Herman Pontzer (on evolutionary anthropology)

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert.
I'm Hermian Permian. I'm joined by my mom.
Hi, Mom. Hi, son.
You're not going to believe this, Miss Monica. Tell me.
Good friend of mine's here. Who? Herman Ponser.
Herman, did you make him up? No, that's really our guest, Herman Ponser. Wow.
Herman Ponser. Herman Ponser.
Maybe my favorite name we've had for a guest. Really good name.
A really cool guy. Incredibly cool.
Professor of Evolutionary Anth global health at Duke University. He's an internationally recognized researcher in human energetics and evolution.
His previous book, which is great, is called Burn, Some Shocking Ways We Consume Calories. We talked about it and it was really interesting.
Yeah, we did a little section on burnrne, and then his new book, Adaptable, How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us. This was so fun.
It was. Evolutionary biology is one of my favorite things to think about.
And anthropology. Yeah, like what was I just, oh my God, we were just discussing what could have been the cause of you and I.

Yeah, I know.

You were saying women, oh, women want to get something of their boyfriends to smell.

Yes.

Like a T-shirt.

I mean, it's a very common desire.

Pink for a woman to want.

Yeah.

And I never met a guy who tried to get a shirt from a girl.

Something's there.

I know.

I wonder if when there's a quantum computer that can model the future and all that, if it can go backwards in time.

And somehow we would get answers to these things.

Well, in the meantime, Herman's working on it.

Herman rocked.

This is a really, really interesting episode.

I'm usually threatened by other anthropology majors because they actually know all this stuff.

And I'm mostly ill-informed, as we find out a few times in this episode.

I'm glad that you allowed it because we all got to learn. Please enjoy Herman Potler.
We are supported by Discover. If there's one thing people have learned from the entertainment industry, it's just how easy it is to earn a reputation, even if it doesn't reflect who you are.
For example, everybody thinks that Discover is a card that isn't widely accepted. But in reality, it's accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide.
Yes, 99%. So maybe now you'll think twice before judging a book by its cover.
Unless it's a cookbook. In that case, judge away.
Based on the February 2024 Nielsen Report. Learn more at discover.com slash credit card.
We are supported by Liquid IV. You know, curiosity, it is the source of our livelihood.
So I'm quite fond of curiosity. Curiosity and staying engaged with the world and people around us fuels what we do on this show.
However you explore life or find interesting people fuel your your journey with extraordinary hydration from Liquid IV, powered by LIV Hydra Science. Visit liquidiv.com to explore flavors like the zesty new hydration multiplier, sugar-free raspberry lemonade.
I just had that on my bike ride. And use code DAX to save 20% off your first order.
Break the mold and own your ritual. Just one stick and 16 ounces of water hydrates better than water alone.
And they're small in light so they fit easily into any backpack, purse, diaper bag, whatever you're using. Convenient, quick, and effective hydration.
It just makes sense. Fuel your curiosity with extraordinary hydration from Liquid IV.
Get 20% off your

first order of Liquid IV when you go to liquidiv.com and use code DAX at checkout. That's

20% off your first order with code'm a Michigander. Okay.
Did you ever see Groundhog Day? Yes. Paksawani.
What is it? Punxsutawani. Punxsutawani.
So we played Punxsutawani in high school ball. They were that close.
Oh, okay. Yeah, yes.
They kind of nailed it. That's sort of the vibe.
I lived in Brooklyn for a few years, and it almost broke me. It was the F train.
You'd be like on the F train at 9 o'clock in the morning. It was like a meat wagon.
You just like packed in just to pass the time once. I was like, I wonder how many people are on this train.
I did the math and then how many cars there are. And I was like, oh, there's more people on this train than there are in the hometown I grew up in.
So 800 people in my hometown of Kersey, Pennsylvania. And what did mom and dad do? High school teachers.
Okay. In Kersey? Kersey's not big enough to have a high school.
So the town next door, St. Mary's, they were there.
We were out to high school too. How many acres did you grow up on? It's kind of a long story, but so the Ponser family was one of the first families to move into that area.
It was not super densely settled ever. Even the Native American folks were like, this is a junky land.
We don't want to spend a lot of time here. Yeah.
And so my extended family owns hundreds of acres of forest. Oh, wow.
And could you get lost in there as a kid and explore? 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I lived at the end of a dirt road in a house that my dad built physically with his hands. It was Buddy Dean.
It was wonderful. I grew up riding motorcycles and hiking around and hunting.
It was kind of an amazing way to grow up. Yeah, would you be out tromping around with a BB gun when you were little? Totally.
I mean, the first time I got an actual firearm, I think, was for my 10th birthday. A .22? Yep.
But my life is so different now because in the academics university world, that's not a background that you see very often. Exactly.
It's kind of looked down upon. Oh, completely.
Well, this is a whole other avenue, but we talk about diversity in the university, and everybody is for that, but it means different things to different people. Yes.
Yeah. It would be interesting to me to see diversity of backgrounds that way.
You don't see a lot of folks from rural America in the ivory tower. No, no.
And also maybe a little more socioeconomic thrust. Yes.
Because we've divided up into these lines that are pretty comical in ways. Is some of it, though, do we think chicken or the egg a little bit? At this point, I think if you're in certain parts of the country, you don't want to be associated with liberal elite institutions.
We've created it as like a us-them. I think about the folks I grew up with.
One of my best friends growing up, he's a union electrician, still lives back in Kersey, and he's got a great life. That was an avenue that is a wonderful way to go, but he would never have considered doing what I'm doing.
This wasn't even on the radar. Who knows what this kid's going to do? But it is really kind of dichotomized that way.
It is. Where'd you go to undergrad? Penn State.
And then you did graduate school at Harvard? That's right. And when did you get in the anthro trajectory? Did you do any reading about me? I also was an anthropology major.
No, I know. I was going to tell you that I'm actually here from UCLA.
You know, the anxiety dream where you have the class that you never finished and they tell you you have an exam? I have with me here. We're here to do this with you.
Okay, wonderful. This is great.
25 years out, let's see how I do. Yeah, I want to see what's changed.
I think I'll do bad and I think I'll be three standard deviations above what most people do. So how about that? There you go.
Some humility and some arrogance. Yes.
I've retained, I think, more than your average bear, but I'm probably wrong about that. Were you excited about the physical anthro, the cultural anthro? Were you like floor field? How did you do it? Yeah, so I deeply regret what I did, which is I was enamored and intoxicated with the excitement of cultural anthropology and learning about mating rituals and patrilocal and metrilocal and all these things, even the kind of fakir modern primitive, that was exciting.
But as I got into it, I was like, oh, no, no, I'm way more interested in physical anthro, specifically evolutionary biology. I found that I left with, I need to know more how we ended up as a species before I study what the species then did culturally.
Yes. What was your route? I went to Penn State, not having any real idea what I wanted to do.
I took a seminar in human evolution that was co-taught by a cultural guy and a sociobiologist, bioanthro guy. Yeah.
And the cultural guy, the postmodern stuff had kind of passed him by and he was not into that. And so he was a good foil for the evolutionary guy because they both kind of saw things sort of the same way.
Cultural anthro and bioanthro can be very at odds. Someone was even telling me at Berkeley, we just interviewed someone, they were like, look, if you get in this trajectory, you can't talk to the physical anthro.
I don't even actually want you speaking to them. Which is kind of nuts.
So there's a lot of that kind of schism still now, but luckily for me, these guys complemented each other well and that class just lit my hair on fire. I mean, it was amazing.
My parents were both high school teachers. It was a home where we talked a lot about ideas and had arguments that were good arguments.
It was really fun growing up. It was such good training looking back.
They were English teachers, so Gave Lusia Biology wasn't thing, really. To sort of have a whole other way to look at the human species in this evolutionary deep time perspective.
And all these quirks and weird things about you, you think, oh, but actually there's a reason for those. That's what was illuminating to me.
First, I'll say, even before Anthro was a Western Civ class, learning how did we get to where I woke up in Milford, Michigan, 1925, and I was prescribed all these things. How arbitrary are they? Where do they come from? That was like, oh, wow, there's an actual explanation for why we're doing everything the way we're doing.
And then you reverse from there, and it's like, oh, and there's an even greater explanation. And then the physical part is the grand explanation.
Just in your intro, I'm really glad at how you lay this out, because one of my great interests was always these differences in populations. I just was drawn to them immediately finding out, oh, we kind of know that Native Americans came from Asia because they have a distant incisor and only Asians have a distant incisor and so do Native Americans.
That's a really cool, hard bit of evidence clue. I like that.
And for people to know the history of anthropology, there was a field called anthropometry, which studied specifically differences between people.

And was heavily weaponized and used during the Nazi era.

Oh, completely.

In fact, completely into the whole eugenics, the big push was that.

So that kind of went away with good reason.

It was being terribly exploited for the wrong reasons.

But my interest was always not from any place of superiority, just a deep curiosity of how we could have these variations within the same species. Right.
And you begin talking about the ways that populations differ, even just more fundamentally how people differ. And because of that really dark history, people get nervous right away.
The sort of superpower that an anthropology background gives you is you spend four years in college talking about this, trying to dissect. People are different.
Yeah. That's a good thing.
How and why. How is it adaptive to where they live? Yes.
And how much of it's noise and how much of it's signal because there's a lot of noise and how much is different within groups versus between. It gets less scary.
You go, okay, that's how that works. And it's actually a weapon in debunking racism.
Yeah, and I think right now, when I look at social media world, which has gotten even weirder recently,

the only people who want to talk about difference that way are the race realists.

That's a new word for eugenics.

What do they call it?

Race realism.

Race realists, this kind of thing.

Oh, saying like we understand that there's differences between races.

Like they're telling the truth about race.

Exactly.

Aye.

Exactly, yes.

Oh, God.

I doubt they are.

Exactly.

It's really kind of scary.

And so you don't have anybody with any real background in how this works talking about it because everybody's afraid to. So then they get to come to the surface.
So let's talk about it in a way that's evidence-based, that's less scary, let's unpack it. I think you have to start with how the body works, right? Because I think people don't have a fluency in that.
How does embryology work? How does the brain work? How do the muscles work? I mean, if you start with those pieces, then you can say, well, then how come your physique is different than yours or mine? How does skin color work? Now we can understand why skin colors differ. And it's not a scary thing.
This is the biology of it. That's how we talk about it.
Yeah, so the book Adaptable aims to educate you on how your body works. But instead of it just being a straight biology textbook, there's going to be exploration of the lifestyle of the people, the landscape, the local adaptations.
So it's a very fun lens to look at it. So I guess let's just start with the history of us as humans.
Oh, yeah. Well, we're part of the great ape family tree.
Our lineage kind of busts out about 7 million years ago, breaks away from the lineage that becomes chimps and bonobos. But the first 5 million years, I think of it as basically the Ewok chapter of human evolution.
You're walking on two legs, but you're furry and kind of ape-like. Are you fully bipedal? Well, the people argue, let's just say yes.
Earliest ones probably have a grasping foot. We see that in a couple of these, like Artipithecus.
That's changed since you left. Yeah, I know, AF forensis.
Prior to Lucy's AF forensis, it was Artipithecus. The initial stuff was found in the 90s, but wasn't fully reported until 2009, I think.
Oh, so I was nine years out. Yeah, I don't know.
There you go. He's what? He's walking on two legs.
He's the first one to walk on two legs. So as far as we can tell, the earliest, earliest ones, even before that one, are walking on two legs.
The evidence for that is, if you look at the skull of one of the earliest fossils we have, you can figure out the orientation of the spinal column. And if it comes straight down out of the head, vertical, then it's probably on two legs.
And if it comes towards out of the back, then it's probably on two legs. So that's the kind of way they put these things together.
Isn't it, Nate? I love that stuff. The osteology class was my favorite one in all of physical and mental health.
So australopithecine is no longer the earliest one. No, you're already two million years.
This is humiliating. Can I just add my favorite one was gigantopithecus.
Yeah, but that's like our long lost Asian cousin. Right, that was in Asia.
That was a giant biped. Still is the biggest ape ever.
Wow, how big? Like, you know, big white weight, twice the size of a gorilla or something crazy like that. They're really, really big.
Think Bigfoot. Some of these people are really grasping for Bigfoot to be real.
Yeah. They like the Gigantopithecus.
There's a wonderful story of a professor, I think he's in Idaho, who did his whole PhD on very normal anatomy and questions in anthropology. And then once he had tenure, he was like, yes.
Let's party. And that was like all about Bigfoot.
I'm like, I have respect for that. How tall was the Giacanapus? Yeah, see.
We can fact check it. This is the fun stuff.
Gorillas aren't that tall. No, but they're 450 pounds.
Right. I don't know, six feet tall.
Let's go six feet tall. Okay.
If I had to guess. I'm not sure how much full skeletons of it either we have.
We have mostly cranial dental stuff, heads and teeth. 9.8 feet.
9.8 feet. Stop it.
Let's go. You want the source.
I can see it on your face. What's the source, Rob? I do.
Britannica? No. Oh, you just shit on Britannica.

They got their own sponsor.

Wikipedia says 12 feet.

12 feet.

No, no, no, no.

That's giraffe-like.

I've had to write a new book.

Okay, so I sidetracked you.

Okay, so seven million years ago.

That's right.

And so you got these bipeds.

They're walking on two legs,

but they've got grasping feet for at least for the first couple million years. Then you get Lucy and Australopithecus afarensis.
And that's another very successful chapter. Not everyone knows about Lucy.
Okay, she came out of the Rift Valley, right? Yeah, so she's one of the earliest, let's say, full skeletons that we've ever found. So it's not just a head and it's not just a tooth.
You can kind of see the whole thing. I mean, it was a really big deal and it's just been 50 years since that discovery, actually.
Wow. And it was named after

his wife? It was named after Lucy and the

Sky of the Diamonds, which was playing on the radio

as they were excavating. Louis Leakey? Is that

who found it? No, no, no. This is up in Ethiopia

and they named Lucy after the song

Lucy and the Sky of the Diamonds. Wow.
Wonderful.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anthropologists are cool.

Very. Yeah, they name it after drug

songs and stuff. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So specifically a drug Beatles song..
Yeah, the name-and-after drug songs and stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So specifically, a drug beetle song.

You know better.

Australopithecus methamphetamine never caught on.

Okay, so they find Lucy.

But again, I mean, it's still very ape-like.

As far as we can tell in terms of diet and stuff,

eating almost all plants.

There's some interesting ideas these days that they might have had some very simple tools maybe,

but things don't really shift away from like an ape-like kind of way of life until you get hunting and gathering going two and a half, two million years ago. And we get fired as well? So that doesn't show up till about a million years ago.
There's a gap. So there's about two and a half million years ago, we start hunting and gathering.
And that changes everything because, I mean, just think about what it means to have a species that does two different things. No other species does that.
There are species that kind of generalize any individual bear, for example. We'll eat fruits and we'll hunt a little bit.
So they're generalists. But there's no other species that half of the group does one thing, acts like a carnivore.
The other half acts like an herbivore and gets plant foods. And so you get the advantages of both.
Then you have to share it. Yeah.
Animals don't like to share, right? Yeah. Very rarely.
And in fact, even apes don't share much. Well, for sex trade, they do.
Yeah. Very specific context.
Yeah. And very little in terms of total amounts.
No one throws it into a big pot other than lions, maybe. Yeah, social carnivores, that's another example.
Wolves. But that's how rare it is.
You can kind of think of specific examples. Almost every animal just keeps it.
That's what usually works for the best. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That has permeated everything. So I come in here and I don't know you guys, but you don't kill me.
That's crazy. That is nuts.
And then you offer me food. Wow.
Think about that. And anytime you have a celebration, you're sharing food.
That's the fabric of what humans are all about. And then what's fun about that is it's just this snowball of social complexity, intellectual complexity.
All of a sudden, brains are not just figuring out where the food is and not just figuring out maybe who to mate with, but they're doing all these calculations about who's in my group, who's a friend, who's an ally, who I can trust, who I can't trust. Then you have all the forging stuff on top of that, and the complexity just snowballs.
And you see the tools develop with that. So over the past two million years, you can literally track from simple stone tools to more complex to multi-piece tools to iPhones.
It ratchets up quickly. Yes.
Do we have any sense, could you determine this from the archaeological record, when does mate selection shift from a game of size to perhaps a game of savvy and aptitude and hunting aptitude and gathering easiest way to track that would be size dimorphism so in a gorilla for example males are twice as big as females and it's because they basically just fight over who has access to the group of females and they're going to just increasingly get bigger and bigger and bigger ad infinitum because the biggest one will have access and pass on its big genes and just keeps going up. Male lions just keep getting bigger than female lions.
Yeah, so that's a funny piece about human sexual biology is that there is less sexual dimorphism than even in Lucy. So Lucy is still pretty significant sexual dimorphism.
She's tiny, the males are not tiny. And so there's probably a lot of male-male competition.
That's what you'd have to infer. And you get to our genus, the genus Homo, and that all of a sudden starts to go away and you get to the sort of 5%, 10% dimorphism that we see today.
Is it only 5% to 10%? It depends on the metric. So in terms of height, probably about 10%.
In terms of strength, for example, can be 20, 30%. It would depend on the population too.

But, so here's what's also fun.

In humans, males are just competing against males for mates.

Females are competing against females for mates.

That's another obvious piece that's very different.

I'm sure that there's some kind of interesting female competition happening within chimps, for example.

But it's subtle.

It's mostly inherited.

Their status.

So females in chimpanzees, they leave.

So they can't inherit status from mom because mom's not there. They grow up in a community when they hit puberty, they go to the other community.
So females are always new. Males stay.
And the males are duking it out for where they are in the hierarchy. And there's friendships too.
It's not all mean. So in bonobos, for example, it's a bit different.
Female groups are dominant to males in bonobos. A male's rank has everything to do with mom and his best female friends.
It's a matriarchy. Kind of more so.
Yeah, in terms of where the power dynamic lies. Interesting.
Okay, so we do see that dimorphism start to shrink. You can call that a move away from pure physical competition to more intellectual competition.
Okay, so we're super unique in the fact that we have split up the food gathering. What else is unique? Obviously, the way we rear young.
The intellectual complexity that kind of runs away and becomes these huge brains that are three times the size of a chimpanzee brain. You end up having to learn so much to be a successful adult that childhood gets strung out.
So there's this 15-year, 20-year gap between being born and being a capable human. No other species is like that.
You were saying that your daughter's seventh birthday party, all the seven-year-olds there, if they were any other animal, would be grandparents at that age. Oh my God.
Yeah, that's right. That's so wild.
Isn't that fun? That's a great way to think about it. It is.
And our frontal lobes aren't even developed until 25, so it takes us 25 years. So there's this long period where adults are working harder than they have to feed themselves because they have to bring enough food home, not just to share with everybody.
But if you were just sharing with other adults that were all capable. It's kind of a one-to-one.
Yeah. But because you're also trying to feed all the young ones, now you've got to get even more than you had to get before.
So it changes the whole economics of all the calorie gathering, basically the food gathering. And we have these extended childhoods because of how much there is to learn because of how complex we get.
And as people get wrong about brains too, people get really nervous about kind of the biology of intelligence. Again, the racists are happy to talk about the biology of intelligence.
Charles, what's his name? Charles Murray. But what people I think get wrong about it is to understand how the human brain works.
You're born unfinished, and you have to be born unfinished because there's so much to learn that your brain's job is to learn how to work in its culture today. You can't be hardwired because it's going to change so quickly that if you sort of genetically encoded what you're supposed to learn, that wouldn't work because it won't work next generation.
It won't be adaptive. That's right.
So your brain comes in completely unfinished and you spend 15 years literally constructing your brain because every time you make a new memory, you're plugging neurons together, you're taking other ones apart. Building this neural network.
We measure something like IQ and we think, oh, that's something inherent about the brain. It can be, if it's a really controlled setting, you could begin to understand how well a brain builds or doesn't build those connections.
But pretty much if you compare across people or across cultures, what you're measuring is the content that got built in there. It's a content measure.
It's not an ability measure. And then you factor in nutrition, too.
We were with Bill Gates in India, and one of his main thrusts is these gaps. As much as like 30% of your intelligence can be missed if you're not hitting your nutritional goals in certain windows of your life.
Like it's pretty dramatic, the impact of nutrition. The brain is the most expensive organ in the body.
And when you are five years old, it's at its peak need, something like half of your resting energy expenditure, the calories you're burning minute by minute as you just rest there as a kid are going to your brain. Well, yeah, proportionally, you look at a baby's head, it's a third of its fucking being.
Yes, and inside what's going on is even more active than it would be as an adult. Because of all the connections that are being built.
It's working its ass off to catch up to this baseline knowledge. It's so cute.
And when they're cranky, it's like, of course they're cranky. They're in a graduate class every day with a final.
Oh, stress. That's right.
So, of course, if you miss those calories, your body's going to try to shield your brain, but there's only so much you can do. Okay, so are you leaning towards, because in 2000, the two most promising explanations for our explosion intelligence was one is our groups are growing in size and the complexity of the group and the facial recognition, all these different things.
And knowing where you're at hierarchically was going to predict your mating success. And that was driving it.
And then there's this other kind of fruit-based. I never loved that one.
Where are we at? Are those still the two debates? Yeah. This is not going to be very satisfying.
I think that's a false dichotomy because we're doing both things. We're in this really complex social world and you've got to be good at that.
You suck at that. I'm sorry.
Your reproductive success is not very high. Yeah.
You get excommunicated and you die very quickly. Yeah.
It goes really far. Or you become a tech bro.
Yeah. That's right.
That's working out pretty well for a lot of them actually. Because they're good at the other part of it, which is the foraging piece.
Today's foraging is getting a job that you can bring home resources, right? Right. So you got to be able to do both.
If you look across all primates, the biggest brain species are the ones that have the hardest job to do figuring out how to go get food. It's not the ones with the biggest social groups.
Oh, right, because like homodraceous baboons have bigger groups than... Exactly.
But that doesn't mean that in any one case, it's not a combination of things. You get these big trends and then the one-off cases, like humans are the extreme one-off case.
There's nothing else like us. Right.
So there's no silver bullet explanation. It's just perhaps some combination of different things.
Yeah. And speaking of tech bros, I'll say that in my line of work, you get emails regularly, Dear Dr.
Ponser, I have figured it out. Here's how it all works together.
And here's the silver bullet thing that nobody's thought of. And it's just the one thing.
And the proportion of those emails from engineers and retired doctors is disproportionate to their numbers on the grade. So there's something about that training of seeing things in a black and white way.
And I give them credit for spending time thinking about this stuff. It's fun to think about and doing a good job.
I don't want to be too harsh on it, but the sort of black and white feeling of how things work and knowing that, well, then it must just be this one thing. And it's never one thing, is it? Right, yes.
It's very comforting that there would be a single explanation and it would be definitive. Yeah, right.
Okay, so our intelligence starts taking a leap. How is that graphed? Is it totally linear or is it more of a hockey stick? Like when we go from Homo erectus to, I know Neanderthals have a 1650 cc brain.
It was enormous, bigger than ours. How gradual is that? The hockey stick inflection point is when you start hunting and gathering.
And then from there on out, it's been just a climb. The way that we're figuring this out is we're going to the field, we're digging up fossils, we're measuring the skull sizes.
I've had a chance to do some of that. That's really fun work.
It's like putting the frames of a movie back together, only it's a two million year long movie. Even if you had 100 frames, that's not enough.
Now, and also part of your work was you've done a lot of field work with the Hadza, and they're in northern Tanzania. That's exactly right.
Okay. And so what have you observed in them that seems

to confirm what you learned on the biological side? There's a fun story there that the first project I did with them was measuring energy expenditures, metabolic rates, how many calories you burn every day. For your book, Burn.
It ended up in Burn. That's exactly right.
This is fascinating because I think we would all assume this group that is walking all day long, they're averaging 19,000 steps for the dudes and 16,000 steps. And then they're busy all day long.
They don't domesticate any animals, any plants. They're doing it.
Right. Yeah.
You think of yourself as burning a couple thousand calories a day or something? I hope. I mean, that's what we're told.
What would you think they're expending? I don't know enough about these types of things. I think that would be a very natural common guess.
They're five times as active as me. I would imagine double.
That's right. Yeah, yeah.
But nobody measured it. Lots of estimations about what that would look like.
It kind of feeds into questions in public health because maybe obesity is a big problem in the U.S. because, well, we're not burning as many calories as we should be.
Maybe we should be burning like hunter-gatherer level calories. But we're not.
And then that also gives right to a whole paleo movement diet. Yes, all of it.
So looking into it, I was like, wait, this is all based on nothing. It's just estimates, you know? We don't really know any of this stuff.
Let's go see. And so a couple of collaborators and I went.
One of the guys I work with is Brian Wood. He's at UCLA now, your alma mater.
Okay, great. He must be a genius.
Yes, of course, of course. He's spent more nights in a Hadza camp in the past 10 years or 20 years

than he's probably spent at home.

He's there a lot.

We go and we do this project, and we're measuring energy expenditures.

We're measuring how many calories you burn every day over about a week, week and a half.

And we use this isotope tracking technique.

It's the best, coolest way to do it, gold standard, so that we know the numbers are real.

Could you explain that for a second?

Because I find it fascinating.

Maybe it's too nerdy, but you're measuring carbon dioxide. I'll go as deep as we want.
Yeah, I love it. Let's put these people to sleep.
Let's go. Good, exactly.
It's called doubly labeled water. You drink a half glass full of water.
So water's H2O. Some of the H's are different.
Some of the O's are different. They're different versions of those elements.
And you can track that if you took a water sample and put it in a mass spectrometer. That's a machine that would measure how much of those different elements were there.
You can use it like tracers, basically. You drink some of that water, and over time, you're going to flush all the marked hydrogens out because you're peeing and you're breathing out water vapor.
All the water you lose, the hydrogen is the marker of that. The oxygen you'll also lose is H2O, but it turns out you also lose oxygen that you drink.
It gets mixed up with all the oxygen and carbon dioxide that you're making in your body. And you end up breathing out those oxygens as CO2 as well.
So those oxygen elements, oxygen isotopes get lost two ways. The hydrogen isotope only gets lost one way.
If you look at the difference in rate of loss, you can figure out how much carbon dioxide the body's making. That's calories per day.
Isn't that cool? Because carbon dioxide is the exhaust. That's exactly right.
Of metabolic activity. You cannot burn calories without making CO2.
You cannot make CO2 without burning calories. It's the measure.
It's not a whoop or a Fitbit. Yes, we're not estimating at all.
This is a real measure. And it got figured out in the 50s, but then we could use it for people in the 80s.
And so people have been doing it since then. And it is the gold standard.
Have you done it to yourself? Because I would want to do, you have. Yeah.
And what did you burn a day? 2,800 a day. Are you active physically? I am.
I was sick that week, so I was less so. I'm not like bedridden, but I wasn't running as much as I was.
So you're probably more like 3,000 a day. Typical American male burns 3,000 calories a day.
Typical American woman is going to burn 2,400 calories a day. Okay.
Because you're lazy. If I had to guess, that's what you're burning.
I'm not lazy. I know the real answer.
What's the real answer? The only real relation hardcore is your nonfat mass. So your muscle and your organs.
As you plot that and you plot calorie consumption, it's spot on. When we're observing the difference between males and females, all we're really observing is the difference in our body composition.
That men have X amount. Well, in this case, 24 divided by 3000.
Yeah. That's probably the exact difference in nonfat body mass.
That's right. That's right.
But anyways, back to the Hadza. So we go there, we do this study.
We live in Hadza land for a summer. Basically it's a big camping trip with scientific equipment, doing these measurements, hanging out, going on hunts, going on gathering outings.
It's really amazing. Yeah.
Is it fun? It's so fun. And the people are just generous, wonderful folks.
Bow and arrow. And what are they getting? Gazelles and stuff? Picture National Geographic Savannah.
That's it. Zebra.
Giraffe. Did you eat some zebra? I've had different animal foods, whatever they would bring home.
I've had zebra. Do you have a favorite? None of it tastes as good as a cow.
Pazic cuisine is not really a thing. It's not fatty, any of those animals.
A and B, it's just the meat. Yeah, there's no seasoning.
There's no salt. Very little salt and very little anything else.
No dry rub. No.
If they kill a zebra, you can't eat a zebra in one day. It's a huge thing.
Even a camp can't eat a zebra in a day. And so they eat what they can right then.
And then they bring all the meat home and they cut it into strips and they hang it from the trees. A camp is about 12 or 20, sometimes even smaller, but let's say a dozen grass houses in a nice part of the savannah and the whole camp just kind of smells like a butcher's shop for a week.
Wow. It's kind of crazy.
Do they have any elevated rates? Probably less of animal-borne bacteria. E.
coli. It isn't rampant.
Any of these subsistence groups, if you look at hunter-gatherers, you look at farmers, parasites are like a part of life. And so I'm sure they have them more than, I hope, us three have them.
I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But no, it doesn't affect their day-to-day. I read this result, and I found it quite depressing.
Oh, right. So we haven't got to the result yet.
We take the samples home. They get analyzed at a lab at Baylor.
Internationally leading guy in this technique sends me the data back. And I'm just so excited about it because we're going to find out they're burning double the calories.
It's going to be so cool to see. And nope, it's the same.
So they, as getting more activity in a day than a typical American gets in a week, are burning the same number of calories every day as the American. Total shocker, right? As a scientist, that's the best.
And so I went back to the guy, Bill Wong, he's the one who did it. I said, Bill, did we screw it up? Yeah, this can't be right.
And he said, no, no, no, the data, because there's internal checks they can do it. Data look great.
And I said, then what's going on? And he goes, well, we see this sometimes. They're more efficient.
And I go, oh, thank God. Somebody understands what's going on here.

And I said,

what do you mean?

And he goes,

well,

they burn fewer calories

than you thought they would.

I go,

that's not an explanation.

Yeah,

yeah,

yeah,

yeah.

And so that's been

the last 15 years

of my career.

A big part of it

has been trying to understand

this phenomenon

because it's not just them.

We've done this

in other cultures.

We've done this

in other species

and activity

doesn't sort of link

up with your

daily expenditure the simple way that people think it does stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare we are supported by ring you don't have to miss out on what's happening at home with ring cameras and doorbells you can see and speak to who's there from anywhere. With Ring's Battery Doorbell Plus, you can greet visitors, get notified about packages, and see what's going on at your front door.
And head-to-toe video lets you see more of what's happening up high and down low. Another great way to check in on home is Ring's Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam.
You can control the camera from your phone and pan around to see what your pets are getting up to.

And with two-way talk, you can even say hi to them.

Oh, that's so cute.

It is.

If I get my dog,

I'm definitely going to talk to him

with the Pan Tilt Indoor Cam.

I love, I have a Ring video doorbell

and I really like it.

And it makes me feel very safe.

Yeah, they're fantastic.

And they're so simple to install.

With Ring, you can check on home from anywhere. Learn more at ring.com.
We are supported by Quince. Something about the weather warming up makes you want to get outside and go somewhere new, doesn't it? It's the spring travel itch.
Oh, my gosh. It's spring break is upon us.
Whether you're in school or not, you should still take a spring trip. Yes, I'm taking the girls to Hawaii.
If you've got spring break travel plans of your own, get where you're going in style by treating yourself to a first-class quality suitcase at an economy price with Quince. Quince has premium luggage options and durable duffel bags to carry it all.
We've told you before about how we love our apparel from Quince. So many cute things.
The cashmere, it's so soft. Beautiful sweater.
But also, I have these knives from Quince that are incredible. They do have really, really, really high-end products.
They're the greatest. So you can get ready to head out with your Quince luggage and stuff it with some fresh outfits from Quince and look amazing on your trip, too.
They've got it all. For your next trip, treat yourself to the luxe upgrades you deserve from Quince.
Go to quince.com slash DAX for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash DAX to get free shipping and 365 day returns.
Quince..com slash tax. We are supported by BetterHelp.

Let's talk numbers.

Traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session,

which adds up fast.

But with BetterHelp Online Therapy, you can save on average up to 50% per session.

And, you know, people don't have any problem investing into their physical health, and I sure would like to see them have that same willingness to invest in their mental health. With BetterHelp, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time.
Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress.
Your mental health is worth it, and now it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally.
It's convenient, too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life.
Plus, switch therapists at any time. Your well-being is worth it.
Visit BetterHelp.com slash DAX today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash DAX.
But it doesn't reject the hard, fast rules, calories in, calories out. Not at all.
You're embracing that. Like if you eat 2,000 calories and you only burn 1,000, you will have a surplus turned into fat.
100%. Vice versa the other way.
So how do you make it jive within that system? I think what it does is it helps explain why people have such trouble doing the calories in calories out thing. First of all, it's hard to know how many calories you're eating.
And then secondly, it's very hard to know how many calories you're burning because it isn't just how active you are. Right.
It turns out. Yeah.
Okay. Now it's like, well, yeah, it's calories in calories out, but good luck tracking either of those things.
It sort of sends you back to square one of like, how do I find a way to do this? If I'm really worried about diet and diet's the best way to handle your weight, which is true, then okay, then how do I find a way to do that? Is it because they are expending so much energy that the body is figuring out a way to conserve the oxygen? It's figuring out a way to conserve energy on other things. When we were there, we brought up the sort of briefcase based respirometry system where you put a mask on a person that's cooked up to a little computer you wear on a chest harness.
We can measure how many calories they burn to walk. That's the same.
So the activity costs aren't lower. So they are really active.
They're burning tons of calories on the activity. There's no secrets there.
The fact that the total number of calories a day is no different than everybody else means there has to be something else going on in all the other things that your body's doing, saving energy here or there, squirreling it away. And that's interesting.
So an analogy to that would be really physically active people here in the States versus inactive people. Right.
When we look at them, what we notice is people who are really physically active, they have less inflammation. Well, what's that? Your immune system isn't as active.
Oh, okay. So we're saving some calories there, maybe.
Your reproductive hormones aren't as sky high. They're actually really high in the sedentary Americans versus like the Hadza, for example.
Or this is why you have Olympic athletes that don't get their period for three years. Yes, that's the issue of it.
But on the way there, there's a very healthy point where your estrogen levels might not be as high as somebody who's sedentary. And maybe that's a good thing.
All signs point to that is a good thing. Yes.
Stress reactivity. If you are an athlete, or even if you just exercise regularly, if I scare you, your heart rate's going to go up at less.
You're going to have the smaller stress response. And if you measure how much cortisol you make all day or how much epinephrine your body makes all day, it's less if you are physically active.
Yeah. Now, have we gotten good at monitoring how many calories the brain is consuming while intensely active? I have to imagine if you're crunching numbers in computing, that activity is going to burn more calories than watching TV.
It's kind of a disappointing amount. They do these tests where they have people play chess against a game that's tuned to be just a little bit better than them.
So they're working their asses off and they're struggling. They lose anyway.
It must be very frustrating. And it's like four calories an hour.
It's nothing. It's like a couple M&Ms.
So it's not like you could say this brain economy is a kind of one-to-one to this physical activity. Probably not.
Probably the brain is one of the pieces that's not getting touched. You can't really mess with it.
And that's because most of what your brain is doing is completely off of your radar. It's all the organizational stuff, housekeeping stuff.
What you found is that there is a pretty narrow margin that the body wants to operate in metabolically. Yeah, it's working to keep you within a narrow range.
Sometimes this gets misinterpreted like, oh, there's no effective exercise at all. No, there can be sometimes you can see it.
Well, I've experienced it. So that's where I'm wrestling with, like as I read this stuff, I'm like, well, no, I up my thing and I've had all the results one would expect.
Yeah. If you start an exercise program tomorrow, it's going to take a while for your body to adjust.
So for the first couple of weeks, you haven't seen the adjustment yet. So you really are burning the extra calories that you expect to burn.
And the body hasn't found its way to homeostasis yet. But if you're doing a lot of weight training, we get into this nonfat body mass or we are going to see a direct result to your metabolism.
So, so when we say no more calories than somebody else, those are all sort of size adjusted comparisons, right? Because it doesn't make any sense for me to say that you and Monica burn the same number of calories. Obviously, it's going to be different because of the size difference.
Right. And so when we do these population comparisons, we don't want to just compare sizes across.
We want to compare adjusted for size. And so that's right.
If you build more muscle, for example, then yeah, you'll burn more calories just because you are bigger. Your body can only adjust so much.
Like these bodybuilders that are walking around 300 pounds of lean muscle, their body's not going to hit a homeostasis where they only consume 3,000 calories a day. They'll go up.
So that's a fun one. The other challenge to this idea is like, well, what about the Tour de France? You're burning 8,000 calories a day.
8,000 calories a day. It's some amount.
I did the math really quick. Can I tell it to you? Because it was great.
They're doing 7,000 to 8,000 calories a day for three weeks, so 21 days straight. That's 150,000 calories in three weeks.
That would be 75 days of normal caloric output in 21 days. The body can't adjust to that, right? It's going to need those 9,000 calories.
That's right. So we know that there are periods the body can, at least for some short-term time, really crank it up.
And we see that with those guys. And we see it with pregnancy, interestingly.
So that's the fun thing. The ceiling kind of comes down, and it's analogous to you can sprint for 10 seconds, or you can jog for an hour.
The sprint in this scenario is the Tour de France. And the jog is how hard can you push yourself for six, seven, eight, nine months.
And the hardest thing

you can do for nine months is pregnancy. We call it

a metabolic ceiling. The total limit to how many

calories your body can possibly burn

is higher for a short-term thing,

but gets regressively lower and kind of squeezes

down to about two and a half times

your basal metabolic rate. I guess I'm just curious

how much it goes up during pregnancy.

It goes up maybe 20, 30%, but that's because

of the size change. It's all proportional, you're saying.
That's right, it remains proportional. So that's kind of fun to think about.
So when your heart rate's above 150, there's no hacking there. Your body's never going to adjust to that.
Not in the moment, surely, no. You're burning those calories right then.
Yeah, so even if you do it for a prolonged period of time, your body's never going to be at 150 beats per minute and only burning the amount of calories one would burn at 80 beats. That's right.
The adjustment seems to be happening in the other times. The non-exercise moments.
Yes, exactly. Do you think you can feel that? The stress response, for example, I think you can feel that.
Who knows how that's affecting the brain exactly, but I think the mood impacts. You're seeing that regulation that's happening from exercise touches everything.
Yeah, we know it's directly related, but we've never had a great explanation for why. My explanation was always like, oh, we were designed to go do physical activity and get a serotonin reward.
And in the absence of any of that physical activity, the brain's like, I'm not giving you that. So that was always my explanation.
But this one's interesting and compelling as well, which is we don't have the energy to do that. Right.
I would like to see people think about exercise in a different way. It's not just about putting your foot on the gas pedal and raising the calories.
It can do that in a short term and your body's going to adjust and juggle the calories. Don't worry so much about the calories.
What the exercise is doing is re-regulating how all the other systems work because they're all linked. So if I start exercising more, I'm going to affect all my other systems in good ways.
Yeah, you say it kind of like calibrates and puts in harmony all these different systems. Yeah, it's like the rhythm section.
But if, okay, so instead of working out, you could just get scared a lot. Oh yeah, you could pay someone to follow you.
You don't have the same output.

You need to drink the isotope, though, so we know exactly.

Is it 80 calories per scare?

Let's do it.

Let's do it.

I actually brought with me.

Now, wouldn't that be amazing if you could get like a can of DLW, crack it open, isotope water?

I'm dying to know how many calories I burn.

Wait, so people who have high anxiety or panic stress and stuff, do they burn more calories just being anxious? Yes. That's wild.
Fun set of studies done in the 90s. You have somebody just kind of hang out and relax.
The best part is you don't even have to scare them. You get them when everybody thinks that they're relaxed.
Right. But then you have them do this survey afterwards, whatever the scale is about how anxious you are in general.
And people who are pinned out on being anxious have higher expenditures just resting. Their body is just going.
They probably have a higher resting heart rate and cortisol. Yeah, their body is dealing with a lot.
The whole thing, yeah. Okay, so really quick, blast paleo.
Because this is on the surface something that seems really logical to people. So the premise of paleo is during the Paleolithic era, we lived a very certain way.
We only ate non-processed vegetables and meat. It was a low-carb, high-protein diet, and this is people's religion.
But what did you find with the Hadza? They don't eat a paleo diet, which is hilarious because they're actually hunting and gathering. There is no single one diet that hunter-gatherers eat.
If you look across the globe, you'll find people on any mix of animal and plant foods across time, across space, you see anything. The real paleo diet would be whatever is there.
100% fish in some cases. So the Hadza have actually quite a lot of carbs in their diet.
We see that again and again and again. This idea that the only way to be paleo or the true paleo is low carb.
Sorry, that's not really true. Yeah, these tubers are very starchy.
They're very starchy. And when it's not tubers, it's berries.
And when it's not tubers and berries, it's honey. There we go.
Yeah, you said 10 to 20% of their calories are straight honey. Fucking water and sugar.
Yeah, people think that honey is magical and it is kind of wonderful, but it's just sugar and water, man. I hate to break it to you.
It is sugar and water. Tell us about what is unique about us humans' heart and's fun.
How did this system come about and what's unique about it? Well, you're kind of your typical mammal setup for hearts and lungs. We have a four-chambered heart.
All mammals got that. Our lungs are driven by a diaphragm, the muscle below your lungs.
It kind of pushes them out and brings air in and pushes air out. That's all the same.
But what we've done is we've taken

your larynx, that's the little voice box, little cartilage

cup that you can feel in your throat, and

we've brought it down in our

necks low.

And that's because of the way

that we've been adapted to speak.

It's a very appropriate

discussion for this. All of this right here,

we're all making air sound waves at you.

That means something to you. That's crazy,

first of all. I know, yeah.
Transferring what's in your

brain to my brain with air waves.

But to get this range of sounds

and particularly the vowel range,

A-E-I-O-U, you need to

have a vocal tract that has kind of two

components. A vertical part that comes up out of your

throat and then a horizontal component that comes out of your

mouth. And you shape those different things separately

to make different sounds. By taking your larynx and putting it down here in your throat, now you can choke.
That's dumb. Okay, so that's a new bug in the system.
Yes, so a chimpanzee, other primates, they have it up high. Their larynx is up almost kind of behind their nose.
It's up real high. And so the likelihood of them swallowing something and it gets dumped into their lungs, way less.
God, I experience this almost eating and i take a deep breath for some reason i suck some food in there and i'm dealing with it for 30 minutes and even cooler deeper history which is that have you ever wondered why food and air go in the same place yeah it's a bad design it's a bad design in general but you know what it is because when we were fish there was a little air pouch called a swim bladder fish stay buoyant. Do you ever wonder how they stay upright and know how deep or shallow to be? It's because they can adjust how much air is in this swim bladder.
And for them, it's not lungs. It's just a little pouch.
But then as vertebrates move on to land, that becomes lungs. That's the structure that gets all vascularized.
Isn't that fun? Because gills are no good anymore, right? Yeah. And now we're stuck with this dumb thing where even embryologically, you see the gut tube form and then a little pouch grows out of your guts and that's your lungs.
Wow. And it all connects out to your mouth.
And now we want to have this vocal communication and there's been such strong selection on that that even though thousands of people die in the United States alone, die every year from choking. Yeah's a big cost.
That's a problem. But this is so valuable that evolution said, yeah, the net result was still more kids having this, even with the risk of dying.
Isn't that crazy? Oh my God. Yeah.
The body's full of these wonderful things. So it had nothing to do with our uprightness because I could also imagine when you're quadrupedal, your orientation is all different.

So that ties into when you run, you can run and talk.

And you can run and kind of breathe in different schedules.

If you ever have some fun with this,

you can take a breath in every two steps,

not every two steps, or in every step and out every step,

or in every three and out, depending on your pace.

You can change that up.

A quadruped that's sprinting can't do that

because every time its front feet hit the ground,

its guts slosh forward, push the air out of its lungs. And then every time it stretches back out, it sloshes back and they pull air back in.
So there's this idea that actually my PhD advisor built on this idea. It's an old idea that goes back to the 80s that being bipedal made it easier for us to become endurance runners that could run down game.
Because there are some cultures even today that will run an animal to exhaustion. That's how they hunt.
Like wolves. Yeah, exactly.
You know, we can kind of run at all these different speeds and still be able to breathe fine. Whereas if you are a quadruped, the range of speeds that you're able to maintain and still be able to breathe effectively is much more limited.
And so you can kind of push these anyway, that's the idea. Now, are there differences within populations or no? About what? Our air supply and our heart.
You don't see it in the vocal tract and that kind of thing, but what you see is there's a bit player in this whole system, which is the spleen. Monica, do you know what the spleen does? Most people don't.
No, I just know it can explode if you have mono. Yes.
So it's mostly like an immune system organ. It tracks what's going on immune system-wise.
But right, it kind of seems expendable. Maybe you can even get it removed.
It's not a big deal. It also acts as a reserve tank for red blood cells.
Oh. And so there are people who live at altitude and are always kind of oxygen starved.
Their spleens get a little bit bigger because it becomes this extra reserve red blood cell thing for their blood to... Eur blood cells are the ones that carry oxygen.
Your hemoglobin. Exactly.
And then there's this amazing case that's kind of documented in 2010 or so. There's a population of folks called the Sama.
You hear them written about as the Bajau as well, but they call themselves the Sama. And they are basically hunter-gatherers in the ocean.
They spend their lives on boats. This is South Pacific, so Southeast Asia.
The Philippines and islands up into Indonesia now, they forage underwater, so they just kind of free dive. There's no scuba or anything like that.
They're just holding their breath. And you can imagine in that very particular population, there was strong selection for, can you hold your breath a little bit longer? Are you less likely to drown because you push it too far? Yeah, yeah.
And in those folks, the gene variants that build a bigger spleen have been favored, and now they have bigger spleens on average. On what order? 30% bigger or? Yeah, something like that.
It's not a double, but it's just enough, right? And evolution is always working on the margins like that. Yeah.
Isn't that so cool? But it's a nice example of, and it's something I try to cover when I teach this stuff, but also in the book, people are always looking for adaptive stories about why this population is different

than that one. Usually, there's nothing there.

Usually, the selection pressures are kind of the same,

like a heart and lungs. It's kind of the same

for everybody, and it's only in

these really small, particular cases

like underwater foraging,

like living at altitude, because

think what has to happen. You have to have selection pressures

be stable for long enough

and really localized

that evolution will say, yes, these particular

I just... like living at altitude.
Because think what has to happen. You have to have selection pressures be stable for long enough and relocalized that evolution will say, yes, these particular gene variants now are an advantage and stably so.
Yeah. So that now things can change.
Most of what we see when we look across populations is kind of just slush and slop and noise. Right.
And maybe not even consistent long enough for it to have a big impact. Okay.
What about how we eat? We're kind of talking about it already. People are really good at eating whatever's around.
You can tell from our teeth and our guts, broadly speaking, that we're ready for a high quality diet. We don't have to spend hours chewing grass, obviously, right? We're good at stuff that's energy dense.
Cooking has actually changed our bodies completely. A common argument from vegetarians is like, look at our mouth.
It doesn't resemble a true omnivore's mouth. They're leaving out that that's because we cook.
Yes. That makes energy in the food easier to get at, which ends up meaning that you get more calories per bite and it's easier to chew and all these things.
This is a fun one too. We talked about how once cultural complexity gets out of hand and kind of snowballs, now the brain is playing catch up.
You're born trying to fill the brain with all the things that you learn. You see this cultural inheritance, in other words.
You call it the dual inheritance sometimes. You've got your DNA inheritance.
We've also got this cultural inheritance that's just as important. And those things have to link up.
Case in point with cooking, there's no gene for fire. There's no genetic varying for fire, but our bodies need cooked food.
So the biological inheritance is a digestive tract that requires cooked food, actually. Raw foodists have a hard time, even today with the weird, amazingly easy to digest foods you get in the supermarket.
You could never be a raw foodist on wild foods. Right.
It wouldn't work. So our bodies need cooked food and how to cook and how to make fire is completely culturally inherited.
You don't come out knowing how to start a fire. That's right.
And so if you don't put those things together, you're done. Isn't that fun? I want to earmark this for the very end get off book a little bit.
But yes, this is like, I read Behave. I don't know if you read Sapolsky's book.
I've read Sapolsky. I've read Parsifal Behave.
Yeah, yeah. But that one does a really great job of theurture debate is really a false dichotomy.
You can look so many times where they're so interwoven, you can't really even make some distinction between which is which. Which, weirdly and funnily, kind of brings back Lamarckian biology a little bit.
But let's earmark that. Because that's not necessarily about the book, but it's a fascinating thing to think about now.
Totally. How about muscle and bone? There's nothing that's more kind of plastic and adaptable than the muscles.
You can change sizes and even change the kind of fiber types if you're slow twitch or fast twitch, power or endurance. That's a really flexible system.
And I think it's another case where if all humans were just born to be just one kind of athlete, just an endurance or just a power kind of thing, it wouldn't work because cultures change. The jobs you have to do change too quickly.
So evolution has to solve that problem by creating flexibility and creating adaptability. So over the course of a lifetime, if you grow up someplace you're doing a lot of running, you'll get good at that.
You grow up somewhere where you're working with your upper body, farming or canoeing, you'll get good at that. Like you see examples of all these things.
The Olympics is the best place to observe this. I love it.
You're like, look at a power lifter, look at the ultramarathoner, look at the sprinter. Every sprinter looks the same.
Every beach volleyballist looks the same. That's it.
And they're all the same species with 99.9% of the same DNA. And look how fucking flexible it is.
Humans are incredibly inherently diverse the way that we're built.

Just look around.

Any population, you're going to find the big people

and the small people and the strong people

and the thin people.

You find all of it everywhere.

And I think that is true.

Humans are kind of inherently more variable.

I think that also gets back to this issue of

every lion has to be the best lion it can be.

And there's a narrow, prescriptive way

of how that's going to work for them to be a successful adult. In a human society, even a hunting and gathering society, where the career options are more limited than maybe here, you're still going to see a variety of ways that are successful to be an adult.
And so I think there's sort of more breadth of possibility there than in other species. I want to go straight to environmental protection.
I would imagine many people don't even know why some people are white and some people are black. I think that's probably true.
I mean, I think they've observed that, but I don't know if they would necessarily know. The molecule that makes the skin dark is a molecule called melanin.
You've got these really cool cells that start off in this very special part of the embryo that migrate into your skin, and those cells make melanin. That's their job.
And the more they make, the darker you are. And so we all make it.
It is. Less.
We're melanin challenged. We're lazy melanin, you can say.
Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I feel it. On a sunny day, I feel it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But even the baseline is variable, right? That's right.
So if we were an African species, we know that 300,000 years ago, that's where we all were. Melanin is this natural sunblock.
You see more melanin, darker skin in populations that have more ultraviolet light exposure. And it's because ultraviolet light is good because it helps you make vitamin D, but it's bad because it blows up this molecule called folate, which you need to make DNA.
You are making two miles of DNA every second or something like that. It's crazy.
And so if you don't make that right, that's a problem. There's no mitosis or there's cancers or if you are pregnant and you are building a fetus, there's a lot of DNA being made there.
And if that doesn't work out, that's not good, obviously. So you need the exact right amount of UV.
Yes. You want to make vitamin D, you want to protect your DNA.
And that balance is why if you're at a high sunlight area, you're going to be inherently adapted to be darker. Populations farther away are going to be adapted to be lighter and get more of that UV because that's the other part of the seesaw.
Yeah, so just to remind people about the geology, so Africa is on the equator or where most of the humans come from, so the sun is always in the same spot in the sky. It's always up and down for 12 hours.
You're out on the savanna. There's not a lot of cover.
You're not in a forest. So as people move north...
The balance shifts. So there's less light.
There's less UV. There's less opportunity to make vitamin D.
And then the skin gets lighter. Yeah.
So there's like a hundred and some genes that work together to kind of figure out how much melanin you're going to make. You can imagine there's variants of those.
We all have those 150 genes, but your versions might be different than mine. And so the versions that help make more melanin, those are going to be successful in high UV places like Africa.
As you move north, the variants that make you a little bit lighter, all of a sudden that's an advantage. And we see those variants get selected for to be lighter.
And then people move back into more tropical areas with higher sunlight intensity. And we see the darker skin variants come back.
Well, that's where it gets Lamarckian. So my question to you is, do we have every ingredient at the disposal and we are turning on and turning off certain things? That's where this weird interplay between how we've thought of Darwinian evolution and now we're starting to see, well, no, we kind of have a lot of genes that are just not activated.
In my mind, that says that you, Dax, could... Be black.
Be black. Right, I can't.
No. But in our population, pick any population, you will find all the variants available.
That's one of the big discoveries of modern genetics is that those variants, the same variants that make some people darker or some people lighter, they're all there in the population. Even if no one's black? Potentially so because what'll happen is they'll just be a much lower frequency.
So maybe only 5% of people have, for one gene, have the variant that would make you darker skin. Since it's at low frequency, it's unlikely they're going to have that variant and the other variant that helps, and the other variant that helps, and the other variant that helps, that all together give you darker skin.
But now, let's make selection favor darker skin. Well, now, bit by bit, you kind of reassemble the frequencies to make those alleles more frequent.
Yeah, the two darker kids of the 100 kids survived. Yes, do a little bit better.
And one had a third of this recipe and another had a third. And now we're two-thirds of the way there.
Yeah, so Lamarck would say anybody in their own lifetime can achieve that change. Right, right.
That's not right. But what is right is that any population over enough time could end up going back and forth on these traits.
I might be misunderstanding, but I guess what Darwin was missing was the epigenome. He also had no idea about genes, and he thought that traits mix like paints mix.
Right, right, right. And if you do that, then you just get blah.
Recessive and dominant. Yeah, he didn't have any idea about that.
So he was out to lunch on how any of genetics works. But the epigenome, which is hovering above your DNA and deciding what RNA is going to send out.
That's a big factor, too. This is where I get into the recipe thing, right? Yeah.
There's an enormous amount of detailed data for the epigenome to choose to use or not use. And there's a lot going on there.
Whatever genes you inherited from mom and dad, they're not all turned on all the time. And this is where nature and nurture start really mingling.
Yes. And this has been a big breakthrough in the last 15, 20 years of just how this works.
The moment you're born and maybe even before you're born, which is crazy. Mom's uterus passed on.
You are listening. You're paying attention.
And yes, you have all these genes from mom and dad, but you're not going to use them all. You're going to pick which ones you use.
And then that creates diversity too. Now I've heard male pattern baldness is an adaptation of going into northern climates as well.
See, I thought it was a sign of prowess and obvious. Yeah, I like to think so.
Is male pattern baldness an adaptation to receive more vitamin D from the top of your head? I doubt it. And here's why.
That extra little patch isn't doing you a whole lot of good, first of all. But if you operate all day...
Yeah, but you're also not wearing as many clothes all day, probably, and you're outside the entire day. You probably get plenty of exposure anyhow.
Here's who really needs the vitamin D is mom. So why is her hair not falling out? Okay.
How do we explain male pattern baldness, though? Is there an armchair theory on it? So this is where I would push back and say, let's be sure that we're looking at an adaptation and not just a tolerated bit of noise. Ah.
Right? Skull shape's a great example of this. Back in the bad old eugenics days, people were measuring the skull shapes of Eastern Europeans and Asians.
Facial proximity. All these things, right? And they're trying to figure out who's a good person and who's a bad person.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was all really ugly shit.
Guess who was great, Aryans. Exactly.
And you do that analysis today and you say, well, what if, rather than assuming that I'm looking at selection favoring that skull shape here and this skull shape there, what if my model is, well, evolution doesn't care. It doesn't affect how you survive.
It doesn't affect how many babies you have. Right, there's no real force acting on this.
So what if the model is, well, it's just noise. And we know what noise should look like.
Noise should look like gray screen noise, right? There's just no real pattern to it. There's a very clear mathematical test you can make for that.
And sure enough, if you look at skull shapes across the globe, it's noise. They don't mean anything.
So let's put a real fine point on this because what I learned in Anthro and what I've repeated to a lot of people is the categorizing of people by race is just simply scientifically very, very weak. In that, the example that was given to me in anthro is there are populations within Africa that have more genetic similarity with populations in Ireland than they do with a neighboring tribe.
Yep. So why on earth would you categorize these people by this thing that is the least telling and least dynamic in everything? This is just like, as you said, 150 alleles or something.
That means nothing in the grand scope of things. If you really wanted to categorize and group people, we just know that would be about the worst way to do it, to get any consistency.
That's exactly right. And the reason why do we do it is because we seem to be inherently built to like to have in groups, out groups.
And we're visual primates, man. Yeah.
So we pick something visual. It's easy.
It's kind of inherent in the way that our brains are built to go that way. So it's not a surprise, but that doesn't make it right.
It's a pretty crap way to do it. It just means nothing if you were looking at it scientifically.
Yeah. But what's crazy to me is that's still how we do it, not just casually.

It's how doctors do it.

Doctors are still doing this race-based view.

That's how they're trained. You come into the

doctor's office, you get a medical test

and how I interpret that test

is through a lens of

if you're black, if you're white, if you're Asian.

You give the exact examples in the books because I was

like, oh, this is fascinating. There's a thing called an

EGFR, estimated glomular

filtration. It's how your kidneys are doing.
It's a blood

test. I get a blood test.
I run it

Thank you. You give the exact examples in the books because I was like, oh, this is fascinating.
There's a thing called an EGFR, estimated glomular filtration. It's how your kidneys are doing.
It's a blood test. I get a blood test.
I run it through this analysis. I get a number, and that's your EGFR.
Okay, is it good or is it bad? It all depends. If I'm a doctor and I'm interpreting that number, I ask, is the patient black or is the patient white? That's fucking crazy because their kidney function has nothing to do with that.
Okay, but let me attempt to push back and maybe you'll correct me in this. So one thing I learned along the way, which I found very fascinating, is that African-Americans, not black people across the globe, but African-Americans have a very elevated rate of hypertension.
And so the question is how they get this rate of hypertension. And what people have figured out is that when the people in Africa were kidnapped, they were first marched to West Africa, most of them, to get put on boats to be brought to America.
Half of those people died of dehydration on that walk. So the people that made it to the boat had a really high salinity count or asymmetrical salinity count.
They were able to hold to the salt in their body. Then they put them on boats.
Half those people died of dehydration. So the people that landed here had this extreme force case of natural selection where a high salinity rate was beneficial to survival.
We assume for half a second that was true. And I'm a doctor and I measure the salinity count of someone's body.
And I see that it's elevated. Well, what I'm really trying to do is decide, is it elevated relative to his peers or her peers or her in-group because that's really what's going to be significant.
Is this person running an outside risk even given their elevated disposition? That would be relevant now. Again, at least it's a plausible mechanism there.
To push back specifically on that one, if that were true, if that bottleneck with the slave trade were what was happening, we would see that in the genes that we know are related to hypertension risk. And we don't see that.
You don't? No. There is no evidence.
And also, you can take black families who are not descendants of the slave trade. Right.
But they grew up in America where there is racism. They have the effects of that.
So race becomes biological. Meaning if someone flew from Nigeria here tomorrow, within some time, they would have the predictable.
Yes, that's right. So yeah, usually there's not even a story as to why.
At least that one has a story. Yeah, yeah.
It seems extremely plausible to me. People dying of dehydration, I'm certain they weren't handing out water.
Let's do more of the heart rate thing. So through the 80s and 90s, it was thought that black folks in America were just genetically predisposed to heart disease.
This is how it is. Accept it.
Accept it. Move on.
And now we know, okay, well actually, if you study folks that are black, and even if they're descendants of the slave trade, but they aren't in the United States exposed to structural racism, they actually don't have hypertension. That isn't a thing that all the folks have downstream.
It's a stress thing. It's a stress thing.
Yeah. Wow.
Another great example, Native Americans in this country have, for all sorts of reasons, they also have hypertension and other sorts of bad heart outcomes. Over-index and diabetes.
Is that because they're predisposed to it? Well, actually, if you also look at Native American groups in Bolivia, it's the same diaspora that came down. The same folks.
But they aren't living in a world that has oppressed them. And so, guess what? Healthiest hearts in the world in Bolivia.
No signs of diabetes. So, it true that in this environment, that gets triggered.
That's set of sequences. But what we're looking at is an environmental influence.
We're not looking at some inherent biological predisposition. And what gets dangerous is if you say, well, that's just how those folks are.
What can we do? Throw up your hands. That's a very different response.
And you say, holy shit, this group does have an issue.

We got to fix it.

Maybe we can fix it. That's right.

So the way that you understand

how the body works

ends up with big consequences

for how you think about society.

Yeah, absolutely.

How we deal with all these problems.

Stay tuned for more

Armchair Expert.

If you dare.

We are supported by Mint Mobile. Do you say data or data? Well, at my house, we say data, but I'm trying to say data.
I know it's correct. That's normal, right? I say data.
For the longest time, I thought paying a fortune on my monthly data plan was just normal. That was until I found out about Mint Mobile and their premium wireless plans that started at just 15 bucks a month.
Say bye-bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw-dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. Mint Mobile is here to rescue you.
All plans come with high speed data or data, your choice, and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Use your phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts.
Ditch overpriced wireless and get three months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month. No matter how you say it, don't overpay it.
Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash dax. That's mintmobile.com slash dax.
Upfront payment of $45 for three months, five gigabyte plan required. Equivalent to $15 per month.
New customer offer for first three months only. Then full price plan options available.
Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.
We are supported by Allstate. Some people just know they could save hundreds on car insurance by checking Allstate first.
Like you know to check that you took your allergy pill first before you go to the botanical garden. Like you know to make sure that cute coat you bought is waterproof first before you wear it outside on a rainy day.
Or checking that a potential partner is an arm cherry. Checking first is smart, so check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds.
You're in good hands with Allstate. Savings vary.
Subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Allstate Fire and Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois.
We are supported by Squarespace, our old friend Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online.
We love Squarespace. We have our Armchair Expert website, which was built by Squarespace.
And it's gorgeous. It's a great, great product.
If you want to build a website that looks as snazzy as the Armchair Expert site, Squarespace makes it simple. With their collection of cutting-edge design tools, you can build a bespoke online presence that perfectly fits your brand or business.
Start with Blueprint AI, Squarespace's AI-enhanced website builder, to get a fully custom website in just a few steps. Basic info about your industry goals and personality will generate premium quality content and personalized design recommendations.
Squarespace also offers a complete library of website templates with options for every use and category. You can make

a gorgeous website without any previous experience. Check out Squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code DAX to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
That's Squarespace.com and promo code DAX to get started today. Here's a fun one.
My mother-in-law just had a DEXA scan done. She had her bone density checked, and they give you a bone density score, how mineralized your bones are.
And then I was reading the report with her because she wanted some input, and they had this thing at the end. Your fracks likelihood,, F-R-A-X, it's this sort of algorithm they run the data through.
Likelihood of major fracture in the next 10 years is X. And I thought, oh, that's interesting.
So I looked that up online. I'd heard about this.
I wanted to look into it. You can go to the FRAX website.
Any doctor would use this. Her doctor used this.
You put in the bone mineral density. You put in your BMI.
Are you frail? Are you robust? A robust Arobustus? Yeah. Good.
Age, sex, the things that are relevant. And then it also asks you, what's your race? Are you black? Are you Asian? Are you Caucasian? And I played with it.
She grew up in China. She's Asian.
If you put in Asian versus Caucasian versus African American, you could change your risk by double or half. So that's 4x from the ceiling to the floor.
Yes.

And it's totally bullshit. I mean, there's no

way that's right. And the training set that they

must have used this on was capturing something about

the environment of folks, and that's

affecting your likelihood. Yes.
I wonder how

this menopause data, because we had a menopause

expert on, she's saying Southeast

Asians go through menopause on average

like six years earlier. Like around

47 or 48, which is earlier than... Yeah, maybe it wasn't six, but it was several years.
She just gave that. I don't know.
Yeah, I wonder if that's a nature-nurture sitch. It would be interesting, yeah.
I don't think we have a great answer. We know why menopause happens mechanistically, but we don't really know what triggers the exact timing, like why it's 47 versus 49.
Yeah. I don't think we have a great handle on exactly what...
Well, you run out of eggs and the body starts ratcheting up. But if everyone starts with so many.
So why do you run out of eggs early or late? And why this time versus that time? Five years difference is a big difference. Why? Yeah.
Who's early and who's later? I don't know. So the idea that your doctor is looking at the census box that you ticked and making real decisions.
It's like, take your car to the mechanic. They say, well, we checked the timing bell.
We checked the brakes.

And we think your car is going to be okay

because it's blue.

Like, whoa, what?

Well, hold on.

We did this as a diagnostic test.

I mean, here's the numbers.

But then it looks pretty bad.

But the good news is you've got a blue car.

Well, what the hell are you talking about?

We do this.

Well, we shouldn't.

If they come in and there's a rod knock

at 100,000 miles and it's an American car, all systems go, this is what we expected. If you bring a Toyota in that's got a rod knock at 100,000, something's really weird.
Because we do know a Toyota will go 300,000 miles and the American car is going to go 150. But that has to do with how that actually is built.
It's the relative system. The quality of manufacturing.
This is literally as dumb as saying

two Toyotas, one by Brodnock,

one's white.

Because the numbers are exactly.

You won, you won.

You're going to win most of these,

but I'm going to keep going for it.

Let's talk about dying

because here's my great curiosity.

Your cells go through mitosis.

They make an identical copy to themselves.

So there's this great mystery

if they're making identical copies,

how does aging even really happen?

So clearly something turns on or off and it starts making the cells differently, which is its own mystery, kind of how it's making identical but not identical copies. My question is, why hasn't there ever been a mutation that just didn't turn that on? What would govern against that? Why couldn't that be a mutation that would have happened by now? Well, first of all, some species are getting pretty close.
So you've got bristlecone pine trees that live 5,000 years. And aren't there some sharks that are like- About 600 years, I think.
Oh my God. I want to live to 600.
Yeah. There's a wonderful story.
It may be apocryphal about the guy who discovered the oldest living organism. You guys ever hear this story? No.
That was lovely. It may be apocryphal, but it's such a good story.
So it's a grad student in forestry and he's trying to study bristlecone pine trees for some reason. I think he's using the tree ring data to figure out environmental changes over deep time.
This is in the 60s. But it has a special tubular drill bit that you can drill it into the tree, pull it out, and you get this core sample of the tree.
Look at the rings. He's starting his research and And he gets up there into the forest, probably somewhere here in Western US.
And he starts drilling into a bristlecone pine, gets the thing stuck. And he's like, ah, I can't finish my dissertation.
I'm in real trouble. So he goes to the ranger station and says, this is what happened.
I'm so sorry. Can I cut that one tree down, please, to get my core thing out? And the guy's like, yeah, fine.
So he cuts it down. Oh my God.
And there's a good scientist about it and saves a section of it and counts the rings later on. He goes, oh my God, I just killed the oldest thing on the planet.
That's risky. It was a 5,000 year old tree.
It was a 5,000 year old tree. I love when you go to Muir Woods and they've got the cross section and then fucking Jesus is on there.
Right. On one of the rings.
Yeah. Oh, it's incredible.
incredible when people argue for like a 6 000 year old history of the earth the really serious anti-evolutionists i

think now we've got tree ring data older than that you know like for sure it's older than that but

anyway yeah how do we age what's unique about how we age obviously we live quite long for we're the

oldest living primate for sure and we do a better job not senescing so there's been selection there

to push that process off the standard story is that whatever the kind of damage that accumulates over time as we get older your body has ways to fix that and repair it and put it back right but that takes energy everything's a trade-off so if my body's spending energy keeping myself alive well i'm not spending those calories on reproduction and that's the balance of that and really the reproduction part is what evolution really cares about how many copies of your genes do you get in the next generation so if you spent all of your energy on maintenance then maybe you could live a lot longer but that's not a great strategy because those genes won't make it to anybody exactly so that's the standard story about why sustenance happens the of exactly what's happening at the cellular level, what's breaking down,

why, that still is, I think, up in the air.

The stuff I find convincing

too is that it's kind of entropy.

The wild number of

chemical interactions that actually

become, at that scale, physical interactions

of molecules bouncing against molecules,

things get wrecked and broken, and you have to put them back together.

The idea would be that that's why calorie restriction,

for example, I don't know if you want to do it, but

that's been the one thing shown in

every species ever looked at. But even

the things get wrecked and broken and you have to put them back together. The idea would be that that's why calorie restriction, for example, I don't know if you want to do it, but that's been the one thing shown in every species ever looked at.
But even in like lab settings in mice, if you cut their calories by 20%, they live a lot longer. Because your body starts eating all the junk that's accumulated.
It kind of cleans up the scrap and uses it. Yeah.
And it just creates less exhaust, less byproduct and less entropy. Okay, so what do we need to know about living and how to live longer? You got to play two games to try to live forever.
One, we know the rules too, and we can do something about it, which is make sure you're exercising, eating a healthy diet. We can talk a long time about what that would look like.
Don't smoke. Don't do things that are going to, we know, lead to early drinking.
I hate to say it, but I think drinking is not. All these things that we know how to do.
And that can push you through the kind of typical falling off the cliff that happens to a lot of us as we get older. But once you push into the kind of the 80s, 90s, then you got to hope you got good genes.
Who's the guy who's trying to live forever is Brian Johnson. Is that the guy? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
And I don't know him and I wish him the best. Did you watch The Doc? The last thing I saw with him was him on Bill Maher's pod talking with him.
Oh, okay. Yeah.
I haven't watched the doc. I kind of keep up with him a little bit on social media because I think it's interesting.
Yeah. I am aware of the routine, at least some of it.
He'll have a really good chance of winning the first game. He's not going to die of heart disease.
That seems unlikely. He's going to beat the four horsemen, as Atiyah would call them.
The preventable cancers. Metabolic disorders.
Yes, he's going to do great. He's going to get to be 80 or 90 if I were to make a prediction.
And then we're going to find out how mom and dad did in the genes category. This is where I'm very discouraged.
Yeah, so I don't know. The idea that you could have a life that's twice as long is, in my mind, the same as saying that I'm going to have a human that's twice as tall.

Right. There are thousands of genes that all work together to make a human sized human.

If you want to make a double sized human,

imagine all the things you'd have to change.

It wouldn't just be make sure you feed them better.

You've got to change genetically how you build the thing.

And so lifespan is just another trait, just like that.

So what I think we're seeing now is there's enough good nutrition around the world, enough good medicine around the world. Please get vaccinated.
Take your antibiotics. Take the medicine you need to take.
We can get you to 80, 90 relatively. That happens for a lot of folks.
That's wonderful. And even over 100.
But then you start hitting the genetic limits of what's possible. Yeah.
That's how I read it. And I'll be happy to be wrong.
Do two minutes on vaccines. Well, as the measles outbreak right now in Texas, it lets us know they're an important public health thing to do.
The vaccination schedule is critically important to keep. There's a reason all those are in there.
Those are all diseases that really harm kids and have lifetime effects and sometimes death. But I mean, these are really nasty things.
Vaccination is one of the greatest medical discoveries ever. It goes back to the 1700s.
George Washington was vaccinating his troops against smallpox. It has saved more lives than any medical discovery ever by a landslide.
That's exactly right. That and clean water.
And you basically have the modern world. Yeah.
And without those things, you don't. And what's really troubling for vaccines is they are a victim of their success.
And that's a real bummer. For the people who did not grow up around polio, as my grandfather did, the notion you wouldn't get a polio vaccine for your kid is outrageous to me.
But a modern person hasn't seen a generation of kids in wheelchairs and on crutches. And the way they work is this really clever thing that your immune system has cells that are listening, looking for infection, and they learn how to identify it and kill it and make antibodies to it.
And you are evolved to have this adaptive response that vaccines kind of take advantage of. The idea that it's sort of unnatural is bullshit.
It's completely using this natural system that your body has evolved. And then the other thing that people always want to tie it to are developmental issues and autism, of course.
And all of that's going to be completely debunked. It's all such bullshit.
And yet, it just won't die. People really want to push it.
And it's kind of scary. From my perspective, I think, man, if we can't hold on to that advantage, right? I know.
Then what are we doing? Okay, this is just my hypothesis. It is the same part of your brain that makes us all very susceptible to religion that's being hijacked.
Because it's driven by a notion of purity in the natural world. Because there's been these studies where if you plot on a U.S.
map the lowest rates of vaccinations, they correlate perfectly with where Whole Foods are.

I believe it.

That's really troubling because people are shocked,

but Whole Foods are also more often college educated.

They're upper socioeconomically.

Yes.

It's a great example of this thing that's become associated with the political right since COVID,

but actually before that was very much on the political left.

Well, this is where the circle meets.

The sense of purity, the sense of nature, natural. There's a thing about everything being natural and non-toxic.
There is ought fallacy. We ought to teach that better, right? Just because something is some way doesn't mean it ought to be that way, first of all.
So just because polio exists in the natural doesn't mean that we ought to just say, yes, let's have that. Yeah.
You naturally can't see at a certain age and we go get glasses. People are very a la carte about what they want to accept and what they don't.
That's right. But a lot of people really think that it causes the person to change.
I know someone who is an anti-vaxxer and they were describing seeing someone get vaccinated and the way they were describing it, they were like, I saw a shift in their eyes. Yeah.
It's because they were protected against COVID. They were happy.
Yeah, exactly. They were smiling.
No, it was wild. And I believe that that's what they saw in their head.
That's fair. I don't know how to tell someone like, no, you didn't.
Yeah. Well, back to anthropology and cultural anthropology and cultural relativity, I grant people their reality.
Yeah, I know. But there has to be a place where we say we appreciate your beliefs and everybody has their own perspective, but that we are going to pay attention to the numbers.
There has to be some agreement about an evidence-based way of making decisions. Your reality is fine, but when it starts impacting other people's realities, that's where I think we have to say no.
We wouldn't even have an issue if it didn't actually pertain to children because that's what it's all about. I don't give a fuck if someone doesn't want to get vaccinated.
If they're going to die of measles and you chose it, it's on you. In the most literal sense, you have decided for your kid they'll have the same position as you will.
And it'd be like branding them your religion when you're born or branding them your political identity. That's the bummer about it is they've inherited their parents' position on something, which is probably not fair.
100%. And they're not old enough.
The age of consent is there for a reason, right? And they're below that. They're powerless to voice a different view.
And yeah, we're seeing outbreaks that are preposterous that we would see in this time. 2025.
So that's really worrisome. I mean, it's, well, yeah, if we want to get into this, but we're watching right now in real time, maybe the dismantling of one of the most amazing medical research apparatuses that there ever has been.
And it's starting with the way that HHS is potentially being led by somebody who's really skeptical about vaccines. That's scary.
Yeah, yeah. Kennedy.
Yeah. All the way down through, they're changing the way the NIH is going to run, and the National Science Foundation is going to run.
I don't think people appreciate just how radical this is. I mean, this is the world I live in, university research.
People are really afraid about what the next year is going to look like. Are we going to be able to do medical research? Is there going to be the next discovery for the next vaccine? Is there going to be the next discovery for the next medicine or the next treatment? Because maybe it's going to be very different.
Maybe not. But it's much harder to fix things than it is to break them.
And so the timeline, when we say in two years, gosh, where's the pipeline for new drugs? It's not going to be six months to put it back together like it was six months to take it down. So that worries me a little bit.
Well, Dr. Ponser, this has been so fun.
You're the first Herman I've ever met. You're the first Dax I've ever met.
Look at that. I've met other Monicas.
Yeah. That's a great name.
It's trusted. Very trusted brand.
We've got a lot of Monicas we like. But we have a character on the show, though, that is Hermium Permium.
Permian. Hermian Permian.
So that's close, but not exactly. And Herman, he sounds like this.
I've never met a Herman. This is really exciting stuff.
And you're a professor and a scientist. Miss Monica, my mom, do you see this? Yeah, it's really cool.
So Hermian and Herman sat in one room together. It's very exciting.
Your book's awesome. I hope everyone's as interested in the human evolution and biology.
Like I am adaptable, how your unique body really works and why our biology unites us as a beautiful message. And it's rooted in our story, which I find endlessly

fascinating. So thank you so much for coming.
Thanks for having me. It's really fun.

Next off is the fact check. I don't even care about facts.
I just want to get into your pants. Do you want me to bore you with some mechanical stuff? Oh, boy.
We're already so tired, but sure. Okay.
We are both drowsy. I know.
What's your explanation? Well, yours is the weather. I guess I don't even need to ask.
But yesterday, the weather was top tier, gorgeous, and I was exhausted. Yeah, so my explanation is I flew 7 a.m.
flight on Friday to Nashville. So that's up at 4 a.m.
to get in the car at 4.45 or whatever. Received my pontoon boat.
Oh, wow. I don't deserve it.
It's too nice of an item for me. I was just like, I don't deserve this.
It's so nice. Wow.
It's so nice. I hit a button and the whole canopy goes up.
The sound system is insane. It's the best sound system.
That's great. That I've ever heard.
So many creature comforts. It's, oh, I love it.

I did put up the bimini and crank the music and walked around the deck for a while and just pretended I was kind of hanging out.

My friend Tyler made the funniest joke.

I bet it's big in the boating world, but I'd never heard it.

He said, it's the most fun you can have on a floating patio.

And I was like, that is what a pontoon boat is. It's a floating patio.
It's just a perfect rectangle. Okay, bored.
And then a lot of busy work, readying stuff to depart, whatever. Then I drove.
Also, and my nose blowing's back a bit because my nose was so full on day two of the motorhome drive back. So clogged.
Really clogged. Well, maybe you have a bug.
I think I might have a bug. I think I have a bug.
Yeah, it's probably a bug. So, yeah, I then drove 2,000 miles and got home and got at it.
Yeah, and just a bit exhausted. Okay, so as you were dying to know, what mechanical things happened on the bus? Oh, that wasn't it? No, nothing's happened so far.
Oh, I thought just the mention of the boat was mechanical. Was enough about the bus.
Oh, the bus, yeah. All in all, best, least amount of shit broke that ever has.
Great. Inside of the front door, all of the molding,

which is a big chunk

because it's got a power sheet in it,

that thing came off.

So that was flopping.

Then it broke.

Still not bad.

Rear toilet,

my bathroom toilet,

no power.

Took the switch out of the middle bathroom,

plugged it into the back one.

Okay, it's not the switch.

Get home,

start reaching out to the dudes I know

that build the bus.

Okay.

This is a gratitude and a grievance.

Okay.

So grateful they talk to me and they help me every time.

So grateful.

But I'm talking with a newer guy and I don't,

I feel like he underestimated my mechanical ability.

Okay.

So I'm like,

where,

where,

where does this plug into maybe the modules bad, blah, blah, blah. He's like, Oh no, there's a fused panel under the bed.
Okay. So I'm like, where does this plug into? Maybe the module's bad, blah, blah, blah.
He's like, oh, no, there's a fused panel under the bed. And I go, okay.
I look under the bed. There's no fused panel visible.
So now I'm going under the bed. And it's an electric bed.
So I can't remove the mattress and look under it. It's all bolted down with this huge heavy frame.
That's two and a half hours yesterday to get under the bed and get all the little plates off of things to find these fuses. Finally, I'm like, I film it.
I'm like, there's no fuse panel under here. And I think he thinks I just can't find it.
Then I started showing him videos like I've taken apart everything. Oh, wow.
So he's like, huh, that's interesting. The only other place it could be is X, Y, and Z.
Go there this morning. Look, no.
Then there's this huge panel with all these

other fuses on it. And I send a picture and say, before I take this off, do you think it could be

behind here? They say, no, absolutely not. I take it off anyways.
It's in there. After three days

of searching for this fuse panel, I found it buried in a wall behind this other huge panel. Plugged it in.
I have power in the back. Flushed it.
It popped the fuse. TBD, more to come.
Wow. Okay.
Can't wait. I know.
While I'm boring you, let me bore you a little more. Oh, no.
Because I didn't get to a couple things last fact check. But I want to talk about my toilet.
Oh, okay. Tell me about your toilet before we move off the toilet topic.
So my plumber is at my house doing some repairs. Now, I had to leave in the middle.
Yeah. And, of course, I'm...
That's a tricky sitch. It's a tricky sitch.
What do you think about that? I mean, I think you just had to do what you had to do, which is go to work. There's really nothing to think about.
Is it ideal? No. It's not ideal, right? It's not ideal.
But I don't think he's going to steal from you. Neither do I.
He's too obvious of a suspect. Either do I, and he's a very nice man.
Do you know him prior to this, or is this his first trip over? No, he's come over before. He's like the building plumber.
Okay, then I'm not too worried. I'm not too worried.
I just, you know, it is weird to leave your apartment or house and leave a stranger in there. Yeah.
I don't think I'd recommend it, but it is what I did. And I do feel a little uneasy about it.
It's fine. What do you think could happen? He'll look through your stuff? I don't know.
There's nothing even specific. It just feels weird.
A little icky. Yeah, icky.
Yeah. and and I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

I

I

I

I

I

I

I It just feels weird. A little icky.
Yeah, icky.

Yeah.

And I already have anxiety, as we talked about.

Right.

I have anxiety today.

Yeah.

Premature death anxiety.

Yeah.

I heard a very sad story.

Yeah.

I'll tell it.

I'll tell it quickly.

You told that.

I can tell this.

Well, mine didn't make you sad, did it?

Thank you. Yeah.
I'll tell it. I'll tell it quickly.

You told that.

I can tell this.

Well, mine didn't make you sad, did it? Sad that I had to listen to it. Okay.
Okay, so yeah, there's a makeup influencer that I follow that I really like that she had a new makeup video. So I clicked it, and it wasn't a makeup video.

It was a very sad story about someone passing away and her family suddenly and unexpectedly. Very sad.
So then I just started—this is how my brain works, right? Like sometimes something will happen. It's not every time.
Sometimes I'll hear a story or something will happen sort of in the zeitgeist or in the news that will spark like a spell of anxiety for me. Right.
And it's just like everything comes to the surface of all the bad stories I've ever heard, the scary stories, the unexpected. So it's just rumination on scary stories.
Like the way life is so scary and unfair. God, I'm sorry you have that.
Thank you, me too. Yeah, so my brain is filled with a lot of bad stories right now.
And then I try to tell myself like, this is what happened. You heard this story and it's why you're feeling like this and it's okay but I'm also like I'm pretty smart so when I say it's okay yeah you start poking holes in it it's like there's a dumb you know when people have angel and devil on their shoulder mine's like I have a stupid mouse and a smart mouse uh-huh and this is a smart mouse wearing glasses obviously.
And a graduation gown? And holding a little pet, like a quill. Yeah, yeah, right.
Very studious. Yeah.
And the stupid mouse is just wearing undies. Sure, that are inside out.
Yeah. And she says, the stupid mouse is like, it's Monica.
It's fine.

It's going to be okay.

And then the smart mouse is like, what makes you think it's going to be okay?

It's not okay.

This is life.

This is what happens.

Yeah.

And then the stupid mouse is like, I guess that's true. But also, you just have to accept it.

And then the smart mouse is like, well, that's not helping.

The acceptance isn't helping me feel better. See, I would reverse those two mice.
I think it's the dumb mouse. Don't say that about the quill girl.
Listen, it's the dumb mouse who is saying you need to be afraid of dying and you need to be afraid the people you love are going to die. And then the smart mouse goes, you're ignoring the odds.
You're just refusing to look at the odds, which is like one in a million you're going to know somebody who dies of an aneurysm. Yeah, but it's actually not, it's not as pointed as that.
It's not like, well, it does obviously start morphing into like my life and people and being scared, but it's actually more like the weight of the world that the world has very upsetting things happening all the time. And I can walk through life ignoring that most of the time.
But then when it's like shoved in my face,

I am forced to remember that that's part of it.

Yeah.

And that's what's happening.

It's like just overwhelm. But even, I hear you, but even that,

if you took your 37 times 365 days you've been alive. What if I just did, was doing this the whole time? Just gently knocking the whole time as you heard this.
But I can't do that. You've hit the limits of my fast math.
Wow. I mean, I could, but it would take me five minutes.
All right. We don't have to do that.
But suffice to say, over 37 years, that's 3,700, 37,000. It's over 150,000 days that no one you love has died.
Well, that's not true. Oh, your grandpa died.
Well, no. One day.
I know people who've died. Out of 100.
This isn't that helpful. It's not helpful.
I just think the smart mouse should be the one that points out the actual odds in the data you've accumulated so far. That's not how emotions work.
Right. The emotions are for the dumb mouse.
No. I'm just asking you to flip the roles of the mice.
I know what you want me to do. I think the dumb mice sees scary stuff in the news and gets really scared because they saw it.

And then the smart mouse goes,

yeah, but it's because you're seeing things

from all over the world.

There's 7 billion of us.

You're seeing,

it's very misleading.

But it's not misleading

that the world has pain in it.

No, that's true.

The world does have pain in it.

That's what the smart mouse is saying.

As the world is suffering.

So there's-

The mouse is Buddhist. Well, obviously.
The smart mouse is like, yes, this world has so much pain and suffering, and it's part of it. Yeah.
And that's hard. That's overwhelming for me.
Yeah. Even though I know it's true.
And I know you can't think your way out of it. I get that.
But also another angle I would framing is, yes, life is scary. It has moments of heartache and pain.
So when you're not in those, they're coming. They're coming.
And on that day, you get to experience what that is.

But to waste any of the days that aren't those days is a little dishonoring to the days where there isn't any suffering.

Yeah.

No, that doesn't help.

I know.

It doesn't really help.

It's okay.

Sometimes you have anxiety. That's right.
Some things I saw and thought of on my trip. Okay.
I was at an In-N-Out in Barstow. And I was in the bus parking.
And so other buses were arriving with people that were on tours. And there was a German group on a tour of conceivably the USA.
And they were stopping at In-N-Out, and the organizer of the trip was wearing an In-N-Out paper hat. Cute.
Yes. And one of the German women had a shirt on that said, New York Dreams, Brooklyn Vibes.
Wow. So they had already gone to New York.
Clearly. Uh-huh.
And I don't know what that means. Brooklyn vibes is like— You're chill? Yeah.
It's more hipster. And New York Dreams? You want to be on Broadway? New York Dreams is— Or finance? Big city dreams.
It's like— Big city dreams. Backwater vibes.
Yeah. I don't know about backwater, but like— It's like saying Hollywood dreams, Los Feliz vibes.
Yeah, I don't know if I would have that shirt. You get their different.
Well, they wanted it. Okay.
I was watching Turning Point, which I was trying to tell you about in the last fact check, the history of the Cold War. No, you're going to like this one.
Okay. This is about the power of media.
Okay. Okay.
So Ronald Reagan was ratcheting up the nuclear arms race really dramatically. Okay.
He really wanted to get leverage over Russia. He was war hawking.
I've talked about this before. This is the only thing my mother never let me see in my whole childhood, the day after.
Yeah, it was a movie. It was a movie about what the day after a nuclear holocaust would look like.
Yeah. And 100 million Americans watched it.
Wow. It still has the record of the most viewed...
Ever? TV movie ever made. Wow.
100 million Americans watched it. Ronald Reagan watched it.
He was profoundly moved and he changed his course. Really? Yes.
And he backed off. He did.
And so began. Holy shit.
A more collaborative approach to nuclear disarmament. And I was like, we want to talk about the power of fucking movies and media.
I know. A hundred million people see this thing and then the president completely changes course.
Yeah. Like, don't underestimate it.
Putin was obsessed with these KGB movies that were popular when he was a kid. He was trying to live out this thing he saw in a movie.
Right. So this circles back sort of to an ongoing debate we have.
Not really, because I think we sort of agree, but the power of media is very extreme. And so then do we have a responsibility if we are participating in the media?

Like, if we're members of the media, is there a responsibility?

Like, if you're a filmmaker or you're a podcaster or a whatever.

I don't think so.

I think you make what you're drawn to.

Whoever made The Day After was into making that kind of movie.

Right.

You know?

Yeah. And then, so they did that well.

But I think to give yourself a call. Now, I have one that's clear movie.
Right. You know? Yeah.
And then so they did that well. But I think to give yourself a cause, now we have, I have one that's clear to me here.
Yeah. Which is openness, vulnerability.
Oops. Trauma poop.
Yeah. But I don't think any, do you think people have to have a? No, I don't think you have to have a cause.
Because I don't really trust everyone's thing that they want to move. No, I actually, I don't mean have a cause necessarily.
I'm just, I guess I'm saying, what if they had made a movie that was like pro... What if it had made Ronald Reagan like blow up everything? Yeah, right.
Right. That's possible.
Yeah, this one clearly was fearful, as everyone should be, of a nuclear disaster.

Yeah.

Several times, the people in charge have been told that the other side had launched missiles.

That's happened several times.

Ugh.

Thank God this Russian dude, he just refused to do it.

Yeah.

His computer was telling him that we had launched 200 nuclear warheads that were inbound and would be there in eight minutes. And you just got to pray that no one ever responds.
Because, like, if I'm—I hate to tell everyone this, but if I'm in that job and I see that Russia has launched the entire arsenal on us, my reaction is not to kill all them people. Right.
What's it going to do? What's it going to do? Yeah. We're all dead.
Exactly. This isn't going to undead us.
Yeah. And I'll just be responsible for killing hundreds of millions of people.
That's how I feel. I hope that's how everyone feels.
They don't. A lot of people are like, yeah, you got, you're getting us, we're getting you.
Yeah. Did you finish Paradise? James Marsden, friend of the pod.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Friend of the pod.
So, it was, it had an element to that, spoiler. I won't say anymore.
Tell me. Remember, like, he decides.
Oh, yeah, yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh. Yeah, you're right.
You're right.

That show was great.

And I've heard a lot of people talking about it.

Last thing on my trip.

Okay.

I watched

the

disappearing murder

of one of these girls.

Abby Petito

or something?

Abby, yep, yep.

That's the one.

Yeah, I haven't seen...

I see it pop up a lot,

but I haven't watched it.

I don't think it's good for me

to watch during my anxiety stuff.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay.
I forget the people's names. It's Gabby Petito.
Gabby and her, who I'm not, I don't want to say his name. Okay.
And her boyfriend, they're going to go out and they're going to have like a vlogging. They're going to live in a van and they're going to be YouTube people.
And at some point, they're on the side of the road,

and the police are called because a motorist saw him hitting her in the car. Right.
They pull up on them, or they pull them over. He was swerving.
He's got some cockamamie story, blah, blah, blah. During the interview with the police, the guy who observed the hitting, he said, well, the gentleman was hitting the girl.
Oh, my God. He's like trying to be like PC about it.
Well, it's so weird. Like you call a woman a girl and then you call guys beating the shit out of a woman a gentleman.
I know. You really flipped this.
He did. It was an accident.
I think maybe you go into like police speak. Yeah.
Like you think that's how the cops talk? Exactly. I think that's what is happening.
He like feels. But then he should have said the gentleman was hitting the victim or something.
He should have said the gentleman was hitting the girl. I don't think he was equipped to really do this.
No, he's probably nervous being. And I just, I heard that line.
I was like, oh my God, hold on. Did you just say the gentleman was hitting the girl? I don't think that you could say that.
Yeah, that should, yeah. That guy should be canceled.
Okay, you're now relieved of all my housekeeping from the bus trip. Oh, thank God.
No, I loved those last ones. Okay, good.
The crazier part of that story is like, he comes home. She's missing.
The parents. Of the gentleman or the girl? Of the gentleman hit her.
The gentleman abuser. Uh-huh.
And they let him live at home for two weeks. And then when the cops come, they go, you can't talk to our lawyers.
Like they get very involved in protecting him. Oh.
And then they find this letter between the mom and the son that predates this. It was like, I love you so much.

If you killed someone, I'd get a shovel and bury the body with you and all this stuff.

It's really kind of like a look at what people do for their kids.

For their kids.

I would do some terrible stuff for my kids.

I would.

I can relate.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. We are supported by Skims.
Skims has been a longtime sponsor, which has been incredible because I would be wearing them, whether they're partnering with us or not. Don't tell them I said that.
Okay. But they are one of my favorite brands.
The quality is next level. It's so good.
What have you been wearing lately? Oh, my goodness. Pretty much everything from the Fits Everybody collection.
You know, I like to do a big clean out of my underwear every now and then. Sure.
And now that I found the Fits Everybody thong from Skims, it's just all I wear. It's comfy.
It's so comfy and it's cute. You need

both in an underpinning. In an unmentionable.
Yes. I really love it.
It's a great product.

Shop Skims best intimates, including the Fits Everybody collection and more at skims.com

and Skims stores. After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you.

Select podcast in the survey and select our show in the drop-down menu that follows. I don't like that.
I know, but I have girls. It's a little less scary.
I know, but like, okay, on the pit. Show I watch.
There is this woman, girl, woman. Gentleman.
There's a storyline with this old, this woman, and she comes in with her son. She's sick.
The woman is sick, and the son brings her in, and the son has a very reclusive lives in the basement maybe yeah but he's in school he's in high school anyway she's sick and she's throwing up and then at one point they realize like or she says i've been i've been poisoning myself to come so that he would bring me here because I think there might be something going on with him.

This is a crazy plot line.

No, it's not. You want to call the cops?

No, because she feels like that's a huge betrayal.

So she feels like the hospital can't get him arrested.

Of course they can, but continue. Well, she doesn that.
Okay. The husband has passed away.
All right. Now, so then they're like, okay, maybe, but then they have to figure out a way to talk to him and like, that's complicated.
And essentially he runs out of the hospital. He flees.
He flees. And then Dr.
Robbie,

Noah Wiley,

he goes chasing him.

He's so athletic.

He's so hot.

And he can't find him.

And then,

but he has like a list.

The older mother

found this list of girls

he had like written about.

And so Dr. Robbie is like not, he's kind of taking it seriously, but he's like- So he's kind of an investigator and a doctor? Yeah.
He's kind of taking it seriously, but he's like, I don't really want to, if I go to the police and ruin this boy's life for no reason, you know, that's his whole thing. That's the conundrum.
Now, I don't want to spoil, okay, if you're watching The Pit and you're not caught up, pause right now. Or fast forward.
By the end. Pawsing won't help you.
There's a mass shooting. Oh, fuck.
And obviously, we're meant to believe it's this kid. Of course, red herring.
Yeah, and I don't know if that's the way it's going to go, but the things you do for your kids, tell me, please, if you... I mean, yeah, it's not going to work for your kids because it's like too hard.
We know them. We know them, so it's trickier.
But let's play it. Let's play.
Because. This is a worst case scenario.
I think we have to play because I think everyone thinks this about their kid, that their kid is incapable of doing something really, truly horrendous. And that's sort of what the mom was saying.
I don't think that. That's not my hang up.
Okay. Well then let's say that you found a list

of kids in the class. What if it says like, I want to kill them and it's a list.
What would you do? um i would ignore it no i'm teasing i'm teasing

i would sit down and we would talk for a long, long while. There's a huge gap between I wish these people were dead and I'm going to kill these people.
Yes, there is. And you're trying to figure that out.
Yep. And then you're also trying to evaluate, do they have the means to do this? How seriously are they? If I had an inkling at all that this was a possibility, I would move.
I would take the kids. I would move away from all these people.
I would get her in therapy, hardcore, and I would get a tutor to come finish her schooling until she got out of this adolescent phase and we would be checking in.

I would not call the police.

Is that what you're wondering?

Well, how fast are you going to move?

That day?

Because, like, I think if they have this, like, need to kill.

Yeah, I also take them to school, so I could definitely pat her down. That's true.
People will be mad about that. I don't think the police have anything to add to make the situation better.
I don't think removing her from the house and putting her in foster care is going to help. I don't think a state mandated counselor is going to help.
I don't think jail time, you know, like I don't think they

have a solution that would be appealing in this situation. They can't fix, that's not what they do.
So involving them, I'm not sure what that would get us. I'm going to remove her from the school.
I'm going to make sure those kids are safe and we move, but there's no services that the city offers that are going to help her in this situation.

And I just would want to help her. Oh, I guess I don't know enough about that to know if that's true.
Homicidal teens? Well, no, about like what the police could do preemptively. We'll think it through.
Let's think of what they could possibly do. I mean, if they have a list like that, I think they could arrest them.
I don't know if you can arrest them based on that. I don't know, actually.
I think you could because it's like premeditated. Attempted? I don't know.
Intent versus attempted. It's not attempted if she made a list.
I don't know. No, it's not attempted.
But regardless, sending her to jail is not going to help. Well, it is going to help protect the other kid.
Well, I'm going to remove her from those other kids. I just think removing her from the situation isn't going to— So, yes, I guess it would protect those kids maybe.
I mean, she might just, like, leave and go kill them. Like, how can you know for, just because you moved.
Well, I'd be moving to many states away. Okay, but what if then she kills at the, oh, you said you're going to do a personal.
I did a Jonathan Height really quick. I thought of all the ways that.
But like, I don't think you really did. Like, in real life, if you moved some states over, unless you, like, literally kept her in her bedroom.
Right. She's going to be out in the world.
Well, yes, at a later date with a lot of therapy and assessment. The therapy is going to be interesting.
Here's a broader question. Do you think—this is a broader, dicier, scarier question.

Okay. Do you think it's possible that a kid could have those feelings and intentions in 11th grade and then grow out of that? I think, I'm inclined to think yes.
Now, I'm not saying everyone would, but I'm saying, do I think that's a possibility? Do I think there's crazy, hormonal, confused, in a worse situation they're going to be in in their whole life, kids that will be different as 20-year-olds? I do. I think that is a possibility.
I think my main obligation is to protect any innocent kids from getting hurt. Yes.
And once I've achieved that, I think I feel fine on my own to be trying to help her through it. And I don't think the state would be helpful in that process.
Some people will be screaming, you're rich, you can do that. Yeah, but the question is, what would I do? Yeah, but I guess if I had a kid at that school and my kid was on that list, you then just taking her away, I don't think would cause me much peace.
I think I would have more peace knowing that kid was in juvie versus their parents decided to take them a couple of states over and like take it on and get therapy. Like, look.
I have five states over. Okay, five states over.
And also. Arizona.
I am conflicted because also I agree that I think like a good therapist and a different, you know, a safer environment for that kid is actually going to probably result in a better outcome for that kid. Yeah, yeah.
And all hands on deck. Like, I get that.
And I get if that's my kid, I'm like, fuck that. That kid needs to be away.
And like, oh, that's it. And for how long?

It says you're buying yourself like a temporary peace of mind.

Well, all of it's temporary.

If you go and you take your kid there, again, they're not going to like live in their room for another 50 years.

So that's also— It kind of times out the same.

It's like by the time they'd be letting a kid out of juvie for having made a list.

Yeah.

It would be the same time Lincoln would be entering the real world as an adult.

Yeah, so I guess, yeah, I would feel like I think there needs to maybe be some putting away during that time. Some confinement.
Just to make sure. I get it.
I get it. I get it.
I'm just being very honest about what I can do.

I would break a lot of laws for my kids.

I would kill for my kids.

I wouldn't kill otherwise.

Right.

You know, there's a lot of things I would do.

Yeah.

I would steal.

I would do anything.

I don't think I'd be able to, like, kill another innocent person. I don't think I could do that.
Well, innocent. They have to be threatening your child for this to work.
I wouldn't. If my kid said, I don't like the grocer, will you kill him? I would not do that.
Yeah. All right.
This is feeding into your anxiety a little bit, I think. What if, okay.
Uh-oh. What if at the grocery store, she pulls a gun.
Oh, wow. Okay.
This is a lot. So at the grocery store, Lincoln has a firearm.

Ugh, I hate this story. Yeah.
Okay, yeah, she has a firearm. She hates the grocer.
Yeah. Mainly because he...
He doesn't sell ripe pears. No, there's something about his face she just really doesn't like.
Okay, that reminds me of Turning Point. Could we continue? Okay.
And she pulls out a gun and is about to shoot him.

Yeah, I tackle her.

No, no, no.

This is the grocer then pulls out a gun.

Okay.

To protect himself.

Yeah.

You're there.

Yeah.

With your own gun.

Yeah.

What do you do?

And I have the opportunity to shoot him before.

I think so. to protect himself.
Yeah. You're there.
Yeah. With your own gun.
Yeah.

What do you do?

And I have the opportunity to shoot him before

I think so.

He shoots her.

That's a good one.

You came up with a good one.

That one's really hard.

It is, right?

That one's really hard.

Good job.

Would you ever maybe shoot her in the foot?

Oh.

So that like she drops her gun? I would just tackle her so he knew the threat was over and that he didn't have to shoot her. Okay, that's your plan.
Yeah. Yeah, it'd be very hard to kill the grocer if she pulled out a gun.
Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
But also, he has a gun to your kid. Yeah.
Okay, turning point. Sorry, you started this, I think.
So when Ukraine had their first elections, there was a pro-West candidate. And forgive me, because I've forgotten these names.
Or I can't pronounce them to begin with. Okay.
And then there was a pro-Russia candidate. Okay.
The pro-Western candidate was leading by a lot. They poisoned him.
They poisoned him. Who did? Russia.
Oh, yeah. Duh.
And his face. Yeah.
Have you ever seen this guy? No, but they used that poison a lot. He lived through it.
Ew. But his whole face became inflamed and atrophied.
I mean, they turned him temporarily into a monster. Ugh, so awful.
Can you fucking believe that's what they... Yes, they do this.
I know, it's maddening. Yeah, it's horrifying.
Oh my God. Oh, so what are the ethics of this? I wish someone would assassinate Putin so bad.
Yeah, me too. Yeah.
But he's inflicting harm. He's killing so many people, so many people.
Now, do you think I could go to jail for saying that I want Putin dead? No. You're just not allowed to say that about our president.
But it's kind of the same as the boy saying The list. Yeah.
Right, so what if they found in my bedroom a list and I said, must kill, and I intend to kill Putin. What can they do?

I think they'd probably give me $100 for a plane ticket.

I know, I know.

That's the thing.

Well, actually, no, not currently.

Why?

Our government is not anti-Putin.

Well, our government is one.

Our leader doesn't seem to be—

Our leader who makes all the decisions.

Yeah. All right, let's do some facts.
Let's do some facts. This is for Herman.
Oh, Herman. I loved Herman.
Learned a lot. Okay, Gigantopithecus.
Yes. I have largest ape to ever live.
Estimated to have stood about 10 feet tall and weighed over 500 pounds. Oh, my God.
I want to see one so bad. Yeah, I know.
I really want to see one. And when you do your time machine, you could go back and see one? I could.
I bet they're going to be hard for me to find, but I guess I'll know exactly where the bones are. It says they're wandering the thick forests of ancient China during the last ice age.
So you'd have to go back there. That's not bad.
That's what, 16,000 years ago. You'd have to wear a coat.
Yeah. Some definite North Face gear.
Like if I were going to Antarctica. Exactly.
Boy, I'd love to see one. And they might think I was cute and not threatening, and they'd be nice to me, and then they could hug me the way I was saying I would like to be hugged.
And maybe even rock to sleep. You wouldn't feel scared and threatened? I would, but if I noticed that they thought I was cute and tiny, I would appeal to their sense of safety.
That's the point I was making about two months ago. Right.
That you only act terrible when you're scared. Yeah.
Or hungry. Yeah.
They might want to eat me. Well, exactly.
Yeah. Because you're just like, you're like a little piece of bread.
Okay. Now malnutrition is bad for you.
Yeah. School-aged children who suffered from early childhood malnutrition have generally been found to have poor IQ levels, cognitive function, school achievement, and greater behavioral problems than matched controls and to a lesser extent siblings.
The disadvantages last at least until adolescence. Yeah, at least.
It's not going to get better. Well, exactly.
Yeah. Your brain's already formed.
That's when your brain is so mushy. Just trying to form is all.
It's not a fair planet. See? See? That's what the smart mouse says.
Uh-huh. It's not a fair planet.
Probably not. Okay.
That's it. That was it.
Okay. That was light.
Light and easy. Easy, beasy.
All right. We like Herman and we like each other.
Yeah. We like each other.
You have some anxiety. It's okay.
It's okay. It'll pass.
It'll pass. It will.
Tomorrow you'll be feeling 10 feet tall and bulletproof.

Gigantopithecus?

All right.

Love you, bye. All right.

Love you.