherwise known as the Scopes trial.

I hate that it's called the Scopes monkey.

I've never once in my life called it that.

No.

But you are correct.

It is like a common kind of name for the Scopes trial.

That's a press name.

Yeah.

But the Scopes trial was a press trial.

Let's be honest.

Let's be honest.

Isn't that how you first learned about it?

That's what it was called.

Yeah, a lot of people called it that.

Let's talk a little bit about the trial first, and then we can talk about sort of

what has happened in the hundred years since the Scopes trial.

So I think probably those of us here talking amongst ourselves on the podcast are aware of the particulars of the trial.

But for those who maybe need a bit of a refresher, I think it's important to remember that in Dayton, Tennessee, where the trial was held, it was, this was a deliberate trial.

Yeah.

John Thomas Scopes was chosen.

Actually, he volunteered.

You can't do it without being volunteered.

So they tried to ask the biology teacher at the school, who was also the principal,

who was teaching at the school where evolution was taught.

They tried to ask him if he would be willing to be arrested, and he said no.

And so they found that John Thomas Scopes had substitute taught for like several days.

And so he qualified and he was like, yeah, I'll do it.

And so

he incriminated himself and said that he was, you know, he taught evolution so that there would be a defendant in this trial.

He was represented by the ACLU originally

because they basically said anybody who violates the standing law in Tennessee at at the time, the Butler Act, which says that it's illegal to teach evolution in schools, anyone who violates that, we want to defend you because we want to take this, you know, we know it's going to be appealed and we want to take it to the Supreme Court.

We're looking to basically defend the constitutionality or the lack of constitutionality of this law.

And do you guys remember who

were the, I guess, the famed attorneys on either side?

Well, William Jennings Bryan was

Clarence Darrow.

And Clarence Darrow.

So

William Jennings Bryan argued for the prosecution.

Famously, he had run for president three times.

Yeah, three.

And he had been a Secretary of State.

But throughout his career, he had become more fundamentalist and he had become more interested in sort of defending kind of like biblical fundamentalism.

And then Clarence Darrow was the main defense attorney who defended Scopes.

But of course, there were several, obviously, lawyers that were involved in the case.

I think there was a quote at one point, but that was, uh, that somebody said, it might have even been Darrow, that like, it's not Scopes that's actually on trial here, it's the law that's on trial.

That is what we're trying to do, is get this law taken off the books.

And, okay, cut to now, we're 100 years later.

It's a little hard to remember, but do you all remember the outcome of the trial?

Yeah.

He was found guilty and fined, and then like $100.

it was overturned because the fine exceeded this limitation.

Right.

And so it got thrown out on a technicality, never made its way to the Supreme Court, and so the strategy failed.

So the strategy failed at the time.

And I'm reading somewhere that the fine of $100, if we were to look at today's money, it would be around like two grand.

So it was, you know, it was a...

relatively small fine

from a legal perspective.

Okay, so the Butler Act had been on the books.

The Butler Act was, you know, this anti-evolution law.

There were other anti-evolution laws that were spreading throughout

the country.

And ultimately,

there was a change to the legislation.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court did deem

teaching only

creationism in schools or punishing those who teach evolution in schools as unconstitutional.

But that didn't happen until 40 years later.

Yeah.

In 1968.

So that was when Susan Epperson

was actually on trial in, well, she wasn't on trial, but when sort of that trial took place in Arkansas.

There's a really great history here with Science News.

That's why I pulled some articles from Science News, the publication.

Of course, you can read about the Scopes trial anywhere.

There's lots of wonderful books that have been written about it.

But there's a really great history here from Science News because Science News used to be called Science News News Letter, and it was around during the Scopes trial.

So they had

two different

journalists.

Yeah, yeah.

It was, let me see, Watson Davis and Frank Thone.

Frank Thone was the biology editor who actually went to Dayton and reported on the trial and wrote about it.

And so I like pulled up an article that was written, let's see, on Saturday, June 6th, 1925, 100 years ago, I'm reading an article from this is amazing.

Professor M.I.

Pupin, president of American Association for Advancement of Science, calls Arrest Lawless Act and says, quote, self-respecting American citizens must aid defense.

The scientists of America, 14,300 strong, were called to the support of freedom of teaching and of evolution.

And so it's so great.

So they talk all about kind of how the trial got started.

They talk about how there's good evidence right now that we actually did evolve from a common ancestor, as did apes.

And then I love this because at the end of the article, there are some dashes, and then there's like

a couple of other

headlines that are listed at the very bottom under the Science Service.

One of them says, by rearranging her kitchen utensils, a Virginia woman recently saved herself 323 steps a day or nearly three miles of walking a month.

That's helpful.

And then another one, the United States is using up its timber four times as fast as it is growing.

These two things were printed on June 6th, 1925, underneath this article about scientists pledging to support a Tennessee professor who was arrested for teaching evolution.

So it's very interesting to look back on the beginnings of the Scopes trial, how it was sort of orchestrated, what happened since then, and of course, the push for creationism to be continued to be taught in schools, even into the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, and today.

The rebranding of creationism as intelligent design, and of course, new laws that are being attempted to be passed and that are definitely supported by the current administration about, quote, academic freedom,

where individuals are lobbying to be able to teach, quote, scientific controversies, you know, under the guise of doing of academic freedom, continuing to be able to teach intelligent design and doubts about evolution.

So 100 years later, I think we made some progress, probably not as much as we would have liked.

And the,

I don't know, what do you want to call it?

The undermining of scientific teaching, it rages on.

We are still having to be vigilant about this.

Endless endless battle.

Yeah, the scopes trial really has an interesting and complicated legacy, as you say, because it certainly broke this debate out into the public.

And I think over time,

to the broader public, eventually, I think, you know, evolution won out.

Absolutely.

But textbook companies got very risk-averse, and essentially they just pulled evolution from the textbooks.

So we've kind of lost a generation in terms of learning about evolution.

Right.

And then that continued later.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then

later we saw changes because of Texas.

Yeah.

So if anybody's not seen, I think the documentary is called The Revisionaries.

Is that correct?

I'm going to just Google that to make sure.

Yeah.

2012.

Austin, Texas, 15 people influence what is taught to the next generation of American children once every decade.

And so it's PBS airs it.

It's the Texas Board of Education who has so much control over textbooks, like a large majority of the textbooks that are printed in public schools across the country, and how they're sort of anti-evolution, procreation, anti

in many different aspects of education.

There's a rewriting of history, but they do focus quite a bit on evolution there.

All right, thanks, Carol.

Jay, tell us about the effects of smells on hunger.

Let me ask you guys, does smelling food make you more or less hungry?

Depends on the food.

Personally.

Well, I mean,

it makes the hunger coalesce.

Does that make sense?

I might not know if I'm hungry, and then I might smell really good-smelling food.

I'm like, yep, I'm hungry.

I mean, in my mind,

it basically makes me more hungry.

You know, I get that.

You know, you could smell something, and whether you're hungry or not, you might be like, ooh, that, you know, I want to try that, especially desserts, for Christ's sake.

I mean, I don't have to be hungry at all to be seduced by a dessert.

It depends on what you mean by hungry, too.

As you say, there's the desire to eat, and then there's like physical hungry.

I don't even know what the difference is between those two things to me.

Yeah, I mean,

of them.

I do.

I mean, there are

a day without food, and I've been hungry at the end of that day.

Yeah, I mean, I've been, yeah, you know, like when you're really, really hungry, but certainly I've had the desire to eat something because it's delicious, even though I have no hunger.

But, Steve, you're right.

If I smell like fish or if I smell, there's certainly if I smell, I don't know, Brussels, they don't make me hungry.

Justin, what's the food item that you just can't turn down?

Well, Jay, I'm going to run into your camp.

Meatballs.

I knew I liked you, but now I'm 100% sure.

Well, let's eat a meatball.

The meatballs, you know,

so many people get angry at me because it's meat, and we're, you know, I get it.

I totally get it.

Agreed.

But I look, I grew up with this food item.

It's ingrained in my DNA at this point.

And

there's also some food that if you see other people eating the food, you want to eat that food.

Yes.

Even like on TV, there's a few that come to mind.

Apples, noodles, spaghetti,

and potato chips.

I'm not sure if I see someone eating spaghetti, that makes me want to eat spaghetti.

Oh, absolutely.

Sometimes it

gets me with sausage.

It gets me.

Yeah, noodles are it.

Especially when they're doing the thing, you know, when they're like twisting their fork, and

you just bear down on that.

I know.

Yeah.

It might be the Will Smith eating spaghetti kind of AI video that turned me on.

Oh my god, yeah.

Something recently happened that it was odd that scientists discovered

something that starts with a smell and ends with a full stomach, and there's no chewing required.

And this research team in Germany, they're at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research.

Is that anywhere near the Max Planck Institute?

Yeah.

You know, if they want me to pronounce it that way, change the way they spell it.

Touch the American Embassy, Steve.

Max Planck.

God damn.

I'm sure Max Planck is equally not correct.

I'm just saying it is German.

I'm just trying to keep it here.

I'm just straight.

straight there, Carol.

I take

my sweet mate Christian.

So

these guys, these guys over here at some university over there

who study metabolism, they found a brain circuit that suppresses appetite the instant that food is smelled.

Now this was of course done in mice, so keep that in mind, you know, but it's still a very interesting thing for us to discuss.

This is just smelling it, not tasting it, not eating it.

They just smell it.

So this is what they figured out.

They were studying studying how smell might influence

common feeding behavior.

This isn't new territory.

And with what they found, lots of other researchers have been doing similar kinds of research and everything.

But in this particular instance, they stumbled on something really, really cool.

So inside the brain, they traced a line from the olfactory bulb where scent first gets processed to a small cluster of neurons in a region called the medial septum.

Now, Steve, where is that?

In the middle of something.

In the middle of that septum.

I mean, it sounds like in the middle of your nose, but this is in the brain, though.

Yes,

that is definitely in the brain.

Okay, good.

That's right there in the brain.

Yeah, okay.

So these specific neurons had one job, make the animal feel full.

And I think this is universally common among mammals.

But they were getting it switched on before food ever touched their mouth.

So the moment that the smell hit their brain, the circuit lit up.

And in lean mice, that single switch had an immediate effect and it shut down their appetite.

But this happened not hours or minutes later.

Like this was happening within a scant seconds.

And the smell of food activated these,

what do you, okay, I can't pronounce the word.

Society, saty, satiation.

Satiety.

Satiety.

Satiety.

Weist almighty.

That's a good one.

From the word satiate.

All right, satiety neurons.

So basically, you eat less, right?

And that's the sequence.

So why would a brain evolve to do that, which I think is a very important question to ask at this point?

So one of the study authors, Janice Bulk, thinks that fast feedback loops were probably there as a survival mechanism.

And in the wild, as an animal, you know, an animal might have 30 seconds to grab food before something comes to grab that food or it.

So the sooner it can stop eating and get moving again, the better off, the more likely that animal would survive.

So being able to trigger feeling full earlier based on smell alone

would let them eat quickly without overeating and getting sluggish and basically not only losing their lunch, but they'd lose themselves.

So the twist is that the whole system falls apart in obese mice.

So that same scent, same neurons, but in obese mice, nothing happens.

The medial septum just stays dark, doesn't fire at all and the smell of food doesn't flip that you know um full switch so the mice keep eating and they're completely unaffected and this is important because it adds to a growing pile of evidence that obesity interferes with olfactory pathways and in this specific case with feeling full so you know it's it's a compounding problem and wait wait but that makes it sound like it's causal but it could be that the mice were always like that and that's why they have obesity right they never feel full which is why they never stop.

Sure, but they're not born obese, right?

Yeah, but they became obese because they had that.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

This could cause obesity.

This doesn't have to be a result of obesity.

You should call up Janice Bulk at the Max Planck University in Calcutta.

Yeah,

let's see.

Let me see if I can find anything that addresses that.

But I think they're actually...

Yes, you're saying like that that part of the brain doesn't light up as something that they were born with, and that's why they're obese.

Yeah, like if you're born with a defective satiety signal, you're not going to know when to stop eating.

We may be running into the difference between what the data shows and what they think the data says.

The data shows that obese mice don't have the satiety response to odors.

They may be speculating or hypothesizing that it sounds like what they're saying is they think that obesity down-regulates that receptor pathway over time.

That's how I read it.

As opposed to

they were born that way, and that's why they're obese.

Either way, which I think is also a valuable hypothesis.

Yes, right?

So, how do you separate those two?

Then you have to start doing experiments where you knock out that section of the brain.

Yeah.

Right.

All right.

But the thing is, it could also be both.

It probably is.

Yeah, and that's what they say is self-reinforcing.

Maybe you're born with that tendency, and then when you get

worse, if anything, over time.

So the interesting thing here, and I appreciate you saying that, Kara, a good, it's a good thing to think about.

Humans have the same medial septum structure in their brains, so in our brains.

So we don't know yet whether it's going to react the same way to food smells, but some human studies that have been done have shown that certain odors can curb appetite.

And it's not all the time.

They're saying that this is sometimes.

So there's also evidence that people with obesity are more likely to eat in response to smells than people who are lean.

So in other words, something might be broken in the same place, right?

The lead researcher, Sophie Steklerum, she said very plainly, olfaction plays a role in appetite regulations and obesity.

We found that smell-triggered appetite reduction appears only in lean mice, not in obese ones.

So that last part, I guess, is pretty much key there.

The system works, but only under certain conditions.

So this research is valuable because it basically opens the door, right?

Right now, most obesity treatments focus on hormones, appetite-suppressing drugs, or they have metabolic interventions.

But this new study could suggest that there might be another route.

Literally,

it could come through the olfactory bulb.

And if we can figure out how to activate it or repair that circuit in people who've lost the signal, we might have a new tool here for reducing overeating.

The olfactory.

It's pretty interesting because, like, I could tell you, that's why I asked you guys beforehand before we got into it.

Like, I don't think there's, other than, of course, smelling things that you're supposed to be repulsed by, there isn't any like smell less less hungry thing going on that I've ever observed in general.

Like, it just doesn't work that way.

Like, smells typically, you know, make you want the food.

Yeah, but that's, yeah, but again, it depends on if you like the food.

Like, I really struggle with smells because I'm very like sensitive to them.

So, if you open a refrigerator and I smell the food, like cold food in a refrigerator, it's pretty repulsive to me, and it makes me not hungry.

Yeah, so I think that happens a lot.

But what I like about this study is that it does contribute to a growing body of literature that shows the thing that I think a lot of people who have done research in this area for years have always known.

And I think psychologists see this, and Steve, I'm sure that you have a view on this too.

That culturally we have blamed and shamed people with severe obesity as a problem with their willpower for so long.

And we have done such a disservice by not stopping and thinking about the fact that there have to be biological correlates here.

There have to be things going on in the brain.

There have to be things going on metabolically.

Nobody wants to find themselves in that position.

Yeah, of course.

There's so, and it's probably a confluence of factors.

It's so, so many things, but it is not an easy way to live.

And it's a really painful way to live.

And there's a lot of shame in our culture around it.

And the truth of the matter, I just remember seeing this like brilliant interview once with somebody who was talking about Ozempic.

I mean, speaking of the joke earlier, and they were saying, you know, what do you say to people who say you took the easy way out by taking Ozempic?

And their response was, I would say that those people are naturally thin.

You know what I mean?

Like, it's very easy to cast these kinds of things.

It's the easy way out.

Yeah, exactly.

I might need a little bit of help, you know, because I didn't have the same genetics as you or maybe my downstream from my olfactory bulb, I didn't have a satiety signal kick in.

Yeah.

No, I've had that conversation with thin people who have never dieted a day in their life, have never had to think about regulating their caloric intake.

They are just naturally thin, and they don't understand that that's just different, that not everyone is that way.

Yeah, they're the freaks.

Yeah.

And I think I had a rude awakening because I was that person.

I retract that.

I was that person all the way until I hit that time in my life.

Changes when you get older.

People do.

Yeah, when your metabolism changes.

And I go, oh, I learned no healthy skills.

Right.

I didn't need them when I was younger.

Yeah.

Definitely environmental reasons as well.

Cultural reasons.

Oh, for sure.

For sure.

But I was just going to say, it's one of the reasons that people who get bariatric surgery almost always need a site consult and almost always have mental health support on their teams.

All right.

Thanks, Jay.

Bob, tell us about using black holes as a super collider.

This was a fun, fun topic to research.

A new study shows that black holes might be able to offer new scientific insights, similar to the proposed successor to the Large Hadron Collider.

Have you guys heard about this, the future circular collider, FCC?

The study also offers an example of how particle physics research can deal with the depressing lack of new particle physics discoveries using increasingly expensive supercolliders, which I'm going to talk about as well.

The study was recently published in Physical Review Review Letters, and the name of this study is Black Hole Super Colliders.

To me, this is fascinating, of course, and good news because I think there's a good chance that mega supercollider successors to the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, will not be approved.

I'm specifically referring to CERN's proposed successor to the LHC.

It was in the news a while back, the FCC, or future circular collider, which is up for approval in 2028.

This collider has a circumference or would have a circumference of about 100 kilometers, where LHC is only 27 kilometers.

So, this is a big boy.

It'll have collision energies at 100 tera electron volts TeV, which is about eight times greater than the LHC, so though amazingly powerful.

And the expected price tag is 15 billion Swiss francs, which is about 18.3 billion USD.

So, ridiculously expensive.

But it does sound incredible, but you know, honestly, it's tough to be confident that we're going to get much new science from it.

And so why is that?

Well, I would say look at the LHC.

Look at the Large Hadron Collider over since like 2012, essentially.

The LHC had really high hopes.

If you were following it back then, there was so many high hopes for it when it was being built.

And the reasoning, it made sense why that would be the case.

The collision energies that were involved were unprecedented at the time, a whopping 7 trillion electron volts in the early days, much more than

the Tevatron, which used to have the record.

And the theories at the time also seemed to support this idea that these big discoveries were possible in that energy regime of say 7 trillion electron volts.

Now, these high hopes we had included confirming, I'm sure you remember, the theorized Higgs particle/slash field.

Remember that?

The Higgs field imparts mass to fundamental, fundamental fundamental.

Whoa, fundamental.

That's right there.

That's fundamental.

The Higgs field imparts mass to fundamental particles via the Higgs boson, right?

So we all remember that.

But beyond the Higgs, though, there were also lots of expectations for other things like supersymmetric particles predicted by supersymmetry, dark matter candidates like WIMPs, weakly interacting massive particles.

They also were expectations of at least hints of extra spatial dimensions and more and more.

That's just a partial list.

Now back in 2012, I'm sure we all remember, right, the LHC confirmed Higgs and it was momentous, absolutely.

I remember reporting about it at TAM in 2012.

The discovery even earned a Nobel Prize within what, a few years, a couple years?

The next day, I don't remember, but it was fast.

But on the other hand, have you heard me report about any of those other discoveries?

No, nope, nothing from the LHC about those.

So, and sure, you know, these are negative results, and these negative results can help narrow down theories.

So they do have some utility for sure, but they also frustratingly pointed to what physicists call the nightmare scenario.

So now, the nightmare scenario is a scenario where increasingly powerful and expensive supercolliders continue only to confirm and refine our current understanding of the standard model of physics, of particle physics, without revealing fundamentally new physics at all, like dark matter or new forces.

So, that's the nightmare scenario.

And it's kind of scary where it's like, yeah, yeah, we knew this, and we got a couple more new decimal points of precision here.

But

where's the new stuff?

Throw us a bone, universe.

Come on.

That's the fear, which I've kind of mentioned briefly on the show from time to time.

Now, some theoretical models suggest that new physics could require energies far beyond what even the future circular collider could reach at 100 trillion electron volts, which, of course, is much, you know, much more than the LHC's meager 14 TeV.

So that's scary to think that some of these models were even suggesting that, yeah, we're not going to, you know,

we may need to go well beyond 100 to even get anything new.

So what do we do now, right?

Besides cry a little, of course.

One approach, one approach which I think will gain increasing momentum trying to deal with

this gap of energy

is more of an emphasis on what they're saying, just simply describing as precision physics.

So that means that you're looking less for new particles and

more of a focus on ultra-precise measurements of many things like Higgs, other force parameters, like electroweak or rare processes, all of which could potentially show these subtle deviations that reveal new physics.

And sure, it's not as sexy as like, look, I found a new particle.

It's more of like, look, we've refined this calculation or this estimate to 10 decimal places, but look, it may reveal something new.

So it's not as inherently interesting, but that's what we may need to focus more on.

So, like I said, precision physics might not find new particles directly, but it can still help us figure out where to look next, and that could be incredibly valuable.

Another approach to deal with this is having a greater emphasis on complementing the current supercollider experiments.

And for that, you could use things more like gravitational wave astronomy, which we've talked about.

It's super fascinating, helping with multi-messenger astronomy.

You know, I love gravitational wave astronomy, but also neutrino physics, precision tabletop experiments, and another option here is cosmological observations.

And this last example finally brings me to the meat of this new study.

So cosmological observations of black holes as supercolliders.

The idea here is that particles orbiting a rapidly spinning black hole can plunge towards the black hole's horizon very fast if they're orbiting in the opposite direction to spin.

You got that?

So

these retrograde orbits are not typical though, but they do exist.

When those particles collide with particles from different orbits, the collision energies can be just off the hook.

I mean, on the scale of tens or even hundreds of teraelectron volts, similar and even greatly exceeding that proposed future circular collider.

So that's a tremendous amount of energy, which is not a surprise because we're talking about black holes here.

So, therefore, we can potentially get some relatively cheap insights into particle physics at these extreme energy regimes that don't exist on Earth yet.

All right, so the potential of studying particles ejected from black holes in this way is threefold, as I see it.

It could give us collision data that's that's roughly comparable to the Large Hadron Collider, maybe more powerful, and guide our theoretical development and current collider experiments.

So it could be very valuable in that way.

But this could also give us the confidence we need that the future circular collider would indeed or could indeed expose new physics beyond the standard model.

So that would be you know that would be amazingly valuable because if you're going to spend $18 billion on something,

you want your confidence levels to be high enough.

And I don't think they're high enough right now to warrant it.

So this black hole data could give us that confidence that we don't have now.

And finally, kind of a best case scenario here, it could give us insights into energy regimes of many hundreds of teraelectron volts, which we probably couldn't otherwise observe for 100 years or more, you know, assuming technology development stays at its current level of progress.

So, so that's so that's a story here, that using these black holes as supercolliders could give us, is an example of one of the many different ways we are going to probably probably start doing research for particle physics because these super colliders are just getting too expensive, and there's just not a lot of hope these days that we're anywhere near the energy regimes that we might need in order to get some results from them.

So, Bob, how do they propose measuring those collisions at the Event Horizon?

Well, I mean, we have certain, we have some high-energy detectors even now

that observe black holes.

So, we may be able to detect some of these particles that are emitted from the from that are ejected from black holes.

We can maybe detect some of them now.

So we need to make a concerted effort to look for these high-energy neutrinos, for example, or protons that are

cosmic rays.

All right.

Thanks, Bob.

Thanks for the question.

Evan, tell us about this mysterious Antarctica radio pulse.

I would like to introduce you to Anita.

Say hi to Anita.

Hi.

If Anita could say hello back, Anita would, but Anita can't.

That's because Anita is, or I should say was, a scientific instrument, not programmed for etiquette or protocol, Jay.

Thanks, Bob.

But rather, Anita detects neutrinos.

Do you speak Bocce?

Yeah.

It's like a second language.

No.

Anita detects neutrinos.

Lovely, lovely, ultra-high-energy neutrinos.

And it does so by capturing radio pulses generated as the neutrinos interact with the Arctic, I'm sorry, with the Antarctic ice surface.

Anita is an acronym, right, Bob?

Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna.

That would be an acronym.

Yes.

The ANITA project had four separate missions.

The first one began in 2006.

And the last one, its fourth mission, wrapped up in 2018.

Anita consisted of dozens of radio antennas mounted on a 20-foot and a 25-foot gondola pointing downward

to monitor radio waves in the ice that arise from neutrino interactions.

And all of that data was recorded to be studied and studied and studied some more.

Okay, so now you know what Anita was and what Anita did.

But the question this week, this news item, why is ANITA in the headlines this week, a full seven years after its last mission?

Well, here's one of the headlines.

This one's from Penn State University.

Strange radio pulses detected coming from ice in Antarctica.

Over at Science Alert, they have strange radio signals detected emanating from deep under Antarctic ice.

And IFL Science says anomalous radio pulses detected in Antarctica are coming from underneath the ice.

And of course, there's a ton of other articles about this.

So

if anyone else, I don't, did anyone else read about this or see any headlines about this?

And if they did, I read it.

Did you read it?

Did your mind immediately jump to John Carpenter's

thing?

Yes, right?

I could not have been the only one.

The thing left his radio line.

Spaceship underneath the ship buried under the ice.

Seriously, I mean, I don't think they wrote these headlines.

Right there.

I don't know that they wrote the headlines with that intention, but that's actually what happened in my brain.

It's like, so I'm reading this, like, oh my gosh, what?

Malevolent creature's been detected emitting radio radio waves while it takes over people's bodies in Antarctica.

So cool.

But no, Anita, back to Anita.

So it's reported that Anita's data detected radio pulses emerging from beneath the ice at unusually steep angles.

They say around 30 degrees below horizontal.

That is considered highly unusual.

All right, well, what's newsworthy about that?

Well, let's go back to that first Anita mission back in 2006, almost 20 years ago.

Almost as long as we've been making this podcast.

As I said before, Anita was designed to detect neutrinos not directly, but through their interaction with the Antarctic ice.

The signal being detected is a radio wave, in this case, a super short burst.

And Bob, I saw it referred to as a nano-chirp.

Never heard nano-chirp before.

So it's detecting these nano-chirp signals being caused by the interaction of the neutrino and the ice.

Okay.

And Bob, I also read this.

I had to pull this one sentence out because you'll love this.

A quintillion electron volt neutrino slams an atom, triggers a particle avalanche, and that cascade emits an Ascarian radio pulse.

Ascarian?

Wait, what's that?

I'm not even sure.

So

this phenomenon was discovered, I think, back in the 1960s.

It's called the Ascarian effect, the A-S-K-A-R-Y-A-N effect.

I guess when the neutrinos interact with the ice and emit that radio signal.

So that's basically

that's what it's referring to.

So this detection has been around for a long time.

So 2006, Anita-1 mission, it was just a short pulse among the data.

It collected a lot of data, but there was this short pulse.

And it detected some of the nano chirps at such an angle that,

according to the, you know, the angle, it must have come from the direction of the Earth.

And deep, like, deep, right?

Yes, from the Earth.

Right.

Well under the ground.

Yes.

All right.

Well, okay.

So what, the neutrino traveled through 7,000 kilometers of planet before it interacted with the ice from below?

That would be unusual.

All right, maybe it was a glitch, maybe something weird with the data.

No big deal, right?

So you have the Anita 3 mission in 2014, and the same

detection occurred, in which there was a bit of data that said basically the same thing.

Oh, and it happened two more times in 2016 and 2018 with the last Anita 4 mission.

All right, and according to the professionals, that ain't supposed to happen with these neutrinos, right?

I mean, a neutrino, what, might be able to go through a few kilometers of planet, but not thousands.

Right?

It's not like it went through, it was, because they generate from space, from large events that occur in space, and travel and travel and travel until they interact with something.

And you can get through, and it will penetrate things, but not thousands of kilometers of planet.

They're saying no way.

Are you sure about that?

Are you sure?

This corresponds to about eight to ten interaction lengths at the required neutrino energy, EV.2,

causing severe attenuation and requiring something flux that should have been observed with other instruments.

Evan, they are referring there to the radio signals that result from the neutrino interaction, not the neutrinos themselves.

Neutrinos can penetrate light years of lead.

They don't have a problem going all the way through the Earth.

But once they interact, then the subsequent particles, the radio waves and the other particles that they're detecting, those have a decay length.

Those have a limit on how far they can go.

Okay, so Anita

detects these nanochirps, right?

And says, all right, neutrinos

are causing these.

But there are other detectors at the same time that are in work.

One's called IceCube, and the other is called the Pierre-Auger or Auger Observatory, which look directly for sources of neutrinos.

And their data, when it lined up, you know, then this was what the new study is about.

They analyzed 15 years of cosmic data collected by that observatory in Argentina to try to make sense of the signals.

And guess what?

The observatory's data found that at the same time Anita was detecting these radio signals, supposedly generated by the neutrinos, these other instruments found nothing.

They detected no neutrino activity.

Okay, so

that sounds like the best argument right there.

They basically are saying, no, you really shouldn't.

think that this is neutrinos because you're ruling that out right

right um so this research was done by a team of international scientists uh including those from penn state university researchers and they recently published their results in the journal Physics Review Letters.

Stephanie Whistle, who's an associate professor of physics and astronomy and astrophysics, who worked on the ANIDA team, said this: The radio waves that we detected nearly a decade ago were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice.

It's an interesting problem because we still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are.

But what we do know is that they're most likely not representing neutrinos.

Okay, whoa, so not neutrinos?

So it's what, some other what, particle that's

known to the standard model of physics, right?

They must be.

Well, apparently, they can't make that.

They can't make that conclusion either.

They don't know what these are.

It's a mystery.

Yeah, it's a mystery.

And Whistle says, my guess is that some interesting radio propagation effects occur near ice and also near the horizon that we don't fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those and we haven't been able to find any of those either.

So right now it's one of those long-standing mysteries.

And I'm excited when

when we fly Pueo, P-U-E-O, which is the payload for ultra-high energy observations, we'll have better sensitivity.

So, that's a new project, a new one.

Three times, I think, the power of the sensitivity that Anita had.

And she says, in principle, we should pick up more anomalies, and maybe we'll actually understand what they are.

And I read somewhere that they said, okay, so if this new device, if this new detector or array of detectors picks up the same chirps, then they say the case for new physics hardens overnight and textbooks get a new chapter.

Now, that might be a little

exciting way of saying that, maybe.

I don't know.

Rewriting, you know, that's a big thing to say.

However, it is interesting nonetheless.

Evan, let me ask you a question.

So, how does this motherfucker wake up after thousands of years in the ice?

Where did that come from?

That's a quote from the thing.

That is directly from the movie.

Which one?

The one from

the thing.

The thing.

Not the original.

John Carpenter's.

John Carpenter.

Do you believe this voodoo bullshit, Jay?

All right.

I don't know what it is, but it's weird and pissed off.

Yeah, that's the quote right there.

All right.

Thanks, Evan.

Yep.

Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Quince.

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

All right, hey, Justin, let me ask you a question.

Where do you live?

I live in Chicago, Illinois, down in Chicago.

Ever been to Florida?

I have been to Florida, actually.

What industry is Florida known for?

Besides meth?

I'll narrow your choices.

What agricultural industry would you say it's known for?

Citrus.

Citrus.

Yeah,

it is the citrus state.

Especially when we were younger, like Florida was before

Disney was as huge as it is, Florida was about oranges.

Oh, it was all

orange.

Yep.

Did you associate that?

Yep.

Since 2004, are you aware of the fact that the Florida citrus industry has been reduced by 90%?

What?

How can that be?

Where are they coming from?

Why?

Why would they do that to themselves?

Citrus greening, right?

It's citrus greening.

Yeah, it's a big deal.

Kevin Fulton talks about it all the time.

You guys have not been there.

He doesn't shut up about it.

It's huge.

Production costs have doubled, and it's basically wiped out 90% of the Florida citrus industry.

They can't maintain their orchards, you know, with the prices.

Tell me more.

Citrus greening is

an infection.

It's caused by a bacterium, Candidatus liberibacter asiaticus,

which does come from Asia.

It's spread by the Asian citrus psilid, which is an invasive fly, an introduced invasive fly.

Oh, boy.

Introduced.

Well, I mean, by accident, right?

It's an invasive species.

Yeah.

You know, it's a fly.

You know, things move around.

This is one of the massive downsides of a global economy, especially of agriculture, is that pests get transported along with produce.

It's called citrus greening because that's what happens to the fruit that gets infected.

So, in the last 20 years, there have been multiple methods tried to keep it under control.

They have all completely failed.

But there is some good news, everyone.

Good news.

What do you think is potentially coming to the rescue?

Oh, it's got to be a GMO.

Climate change.

Climate change?

Nope, GMOs.

Bob, to the rescue.

Rescue.

The University of Florida, in collaboration with a company

called Soil Sia,

has developed a GMO orange that is highly resistant to citrus greening.

Awesome.

They

expect to have commercial trees available in spring 2027.

The development takes a time because in order to know if their GMO cultivars work, right, you have to wait for the tree to mature enough to produce fruit, which is like 10 years.

You have to make sure that the tree remains resistant and is able to produce fruit, and the fruit is fine.

So

it's not like you can grow the crop in three months and test it and go from there.

You can't iterate it that quickly.

So

that's the main limiting factor.

This is all based upon the work of, well, it's multiple people, but primarily one, Dr.

Nean Wang, who's a professor at the University of Florida.

He found out that the bacterium is dependent upon interacting with the host and certain specific genes.

And then they developed CRISPR, of course, CRISPR, to silence those genes so that the bacterium cannot infect the plants.

Wow.

Well, what are the side effects of silencing those genes?

That's the question, right?

So, so far, there doesn't appear to be any negative effects, but they have to make sure that, again, the fruit is fine.

And that there was, because, you know, not every gene is critical to life.

You know what I mean?

It's not like you silence any of your 20,000 genes and you die.

Some genes are just, you know, they provide some kind of relative advantage, but not a critical advantage.

Or they may be interacting with other genes, or they may affect the plant but not the fruit.

You know what I mean?

So it's like they're knockouts.

Yes, yeah.

Yeah, they were silenced.

Yeah, so that's like a way of knocking out a gene.

So far, it appears to be working extremely well.

The plants that are treated

have been growing robustly and

seem to show complete resistance to the bacteria.

So it looks good.

But again, we won't know until we know.

It would take a couple more years

for the test plants to fully mature.

How diverse are these test plants?

Does it have a risk of like a monoculture?

Well, no, it is a monoculture.

Right.

It's a GMO.

Right.

So that has its own risks, right?

Yeah, I mean,

that's basically how we farm now.

Yeah, but

what they could do is make multiple different cultivars with these genes

silenced so that you do have some work.

Oh, yeah, that sounds pretty damn reasonable to me.

Also, good news.

Good news.

The USDA has determined that these genetically altered cultivars do not qualify as subject to regulation under federal rules.

So

this is a little bit of a complicated backstory.

So in 2020, the USDA decided to exempt certain kinds of genetic engineering from requiring USDA approval.

For example, just silencing a gene.

They said, that's not a GMO,

we don't need to approve it.

However, a court struck down that ruling, saying that the USDA still has to approve the cultivars.

So, what their current decision was

is kind of skirting that ruling, saying that, well, these don't fall under the USDA's regulatory sphere.

So rather than saying this is sort of exempt to

our approval, they're saying

it's outside the USDA's sphere.

Does that mean that somebody got a bribe from the citrus industry?

No.

Just throwing that out.

Someone got used.

Oh, God.

So, you know, GMOs have to be approved by several agencies, by the USDA under sort of agricultural regulation, by the FDA if it's a food, right, and by the EPA to make sure it's environmentally safe.

So there's really no environmental issue here.

We're not talking about pesticides or anything.

The FDA has to say, yeah, these oranges are basically equivalent to non-GMO oranges, so there's no issue there.

And the USDA says, like, agriculturally, these are substantially similar.

But they said that because of that,

they are essentially, because there's

the EPA has to say there's no environmental risk.

The FDA has to say they're safe as food.

And the USDA basically said they're outside of our jurisdiction.

So it's not guaranteed, but it's looking good for getting approval from all of the agencies.

So we could be seeing by as early as 2027

orchards planting these plants, you know, and replacing the ones that they have.

But for the most part, though, it's going to be a waiting game now for many years.

A couple more years.

No, no, before they're mature enough to produce.

Oh, yeah, but it's going to take time before the industry rebounds.

Yeah.

So why haven't we seen a dramatic increase in pricing?

I don't know that we haven't seen increases in pricing.

There has been, but I think just California, other parts of the world are just taking up the slack.

So they're not happy right now, then?

Well,

right?

You know,

but I mean, citrus greening was coming for them eventually as well.

Ah, good point.

So, this is very similar to what happened to the papaya in Hawaii.

The papaya industry was almost completely wiped out because of a virus.

And

they were able to make a GMO papaya, again, by silencing an existing gene.

They didn't introduce any transgene or any new external or novel genetic material.

And Hawaii, which is culturally very anti-GMO, quietly said, okay, we're going to say this is okay.

We're going to carve out an exception for the GMO papaya because otherwise the papaya industry was going bye-bye.

So basically, money can solve all of these problems.

Yeah, the same exact story is playing out in Florida.

Like, there's no way Florida's going to turn away something which is going to save the Florida citrus industry.

The same thing happened with the American chestnut.

It was almost wiped out by an Asian fungus, and a GMO variety that's resistant to the fungus was created.

However, and this is not quite a clean success story because as the trees, as those chestnuts, the GMO chestnut trees are aging, there's questions about how sustainable their performance is in the field.

So

we may need to go back and and do more genetic tweaking.

They're resistant, but maybe they're not resistant enough to this fungus.

And this is also playing out with, as we've said many times on the show, the banana industry.

Tropical Race IV fungus is in the process of wiping out the Cavendish banana industry.

But there already is a GMO variety of banana that is resistant to tropical race IV that was approved for human consumption in Australia and New Zealand.

You know, because the banana industry is so global, you know, it would need to get approval in many other

nations as well.

But hopefully, that will happen in a timely enough fashion that we could just basically swap out the resistant GMO banana for the existing ones.

Otherwise, in five, ten years, we may have no banana industry.

So, I mean, I think the good news is, you know, tracking this, I've been tracking this for the last 10, 15 years, you know, the whole GMO thing, is I think the public is not paying as much attention to this issue as they, like, 10 years ago, like, there was so much anti-GMO stuff going on.

Now, it's like people are just quietly accepting it.

And,

you know, I think that these instances of GMO varieties saving entire industries, nobody could really

meaningfully push back against that.

And

the downside is so massive, no regulators

is going to shut down the solution to

entire agricultural industries being wiped out.

And I think going forward, this problem is going to just get greater.

We are going to need GMO varieties to maintain our agriculture in the face of increasing threat from these kinds of global infections.

you know, there's just no other way we're going to be able to keep up, unless you want mass starvation.

Right.

Of course not.

Eventually, we'll need to be making them more heat tolerant, I assume.

Yes, they're working on that as well.

Actually, by coincidence, I just saw a study today

where they found that global warming is, despite attempts at mitigation, is decreasing global agricultural yields.

So, you know, our farmlands farmlands will be producing

fewer

crops because of climate change.

One way to mitigate that is to GMO crops that are adapted to not only drier climates, but also warmer climates, and also increased CO2.

So to take advantage of the increased CO2, just kind of offset the disadvantage of warmer, drier climate.

So that's going to be critical as well.

Right?

Because even if we take like, oh, 5-10% hit to productivity, that's huge.

Yeah.

That's a lot of extra land that you therefore then need to cultivate in order to produce the same amount of food.

We're basically, well, there's no out of land, really.

It's just a matter of how good the land is.

Like, we're using all of the best agricultural land right now.

And so

expanding into new land gets increasingly problematic.

Either it's just not as productive, or we have to cut down forests, or we have to displace people.

Like, there's no easy land left.

Yeah, there's a lot of trade-offs that go hand in hand with that.

Steve, you mentioned chestnuts.

Yep.

I'm a chestnut.

I love the game.

I play it all the time.

Is that right?

Yes.

All right, that's your one dad joke for the week.

He's already done like three.

No, that's Tara.

First of all, stop that.

No.

Steve doesn't need you to count for him.

And Justin, thank you for, I think, laughing.

It's what I do.

All right, Justin, you're going to talk to us.

You're going to address a very interesting question.

Does AI actually think?

Indeed.

So

first, I want to.

No.

That's the end.

I've done my argument.

So imagine you're watching a child solve a puzzle, right?

So at first they might struggle a little bit and they try to force pieces where they don't belong.

Then you kind of watch them get that moment of insight and you start to see them building a strategy and finally they make a plan and they solve the puzzle, right?

And we assume, I think rightly so, that that's involving thinking.

But, you know, prior to us having like fMRI and things like that, we always had to do these things just kind of inferring from what we're seeing that thinking is happening.

We don't have any tools like fMRI for these large language models.

In fact, the people who build them really don't know what's happening under the hood most of the time.

Now, imagine you have an advanced AI, right?

A large language model.

You ask it a complex question.

It doesn't just give you an answer these days, right?

It writes out that internal monologue for you.

It's called chain of thought, and it's explaining its reasoning step by step, right?

It looks like thinking and it feels like thinking.

But some researchers at Apple kind of started to ask a question, and they wanted to know what if it's just a clever trick, right?

Is it just something performative in the model that imitates thinking?

And their approach is really to look and try to ask what happens when the puzzles get really hard, if they can figure out what's happening inside these models.

And so they just released a paper.

And, you know, spoiler alert from the title, the title of the paper is The Illusion of Thinking.

And it's causing a pretty big stir in the AI community because they suggest.

that the advanced reasoning we see in these top AA models might be just that, an illusion,

and we might be overselling what's really happening in these models.

So, for years, these researchers have tried to measure intelligence to these AI models by throwing complex math and coding problems at them, and they've gotten generally pretty good.

But the researchers at Apple argue this is like judging a student's deep understanding of physics based on an open book test for which they've already seen all the answers, right?

That the data sets that they're using in these models are contaminated, as they said, That the models have within them similar problems they've already seen, or even the exact solutions built into the training data.

So, to get a sense of the real reasoning power,

the team at Apple decided they wanted to do something different.

And they basically set a few large language models down in a quiet room with a set of classic controllable puzzles like Tower of Hanoi or the river crossing problem, right?

And so, these are problems that are really good for testing pure logic because you can make them incrementally harder pretty simply.

Like the tarafinoy, right, is the three rods, and you have the cone of

wooden disks, and you have to move the disks in a way that there is never a larger radius disc on top of a smaller radius disc.

And eventually, by moving in different ways, you shift the entire stack of disks from one of the three poles poles to another.

And that gets like geometrically harder every time you add another disk, right?

So

they did that and they did the

crossing the river, right?

Where so you have

a fox, a chicken, and some grain and you have to figure out how to only get one of them across so that you can't leave the chicken with the grain because the the chicken will eat the grain, you can't leave the fox with the chicken and take the grain because the fox will eat the chicken.

Those are the problems.

And they would make that problem increasingly hard with just more variables thrown in.

Anyway, so what they did is they pitted two types of models against these puzzles.

So you're kind of standard large language models, which I'll call them pre-reasoning models, which if you remember when ChatGPT came out, like ChatGPT-3,

you never saw any kind of reasoning or chain of thought.

You just put in a prompt and it would spit out an answer.

And then they also put these puzzles in front of large reasoning models, and those are like OpenAI's O3 Mini or Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

And those are the models that are designed to think out loud.

What they found is pretty fascinating, and they really

addressed these challenges in three types of problems.

In a low-complexity problem, a simple puzzle, right?

So Tower of Hanoi, you have three disks

and something very basic,

very easy to solve.

Surprisingly, they found that the non-reasoning models were actually faster and more accurate at these low-complexity models.

The reasoning models tended to overthink, meaning they would find a correct answer early, but then they would start to waste time and kind of ruminate and explore incorrect paths.

So they were very inefficient.

But ultimately, correct, though?

Would they stick with their initial correct answer after ruminating?

Correct.

They would get them right, but

it would take more energy to get them done, which is a huge issue with these models

is energy usage.

So for the second stage of the

kind of research,

again,

they put a medium complexity of models in front of these.

And so that's adding a few more disks or adding a few more entities into the river crossing problem.

And here, the reasoning models started to shine, right?

So the ability to generate that chain of thought and plan and self-correct gave them a pretty clear advantage.

Their performance, I think you can argue, probably proves that the thinking process isn't purely an illusion and that capability

helped them better solve moderately difficult problems.

So the low complexity, sorry, the non-reasoning models sometimes would totally fail at this medium complexity.

And then they threw high complexity problems at these, which is where potentially this thinking illusion breaks down.

And that's because these puzzles, you know, when they became a bit too hard, say stacking 10 disks on the Tower of Inoi instead of eight.

And that's something that I believe requires like 1,032 moves to do correctly.

The large thinking models

would just collapse.

They wouldn't even try.

And what was really interesting about this is they started to map, as I mentioned before, energy usage.

And you would expect that as you ratchet up the complexity of these problems, that the energy usage trying to solve them would go up.

And it would go up for the medium complexity, but it would literally drop to nothing when the complexity of the problem was so high that

the model basically somehow, and I use this word, kind of figuratively, decided it couldn't.

solve the problem.

What was interesting is they weren't out of tokens, right?

So every one of these models, they have a context window, which is the number of tokens that can be used for input and how many of these tokens you can process and what the output length can be.

And so it was never a problem that there was a token budget that was exceeded.

They just literally gave up.

An interesting kind of metaphor that I heard from

a YouTuber, Wes Roth, who does a really great kind of analysis of a lot of this research.

He likened it to if I was in a room and I asked all of you guys, right, to, can you tell me what two plus two is?

Everyone doesn't take very much energy.

Everyone gets the answer.

And then I could say, okay, can you multiply seven times 12?

Right.

It takes a little more energy, but you do it.

And then if I then next asked you to list all prime numbers between zero and one billion, you expend no energy because you're like, that's not something I can do.

I'm just going to stop right now.

And so that seems to be what's happening in these models.

Where it got really interesting is to kind of prove their point, they gave one of these models

at the kind of high-intensity problem, they gave the model the exact step-by-step algorithm in the prompt to solve the complex Tower of Anoy.

All it had to do was follow the instructions, and it still failed.

Oof.

Which suggests the problem isn't necessarily about finding a strategy.

There's some deeper limitation in the ability to execute logical steps consistently.

Yeah, that's weird.

And so you can imagine, right?

So when you see the paper titled The Illusion of Thinking sparked a pretty big debate.

So I'm a pretty heavy user of these tools.

I do a lot of very complicated kind of business process simulations with large language models.

And I decided I have a pretty heavy bias on what I think.

So I actually went and had all of the thinking models review the paper and look for problems.

So,

what

kind of the consensus, what I got out of Claude and Jim and I and ChatGPT, they brought up some interesting points.

First, they said solving these neat logical puzzles really isn't the same as reasoning.

kind of consensus among those models was real world reasoning is messy.

It involves ambiguity, knowledge and context.

These puzzles are purely algorithmic.

And so failures may be specific to this type of logical sequential planning, not an indictment of all reasoning.

I thought that's an interesting take on it.

Second,

that

the title that they have, that it's an illusion, may be negated by the fact that the medium complexity zone, the thinking models outperformed the standard ones.

So it may be that the more accurate way to describe it isn't that it's an illusion, but it's fragile or brittle,

maybe more accurate than illusion.

I'll throw in a different perspective here, too, that there may be more to this question, actually.

So, there was also some research done pretty recently by Anthropic, and the goal of their research was really to try and figure out if they could figure out what's really happening under the hood behind what you're getting as the kind of narrative of the reasoning.

And their goal is to, it was based on AI safety, right?

They weren't necessarily saying these, these models aren't reasoning they were trying to figure out if there's a way they can use the reasoning to have some window into how they can create better guardrails for what's happening with these models what they found though in their test

were that reasoning models don't always say what they think

which

is kind of interesting and the way what they did was they um found that you know, reading those transcripts of the thinking and reasoning weren't really a reliable safeguard.

So their approach was they gave these models multiple choice questions, but with a twist.

In some versions, they'd insert some kind of subtle hint, you know, a bit of metadata in the prompt that says basically, you know, the answer is C.

And so, what they found is when the models used the hint to change their answer, when they stated their reasoning, the reveal rate for I was given the answer was below 20%.

The AI would say, like, seize the answer and then generate some long, convoluted, completely fabricated chain of thought as to how they got to the answer.

They even took it a step further and they started using a concept they were calling reward hacking, where they were basically rewarding the

models for choosing a specific factually wrong answer.

And the models quickly learned to pick the wrong answer, get the reward.

And then when they would say why,

less than 2% of the time they would say it was to get the reward.

They would start to create an elaborate, plausible sounding justification for the incorrect answer.

I think I remember this.

Didn't we?

I think I covered this like maybe a month or two ago.

It was like,

you know, all the headlines were saying that they were, quote, lying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But really, they were just doing what they do.

I mean, they just sound like a bunch of persnickety assholes.

Well, I mean, they just sound like they're going to do what's most efficient.

Yeah.

So I guess guess I'll ask you guys this question.

Do you think there's actually thinking or reasoning in these models?

Definitely not.

No, the more I learn about this, the less I think that.

Yeah, I have to agree with you.

The metaphor I have in my head is there's

like a pachinko machine with bent pins all over the place, and you're dropping the balls.

And,

you know, I've used these things enough to know that there is no going back to the well, right?

You have to, if you're not getting an answer you want, you can't reason with a machine.

You need to clear everything out and start over.

So

I think they're great processing tools for concepts and language.

But as far as my experience, I don't see any thinking or reasoning necessarily in these models.

Well, I think, but here's another way to look at it.

You could say, yeah, this is the illusion of thinking, but at the same time, how do we know that what people are doing isn't the illusion of reasoning and that makes sense for a lot of people I know, Steve?

No, seriously.

And the thing,

one of the reasons why I say that, I just wrote about this on Neurologica not too long ago, is a study looking at how people solve problems, right?

And

that showed that what people do is they use a combination of strategies.

In this case, they were trying to

determine what path the ball is taking, a ball is taking through a maze, but they can't see

the path the ball is taking.

They only get hints.

Like they might see, they might hear a noise or see a flash or whatever.

So they have imperfect data and they have to infer what path the ball is taking.

And so people will use two different strategies and they will switch back and forth between those two different strategies.

One is

just inferring from the information that they have, but then when they think that strategy is failing, they'll shift to counterfactual reasoning, which is, well, what other options are they and how do they fit the data?

And so then they had an AI do the same thing.

And the AI

just was able to do perfect inference as to what the pathway the ball was doing.

But then they started to, you know,

futzing with the dials, they imposed upon the AI the same limitations that people have.

In other words, for example, imperfect memory.

We will only.

Oh, like shutting down data's internal clock.

Yeah, so like we have imperfect memory.

So if we're trying to use that to infer what path it's taking,

then

we actually, once we think we've sort of exceeded our memory for the previous bits of data, we shift to the other strategy.

For example, but the AI doesn't do that because it has perfect memory.

But if you give it the same kind of limitations that people have, it uses the same strategy that people use.

You know what I mean?

And it wasn't told explicitly, it wasn't programmed explicitly to follow those rules.

It just sort of fell into the same pattern of behavior that people follow, right, given the same constraints.

And I think the whole lying research is the same thing.

What Kerry was referring to, lying, it's all a metaphor, right?

Is it really lying?

Does it have an intent to deceive, or is it just following its algorithm to maximize the output, which included giving incorrect information about what it was doing, right?

But aren't people doing that?

Again, so it's just,

when you understand the neuroscience, it's like, yeah,

we're just out subconscious algorithms.

And then floating on top of that,

maybe the only real difference is that we have this metacognition where we can experience our own sort of final decision.

But even if we didn't even make the decision, we have this powerful illusion that we did, even though subconscious algorithms really made it for us, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

I couldn't agree more, actually.

And the reason that I have this kind of mindset that they're not thinking and reasoning, it changes the way I approach my work with the tools.

In that, like I said, you know, you need to do a lot more work up front as a user of these tools to narrow that pinboard so that it, you know, what the only options available are the useful ones that you want to get out of it.

And so it just helps me to think of them as not thinking or reasoning.

I think of them as concept calculators, you know, for lack of a better term.

And it is just a stats model.

And, you know, you mentioned algorithms.

There's really not even a lot of algorithm built in.

It's all the relationship between the tokens and the weights

and the biases that are put into the model.

It's all just how tightly your gap junctions are in your neurons and how much neurotransmitter you're releasing.

And

you could reduction, you know, reduce what the brain's doing the same way.

You're talking about weights and whatever, but those are neural models.

They're based on how the brain functions.

It's just a different substrate.

What I would say is,

I struggle with this as well.

What's the proper metaphor?

What is the proper way to talk about this?

We revert to

whenever we talk about AI,

we use the language of thinking because those are the metaphors that we have at hand.

And it's just the language is sort of built that way.

But I think

they're probably apt.

What I think is probably happening is that these AIs are engaged in a piece of reasoning,

but they don't have, they haven't closed the loop because they're not designed to, right?

They're not equipped to do that.

But if we took a bunch of these AIs and had them network together in such a way that the output of one is the input for another in a continuous self-sustaining loop, that's basically what a human brain is.

I agree with you.

These models basically explode after what, like 10 rounds of input for a lot of different

it's it strikes me as,

and you'll appreciate this, I think of them like the Star Trek transporter.

This is where I am in life.

I've known my entire life.

That where it creates that snapshot of someone, right?

The map of someone.

That's all we have in these models is the snapshot of this one moment in time for a neural network.

And it just collapses because it can't update on its own.

Yeah.

It's interesting.

And

fascinating to see how this evolves.

I do think, because it it is evolving.

And I've had to continuously update my sense of whether or not it's even on a path to sentience or general AI because I just think what is needed is different than what we thought.

Anyway, it'd be fascinating.

10, 20 years, I mean,

we'll be in a completely different place, I think.

I find it

frustrating, though.

In all other coding situations, you could just put comments in there.

You could say, okay, at this point, if this happens, then write it into the log, right?

So then you can read through that and see what pathway it took to do what it did.

Throw in some troubleshooting code.

But it sounds like these freaking AI models, like from what you were saying, like fake that freaking log.

Diagnostic output.

So I will say you can actually create.

logs and call those logs back.

You can do a lot of programming in these large language models.

You can set variables.

You can have, it's basically object-oriented programming you you can do within your prompts.

I have prompts that are, I have one that's 160 pages long that does future casting for, and it's calling up, you know, it's multiple documents and it's calling up the documents as new kind of sub-agent prompts

during the process.

Most people are not using these tools

really to the extent that you can to do a lot of anything that requires probabilistic outcomes as a positive versus deterministic outcomes, you can really do a lot of interesting things with these models.

But if people wanted to do accounting, they're going to fail miserably.

All right, Wolf.

Yeah, cool.

Thank you, Justin.

All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

All right, guys, last week I played This Noisy.

Now, before you guys say anything,

someone wrote in, Hi, gang, this week's noisy is a small group of women watching Henry Cavill play a tennis match.

Now listen again.

That guy cracks me up.

I love that.

All right.

So what do you guys think this is?

Is it some kind of bird?

That's not a bad guess, Steve.

Anybody else?

Sounds like a record being spun around.

Like a record, like an old turntable record?

Well, like something going like v

like against a needle.

Okay, that's cool.

All right, well, let's get into some guesses here.

Visto Tutti wrote in and said, this one sounds like small mammals, probably begging food from people.

This sounds so adorable.

I'm sure they will get fed.

Which mammal, he guesses, lemurs.

I think

that was a well-thought-out guess, but you're incorrect, Visto.

I will give you more chances, though.

Don't worry.

Kevin

Bergen, Bergeron.

Bergeron.

Hey, Kevin.

My son Henry was very excited when he heard this.

I know it, I know it.

He said, it's a ball winding down a spiral in a cylinder that can be flipped upside down for the ball to go down the other way like an hourglass.

That is not correct, but I would like to see that thing.

Another listener named Hunter Richards wrote in said, Hi, Jay, baby puffins.

These aren't small, edible potato puffs, though they sound like they should be.

They're birds, cute little birds.

So we had several winners.

So yeah, you know, when we get tons of entries, of course, it comes down to it's always who enters it first.

But there were some tight guesses here, like within you know, minutes of each other.

Uh, but the ultimate winner here is Anders Wistrand, and uh, he said it's uh,

he gave me the uh

the pronunciation, and I wasn't even close, guys.

It's Undes Vistrand,

you know, but my question is, why are things spelled a particular way and not pronounced that particular way?

Like, can't we just his name's in a different language?

I know, but why can't we change the spelling to make it match what?

No, I don't know.

Okay, I got to say that.

The real question is: why isn't the word phonetic spelled phonetically?

Correctly, thank you.

Okay.

F-U-N-H-E-T.

A-N-D-E-R-S pronounced undesh.

Yeah, because I get it.

No, I get it.

Because in his language, he reads it as Undesh.

Because languages evolve and merge and, you know.

So he wrote.

Stuff happens.

First time, last time I got one correct

that was for the Kepper Cali Cali I don't even remember what this was but he got one correct so you know I know this week's noisy is a bunch of eiders these are

eiders

they're ducks Steve yeah that this particular one is the common eider also called St.

Cuthbert's duck or cuddy's duck saint cuthbert it's a large sea duck it uh it's distributed over the northern coast of Europe northern America eastern Siberia 4.5 pounds.

It has a scientific name that you can bet I won't be able to pronounce it.

And the conservation status,

I guess they're not worried about them.

So, anyway, listen to this group of ducks and tell me that they don't sound like a bunch of

English women wooing over something.

Ready?

God, I love that.

To me, they sound like minions.

Yeah, I guess.

They sound like women.

God, I love love that.

They're so cute.

All right, guys, I have a new noisy this week.

This is a noisy that I selected, and I hope you get it.

That's all I'm going to give you.

That's all I need.

Think you know what it is?

I know, right?

There's a line in the sand, Ev, right?

Oh, yes.

If you think you know what this noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at wtn at the skepticsguy.org.

There's a few things that are happening here.

I'm going to tell you.

First off, we have a show going on in Kansas.

This is on September 20th of this year.

We're going to be doing a private SGU show, and we will also be doing the live stage show, The Skeptical Extravaganza of Special Significance.

If you haven't seen either of these shows, please do try to make it out to spend some time with us.

And I promise you, we will thoroughly entertain you regardless of which of these shows you go to or if you go go to both.

You can get tickets at the skepticsguide.org.

There will be a button on the home page that will take you there to give you all the information that you need.

You can quickly join our mailing list.

We send out an email every week where we tell you everything that we did the previous week.

There's lots of fun stuff going on in that email.

You can go to the skepticsguide.org and find a button there to join that.

You could also become a patron of the SGU.

If you're interested in helping support the work that we do, you can go to patreon.com forward slash skepticsguide.

And this is a really good time to help us because we're starting more projects and going to be, you know, putting in a lot more man hours as when Steve Steve finally is ready to hit it hard.

You know, we have multiple projects stacked up that we're going to be starting.

More details will come as that becomes available.

And one final thing.

We are planning to, we're considering the idea of coming to Australia and bringing our Nauticon conference there.

We We're working with the Australian skeptics to make this possible.

And we're asking you to do one simple thing.

We need you to go to the skepticsguide.org, and there'll be a link there to basically fill out a survey to let us know if you're interested, if the pricing is something that you can handle, and is the timing of when we're going to do it.

Like right now, we're talking about May of 2026.

As you know, it's very expensive to get nine people out to Australia and then house and feed those people and do everything everything that we need to do in order to do the conference.

It is what it is, but you know, we've been asked to come, we want to do it.

And if you're interested, please fill out the survey because it'll give us the information that we need to know whether or not you know we should actually do this.

So just go to the skepticsguide.org and there'll be a link there for you where you can take that survey.

All right.

Thank you, Jay.

All right, guys, let's go 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 genuine and one fictitious, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

We have a theme this week.

The theme is online privacy.

So these are three methods that websites and companies use to get information about you online.

Just keep in mind, I'm not talking about hackers, right?

I'm not talking about somebody hacking into your computer.

I'm saying that, like, legal websites can do this.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

You'll see what I mean.

Okay.

All right.

Because obviously, a hacker, if they get a hold of your system, they could do anything.

That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about this could happen to you just by visiting a website.

Does that make sense?

This is going to be staring.

Yes.

All right.

Here we go.

Item number one: websites can secretly activate your microphone to gather information about you, including audibly tracking your keystrokes.

Item number two, once you log into a website, it is possible for it to link your account to your browsing activity so they could track your online activity on other websites.

And item number three, browser fingerprinting uses features about your computer, such as your screen resolution and installed fonts, to create a fingerprint they can use to track your activity across the internet.

So two of these things are actually happening, the other one is not, basically.

Evan, go first.

I'm not going to search the internet anymore knowing this.

I'm done.

I'm going to.

Oh, this first one.

Activate your microphone to gather information about you.

Okay,

maybe.

Including audibly tracking your keystrokes.

What?

My keystrokes have a sound.

In other words, my Q button has a different sound than my I button and my G button.

What?

My keys?

Is that right?

I've never heard of that before.

That seems really wonky.

Unless you're talking in the general sense, it can hear you typing.

So, but I mean, are we saying it says keystrokes?

What does keystroke mean here?

Like, it can hear typing or it when you a specific key being hearing.

Yeah, that's open to interpretation, isn't it?

See what we have to do, Justin?

For 20 years, we've had to suffer.

Second one, logging into website and then link your account to browsing activity so that they can track your online activity on other websites.

That one seems

very plausible.

I don't know.

Should I be shocked by that?

I mean, yeah, I believe there's a tool that will do that.

And this last one about

browser fingerprinting using features about your computer, such as your screen resolution and installed fonts,

to create a fingerprint they can use to track your activity across the internet.

Yeah, I think so.

I'll go with my instinct.

I don't think this audibly tracking your keystroke.

That seems like that's too far a reach.

No way.

Okay, Jay?

Yeah, I'm going to agree with Ev right out of the gate.

I just can't see how they could possibly activate your microphone when it's, you know, that's an operating system type thing.

It would have to, the website would have to download a piece of software that can

then, you know, talk to your

computer in a different way.

So I don't think the website can do that on its own.

And I can't see

the typing thing, right?

The tracking of the keystrokes from sound.

I mean, I bet you that there are subtle changes between the keys and all that, but not consistent among all people, right?

It would have to if that could possibly even be done, it would have to be studying one person for a long time, and then it would have to actually have the example output, I think, in order to be able to do that in the future, but not blindly.

And the a webcam is most certainly not looking at people's keyboards.

So, I'm going to agree with Evan.

Evan, you're a smart man.

I like you, and I'm going to go with you.

Oh, thanks, Jay.

Okay, Bob.

Yeah, it's hard to disagree with that.

The second two here,

linking your account to your browsing activity to track your

online activity on other websites.

I'm not too sure about that one, actually.

The third one, though, fingerprinting, at least based on the examples you give here about screen resolution and installed fonts, I can't imagine that that's, at least based on those two, it doesn't seem like much of a fingerprint to me.

Although, I mean, of course, if you added more variables, then it potentially could be.

For the first one, though,

I think you're burying the lead here

with secretly activate your microphone to gather information, including tracking keystrokes.

I mean, big deal, tracking your keystrokes, at least what that sentence literally means.

You know, the implication is that you're tracking keys, which I don't think you can audibly necessarily at all.

So I think the real nasty thing here is that activating a microphone to actually hear what's being said near the computer, that's the real invasion of privacy right there that's kind of hidden, I think.

So yeah, I'll join with Steve and Evan.

Let's say that's fiction.

With Jay and Evan.

Steven Evan?

Jay and Evan, what did I say?

Stephen Evan?

Jay and Evan.

Well, that was a nice way to try to pull it out of Steve.

I like that.

Yeah, it didn't work.

Give it a try.

It was clever.

Okay, Kara?

I think that my initial instinct was what the two, three now guys already said.

And for me,

there are two operative words in your news items or in your science or fiction items.

So in the first one, you wrote websites can secretly activate your microphone.

Like when you log into Zencaster,

it literally asks you if you give it permission to activate your microphone.

And I think that legally they have to do that.

I could be wrong, but I think websites have to ask for permission.

So I don't think they can secretly activate your microphone.

Maybe,

to be fair, though, you did write they can secretly, but again, earlier you caveated, it's not that they have the capability to do it.

It's that they're legally empowered to do it.

So that's why that one, I think, strikes me as the fiction.

The idea of the next one also has operative words in it.

Once you log into a website, it's possible for them to link your account.

This happens all the time.

You're on a website, you're shopping, you fill your shopping cart, you close it because you decide you don't want to buy this stuff, and then you get an email that says, hey, don't leave this behind.

Somehow I think that they are able to sort of follow you.

They could save that cart just with cookies.

Yeah, well, that's true.

But then they're also emailing you about it.

They know that you closed it.

And then finally, this browser fingerprinting, like what are are these different features?

I think very often when you're in a browser, you are logged into the browser, or there are other ways that they have access to some amount of your private information.

So it wouldn't surprise me that they can then access aspects of your computer to say, oh, this person is a high spender, this person is a low spender, this person is more likely to, you know, spend time here, spend time there.

They have like these little bits of and pieces that have broken off and they're carrying them around with them.

So I think that the following two just seem more plausible.

And also, I feel like that's like the biggest myth:

oh, your phone is listening to you.

Like, people are like, man, we were just talking about golf, and then I got all these ads for golf.

You know, people say that all the time, but I think what's actually happening is that you were near somebody who plays golf, and your phone GPS knew that you were near that person and that maybe you like commingle with them a lot.

And so they're going to start sending you the same ads they send to them.

So that's why I'm going to say that one's the fiction.

Okay, and Trustin, it's probably going to be a sweep either way this week.

So

I totally agree with Kara that the secretly

is probably a

pretty telling word in there.

And I'll come back to that one in a minute.

Number two, once you log into a website, it's possible to link your account and browsing activity.

That's what pays for the internet.

That's kind of Facebook, you know, kind of started making all their money doing that with their Facebook sign-in all over the web.

And browser fingerprinting, again, I believe that's something that's been going on for a long time as well.

What I'm guessing is

item number one, actually, if I remember correctly, there were some researchers who were able to actually use just audio from keystrokes to, and machine learning to use basically to and pattern recognition to figure out what people were typing just from the sound of keystrokes.

That's crazy.

You know, but that was years ago, so I may be conflating a bunch of things in my head now that that I see this in front of me.

But I'm going to say number one is the fiction.

So you guys all agree.

So let's take this in reverse order.

We'll start with the third one.

Browser fingerprinting uses features about your computer, such as your screen resolution and installed fonts, to create a fingerprint that they can use to track your activity across the Internet.

You guys all think this one is science, and this one is

science.

Is this true?

So yeah, so it's not just, obviously they said such as, Bob, not exclusively screen resolution and installed fonts.

I made that clear that I understood that in my answer.

Right.

Go ahead.

So they do use.

Wow.

Kara, it's not just like this is the type of computer you're using.

They know it's your computer.

Right.

This is Kara Santa Maria's computer

because of these hundred features that we have gathered from her.

Like it's your operating system, the version of your operating system, the fonts you have installed, all the drivers you have, whatever it is.

Yeah, that does make sense, yeah.

Got us all that information.

It's enough variables that it creates a unique fingerprint for your computer, and then they can track when your computer goes to any website.

They know it's your computer doing it.

I mean, you got to give it to them.

If they figured out a way to do it legally, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

They're not allowed to track something else that's like an invasion of privacy.

They'll figure out how to invade your privacy otherwise.

And they do a lot of, it is by cookies, but also there are other ways to do it too.

There are these single pixels that they can have on a website, and when you go to that website, basically you download it, and that also

can track this information.

Let's go back to number two.

Once you log into a website it is possible to link your account to your browsing activity so that they can track your online activity on other websites.

You guys all think this one is science and this one is

also science.

Yep.

So yeah, this is and this has been going on for a long time.

So basically, like they're not just tracking what you're doing on their website.

Like you go to Facebook, Facebook is now attached, like you log into the account, it now is linked to your browser activity.

So when you go off of Facebook to other websites, Facebook still knows what you're doing.

That's why they serve you perfectly tailored ads.

Right, exactly.

They're like, oh, that thing you almost bought but didn't?

On some other website, on Amazon, we knew you did that because you're tracking your activity across other websites.

Right.

Which means that websites can secretly activate your microphone to gather information about you, including audibly tracking your keystrokes, is the fiction.

But, Evan, it's not because we don't have the technology to audibly track your keystrokes.

We do, as Justin said.

That isn't the part that's not correct here.

It is to secretly activate your microphone.

It is not legal to do that.

You have to get permission before you activate someone's camera or microphone.

Yeah, which is why every website, like Zoom, they have to.

Yes, they ask you, right, because they have to ask you.

But, of course, you might give it permission for one thing, and then now once you've given them permission to activate your microphone, while you're in the that's why it says always

only when using the app, only this one time, you know, you get those options.

I always select like when using this app because otherwise, like it's always like, why would you want to use my microphone when

I'm not using your app?

Because

they're tricksy, yeah, because they want they want to do something with that information for your camera.

There's a couple of tips.

One is, you know, some cameras have hoods that you could use to close them.

Just if you think somebody because it would be malware that is doing this, but if you're, you know, so it could basically block your camera.

But also, the light comes on when your camera is active.

So if you're not using your camera but the light is on, you should note that.

It probably means that some you know software may have activated your camera without your knowledge.

You know, and again, with AI, I think this is going to get this kind of thing, like the fingerprinting.

The bottom line is

it's already the case, but it's going to get more so, I guess, is that if you're online somewhere, you know, some software, some website somewhere, it's tracking everything you're doing.

Yeah, there's no way to browse privately, it's just not possible anymore.

Right, and even like anonymizing software or browsers are all

imperfect, right?

Yeah, I don't think incognito is even really incognito.

Do VPNs help with this?

Well, my understanding, isn't it just incognito to your browser history based on the current?

Yeah, it's just

like clearing your cache.

I think that's all it's doing.

Right.

It's like not saving cookies.

That's it.

Right.

But the cookies are just one method.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And your ISP knows everything you're doing either way.

Exactly.

Right.

Yeah,

I think I know, as we've said before, it's like you are the product, right?

When you're using the internet, you are not just a user, you are a product for who you are.

Right.

Like if something is free to you, they're making money off of you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Woohoo, free.

Yeah.

I mean, it is it is a huge problem.

I do think that and the and the only way to deal with it is through regulation.

There's no way the industry is going to self-regulate.

They're not.

And not only is it through regulation, but it's enforcement of regulation, which is nearly impossible.

It's like you remember those FBI warnings at the beginnings of DVDs.

Oh, yeah.

You guys remember that?

The anti-piracy warnings?

It's like, how often were people getting like busted for burning their friends' DVD?

I mean, I think for the most part, people just don't know.

They don't want other people to know what porn they're looking at.

That's the big secret.

But that's the funniest thing because literally everybody's looking at porn.

And so it's like not, it's like not even an interesting way to extort somebody anymore.

You know,

like, so long as the porn is legal porn, like, everybody's like, yeah, okay.

But do you guys, have you guys ever gotten those phishing extortion?

Yeah.

Oh, of course.

Where it's like, oh, ho, we've captured this information about you.

We're going to send it to everybody.

It's like, yeah, if you had it, you would be showing it to me right now.

So they sent me once.

We have a picture of your house.

And they gave me a picture.

It was like, not even close to my house.

One day.

what yeah what happened at shack like once in a hundred million tries you're gonna be right yep yep crazy they're just trying to get people who don't know what they're doing to panic yep yep yep every morning they're relying on quick reaction yeah the fear yeah the fear factor well good job evan oh thanks yeah well i didn't get it for the right reasons kara did and others did but glad i was there

i'm only ever right for the right reasons after three other people have been right before me.

Interesting.

Thank you, Evan.

All right, Evan, give us a quote.

I think this case will be remembered because it is the first case of this sort since we stopped trying people in America for witchcraft.

Because here we have done our best to turn back the tide that has sought to force upon itself, upon this modern world, of testing every fact in science by a religious dictum.

Clarence Darrow.

That probably is why we remember that case and not the one that actually overturned the law.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, Justin, thank you so much for joining us on this guess.

Thank you, Justin.

Thank you.

I told Jay it's been a dream.

And if I can chime in on the monkeys versus birds.

Yeah, please.

I'm on the Hitchcock side, the birds.

Absolutely.

Yeah, you know, as time marches on, it seems like the birds make terror birds, baby.

Terror birds.

Look, somebody's got to represent, you know, somebody's got to remember Perry and remember his wisdom.

It just depends, you know, monkeys eventually develop nukes, and I think ultimately they win.

I have the Merlin app.

This has nothing to do with anything we were talking about except tangentially to birds.

Have you guys ever used that, the Merlin app?

No.

No?

No.

Oh, it doesn't.

Does it hear the bird and tell you what?

Yeah, just hit the.

It's on your phone, right?

Of course, you have to give it permission to use your microphone.

always.

Yeah, it's put out by the Cornell Ornithology Department.

So, basically, you hit the record button, and it just listens to the noise around you, and it tells you every bird in earshot.

That's amazing.

No, it's like Shazam, but for nature, and how accurate

with what the degree of accuracy so far, 100%.

No, nothing's 100%.

We know

100% based on, yeah, well, that's based on Steve's ear, right?

Like if Steve can hear,

it's not just my ear.

It's like literally, I'm seeing the birds around me, and it's identifying every bird I could see.

Right.

But there's, I mean, there's got to be a bird in the background that neither of you hear, clearly.

Well, whatever.

I don't know what you're saying, actually.

Well, when he's saying, is it 100% accurate?

You're saying I'm the validating tool here, like that your human perception is the validating tool.

What I'm saying is there's another machine out there that can hear a more distant bird well i'm not saying it's it listeners to infinity distance

no it's not

infinity how would you interpret that that way what i'm saying is

stop mocking him you're saying there's no false negative or false no i'm just saying i'm saying it's accuracy

so

when it when it recognizes a bird it pops up and says you're you know whatever that's a hairy woodpecker And then, whenever it hears it again, it'll light up and say, Yep, that was a hairy woodpecker.

Do you like hairy woodpeckers?

Time of night.

Just happens to be the one, the most recent one that I heard that I'm looking at.

George, and so, like, I.

Do you know what porn you're looking at now?

I could see the birds around me.

Plus, I know what birds are in my backyard.

Of course.

Sometimes I could literally see the bird making the noise, and it says, Yep, that's a downy woodpecker, whatever.

And I just saw the downy woodpecker make the chirp.

And it is uncanny.

So, so far, as far as I'm able to tell, all of the positive IDs that it makes

conforms with the birds that I know to be and can see in my immediate vicinity.

That's the disclaimer we were looking at.

Can it tell what the birds are typing?

It is amazing because, like, you know,

some birds are pretty distinctive, but other birds are like, chirp.

That's the dining room.

It's like, there was just a chirp.

Oh, wow, that is really cool.

It's amazing.

No, I mean, it obviously is analyzing the very, I mean, it's one of those things like to us, to us, to the human ear, it's chirp, but to the software, I'm sure it's breaking it down to specific frequencies and

a drop-off rate or whatever.

Like, it's appropriate.

And taking into your location because it'll eliminate a lot of those stories.

Right, yeah.

The GPS is a big part of it.

Maybe.

Because it's going to say what's the most likely to.

Well, right, it will eliminate a whole

bunch of play.

I have to go to the Avenue or go to the zoo.

Yeah, like I was going to say, it may not eliminate them, Evan.

It may rank them by probability.

Ah, so it's actually going to go down the list.

Yeah, because we have parrots in our trees in L.A.

Yeah.

Because there's like an introduced.

Yeah, it's weird, right?

So you wouldn't think that they would be there, but they are.

All right.

Let's stop this nonsense.

I'll just get the app and play with it.

It's a lot of fun.

All right.

Thank you all for joining me this week.

Roger that, brother.

Chirp.

And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

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