 and it will be silent for just a moment. Commercials, I thought I turned off the monetization. Dude, YouTube. This is TWIS, this week in Science episode number 594, recorded on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2016. Just a little suggestion. Hey everyone, I am Dr. Kiki and we are here for this week in Science to fill your heads with an invader, some suggestion. And sperm, but first. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. When the first American arrived in North America, there was no one here to greet them. 20,000 years ago, there were lions, saber-toothed cats, and nine-foot-long saber-toothed salmon, giant sloths, giant tortoises, giant condors, and giant beavers. There were horses, camels, mammoths, and mastodons, a beautiful armadillo, a short-faced bear, and a dire wolf. And while the biggest threat of all was yet to come, the people were thankful for the discovery they had made. They populated two continents and formed countless civilizations. In the course of human history, there are none that traveled so far, so fast from our original origins. And about 1,500 years ago, they domesticated the bird that is now synonymous with giving thanks. So on this day of thanks, as millions take part in a traditional dinner, remember to thank the people who made the meal possible and for their home in which you eat it. And if stuffing yourself on traditional irony isn't your thing, we've got a kitchen full of science-y goodness cooking on This Week in Science. Coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I wanna learn everything. I wanna fill it all up with new discoveries that happen every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. I wanna know what's happening, what's happening, what's happening This Week in Science. What's happening, what's happening, what's happening This Week in Science. Science to you, Kiki and Blair. And good science to you, Justin, Blair, and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. And you know what? Happy twist giving. Happy twist giving. Happy twist giving, everybody. I'm twist-ful for you and you and you and all of you. I am so thankful for everyone as well. Thank you for coming back week after week for enjoying science with us, for wanting to fill your heads and being curious about the world. Thank you so much to everyone who is a part of making this show happen. Thank you to my co-hosts and thank you to our guest that we have today. We are joined tonight by Eric Vance, who is a science writer and we'll be talking with him in just one moment about his new book, Suggestable You. But first we need to talk, tell you what else is gonna be on the show. Do you know what just came in This Week today? What? Yes. The new twist calendar. 2017 calendars are in my hands. Make sure you go to twist.org if you're interested in checking those out and potentially getting one of your own. And don't forget, you can help twist out just by sharing us on social media. Tell people about twists. Thank you, twist giving. Give people the gift of twists, right? That's what we need to do. What did I bring for the show This Week? I brought, oh, climate on the hot seat. Or not necessarily like climate, but maybe NASA also. And I've also got a story about the EM drive. It's back again. It's like the zombie science that never goes away. And sperm. Interesting contribution. The gift that keeps on giving. Justin is indeed. What did you bring? I've got the invasion of planet Earth as well as a couple of turkey origin stories. And Belair, what is in the animal corner this evening? Oh, I got some dumb ducks and some salty frogs. That sounds exciting. Oh boy, we are all ramped up and ready to go. And I hope you are ready for a great show with us. I would like now to welcome Eric Vance to the show. He is a biologist turned science writer based in California and Mexico. He went to the UC Santa Cruz Writing Program, science writing program. And that's where he got turned on to the world of science journalism and telling stories about people and the things that they do in science. He's written for the New York Times, Nature Scientific American, Harper's National Geographic and other outlets like the Wonderful Last Word on Nothing blog. And if you haven't checked that out, I highly recommend it. It's a wonderful blog. And today though, talking with him about his book, Suggestable You, You're Suggestable. Yes, you are. Nuh-uh, you are. Eric, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. And I would like to say we are all suggestable except for Blair. Right, you got it. Blair. I think she's, you know, she's encased in titanium or something. I don't know. I can't get in there. I don't know. So I just would love to know the idea of suggestibility. I mean, we've got things like hypnotism and their ideas of people thinking that they've been cursed. And we all have also grown up maybe with superstitions and other things. What was it that brought you to want to tell this particular story? Well, gosh, I mean, I guess the easy answer is that I was raised in Christian science and I actually didn't go to a doctor until I was 18 years old. And so, and actually when I went to the doctor for the first time, I was very unimpressed. And I haven't been missing much. I mean, this is terrible. So, you know, I, at the same time, you know, I got into science, I got into science journalism. I got, you know, I, you know, I love science and medicine and all these things. But I was left with these questions about the healings I had seen when I was a kid, like in my community. And it sort of nagged at me for many, many years until a few years later, a few years into my science writing career, I happened to cross a guy who was doing a lecture on Placebos at a brain mapping conference. And I recognized his name as a fellow Christian scientist or a fellow former Christian scientist. And it, like a light went off. It was like a, like a recovering Catholic studying the, like the neural underpinnings of guilt. You know, it's like so perfect. And so, and I was hooked. And I just around him and I did some other stories and just kind of snowballed to the point where this book is, it's kind of, I mean, there's this connective tissue, which is expectancies and expectation and suggestion. But it's really, it's hard. It's just a bunch of cool stuff that I really wanted to write about that I was like continually blown away by. So this is sort of like, it's, it is a through thread and it's a very, it's connected, but it's also just a bunch of stuff that I was just like, oh my God, how do I not know this? This is amazing. Yeah, it's, I mean, this is fascinating stuff. Dealing with the brain and how we, you know, how we respond to our environment and how we respond to other people. And then also this idea of how we potentially heal ourselves, you know, it's, amazing. So they heal yourself. Is there actually, is there more than anecdotal evidence of that? It depends on the way you think of the word heal. And this is sort of something I, you know, and this is, it's really important to understand, like yes, the easy answer is yes, there are amazing things that you can do to your body. And I profile a guy also, it's also like the cover story in National Geographic this month, and I profile this guy who, he had this, he did this trial and it was, he had Parkinson's, it was a Parkinson's trial and there were the people who got this, they drew, it was a surgery and they drilled into your head and they injected Neurotin and your substantia nigra, they're really deep into your brain and then other people got just a sham surgery where they just did a couple of divots in the head and then left and they were done, which is kind of crazy that that happens, but it's very important because Parkinson's has a very high placebo response and this thing just changed his life. Like he was, he went from barely being able to walk to hella skiing. Like he was, he was taking a helicopter up and you ski down, like with his son and it just like changed his life and he was like, and they were like, you know, they were excited, like this, this they cured Parkinson's, like this is that his doctor was going nuts because they thought they cured Parkinson's and it turned out that the trial actually failed because of a very high placebo response that the condition could not outperform the placebo response, right? You guys are following me so far, right? So crushing, crushing blow and then they unblinded the trial. This guy, he'd gotten the sham surgery. The guy who went from not being able to walk to hella skiing. Yes, yeah, he didn't get the surgery. His own mind did that for him and it was a hard thing for him to come to terms with but this is the kind of like, like, you know, like end of the spectrum of potential. Like, you know, this is amazing things that can happen. At the same time, there are rules and there are limitations to these techniques, you know, and to placebos. Like it does some things amazingly and some things not at all and that's a really important takeaway from this book is like, look, this is amazing but it's not a cure-all and you can't placebo everything and that's important. Yeah, and the distinction there, especially with placebo is that, you know, what exactly has changed? Is the disease still there? Is it underlying the condition that's damaging those dopamine neurons? Is it still there? And will it come back in force later maybe? Did the placebo treatment just kind of buy it a little time because of whatever factors started being produced in the brain? Well, the disease was still there in his case and he still has it and it has not come back in force actually. He has managed to continue the progress that he's made but it is, it's a great question because placebos by nature people thought of them as being temporary and in many cases they are and it's a good way to think of placebos but there are some questions about especially in the area of chronic pain. Whether or not placebos can help rewire chronic pain that may not be based in the extremity that you're feeling it and create expectancies or change the neurochemistry that we have in order to permanently change someone's pain experience. Now this is an exciting new area with a lot of questions and certainly there's a lot of temporary relief that comes from chronic pain from placebos but there's also these questions and there's a really clever guy at Bethesda at the Walter Reed facility who's actually using placebos in order to sort of permanently both lessen chronic pain and avoid opioid addiction. It's amazing. I can tell you about it if you want. I would love to hear about it. Yes, please. All right, I mean I don't, I kind of, this is the kind of thing I've gotten hooked on this and once I started going I just go off. This is what we love too. So we're like, yes, stories. Tell us more. So glad I've met my people. So Christopher Speedback's doing this. So placebos are basically, it's creating expectation. This is what this whole book is about. About, you know, it's about expectation. It's about your brain is a prediction machine. Right, this isn't new to you guys. You have to know this. This is what your brain does. It makes predictions and there are little predictions. Like if I drop this, you know, lead ball on my foot, you know, it will hit and it'll hurt. It'll hurt, you know, and big predictions. Like, you know, the hunting will be good and the planes, you know, this summer, you know, like these are the predictions that we've evolved making. And a lot of these placebos, you sort of, you can do classical conditioning in these different ways. You can sort of create a, you can create a next expectancy for a benefit. And then your brain basically steps in. So take a, when you take a pill, let's say when you take a Tylenol and you're walking into, you know, it's headache and it's, oh my God, your head hurts so much. Go in, take a pill. Oh my God, you take the water, drink the water. And then, oh, thank God. Do you guys have that experience? I do. Yeah, but it's a little bit of a coffee. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say too, is I think a lot of the time it's because I forced myself to drink a bunch of water when I take a pill. Right. So basically that's the way expectation, I mean, for me, I get this like immediate placebo response. And I mean, and it might be the water, it also might, you know, but there's also a certain part of your brain. It's also, it has an expectancy for feeling better. And then if that expectancy isn't met, it'll basically drop in and self-medicate. It'll drop its own drugs into the place where it gets you to where it's expected to be. And you can test this in the laboratory and they did it with me where they showed me like different lights for different types of pain. And once I got to expect certain pains and certain lights, they started changing them. And basically my brain would just step in on this one where they gave me a really powerful shock for a green light. And my brain was expecting a low shock. And then my, so my brain just stepped in and added the drugs in order to make it a low shock in order to basically take the pain away. Right. So you're tricking me. You know, you're getting tricked into this. So this guy Christopher Speedack at Walter Reed, he thought, you know, he read some of the work along these lines and he thought, you know, what if I could use this to help patients that he, you know, they are coming back from war. And he has a lot of patients who've lost limbs in the battlefield. And when you lose a limb, you have a lot of chronic pain that goes along with it. Obviously there's this phantom limb syndrome, but there's also just the pain on the end of the limb that just it's very hard to deal with. And so he thought, okay, so, I mean, obviously you have to prescribe these opioids, these strong drugs to take away their pain. But every time they take one, I'm going to have them either listen to music they like or they give them like a little caramel from their childhood or maybe smell some eucalyptus. Like one guy, you know, he was from California. He loved the smell of eucalyptus and I'm smell eucalyptus. And every time they took the drug, they brought that sensation again and again until after- They're doing an association. Exactly. This is classical conditioning. Yeah. This is how you trigger a lot of placebo responses in the lab. And then over time he took away the drugs but he kept the stimulation there. And he's got guys who, you know, he's had people from Vietnam War who've been on heavy drugs for 40 years. And he's got guys that, you know, that he was able to get to early after these more recent wars who were almost completely drug free. And basically the theory is that their brain is adding the drugs that it needs in order to find homeostasis, in order to find an even level that it couldn't have found without that sort of extra help. Telling your brain looking to step in a little more. And- I wonder if, I mean, what it's also sounding like is like it's a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of a thing and a removal of a negative expectation, right? By introducing the placebo, you've like, okay, the negative expectation of what's gonna happen is out of the way. I'm expecting this positive benefit. And the brain says, yeah, this is what that positive benefit feels like. Here you go. Right, exactly. And your brain doesn't wanna be wrong. Like your brain, once it makes a prediction, it doesn't wanna be wrong. It can't break the rules, but it can bend them. You know, and it can add enough to, you know, to basically, you know, be able to fill out the paperwork and say, yeah, you know, whatever, you know, it was close enough to what I expected. Like in the case of the shocks when I got these shocks and I was expecting this very low shock and they gave me a very powerful shock. The low shock that I felt, I felt the low shock, was a little higher than the old one. It was like the brain like added enough drugs to almost get it down there. And it's like, okay, that's close enough. So, you know, because it just needs to sort of, I just think it sort of self gratifying. It's like, yeah, I was right. I was pretty much right. And a little bit too. Yeah, it's, you're right. But it's also like, wait, no, that's the wrong amount of input sensation I should be giving you for that light association. So, okay, let me adjust it to reality. Because I might have to adjust our experience to reality all the time. Constantly. One of the, one of the sides I talked to you, brilliant guy, he said, look, and this is what's interesting about this is, imagine putting your hand into like some, burning your hand and then putting it in the cold water, right? And the relief goes up your arm into your spinal cord, into your thalamus. Get spread out, you know, the ACC different parts of your brain until it gets to the front of your brain, the prefrontal cortex. And you're just like, oh my God, I'm gonna leave my hand in here forever. Like this is great, right? That is sort of the process of pain relief, right? Now, the placebo works backwards. Placebo starts in the front of your brain and they've seen this now, it's been almost a couple of decades since they first saw this. It starts in the front of your brain and goes backwards and says, okay, like this is what we're expecting. This is what we got. And then it starts releasing drugs sort of as it goes backwards. And the scientists told me that reality is basically all the information coming up from your body, colliding with all the information coming from your brain. And that's, and what wins out is what we experience. That's what reality is. We're just, it's just, you know, the confluence of these two different things and where they match, fine, where they don't match, one side ends up winning out. And then that's what you'll experience. And in the case of placebo, it's when the brain wins out. It's like, no, no, no, this is low pain. Sorry, but you're wrong, buddy. And that's a sort of very elegant way to sort of think about your experience. Like you said, what? I believe it reminds me of Blair, who happens to be colorblind, saw or thought that the little person in the crosswalks was green, because green means go. And so she, it was her brain imprinting the green on the little man, but that was never actually there because it was her expectation. Right, exactly. And what is, I mean, you know, like color, all these experiences we have to think are so real, you know, I mean, they're basically your brain telling you stuff. And in a lot of cases, and a lot of optical illusions work the same way where you can like trick your brain into seeing something. It's not true, but it has an expectancy. It fills in the gaps, you know? I mean, it's got a lot to do. Your brain's busy and it, you know, and sometimes it cuts in corners. And that's a lot of what, you know, you run into with both hypnosis and placebo and all these things is your brain kind of cutting corners and you can benefit from those, you know, those efficiencies. Yes. So is hypnosis, in a way, similar to the classical conditioning with the pain relief and the really pleasant stimuli, you know? Is it something that's kind of similar, training the brain again? For decades, people have been trying to figure out if hypnosis and placebo are the same thing. And there's been a lot of, you know, discussion about this at the same time they've been trying to figure out whether or not there's certain people who have a habit of responding to placebos like always. Like, is there like a perfect placebo responder? Because if we could find these people, drugs would be a lot cheaper to make. Because you could get rid of, you could lower the placebo response, right? Like, who are the people who are messing everything up? Like, let's get rid of them. And then let's try it with the rest of us, us normal people, right? And then this is the idea and it hasn't worked out because placebo moves around. It changes from day to day. You can remove everyone from a trial who has a placebo response and then do a new trial, which is people who are left, and you'll have new placebo responders like growing up among them. And so it's really hard to get rid of now. Hypnosis is... I'm just imagining placebo, like a strange arm growing up about your back. The walking placebos, you know? Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. And it drives some of these guys frankly, these men and women, absolutely insane. Because, you know, it's very expensive. It's very expensive. A person in a trial costs about $30,000. And if you have high placebo responses, you have to have these massive numbers of subjects in order to figure out if you're beating the placebo or not. Because if you get stuck in this, like, you know, not enough people, you get a bunch of placebo responders, 70% in some cases. It's like, well, you know, I guess, you know, we don't know if the drug works because everyone is finding the placebos. So you have this problem now. Hypnosis tends to be kind of stable throughout your life. And so it tends to be kind of flat. So if you're not hypnotizable, you don't tend to be hypnotizable later. And if you are hypnotizable, it tends to stay kind of that way throughout your life. It's kind of like IQ. It's not like perfect, but it kind of works. And that's the first thing. And the second thing is if you give someone who's having a placebo response naloxone, which is what you give someone who's having a drug overdose, a placebo response to pain, I should say. The placebo response disappears. It's gone. And the pain is back. And then you take naloxone away and the placebo response comes back. So you can medicate this thing. If you give someone who's hypnotized and having a non-pain, you know, like a pain relieving experience, it doesn't do anything. So something else is going on there. Different networks. Well, naloxone definitely works on the opioid network, that brain. So it's different. If it doesn't work for hypnotism, then there are definitely different transmitters and receptors in the brain and the neurons of the brain that are working. But they seem so similar. You know, they treat a lot of the same conditions too. You get like this list that you might already know. It's like chronic pain, Parkinson's disease, irritable bowel syndrome, anxiety, depression, and in the case of placebo, some autoimmune diseases and asthma, and then some forms of addiction maybe. And so, gosh, they gotta be the same, right? It's gotta be like dopamine and opioids. It's gotta be in there somewhere. And so it feels so right that people have tried for years and to make that connection. And some people still think it's there. But I just, you know, I don't think it's quite there, but there are other ways it's gonna cat, right? And there's a lot of brainwaves and maybe hypnosis is more mechanical. You know, it's sort of on a different scale. I know it's amazing though. That's the other thing. It's like, I saw, I met a hypnotist who was, and he had filmed this guy who was working with, he works in burn labs. And he's a professor at the University of Washington. And burns are like the most painful thing, I think in existence, like the really big bad burns, like, I don't think there's any pain that's worse than that. And it just, you know, and this guy has big burns and they were trying to change his bandages and they just couldn't because he was just like, he wouldn't let them touch it. Too painful, yeah. Yeah, too painful. And so this guy comes in and, you know, and everyone's kind of dubious. Everyone's always dubious to the hypnotist. And he comes in and he's like, look, let me try and- Until he starts talking and then they believe everything he says. Right? Just looking into my eyes for a second. I mean, let me convince you here. Well, that's the thing is it's not like, it's actually more of a partnership. And so he's talking to this guy and he's like, I'd like to hypnotize me. It's like, you know, you can't hypnotize me. Like, can I try? And he's like, yeah, you can do whatever. He's like, okay, I'd like you to relax. And he says, no, I'm not gonna relax. He says, okay, I'd like you to be really, really tense. And he's like, I'm gonna relax. And so he basically gets this guy. Like, and he turns out this guy just happens to be very hypnotizable. And he goes down. And he's awake, like he's conscious. He's not like out of it, but you know, he gives him a suggestion. He won't feel any pain. And they take off his bandages and they are scrubbing out his wounds. And this guy's been on for a while. I know, right? He's done crazy opioids for a while and they just weren't helping him. And he feels nothing. Like he's just like tripping out and hanging out. Like that is not a placebo response. There's something going on. And so, you know, and then, you know, and this guy's like, this is amazing. This is like some sort of miracle thing. And you turn around to be exact same thing as someone else and it does nothing. It doesn't work. Yeah. So it's very visual as to whether or not you're prone to suggestion through hypnosis. Yes. Yeah. And you can't pin it down. Have you been hypnotized? I've tried like the dickens. I sat down, I'm low. So I wouldn't say it doesn't work. I'm low on the scale, the Stanford scale. Actually, I'm like a three out of 12. And so, it took half an hour and of a very talented hypnotist working on me. And I got relaxed. I got to this point where I was, I kept being like, am I hypnotized? Am I hypnotized? Am I hypnotized? Wow, this is it. This is it. I'm hypnotized. Oh, no, I'm hypnotized more, you know? I think that would very much be a very lucid awareness of the fact that I'm attempting to hypnotize, dehypnotize. Right? I was just like, is this it? This is what it feels like. Is that it? It's not it yet? Okay, let's keep trying, keep trying. You lift up my arm and I wouldn't be doing the right thing. You'd be like, you could hear, he was very good, but you could hear there was a hint of frustration. Cause I'm a journalist, I'm here, he wants to impress me. He wants to show like this stuff is real. Okay, I'm gonna cap down from 10. One more time. I'm gonna get a relax. Yeah, okay, I mean it was less subtle than I thought it was. Yeah, I mean the poor guy because he's got this real thing and no one takes him serious. I mean it's very hard for hypnotists to be taken seriously. They've got a real thing. It's amazing, but like they don't get a lot of respect. And so I'm sitting there and finally he's just like, all right, you know, and theoretically you can't change your hypnosis. But then my assistant's there, you guys know Liz Neely, right? Yes. Yeah, so she was helping me out that day and just like, you know, she lives in the area and she sits down and she just goes right out. Like she just, you know, she just, it was amazing. It was like, it was like a completely different thing. And I was looking at it, I was just like, man. You know, and she was conscious, of course. She's very conscious in a way, but she was in this different zone and she went right there. And they would say that she is more talented. She's a talented hypnosis subject and I'm not talented. And that's- I don't know, maybe it takes some practice or it's innate or not. That's a very suggestive scale. Oh, and it's not one way. Yeah, I mean, well, I think they're trying to turn the expectation on its end there, but I have been trying to increase my hypnotizability. It's generally accepted that hypnotizability doesn't change, but there's some people who think it might. I'm working on it, but again, I'm still like, oh, I'm so hypnotized right now. It's like the first time, can I say this on the show? And it's like- Yes, you can on the show. Yes, the first time, like, you know, you try weed and you're just like, oh, wow, am I totally out? Am I high now? Is this what it is? I can't tell how long I was supposed to wait to kick in. Is it- I think this is it. Am I supposed to see something more than this? Cause it's not as much going on as I thought, although there is sort of, were you standing there a minute ago? Did you just, where did you go? Okay, it's working, it's working. Okay, this is what it is. This is it, really? This is what it is? That's weird, that this is what it is. This is the experience of trying to be hypnotized. Like this is what's going on in my head. And so yeah, I would, I also tried to do hypnosis and I also stuck at that. So that I can improve on, that I can learn a lot of tricks I can get better at. But- I have a friend who recorded a hypnosis session for a hypnotist because he preferred her voice. He liked something about her voice. He found, he thought as a tool, would work better than his own voice. Nice. In a prerecorded session. Wow, did it work? Yeah, and he used it, I mean, he would use her for like when he wins, I guess, I don't know if it was how they implemented it, but it was a recorded thing. And apparently it took him a long time to get it recorded just right. But it was, you know, I guess for something that he could give to a patient if he couldn't be there or wasn't available, or they, you know- Yeah. I don't know how that- I mean, you have to move really smooth and it has to feel really natural because the person's awake, they're listening. Like Dan, and if you're like, and you're flying through space and you can feel like at peace and you know, and then, and it's like, it kind of breaks the thing. Your phone's going off. Let me just get this. Okay, there's a text message scrolling across the sky that you can see that you got to pick up the kids at three, remind me of that later. Or even worse actually is when you're just like, you're flying through space and it's like being a fiction writer or something and you like don't know what happens next. And you're like, man, you know. You know, like it's, you have to thinking, always getting this thing going. And it's like, you know, if you have a little bit, you can tell they're like, eh, you know, unless they're really, really in a deep trance, the one thing I will say though is the same team is working on virtual reality hypnosis. And that's amazing. They let me see like the beta version. And it's like you're following a creek down. I'd seen some of the older versions with like, like snow falling and it isn't doing anything for me. But then there's one where you're following a creek and the water is like, literally hypnotic. And you're just like, oh, and they count down and then there, and that one, I was just like, whoa. You know. Imagine the virtual reality. You're like, you're surrounded by it. And so your brain really, it's not just you sitting in a chair in an office listening to somebody say things smoothly. It's like all of a sudden your senses, you know, maybe not, you know, your sense of touch or anything, but your hearing and your sight are completely engulfed in this. Yeah, I wonder if there's some people who are more likely to be visually hypnotized than they are to be audio hypnotized. I mean, I mean, deaf people. Right. You can hypnotize deaf people. You can also hypnotize blind people. These things, these things work. Yeah. Tushie. Sorry. Please. Yeah, no, I mean, it's just like, I think like I've seen like art school, cinema stuff that I was just, I think I might have been in a different place. I watched, I think it was like a 30 minute video where somebody had fixed a camcorder to the hub of their car and drove around LA. Oh, wow. And it was sometimes like a spinning wheel and sometimes it just, you know, blurry kind of image and then it would slow down and the world would sort of be slowly rotating and they'd accelerate again. And this thing went on for like 30 minutes and I was transfixed. Like I almost couldn't turn away from it. So I wonder if like there is ability to get into these states that might not work audio for some people, but for some folks a completely visual version of it. Sensory modality, specificity then. There's a question that we really should have, if there were more people like taking this stuff seriously, like we would have answered these questions, but there's just not enough people doing it. And you're 100% right because, you know, the hypnosis for most of it, it's not necessarily some weird, bizarre state you're going this is a whole argument about what exactly it is. But like in my experience, it's not that the similar from staring at a fire too long or staring at the clouds or watching water drip, like it's a state that you kind of recognize. Like we've all been there and been like, you know, that's, it's not, it's just some people, like you say, can get there easily and then can get deeper. But it's not foreign, it's not, and it's not like in the movies where like, and then you're just like, you just take over your brain, like it doesn't work like that. It's just- So what about the, so the taking over the brain, implanting memories in people's heads, you know, there's like all these movies and television shows where it's like, I'm going to hypnotize you now and now you're going to talk to like a duck, you know, and some, and suddenly the person's talking like Donald Duck or, you know, they're kind of ridiculous examples that take it to the extreme. Is there any truth to them? The short answer is no. TV is a terrible place to learn about hypnosis. In fact, TV, I think TV kind of ruined hypnosis in a lot of ways or the silver screen. If you think about Dracula, right? Think about the, do you ever read the book Dracula? I like the horror. I like the horror. I like the horror. I like your hymn. Right. Well, if you- The book, in the book, it was actually the heroes who used hypnosis to find the vampire. They actually hypnotized Nina and like, and found the vampire hypnosis. By the time it came out on the silver screen, it was the vampire using hypnosis. And in that time, it just got this like lousy reputation and like there was this, there were all these crazy stories in like late 1800s about hypnosis. And my favorite was this guy who was, everyone was worried about like people committing crimes on like being hypnotized and brain, you know, mind control. And there's one guy who, like he robbed a bank after being hypnotized. And it was a huge news. People were like, oh my God, like you can hypnotize when you're out at the bank. What no one mentioned was the guy was a bank robber. But he was just like his fifth bank that week, you know? Like it wasn't like any of the- Yeah. So, it's a really, hypnosis makes you worse at your job. Right, because he got caught after that. I mean, it was too relaxed on that job. He's just like, hey, whatever, give me money or don't, I don't care, whatever. So, I mean, and there's a lot of things like this, you know, you go into it like, and this whole like walking like a duck, that started with a guy who would do these traveling hypnosis shows. And if you go back and you know, and some of the people who like, tried to understand him better would go to multiple shows. And it was the same guy walking like a duck every time. Right. And he was on the payroll. And you can do this, but you can also get someone to walk like a duck. I mean, hypnosis at its very best feels a little like being drunk. Like you just, you lose some inhibitions. So walking like a duck isn't like, if you're drunk, you just, I can make you walk like a duck, believe me. Like you can do that. And a lot of it on stage, on stage, this is also just peer pressure. You just telling someone to do something and they're in that vibe and you get that thing. And they may not be hypnotized, but they'll do what you say. Right. So there's a lot going on with, and with stage hypnosis is really kind of muddy the waters. It's fascinating in its own right, but it's not the same gig. And it has kind of, you know, I think it's really cool, but it has kind of given hypnosis kind of a bad rap. And then, you know, and the bank robbers too them, you know, they didn't help much. Have you gotten any, or did you get any suggestions from your editor or from, you know, publisher, the publisher as you were writing your book? Did anybody, did you, were you subject to peer pressure in suggestion as to which thing, like particular things you should take part in? I mean, like going to see a witch doctor. Oh, no, that was my own idiocy. Most of the stuff I did, I think my editors would have told me not to. And that's, that's fairly. I really shouldn't do that. I mean, they're getting cursed by a witch doctor. I had a chapter on no seabos, which is the anti-seabos. It's what you were talking about before, about the negative expectations you have to create negative outcomes. And there's not a lot known about them. They're actually really hard to study. You can't go to a Parkinson's patient and be like, this pill was going to make your Parkinson's worse. That's a rough stuff. You're taking no good. Go to someone's clinically depressed and say, this pill will increase your depression. Like, that's not right. You can't do that. Wait, wait, it's not right, we can buy our fear of it. Can't we, I mean, we're assuming that would work. The negative placebo would be pretty powerful. Yeah, no, I mean, there's no question because you can do it with pain and all these things, pain is very responsive and you can create these nocebo pain experiences. So you would assume with these conditions that I listed that are placebo prone, one would assume, and it may be that nocebo is actually on a 20 different pathway and this isn't true, but one would assume that there would be a similar path, a similar trend for nocebos and you really wouldn't, some of these really wouldn't want to find out. So there's not a lot known and it's really hard to study and you can say a couple of people pay but it's not real easy to work with. So I ended up with half the chapter and I was like, you know, I kind of don't want to, I don't want to spend a bunch of stuff, you know, that there's not really very good science. So I got into superstition and I got into curses and zombies and all this great stuff. Maybe if you believe the house is haunted, suddenly every creek in the foundation sounds like ghosts, right? That's more and more evidence, right? So my question would then be, if you, would that affect your body? Like would that affect your health? Like, could you have an expectation that like, let's say you assume these ghosts want to hurt you? You're gonna get possessed. Could you, yeah, could you have either psychological or physical response to that? Like that's where the rubber meets the road for me. And so I was interested in people who were cursed and then got sick or cursed and then died. And so you sort of start, you start looking at these things and you get into, and it's, you know, a superstition, you know, believing that, you know, that you scoff the first baseline on your way to the pitcher's mound and therefore you're gonna have a bad day and you have a bad day. You know, that's not exactly a nocebo or believing you got, you know, the spread of everything's gonna happen to you. It's not exactly nocebo, but it's in the same family. It felt similar. So I went far and up down that road that I was like, I need to get someone to curse me. Like, I gotta be a cursed. Yeah, you look at me. Oh my goodness. It made sense to me. So I think that's a valiant effort. But again, you're gonna be like, okay, am I thinking this because of the curse? I think if you still, you would be too lucid about it. Like you would have to get somebody who believes in curses and be like, I just brought the witch doctor over to your house to curse you. Hope you don't mind. Thanks, I'll be across the street from my binoculars seeing how you do. That would be more... That would be terrible. That's a terrible... How could be terrible? It's not a good idea. And I thought about that. I'm like, why don't I curse someone else? And I was like, that actually, what a terrible thing to think. Like, no, I wouldn't want to curse someone else, especially, and I talked to a lot of people, people who are very logical, you know, long time war correspondents and stuff who live in Mexico City with me. And they were like, these are hard guys with, you know, like steel sort of wills. And they're sort of like, oh my God, no, don't do that. No, that would be a really bad idea. You don't know, you don't believe in curses. And it's like, yeah, but still wouldn't do it. I'm getting a sense from you guys, you guys wouldn't do it either. But I was actually interested in that self thinking. Like, could, would my fear, would my nervous, would my looking over my shoulder affect my health? Like, would it, you know, would there be a repercussion from that? And I was, I wasn't interested to see if like a piano would fall on me, because you know, let's be honest. But I was interested to find out if I would deteriorate. And I didn't, but I did have kind of another bizarre experience in which was completely unrelated. But my, my wife had a complication with her pregnancy during that week. Okay, okay, curse has to go away now. Yeah, that's what I was about to ask you, is did you get a counter-curse for when you were sick of it? Well, that's, well, here's the thing is actually I did, and I went back to the doctor, the witch doctor to get the curse removed. And he was gone actually on that, it was like a Friday. And he was gone, he was, he was there and his sister was like, yeah, yeah, he's dealing with some family matters. And I was like, so you can come back on Tuesday. And it was over the weekend. I was waiting for this guy to come back that, that there was this complication. And, Eric, Eric, what are you doing this weekend? I'm not leaving the house. Hey, I forgot to smile again. This is, I'm not leaving the house. Actually, I actually went rock climbing on the day before, because I was called out like, I wanted to like push it. I was just like, come on, like, cause I was getting cocky by then. It was fine, like no problem. But then it was the next day that my wife had this complication. And what I learned was, you know, a man of science, a man of reason can go to a superstitious freak like that. It happens, like I very quickly, and my wife never occurred to her that it might have been a curse. But immediately I was just like, if this child dies, like, I will never forgive myself. This is the worst thing I've ever done. And the kid was fine. It was gas and some discomfort from some bad tacos. And it was fine. And that was actually the day I learned that he was a boy. And it was this wonderful day, but it was so quick, moving from confidence. All it takes is one bad thing. And that's really the power of a curse. It's the what if. It's this power of suggestion that you might have done this. And that's really where it comes from. And your brain is still wired for protecting the, you know, family and children and everything. Like any threat, you know, even if it is something superstitious, you may feel that same desire to protect or regret for not having protected better. And even one step beyond that, actually, and this is actual, the only science that I was going to squeeze out of the Nacibo work, there's a lot of science, there's a lot of great stuff out there. A lot of great people don't work, but like the thing that I really took away is actually Nacibos are more in a way more powerful than Placebos. They're certainly easier to create. In a Placebo, you have to do the class conditioning, you got to train people, you got to get them like, you know, having this thing. And in a Nacibo, you just have to say, this is really going to hurt. And it just happens because we're hardwired for fear. We're not hardwired for hope. You know, if fear is really the way we go and you know, look at the news cycle, I mean like this works on us. So it makes sense, but in all of these studies you see again and again, Nacibos tend to be stronger, they tend to be more, they stick around longer than Placebos. Do you think that after digging into all this for yourself personally, have you come away understanding your brain and how you relate to the world better? And do you think you are more prepared for dealing with the world of the fear in the media and all the things that come at us? Yes, on that second one, yes. I do think I understand at least, at least I understand how these things work. It doesn't necessarily change how susceptible, how suggestible we are. Like I can tell you, this is a Placebo and you take a Placebo and I ask you, what was that? You say it's a Placebo. This is an experiment that was done at Harvard but to cap check, it's amazing. And people still have Placebo responses. A lot of this stuff is hardwired, it's unconscious, it's not stoppable. So I still, for me it's fizzy drinks. When you drop a little fizzy thing in the water and you want it to sort of like airborne, which I didn't see, but it's not pretty much better than a Placebo. And I just watch it fizz and I get the fizzy thing, it's gotta be doing something, right? It's fizzy, it's totally doing something. And I know that about myself. I know that I'm going into this thing and like, ooh, look at it go. And that that's affecting my expectations. Bubbles, it's science. I mean, it's not hard to entertain me. And so that's understanding about myself. Like I utilize that. I also take raw garlic because it's like boom. And then I feel like I'm somehow better. And that's like, I'm tapping to my own expectations and I know it, but it also still works. So it is, if you read the book, it won't affect your ability to have a Placebo response, but it will affect your ability to sort of plan your life around it. Like for instance, one of the things that Placebo does not respond well to is, it does not help very much as cancer. And it affects a lot of the symptoms around cancer, the pain, the nausea, you know, a lot of these things respond very well to Placebos, but the tumor doesn't. So you can tap into your expectations. You can go to these other methods of healing, but you need to know their limits. And you need to know when it's time to go to a doctor. And that's really important. So it's like a trust verify, you know, like go along with it, you know, if we're talking about pain, if we're talking about these like stomach problems and no one can help you with your stomach, like, you know, try this smoke therapy, go to a Shaman, try a homeopathy, like tap into this stuff. This is all the same expectation in our bodies, but their limits and know where those are. Yeah, and I think that like the FTC recently put, recently put labeling requirements onto homeopathic products in drug stores. And I think personally that is fantastic because people need to know that, okay, scientifically, this is not a cure for your cold. This is not, does not have any scientific evidence behind it that it's actually gonna help. But you know, if you do wanna take it and tap into that Placebo effect, you still can do it, but you need, people need to have that information. Yeah, I mean, cold's a tricky one because you're talking about immune responses and the immune. And the cold pill doesn't even really improve things. Right, that's the thing. And you do have these things like a cold, I mean, you know, and the immune response in humans actually in Placebo, it has been shown in rats, but not really. I mean, it hasn't been worked out exactly how, but immune does immune responses, the T cells can respond to belief in rats. And rats can have Placebo, too, which is cool. But yeah, in a lot of these conditions, like the chronic pain, you know, I've talked to a lot of doctors who say like, I'm lucky if I can breathe or help like 40% of my patients. Like it's really hard. Like long-term chronic pain, fibromyalgia, you know, so that the really tough ones, it's hard. And you know, and these are the folks who are really open to sort of these other different methods because I mean, medical science hasn't really broken through a lot of these things. It was a lot of the stomach issues, you know, like when medical science comes up with these really definitive cures, then you will see these shifts, you know, like you did with Viagra. Viagra's one of my favorites. We're gonna get to sperm later, right? But Viagra, you know, like for a long time, because you can get Placebo responses from performance issues. Like, and when they actually tested Viagra, like it outperforms Placebo well, right? But there still was a Placebo response. He still had people who even had like physical, it wasn't just psychological impotence. It was physical and some people would have that response, which is how a lot of the traditional medicines worked on, you know, on sort of male enhancement or male performance. And so, but once Viagra came out, something of those things weren't necessary. And now if you go into a lot of these traditional medicine places, you will actually find Viagra in the powders that they're selling. You know, you actually, if you test them, they actually have Viagra. They actually have that. Yeah, that was like when they did analysis. It's the NFL is basically single-handedly funding a giant laboratory because everybody's so afraid of the supplements that they're taking that they accidentally take something that'll get them kicked out of the game. So the NFL union has basically got a lab set up to test supplements and the players can say, okay, I want to try this. They send it off to the lab. They come back and say what's actually in it. Oh my God, it's amazing. Yeah, and so one of the things that would show up in a lot of natural, like calming, you know, herbal remedy stuff would be like, like what is it, the Prozac? Or like, yeah, you know, so they're, and or Viagra, you know, so they're actually taking, you know, drugs that are known to have an effect and slipping them into things that are being called all natural homeopathic. Well, these things have their limits and it's important to understand those. And then it's, you know, and then within those limits yet you can play it. And with hypnosis, there's these amazing things that you met, someone mentioned memories. Like, and I have a chapter on this, like don't mess with your memories with hypnosis. Like play with anything you want, your body, but don't play with your memories because you can implant memories that aren't yours. And that's not hard to do. And it's not hard to do with someone who's not hypnotized. So, like, you know, with all these things, there's sort of limits and there's rules and there's ways to do it safely. And at the end of the day, you know, some of these things can, I believe, can be permanent. You know, I mean, we're talking about your brain, you're talking about expectations, those predictions that we're doing. And there's some really interesting science on whether or not certain people, I can't help but think. Like, you know that person, that person who just responds to everything. And I just really think that at some point in the next 20 years, we're gonna find that person. And then I will have all my friends tested and I will pick out which, because I know which ones they are. I'll pick them out, they'll be a great guinea pig. You are my guinea pig forever. Yeah, there's no, there's some great genetic, there's great genetic work going on. There's a piece coming out in Washington Post that covers a lot of this. Awesome, awesome. Well, I don't wanna keep you much longer. So I wanna tell everybody, if you're interested, Eric's book is Suggestable You. It is available now. And it is entertaining. There is some great stuff in here. And if this conversation, if you found this conversation entertaining, you will probably find this book even more so. Even more so. Eric, thank you so much for joining us tonight. It was just great. Thank you for having me. This was really fun. Yeah, we had blast. Really fun to talk with you. And where can people find you online if they would like to look for you and more of your writing? You can see more of my writing that doesn't have much to do with Suggestability at ericvance.com. But there's also, if you wanna learn more about the book, it's there's Suggestable You.com. And or just Twitter, send me a tweet at ericvance. That's Eric with a K. Fantastic, all right. But we are going to move into our break. And when we come back, we're gonna be talking a lot more about science. We've got some stories for you for this week's news. Eric, you're more than welcome to hang out with us and chat science. Or you can get on with your Thanksgiving festivities because we know it's Thanksgiving Eve today. So. I've been getting dirty looks actually for the last hour. So. Thank you, Eric. All right, see you guys. Bye, thank you. Have a great night. Happy Thanksgiving. You too. And we will be back in just a few moments with more this week in science. 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And can't stop the lives that they lead need adjusting. They drive to the bookstore and blind and start trusting. The miracles and cures already. And we're back with more of this vegan science. Yes, we are. And I forgot to mention in the break. You got all kinds of stuff. I'm looking at the rundown right here. You've got a tremendous amount of science. I do. I was just gonna throw a bunch of them together though, quickly, but the first, but before I jump into the science, I just wanted to remind everybody, if you are in the San Francisco Bay area, January 19th, we are going to be at Cal Academy of Sciences for SF Sketch Fest, which is gonna be awesome. It's a week and a half long, two week long comedy festival that takes place throughout San Francisco. And we're part of the Cal Academy of Sciences Sketch Fest Nightlife Program. It's going to be fantastic. And if you wanna be a part of it, get your tickets now and come see us at the Academy on the 19th. Please. Thanks for reminding me, Fada. And now, back to your regularly programmed science. Oh, the EM drive. EM drive. We've talked about this thing before. It's the weird thing that uses basically a hunk of copper to create particles out of nothing because, you know, in the void of the universe, particles randomly pop into and out of existence, you know, at the Planck scale of universal space. Anyway, it's decided that they pop into and out of existence and there's really no fuel, but there are particles that suddenly get there in the engine somehow and then they produce thrust somehow and things move and there's a certain amount of thrust that comes out of the engine. And we've been talking about this people want it to be real and they want it to be something that could be used for interstellar space travel to be able to ionically get us from place to place without having to carry a lot of fuel with us because fuel's heavy. I mean, once you're in space, it doesn't really matter, but getting off the planet, that's kind of the issue. So anyway, there's this wonderful review of the new article that has been published by the NASA team that has been investigating this EM drive design. They have published in the Journal of Propulsion and Power. And so we've talked before about they've published in archive.org and they've also put out like kind of pre summaries of the work that they're doing, but there's actually a published peer reviewed article out now entitled measurement of impulsive thrust from a closed radio frequency cavity in vacuum. And so they tested this in a vacuum with power scans at 40, 60 and 80 watts. And they basically only found thrust that was different from error from, you know, by chance at the 40 watt level, but it's all very odd. And there's a wonderful write up of it over at ours, Technica by Chris Lee. And he is a physicist who specializes in quantum physics and optics. And so this should be his bread and butter cup of tea and he should have read this article and gone, yes, I get it, I see what's going on. And basically he said, he read their journal article and went, what? You're making things up. Yeah, yeah, so if you want a humorous take down of the EM drive journal article, I recommend this article entitled NASA's EM drive still a WTF thruster. Strengths in the chat room. Rockets don't respond well to placebos. Exactly. And that seems to be something placebo-ish happening here in this system. And we don't know exactly what's happening. Yeah, we don't know exactly what's happening here and there is not anything within standard physics that can really explain it, but nobody's going to the extent to try and explain it in this paper. And so the gist here is that basically they've published their results of their study, but they're not actually going into the we don't really know what's happening here part of it and digging deeper to discover more about the underlying mechanisms. And so the mechanism is still very unknown, undescribed and the physics is still fuzzy. And I would think somebody who deals with quantum physics and these random particles bopping and doing out of existence, that he would have something of a leg up on me for understanding the article. But yeah, his last paragraph was, I know that I sound a bit flippant and dismissive of this work. I promise you that I went into this paper determined to be skeptical, but positive. Unfortunately, all of my positive thoughts drained through the gaping holes in the paper leaving me skeptical and exasperated. So, so mDrive still, still, we don't know whether it works or how it works or what's going on there. And it's a big gaping question. So maybe we're not gonna jump forward on that one too fast. Keep your skeptical hats on everybody. That's all I ask. In other news, I know people don't like the politics and the stuff, but you know what? We gotta bring the science policy front and center because it was reported this last week. But the North Pole, the Arctic, is about 36 degrees warmer than normal. 36 degrees warmer than normal. So basically- That's like a heat gun. Yeah, so there are images of the Earth and the daily average of different areas of the Earth. And we have this information thanks to satellites that are able to take surface temperature and atmospheric measurements and get these temperatures for us. Thank goodness NASA and NOAA are involved in managing these satellites so that we can see our changing planet from week to week, month to month throughout the year. Anyway, the data is showing that the Arctic is very hot. And there's a big area of cold polar air that is moved from where it normally is over the Arctic to over Siberia, which is a very interesting shift. And this is resulting from a wibbly-wobbly jet stream. So the jet stream that normally flows over the Northern Hemisphere and usually brings cool air out of the Arctic down into North America and then wibble-wobbles back up. It's a lot more wibbly-wobbly and it's pushed hot air into the Arctic and cold air that should be in the Arctic is, like I said, in Siberia. And additionally, we talked with a researcher from NASA this summer, didn't interview, we talked about Arctic sea ice, and sea ice is low. And so together, the low sea ice and this weird jet stream that's pushing warm air North, we have conditions that have led to an extremely unseasonally warm Arctic. So 2016, on the road to being the hottest year on record and additionally, the Arctic having its hottest winter on record. And the Arctic can change and shift as it goes into, we're coming up to the 24 hours of night. It's coming, we're getting closer to that shortest day in the Arctic. So there will be less and less sun, there will be more dark, it'll be colder up there and things can shift drastically as the planet tilts, as this tilt happens. But what's going on? The question is how much sea ice will be able to form over the winter? Because that's what we normally depend on the winter for is the formation of a very thick sea ice that can then modulate the climate in the North during the spring and the summer months. So. Yeah, and the amount of ice also affects albedo which it kind of reduces, with the lack of ice means there's more of a feedback loop because then also heat is absorbed easier. So it's definitely, it's all connected and it all feeds off of each other. Yeah, and we've seen climate change in increments though, accelerated increments. We've been still seeing it in increments. If we get to a point where we're really drastically changing things like a jet stream, you're going to see more dramatic examples of more drastic climate change. That's a great point. That's something you can turn around and see a difference in a couple of days or a couple of weeks as opposed to years when people, unless you're taking data every day, you might not notice because it is so gradual. Everything just looks like weather. And so along those lines of being able to see those changes along the days of the year, on screen right now I have a graph that was shared by Zach Laib onto Twitter and he's a PhD student at the University of California at Irvine. He studies the Arctic and this is from a Washington Post article. Anyway, this image is from the Danish Meteorological Institute and it shows, if you look at the end of the red line that's at the top, which, you know, it's big and bouncy, but relatively low for the first part of the end of the winter in 2016, so January, February-ish. And then it starts spiking during the summer as temperatures go up in the summer months and that starts dropping as we get into the fall and all of a sudden there is a giant spike in the data and his tweet, this spike puts the temperatures about 20 degrees Celsius higher than normal at this above 80 degrees latitude north. And he wrote, today's Arctic mean temperature continues to move the wrong direction up quite an anomalous spike. So, we would not really have this without the temperature recording instruments, the scientific efforts of many government organizations like NASA and NOAA and along those lines, I want to say that news this week that a Trump advisor, as Trump is coming into office in January, has said that Trump, even though he wants to push forward NASA's mission for exploring the solar system, he wants to, Trump wants to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century, which is a great inspirational cause to get behind. He thinks that that's all NASA should be about. He wants to take away NASA's science funding. He wants to take away the funding for so-called politicized science from NASA and all I have to say is, who else is gonna put those satellites up and manage them and take care of them? Well, and politicized science is kind of like, it should be an oxymoron, it should be. Yeah, it should be because science informs policy. And we need this information, we need this to understand how our planet is doing. We need to see our planet breathe to know that it is still breathing. And if we don't have eyes from the heavens looking down to make sure that there's still a pulse, that there's still breath, we're not gonna know it. We won't see the last gasp before it happens. And so, yay, we might be able to see all sorts of other places in the solar system, but we also need to be looking at our planet. And so to be clear though, this is not new. James Hansen at NASA battled Bush administration, people who are getting appointed to over, so he had a 20 year old who was redacting reports, or a 22 year old who was redacting reports that he was putting out from NASA who was working for Republican administration at the time. So there's politics involved and part of why they don't want, because exactly what you said, information, data informs policy. And if they want a policy that's not supported by data, they got to do something with the data and the quickest ways to make it go away. And we've had pushes by Congress over this last eight years, who have been attempting to make the mission of NASA focused on space, which it is, it is about, it is focused on space exploration, but by the double speakin' errors, we're going to stop looking at the planet. Although it's still in the directive, which they have attempted to change, still in the directive of NASA to protect planet Earth is part of their overarching directive. So, and that is, and that's what James Hansen used to say, nope, this is part of protecting the planet is observing and continuing to do the data. He's since retired, but yeah, NASA's gonna be in a lot, but part of it is they're going to keep attempting to push these other missions of NASA in lieu of it, because I think it would be politically disastrous to go full on against NASA and to try to get rid of it as a program. But yeah, whenever you hear about, we're gonna focus on exploring space, we're already doing that, what they're gonna be doing is just cutting funding in other areas that NASA provides. Yeah, so the quote from Bob Walker with The Guardian, he said, we see NASA in an exploration role in deep space research. Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies where it is their prime mission, but along those lines, other agencies do not really have the budget to be able to take over what NASA has been doing with the view of Earth from space. Walker did clarify, he didn't want to abolish all Earth science programs, he just wants to move them to other agencies. So it could just be a specification of the goals, but I'm imagining that in the process he wouldn't be so upset if things fell through the cracks and didn't get replaced. Oh, we took away your budget and we're not giving them a budget, so oh, do what you can. Yeah, but this isn't new. There's been an attack on this aspect of NASA's mission for the last 16 years. Yeah, so anyway, that's what I really wanted to talk about. We've got also in line with this, the Arctic heating app. There's also currently measurements of the Antarctic Glacier retreats and there is research suggesting that this retreat goes back actually to the 1940s. The researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory looked at ice cores of the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica and they find that this is a climatically forced trend that was triggered in the 1940s, that the glacier is just melting, it's moving back, stepping on back. So it's not, we're not just looking at the Arctic, we're looking at the Antarctic, we're looking at the whole planet, things, dealing with climate are deep. We really need to be working on them. This is the weekend science. Are we being invaded, Justin? Yeah, hopefully this is just coming live over the wire. Hopefully this is not in response to what we just reported, but recent reports have just come in. What is being called an invasion force? It says here that an invasion force invisible to radar has gathered with the potential to take over the world. A team of scientists, though, may have caught onto them in time, but may do little to stop the armies from global domination. I can't believe what I'm reading. What is this global threat that I'm, is it aliens? Is it microbes? Is it cats? No, it's ants, not just any ant. Leptsiaudokenaecens, which is a very specific sort of ant and while it may look just like any other ant to the untrained eye, this ant is part of a new super colony that is poised to take over the world. According to Dr. Magdalena Sorge, post-doctoral researcher with North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the discovery is significant for two reasons. One, super colonies are super rare and therefore super cool, and two, other species in this genus have recently made headlines as invasive species. One in South Africa's Kruger National Park and another that shut down Australia's Darwin port for several days. The port got shut down because they somehow discovered that they had this invasive ant species colony in a shipping container, and so they not only stopped sending out shipping containers, they went to places where the shipping containers had already left from that particular batch, I guess, and tracked them down and investigated them because they were very concerned that this invasive ant colony had escaped, and it may have. They did not completely sure, but they did a pretty good job of containing what they did find. So this is actually, this is in a forest in Ethiopia, and it says, well, the ant is actually native to the general region. It is now moving in large numbers beyond the forest boundaries in the neighboring agricultural fields and along recently constructed roads to other urban areas. It, they say it may just be the beginning. So, Sorger, the species we found in Ethiopia may have a high potential of becoming a globally invasive species. Invasive species often travel with humans, so is tourism, global commerce to the region continues to increase so with the likelihood that the ants could hitch a ride. That's how fire ants started from a pregnant queen going from one place to the other. It's the interesting thing about super colonies is as opposed to one colony that has a queen, super colonies can have multiple queens and the same sort of brood. And what they'll do is these ants will go out and there's sort of ants everywhere in the world. There's more ants than there are probably any other sort of insect living creature kind of thing. There's lots and lots of ants. I think I live on a giant ant hill that is the entire metropolitan area of Portland. Hmm, it's an ant hill. There are a lot of ants, but I think there are more beetles in the world. I think the most of any animal on the planet is beetles. So what these ants are doing though, any super colony, they're going out, they're killing off whatever the native ant was in the area. And they're super populating the area with this new colony. One of them that they looked at is a super colony that spans 24 miles. Wow. You know, so this is... It's a lot of ants. I think we had our first interview. I think we had our first interview related to ants back at UC Davis. It was probably early 2000s, early in the show. And it was the first time I had heard of the idea of super colonies. And our guest actually brought some ants into the studio with us and was talking with us about... Talking with us about these little species of ants and talking about how these little tiny ants had, they had this super colony that pretty much went from south of San Francisco. It was almost the entire state of California, really. That the super colony had just... This is one population of ants. Yeah. And what's why... They're looking at this right now sort of like an invasive species in their native habitat. Because something has coalesced that they've got the upper hand or have gotten into that dominant footing where these ants are leveraging their colony into a super colony and taking over their own native area. And which is why I think the fear of this particular super colony becoming a global nuisance, it's one thing to show up somewhere where you weren't expected for dinner and be an ant from far away or an ant colony or any sort of invasive species and find yourself a new type of niche where you don't have the evolutionary ecological barriers to overexpansion. You've grown up in some sort of balance most things have from where their native region is. And so for something that is already dominating against an ecology that was sort of had enough time to come up with defenses for them or to counters for the population expansion. For them to be dominating there where evolution is ready for them versus showing up somewhere else that's unprepared. Because I think why this particular colony was having attention brought to it. So, yeah, ants. Ants who are just amazing at taking over kind of like the Romans or the, or the Huns. Or like the Huns. Hopefully the, hopefully, yeah, hopefully these ants. So what we need to do is build a wall is what you're saying. I never said that. I mean, it would have to go deep underground because it'd be like an underground. Because that's how they kept the Huns out. Yes, whiskey renegade, kind of like humans in general. Yes, thank you. Thank you. I love it. All right, well, we're no longer being, my house is constantly under invasion by ants. I just, constantly, I'm just, I just hope they don't try and kill us, take us out and just own the house at any point. But you know what time it is right now? What time is it? It's time. For Blair's Animal Corner. Oh yeah, it's a good part of the show when we kick it over to Blair and she does some animal stories. Then you find yourself behind a Vegas floor by deviled a pet dop-head doll. You want to hear about an animal street on gun. Except for giant panda vats that don't grow. B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b. What's that, Blair? So, again. Play it again. Play the song again. I love it. All right, so tomorrow's Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. It's officially that fun time of year with the jingle bells and the the snow and the ice and so something that comes with that is about 22 million metric tons of road salt applied to roads in the US each year. I also salted my turkey. That's different. No, it's not road salt. I know. Not road salt. Road salt, predominantly sodium chloride, has been spread on roads for decades I would say, if not longer. It's been part of the process to de-ice the roads so we can drive and until now there hasn't been a lot of consideration to what that does to the environment. Mainly because it's salt. It's natural. It's fine. Well, it's salt. It comes out of the earth. It's the salt of the earth there. Come on. Scientists at Yale and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, RPI have looked at the effect of road salt on frogs and they've also looked at the effects of leaf litter on frogs which is something else that litters the road and gets washed down into the streams this time of year. Stupid fall. Things falling constantly. Everything's on the ground and then gets washed into the water. Yes, so what they found was that frogs that were put in tanks with levels of road salt that were comparable to what you would expect from the washed off water from the roads had a change in their sex ratio. There was a masculinizing effect of salt and it was most likely due to a sex reversal during development because there is some sort of receptor that the sodium most likely binds to mimicking the actions of testosterone or estrogen which triggers either masculinizing or feminizing functions. So overall the frogs had a 10% decrease in females when they were in these road salt solutions. When they were put in oak leaf litter and no salt they had a female biosex ratio about 63% of the population was female. So they saw this very interesting combination where different litters on the road getting washed into waterways could affect the sex ratios in different ways. So the normal stuff that's falling onto the road biases towards female. The salt that we are adding in biases towards male. That means overall with the addition of all of the salt we will get more male frogs and why is that a problem? What do you need to make new frogs? Lots of male frogs and female frogs. Female frogs are way more important for making baby frogs. I get why this is all important but the thing that really interests me as you're telling us is what past ecological event would set this up within the frogs? What is it about having a saltier, brineer environment that they're like oh we need to cut back on population or just have more male frogs for some reason? So that's not really what this is pointing towards. What this is pointing towards is that this is a accidental association. So the sodium binds to receptors that are supposed to respond to testosterone or estrogen. So is this a reason that we should have less salt in our diet? That's a different kind of salt. No, sodium chloride. It's not. Yes, but it is something that we're not dumping into the waterways. I would guess that this isn't as much of a problem. I would guess also because our kidneys, their main job is to process salt and if they're doing their job then that's why the salt affects our physiology and not much differently as opposed to the skin of the frogs which are in the water and they're just everything's just coming in through the skin. I would say the fact that we just dump this stuff out on the roads, it gets washed into the sewers or washed into the wilderness waterways. That is the direct association that is causing this problem. Fascinating. Again, this is all experimental in a lab. They haven't done wildlife surveys. There hasn't been a lateral survey over many, many, many years about the sex ratios of frogs in the areas where we use a lot of road salt. What's also interesting is I thought that, and I could be mistaken about this, I thought that California did away with salting our roads because it was killing off trees along those roadways. The wash-off was ruining soil making salt the fields of your animals. That would make sense. That would make sense in our own environment to the point where we were killing off the wildlife around the roads. I think that's, once again, California's regulating things pretty quick. The thing about this that I found very interesting is that it's a mineral that is affecting something in a way that we thought only hormones could. That's really the thing that stands out to me about this. This is the thing that's really getting me is that this is salt attaching to, it's blocking the receptor. Sodium chloride, simple molecule that is in the environment already that is in sodium chloride. Sodium chloride, they combine in cells. Sodium chloride is common, but you don't want too much of it for just cellular toxicity in general, but that the receptor is getting confused. This is the weird point. This is where I'm wondering if they've made a mistake somehow in their research or whether there's something that we really don't understand about these sex hormone receptors. I think so what it's looking like is that it has to do with the dilution. It has to do with the fact that the amount of salt that we are dumping causes this huge amount of salt to end up in ponds, that then these animals are basically just sitting in salt water. Because there's osmosis and if they're taking the sodium chloride in through their skin, they're also going to be bringing in a lot more water too. You've got bloated frogs, which is going to pose problems metabolically. Is there something else happening metabolically that's leading to more testosterone? This may not be an uncommon thing to have. How many species, Blair, of sea frog? Zero. Okay, right. This may naturally occur or anytime frogs interact with an ocean or a salty beach environment. It might be this is why we don't have sea frogs. I don't think this is why, but because of something, roads. Because of the sex ratio, I don't think that's why. I think there's fundamental biological processes that in salt water is difficult with amphibians. So I think that it's something that just like Kiki said, deserves more study now because there's something fundamentally weird happening here. Can normal ions change receptors response to sex hormones? We need to take a couple steps back here and look at this crazy situation. But ultimately, this is another reminder that whatever you throw into an environment, no matter how natural you think it is, it could have an impact on species. Moving on to kind of more lighthearted news. We're not under hypnosis here. This is a story about ducks. It is a story about ducks. We've talked before about how ducks imprint very quickly on their mother or a mother object often in a lab. They will imprint to pretty much whatever is in with them when they are first hatched. If it's there for more than a few minutes, and then they will follow that object around, even if it's a red cube, they will pretend that that red cube is their mother and follow it around. So ducklings, they are just the most precious, naive, imprintable little nuggets. And new research that was published in the journal Animal Behavior from the University of Oxford have shown that newly hatched ducklings have extreme separation between the hemispheres in their brain. How do we know this? Because they covered one eye and then they had them imprint on a maternal surrogate. It was either red or blue. Then they had them, in choice tests, they always picked the one that they were imprinted with. In subsequent choice tests, over the next three hours, they were presented with them wearing either no eye patch, a patch over the same eye, or a patch over the other eye, the one that had been trained on the decoy. The ducklings made the choice if they had both eyes or the same eye with which they had learned, which was their mother, they always prefer the original decoy. But the ones that put the patch on the eye that had learned so that the fresh eye was now making the decision showed no reliable preference between the two. This is a fascinating thing about ducks, to add to this, ducks can sleep with one eye open. One thing, ducks can put one eye closed, half brain asleep, switch. It's a survival tactic because what they'll do is a bunch of ducks will sleep huddled up together. The ones on the outside will be keeping the outside eye open, sort of watching for predators, and the inside towards the group eye closed and be sleeping partly. And the duck, there's a duck at the other end that's got the opposite eye, and at some point they might shift, they might turn and face the other way and switch eyes. That one's closed, the other's open, half the brain is asleep, the other is out there watching. And it's fascinating to find that there's a, really it's not just an awesome sort of sleep behavior that they can engage in, but that these two sides of the brain are in such little contact that they could separately imprint on who's their mother. Yeah, so here comes the brain stuff, which is why I'm so excited to talk to Kiki about it. All right, so mammals, mammals have something called the corpus callosum, and that connects the two halves of the brain. That allows for rapid transfer of information between the two brain hemispheres, and that includes information from the visual system. But in birds and other vertebrates, Kiki, no equivalent structure? Does that check out? No, I mean, there is definitely in the visual system, we find that there's activation of the opposite hemisphere. So right eye is stimulated, activation is in the left hemisphere. If the left eye is stimulated, there's activation in the right hemisphere. But there's no structure like the corpus callosum that allows rapid transfer between the two in birds, not to your knowledge. That's what this research is telling me. So there's nothing, yeah, I'm trying to remember it's been a while. Don't you ever think about bird brains forever? So they're saying that there's not an analogous structure. It's not the same. It would go through, it has to go through a basal brain structure or through the cerebellum or something. Yeah, so they're saying that each eye, the information goes directly to the opposite side. So that means information obtained with one eye has to follow more complex anatomical routes to become available to other, like you were saying. So it has to kind of take a circuitous path to talk to each other. So the difference between checking with one side and the other, the two sides of the brain don't talk super well, and it can cause internal conflicts. So the second half of this experiment was they took ducklings, they imprinted opposite, they imprinted them with the different decoys on each eye. And then they tested them. The right eye was trained to the red, the left eye was trained to the blue, and then when they tested with both eyes, there was no statistical preference. So the left and right, they were kind of neutralizing each other. So the implication here is that the corpus callosum and the unified visual mind may be a mammalian innovation. There are no red moms, there are no blue moms, it's all purple moms. Well, to us, that's the point. But then it's very separate. No, I mean, in that training situation where, you know, it's a particular eye being trained to a particular thing, yes, but in nature, is that going to happen? Right, so that's kind of something that they brought up as well as if you think about flying and having most of these birds have eyes on either side of their head, especially ducks, right? They have them on either side of their head, so there's not a visual overlap. So they have completely separate stimuli coming from completely different sides of their head. And if those eyes aren't talking to each other, how does their brain process two completely separate images in two completely separate hemispheres and get them anywhere? Yeah, and that also is a little bit of a misnomer. Yes, birds' eyes are very much on the side of their head, but they do have overlap and there is a certain amount of forward-seeing and overlap. Maybe not at the end of their beak. It's kind of like, can you see your finger? Are you touching it at the end of your nose? Kind of a thing. There is a certain amount of overlap for sure, but much less than humans and other animals that have our eyes forward on the front of our heads. But that little tiny bit of overlap might be enough to start to make the mapping possible, to make the calibration possible. And especially, you've got birds who are acrobats in the air. Some of the amazing feats of flight that birds do in forests, where trees are thick or in jungle canopies, where vegetation is dense. I mean, it's no small thing. I would run into a tree. I would. I wonder also if there's less compartmentalization because we have so many things that are specifically right-brain or specifically left-brain, more so than other things. But I don't know, is there less of that because the brain can't talk to the different sides as easily? Yeah, or would you have to double up on both sides of the brain? Maybe that's what's been holding back many species from being more sentient. Both sides of the brain have to double up the same tasks, and they can't compartmentalize because they just don't talk. That's what I got! I think it's fascinating, and now I'm looking up all sorts of things about analogous structures to the corpus callosum. Because what we find very often in the avian brain and in brains of other species, reptiles, et cetera, that there are structures that don't look like the structures in our brain, but they have similar function. What is analogous or to the corpus callosum? Is there something that we don't call the corpus callosum in the bird brain? If you look it up and go, is there a corpus callosum in the bird brain, Google or Wikipedia is going to tell you no. But is there a structure that does the crosstalk that would be necessary? What's there? I'm going to find out, because now I'm... I suspect it would have to be a bit, because if that one eye in my sleeping scenario is open watching for danger and sees danger but can't get the other side of the brain to wake up. There's still connections. It's not like it's not connected at all. It's just not a constant rapid continuum of information exchange is kind of what the research indicated. Absolutely. All right, let's move forward. Hey Blair, you have a little bit of curly hair. A little bit. Yeah, do you have any trouble combing your hair? Sometimes. Yeah, it can take 20 minutes sometimes to brush my hair. That's not an exaggeration. Yeah, no, I understand. I feel your pain. I do, but you can comb your hair. Your hair is not uncomable. Yes. I don't have dreadlocks. No, but it's not dreadlocks. There are people who have what's called uncomable hair syndrome. And this is a hair shaft problem. It's characterized by dry, frizzy, pale hair, and it's impossible to comb it flat. Yes. And so when they're looking to find out what's going on in these hairs, they put them over and not over under an electron microscope. When you look at hair, straight hair kind of appears, it just looks round. You imagine looking at a hair in a picture of a magnified piece of hair. Think of a round piece of hair, right? They can also curly hair has a bit of an oblique angle to it. And this obliqueness is what leads to the curling of the actual hair as it comes out of the shaft. But uncomable hair, the cross section, is triangular or heart shaped. And it's grooved from root to end. And this is a result of the mutations in three genes, pad I3 or pad 13, TGM3 and TCHH. These mutations direct the process and... Non-cylindrical hair? Yeah. I don't have cylindrical hair. My hair is oblique because I have kind of a curly hair going on, but I've probably got some that are cylindrical because my hair is kind of mixed. But American Journal of Human Genetics is where the study is published and there's only been about a hundred cases of this reported historically, but probably there are a lot of people who just... It's their hair. And so why are you going to go to your doctor about your hair, right? I got problems combing my hair. I got to go to the doctor. That's not the first person you think of. So genetic mutations specifically lead to hair that is so tangled that it's almost impossible to brush. It doesn't want to brush flat. And then my final story for tonight, as we move into Thanksgiving and we think about the great meal that we're going to be eating, I want you to think about all the wonderful things that you're going to be eating. And I hope that you're including something in that meal that includes sperm-idine. Sperm-idine. It's a chemical. It's so named because it was first isolated from sperm. Sperm-idine. It's in sperm. It's also in a lot of other things like cheese, broccoli, all sorts of things have sperm-idine in them. You can look it up online, look it up on Wikipedia. There's lists of foods that contain sperm-idine. New study published in Nature Medicine revealed in mice. This is in mice, not in humans, but when mice were given sperm-idine, they lived longer and they had healthier hearts. So basically it's a polyamine and this polyamine protein was discovered to extend the lives of fruit flies. And then similar studies had found that it actually releases or improves nitric oxide production. It increases the levels of amino acids that are related to itself chemically. And together, nitric oxide and the semino acid are linked to reduced cardiovascular risks. So it's a good combination of things. And so they think it's very systemic because sperm-idine's kind of found just all over the place. Blah-blah-blah science headline. You're turkey with a side of... What kind of gravy? Want to live longer? What kind of gravy do you like? Yes. So I was doing a little late reading in the scientific journal and you won't believe what I learned. Justin, what do you got? That's right. That's a fine story. There it is. To wrap it all up for this turkey day week show. So it's giving two stories on turkeys in the Americas. This is one is a domestication in Mexico, according to researcher Gary Feynman. Our research tells us that turkey had been domesticated by 400 to 500 AD and I can't pronounce it, Mexico. O-A-X-A-C-A. Waxaca? Waxaca. Waxaca. I knew I was getting a missing a couple in 10 ages. Waxaca. Mexico. That was home to the Zapotec people going back thousands of years. They found... They found the unhatched turkey eggs along with other juvenile adult turkey bones. That tells them that the birds had been domesticated. And then moving on to another story, which is in Mesa Verde, which is they were doing what is called the basket maker two era, which ran from 400 BC to 500 AD. Ancient Pueblo people shifted from making blankets of rabbit fur to using turkey feathers. They switched over to the down blanket apparently. It says here one blanket could require 12,000 feathers, most of which of course could be taken as the birds molted. Blankets helped warm off high altitude chill of Mesa Verde, but the turkeys also must have had some symbolic importance. So there was lots of things that were sort of adorned with turkeys. In the late 1100s, the Pueblo population boomed from... And this is about a little after the domestication event in Mexico. In the late 1100s, the Pueblo population boomed from what is now Mesa Verde National Park over into nearby Southeast Utah. And it says here that the major protein source, which had been here, was getting replaced by turkeys as a source of meat. And of course they find this in archaeological record as an abundance of turkey bones. Showing up. So turkey, it's what's been for dinner for lots of people. Most of whom I guess aren't here anymore. For a really long time. A really long time. Yummy turkeys, you got anything else Blair? Are we good? No, I'm all done. We are all done. All right you guys, it is time for us to end the show. And you know what we do at the end of the show. I'd like to thank our Patreon sponsors. But before I do that, I really, really, really would like to thank everyone who listens to this show. It's Twist Giving, the eve of Thanksgiving. And I just, we said it at the beginning of the show, but I'll say it again, thank you. You are what keeps this show going. You're part of our weekly family who listen to us, listen to all the crazy things we say, listen to the science that we bring, and we hope that we inspire you to be a little bit more curious on your daily life as you move through the world. Thank you for allowing us to be a part of your life. Now I'd like to thank our Patreon sponsors. Thank you to Chris Clark, Paul Disney, Gvert and a lot more John Ratan, Swamid Richard, Onimus, Byron Lee, EO, Jared Lassette, Ulysses Adkins, Kevin Parachan, Andy Keith-Corsell, Jake Jones, Dave Friedel, Mike McRaw, James W. 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This weekend science, this weekend science, this weekend science It did, so the music stopped. We're now in the after show. Welcome, John. Thank you for joining us I muted you for the end of the show if you would like to unmute yourself. I don't know if I can unmute you. Oh, there you go. Now we can talk to you. Is it just me? It looks like it. Nobody else has showed up. You are the only one who responded. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sure that's disappointing. No! The after-show is very hard for anybody to make. It nobody ever does. Hey, you guys! We can do the after-show for a hangout for Patreon sponsors and then and then people are like, yeah, I gotta go to bed. It's like when our whole family is out and I come home alone and the dog is wagging his tail and he sees it's just me. I have to apologize to him. That's funny. That's funny. Yeah, I don't know where everybody... My son caught me doing it now once. He thought it was funny. He did what? My son caught me doing it apologizing to the dog once. He thought it was funny. It is funny. After your hair story, I went and looked at your Instagram account because I remembered you have a lot of funny hair photos. I do. I do. I take photos of my hair on occasions. Sometimes when it's all over my face, sometimes when it's neatly put up in a bun. Sometimes when it's just been done. Sometimes while it's being done at the hair salon. Exactly. All right. I've got a I've got a pre- Thanksgiving thing I have to go to. What? Yeah. Now? Yeah. It's like 10 at night. What is it? What are people doing right now? This is when these things take place around the times when you can't possibly be died down by family. Wait, what? Yeah. It's like the sort of like the you know like a Gilbert Christmas party. You got through all the celebration with those people you have to associate with and now you get to go hang out with your friends. So I got a role. John. Hi. Good. Hey, quick question. This is a pop survey that came into my head when Kiki was announcing like to tell your friend thing. How did you first find out about the show? Oh, no. I don't know. It's a long, long time ago. I'll think about it. I'm sorry. I don't remember off the top of my head. It's like that friendship or relationship that you're just like it's just when did we meet? Maybe the chat room could answer it too. Like, how did you find this show? How did this pop into your existence? I mean, we've been doing this show for so long that it is possible to have come across the show, paid no attention, found it again, heard about, you know, I was curious. I think it was about two years before you switched to this platform. So maybe on. Yeah. So maybe I saw Kiki on somebody else's show. I don't know. Oh, hot hot red said he found me on JTV. Oh, that's awesome. When I did Justin TV for a while, that was cool. Yeah, I got no credit for Justin TV, by the way. I don't know why that. There are lots of Justin's Justin. You're not the only Justin. Sorry. I mean, I know I know I know a lot of people found found the show from the early days of podcasting when there were lots of sort of what do you what do you call it? Like, you could go to like the one that I always remember just because the name, which is it must mean it's a really good name was there was something called podcast pickle, which yeah, I remember podcast pickle. Right, which would just grab podcasts from all over and you went there and you search podcast pickle for a podcast you might be interested in. That's how you found it. I don't know. Things are as in existence anymore. And so YouTube is sort of taking on taking over podcasting to a great degree to where I tend to find shows on YouTube now more than I would find it say on an iTunes or now just, you know, seeing somebody on a different show or something. Looks like podcast pickle closed. Yeah, I think there were but and it was one of many, many, many of these sort of hubs of podcasting. Yeah, that when we first started doing it the first years that we were doing this as a podcast, it's sort of we would we would see the the traffic on the back webs. It's coming from these things. Yeah, so let's see what do we have we have. Hot Rod found me on Justin TV. And I mentioned the podcast. So Hot Rod found the podcast that way. Oh, identity for that's funny. Let's see. Eric in Alaska through the Science Hour show on Twitter. Awesome. Whiskey renegade says I was working a very repetitive desk job and I wanted interesting audio to listen to you while I typed. So I searched Google for science shows online. After about 10 fails, I found twists and it worked perfectly. I love that we've it took some tries to find us. Strengths found us on Twitter. I think we I think a lot of people who listen to us now found us on Twitter. Actually, I find that a lot of our live audience. Right. You know, it's because that is Twitter is all about sort of the life streaming content. And and it worked well for what our shows become after is that partnership. I think about how I found most of the podcast that I now listen to. And most of those I found as suggestions or tags at the end of other podcasts. My Republican friend is in there. I like the fact he's owning the Republican tag because he's been telling me for years and years and years that he's he's broken with any affiliation and may never have actually been registered member of but but this is yeah, this is how he's known to the audience. So yeah, my Republican friend found a show that forced him to listen to it. That's awesome. Justin made me do it. Yeah, Republican friend has been has been talked about in quite a few after shows. Salty hash says before the incident on twit. I think I know that I wasn't involved. I think it was you and Blair. Actually, it was all Blair. How dare you? Well, let me go back and how re litigate this one more time. Shall we? I own a brick. Is it my fault if you break a window with it? If you if the brick that you threw was was what was it cards against humanity, a brick of cards against humanity and you threw it into a live broadcasted show, I didn't throw it. We were playing it off screen. I never said we should play it on there. That part was me. See, that's what I'm saying. Because I own a brick. Does owning the brick make you responsible for someone else picking it up and throwing it through a window? No, it does not. This is a question. No, no. Even if I brought the brick and it said throw me through a window on it. It's still your fault for throwing it. That's all I'm saying. In certain states, you'd be you'd be an accomplice. Hey, I'm not saying I am without blame, but I'm saying the grand majority is the person who said, let's do this on air. Actually, I think and I think I think there was a little extra blame to go around because I was working under it was it was my background that caused this because I was working under the assumption of radio where you have a safe harbor after a certain hour and this was late late into the night. And I thought, yeah, it was like two in the morning or something. No, it's been nightish, but whatever. But apparently midnightish morning crewed broadcast on a globally streaming thing where young children were waking up to their favorite gadget show in Jolly Old England. And we're hit with the lewdest, crudest, rudest, most politically incorrect language being put out there by adults while drinking and laughing hysterically at it. But let me also say let me also say it was not our show. There were several producers there. It's true. There were many people to make or not make that decision. Okay. Yes, however, however, there were many moments where they could have gone. We're there. All right, guys. People who were there weren't management. They were technically techs and support staff who were there to facilitate host making they were there to make sure that nothing got broken overnight and that got out on air in high definition. There there were people hosting the show whose show it was as well. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, I think everybody who was there, though, was not an anchor of no. I mean, I don't want to cast as many anchors now, but the person whose show it was was there. Yeah, but they were they were but we were supposed to take over a show after that show and be a participating guest host who for everybody who was there, we had an anchor show that was not going off the air anytime soon at that time. So yeah, I will take full responsibility because I knew that there was a potential that not everybody would be happy with what was going to take place. And I was pushing for it because I was humor and fun that would be had. And I think it was actually if anybody could find it last time I'd seen it, it was archived on Justin TV. No way. It was. It was pretty fantastic. I mean, this was like comedy center. I don't remember Barbara. Yeah, I've blocked it from my memory. But it was pretty brilliant. I got the game on. Yes. I identity for says I watched that stream and nearly died laughing. Yeah, it was pretty amazing. Oh my goodness. You people. Well, it was the incident incident. I actually remember during the show, like I literally there and I got in trouble involved falling out of my chair. Do you remember that actually? I remember that ability to breathe. While laughing, it was so ridiculous. It was so it was a good show, but I do have to go. I do have to go. You have to go. Have a wonderful Republican friend right is waiting now. So is it the one called Republican in the chat? He's like in the chat room. Yeah, while he's waiting for you. That's my Republican friend who is like he's pointing out, by the way, I'm not a Republican. Yeah, I've covered this already, Republican friend. I've already covered the fact that that this is my first long time ago. The show's been on for for 10 plus years. The first time I mentioned you to the audience, that was the name you had. And now it's just stuck. And if I change your name, it won't make any sense. Oh my gosh, it's hilarious. Yeah. Well, you and Republican go have a great time tonight. OK, can I can I play? Can I have a Thanksgiving Thanksgiving? I will I will see you all next week. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, we'll be back. I hope you will. So I can't say I want to know if my Republican friend is really Donald Trump. Actually, I would probably be fitting to. I don't know that Donald Trump is even a Republican. I don't know who is anymore. I don't know what that even means. It's just tremendous. He's just tremendous. You know what that means anymore. Can I fly out tonight for public? Oh wait, no, I'll see you later. Oh my goodness. Good night, identity for other people. That was just Justin leaving. Blair's yawning that we did a late show tonight, didn't we? Mm hmm. Guest equals guest late start equals two hours plus fantastic. John, what are your plans for Thanksgiving? I'm going with my daughters to a Doctor Who convention. That's awesome. And I do have a costume as the 12th Doctor Who and I'm trying to work up my courage to wear it. Oh, you should totally wear it. Yes. It includes a wig, actually, speaking of hair. Oh, that's fantastic. I need pictures. Wear it. Take pictures. Oh, that's fantastic. Is it on Friday? Or are you leaving? Actually, three days. There's a reception Thursday night. All day Friday, all day Saturday. All or most of the day Sunday. I think we'll go Thursday and Friday. No, Friday Saturday. Sorry. Friday Saturday. Yeah, that would be fun. Identity four can't leave anyway. The audio is not done rendering yet. Slow machine. 15 more minutes of rendering. We can do that. We can do 15 minutes. How's your week going? You made a pie crust. I made, yes, it's in the fridge. I haven't rolled it out yet. I'm going to roll it out tomorrow and put all the filling in there tomorrow morning and cook up my pies. I'm going to make some biscuits. Yeah, it's been a pretty fun week. I've been planning for the zoom mobile busy season, which is upcoming now. And I fed a reindeer a graham cracker today. Do reindeers like graham crackers? These ones do. Hi. Yeah. Hi. So that was fun. Did you know that reindeer, when they walk, they click? Click. Click. Click. There's a tendon in their leg or their foot that snaps when they walk. It's really loud. It's like every foot as they move. And yeah, reindeer or caribou. And it's because in the Arctic where they live, when there's whiteouts, when there's really intense snowstorms, it's how they can hear one another and they know where they are. Ah. Okay. That would make it like, it's more understandable for how it would persist. Because I'm just thinking that would make you so vulnerable to predators. Right. So I guess it's more important to stay together than it is to be stealthy. I guess. Yeah. Well, because with reindeer, it is their group animal. So yeah, they would have to stay together and there is that safety in numbers. We always watch, you know, the David Attenborough specials and stuff or the wild planets where they're like, and there's the straggler who's not keeping up with the rest of everybody. Oh, look. And that ends that caribou's life. Yes. Exactly. Yes. That's the end. You didn't keep up. You were a second old or whatever it was and you didn't stick with the others. Yeah. Yeah. Feta, Feta reindeer. Let's see. Oh, I held a Euromastix today. What's that? It's a type of lizard. A lizard. Yes. The Moroccan Euromastix has a basking temperature of 120 degrees Fahrenheit. What? Yes. They live in the Sahara desert. Oh, my God. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, that's great. So in the sun, when they just lie in the sun and they're just like, I can take it. 120. If it gets above 120, maybe they move. Oh, that's fascinating because here. Wow. Interesting thinking about reptiles versus, especially, you know, what is it, ectotherms versus endoderm. So, you know, humans, endoderm, and also endoderm that relies on homeostasis to keep everything constant. And so our temperature, if it goes away from normal, is a sign of infection. Let me put you up there so I can see. But these animals, they're just like, whatever the sun dishes out or doesn't dish out. Yep. So how cold can they go? Not as cold. So basically they're, I think of reptiles as kind of having a wider sweet spot. So we have a very narrow sweet spot of like a degree, right? But they have a much wider sweet spot, maybe 20 degrees. And so for these animals, it's just shifted hotter than, Right. Yeah, than other reptiles. That's interesting. Have you seen, so strengths in the chat room are saying, David Attenborough is still going strong with Planet Earth 2, which I've been watching with BBC. And did you see the Lizard Snake video from the BBC? Oh yeah, the iguana in the snakes. Yeah. Yes, iguanas. And the baby iguanas as they hatch on this beach. Right. Isn't it like in the Galapagos or something? Yeah. Marina iguanas are in the Galapagos. Yeah. So I've always wanted to go to the Galapagos. I've thought, you know, I'm a biologist, the Galapagos. This is the easing place to go. It's the place that really struck Darwin for his theory or his idea of natural selection. And yes, gotta go to the Galapagos. I am never going there now. Never, ever, ever, never, never, never. These beaches are covered in snakes that will chase you and they'll get around you. And oh my, that was like nightmare juice to the end decree. It is the most terrible, terrifying thing I have ever watched in my life. And I didn't know what was going to happen. And I watched it with my son and I think my son was traumatized. Aw. I couldn't. Snakes are villainized unnecessarily. So I have a question about that. You know, there's that statistic and I don't know. I think it's unnecessary. Go ahead. It's valid that like about 1% of the population is psychopaths. I want to know how many people identified with the snakes. So here's the thing about the snakes. And now you're going to think that I'm a psychopath. Here's the thing about the snakes. They're trying to get food. So when you watch, when you watch wolves hunting, right, do you then hate wolves afterwards? I'm not very happy with them. I would have that wolves hunting me. That would be a nightmare scenario also. Okay. So these snakes. I don't want to be hunted. Yes. But those snakes aren't going to try to hunt you because you're a human. You're much larger than a marina guana. I don't know about that. There were a lot of snakes. That was like a beach covered in snakes. And they just came out of nowhere. They were like, like you could go walking along that beach and look over and there's be this little glassy eyes. Just glittering. Yeah, but people probably do. I bet people walk those beaches all the time and the snakes don't move because they don't eat humans. I bet they would bite a human. No. Try. Yeah. I didn't know this about you. You're a snake hater. I really don't like them. Wow. I have no idea. I've tried. I've really tried. I have. I've had friends with snakes. My brother had a snake. I've really tried to like snakes. Oh my. Basically the only snake that I'm okay with is like a garter snake. They're cool. Yeah. They're cool. Little, full snakes. Oh my God, whiskey renegade. It's so many snakes. And the full video, it's like what you might have seen on YouTube is like this little tiny clip of the video. The full scene is horrendous. So I saw it in an article that was actually, it was on the AAAS website about how this part of this nature documentary, maybe they didn't think it through as well about how it would be received because what was intended to be just an observation of how life persists on the Galapagos turned into the exact kind of fodder that promotes the villainization of snakes. And whereas these snakes are just trying to eat and they actually miss probably four out of five times when they're trying to eat an iguana, the one time that they catch it, that's their food for probably three weeks. Right. Okay. Fine. Understood. I mean, definitely it was this, the way they edited the scene together, it is dramatic. Yeah, exactly. It is death after death after death and it is a beach covered in snakes. Like it is a carpet of rippling snakes. Yeah, and that's kind of what the article was talking about was maybe they wanted to go with a sensationalist route because it was more entertaining but in the long run was not the best way to go if you're trying to promote wildlife and conservation education. Well, at least love of snakes. I mean, sure. I mean, it's a wildlife video, so it's like this is what's happening in the Galapagos and yes, the babies. I mean, there have been scenes also of what baby sea turtles hatching and birds coming in and eating the baby sea turtles probably on Planet Earth 1. But, you know, life does progress in this way and documentaries of this sort have to portray it somehow. Life and death. I just think about. And hunger. But snakes? Snakes. So for example, if you watch on Planet Earth, you can watch a video or you can watch a segment about African painted dogs and how they hunt cooperatively to catch their food. And you could tell the story from the perspective of the dogs and you could tell the story from the perspective of the prey animal. This video decides to do it from the perspective of the dogs. The dogs are the heroes in that tale. This is the same sort of situation. You could tell it from the perspective of the iguana or you could tell it from the perspective of the snakes. And it is more popular. Compelling to tell it from the perspective of the iguana. Of course. Because people don't like snakes. But this might have been a moment where you could have talked about the struggle of being a snake on a beach amongst hundreds of other snakes that are also looking for food in a landscape that doesn't have a lot of suitable food items. And you could talk about it from the struggle of trying to compete with one another to get a food item when it comes along. I understand what you're saying. But have you seen these snakes? Yeah. They float. They fly. They have magic powers. Oh my God. And that video on YouTube is only a very small, small. It's a two minute long video. Small segment of the full segment. And yes, this one iguana gets away. There's these hundreds of snakes. So even if, even if they caught the iguana, that would feed one or two snakes, depending. So all those other snakes that lose that fight still go hungry. And it's not, I'm just saying that perspective taking is important. I think you're right. I agree with you there, but I'm going to say I would be fine with a few less snakes on the back. Well, okay. Snakes are really important. For example, in your ecosystem, if you try to take away some snakes, you will end up with a lot more mice in your house. Right. So if the iguanas are that important for their survival, if they're like only surviving on these iguanas, like there's either a lot of iguanas for that many, there's a lot of snakes on that beach. So great question. What are they eating? What are they eating? What are they eating? Is it all iguanas? I don't know. No, it's not all iguanas. It's other stuff. I don't know. I've seen pictures of marine iguanas where there's more iguana than rock in the picture. There's just so many marine iguanas. Could be. I don't have a variation of this conversation in my house fairly often because everyone else in the house doesn't like spiders. And I like the spiders because they deal with other things. I don't like spiders. But I respect them. And I often, if I can, will move them as opposed to kill them if they're up in my face, they did. But otherwise, I will do my best to relocate them. And I love reporting on spiders. I even will watch spider videos, all that kind of stuff. But I still have kind of a deep-seated issue with spiders. But I know that we can't do without them. You, spiders, except for maybe the peacock spider, me, snakes. I understand. But I don't have to like them. And I can have an opinion. They're us in an outlet mall that displayed reptiles. And they were most well-known for having a Burmese python, which passed away about four years ago. The death was measured at 18 feet 10 inches and weighed 403 pounds. Whoa. Nice. That's a big snake. The anaconda, the zoo is 14 and a half feet. The anaconda and it's got buns, huh? All right. It's almost 11. It's almost 11. I know. The gem doctor walking into a spider web makes anyone a ninja warrior. Or someone. Yeah. I was going to say more someone suffering from a seizure is more what I become. Yeah. If they up in my face, they did. That's right. Blair Baz's T-shirts. At a ton list. I'm not alone. I've been good company with Indiana Jones. Yeah. You are. Also my mother. Every time I've brought her to the zoo, I've tried to get her to touch a snake. And I'll like back her into a corner with it. And she's like, no, no, no, no, no. That's why I get her to like. And then we're done. Even the legless lizard that looks like a snake. She's not into that. Yeah. Even the skink. I showed her the skink recently. I like skinks. They have teeny tiny legs. So they look like snakes kind of. And it was almost too much. Almost too much for. Exactly. Twit refugee. Why did it have to be snakes? Although I do have to say as much as I appreciate spiders, I really would not have wanted to, you know, if it was a pit full of spiders instead of a pit full of snakes, I wouldn't have liked that either. I'd prefer the, yeah, pit of snakes is way better than pit of spiders. Um, yeah. Yeah. It's. Did you know that in Indiana Jones. At least one scene. The snake. Goes right up against the screen. And like. Continues going, but. When you look. It blanks. Which means. It's not a snake. It's a legless lizard. It's a legless lizard. Because Harrison Ford supposedly. Was also actually afraid of snakes. So. A scene where he had to be very close to a snake. They used legless lizards. They're like, Hey, it's not really a snake. It's just. You know, another reptile with. No legs. Lizard. It eats slugs. You'll be fine. Slugs. I found a slug in my basement. It's just making its way through the basement. I don't know how it got in there. For a little thing. Well, one of my vivid childhood memories. I think I was in fourth grade. And. I was in class and the loudspeaker came on apparently in the entire school. And the principal said, John. You have to go home to help your mother. She found a salamander. What? That's awesome. And it was a, it was the, one of the biggest salamanders I've ever seen to give her credit. Uh, where, where was this? We're about. Minnesota. Minnesota. The salamander was probably almost a foot long. And it was sitting outside a drain next to our house. Where are hellbenders from? Perhaps it was a hellbender. I'm looking amphibians of Minnesota. Like what? Salamander. Yeah. It was probably a hellbender. What? No. Okay. Giant endemic salamander to north of eastern North America. Okay. It's not listed on the Minnesota department of natural resources website as a salamander in Minnesota. Oh yeah. I don't see it in the mitten. Blue spotted salamander. Eastern redback salamander. Four toad salamander. A mud puppy. Spotted salamander and tiger salamander. Mud puppies get pretty big too. Yeah. It could be a mud puppy. Tiger. Could you think a tiger salamander could get that big? No. Tiger salamander. No way. You're like, nope. Yeah. Mud puppies can get six foot long. Huh? Mud puppies get to be like a foot long. Yeah. There we go. There we go. Yeah. Average length of 13 inches. Yeah, so it's probably a mud puppy. That's cool. I'm really looking at the exact same website. Good ol' Wikipedia. Look at that mud puppy. Oh, it didn't really look like that though. No. It was a baby, I think. Because of the frilly gills. So this is 40 plus years ago, but I feel like it was blue and yellow. Maybe it was a tiger salamander then. A blue spotted. Just a really ridiculously large one. A blue spotted or three to five inches long. No, this one was a lot bigger than that. Tiger salamander. Yeah, tiger spout salamanders are black with yellow. I might have been them. Yeah. So we took it to the park and let it go where hopefully it lived had liver after. But your mom needed help dealing with it. Yes. Did you think it was slimy? No, that's the snake cliche, right? But they really generally dry. Yeah, yeah. Spotted salamander. It doesn't say how large this spotted salamander gets. Could have been a spotted salamander. Ambistoma maculatum. Kind of cute. The other one I wish I had a photo was, is we found this really giant bug. And we took it to an entomologist at the University of Minnesota to ask him what it was. And he said he didn't know. Oh, that's interesting. That is interesting. You're like, I'm going to the expert. And the expert's like, I don't know. It's one of the things in, in so many places, just how we have invasive species and we have species that come in on bananas. Those spiders. You find things. Yeah. Yeah. You find things that people might not know much about. That's fascinating. That's Canadian. Okay. I definitely am going to sleep now. We have a Ben Roth. I could just join too. I've got a big day tomorrow. Don't we all. Twist giving. Ben, I hope that your. I hope your step father is okay. He's on Facebook. He wasn't doing well. I hope that he's all right. Yeah. Stanley club cup. No. We're not flashing skits Stanley cups here. Salty hash as tiger salamanders get pretty big. Yeah. I've never heard of getting that big before, but I did it before. Google's help vendors gets very disturbed and confused. That's funny. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Very sorry. I'm sorry. My fingers are crossed. Good night, everybody. Yeah. We will. Got a turkey in the brine right now in the refrigerator. I made it pumpkin ice cream. Pie. And a ginger snap crust. What other fun stuff are we going to do? I'm going to do lots of stuffing tomorrow. I have friends coming over here. I'm going to have a big dinner and I hope somebody else is going to wash the dishes. I will feed everyone and say many thanks for people who wash dishes. Smart. Yeah. I like watching the dishes because then it gets me out of the conversation. So you don't have to actually sit and talk with people. That's funny. It depends. If I'm with people, I really, really want to be talking with them. I want to be hanging out and talking. I don't want to be washing dishes. And also if I made it all the food. I don't want to wash all the dishes on top of it. That's a fair trade. I think so. Oh, no identity for. Just don't get me soilent. Okay. Yeah. Safeway should be open in the morning. Just don't, don't do soilent. Soilent. Soilent. We talked about it. I don't, I was looking into the soilent issue a little bit more. The algae. In Soilent. And it turns out that the company that makes the algae that. Soilent uses as protein flower in its. Mixture. Uses clorella. Which is the type of blue green algae. And there are a lot of people who like take clorella in their food movement for a while. But it turns out. That there are people. It's just a thing. Who are clorella intolerant. And it leads to the exact symptoms. That have been reported in. A bunch of people. Who are using Soilent as their diet. So yeah. Who would eat paste for Thanksgiving? Sorry. I didn't eat more. I hope nobody. Has to eat paste for Thanksgiving. Yeah. Yeah. All right, John, thank you so much for joining us this evening. I hope. I hope you enjoyed. Your, your little hangout. Yeah, good. I know it was, it's not as long maybe as it would have been if it were. Earlier in the day. Maybe now you'll actually get to bed before what two in the morning. Okay. I just want. It's just one. It's still early, still early on the East coast. Everyone. Identity for your funny. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. It was fantastic to have you here. I hope you enjoyed the show and that we will see you next week. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. And I hope that. Yeah. I hope it's great for everyone and that we see you next week. Bye Blair. Thank you. Thank you. And bye, John. Thank you. All right, everyone, we will see you later.