AI to the Rescue
Of Outrage-Happy Humans
A clip from Stephanie Ruhle’s 11th Hour has been making the rounds, featuring panelists reacting to an interview of Speaker Mike Johnson and his wife explaining that men’s brains are like waffles (compartmentalized, one thing at a time) while women’s brains are like spaghetti (all interconnected and tangled). The panel reacted with appropriate bewilderment—”Are you kidding me?”—before moving on.
What nobody mentioned, neither on Ruhle’s show nor in the Daily Beast coverage of that segment: the Johnsons were plagiarizing. They were parroting material from an evangelical marriage seminar book that’s been circulating for years, presenting as if it were their own insight.
I found this out in less than ten seconds. I Googled the strange analogy because I wanted the transcript of the interview to discuss it with my thinking A.I.des, and the source popped right up. Then, curious whether AI would recognize the source, I tested the same prompt on all three. Every single one identified it immediately as established pseudopsychology material, not original Johnson thinking.
So a casual Google search and AI pattern-matching both outperformed an entire production team at a major news network. And it’s not because I’m a brain scientist—I was just scandalized enough to look it up. It’s because they didn’t bother.
The Study Even the Propagandists Failed to Read
When I was discussing this absurdity with Gemini 3 Pro, it did something the 11th Hour producers should have done: it identified the actual scientific study that gets misused to justify waffle/spaghetti claims. The 2014 (epub year 2013) Ingalhalikar et al. paper “Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain” is the neuroscience that propagandists ran with—or rather, ran past without actually reading.
Give the propagandists credit for one thing: they made it past the title! They spotted “within-hemispheric versus between-hemispheric connectivity” in the abstract and mapped those concepts onto waffles versus spaghetti. If the authors had used Latinate prefixes instead of Anglo-Saxon prepositions—”intrahemispheric versus interhemispheric”—the propagandists would probably have gotten confused and given up entirely.
But here’s what the abstract actually reveals. The study examined 949 youths aged 8–22 (428 males, 521 females) using diffusion tensor imaging to model—not directly observe—brain connectivity patterns. Notice the problems immediately: the age range spans everything from pre-puberty through massive adolescent reorganization to young adulthood, all before the frontal lobe fully matures. The sample sizes are unbalanced. And they’re studying developmental trajectories, not stable adult architecture.
The findings? Males showed slightly stronger within-hemispheric connectivity on average, while females showed slightly stronger between-hemispheric connectivity. But—and this is crucial—the pattern reversed in the cerebellum. If male and female brains were fundamentally different architectures (waffles versus spaghetti), why would one brain region flip the script? The reversal suggests these aren’t fixed gender essences but developmental patterns influenced by hormones, socialization, and activity.
The researchers themselves use careful language: they “suggest” that male brains “facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action” while female brains “facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.” That’s not mechanistic claims—it’s interpretation. And notice: “communication between analytical and intuitive” sounds like integration, not tangled mess. Both patterns describe brains connecting different types of information, just with slight average differences in how.
The study’s claim about “connectivity supporting perception–action coordination” covers a wide range of sensory–motor processes, not just one skill. Hand–eye coordination is only a single example within this broader set—but it’s a useful illustration because even within this narrow subset, reality produces countless counterexamples to the idea of categorical sex differences. If the claim were biologically universal, elite female athletes, surgeons, pilots, and artisans simply wouldn’t exist. Yet they do, in enormous numbers. One counterexample is enough to falsify a universal claim; millions make the claim scientifically unserious. Which means either the connectivity difference doesn’t produce the claimed functional difference, or individual variation and training overwhelm whatever small average effect exists, or both. The waffle/spaghetti binary collapses on contact with reality.
This is exactly what responsible science communication looks like—what Gemini 3 Pro demonstrated and what the 11th Hour producers should have done. Acknowledge the study exists, explain what it actually showed (small average differences with huge overlap during development), then dismantle the unjustified leap from “slight connectivity variations” to “men compartmentalize, women mix up everything.” Instead we got people raising their eyebrows at folksy pseudoscience while missing the plagiarized, misrepresented research underneath.
The Plagiarism Pattern
This isn’t the first time. Melania plagiarized Michelle Obama’s 2008 DNC speech. Ivanka sold knockoffs of major brand designs. Now the Johnsons are reciting someone else’s marriage seminar material without attribution, presenting it as personal insight about their own marriage and brain function.
As an ethical capitalist, I believe even propagandists have copyright. If you’re going to spout pseudoscience, at least have the integrity to cite whose pseudoscience you’re regurgitating.
What This Reveals About Media Failure
I don’t need to watch a panel of people saying, ”Are you kidding me?” I already said that myself when I saw the clip. Universal reactions aren’t information or entertainment—they’re just validation that other people share your disgust, which is the cable news equivalent of reaction videos.
The media is losing ground because they’ve stopped doing the actual work. A competent segment would have: identified the plagiarism, explained the source material’s history in evangelical marriage counseling, brought in actual neuroscientists to explain what’s wrong with the claims, and connected it to why this matters—because when the Speaker of the House endorses pseudoscience about fundamental cognitive differences between men and women, it’s not just embarrassing, it’s disqualifying.
This is the person controlling the legislative agenda. His beliefs about human biology directly shape his approach to education policy, workplace discrimination law, healthcare access, Title IX enforcement, and every other area where gender equity matters. If he genuinely thinks women’s brains are inherently “tangled spaghetti” compared to men’s organized “waffles,” that worldview affects how he thinks about women in leadership, STEM education funding, pregnancy discrimination protections, and whether biological fundamentalism justifies treating men and women differently under law.
The plagiarism makes it worse—he’s not even doing his own thinking about these consequential beliefs. He’s outsourcing his understanding of human cognition to marriage seminar grifters, parroting their material without attribution or critical examination, and then making policy based on that “borrowed” pseudoscience. The profound lack of intellectual honesty, the absence of critical thinking, and the embrace of discriminatory philosophy about human biology should disqualify someone from making decisions that affect all Americans.
AI as Sounding Board
Here’s the genuinely interesting part: I asked AI models about the waffle/spaghetti analogy as a test, curious whether they’d recognize the plagiarism. All three identified it instantly. Not because AI is smarter than humans at journalism, but because pattern-matching across massive datasets is exactly what AI is built for.
That’s a perfect use case for AI as a research assistant: helping journalists quickly verify whether something is original or plagiarized before running a segment. But the collaboration went further than fact-checking. When I was drafting this post, focused entirely on the plagiarism and pseudoscience, Claude reminded me of Mike Johnson’s position and pointed out the policy implications—that the Speaker of the House endorsing this kind of biological fundamentalism matters for how he approaches legislation. That observation shifted my entire frame from “why is this person parroting nonsense” to “this reveals someone fundamentally unqualified for the office he holds.”
That’s what AI can do well: expand the analytical frame so you see angles you might have missed while focused on immediate outrage. The word salad was so ridiculous it became the entire story in my own mind, obscuring the more important story about fitness for office. AI didn’t replace my judgment—it gave me perspective to see the bigger picture.
If networks expect us to tune in, they need to stop reacting and start reporting. Because right now, AI isn’t replacing journalists; journalists replaced themselves by abandoning the work. AI is just filling the vacuum they left—for me anyway.
[This post was drafted with assistance from Claude Sonnet 4.5, ChatGPT-5.1, and Gemini 3 Pro.]
Gemini 3 Pro
Prompt: I saw a clip from Stephanie Ruhle’s show where she and the panel were discussing a recent interview of Mike Johnson and his wife comparing male brain to waffles and women’s brains to spaghetti. Mind-blowing the stupid non-science that comes out of these people’s mouths.
While kids LOVE spaghetti, noodles are often used as a metaphor for lack of organization and messiness (tangle). Very skewed analogy, which I don’t think any woman with half a brain would accept. It’s bunk anyway. Prove it to me using brain scans. Bet you can’t!
ChatGPT-5.1
Prompt: They should have used AI. You recognized it right away!
Prompt: The shared outrage helps no one, and it’s very narcissistic of media personalities to think anyone would tune in to see people who should be either informing or entertaining viewers just air grievances.
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Prompt:
A competent segment would have […] connected it to policy implications when the Speaker of the House endorses pseudoscience about gender.
Yes. The profound lack of intellectual honesty, uncritical parroting, and the discriminatory philosophy about human biology are disqualifying for a person who makes decisions that affect all Americans!
Prompt: Did you notice Gem 3 Pro meeting the propagandists halfway and discussing Ingalhalikar et al.? That was so mature, and exactly what the 11th Hour producers should have done: bringing on neuroscientists to point out that propagandists just ran with the title of that paper (”Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain”) without even reading through the abstract, which exposes a lot of flaws with the methodology, presents a generalization that is easily falsifiable, but still does not justify the waffle/spaghetti analogy). Here’s part of that abstract, which I looked up, because I’m a curious human:
In this work, we modeled the structural connectome using diffusion tensor imaging in a sample of 949 youths (aged 8-22 y, 428 males and 521 females) and discovered unique sex differences in brain connectivity during the course of development. Connection-wise statistical analysis, as well as analysis of regional and global network measures, presented a comprehensive description of network characteristics. In all supratentorial regions, males had greater within-hemispheric connectivity, as well as enhanced modularity and transitivity, whereas between-hemispheric connectivity and cross-module participation predominated in females. However, this effect was reversed in the cerebellar connections. Analysis of these changes developmentally demonstrated differences in trajectory between males and females mainly in adolescence and in adulthood. Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.
