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Chapter 1: What is the purpose of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast?
You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, June 17th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And we have two guests, George Robb. It's June, everybody. Hey. And Andrea Jones-Roy.
It's also June where I am.
No time travel here. Thank you guys for joining us. So Evan is off this week and Cara said that it was okay if I told everybody that she's getting a colonoscopy.
Good for her.
I think she's having a camera up her butt right as we speak.
Wow. And she didn't want to join and keep us posted on how it's going?
She's actually streaming.
She is streaming. From the colonoscopy? That's right.
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Chapter 2: What personal updates do the hosts share about their health?
Okay, me too.
I haven't. Am I the only one in the club? Oh, man. Or not in the club, as the case may be. I gotta go. I gotta make an appointment.
Yeah, I'm a little behind in my... I gotta make it happen soon.
I'm in arrears with my doctor.
Arrears. I love it. Oh, sweet. I'm thinking of doing it before the big trip, LA, Sydney, New Zealand.
Yeah, because you don't want to do it on the back end.
Very good.
Who's being cheeky now?
Come on. Overall, I have to say this is a great analysis.
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Chapter 3: How does the discussion shift towards colonoscopies?
Okay.
Unless you have family history.
Okay. Okay.
Or you have symptoms. Okay. All right. Or like blood coming out there.
All right. We'll do a quick exam and then we'll report back. Good. Yeah.
Yeah. All right. It's nothing. Now, the thing is, I've noticed, you know, over the last 30 years of my life, getting occasional procedures is they got the conscious sedation dialed in pretty well now. Even when I was talking to the doctor for my more recent colonoscopy, this is my second one, I said, for the first one, I actually woke up in the middle of my upper GI.
No way. Were you in horrible pain? What happened?
Well, you're just like, what am I choking on? You're like, you have no idea what's going on, right? You're just so stupid.
Are you intubated?
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Chapter 4: What insights are shared about colon cancer and its rising rates?
But yeah, I mean, there's going to be audience members on stage. We're going to be talking to the audience all the time. There's lots of... There's interaction that I can't reveal because it's secret to this specific conference.
We can say at the last Not A Con, Jay formed a cult with some of the audience members.
Which is still active. It was a very convincing cult. Jay, I'm still upset that I haven't been inaugurated as a member. So we'll talk after this.
Well, we'll talk. I mean, this is, you know... If you don't understand the shark fin reference, that's because you are indoctrinated. But those of us who were there, it's so funny you say that because we were just at PsyCon and I had a couple of people who were with me at that Nauticon in my group flash me our secret sign.
Oh my God, that's awesome.
It thoroughly entertains me that that is still alive after two years. It's awesome. So yeah, join us, guys. We're going to have a great time. You're not going to want to miss it. And going to SciCon showed me it's great to regroup with old friends. I hadn't seen a lot of those people in a long time. It was really nice to catch up.
So that's another thing you can do is just meet some of your friends you haven't had the opportunity to see. So we hope you join us.
We had one of our best extravaganzas that we ever had at, at Saigon. And that, that show is just so dialed in. It's just so dialed in and fun and people were loving it. The response was really, really great. So you get a chance to come see us do this international extravaganza, which is just a, just a blast.
You had a spontaneous participation by Bill Nye, the science guy. Seriously. Who none of us knew were in the audience because the lights were in our eyes. We couldn't see anything. He's like in the third row. Anyway, that was cool. But in Australia, in Sydney, George, we're going to have Australia's Bill Nye, which I'm informed Bill Nye is America's this guy. And that's Dr. Carl.
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Chapter 5: What are the claims about piano teaching methods and their effectiveness?
That doesn't exist. So this is a made up statistic. It's like anecdotal and conjecture. It sounds right. 80% of students quit piano after a year. Like that sounds that could be a thing, but there's no way to really even tell that. They talk about how they're normally it takes 12 years to achieve success.
Like the equivalent of a black belt in piano, which they associated with this ABRSM, which is the Associated Board of the Royal School of Music Diploma, which is sort of a test and that's a thing that exists. It's a legit thing. They say that normally it takes 12 years to get to that level, that black belt level. But their students can do it in four.
96% of their students can get to that high level of piano pedagogy in four years. Which, it made me wonder, where are all of these students then if they're doing this in four years? You know, let's say you start playing piano or taking lessons at nine years. 10, you should have 14, 15, 16 year olds that have these, you know, supposed 12 years of traditional piano knowledge behind them.
Chapter 6: How do the piano teaching methods compare to traditional ones?
And they just sort of weren't there. It's like there's none on their website. There was none in the 60 Minutes story. There should be just like covered in all of these kids having all this information. And you would think if they did exist, they would absolutely showcase it. That's the thing. That would be front and center. Yeah.
They claim that other piano methods, current piano methods are all stuck in the 1700s in the same time as Mozart. You know, they come and they say. Piano teachers today teach exactly the same way they taught in Mozart's time, which is complete nonsense. You know, repertoire, methods. I mean, even the instrument itself is different than it was in the 1700s.
They say in the pie and method, we give students the choice of songs and traditional music lessons do not. That's also bunk.
Chapter 7: What are the implications of the claims made about piano student success rates?
You go to any piano teacher, they will have books of video game music and popular songs and whatever the kids want to learn. They will have music for because to get a kid interested, you don't necessarily want them playing Mozart attitudes. If they want to do, you know, let the theme to Legend of Zelda. They're all about that. So that's nonsense.
They talk about how mentorship is only available in the Payam method. Nonsense. I mean, mentorship is like all teachers, all music teachers are interested in mentoring. They talk about custom curriculum based on activity. Sorry, based on ability. Again, like... It exists in every other teaching method. It's very, very strange. Specialized teacher access.
They say, yes, we have specialized teacher access, but no, you only have one teacher in traditional methods, which again is nonsense.
Chapter 8: What controversies arise from the discussion of the Payam Piano Method?
You always have teachers working with each other. So that just all goes out the window. They continued through this story. They start getting into the details of the way they teach using this alphanumeric system, right? Where in essence, they assign numbers to your fingers so that your pinky is one, your second finger's two, three, four, five. And then you associate that to the keys on the piano.
And they literally write the numbers in dry erase marker on the piano. And he talks about how this is this new system. And it's like any piano book that you buy uses numbers and letters and some combination therein. This is not a new thing, you know. And it's not necessarily the best or most efficient way to do it because if you're drawing on a piano ā
like literally drawing, you're not incentivizing the student to memorize that, you know, C is C and B is B and D is D because it's being drawn on there. And like a seven-year-old within a half hour can memorize the piano. Like that's just, that's like a given. So it's kind of nonsense, you know?
Oh yeah, they also brought up this idea that their students are sweeping these piano competitions across the country. There was one particular piano competition that had 300,000 entrants, and they had sent 42 of these students, and they all excelled well in this thing. Is that not true? Well, it turns out it's not a piano pedagogy competition.
It's a piano compositional competition, which is veryā¦ very different. So it's kids that are sending in songs they've written versus how well they play piano. And it wasn't just for piano compositions. It was also poetry and short stories and dance and art. And so, yeah, 300,000 kids did enter this, but only about 45,000 were for music entries. And again, not for playing piano, for composing.
And it's great. It's a super, it's great, great, super cool thing. I would encourage 100% for kids to send in stuff that they've written. And these particular Payam students did really well. But again, it wasn't in piano playing. It was in composing. So it's like, okay. And throughout the entire story, the PyM guy was kind of not giving the students credit for like the work that they've done.
He was sort of, it made it feel like it's all about his system that he's developed. It's so simple, like anyone can do it. Whereas these kids are obviously putting in a lot of work and doing the stuff you need to do to be able to get better slowly over time. And all of that's fine. You know, all of that is fine.
If you want to have whatever system you want to use to teach and you think it's the best system, it's totally fine. But once you start doing a little bit of deeper digging, it gets really interesting because this entire company, this Payam Piano Method, is essentially spreading out franchises across the country, right? It's trying to be the McDonald's of piano teaching.
Which, again, could be an honorable thing. But here's the problem. You go to the website and see what are the requirements to teach in one of these dozens, if not hundreds, of future expanding piano laboratories. And guess what's not a requirement to be a piano teacher?
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