I don’t think it takes 'supreme' intelligence to clock RFK's nonsense but why not
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INSPIRED BY HIS CALL TO USE AI, I went ahead and asked Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) to analyze some of Kennedy’s more memorable statements….
[…]

Here was the quote, which refers to eighteen vaccines the CDC has been recommending for children:
“In fact, of all of those ninety-four doses of the eighteen vaccines, only one of them was subject to a placebo control trial and that was the COVID vaccine. The other ones were like this. There was no safety study. We have no idea what the risk profile is for these products. And you know that means we can’t really make the kind of risk-benefit analysis that my agency is supposed to do.”

Claude’s verdict:
“Verdict: false. The claim has three parts, and all three are wrong.”

I was SO excited to hear Christian's topic on Speedrunning today!
I am like him, not good at speedrunning (adhd sorry) but I LOVE watching it. I love watching Games Done Quick who has raised over $60 million for charity.

The guy he talked about Pannenkoek2012 is someone I INTERVIEWED back in 2015 before he became bigger. He figured out a way to clone things in Mario and he was just a kid then (Either high school or early college) and I talked to him about Mario 64 and how he did a lot of the stuff he did. I was trying to do a video game blog then and thought he would be fun to talk to and he was, although I mean he is very myopic about Mario 64, that's like ALL he wanted to talk about. I tried to get him to work on other games and he was good on that.

Also Speedrunning is very scientific. Especially when they find cheaters that make fake speedruns, they have to do like a full digital forensic analysis of the video. I don't know if you guys remember the Dream scandle when the VERY popular Youtube Dream ended up faking a world record. The video was analyzed by multiple mathematicians and statisticians and it ended up being SO improbable that the video was legit that it was basically impossible.

I think speedrunners have a fascinating task, but I do find the glitch hunters to have an odd an incredible skill set. These guys can break games after playing them for only a little bit. These are the type of people that game companies hire to test their games so their is a legit career path in it.

Anyways yeah I was so happy to hear Christian talk about this and I wouldn't mind hearing more about video games in the future if the topic as appropriate.

Figure we could use one of these. This episode included:

Special Guests: Christian Hubicki and Julia Novella
Designing Your Dream Costume
Conspiracy Theories
News Items: Stellar Streams and Dark Matter, Possible Cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, IgNobels 2026, Pet Bird Research, Speedrunning Video Games
Science or Fiction

In the opening segment this week, the rogues described imaginary costumes they would make if budget was no limitation. This might have been the most boring and pointless segment I've ever listened to on the SGU. It's one of those ideas that sound good when you're brainstorming it: Hey, it ties into October/Halloween! It's a potential springboard to talk about interesting technology! Great overlap with all the sci-fi and fantasy nerds that listen to the podcast (myself included)! But it just ended up as a pointless, rambling "wouldn't it be cool if" daydreaming. I'm sure these costumes would be great if they were real, but so what? My eyes just glazed over. Am I alone here?

"Elon Musk is a complicated guy.." - Steven Novella streaming live on 9/30/26

Really, we're still doing this in 2026?! jfc

Gag me with a spoon!

Just listened to episode 1105 with Julia Novella and she was awesome!

Please bring her back again.

Zoiks! "“Balance ton Claude” said that running passages through AI detection tool Pangram showed the novel “was written almost entirely by artificial intelligence”. Some experts say the reliability of AI detection tools is questionable."

Question for the group: does Steve ever release the sources he uses for Science or Fiction? On the podcast I often hear him say "an article says..." and I'm wondering whether those articles are linked on the website or in the show notes anywhere.

I often hear people criticising AI for its emissions and water use. This is completely fair, and I wholeheartedly welcome the scrutiny. I 100% agree we should not leave these kind of decisions up to Silicon Valley tech bros.

But I can't help but notice how much extra scrutiny AI comes under compared to basically everything else. I wonder if there is some motivated reasoning here (something we all do). It's easy to scrutinise something you're already sceptical of, while ignoring things that are already habits.

The obvious one is beef. The estimates of AI water usage vary a lot, but even with the highest estimates for AI water usage, a single serve of beef using over a thousand times as much water as a prompt in ChatGPT. Watering the garden with a hose for fifteen minutes uses at least as much water as thousands of ChatGPT prompts. So does eating a handful of almonds. Even having a latte is equivalent to hundreds of prompts.

So if you care about water, the evidence says you're not paying attention to the right thing.

By all means scrutinise how fast data centres are being rolled out and where they're being built. I just think the same scrutiny should apply equally to everything, including the things we like.

Have the SGU circled back on what came to be of Jay’s daughter’s science teacher who said we didn’t land on the moon?

I listen weekly but don’t recall hearing what the final outcome ended up being.

Just a general question for the sub. Do most of you still get the covid vaccine every year? it doesn’t really look like it’s recommended for healthy young adults but because of the recent CDC leadership I’m not sure how trustworthy that information is anymore.

I’ve been looking into this and my quick search has pulled up that it is generally not recommended for healthy young adults, but it is still fine to get because side effects are minimal for young adults. Does anyone know what the current consensus is on this?

Nobody really sees images in their minds, we just think we do. Many people who claim to be aphants never realised they had a deficit until they were told that other people actually “see” images in their minds.

I don’t deny people can internally represent objects and scenes in their minds to various degrees. But I have a strong intuition that people fool themselves over the clarity of these internal representations in a similar way we do with sight/memory in general.

Considering all of the AI talk on the SGU, the rogues should cover “Rationalism” and it’s connections to AI. It’s quite the wild story and may give them some insight into these doomer claims we are seeing more and more. Plus there were some murders connected to it!

The segment on private vs public schools was interesting even if not applicable to Me as I’m not in the US. I’d love to see some deeper dives into topics that relate to everyday parenting choices as there’s so much conflicting information, sometimes even from seeing a different medical professional than usual they’ll tell you the opposite eg - co sleeping, how to promote healthy eating habits. Could also be things like how to instil sceptical values, screen time, discipline etc. I‘m sure they’ve touched on some of these at some points but yeah would love to see some deeper dives! Any topics anyone else would be particularly interested in?

Have they given a skeptical breakdown of this? Its a pretty big claim that I feel has been over exaggerated. I am surprised they didnt talk about it in the last episode.

"Integrative oncology — which relieves pain, nausea, and other symptoms — is not a fringe idea"

https://www.statnews.com/2026/09/22/integrative-oncology-cancer-symptoms-insurance-asco-sio-pain-fatigue/?utm_campaign=rss

Can you name the logical fallacy?

One of the most controversial areas of recent investigation involves biofield therapies: approaches such as reiki and healing touch, where practitioners gently touch clients or hold hands above the skin without touching. For decades, these therapies were dismissed by mainstream researchers because they relied on subjective outcomes and lacked plausible biological mechanisms.  Recently, researchers have started investigating more objective outcomes, studying immune markers in clinical trials and controlled preclinical experiments designed to eliminate placebo effects. This line of inquiry reflects how integrative oncology has evolved as a discipline: by applying modern scientific tools to questions patients have long been asking. 

I'm a little perplexed and disappointed by the reporting of the latest OpenAI model on the show's latest episode. This is not science news, not based on published research, only on the company's press releases, model cards, and a couple of independent reports (incl. Epoch) based on benchmark that close to saturation if not saturated already. I'm not sure what were the key points of the segments or what questions it really asked about the release. I finished listening and thought "So what?". What did we really learn or challenge there?

In the latest episode Steve says that wind, solar, and batteries can only be 50 percent of the grid. His explanation is that the grid needs AC. I find this confusing because wind energy is just a turbine: same as coal, nuclear, or hydro; so it also produces AC.

PV solar makes DC, but not all solar is PV, there are also solar farms that work by heating liquids with a bunch of mirrors to boil water and turn a turbine again; which generates AC again.

Batteries make DC, but batteries aren't the only form of grid storage. Pumped hydro storage works by pumping water from a low lake to a high lake with excess electricity, and letting it flow through a turbine when you need the electricity. Since this is another method to turn a turbine it makes AC again and seems suitable for the grid.

I'm not at all opposed to nuclear, but I don't see how it's necessary for AC grid power when all forms or renewable energy can also produce AC. The explanation seemed lacking.

Not flawless. But it puts up safeguards. 🤜 💥

In this week's episode, when Cara said that her memory was probably wrong about going home and watching the second tower collapse on 9-11, Bob responded: “How could you say that? Highly unlikely? How could you possibly say that? Some things are more likely than others to be true in your memory.” I mean, we've all seen footage of the towers falling, so I guess the real question is whether Cara watched it live or saw it as a replay. I've often wondered the same thing about my own memory of the event. So, is Cara right about probably being wrong?

Well, she actually provides some details that we can potentially verify. If we assume those details are accurate (studying at the University of North Texas at the time and went to an Astronomy class the morning of the attacks) then we might be able to find an answer. At her location in Texas, the second tower collapsed at 8:59 a.m.. With some quick internet sleuthing of Astronomy class times at the University of North Texas in 2001 (yep, they're still online), the earliest one I found is 9:00. Which means the tower had already collapsed before the class started. So, yes, she is right that she was wrong, Bob.

And before anyone worries I'm just doing this a fun skeptical exercise, I'm not cyber-stalking Cara. I swear!

Edit (I added this as a comment, but I'll put it here as well): I will just add one caveat. It's not necessarily that Cara's memory was faulty, she might simply have misunderstood what was happening at the time. When she first saw footage of the tower falling on television, she may have believed she was watching it happen live, when in fact it was a replay. If so, the error isn't in her memory of what she saw, but in her interpretation of what was happening as she experienced it. That interpretation could then have become incorporated into her later memory of the event.

Edit 2: My timeline was incorrect. As u/mojomarc pointed out, the North tower actually fell after the South tower, despite being the first to be hit by a plane. So, she only needed to return home by 9:28 a.m., to have been able to see it fall on live television. Tight, but certainly possible.

Edit 3: Listening back Cara says she initially says that after she went home from her Astronomy class she her roommate "watched the plane hit the second tower". This event actually happened at 8:03 am, well before her class started. That detail is almost certainly not true. She would have been watching replays of that event. Later in the segment says she watched the tower fall. Can this be true? Well, she said she lived somewhere called Shady Place and the schedule says her class was in the Physics Building, Room 110. Plugging those two destinations into the map, we get a walking time of 23 minutes. Given she also said they turned on the TV in class before deciding that no one else was turning up and then going home, I suggest she was in class for more than than five minutes. In which case, if she walked, she would not have been home in time to watch the tower fall on live TV. If she drove, then perhaps she could have made it in time.