 Oh. Oh, Facebook. Yes. Hello, everybody. We are live. This is the live broadcast of the This Week in Science podcast, as I say at the beginning of every stream. This may not be the final version for the podcast. There's clipping and trimming and tightening things up. The podcast is a finely tuned, edited machine of an audio listening thing. So if you would like to listen to the podcast, I suggest you subscribe to it. You can find that just about anywhere. But we are going to do a show now. But if you like curse words, vulgar talk, and weird technical We're family friendly all the time. All the time. We do try. All right. Is our audio all right, everybody? Are we good? Yeah, it's all good. Hot Rod C's funny looking people. Thank you very much. We are going to start this show in oh, just a moment. How about in about three, a two, a one. This is twist. This week in science episode number 799 recorded on Wednesday, November 11th, 2020. How to grow young. Hi, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki. And tonight on the show, we are going to fill your heads with bats, bacteria, and an interview. But first, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer, change from before we are born until after we are dead. Life is an unending series of changes. Sometimes we see changes of breath of fresh air, the liberation of the oppressed, the reuniting of lovers, the legalization of a recreational libation, a long waited vaccination, a free and fair election. All of these things seem like good change to us. Sometimes change looks ominous, bad even the sudden oppression of people, the unexpected separation of loved ones from each other, the polarization of political rhetoric, a pandemic, and at times even a free and fair election can seem like a bad change. There is one form of change that affects all others, science. Science is changing the way we live every day, changing the outcomes of illness, accidents, natural disasters, changing the way we connect, interact, and understand the world, changing what is possible, what is actually known, and what can be imagined next. That is constantly changing the change that we encounter. In fact, the only thing that's not been changing is this week in science, coming up next. And to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there, welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We're back again to talk about all the science and there was some hopefully everyone's feeling as light and you know, like in dancing on your tiptoes, not crushing the flowers anymore under your feet. Yeah. I don't know. I'm feeling like this is a good week for science. I brought a whole bunch of stories about space bacteria, brains, aging, and we are going to be talking with our guest, Marta Zeraska, about growing young, about aging and how we can do it a little bit better in just a little bit. Justin, what did you bring for the show? He's not in the show anymore. Oh, no. He disappeared. He disappeared. Did I turn him off? I don't know. We'll bring him back. He'll be back. Justin, what did you bring? Nothing. I left. All right, Blair, what is in the animal corner? Oh my goodness. I have bats wearing masks. I have oil eating worms. I have touchy fish and mean mongooses. Mean mongooses. How about friendly mongooses? Never. Never trust a weasel. He was a friend to all. Justin, what did you bring for the show? I've got global climate change. How that's going to be getting wetter. Somebody was, a paleontologist was studying sharks and made a pterosaur discovery and a kind of interesting insight to the religiosity of Trump supporters. Very interesting. I can't wait to dig into all of these stories and even more. But as we jump in, I want to remind everyone that if you have not yet subscribed to This Week in Science, you can find us on YouTube and Facebook and Twitch. Look for This Week in Science. We are Twist Science, T-W-I-S-C-I-E-N-C-E on the Twitch channel. You can find us also all places that podcasts are found. Podcasts, Stitchers, Breaker, Pandora, Radio.com, TuneIn, Google, Apple, just again, This Week in Science, head to twist.org, which is our website. And you have a special prize if you can figure out which one of those is not real. I don't think I made any of them up. I always feel like things can't all be real names of things. People make up some of the craziest names. I mean, pharmaceuticals are an example of that. Anyway, let's talk about the science. Okay, so quick stories. Let's dig in, dive in. First story, what would it be like if our moon glowed? Could you imagine if our moon glowed in the dark at night? Like of its own? But like out of its own? Of its own accord. Not just reflecting the light of others. Not acting like a mirror, but acting more like, you know, like one of those glowing stars that you charge up with light during the day, and then you watch them at night on your ceiling where you've placed them when they glow at night. It would just be like the sun, but dimmer. It would be like a light-dark thing as it did the, because you could always see the whole moon. Right, you could always see the whole moon. Well, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California were looking at Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. And Jupiter has this amazing magnetic field. It also has a lot of radiation that it, as a planet, releases. And that radiation impacts the moons around it. Now Europa is very icy and the researchers went, hmm, some of those icy compounds are probably pretty salty too. And so let's take a look at what this would look like. What would it look like to the naked eye? How would it look? And so they're like, hmm, okay, let's, I think it's going to look this particular way that a, you know, one salty compound will glow a little blue. This other compound might glow a little green. And we can't actually go there and look at it yet. There is a mission heading out there in the next couple of years to be able to go check it out and see what it does look like and whether or not it does glow in the dark. But their work took advantage of a device that they call Iceheart. And Iceheart is otherwise known as Ice Chamber for Europa's High Energy Electron and Radiation Environment Testing. They took Iceheart to a high energy electron beam facility and subjected it to a high energy electron beam. And what they found is that the glow tied to different ice compositions, it wasn't one, just one glow that was the same for everything. They saw that sodium chloride was significantly lower in its glowiness than other salts that they were looking at. And so they, they looked at it and they were like, this is weird. This doesn't look the way that it's supposed to. This is cool. And so it gave them a little aha moment about how Europa might actually look. But if Europa were not under radiation, it would probably just look like our moon dark in the dark and reflecting light and the light. But it may in fact have a crazy glow to it, which would be very exciting. So hopefully the upcoming Europa Clipper will be able to take a look at it. And when they get there, be able to determine if they're right based on this simulation in the lab laboratory. Glow moons would be great. Wild. Wild, I know. I mean, I could put a glow moon on my ceiling, but I didn't expect one around Jupiter. No. All right, Justin has dropped out. Can you tell me a bit about some cool bacteria? Yeah, I sure can. So we've talked, we've discussed many times the fact that there are certain bacterias that we know potentially could eat oil or plastics. The exact application of those are still kind of under question, which is where this study comes in. So this is from the Bionano Technology Lab of Kazan Federal University, which is in Russia. They wanted to find a way to deliver oil consuming bacteria straight into soil to remove oil from the soil. And they found that they could potentially use nematodes, worms as public transit for the marine bacteria so that they could kind of deliver them to the soil through the worms. This is Seynorhabdytis elegans is the nematode. C. elegans. Yes. And yes, thank you. It's a much easier way to say it. And the bacteria in question was Alcanaverax borcumensis. And so nailed it. The nematodes actually eat bacteria as part of their diet. So they first checked to make sure that the nematodes could survive eating the bacteria and it was no problem. And then they also found that the undigested bacteria in the nematodes changed the gut microflora of the worms. Makes sense. It is their microflora, right? And that actually led to enhanced digestion of oil in the nematode and left their body through natural ways. They will just poop out the leftovers of this oil. And they found that worms themselves can eat oil products if they're not fed other things with the aid of this bacteria as well. They saw that the oil dissipates into small particles of five to six micrometers. And then that's inside the worms guts. And then the bacteria can take over and break them down further. They don't know which components other types of oils would produce when digested by nematodes. But so far, it looks pretty good. They also think that this might be able to be used to deliver bacteria to water tables to be able to get rid of oil from water through some oil eating bacteria via worms. But then you'd have worms in the water. So I don't know. I don't know at what point that would become a problem. But problem one, the oil could potentially be solved this way. Unless it's the worms in the soil, and the soil gets close enough to the water, it's infused with the water. And then the bacteria are then, it's just all part of that mushy underground ecosystem. Yeah. And that never spreads anywhere else. Because nothing needs worms. It would never. No. It couldn't turn into a bigger problem in the next step of that chain. Yeah, it's not like they're very tiny or anything. Oh, wait. Little tiny nematodes. But I love the idea of using nature to, I mean, if these nematodes eat bacteria to begin with, and they're just using the nematodes to move bacteria from one place to another to introduce them to a place where they're needed. I don't know. It seems like if the nematodes are going to be there anyway, this seems like a smart plan. I mean, we're doing interesting things in nanotechnology, doping little molecules, gold ions, and atoms with antibodies so that we can use them to attack cancer tumors. And we're sending these things, in our bodies, our little ecosystems. So it's a similar kind of concept. Use things to to shuttle things around. And this is a very, it seems like a very natural system. Yeah, it reminded me of the study we talked about a while back using sperm to deliver drugs. Yes. Yeah, take something biotic that could make your delivery instead of a biotic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Justin, can you say a couple of words? Your microphone was, seemed like it was a bit punchy. I have no idea. I'm even hearable. Is it good? Am I here? It's in my ears. It does not sound good, but you are here. It kind of sounds like you're on a radio show via telephone in the 1980s, but apparently, apparently it is that this is the same place that I set up last week, but the internet connection is bad now. Don't know why. Is it too much? Should I drop out? Don't, don't shout. But I don't know why the microphone would be sounding different. Is it using a different microphone? Can you check your settings? Which is the good one? Is it, is it this one? Do you like this one? Tap the microphone. Just tap the microphone. No, and that's not using that. Oh, that's fine. We're on the laptop mic. That one works out. Stand by, everyone. Apologies for the technical difficulties. Take care of the technical difficulties of the... Patrick Pecoraro, I know you, you can't watch, you can't set the feed to two times speed until after we finish. Sorry. Yeah, because then you'd be in the future. We don't know what we're gonna say yet. We have an idea. I can't hear Justin at all now. No. You don't exist, Justin. He'll be right back. So moving on to my next story. I have another bacteria story. This one is about bacteria in space. So we talked earlier this year back in August about some bacteria that had spent a long period of time in space on the outside of the International Space Station. Now, researchers have done a deeper dive on some of these bacteria called Dinococcus radiodurans. And Dinococcus radiodurans are an extremophile species of bacteria who were found, who are known to be able to handle high amounts of radiation. Now, the last study that was done, they discovered that there were, in comparison to E. coli bacteria, the radiodurans were able to chop up their DNA, their chromosomes, and be able to remix them and put them together in a way that seemed as if they were totally fine and had never been affected by radiation previously. In this study, the bacterial cells were dehydrated, shipped to the International Space Station, and then they were placed in what's called the Exposed Facility. The Exposed Facility is a platform that is continually exposed to space. And they were behind a glass window that blocked out UV light and at wavelengths less than 200 nanometers, which is the amount of radiation that does start to damage the radiodurans in a negative manner. So, and it's also the amount of radiation that would be blocked out by carbon dioxide in Mars' atmosphere. More on that in a moment. Anyway, they looked at these bacteria when they were brought back to Earth, and they discovered that they have some really interesting physical characteristics that are very different from the control group of bacteria that were left here on Earth and exposed to UV light in a similar manner. The bacteria that came back from low Earth orbit have little nodules all around the area that are outside. They are vesiculated, which means that they have gotten rid of a bunch of compounds inside the bacteria that were negatively affecting them and causing metabolic stress. They created vesicles to expel and store these metabolites on their exterior. And the regular bacteria, the bacteria that were in the control group, did not. So, the bacteria came back really lumpy compared to those that stayed here on Earth, but they were still alive. Big caveat, however, a lot of them did die. In fact, a very large majority of these bacteria actually died. And in looking at the difference between the survival rate of the control bacteria to these space bacteria, they really didn't do very well. They only about 5% or so survived, between 5% and 10% actually survived. So, space, it does kill the bacteria. A number of them do survive. They have really interesting characteristics which allow them to survive. The highlight of this is that we should really be thinking about what we are doing to sterilize spacecraft that we send to other planets like Mars where these bacteria could potentially be surviving when the craft reach the surface. Well, I always whenever we've talked about this kind of stuff, I always think about what this means for panspermia. Both for the start of our planet, but also whenever anything breaks off of Earth. Yeah. Has this happened before? Have we seeded other planets in the past? You know, and I think this helps kind of put a stop to my wild musings about that a little bit just because at least here, it seems like at least for this type of bacteria, there would be clear kind of indicators of the fact that they came from space, potentially, right? They'd have these weird lumps on them or something. So, maybe this is a good start of a way to kind of look for the signs of bacteria that's been in space. Maybe they're kind of a smoking gun. Were you recently in space? Yeah. Are you covered in vesicles on your external layers? Oh, you're all bumpy. You're bumpy. Would you tell me? Okay, Blair, Justin has dropped off again. So, tell me about those wrinkled faced bats. Wrinkled faced bats. Okay. So, wrinkled faced bats are this crazy bat. Their face is all wrinkly. I put a picture in the show notes. Kiki, if you could find it in like the notes section. So, the wrinkled faced bats, they look wild without the fact that they have this fleshy extra skin under their chin that they can pull over their face like a mask. They're COVID prepared. How's that for bats and COVID? The skin mask is only developed by males. They think that all these little folds on their face are actually for air movement for whatever reason. But so, they have this flap that goes up on their face and they have not been observed really doing much of anything in the wild because as one of the lead researchers from this study says they're small, they're nocturnal and they fly. So, it is not easy to study. So, this is the first time they've been able to record vocalizations, mating behavior. They used ultrasonic sensors. They used infrared cameras. They're able to see what mating behavior looked like in these wrinkled faced bats. And they found that they actually pull those masks down before they mate. Why? We don't know. To show their potential mate their real face. This is why I really am. This is why it's weird though, is they form lex, which basically means all the males gather up in a big space and the women get to go, that one. So, when they do that, they still have the mask on. They don't pull the mask down until copulation begins. So, lesson for everybody in this day and age, I think. Keep your mask on until you're inside with your significant other. Yeah. So, the footage of courtship showed males emit large low frequency whistling calls when the females came to mate. When selected by a female, males pulled down their mask like skin flaps prior to mating. They only pulled the flaps back when they were done with copulation. So, again, why? But it's a wild, wild behavior that's just been documented. So, the other thing the lead researcher said is, there are many questions. That is the beauty with this species when you found it. Many questions arise. So, lots to be learned about the wrinkle-faced bats. I think their wrinkly face is pretty cute, actually. Yikes. I was looking at that one. I was like, you know, an up close of these might be really good for the animal corner calendar for next year, for 2022. Might be pretty wild. I think that would be fun. Wrinkly thing. No, never mind. Not going there. Okay. Just in. I'm going to go quick just because I'm not sure I'm going to have but a few moments of internet in between getting kicked off. Global climate change is causing hurricanes that make landfall to take more time to weaken. Reports a study published in the journal Nature. Studies have shown that global climate change will intensify hurricanes. We kind of knew this already. We're going to get more of them. They're going to be stronger. But this is the first study to specifically look at hurricanes that have made landfall. Hurricanes that develop over warmer ocean waters carry more moisture and therefore stay stronger for longer after hitting land. In the future, as the world continues to warm, hurricanes are more likely then to last longer, reach communities further inland, and be more destructive. Great. Yeah. So this all comes down to hurricanes having fuel. Their fuel of a hurricane is moisture. As the moisture moves up through the hurricane, it releases heat that was collected in the sea surface temperature. And that turns into wind energy, which then propels it to go faster. The scientists analyzed North Atlantic hurricanes that made landfall of the past half century. They found that during the course of the first day after landfall, hurricanes weakened almost twice as slowly under today's conditions than they did 50 years ago. Wow. Are they wetter and hotter? Is that what's going on? Well, the heat itself, the heat is coming from the surface of the water, which is also allowing more moisture to get up into the hurricane. But that heat then turns into actual wind power. This is quotey voice, quoting Lynn Lee, who's the first author PhD student at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology of Fluid Mechanics. We are in the Fluid Mechanics unit. When we plotted the data, we can clearly see that the amount of time it took for hurricane to weaken was increasing with the years. But it wasn't a straight line. It was undulating. And we found that these ups and downs matched the same ups and downs we see in sea surface temperature. Hurricanes are heat engines. Just like the engines in cars and cars, fuel is combusted and that heat energy is converted into mechanical work for hurricanes. The moisture is taken up from the surface of the ocean is the fuel that intensifies and sustains a hurricane's destructive power with heat energy from the moisture converted into powerful winds, making landfall as equivalent to stopping the fuel supply to the engine of the car. Without fuel, the car will decelerate. Without its moisture source, hurricane will decay. And that's the problem. There's more moisture stock, if you will, in these new modern-day hurricanes, which allows them to persist and destruct and flood stuff longer than they did in the only days. Oh, look, and you have graphics up there. Yes. Oh, and they relate to this story. That's even better. So you can see it's getting stronger, faster, longer, worse. So I mean, that's the thing about climate change and extreme weather events, right? It doesn't create hurricanes. It makes them more frequent and more intense. Well, technically it can create more hurricanes. More frequent, right? So it doesn't create more cyclones or tropical storms. It doesn't create more tropical storms, necessarily. But it gives those tropical storms that usually would die out the energy to keep going. And then as they move up, they can even hit warmer waters, which gives them the fuel boost to go full hurricane. No, that's what I'm saying. We're not likely to get a hurricane in California. But that's more what I mean, is that they're happening more frequently and more intensely. No, we're not going to get hurricanes. But what we will get, see, we have a different system of heating and cooling. And our, would it be our, would it be the Eastern Pacific? We have a thing called the Santa Ana winds, which is completely driven by sea temperature and along with some of the other, I think there's like the Mount Diablo and a couple of, these things are driven by sea temperature. You can actually, the Navy used to predict the severity of the coming Santa Ana's wind season many months in advance by measuring the surface temperature of the ocean. They can tell when it's going to be a bad one before it is, based on ocean sea surface temperatures. So bigger winds in California, I mean. Fire, yeah, would be the thing that it would be bigger, more fires. Anyway, so that's bad change. We don't want that. A good change. Good change. That's what I want. I like good change. Okay, this is a good change. There's a paleontologist was studying a 100 year old shark fossil collection and discovered a new species of pterosaur. University of Portsmouth PhD student Roy Smith discovered the mystery creature amongst fossil collections housed in the Sedwick Museum of Cambridge and the Booth Museum at Brighton. This collection was assembled between 1850 and 1900 from phosphate miners and around England. And they would find these small fossil fragments and they would get a little extra money by turning them over to the university folk. So, but these things have been like, like the story that we have so often that comes up on the show. It's been in the collection for 120, 170 years. These fossils have been sitting in a box somewhere. They at one point did get sorted and all of the shark spines that they found went into this one bucket. However, it was these sharks, spines that were being observed and reanalyzed, I guess, and it turned out they weren't, although similar looking to a shark fin spine, they had these, well, according to Smith, one such feature they had was a tiny little holes where nerves come to the surface and are used for sensitive feeding by the pterosaurs. Shark fin spines do not have these, but the early paleontologists clearly missed these features. Two of the specimens discovered can be identified as a specific pterosaur. But one additional specimen is clearly distinct and represents a potential new species. It's a paleontological mystery now. That's awesome. Yeah. So, he's waiting now. He says he's waiting for the COVID restrictions to be lifted so he can go to other museums and check through their old collections around this time because these are, you know, when you're dealing with a hundred different sites, misclassifications, right? Yeah. These sites have been over mined. There's not always great detail about where they were even found, which mine they came from, what year they might have even been found. They just sort of found their way into collections. But even though he's looked through the collections he has access to and found only what he can, this small segment of specimens for this species, he knows that there's other collections out there. And so once they can go and meet face to face with other people and talk, I guess they're in a bigger shutdown than most places right now. Yeah. At this point. Right now. Yeah. Yeah. I have something that kind of falls into that. The idea of something, things that had been thought to just have one function but are still around and then under a little bit of digging discover that they have another function. Researchers publishing in the journal Nature Immunology from the University of Bonn in Germany have discovered a gene called Creld1, C-R-E-L-D-1. It's either a gene or something out of, like, I don't know, a name for an orc or something. I'm Creld. I am Creld. Creld1. I am the Creld1. Creld1 is involved in the development period of the heart in the embryo during the embryonic stages, but it sticks around after birth. Nobody really knew what it was doing. It's around in just about every cell in the body and this purpose, its purpose was unknown. However, researchers decided they were going to look into this and so they used transcriptome analysis to look at the transcripts, things that were being transcribed and proteins that were being created. What they were able to discover is that out of 4,500 test subjects they were able to determine that Creld1 is involved in the immune system. It's very important for the immune system actually. They found that people who have low levels of Creld1 have very few T cells. They don't have a lot of T cells and T cells are really important for fighting off invasive agents in our bodies, a huge part of our immune system. And so they're going to try and figure out a little bit more about that, but they, through mouse experiments, discovered that if they cut out Creld1 then it completely led to a lack of T cells. The T cells were not able to continue propagating within the mice when Creld was deleted. And so they die earlier and then there's nothing left to protect. They said, the researchers said, we see similar changes in people with an aged immune system as well. It's also thought that people who have immunodeficiencies and as they age, deteriorated diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's disease may have something wrong with their Creld1 activity. So Creld1, who knew, used to just be involved with the heart, but now it has to do with keeping your immune system from getting old. Although I wonder, I wonder if this is also one of those things that now fascinates me about the wanting to see how many COVID survivors or people who got COVID were asymptomatic might have this Creld thing going on with the lower T cells because it's more and more finding that it's the body's own reaction to the immune system's own reaction often is part of the catalyst for getting really ill with this sort of an overreaction. We don't know where it starts. And as anything, we now know the researchers have now discovered the link between Creld1 and the immune system. Causative, correlational, is it affected by things or is it something that is the cause of these things? This is not yet known. So there is much more work to be done. Yeah. Yeah. But hey, everyone, if you are watching Twists right now, we have calendars. We have calendars. Head over to twist.org to click on the froggy toad link and purchase Blair's Animal Corner calendar because I can have horned toad. It is a horned frog. But the reason the frog toad thing happened is because of the hypnotode. People think it looks like the hypnotode, but it is technically a horned frog. Hence frog toad. But yes, it is a horned frog. Click on the horned frog. Purchase your 2021 Twists Blair's Animal Corner calendar. They are available now. And while you're there, if you're interested in any other Twists merchandise, head over, click the Zazzle Store link and peruse our wares. The holidays are coming up. Twist goodies make great gifts. All right. Let's come back now. I would love to introduce our guest for the evening. Marta Zarazka is a Polish-Canadian science journalist who lives in a tiny French village in the countryside and recently wrote a book called Growing Young, How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100. Now, Marta, as we get into this, I just want you to know for full disclosure, Blair does want to live forever. So 200. Okay. That's my next book. Okay. How to live to 200. Yes, exactly. How did you come to get into this topic? I mean, we all want to grow old gracefully, but what led to this book in particular? I mean, I've been writing about this kind of topics for years now. I'm a science journalist. I write for the Washington Post Scientific American Discover and New Scientists. So these are topics I've been writing about for a long time. So nutrition, how to live healthy, how to be happy psychology, mental health. So it was obviously all the time something that I was interested in. I was reading tons of research papers on this. And at the same time, I was trying to be healthy. And in my everyday life, my personal life, I have a family. So I was trying to keep everybody eating well and exercising and so on. At the same time, you know, in my work, I was coming across more and more research showing that maybe perhaps diet and exercise were not the only things that were really important, and perhaps maybe not even the most important things. So there was particularly one meta-analysis of studies that I read that really opened my eyes to this topic of things that matter, perhaps more than diet and exercise. And in this meta-analysis, the scientists showed that although things like diet and exercise are important, of course, for health, other things. So for example, how socially included you are. So how connected you are to a community, whether you have a significant adder, whether you have lots of friends and so on and so on. This kind of social inclusion can lower your mortality risk by about 45%. Whereas when we are talking about diet and exercise, this is usually around 20 to 30% reduction of mortality. 45? 45, yes. So it's huge. I need to make more friends. And when they actually put together like all the possible, I call them soft drivers of health, so like, you know, this kind of optimism and generally how you live your life socially and mentally, they came out actually with 65% of mortality reduction. And this is higher than quitting smoking if you smoke two packets a day. So this is really, really huge. So when I read that, I was like, okay, I'm obviously, you know, doing not not doing the best things I can for it to stay healthy and live long, you know, all my organic matcha tea and so on. So on might not be the best idea. And so I read about 600 research papers and talked to those as a scientist. And I wrote growing young. And this is also changed the way I approach health and longevity in my personal life as well. So are you, I mean, you're not having dinner parties right now, I would, I would guess, but we are down that way. I cannot leave my permission. So this can be like a very, very unhealthy time aside from the, the pandemic. I mean, sorry. Does this count as socializing? Does this count as? You know, it's better than texting. And actually, there is actual research showing that that when you text people, you don't get the same amount of oxytocin release when compared to when you call people, they haven't tested Zoom or, you know, the video calling, but I would assume it's even better than the voice calling, but definitely still above is the actual connection when you can have a real eye contact, when you can touch, you know, touch releases also those social hormones, right? So, so definitely video is not the same as contacting person. We also, you know, we also are noses. We are, you know, they're much more powerful than we realize and we pick up all the sense that give us all this information about the other person. So definitely it's not the same. That's what's been giving me away. Um, what is also I imagine is also like there's some microbiome transfer going on to amongst close, close contact. Oh, yeah. So we definitely exchange microbes with other people. So for example, when you do contact sports, right? So the two teams will exchange skin microbes between each other. We also exchange gut microbes. So with our family members, for example, even with our family parents. So, and there was, there's some fascinating research being done on mice. I actually took my tiny little part in it. I was in, it's in Oxford. So I, I stuck around when the scientists were catching the mice for, for the research in the, in the, in the forest around Oxford University. They were measuring the, the microbiome of the mice. They also monitor who hangs out with whom. So these are probably the most monitored mice in the world where they have all this, you know, cameras watching who goes where and all the time. And what they discovered is that, um, the mice, uh, not only exchange microbes of their friends, but also the more diverse their networks of friends, the healthier that got their gut microbiome, which also gives you an idea, you know, that probably will work similar in humans because for now generally the research on my gut microbiome in mice translates pretty well to humans. So probably, you know, if we also exchange the microbes, which we do, the more diverse our friendships networks, we probably also have more diverse gut microbiomes, which is absolutely fascinating, right? So if you are a loner, your, your guts health may, may suffer basically. Right. Yeah. Diversity on all those counts is beneficial as far as we can tell. Um, you also, you mentioned you went to Oxford to track the, track the researchers who were trapping the mice, but you've all, you traveled all over the world for your, your work on this book. What were some of the most intriguing adventures that you got to go on? I mean, so definitely, you know, Japan was the big one. Uh, so I have a whole chapter in Japan. This is the longest living nation currently on the planet. And, um, and it was really fascinating because, you know, I kind of came with some preconceptions, right, about Japan and what makes them live long. First of all, you know, we've all heard about Okinawa diet and so on and so on. And, and first of all, these days, Okinawa is not the longest lived, uh, part of Japan is actually Nagano prefectory. Uh, so the mountainous part where they have, they're really big mountains. They actually called Alps as well. And, um, just like in Europe. So, so this is where people in Japan live the longest right now. And, um, and even the diet there is also quite healthy. But what really struck me that when I talked with researchers and people, uh, they, uh, the conversation really went very fast to things like purpose in life, for example, which, you know, or social, uh, the structure of the society. So things that's really when you talk to aging researchers in the West, usually they don't really come up, right? You don't, they, you talk about diet, exercise in the cell, cellular aging, uh, mitochondria, things like that. But they really went into purpose in life very, very fast. So even to the point that they call it Ikigai is kind of a cousin of purpose in life. Supposedly it doesn't translate very well. I don't speak Japanese, so I, I cannot really comment on that. But, um, so, uh, so they, they recognize as Ikigai, so the kind of purpose in life as such an important component of our healthy aging and longevity that the actual ministry of health of Japan has included in their official health promotion strategy. Uh, and lots of research supports this idea that people who have Ikigai, who have this purpose in life, uh, live longer, healthier, they have less cardiovascular disease, for example. Uh, so this was really something that's, um, that was particularly interesting to me. And, um, what I also visited were, uh, so-called silver hair employment agencies. So these are employment agencies for elderly people in Japan. It sounds crazy for, you know, at least for my Western mind. And, but for them it's completely normal. And, um, so what happens is when the Japanese people reach retirement age, some of them decide to not completely retire, but switch their career to something easy, um, usually part-time. And they don't do it really for the money. They do it to be involved in the community. So they go to the specialized retirement employment agencies and they'll get themselves a job as a public space gardener or helping children cross the street. And, and they do it exactly for this Ikigai, so this involvement in community for helping others, for being, having purpose in life. Um, and, uh, again, it is also recognized as one of potential drivers of health longevity in Japan. So basically what that implication is that retirement could kill you. I mean, it's very cultural. It's very cultural. Yeah. But it's interesting how, uh, how you see people who were not able to retire and have to work late, late, late into their lives. And they often look, act, seem very different than the people who did retire. And you might assume that's because the people retired because they were feeling more old and tired. But maybe it's the other way around. I think it's both. I mean, I'm writing an article for the Washington Post on this right now. So, so I'm really digging very deeply into this kind of retirement issue here. But, uh, and it seems that it really depends. So it depends also on how you retire, right? So if you retire and just kind of give up on everything and just stay on your couch and watch Netflix the whole day, uh, this kind of retirement definitely can be bad for your health. And not just because of the sitting on the couch part is because of losing the connections, losing the purpose in life. Exactly. But if you retire and you stay active, you don't have to work. You can be volunteering. You can be just involved in your community or in your family really, like having this exactly this eke guy, this purpose in life, uh, then, then it definitely can be still very good for your health. So it's really depends how you approach it and whether you're retiring, retiring means losing all this kind of social part of working that's that is so important. Yeah. I know a lot of a lot of old guys who retired and they thought, ah, I got plenty to do when I'm retired. I got the honey do list that I've got to get through all those things that I've been asked to do over the years. They kept getting put off. I'll go do that and then I'll be fine. And then two months later, they're back in the workforce because they got through the list. They sat on the couch. They looked around and went, is this all there is? I can't do this. I can't do this and went back. But we, hey, we've got twists. We can just keep doing this. Yeah. Exactly. I'm gonna be fine. That's gonna be great. So I'm really curious this kind of this idea behind needing a driver and a reason for living and all this kind of stuff. It sounds very kind of ethereal and like, you know, more spiritual. But of course, the science part of me is dragging me back down to like scientifically what's happening in the body. So is this stress? Is this anxiety? Is this a lack of kind of like positive social hormones that are happening in your body? I mean, it's everything. So as you all know, you know, our human bodies are extremely interconnected, right? So for, so there are, for example, the social hormones I've mentioned before that when we are touching or having direct eye contact with other people, we have the oxytocin release. So this is one of the social hormones, then you have serotonin, endorphins, vasopressin. So these are all the so-called social hormones that link the way we live our lives socially and you could say mentally and how our bodies function, right? For example, you have oxytocin, so the so-called love hormone that, you know, makes you connected to people. But on the other hand, it has very biological direct effects on the body. So for instance, it has, it influences our immune system. It also, for example, promotes bone growth, serotonin on the other hand, another social hormone. It can, it regulates body temperature. It can affect liver health. So these are very direct biological effects. So this is part of it. Then you have the stress axis, right? So the HPA axis, for instance, and our social connections influence how the stress, the fight or flight response acts in our body. So we evolved, you know, we are social apes. We evolved to be surrounded by others and our bodies function the best when we are with our tribe, when we are connected, when we feel basically secure in the tribe. So when we are alone, when we are, for example, ostracized or excluded from the tribe, then our, then our bodies start reacting differently. So for example, when you're with other people, you are much more likely to catch viruses as we've learned very well these days. So our bodies up the antiviral response. But when you are alone, when you're lonely, you no longer need the kind of such a powerful antiviral response. And instead, our body switches to antibacterial response to inflammation, which made perfect sense when, you know, in our ancestral times, when being alone usually meant being alone on the savannah, so being much more likely to be wounded, for instance, right, hurt by wild animals and such wounds could be brimming with bacteria. So you needed to up your antibacterial response. But of course, our bodies are always trying to save on energy. So, you know, to up the antibacterial response, the antiviral response would go down. What it means for today, for instance, that when we are feeling lonely, our antiviral response still goes down. And you can see it on the gene expression level. This is very unfortunate, of course, for today, because, you know, we are feeling lonely because we're, for example, in lockdown in our houses all alone. And at the same time, our response to viruses goes down, which is very, very unfortunate, right. So, yeah, so all these things are super, super biological. We also mentioned that the gut microbiome as well. So that's another very biological connection between how we are with other people and how our bodies function. This is also fascinating the way that it works together. You mentioned the, you mentioned your Western perspective. And, you know, you are a Western perspective in Europe, which is a bit different in terms of social connections and the way that they, the way that communities work and people work with each other than it, than it is in America. And I know that the Western perspective here in America has led us to be very independent and people are driven to leave their families. I mean, I'm Canadian too, so. Yes, you are Canadian too, but I'm just making the, you know, the distinction that there are different perspectives on, I don't know how we approach it, but there's, I feel like there's this American independence where people are like, I'm going to leave home and go to college and then I'm going to go live by myself in a big city and I'm going to get a job and maybe I'll live with roommates I don't like. I think that's what you did, Kiki. I don't know that it's that common though. I don't actually know that that's that common in the United States. And we don't treat, we don't treat our elderly in the way that people, the way that they do in Japan. There's no, there's not as much honor for the elderly. I don't, I mean. How can you say this? We just had a presidential election campaign. We're the only two people who could have been the president. We're like late seniors. I don't know. That's not what I'm talking about, Justin. That is two people. So in a nation of 300 million. Look at the Senate. I don't know. I think we put, I think we put really old people. We're in America where we put old people in the Senate. I don't know if I can only agree with that. It might be the opposite and we might be putting too much trust in our elderly. No, but my, I guess my, my question here culturally is, you know, what have, what have you found or what, what, what have you seen from a cultural standpoint on, you know, here in Western society, we've always put our long life, life expectancies down to our diet and exercise and, you know, and our medicine and suddenly life expectancies are starting to drop. I mean, certainly, you know, United States is the most individualistic nation on the planet, right? According to these research. So there is something to it. That's for certain. And yes, it's not the longest lived either among the developed nations. And so there's, there are some troubling signs, you know, definitely both Canadians as well, right? We, we put a lot of trust in things like diet, but I, and by diet, unfortunately, often people don't meet the kind of the reasonable, it's healthy diet where, you know, just eat your veggies and stay away from sugar and junk food, but going too much into the fat diet. So this is also what I write about. I have a whole chapter in growing young about it, you know, how that we put too much belief in fat diets and miracle foods in all this kind of, you know, heritage organic broccoli and supplements as well and, and exercise trackers and all this kind of miraculous solutions or one pill solutions to longevity and health and you just take this or, you know, do this particular exercise tracked by your app and you will be perfectly fine. Unfortunately, this kind of reductionist approach, you know, it doesn't work. Our, our bodies are very complicated and we are social creatures and, and we need more, right? Diet is very important. So it's exercise, but they are fairly simple. So as Michael Pollan has said, you know, eat food, not too much, mostly plants. And if you do that, it will be generally fine. And, you know, the same of exercise, you generally have to move. You don't have to do this kind of, you know, crazy things that we are doing of all this special fitness gadgets and so on and so on. And so there is, there is this and so this is definitely, you know, much more prevalent in, in Canada or US than for example, in France, where I live right now, where people seem to be more relaxed about how they eat and, and eating here also, it's, it's a much more social affair. So one statistic I realized that, you know, for example, in US, most vast majority of people, so I think those 61% of people eat their meals always on their own. And, you know, usually in front of the TV, whereas, for example, in France, it's the opposite. So most people will be eating with their family every single night. And, and they're really obsessed about it. When my daughter was very French, when she was three years old, she actually refused to eat any meals at all. If we were not sitting at the table with her, she was like, no, I'm not even touching it. So, oh, wow. Oh, I love it. And, you know, they're, they're very much into this eating there. You know, I, when I, when I still lived in Canada, I was, you know, usually I would think nothing twice about eating in my car or eating a sandwich while walking down the street, whereas in France, it's a horrible, horrible fob. I just don't do that. You are supposed to eat at a table and preferably exactly what it is, you know, for hours talking and so on. So this kind of, which also, you know, brought me to thinking about the so called Mediterranean diet, right, which is definitely a good type of eating. And we always analyze, you know, how much wine they are drinking, how much cheese they're eating, what kind of vegetables, olive oil and so on and so on. Whereas we don't really pay enough attention to how these foods are eaten. Because in all these cultures, so French, Italians, you know, Spanish, they not only eat certain foods, but they eat them in certain way. And it's a very social way, right? They eat them with other people, they take their time, they have long conversations. So, you know, taking this kind of diet and eating the Mediterranean diet alone in your car will not bring you the same benefits. Well, not to mention, you definitely eat more if you're, for example, eating by yourself in front of the TV. Then if you eat while talking amongst a bunch of other people, like it paces you, you know, I think about that all the time. If you sit down to a meal at a table, there's a pacing involved in your eating and you kind of feel that you're full and then you stop eating. But if you're just shoveling it in, you're likely to eat more because it's happening faster and you're not paying attention. Yeah, there's within the so called biohacking movement where people are attempting to, as you mentioned, they've got body trackers and they're tracking all of their activity and the food that they eat and putting butter in their coffee. I've come across a new fad, which is, they do, what is it called? They call it a dopamine fast. The idea is that because of modern technology and being connected all the time, that our devices through the algorithms are constantly stimulating or the dopamine because they're basically like Facebook slot machine, you know, keep scrolling, keep scrolling, and your dopamine keeps going. And so instead of just unplugging from social media, though, they are taking complete breaks from people, from all stimulation, and they're talking as if this is a good thing. I'm wondering if you've come across this at all. I haven't come across it, but I mean, parts of it sound perfectly irrational and actually a good idea. So the technology part definitely being addicted to your phone is doing nothing good to your brain or to your health because also because we know that spending too much time on your phone or even having placing your phone during conversations actually destroys the quality of connections of other people. There is already more and more research on that. But on the other hand, completely isolating yourself because we do get dopamine hits, for example, from kindness. So kindness gives you a dopamine. Is it good to have a fast from this kind of dopamine hits? Probably not. Or from connecting with your loved ones as well. So should we be fasting from this? I think it's again too many things in one kind of bag. Yes, try not to look at your phone too much, but complete isolation and trying not to get any dopamine that's even if it's possible, right? The neuroscience doesn't quite fit, but yeah, it's like, you know, a lot of things are rewarding, right? So food is can be rewarding, like anything. So unless you could stop eating, stop breathing. And I don't know. Well, yeah, I think it's another example of extremes. I like the idea of the sort of no interaction reset, though. It sounds sort of like just going to the cab and getting away from everything for a while. And then when you go back and re-interact with society and people again, maybe you're seeing them more one on one, maybe the television that was always on, maybe it seems like noise now, because it's just too much. I don't know. I mean, television on definitely is not a good idea. But I mean, the Hermit style, well, I don't mean as a lifestyle. I mean, as a, like, as a, you know, sort of like a spot treatment for your brain, letting the reactions reset back down to just nothing, silent, and then go re-enter society. And it sounds like it would work. Can you imagine going to a movie now, you'd be like, wow. I mean, I cannot imagine leaving my, oh my goodness, I'm eating popcorn in a movie theater. This is amazing. It'll like be so like over the top compared to, you know, going out and eating it at a dinner with a tablecloth and people bringing you food. And wow, that would be so overstimulating right now because we sort of walked back that interaction for a while. I don't know. I can see the benefits of it anyway. But on the other side of, on the other side of that, you also talk about things like hugging centers and there are movements among different groups of people where people come together who are strangers for hugs, for physical contact that where they don't have that physical contact. And I'm wondering if you have evidence to the benefit of physical contact with strangers versus contact with people that are friends, that are people that you're familiar with. I mean, yes. So the hugging center, there was something another part of my research for growing. I went to a center like that. This particular one was in Poland, although there are plenty of those things as well on the western coast in California, in western Canada, I think also in Ontario, in the UK. But I went to one in Warsaw, Poland. So the hugging center, the idea is some kind of like cross between a spa and a psychotherapist office. So you go there because you don't, you feel that you don't have enough hugs or enough contact, physical contact with other people. It felt very weird for me at the very beginning. It's kind of the whole idea of, you know, hugging is stranger. And when I arrived, I got a little card with all the positions that were possible, like, you know, spooning or patting your hair or just classic hugging and stuff like that. So it was very, very, very weird at first. But, you know, the lady was a professional, I guess. So she knew how to relax me into the hugging. So yes, it was some kind of a cross between a massage and psychotherapy, because you can also talk and chat about your life and stuff like that. And surprisingly, there is lots of people who actually come to those things and pay good money to be hugs. And some, which is a sad thing when you think about it, that so many people don't have anybody in their lives with whom they can get this kind of physical contact. And yes, you can go for psychotherapy, but it's not the same because, you know, psychotherapy is about talking about your problems and you generally are not supposed to be hugging all the time with your therapist. Whereas massage is also kind of very, can be very impersonal, you know, your massage therapist can be thinking about her dinner plans while massaging you. So this is some kind of a cross. And when you think about it, you know, 25% of Americans don't have a single friend in whom they can confide. So no wonder they may need someone, even a stranger to hug. And you ask me, you know, how does it compare in kind of the social hormone release with hugging friends and or your family? And we don't really have research on that yet. But we know, for example, from other studies that massage therapy can release this kind of social hormones. My guess would be that it's not as good as when you are connecting with the people whom you actually really care about. But it's better than nothing. There is something in it as well. So even holding hands with strangers can also give you this boost. And if you really are missing something here, if you really don't have this connection, it can be good. So the therapist in the center where I went, she told me, for example, that her clients are either people who exactly have no friends for various reasons, or for example, they moved to their new to the city, or they feel their parents didn't hug them enough when they were children. So there are lots of reasons why people need that. And some it's just part of our the way our society is. I guess that this kind of places are needed. Yeah, well, some people need a lot more than hugs from strangers. So the hugging thing sounds like a very sweet practice. Actually, that sounds pretty awesome. And it actually makes me question why therapists don't hug their patients? Why they don't have masseuse therapists to massage you while you're telling them all about your fears and threats and frustrations. And that would be the best combination. Yeah, you have something new. And then it's like, Oh, I can really now I feel like I'm both mentally and physically relaxed in the same space. And it might be painful on both fronts. But it seems like that would be the way to do it. Yeah, I like this hugging therapy. It's the wrong time to invest in it, folks. So right now. Yeah, that's all people. I'm very interested to see kind of some some some data on generational differences, gender differences, cultural differences on on hugging, because I don't feel like I have to know a person that well to give them a hug. I've definitely had mild acquaintances tell me, Oh, my God, I'm having a terrible day. Will you give me a hug? And they get a hug. So I think I just want to double check. And sometimes I'm a little so our is it as hugging or we're using that as a euphemism? No, no, okay. Just a hug, Justin. Well, I'm talking about tags. Okay. Okay. Well, sometimes it's like over my head. I just want to make sure I've not missed it. It is hug. I've been asked by people I don't know super well. You do you need a hug? And I'm like, yes. And it helps. I just I don't know. It just it's very odd to me that for my personal experience, I have not seen this barrier of a lack of availability of hugs. And I don't think it's because I'm I have it. It's not solely people I'm incredibly close to that I'm getting them from I guess is my point. So I'm I'm very curious if I'm in a unique situation here that I just know a lot of people that are like, huggy, I guess, or if it's something that, yeah, if it's something that they're specific kind of centers that this could be focused on to make sure people have an outlet because I can I've certainly experienced the power of a hug. I mean, it is definitely very cultural, right? So in China, where I live now, you know, people, they don't really hug, but they kiss all the time, right? In the kind of the busy, you know, on the two cheeks where you're exactly. And for me, it was very strange when I moved here first time, because you know, you, you, for example, you meet your friend and your friend is coming with a group of their friends you've never seen before. And you're supposed to kiss everybody, including the guys, which is like, you know, for me, it was kind of weird at first. But yeah, so there are definitely some cultural differences. And in other cultures, people kind of keep their distance much more. And which is very good for the pandemic times, not very good, maybe for the social hormones. But so there is very strong cultural thing going on as well. But in general, we all need a connection. And this is also a question sometimes I'm asked by by readers, you know, what about the introverts and extroverts, right? Do I do we all need to party and have 100 friends and so on? But the truth is that we don't. So what you really need is a connection, whatever your style. So for some people, the connection means they really need a lot of friends. And if they don't, they feel unhappy, they feel they're lonely. And so they really need that. Whereas for some other people who are more introverted, having this kind of one on one connection, so you can, you just meet one person at a time in a one neighbor in time, one family member, one friend is perfectly fine as well. What is not fine is when you are among those 25% of people, you know, Americans who have not a single person in whom they can confide if you are lonely, you know, for example, people who are lonely, they have shorter telomeres, right? They have different gene expression related to cancer to immune to the immune system. They unfortunately, they have much higher mortality risks. So so obviously, if you are feeling lonely, then your needs are not being met. And something should be changed. What's interesting is that's going to tie into a story that I've got coming up in the second half. It ties into some conservative voting patterns, too. People who, the story that's coming up is that the interesting thing is this will be about Christian nationalists, these people who identify them as voting based on their Christian ideals for support in support of Trump aren't churchgoers. They are not people who have a connection to their church any longer, and they tend to be very isolated. And so it's a really interesting sort of thing that you're describing, because these, this sounds like people who need hugs. It sounds like these are people who need this hugging therapy immediately. Impossible. And it is, you know, I grew up with the next canvassing for the next election, people going out, do you need a hug today? So I grew up, I grew up with a very affectionate family, kiss on the lips on the way out the door to school, all that sort of stuff. It was just so normal and natural. And then I noticed that it didn't happen at other households. Like sometimes, yeah, but not like, you know, it was just sort of a weird thing. You just assume everybody's getting a hug when they have a bad day. But it's it's, if it's not true, then that's, yeah, that's an incredibly different way of going through the world and to recognize that you've been lacking hugs and go seek them out. That's, oh, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. People got to find these connections. And you know, so what I was going to ask here is, so how can we take these lessons? There's the scientific evidence that, you know, that that connection, having this connection to your community, to your family, to other individuals, friends is beneficial to us in the long term, that it's going to help us live healthier, potentially longer lives, right? So how do we, how do we go about teaching this? How do we go about creating a world of community? I mean, it's not just the connection, right? So I write about also things like kindness, empathy. So volunteering, optimism, conscientiousness, right? So this kind of propensity of keeping your desk clean and being on time for meetings and things like that. Mindfulness. So all, all of these things together, these are all the soft drivers of health I'm describing and growing in. So, so definitely, you know, for me, the first step is just to realize that it's not just diet and exercise. And also, it's definitely not the kind of diet and exercise we've talked about. So, you know, supplements and exercise gadgets. There is much more. There's a big picture of just living well, being connected, being, having purpose in life as well. It's extremely important. Being empathetic, being kind, being optimistic, the way you live your life. So this is why I call, I also call the book growing young, because it's about growing as a person, right? So if you grow as a person, your body will kind of maybe not definitely become younger, but it will stay younger, longer. We'll be aging better if we, if we grew as people and develop a kind of mental habits, social habits that are, that are good for us. And I think exactly the first step is just to realize that these things are important, because we don't hear about it. And so we don't really read a lot about it. And the, the reason for that, I believe is that there is no money for anybody to be made on it. When you think about diet and exercise, you know, all the gadgets and pills and miracle foods and bad diet and so on, there is just no money in it, right? There are companies, producers, there's advertising, there is marketing, all that's going on to sell us something. Whereas when we're talking about being kind to someone, being, you know, connected, going for a walk with your friends, trying to stay optimistic, finding purpose in life. These are things that are, that don't have any monetary value. Nobody's trying to sell you anything here. So, and this is why it doesn't make it to the news. It doesn't make it on, on the social media, or to the influencers and YouTube videos, because there are no products. And if there are no products, well, we don't hear about it. So, so just change the perspective. Yeah. How do we learn to turn a profit on kindness? Like, how do we make some money out of this empathy thing? Well, it's just better to make it popular, right? We'll get a marketing team. I like that. I like, I used to enjoy it. People still bring up the catch phrase, the pay it forward, that became popular. I think it was back in the 90s. And it's this, the idea of when somebody does something good for you, you do something good for other people. And it's always take whatever you have and pay it forward into the lives of other people. Try and, because if you help others, maybe that makes their life easier. Maybe it makes a connection. Maybe it also makes you feel more positive about things. And it works, you know, there is, there was a story in Tim Hortons, you know, our national Canadian coffee chain. There was in the drive through like several years ago, there was one driver paid for the bill of the driver behind him, just because he was being kind. And, you know, they're a chain developed. So each person felt, you know, really grateful for their meal being bought by someone else. So they kept paying for the driver behind. And there were over 200 people have done it. So it was absolutely crazy. You know, I've never seen healthy eating or, you know, broccoli eating or matcha drinking spread the same way. It's amazing, right? How this kind of kindness can really go around. Yeah. And yeah, if we can, if we can promote that, and I think there's, you know, the value in it isn't monetary. It's, I mean, in a long, in a long way, it is, okay, if we are talking about monetary value, there is some monetary value to the healthcare system. So there are actual studies, there are studies showing how much kind, maybe not on kindness yet, but there are studies on loneliness, for example, or on things like neuroticism. So personality traits, how much they cost the healthcare system. And these are, you know, billions of dollars we are talking about here. So, so that's why in the UK, they now have a ministry for loneliness in the government, because they recognize it as a health issue, a really big problem for the healthcare system, which costs a lot of money. So, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if somebody did calculate how much kindness also benefits the healthcare system. I haven't seen studies like this yet, but you know, there is money in it as well for, for the healthcare system. I think that's amazing. And there's a question in our chat room, not that we haven't touched on it, but can you get some of these positive benefits from hugging your dogs and your animals? Do those count? I mean, they're obviously not as good as hugging people, but there is some research. There is not a lot of it, but there is one study I've seen down looking into your dog's eyes. And it does cause an oxytocin release as well, both in the owner and in the dog as well. So, so there are certainly some benefits of looking into your dog's eyes. I have cats and they take that as a threat, so I don't know if it works. I have learned, however, the little, the slow blink that you give to your cat, so they relax because they like the slow blink. That's don't threaten them. Give them a slow blink. They're caught. They'll calm down and enjoy it. Yes. Okay, so if I'm, if I'm thinking about my to-do list real quick of how to do this, I want to sum this up. Okay, so basically be a good person, right? Keep your social connections and find meaning in something that I do and kind of sustain that. Stay optimistic as well. Optimism is a big thing, so can add 10 years old to your life for your research. Oh, I've got a free 10 right there. That's the easiest thing I've ever done for my health. Is there anything else that you want to touch on or tell us about your book before we go here? I mean, there's so much more I could talk for hours, so I'm not sure how many hours we have here. There's, you know, lots of things we still haven't touched on, so exactly the personality, you know, the mindfulness, marriage as well. There's so much more going on, but I don't think we can even. The personality type one is a little frightening because as much as I feel like it's possible to change diet or throw yourself out there socially more or make sure that you're getting a new hobby if this one isn't working out or finding a new job or whatever it is that keeps you engaged and all of these different things that you can tell, boy, I feel like sometimes people's deal is just their deal. I mean, personality traits, I mean, you'd be surprised how much wrong I mean, there is lots and lots of new research coming in showing that personality can be changed as well and actually much more than we realize. And we've been doing it for a long time, you know, psychotherapy in a way is changing personality and personality trait of neuroticism and it's been, it works well and other personality types also can be changed, especially the ones, luckily, the ones that are most important for health, so for example, conscientiousness. And the usual recommendation of researchers who do study those things is that's basically to fake it and remake it. So if you want to, for example, become more conscientious, you just behave like a conscientious person, like for example, today I will clean my desk. Just one thing, small steps, right, just like with exercise or any kind of habits change, you just do small adjustments and after several months you can actually see that you become much more conscientious. So it does work. There is some genetic basis to our personality, obviously, but there is a genetic basis to a lot of things. For example, to our, you mentioned exercise, but we all differ in our anatomical features in our muscles. For example, I wasn't born with a particularly muscular, as a muscular type, but it doesn't mean I give up on exercise. I'm still trying, right? I'll never be all sunburnt bald, but I still run and I still try to run better. And it's the same thing with empathy, for example, which also has a lot of genetic component to it or other personality traits, conscientiousness, neuroticism, optimism as well has some genetic basis to it, but we still can improve a lot no matter where we start. I think it would be amazing for people to really work on empathy for others, empathy for others outside of their in-group. Yeah. And if that fails, psilocybin in the water supply. There we go. Come to Oregon. Marta, thank you so much for joining us tonight or your morning. I know you have a long day ahead of you, unless you take a nap. Your book, Growing Young, is available now and it's got wonderful stories, wonderful science and really great, great writing. Thank you for being here and talking with us today and just really appreciate it. Where can people find you and find out more about the book? I think the good place to start is the book's website. There are more resources there as well. So it's www.growingyungthebook.com. And so you can connect with me on Twitter at my handle is Mzarazka. So it's Z-A-R-A-S-K-A. Fantastic. Thank you so much. And I do hope that you stay young and are able to maintain your optimism and connections even in the midst of this pandemic as I hope that we all will and have a wonderful day. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me. Bye. Thank you for joining us. Bye. All right, everybody. That was Marta Zarazka and you, as she said, can find her book at growingyoungthebook.com. This is This Week in Science. If you want to help us grow, you know what you could do? Get a friend to subscribe today. You know what we're talking about? Connection and friends and family. Yes. Community help grow twists. We would love your help. That would be just amazing. Tell somebody to subscribe to twists today. All right. As we come back, hey Blair. What time is it? It is that time. It's that time for where's Justin? Nope. We're not playing that game. It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. Yeah, Blair. Wow. Ghost Justin asked me what I got. Well, first, I have some touchy fish. Touchy fish. Touchy-feely fish. This is a study from the University of Chicago as opposed to a university from the study of Chicago. And this is looking at round gobies. That's Neogobius melanostomus. And they wanted to see if fish had some sort of feeling of touch in their fingers. Considering you could do many things without being able to see. And just by touch, you could kind of try to figure out where you are. I'm immediately reminded of a place called the tactile dome that I went when I was gone and held. Yes, it was dark. And then you crawl through the whole view of the dome. Yeah, and you could feel kind of what was going on in each room, but even though it was dark. Anyway, so our sense of touch is really developed. And so these researchers from the University of Chicago wanted to know if fish had a similar ability of a sense of touch, mainly because a lot of fish are in contact with the bottom of a body of water, the kind of the floor, constantly. And so if they're constantly kind of scooting along mud or rocks, they might want to be able to feel what's going on. So to test this, they had to figure out kind of how they maneuvered over these different sorts of things. And what we're going on with the nerve signals, they want to record nerve signals from individual fin rays. So those are the individual kind of lines that go down the fins. Those are called the fin rays. And so what they did is they had the fish go over a piece of slate, so something very slick, or a wavy piece of plastic on the tank bottom. And they were able to film that. They also filmed when they wedged themselves against the side of the tank. And the fish's fins splayed out over the surface like a hand laid upon them. So basically, I guess I didn't really think about it before, but if you lay your hand out on a thing, you kind of subconsciously fan out your fingers. And so that's what these fins were also doing. So it's very interesting. So looking at the behavior, it looks like they're kind of feeling the floor. To figure out actually what's happening, they had to look at the nerves. So they brought a short horizontal bar along a fin ray towards the tip of the fin. So they kind of had this little bar underneath the fin and pulled it forward. And they did it at speeds ranging from 5 millimeters per second to 20 millimeters per second. And recorded the electrical signals in nerves as the bar moved over the fin. And based on what they saw, it was clear that the fins sensed when they were being touched. Okay, great, step one. They have some sort of feeling in their fins. But in addition, they saw that each nerve on each little fin ray only sensed contact along a tiny portion of each fin ray. So there were individual nerves along each fin ray for each little section of fin. So that would make sense. They'd be able to feel fine surface detail to kind of test that even further. The next step of the study was to design a rotating wheel with two millimeter wide ridges along the edge. They had gaps of three, five or seven millimeters. And that was to mimic different kind of sediment textures. So ranging from coarse sand to granules to pebbles. So those are kind of the three to five and seven millimeters. So tiny little things to big clunky things that they're touching. They then rolled the wheel along the fish's fin ray at speeds from 20 to 80 millimeters per second. And it took many designs of this kind of funny wheel of fortune to figure out how this would work best. But eventually they were able to catch the nerve signals and they saw that they synchronized with each ridge as it contacted the ray regardless of the gaps. So the nerve signals firing matched the pattern of the ridges moving across the skin even when the speed was faster. So this is actually similar to tests that have been done on monkey finger pads. And they seem to be as sensitive to coarse surfaces as the monkey finger pads. Of course, this is definitely a first step, difficult to tell just with a Gobi too. Like can you train them to differentiate between different textures and then make it dark and then have them touch it and do a behavior? I don't know if you could do that with a Gobi. You could try, but I would say that would probably be a real way to try to test their sense of touch is to see if they could make decisions based on what they felt. So that would be, if I was running this study that would be my next step. But the real interesting thing here is that they do have a kind of a developed sense of touch in their fins. This is interesting because primates at fish obviously they diverged a pretty long time ago. Long time ago. Yeah. And this response seems similar. And so that might mean an early development of this sense of touch. This might be really at the very beginning of vertebrate evolution or before who knows. And so this touch sensibility is something that we've, of course, as we human like to do, we've kind of identified primates as the ones that do it and they're special for it. But really, maybe not. Wow. But let me, I mean, okay, they chose the gobees. They chose the gobees, but these are rock bottom dwelling fish that where it would be important for them to touch things and be able to feel their surroundings as opposed to a fish that's hanging out in the water column all the time and never touches anything except water. So I'm skeptical of that conclusion. So that this is where it gets difficult and we need our time machine because a tuna that's never gonna touch the ground, they might have lost that ability over evolutionary time because they didn't need it. Yes. So we need our phylogenies. There we go. Right. We need to look at DNA. We'll need to figure out where this started. But I mean, wouldn't that be like, if you're, I'm assuming if we're going way, way back. Yeah. The first sort of thing was probably kind of a slimy, crawly thing and touch sensing was probably there before vision or auditory. I mean- No, so those came in. I mean, if you're talking about vertebrates, fish came before amphibians. So if you're talking about- No, no, no, I'm talking about before fish. Okay, you're talking about- I'm talking about way before fish. Sure. Yeah, I'm talking about the first animal, multicellular, slime mold creature, whatever it was. Talk about worms or some stuff. Yeah, even worms, even trilobites, whatever they are that you're going back in, they were going to be crawly, touchy. They weren't swimmers. They weren't, they might've been free floating thingies. You can sort of imagine something that small but it seems like touch sensory to explore the outside world would have been like the first sense. Like it would have been there before you got to any of the other senses for the external world. Yeah. So I can see it being pre-fish, absolutely. Sure, and I mean, it's one of the five senses. So like there is part of it to me that I'm like, well, it's kind of just part of being alive is being able to feel your way around, right? So it all kind of depends on how, how developed of a sense of touch you're talking about too. I mean, and just nerve endings at near this outer, like pain sensor, where, oh, where's it coming from would be helpful, you know? Is this a thing that could cause pain that I'm touching or is this a good thing that I want to get closer to? You know, just something on that simple level, is this a warmer area called, whatever it is, I think touch has been, it doesn't seem surprising that fish could feel things. Yeah. Your appendages are gonna be sensitive. What kind of sense, that's really the question. And we, and that's the point of this really is that we consider our touch, the primate sense of touch to be so advanced and well, our fingertips are so finely attuned to things. They're magic machines, right? Well, they kind of are though, compared to the rest of our bodies. Right, but at the same time. But within every creature, there's going to be, you know, I would assume the elephant's prehensilled trunk. But you're not listening at this, but what I'm saying is that we have this human centric view and we're like, oh, our fingers are so amazing. And so it's hard for us as humans, or it shouldn't be, but it has been hard for us to understand that other animals would have these amazing sensory abilities as well. So it's like, ooh, fish have a sense of touch like people. Who knew? So that's all I'm saying. Well, quit mocking Blair for bringing the story. I mean, it's a good story. They needed to do this study. My goodness. Okay, well, moving on to touchy fish. I hope they touch each other. Just so violent, violent mongooses. So mongooses are female lead. So they're a matriarchal society. So they're probably more peaceful than other societies, right? In this case, no. So female banded mongooses, they have kind of a funny thing where because their group is pretty much all related to one another, males, mongooses don't leave after they're born. So the males are usually related in some way to the matriarch. The females kind of convince the whole group to go to war with another mongoose group. So the females can sneakily mate with the males from the other group while everyone's fighting. That's sneaky. So this is a study for University of Exeter and the University of Cambridge. They have found specific quote, exploitative leadership in mongooses. This is also seen in humans, of course, lions, chimpanzees. This is something where the leaders of a group are decoupled from the cost of their choices. And the cost of their choices are amplified in the destructive nature of intergroup conflict. So basically the leaders are not the ones that feel the fallback from starting conflict. So this decoupling of like the consequences of their actions, I guess. And so this is potentially why, at least in this case, but potentially in other species as well, there has been this kind of continued evolution of severe collective violence in animal society. So this is where in a normal situation, if the entire group went to war, then the one in charge, this female in this case, as well as all of her progeny would be equally injured, have kind of drawbacks from that. And so there would be a reason not to go to this war unnecessarily, I suppose. But it seems that in this case, the males within the group are mostly the ones that pay the cost. And there's this very real reason to do it, which is that they need that new genetic injection into their group. Yeah, no, it sounds like a survival strategy in this instance, absolutely. Yeah, but you can see how this, there's lots of other animal societies where they find a way around this. Yeah, yeah. Like maybe a male sneaks off and gets into the other colony and mates with the female and then sneaks back or the female sneaks away and gets some of that other genetic material and comes back, you know? There's other ways to do it. It's violent to society as baboons are thought to have. The males all leave their troop and go off to a different and join a different troop and have to get embedded there. And they don't, so yeah, there's different strategies. Certainly the mongooses decided to have a big brawl and then they go off and then do sneaky mating. I guess it's, I mean, I guess because the problem would be if the female just went over there to find a mate outside of the group would be her against everyone. It would just be, it wouldn't work. So, sounds like- Yeah, and so that's kind of where this gets odd because so the society that you're describing, Justin, is also like what lions do. And so the idea is males, it's male led, it's patriarchal. And so when the males are old enough, they're kicked out. They develop bachelor prides for a while as they get older and then they show up to challenge a male patriarch from another pride. And if they win, then they are now the head. That what that does is it creates turnover in who's the main provider of the male genes in that group. So there's a regular turnover. Like every couple of years, there's a new male. So you don't get this unnecessary flood of genes from one father. But it also means that that male by design, the way that works out is not related to any of the females in the group. Because it's a matriarchal society, it gets a little more complicated because the only males in that group were born of her. Yes. So Kiki, you're muted, sorry. But yeah. Yeah, so it does, it complicates things a little more. And the way that the society has figured it out is to start fights with other groups. But it's something that scientists have known mongus do for a long time, that they start these weird rivalries between different groups, but they don't know exactly why, what sparks it. And now they think they know this is the deal. It's because the female needs to increase the gene pool. Yeah. That is, by the way, for the listening audience, they have a very frightening looking photo up on right now, which is about 11 versus 11 mongooses all squaring off and like bearing teeth and getting ready to brawl. It's very frightening looking. It's like two mongoose football teams. Yeah. Yeah. Or rugby teams, maybe. They look, and they're all giving their fierce mongoose look at the other side. Oh, it looks scary. Yeah. And I had forgotten the collective noun for mongoose, so I wanted to look it up just so I could. And now you all will know, no, it's mongooses. But the collective noun, like a pride of lions. It's a pack, a gang, or a mob. Mob. Which makes sense. I like mob of mongooses. Yeah. It makes sense based on what we just talked about. Yeah, it totally does. That's fascinating. But it's like, hey, girls, go fight. I need to take care of something. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, all my sons. Yeah. Mommy needs you to do something for her. Mommy needs you to go take care of something. Yeah. I heard them call you names over there. Go tell them. These sons are bad. Yeah. Anyway. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. This is This Week in Science. And if you are just tuning in, we have a few more stories to go. And calendars are here. Head to twist.org to get ready for 2021 with a Twist Blair's Animal Corner calendar. A link for orders is on our website. Go to the horny frog, horned frog, frog toad. Click on that. And thank you for listening to Twist. Thank you for being a part of our audience. And if you are able, please help continue. Please help us continue to do what we do by bringing our show to you and to others every week. With your help, we can continue to do it week after week after week. Click the Patreon link at twist.org. Choose your level of support. And know that you are helping to bring science and sanity to more people in the world. We really can't do it without you. Thank you for your support. All right, Justin. I think it's your turn. You got some stories? Yeah. So I've got one more story for the end of the show. This is a lot of people have been wondering about talking about pondering, being amazed by the fact that the next former president was so popular against people who identified themselves as very Christian or nationalistic Christians as they're going to be defined here. Despite the fact that he seemed to have zero of the qualities considered virtuous or good by Christianity, seven for seven and deadly sins on a daily basis, 10 commandments is basically like a bucket list of things to break. So what gives? Why is what was the connection here? Why does this make any sense whatsoever? Research by LSU sociologists indicates it wasn't Christian nationalism that drove churchgoers to vote for Trump in 2016. They're using 2016 because even now we don't have the actual data who voted for who. We have some ideas, but the better data comes out by sometime next year. Rather surprisingly, though, to those doing the study, Christian nationalism was important amongst non-churchgoers. And that likely drove many of his supporters to the polls also in 2020. But the research shows Christian nationalist support of Trump isn't tied to religious institutions, religious teachings, attending church on a regular basis, or anything that is Christian. It's actually much more tied to people who have stopped attending church or have not attended church in a very long time but still identify themselves as Christians. Regardless of the political or personal background, voters who hold strong Christian nationalist values voted for Trump at high levels, despite not going to church. The researchers define Christian nationalism as a set of beliefs about how Christianity should be prioritized in public life, in laws, and in America's national identity. Think about that. They want to prioritize Christianity into every aspect of the nation of the United States, despite not actually practicing it in any sort of traditional way, at least, right? So this is going to be in a paper sociological forum titled Unchurched Christian Nationalism in the 2016 Presidential Election. And they sort of calling for a little bit of nuance in how we explain the so-called religious vote for Trump. So this is, okay, another finding that they found here, detachment from religious communities intensify conservative attitudes. Detachment from religious communities. Quoting, who am I quoting here? This is the authors in general quoting from the paper. The 2016 election may not have been straightforward story of religious communities coalescing around Christian nationalistic candidate. Christian nationalism operates differently for those inside and outside of religious institutions and religion's most dynamic effects on US politics may have less to do with what happens inside churches than how people, whether they are individually religious or not, use religious ideas to draw and impose boundaries around their national identity. It seems to be sort of a larger, they say the Christian nationalism can be seen as a aspect of a larger populist ethos of victimization, embattlement and resentment. Now remember, think back to the interview we just had of people who become isolated and lonely, also having more health issues, having maybe physical mental health issues as well as all of this and how prevalent they found 25% of people having this being in this lonely state where they have no one in which to confide. And these are people who are identifying as a thing that they are not connected to, but they still have this identity. Trump received significant support from alienated Americans who appear to be disengaged from religious congregations and other social institutions. Second, how Christian nationalist rhetoric can indicate nostalgia. So nostalgia for the age that never existed, make it great again, you know, back when, identifying with maybe the childhood vision of what Christianity was in this case. Or it can be used as a veil for increasingly unpopular opinions, racial bias, anti LGBTQ views, that sort of thing. Referencing previous research to the author's right that many Americans now feel they are victimized for expressing traditional values concerning marriage, sexuality and gender identity. Again, outside of any institutionalized belief system in this. They point out that religious communities can have a stress buffering effect. So people feel less desperate for an authoritarian figure like Trump. So this is like getting, you know, going into being part of a community, having those social interactions, maybe getting the hugs at the church, has a sort of stress buffering effect where you don't feel like everything is under assault. Like you, if you're watching certain networks that tell you everything is under assault, if you're in a community, that's having a perfectly fine time living out the ideals of that religion. It also suggests that the disconnect isn't really there. If Trump talks religious without acting like a religious person to people who consider themselves religious without themselves participating in religion or acting religious themselves. Really fascinating in contrast to what we were just talking about. I think you're on to something there that, you know, the connection and the being connected to something that is palpable as community is something greater than you. And you have somebody who's a pastor at the church, you have your community that buffers your connection with God, with, you know, the Holy Trinity, whatever, you know, whatever, however you define it. And that connection is strengthened by your community. And so you don't need an authoritarian to come in and be that higher figure to tell you what to do. And, you know, you've also, yes, your identity is tied into your beliefs and your community and what you're a part of. But when your identity is also, you've had to bolster it because you've become separated and maybe independent from that community. You've had to, you know, put up a brick wall and define things very strictly. And so your identity maybe becomes a bit firmer and the rhetoric that you're talking about that comes out politically then speaks to that identity, the fear, the, you know, the feeling that you're being attacked or whatever it may be and speaks to that identity and then makes you feel like you're a part of something greater. So there's- That becomes a community. Yeah, that becomes a community. It's a need, maybe that need for belonging, need for connection, very deep psychological roots in all of this for sure. Yeah, I know. Those conspiracy theory Facebook groups come in and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. But yeah, anything else can take its place because you're already doing mystical wish thinking on some level and you never developed it out. You developed it largely outside of a structured mythical magical thinking. I know there's not enough pews in the United States for everybody who calls themselves a Christian to go to on any given Sunday. It's just not that many churches, meaning most people aren't doing this. But is it, as a hardcore atheist, I now suddenly want their church to start reaching out to the community and grabbing some of these people and bringing them in because obviously they need that stress buffering. You need to bring these people back in because they went out there on their own. They're not doing good things. They're not making good choices. There's people who need it, I guess. Well, and there, I've heard a lot of, I mean, yeah, I also don't have experiences with this sort of thing, but I've heard a lot of stories like from my father who went to Catholic school for his entire life, that you go to a Bible study and you talk about different interpretations and you talk about shades of gray and you talk about all this kind of stuff that we talk to each other about kind of minutia in opinions and all these sorts of things every day when we talk to each other in person, over a beer or in a classroom or whatever it is. And so yeah, you can totally see how if you're not doing that, if you're living in your echo chamber online as it pertains to your religion, it's a lot harder to see those shades of gray. Then I think when you're talking about Christian nationalists, I don't actually think, I think they have a, Jesus is good and the Bible is against everything that I'm against and I don't think they're doing any nuance. There is no, nothing from the text involved. And even when you get up to a greater level, oh gosh, who was it? I think it was, was it Kasich Kasinich? What's his name? I don't know. It's this great clip of a video where he's in this Jewish bookstore in New York and he's like, so, hey, what about that Abraham? And this is a guy who's like religious right for the longest time. And, and they're like, yes, you know, we've read variations of interpretations of the handwriting of the double meaning of the triple interpretations through the different languages. It's like, oh, isn't there something about a whale in there? I don't know. Like he just had this like one story version he'd heard. And yeah, there's people who go very deep into text interpretation and origin story and everything else. And he's trying to have a conversation like, yeah, well, this kind of is like, no, you don't know the Bible. Stop. But, but, but yeah, I mean, I've noticed it quite a bit because I used to be very curious to talk to people about their religion. I don't do it anymore. I don't care. I can't. But I was, because I went and read the thing and I was always just really fascinated how individualized people's interpretation of what was written in there was and how different it was from what was written in there. And for you to have a belief system that you get to make up and you share it in common with other people who've also made it up seems very strange. Well, I think that thing that is strange and the soul be the, we should move away from the, like actually nevermind. We should move away from the religion and this conversation. Oh, we're not kicking people need to have religion. You can't just tell everybody to move away from religion. I think in terms of the study, I think in terms of the study, in terms of the study, it's very interesting. And I think it's a very, we need to have social science studies looking into identity politics and why people choose things the way that they do. It's to understand our country, to understand the world even. This is fascinating stuff, but in terms of speculating on our own terms and our own levels of, I mean, this is not an area that I'm entirely versed in. So it's not a conversation that you should go much further in respect to the show right now. That's fine. But it is, I will do a last analogy and then I will move on. Okay, so let's all talk about the book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Son. All right, is that what it is? Oh, wait, what are you talking? No, I don't remember like the wizards part, but I really liked the part where, what do you mean you missed the wizards? Yeah, I didn't know there were wizards in there. Yeah, the whole thing's like about wizards. I didn't, no, no, I'm talking more about like the part where they were shooting lightning bolts at people. No, that's not, there was a lightning bolt, but it wasn't, they were shooting it. That's how bad it is. It's worse than the worst game of telephone. Anyway, yeah, I'll move on. What's the next story, Kiki? Who's got a story? Who's next? I've got some stories. I have a couple of stories. I got chills. They're multiplying. Okay. What? Are you losing control? No, I'm totally in control because I'm going to talk about science right now. Great. Hello everybody, I got this. I'm in control, but what I'm going to talk about is musical chills. When you listen to music, do you ever get that feeling, goose bumps? Or you just, the music, there's something that happens and you're like, oh my God, this music is giving me goose bumps. Music also sometimes makes me cry. Yes, it's very evocative in that way. Yes. Justin? Chills? So, I can remember when that could happen. It doesn't anymore. Okay, you don't listen to music anymore? No, I listen to music anymore, but I know more. No, I remember there were like Pink Floyd songs. I would get like, whoa, these chills. Now, I totally know what you're talking about. I haven't had them for several decades. So that's interesting. That's very interesting and I wonder what happened because researchers have been looking into the pleasure inducing aspects of listening to music for some time and this particular study used a method called high density EEG, electroencephalogram. And the high density EEG is able to reveal patterns of brain activity in the cerebral cortex that have been identified by fMRI or PET scanning. It's very high resolution and is able to, instead of kind of give just general blobs of brain activity or just a certain brain rhythm in the brain overall, it's able to tune in on certain areas of the brain. The reason they looked at it at musical chills with this technique is that they'd like to be able to actually study people having pleasurable music experiences outside of fMRI machines. They'd like to go into people's living rooms. They'd like to go to concerts. They'd like to go places where people listen to music together in groups, speaking of the connection aspect of things that we were talking about earlier with Marta's book. It really hasn't been possible before because the technology that we've used is so individual in nature. You can only scan one brain at a time with fMRI or PET scanning. You can't stick EEGs on a, you can stick EEGs on a number of people and have them listen to the same music at the same time and see what happens in all of their brains simultaneously. And it's also much more portable so you can go places. They in this didn't go anywhere. They were in the laboratory for this particular study just to give proof of concept. But what they were aiming to do is really identify those the cortical brain regions that become active when people get the chills. And so this research took place in France. They recruited a whole bunch of people at this French university and they started out with like, I don't know over a hundred volunteers but then for one reason or another they weren't able to come in. All of them were right-handed. All of them were sensitive to musical reward according to the Bartholona Music Reward Questionnaire and they had to have a score over 65 on this questionnaire. And so like half the people out of their hundred people or so who wanted to be in the study did not make it to that limit. They just didn't, or they weren't right-handed because of right-handedness indicates brain use or which hemisphere is dominant of the brain so they wanted to not have that be an aspect. And so they decided to look at the brain that way. Nine of them did not get enough chill inducing segments of music. So all the volunteers had to know pieces of music that would give them chills and had to tell the researchers. And so they had to be able to identify enough of them for the study. A bunch of them like didn't call back after their initial request. Few of them, they couldn't make the time for an appointment happen because their schedules are too busy and one had a haircut that was incompatible with EEG recording according to the study. So if you would like to be in EEG recording studies make sure your haircut is appropriate. So they ended up with like 23 or so subjects that they used for this study and they put EEGs on them and they had them listen to 60 to 90 second extracts of music with their eyes closed in a comfortable chair. And then they were supposed to report their emotional pleasure. They had a response box that they were supposed to report it in. And what they ended up finding is that there were definitely particular areas of the brain that became active in response to music that gave them the chills. There are two specific patterns for chills. There's a decreased theta activity in the right central region of the cortex which could reflect supplementary motor area activation during the chills and it might be related to rhythmic anticipation processing according to the researchers. There was also a decreased theta activity in the right temporal region which they think might be related to musical appreciation and it might reflect the right superior temporal gyrus getting active but they did not find prefrontal asymmetry reflecting emotional pleasure but there was also, there were other brain waves that responded to increased emotional awareness. But all that said, there are very specific brain waves that are related to first anticipation of pleasure in the music. Like maybe you know the music or that you can sense the pacing of the music or the chords that are being used. There's some anticipatory aspect of the chills and then there is the actual dopamine release and enjoyment of the music itself. I feel like they should have swapped them all, right? Like give them different, give the music that one person thought was great to somebody else. Well, because I think, there's music that makes you feel sad, right? And that's usually a minor key but I would be interested to see if there's something musically in common with something that gives you chills. It might not just be that you really like it or that you have an emotional connection to it but mechanically it might be something about the music that's causing it which in which case you could decouple the dopamine release of a song you like from whatever's giving you the chills physically by taking a chill inducing song from me and making Justin listen to it. Right, but then I mean, I guess, but in that sense you'd be determining aspects of the music itself and what would be, that's like the actual music what would be leading to the chills potentially as opposed to what's actually happening in an individual's brain. Although it would be interesting to see whether, you know, whether the chills, I mean, not everybody gets the chills to the same pieces of music. Right, but I wonder if there's a commonality, I guess is what I'm trying to see mechanically with the music because that would be interesting but also to your point, it's really hard to parse out the difference between your brain's response to a song you like and your brain's response to a song that gives you a physiological response. So how can you decouple that? I don't know, it might be the next step. If a song gives you dopamine, I guess you like it. Right, unless you like getting chills from a song the first time you hear it and you've decided if you like it yet but you're like, oh, the song gave me chills. Right, yeah, I mean, every time I've gotten chills from a song, there's not a particular thing that I could say, oh, this is the G minor chord or, you know, G major or, you know, oh, the drums are, you know, 120 beats per minute. You know, there's nothing that I could put my finger on in that way that I would say is a commonality between any of the songs that have ever given me the chills. So. I mean, my very unscientific response to that based on just a quick catalog of the songs I know that give me chills is that there's usually some sort of swelling in the music. So there's a sudden change in decibels or something or the fullness of the music. So a sudden swell creates an emotional and physiological response. Yeah, that sounds very plausible. I think for me, it's a, I need at least 180 beats per minute for it to be even interesting. But that was- Maybe it's just that you've listened to Pink Floyd too many times. There's nothing novel to it anymore. You need new music, Justin. No, I think that is, there is definitely something to that. There's a song, which is a lot of minor chords. In the pie, it's a Steely, ooh, no, it's not Steely Dan. Who is it? Oh my goodness, Lead Belly. Lead Belly's in the pines. It has this like sort of a haunting sound and maybe it's giving, ooh, I'm getting a little bit of chills thinking about the song right now. So I can still work. Jimi Hendrix machine gun. That's another one. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-prr-pr-pr-pr-pr-pr-pr-pr-pr- Oh my God, that one works too. So there are still songs I could think of that are chill inducing to some extent. So that is possible. I had to look back and pull back some songs I haven't listened to much in the past, but yeah, playing a song, playing a song for the first, like figuring out a song that you wanna play or something, writing a piece of music, that can do it for me. More so, I think, than just listening to songs. Or maybe it's just music today, kids today. They don't know how to make music, I don't understand. Okay. Okay, old man. All right, Green Bell. No, I'm not a stone, but maybe, but there could be a thing to, yeah. It could be that I need to listen to more old blues records and some more of the old 60s music, like the music that I listened to as a child, maybe the music that still can do that. Maybe don't bring it back, yeah. Maybe, yeah, maybe it's the music that you've been listening to. The music of today, I try to stay current, but yeah. Doesn't do it for you, yeah. Another study in nature neuroscience has been using AI machine learning to pick patterns out of the noise of brain activity. Now, the researchers say that by being able to understand certain signal patterns within the noise of all the activity in the brain, that they will be able to determine the signals that indicate certain behaviors, like moving a finger, lifting an arm, blinking eyelids. For example, all these movements, they all have their own brain activity signal, but how do you, if you're blinking and lifting a finger and raising an arm all at the same time, how does a brain computer device that's wanting to help you do these activities if you are paralyzed, say, how does it decide what out of the noise means finger, eyelid, or arm? So there's a lot going on for multitasking of movements that we take for granted if you are able-bodied, but that people who have limited mobility may be very, you know, would be very aided by could we get brain computer interfaces that allow prostheses to work to, you know, maybe be Gundam devices that we walk inside that, you know, are external robots that carry us around, but we have to be able to control them somehow, right? The computers are gonna be the interfaces. So the researchers, you're muted, but the researchers for the first time, it's been a tough road. And the researchers for the first time have created through machine learning, AI, an algorithm that has been able to uncover neural patterns that were previously missed by other brain decoders and it's able to advance the decoding of complex brain activity and the development of these interfaces for future use. Additionally, the researchers say that being able to restore lost function, it can also help us investigate basic questions about the brain's functions, you know, just generally. And Blair, because I like thinking of things that might disturb you, I was also thinking that once we have this technology, they could listen to our brain, to our brains using radar for whatever detectors from outside and they'll know what you're thinking. No, no. No, no. But doesn't this mean that I could put my head in a jar on a robot body and it would move? Yep. Yep. So that's where you're going. Yep. That's, I'll take that instead. Can I have that answer to this study instead? Yes. I like your optimistic nature. So now that you're gonna live to 100 by being optimistic, you will, when you get to the age where your body deteriorates and you can't keep it alive anymore, put your brain in a robot, totally be fine. Download me, I'm ready. Yep. I think it'll work, I think it will. Blair bought 5,000 reporting for duty. And this study, we didn't have any COVID stories today and I did want to talk about a couple of things that were brought up before the end of the show. This last week, big announcement, huge, huge, huge announcement that is great news for everybody that Pfizer's vaccine in a small subset of its clinical trial testing has had 90% effectiveness. So the headlines you may have seen are 90% effective, vaccine is on its way, God, everybody's excited. But I wanna put some realism into these expectations because that's why I'm here to dash your optimism and to bring- Just ground the conversation. That's, yes, let's ground the conversation in a little realities. Like I said, 90% effectiveness in a small subset of the clinical trial data. What that means is that there is a lot more, there are many more people, many more subjects who are still being tested, who will still be tested, who are still being followed. There is a lot of data still to be collected before rollout of this vaccine, approval of the vaccine and rollout can happen. Also, this was an announcement by press release. This data has not been peer reviewed. Pfizer has been doing- Hey, Pfizer has been doing a great job of staying out of the politics of things, but at the same time, they are a company and they want their stock prices to go up and they are looking for, they're interested in their bottom line and this data has not been fully, fully reviewed by the scientific community. So there's a lot more still to come in that process. And isn't part of the strategy for the United States to pump money into pharmaceutical companies before their vaccines are approved? So doing this would be helpful to them in getting some money. Yes, but they already have a deal with the United States for the Operation Warp Drive. However, they have not taken any money for the development of this vaccine. Yeah, they've taken no government money. They've pre-sold 300 million doses or whatever to the European Union. And they have a possible deal for a couple million doses with the United States. So how do you have- Good news, I'm happy about it. I just kind of wanted to throw that out there that they have a lot to gain by just going like, hey, it's going really good, you guys. That's what I was, it's science press release. Yeah, totally. Yes, yes. The other, there are a few other facets to this to consider, it is very highly efficient, 90%. That's great. So this is really good news and people within the vaccine science community are very excited about this because not only is it highly effective that it's giving antibody protection, this is also an mRNA vaccine. It's one of the new players on the field. It's not one of the tried and true of vaccine standards that we've had in the past. So that in itself is exciting. It means the target of the spike protein that basically all the vaccines are aiming at is the right target and that gives a lot of hope. Well, it is right now. It is right now. Unfortunately, what's- Until the mink mutations get out, right? Exactly. Unfortunately, the Denmark, where I just was but I'm not now, the mink industry, mink apparently can catch COVID from humans. Yes. Which they did and then apparently minks can get COVID to humans. Which they did and apparently there was a mutation that happened while it was in the mink that changed the spike protein in such a way as this vaccine may not be effective on it. Maybe. They don't know that for sure. We don't know that yet. But the fact that there was a mutation that it was- On the spike protein that this was designed for means it might need one of the different vaccines, perhaps there's something that's not attacking that specific spike protein. Yeah, we just don't know, but- For now. For now. It's why they're killing all the minks to reduce that probability possibility. Anyway, so exciting mRNA vaccine may work. Other problem with it though is it's a two-dose vaccine, which means that even once it does roll out, they have to produce twice the amount of vaccine of a single-dose vaccine. So not only do they have to double produce the vaccine, they have to get two million doses is only going to vaccinate one million people. Of those one million people, will all of them get both shots? Will all of them come back at the three-week timeframe to get the booster shot? Will the efficacy work? I mean, how much will it affect things if people aren't getting fully vaccinated with this? And Carol Ann in the chat room also mentioned- The temperature. The temperature, they have to be minus 70 degrees Celsius. Minus 80 degrees Celsius. Oh, 80, yeah. Which is minus 79 degrees, you can keep the vaccine cold with dry ice for a short period of time, but that still doesn't make it really easy to distribute to places that don't have freezers or dry ice, you know, super cold freezers, sub-zero freezers, and who don't have dry ice capabilities. What about Africa? I mean, yeah, New York City, you can probably get it from a delivery point to multiple pharmacies, multiple doctors in one day, but how's that going to work in rural North Dakota? Mm-hmm. The logistics are going to be very challenging. Well, you actually wouldn't send it to North Dakota or perhaps even South Dakota because they're sending all their COVID patients out of state because they have, North Dakota has, that was a super spreader state that was like, we're not going to wear a mask, we're going to hold these big events, we don't care, only has 20 intensive care unit beds in the whole state. The whole state, yeah. And so all of their patients are going out of state. So why do we have two Dakotas? Good question. Why do we have any better question? Yep. So the, this vaccine- 150,000 people can't have two senators, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, it's not right. This vaccine is a positive, positive stroke because it's a, you know, this is a plus. This is in the win column, but it is premature and don't get excited yet. I mean, hopefully, hopefully by next year, maybe by next summer, maybe, but there is still a lot of time before this vaccine or any other is going to be distributed. So keep on wearing those masks and social distancing everyone. It's not coming tomorrow, it's going to be some ways off. It's very important to be real about all this. Have grounded conversations, as Blair said. Yes. And on that note, and on that note. Oh, did we reach the end of the show? Yeah, it's late, I'm tired. We did a good one, this is good, this is good. I feel very optimistic. I would like to be kind to our listeners and not keep them up too late if they're staying up late and listening along with this podcast. Kind to my co-hosts. And I would like to, let's see. Oh, oh, I didn't come back with my Twitter result from my poll from last week. I just remembered that. Do you remember my poll from last week? Yeah, you're right. Would you support it or shut down? Yeah, let's see if I can really, should I wait until after show? I should let people know, though. Here we go. Where's my poll? I should have put the link in the notes because it is late. In the meantime, we should buy a calendar. Go to twist.org, get a calendar. The only thing better than getting a calendar. Getting two calendars? Oh, five calendars. Five calendars? Well, you need one to work, too. It's got to depend on what, when Friday is gonna come. You have to have a reason to go into work once a month to flip your calendar, since everyone's working from home. You see, yeah. Anyway, we have 560 votes. If COVID-19 is spiking in your area, how do you feel about lockdowns to control the spread as it is spiking everywhere in the United States right now? It is spiking in Europe where it's a huge deal at the moment and local areas should be applying slowdowns, lockdowns depending on the severity of those spikes to control the virus. We have many months to go, but there's exponential growth right now that's kind of scary. 78.2% say I'm for it. All right, let's do it. That's good enough. I don't care if I care what anybody else says. I got a majority, that's a win. It's a win. Lock it down. Let's go. Speaking of democracy, that's very, very great. There were 14.6% who said, I have many thoughts, that was one result. 5%, I'm against it and 2.1% had other thoughts. Okay, the 14% with many thoughts, focus. You were asked a simple question. You can choose one of two answers. You can think about all those other thoughts later. Black, white, up, down, heads, tails, yes, no, go. Yeah, Gaurav Sharma, sample size, total sample size, 560 individuals. I would in the responses to this, I learned that Australia has basically, they're gonna have an amazing Christmas. They're going to have a wonderful, their summer holiday, our winter holiday, because they have been locked down. They took it seriously and in Victoria, there are zero cases. They are experiencing the ability of being able to go back out and live life normally because they did what it took. And yeah, stop, stop, I don't wanna hear it. Literally, literally, all you need to do is stay at home until the milk in your refrigerator is expired and then we could all go outside again. That's how long it would take. Go to the store, buy milk, put it in the fridge, start the countdown. As soon as it's bad, the world is safe and we can restart society as it was before. That's all this would take. But humanity doesn't have the self-discipline to outlast milk going bad in the fridge to maintain society. Humanity does, apparently the United States doesn't. But anyway, yes, so. Good job, Australia. Good job, Australia. Regional lockdowns have worked and I do hope moving forward, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere who are going into the winter season, yeah, that we can get through this together. But if you voted, thanks for voting, thanks for sharing your mind, it was very interesting. And yes, Carol Ann, I admittedly understand that Twitter, a poll on Twitter is not scientific and there are many flaws, but it did turn out quite interesting. And on that note, all right, we've made it to the end of the show. We did it. Thank you for listening. Thank you all for being a part of this community. Thank you. I hope that you learned some things from Marta Zarazka about growing young. That was very fun. How you can live to 100. It's a great book. It's a really great book and useful. I like the idea of not having to buy a gadget, but you know. It's also, if you hold that up again, that's a pretty thick book. And I feel like we only scratch the surface of the subjects that she's covered in this, so. Yeah, but she writes very often in other outlets, as she said, so you can follow her and keep learning with her as she covers all of this stuff. All right, shout outs to Fada. Thank you for your help with social media and show notes. Gord, thank you for manning the chat room. Identity four, thank you for recording the show. And thank you to our Patreon sponsors and the boroughs welcome fund for their generous support of TWIS. Thank you to Chris Wozniak, Dave Bunn, Vegard Schäftstad, Hal Snyder, Donathan Stiles, AKA Don Stilo, John Scioli, Guillaume John Lee, Ali Coffin, Maddie Perringor, of Sharma, Shoebrew, Sarah Forfar, Darwin Hannon, Donald Mundus, Stephen Albron, Darryl Meishak, Stu Pollack, Andrew Swanson, Fred S104, Corin Benton, Sky Luke, Paul Ronevich, Ben Bignell, Kevin Reardon, Noodles Jack, Brian Carrington, Matt Bates, Joshua Fury, Shauna Nina Lam, John McKee, Greg Riley, Marc Hessenflow, Jean Tellier, Steve Leesman, AKA Zima, Ken Hayes, Howard Tan, Christopher Wrappen, Richard Brendon Minnish, Melizan, Johnny Gridley, flying out, Richard Porter, Christopher Dreyer, Mark Masaru, Artyom, Greg Briggs, John Atwood, Melania, as a Russian super spy, Rudy Garcia, Dave Wilkinson, Rodney Lewis, Paul, Matt Sutter, Philip Shane, Kirk Larson, Craig Landon, Mountain Sloth, Jim Drapeau, Sarah Chavez, Alex Wilson, John Ratnaswamy, Sue Doster, Jason Oldes, Dave Neighbor, Eric Knapp, Kevin Perichan, Aaron Luthon, Steve DeBell, Bob Calder, Marjorie, Paul Stanton, Paul Disney, Patrick Pecoraro, Ben Rothig, Gary S., Tony Steele, Ulysses Adkins, Brian Condren, Jason Roberts, and Dave Freidl. Thank you for all of your support on Patreon. And if you are interested in supporting us on Patreon, you can go to twist.org and click on the Patreon link. It's that easy. On next week's show. We will be back Wednesday, 8 p.m. broadcasting live from our YouTube and Facebook studio channels, as well as twist.org slash live. Hey, do you wanna listen to us as a podcast? Just search for this week in Science Over Podcasts or found, then you can listen to us on two times or four times or 17 times, talk like chipmunks. If you enjoyed the show, get your friends to subscribe as well. For more information on anything you've heard here today, show notes and links to stories will be available on our website, www.twist.org and you can also sign up for our newsletter. You're really messing with them now. You can also contact us directly, email Kirsten at kirstenthesweekinscience.com, Justin at twistmedia.com, or Blair, me at BlairBaz at twist.org. Just be sure to put twist, T-W-I-S in the subject line and your email will get spam filtered all the way out to a glowing moon. Ooh, pretty. You can also hit us up on the Twitter where we are at twist.science at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Menagerie. We love your feedback. If there's a topic you'd like us to cover or address, a suggestion for an interview, a haiku that comes during the night, please let us know. We'll be back here next week and I think that's our 800th episode. I forgot about that. I forgot. And 800, it's coming. Again, for more great science news, to celebrate 800 episodes of twist. Yeah, I'm gonna have to get better internet by then. If you've learned anything from the show, remember. It's all in your head. In science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science, it's the end of the world. So I'm setting up shop, got my banner unfurled. It says the scientist is in. I'm gonna sell my advice. Show them how to stop their robots with a simple device. I'll reverse below the warming with a wave of my hand. And all it'll cost you is a couple of grand. Coming your way. So everybody listen to what I say. I use the scientific method for all that it's worth. And I'll broadcast my opinion all over the earth. Science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. I've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news. That what I say may not represent your views. But I've done the calculations and I've got a plan. If you listen to the science, you may just get understand. That we're not trying to threaten your philosophy. We're just trying to say. So everybody listen to everything we say. And if you use our methods that are old. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. I've got a laundry list of items I want to address. From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought. And I'll try to answer any question you've got. So how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour to what we say? And if you learn this week in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, science, science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, this week in science. This week in science, this week in science. We have reached the end of the show. It is now after the show. I hit the wrong space key. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. This weekend was her adoptive, so we've had her for a year. She's such a big girl now. She's not that little puppy anymore. She's almost 30 pounds. Really? Wow. Oh my god, she's so cute. She's sleepy. Still late for her on Wednesday nights. She's about the night. Doesn't she know what's up yet? I mean, every Wednesday, every week. Sadie, Sadie, Sadie. Are you calling my headphones? She's so cute. Oh, there's Justin. He can come back now. There you are. Hello. Hello. Hello. And just seeing Gaurav Sharma's response to your comment about staying home as long as until the milk rots, he says, what if it's almond milk? We would be home for months. Even better. Even better. Over months. That's funny. Puppy break. Dance break. How is everybody? Not bad. We're excited. We'll have some scientists in charge of COVID pretty soon. 13 of them already have been identified. Yes. Good. Yes. Yeah. I was explaining this to somebody recently that they were like, well, how well is Biden going to rule? Because, you know, he's like an old guy who seems kind of out of touch, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, it doesn't, it doesn't matter. Democratic president doesn't matter what they, how they are. What matters is they're going to put in place people who are experts in the things that they're in charge of in that lobbyist who are looking to destroy those institutions. They're going to put in people who want to bolster those institutions and they're experts in them, and so they will manage them well. And then the president, Democratic presidents are really lazy in this way, which is fantastic. They go, I don't know anything about that, that Biden, let's put a physicist in charge of it. Yeah. What is this? EPA? Well, let's put some climate scientists and ecological science, put some scientists in charge of it. What's this? Humane and housing? What is it? Human housing and urban development? I don't know anything about that. Let's put somebody who knows a lot about that in charge of that institution and therefore everything runs better. What is this? Education? Maybe we should have somebody who's ever had anything to do with education before. Or somebody who wasn't lobbied against public education. Yeah. Maybe that would be an improvement. Yeah. That's the thing, it's like, in a weird way, I have zero confidence in Biden's ability to actually take on any single one of these issues that I think are going to be prescient in our future. And I have every confidence that he won't try to be in charge in micromanage. Yeah, he won't get in the way. It will be the fact that you'll have somebody who will have a selection process for those people to be in charge that you can rely on in a way that doesn't give you chills that they're in charge of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Caroline, things have been broken for the last four years. It would be good. It would be nice to not have things being broken on purpose. Yeah. There's a weird, there's a whole weird like, you know, flag hugging, waving thing that happens on one side of our political spectrum that at the same time seems hell bent on destroying America at its core. And I've never really understood, it hasn't always been this way either. It's rather a 20-year phenomenon now, I guess that's a while. So one thing that I find really interesting just observing, observing the dialogue that's going on. So four years ago when the election was happening and they were counting the votes and there wasn't a count that was in on election night, that didn't happen on election night. It never happens on election night. The conservative media was talking about Democrats not, or Democrats not believing in democracy and Democrats were going to be fighting the vote and Democrats are against the way our government works. I am watching like the same dialogue happen on the more liberal media outlets now. Like it's just the exact, the exact same messages, the exact same words are being said, but it's like. When Bush won his second, when Bush went, no, no, when Bush won his second term, there were the left media was full of, well, what about these ballots? These were ballots found in a trash can and this one district and wherever. And yeah, it is, it is a net, but I'm okay with that. I'm actually like literally okay with that being a thing because I do think you should have, you know, I didn't like the fact that the guy who was in charge of Daibold, which makes ATM machines, was the head of that company, that company was then making voting machines and he was secretary of state or something, you know, Ohio and had promised the election. There was, you know, you shouldn't have that close of a connection between person making voting machines and government and somebody in charge of election and somebody like there should be bigger separation there because all these things do call these things into question, but it's a messy system. It's always a messy system. I didn't like the last election. I totally agreed with the result in terms of that was democracy. I thought we have the Democrats had run a very damaged person who shouldn't have gotten through the primary and it was just a mistake to begin with. I'm not going to talk about, I don't want to talk about that aspect of it, but I think just in terms of, not in terms of who was running or any of that, but just in terms of the system itself and how it works, there in like the last 50 years there has been, what we've talked about it before, there's like less than a percent of voter fraud that's been proven in like the last 50 years. Like it's this like very minuscule number of votes compared to the millions of ballots that get processed. It's and the fact that every election, somebody's calling fraud, somebody's trying to, you know, discredit and I don't think if I've ever had, I haven't heard about the same party asking to stop count in one state and continue count in another state in another state while I was like, this is maybe kind of a radical thing to say, perhaps, but this whole idea too that like ballots came in a few hours late and they're counting ballots that came in late. I don't care. Every American should have a vote if they want to vote. And if it came in a couple hours late, I don't care. Count it. Yeah. But I mean, the if it fits within the rules of it was mailed or postmarked before the date, I don't even care about that. Or if somebody was standing in line and they were slow and the ballots didn't get, you know, the boxes didn't get closed and delivered to the right place for a few hours, fine. It's fine. Those votes are still valid. Yeah. They still votes. So, yeah, there was a bunch of fun stuff that happened. One was like, they need to stop the voting, even though actually the voting had ended and they were counting. So then that got fixed to stop the counting, which then people had to point out, well, that would mean you lost because you're not ahead now. When, like, but I think the defining moment of not just this election, but the last four years is the president's lawyer, who is the former mayor of a large city in America, held a press conference in front of a garage door of a landscaping company because somebody accidentally booked the four seasons landscaping company instead of the four seasons luxury hotel because of just ineptitude, start saying that they're ahead, they're winning and there's been some fraud, but they're still going to win. And then somebody tells them, actually, the election's been called the other way, makes an appeal to God. Yeah. And then introduces a convicted sex offender from New Jersey who then lies and identifies themselves as a Pennsylvanian who was a poll counter, a poll watcher and saw all sorts of and wasn't a lot, which was a total lie. Like that, that whole, that whole like series of events culminating together in this tight little couple of minute TV spot, absolutely epitomized everything that's happened in the last four years. Less than eloquent, for sure. Less and eloquent. Lesson, like it starts with a mistake. We're in the wrong location. We're having to scramble. Here's what's going on. Actually, there's a fact that counters that. Appeal to God as my witness, we will prevail. And now let me introduce a sex offender from a different state who's about to lie and say he's from this state and who's watching the polls. And it was just so amazing. It's been, it's been a wild ride the last seven days. It definitely has. But again, this is, this is normal. I mean, we, I do agree with the fact that, well, normal would be, you would start the transition regardless of if you were going to fight the election or not, you still, that transition process usually went on siloed away from all the political activity. That's not taking place. That's new. That's weird. But yeah, Hillary was still like wanting to recount Michigan or something like late into December, Gourvy Bush went on for months after, in fact, Bush called and conceded or Gore called and conceded. And then called back an hour later and was like, I'm conceded because I'm going to wait and then, you know, it's fine that it's messy. It should be messy. It shouldn't be, it shouldn't be a knee jerk reaction to the initial numbers. I think one of the stories that I was, I mean, that one was a landslide, but Carter, Jimmy Carter conceded it before like the California polls had closed because things were going so badly. He was just like, I quit it. All right, that's it. I'm done. Yeah. But, but what is very odd is getting to the point where there seems to be, well, OK, so one of the theories of why there is foot dragging is that they don't want to anger the, the, the impotent child because they still want him to come out and support the Senate candidates in Georgia, which are going to be voting in like January or some of their vote. Are there, they're doing a recount now, but they still need to do a runoff election, which is going to happen like early January or something. And they want Trump to bring out the vote that he's brought out because they realize like we did really well in the down ballot because of you and how polarizing you were, even though you didn't get those votes. A lot of our people did. There's another reason, Justin, and that is that they're fundraising right now to fight the campaign results. But the majority of those funds are actually going to retire debt from the election. Yes. So if, if he calls it now, they can't fundraise any more to fight the election. That's true. That's also a big part. Because he's such a good businessman, is the thing. You know, whatever. This is a bit of twist after dark we're having right now. Well, you know, these elections come about at least once every four years. So we don't, we don't do this a lot. No, it's here's my whole thing about America. America, you just think there's going to knock right now. America. I alluded to this last last week, I think we're not that old as a country. And in fact, we have a really good tradition of adapting as a country through the 1800s, changing, fundamentally changing our identity as a nation and how we govern happened throughout the 1800s. And then all of a sudden, the history and current and like laws of how the United States governs, wait, wait, wait, wait a second, came like the rule of law and you can't touch it. OK, something's very sus about what you just said. Wait, what were we doing throughout the 1800s? I mean, it happened. There were certain events that call war. We had a civil war. But before that, no, no, before that, right, we had the whole situation where, oh, gosh, my US history is so bad. It wasn't the Articles of Confederation, but there was a whole thing where. For the fourth seasons right now, that's beautiful. Yeah, I know. But no, no, I mean, how about this is really good. How about just how about when was the last time we added an amendment? I'm just saying like we added an amendment to make alcohol illegal and then added an amendment to say, never mind, it's legal again. My point is there's plasticity built into this stuff. Oh, totally. Now there's this new way of looking at it like we can't touch the Constitution. We can't change how things work. And it's like it's not a new way of looking at it, though, Blair. It's been like there are it's like we were talking like Justin was talking about the Bible earlier, right? Yeah, there are different ways of interpreting the original document. And there are some people who are originalists and they think that everything that was written down, the way they believe is what was written down by the founders of our country is doctrine and that we should never change it. And that's the way it should be. Never mind that we've never mind that we've added amendments and done all these other things, right? Never mind that we have a Supreme Court who is making judgments based on modern context. And, you know, but the issue now is like some of those Supreme Court justices are originalists and are interpreting the Constitution based on an originalist perspective. But that's not the only way. So there are there are a variety of ways of interpreting and allowing or not allowing a change with the times. And there are some people who think that the founding fathers thought we should change with the times that they that they added that flexibility into the Constitution and the way it works. There are others who don't. And that's that's where we're having a major schism right now. It's just kind of like if you want to follow the Constitution by rote. Then you have to live like they did in the 1700s. Like, you know, I'm not going to do that. I'm sorry. Nope. Nope. This is my point is the reality you're living in is not the one that wrote that document. And there has to be a moment where you acknowledge that the world is it's it's exactly what we were talking about. Right. You read a piece of literature from a hundred years ago, you have to acknowledge that some things in that are outdated, inappropriate and don't apply to the current world. Yeah. On the other hand, I think a lot of the things that are written in that document outlived and outpurposed the people that wrote it. Yeah. I mean, you're talking about a document that said all men are created equal in a time when people did not think all men were equal men when women were still not allowed to hold property, not allowed to vote when black people were slaves. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, so but you look at the you look at the writing, it's not going to be much to feel like, okay, apparently, the very littered articulate ones were the progressives who were like, okay, this might take a while. They're probably thinking this is going to take 20 years to kick in. But I'm going to write it in this way anyway. It took a little longer. It took a lot longer for a lot of that stuff to come to fruition. But the document itself actually was higher inspirational and more effective, I think, than the people that a lot of the people that signed it. So yeah, I do have a big amount of love for the founding father documents in that way. I think they're I think I mean, they have, they've, they created a great country, right? There has been a great country. We have a flawed history. But that doesn't mean that there aren't great things about the country. And it doesn't mean that we can't do even better. I think the documents are still good. And yeah, I think that's my point is, we should be striving to better ourselves as a country constantly, instead of looking backwards and trying to get back where we came from. And I think that's that's the part that is especially frustrating to me. Like, for example, the electoral college, it happened for reason. Does that reason still exist? Could it be adjusted? Could it be changed? No, it'd be removed. It can't. It can't until you get rid of two Dakotas with a combined populate voting population of 350,000 people having four senators. Well, this is my other problem, right? Something like that gets corrected. Nothing else can be fixed. We didn't get the 50th state until what like 19? Oh, gosh, it was like 1970 something, I think was the last state, right? Hawaii, right? Yeah, yeah. This is my point is like DC should be its own state. Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico, like, but there's this some there's something there about like, we don't want to change the tradition of 50 states. It's like, well, actually, that tradition's pretty young. Yeah, I mean, so is in God, we trust on the money that wasn't that was there in the 50s to fight communism for some reason. Yeah, it's like all sorts of all sorts of that's part of it too, right? Is the conflating of like, this is tradition. It's like, well, actually, it's not really. Well, you know, this is also sort of what came up in the Supreme Court debates over the Affordable Care Act. You know, there was all this they've been trying to tear it down. And they're like, okay, on what grounds? Well, the grounds you brought this time actually conflict with the grounds you brought last time. And actually, you know, you can it's it's yeah. I think I think I think part of the problem America has is they don't have a lot of good insight into what is taking place in other countries. I think that's it. There are there are nations that are doing better with a lot of things. You know, I've talked about this quite a bit, you know, traveling around Denmark, I didn't see homelessness. Didn't see it. It doesn't exist. You can have you will be housed in Denmark. With that brings all sorts of things that you know, make it easier for somebody to restart life or deal with their mental illness or whatever it is. You don't see people living with all of their possessions under a tent on the side of the highway. It is commonplace in America. It's normal in America. And if you're in a part of America that doesn't have it, that's because those people left your area. Probably your police put them on a bus and gave them a bus ticket to some big city somewhere where there were social services or they sought it out on their own just because you didn't provide it. Doesn't matter. Throughout America, we don't care for the least amongst us. By the way, that's a principle in the Christian Bible, caring for the least amongst us. It's also a progressive ideal, but it's not a conservative one. Why is that? Because if you are needy, that means that you're not working hard enough. Work harder. Work harder. I'm trying. Work harder. Oh, my God. Yeah, I mean, the thing that really gets my goat, as long as we're continuing on this is when Congress is actively working against something that the majority of Americans are for. So you can do polls and you can figure out, for example, I think it's like 70% of the United States is fine with Roe v. Wade. Keep it. Yep. But in Congress, it's like 50-50 neck and neck. That should not be, you are supposed to represent the will of the people. That's because of the Senate. Yes, it is because of the Senate. Listen, it's worse than 50-50 of states can get power this way, even though the population doesn't think this way. Senate is the most ridiculous anti-democratic system of rule that we have as part of the founding fought. That's where they screwed up. It was some concession they made because some rural states are afraid of not having enough. They shouldn't have had enough decision making. They should have been rid of it after the Civil War. After the Civil War. They should have been, you know what, the state's rights things is bogus. My favorite, my favorite recently is a Mississippi Republican who's been calling for his state to succeed from the union. Oh, good. Succeed. S-U-C-C-E. Let's succeed from the union. Oh my God. If you can't smell it, don't do it. Am I right? I know it. That's like a good rule of thumb for all of life. If you can't smell it, don't do it. Yipes. Yeah, well, that's the other thing about Washington, I typed this in the chat room, but Washington D.C. Puerto Rico and Guam likely to all give democratic senators to the Senate, which is likely why it's not happening also, is that it would create a probably a pretty sizable shift in in how some of things work. So I think that's a big part of the reason it's not happening. Yeah. But California and over here in my little bubble. No, no, no, no, no, it's though. I mean, in the last 28 years. Is it the last 28 years? There's been one four year presidential term that had a majority votes for a Republican president. Yeah, I think you're right. Something's wrong with that system. Yeah, that in that there were 12 years of Republican presidency. And only four of those years had had a majority vote. Why are these people getting power still? I don't understand. Yeah, it's wild. broken system. And that's and and and this is this is by the way in case anybody thinks that I'm a Democrat, I am left to the Democrats and US does need a good parliamentary system. We do need to be able to have a third party system that doesn't immediately transfer power over to this minority thinking group that to give them control. I'm I'm I'm Democrats. Ranked voting. Ranked voting is at least no with the primaries. I think it would help with the primaries first of all. Okay, but I also think that in a presidential election, a third or even fourth party candidate could gain traction enough to get on the ballot. If it was a ranked choice system, and it would not risk that what would happen, what people are afraid of doing by voting third party, if you can vote ranked choice, then you could vote for someone left of the Democrat, vote for the Democrat as your second choice, you then you're not quote unquote, throwing your vote away. And you might actually have a better chance of that third party gaining traction and power and eventually succeeding. Yeah, and then it's not just a specific pitting one side against the other when it's very obvious that there are multiple groups, multiple political political identities and groups within the United States that are not being represented. Like this, right now, the Democrat Democratic Party is hemorrhaging internally because center, center Democrats or Democrats who are on the right end of Democrats, the progressives don't like them. And people are like, well, those Democrats should just be Republicans and then Republicans have gone really far right. And now it's like, it's just really confusing. There's all these groups battling with each other. And I'm just like, I mean, I just want what I want. Yeah. And I, you know, I like being able to vote for what I want. But this whole having to stick to these two parties that don't necessarily represent you, like, even looking at like the Green Party, which I would think I should like the Green Party. The candidates suck. You know, like, I should like this, you know, this other whatever party, the People's Party, that sounds great. No, okay, don't like that either. Like, there's none of these, none of the parties you can't fit yourself into them. Yeah, the problem with the Democratic Party is that it has this idea of being centrist in what's being the middle reaching across the aisle. And so every time the Republicans have to move further right. And it's fine because the Democrats move to the Democrat, the Democratic Centralist Party today is what Republicans were 20 years ago. Yes. Yeah, so progressive wing, which actually got them the blue wave, but was sort of shut out from being at the forefront this time. Guess what? Down ballot, we lost. Guess what? Pushing out the progressives that got the blue wave from having Yeah. Yeah. Learn from your mistakes. Democrats can't. The Democratic Party is it's too big of a tent. It's too big of a tent. Yeah, it's a big I think that's a fair point too is that a lot of if they really did encompass the far far left, like they would want to all the way up to that center position. It's yeah, the spread is very, very wide. And I think yeah, I think you're exactly right, Justin, it's they're afraid of going too far to the extreme because we'll lose that center part of the tent. And by staying in the center, they disenfranchise but don't lose as many as the far left because the people in the far left have more to lose by not supporting the Democrats because we have a two party system. So like and then to your point about about the totally I'm getting tired and forgetting things but but to your point Blair about about the Never mind. Ranked choice. Ranked choice. No, it was before that. It was a great thought and I totally lost it. I just went extra, extra states. Oh, no, no, yes. No, about the about like, well, anyway, progressives. They it's not just progressive views that are interested in health care for everybody, insurance for everybody. Medicare for all is a majority view. Like at this point, there are more Americans who would like Medicare for all who appreciate that than there are not on both like all around Democrats, Republicans like people are like, Yeah, I want I want insurance. That's nice. I like that. So it's not a progress. It shouldn't be a progressive talking point. And the fact that centrist Democrats are like, No, we're not going to we're not going to do Medicare for all. We're not we're not going to go there. Like, Yeah, and then you lose you lose. I mean, it's such it's such utter ridiculousness. You just won the blue wave based on that promise. And you didn't bring it on the next round of fighting. And so all of those people who might go, you know what? I am a racist. Normally, I vote for the most racist candidate I can. Man, I would love some health care. And I got a couple of kids about to head to college would be nice to not have to go to debt for that. You might actually pull. Oh, that's like the one thing you could think somebody might vote completely in their best interest. But instead, you got out, they're not going to do anything different on any of these things for me. I'll just go with the racist guy. It'll be fine. Did did I tell you guys what happened with my health care for the month of November? Because it's it's quite a story. So I changed jobs, right? Did you do Cobra? So let me tell you about Cobra, right? So I changed jobs. And I had most people have a pretty long probationary period before they can get on their health care with their job. This job I'm going into is really nice. There's only a month lapse, right? But I still have this month lapse. And you're not supposed to have a lapse in coverage, right? And so they offered me Cobra. But guess how much Cobra is for my last job's health insurance? Oh, just $800 for the month. So then I call my medical provider. And I'm like, may I please enroll in your cheapest plan for this month? Surely it is less than $800. And they said, Oh, it's not open enrollment right now. Yeah, you can't so you can't. You can enroll you, but it would start January first. Yeah, I'm like, okay, so this is Blair's first time ever encountering this normal. So this is so normal for people, Blair. The system's so broken. So then oh, but you're telling me if I don't have health care for the month of November, I'll get a tax penalty. No, actually, well, so you want, but like you don't want a lapse of coverage. And so also, if I get hurt in the month of November, all suddenly, oh, the hospital like $50,000. Great. Okay, so I need to figure this out. So I on like, I have like four different phone calls. Imagine if I like worked several jobs and had children, how this would go because I spent a week figuring this out. Okay. So then finally, I get someone on the phone from covered California, right? And they go, okay, we can get you on this plan. But because the job you're going into has whatever salary, you don't qualify for our cheapest plan. So you can sign up for health care for $400 for the month. I'm like, well, that's better than $800. But that's still 400 freaking dollars. Like what is okay. So then so then and that's covered California, by the way, that was the price of health care and 2000. That was going up 10 to 20% per year before this is this or it was in fact, it was probably like $600, $800 for an individual before the Affordable Care Act took place. Yeah, it used to be even worse. So in 2009, when I graduated college, I bought my own health care because I didn't have health care through my school anymore. And I was paying as a 22 year old healthy female because that counts for your insurance premiums for some reason. I was paying like $250 a month, which for someone making minimum wage, which was at the time $10 an hour, that was a lot of money. No, it was $8 an hour is making in that time, I think. But yeah, so that was a lot of money. But I paid it because I was afraid of what would happen if I got hurt and I didn't have health care. But anyway, so what ended up happening with me was that then I got married and my husband works for a health care company. So I was like, oh, maybe I can get on his health care. So it took like six more phone calls and a bunch of stuff to try to get on his health care, which then we had to like fax them a copy or scan them a copy of the marriage certificate and get on the phone with someone else and all this kind of stuff. And finally, they're like, okay, we can get you on here. We think we'll let you know in a few days. So then I had to like wait with bated breath, not pay my covered California premium handle. Yeah, so I just like waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, finally figured out I got on his health care. So then I go to try to cancel my covered California coverage and they go, oh, it's too late. You have to pay us $400. I was like, what? Yeah. Which like, thankfully, I spent several hours. I escalated the claim, talked to some managers, explained the situation, explained how I was told by several people that I would not have to pay previously. And now they're telling me that I had to pay. And eventually it all got sorted out. But I was like, no wonder people go without health care. No wonder people are pissed. No wonder people don't know how to get on health care. And no wonder people can't afford it. Because like, also, again, no wonder the middle class is encouraged to not leave their job, even though most of the time when you leave your job, you end up making more money because you're guaranteed to have a lapse in health care if you change jobs willfully. Yeah. Or you have to pay for your health care yourself. Like, I can't, that was just, I was in shock. I don't know why I've never had to deal with that in that way before. I'm trying to remember, I must have just like, lucked into doing it during an open enrollment period in the past, or they've changed the rules. And not realized it or something. Another scary thing before the Obamacare Affordable Care Act, whatever you want to call it, is came up actually during the, oh, somebody should have corrected the lawyer who was saying like, you know, is it okay for the government to tell citizens what type of health care they must purchase? Isn't that making them forcing a action upon them? Problem is, health care was not defined before Obamacare, meaning you could pay that $400 a month and think you're covered because you're paying $400 a month for health care. Oh yeah, except it doesn't cover these drugs, this type of treatment, this being in the hospital, you're not actually got to pay out of pocket to see a doctor. It could actually cover nothing that you need for your health care, because it was undefined and what that horrible claim of, you know, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. The reason that stopped working is because health care plans, how they had been designed previously, and not somewhat California was pretty strong, had pretty strong regulations. A lot of states didn't have any. So there's states where you could be paying $400 a month and didn't cover your pregnancy, it didn't cover dialysis, it didn't cover your prescription drugs, it didn't cover your overnight stays in hospital, it only covered you if you didn't get sick. You can go in for the physical once every six months, but if you got sick it kind of stopped working and you started to have to pay out a pocket for everything. So one of the things that ACT did was it made it so the thing that you're paying for actually covers you regardless. So yeah, women, you know, your health insurance, I don't know how deep you looked into it, it may not have ever covered you being pregnant. Right, yeah. That was the thing that was very typically left off. Yeah, there was what was it, it was a pre-existing condition, being a woman. Yeah. Well, and then there was the whole thing where I ended up owing the hospital like $5,000 because I went to the hospital when I was insured, but the bill was issued when I wasn't. Yeah. So that was fun. I spent the next several years paying that off. Whoa. Yeah. Oh, you're paying it? I've never paid it. You should have bought that. No, I did. I spent probably 50 hours on the phone about it. Okay. And they were like, listen to the fine print, you should have read the fine print. It's one thing that I learned a long time ago. It's in the fine print. It's one thing I learned a really long time ago is that if you don't pay a medical bill, it eventually just goes away. They don't do collections on medical bills like they do if you ran up your credit card debt because everybody knows that system's broken. If you go on for a loan, it's like, oh, you've got $8,000 that you never paid back. Oh, it's medical. No worries. I'll make a call to the bank. They get it. No, no. I experienced this in the car sales business forever. When people, you'd look over the credit report, oh my gosh, they owe $60,000 that they never paid back. Oh, it's medical? Doesn't count. Doesn't count. Call the bank. Oh, yeah. It's medical. Oh, no worries then. They just didn't care because everybody understood financial institutions understand that system's just broken. So at this point, it's like why pretend that there's another version of it other than universal health care? It's like no fault insurance. Don't spend a billion dollars with investigators and people taping outlines and lawyers trying to figure out who caused the accident. Have the insurance companies cover it. If you both have insurance, have them split it. Just doesn't matter. It's not worth it. It costs more to have the other system. All right, I got to go. I think everybody has a horror story. I think everybody has something. Yeah, I need to go to sleep too. Yeah, yeah. Say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Keke. At the Four Seasons Landscaping. I am so glad you all came to my press conference tonight. It's wonderful to be able to speak with the American people. The people of the world are watching. And everyone, I hope you join us again next week for episode number 800. Oh my gosh, what are we gonna do? I'm gonna have a drink. And maybe confetti, glitter, balloon? Yes, champagne would be good. Oh, champagne. And I'm gonna wear a tie. Maybe we'll see. Tie. Maybe I'll wear a nice hat. No, hats are good. We'll see. We'll see. It's episode 800. Oh, and I'm having a new location. What? I might be in a new location. It was really good, isn't it? Oh, I hope you have good internet and everyone, you know, for those of you who have just joined us, we're so glad that you've just joined us. For those of us who have been with the show forever, 800 plus a few. That's all. Thank you for being a part of it. That's awesome. We actually, I don't say this enough. I'm glad you do. I appreciate every one of our listeners. I love that you're on the journey with them. And you. Oh, and you. And you. Are you guys saying me? Are you? Because I feel like that's- No, I'm talking to our listeners just to- No, I feel like you're about saying me. Oh. This is between me and the listeners. Okay. Thank you. And thank you, friend. Good night, everybody. Traveled around the world back again. Why are you getting these old- Good night.