Herman Pontzer (on evolutionary anthropology)

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Speaker 1 Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Hermian Permian.
I'm joined by my mom. Hi, mom.

Speaker 2 Hi, son.

Speaker 1 You're not going to believe this, Miss Monica. Tell me.
Good friend of mine's here. Who? Herman Ponser.

Speaker 2 Hermiam, did did you make him up?

Speaker 1 No, that's really our guest. Herman Ponser.
Wow. Herman Ponser.
Herman Pons. Herman Ponser.

Speaker 1 Maybe my favorite name we've had for a guest.

Speaker 2 Really good name.

Speaker 1 A really cool guy. Incredibly cool.
Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Global Health at Duke University. He's an internationally recognized researcher in human energetics and evolution.

Speaker 1 His previous book, which is great, is called Burn, Some Shocking Ways We Consume Calories.

Speaker 2 We talked about it and it was really interesting.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we did a little section on Burn and then his new book, Adaptable, How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us. This was so fun.

Speaker 2 It was.

Speaker 1 Evolutionary biology is one of my favorite things to think about.

Speaker 2 And anthropology.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like, what was I just, oh my God, we were just discussing what could have been the cause of

Speaker 2 you and I.

Speaker 1 I know. You were saying women, oh, women want to get something of their boyfriends to smell.
Yes. Like a t-shirt or something.
It's a very common desire.

Speaker 2 Women to want, yeah.

Speaker 1 And I never met a guy who tried to get a shirt from a girl. Something's there.
I know.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Well, in the meantime, Herman's working on it.

Speaker 1 Herman, Rock. This is a really, really interesting episode.
I'm usually threatened by other anthropology majors because they actually know all this stuff.

Speaker 1 And I have I'm mostly ill-informed as we find out a few times in this episode.

Speaker 2 I'm glad that you allowed it because we all got to learn.

Speaker 1 Please enjoy Herman Potler.

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Speaker 2 Dax is getting a new tattoo, and Rob is matching.

Speaker 1 So, like when you hug each other, if it forms a full yes, yes. But only our wives will see it.
So, you're from Pennsylvania? Mm-hmm. Whereabouts? I'm a Michigander.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Did you ever see Groundhog Day? Yes. Poxawani.
What is it? Punctatani. Punctsatani.
So we played Punctatani in high school ball. We were that close.
Oh, okay. Yes.
They kind of nailed it.

Speaker 1 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 nine o'clock in the morning.
It was like a meat wagon.

Speaker 1 You just like packed in just to pass the time once. I was like, I wonder how many people are on this train.
And I did the math and then how many cars there are.

Speaker 1 And I was like, oh, there's more people on this train than there are in the hometown I i grew up in what yeah what was the population 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.

Speaker 1 Mary's they were there where I went 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 junkie land we don't want to spend a whole lot of time here yeah and so my extended family owns hundreds of acres of forest oh wow.

Speaker 1 And could you get lost in there as a kid? 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.

Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, the first time I got an actual firearm, I think, was for my 10th birthday. At 22? Yep.

Speaker 1 But my life is so different now because in the academics, university world, that's not a background that you see very often.

Speaker 1 Right. It's kind of looked down upon.
Oh, completely.

Speaker 1 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, yes.

Speaker 1 It would be interesting to me to see diversity of backgrounds that way. You don't see a lot of folks in rural America in the ivory tower.
No, no.

Speaker 1 And also maybe a little more socioeconomic thrust. Because we've divided up into these lines that are pretty comical in ways.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Is some of it, though, do we think think chicken or the egg a little bit?

Speaker 2 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 an us them.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But it is really kind of dichotomized that way. It is.
Where did you go to undergrad? Penn State. And then you did graduate school at Harvard? That's right.

Speaker 1 And when did you get in the anthro trajectory? Did you do any reading about me? I also was an anthropologist. No, I know.
I was going to tell you that I'm actually here from UCLA.

Speaker 1 You know, the anxiety dream where you have the class that you never finished, then they tell you you have an exam.

Speaker 1 I have it with me here.

Speaker 1 We're here to do this with you. Okay, well, I'm nervous.

Speaker 2 This is great.

Speaker 1 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 about that?

Speaker 1 Oh, 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.

Speaker 1 Were you excited about the physical anthro, the cultural anthro? Were you like floor-field? How did you do it?

Speaker 1 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 matrilocal and all these things, even the kind of fakir, modern primitive.

Speaker 1 That was exciting. But as I got into it, I was like, oh, oh, no, no, I'm way more interested in physical anthro, specifically evolutionary biology.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the cultural guy, the postmodern stuff, had kind of passed him by and he was not into that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 anthropologist.

Speaker 1 We 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 complimented each other well.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It was really fun. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it was such good training looking back.

Speaker 1 They were English teachers, so evolutionary biology wasn't their thing really to sort of have a whole nother way to look at the human species in this evolutionary deep time perspective.

Speaker 1 And all these quirks and weird things about you think, oh, but actually there's a reason for those. That's what was illuminating to me.

Speaker 1 First, I'll say even before Anthro was a Western CIF 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, and there's an even greater explanation. And then the physical part is the grand explanation.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Finding out, oh, we kind of know that Native Americans came from Asia because they have a distancer and only Asians have a distancer and so do Native Americans.

Speaker 1 That's a really cool hard bit of evidence clue. I like that.

Speaker 1 And for people who 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.

Speaker 1 Oh, completely. Fed 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And you begin talking about the ways that populations differ, or even just more fundamentally, how people differ. And because of that really dark history, people get nervous right away.

Speaker 1 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. That's a good thing.
How and why.

Speaker 1 How is it adaptive to where they live? Yes. And how much of it's noise and how much of its signal, because it's a lot of noise.
And how much is different within groups versus between?

Speaker 1 It gets less scary. You go, okay, that's how that works.
And it's actually a weapon in debunking racism. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's the new word for eugenics. What do they call it race? Race realism.
Race realists, this kind of thing.

Speaker 2 They're saying like we understand that there's differences between races.

Speaker 1 Like they're telling the truth about race. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Yes.

Speaker 1 I doubt they they are.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 So then they get to come to the surface.

Speaker 1 So let's talk about it in a way that's evidence-based, that's less scary, that's unpack it. I think you have to start with how the body works, right?

Speaker 1 Because I think people don't have a fluency in that. How does embryology work? How does the brain work? How do their muscles work?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Our lineage kind of busts out about seven million years ago, breaks away from the lineage that becomes chimps and bonobos.

Speaker 1 But the first five 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?

Speaker 1 Well, people argue, let's just say yes. Okay.
Earliest ones probably have a grasping foot. We see that in a couple of these, like Artopithecus.
That's changed since you left. Yeah, I know, A.
A.

Speaker 1 Forensis. Prior to Lucy's A.
A. Forensis is 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.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 He's what? He's walking on two legs.

Speaker 2 He's the first one to walk on two legs.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And if it comes towards out of the back, then it's probably on quite legs. So that's kind of the kind of ways they put put these things together.
Isn't it, Nate? I love that stuff.

Speaker 1 The osteology class was my favorite one in all of physical animals. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So Australopithecine is no longer the earliest one. No, you're already two million years.
This is humiliating.

Speaker 1 Can I just add my favorite one was Gigantopithecus.

Speaker 1 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.
Like, you know,

Speaker 1 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 gigantic.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And now he's like all about Bigfoot. I'm like, I have respect for that.
How tall was the gigantic?

Speaker 2 Yeah, see. We can fact check that.

Speaker 1 This is the fun stuff. Gorillas aren't that tall.
No, but they're 450 pounds. Right.

Speaker 1 I don't now six feet tall let's go six feet tall okay 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

Speaker 1 feet let's go you want the source i can see it on your face

Speaker 1 i do britannica yeah oh you just shoved britannica thank god they're not a sponsor

Speaker 1 wikipedia says 12 feet

Speaker 1 okay

Speaker 1 i'm gonna have to write a new book.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I sidetracked you. Okay, so seven million years ago.
That's right. And so you got these bipeds.

Speaker 1 They're walking on two legs, but they've got grasping feet, at least for the first couple million years. Then you get Lucy and Australopithecus afarensis.
And that's another very successful chapter.

Speaker 2 Not everyone knows about Lucy.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 and it was named after his wife it was named after lucy and the skylight diamonds which was playing on the radio as they were

Speaker 1 lucid is that who found it no no no this is an up in ethiopia and they named lucy after the song the beetle diamonds yeah wonderful yeah yeah yeah anthropologist are cool very yeah they name it after drug songs and stuff yeah yeah yeah yeah so specifically a drug beetle song even better oshlepithegas methamphetamine never caught on

Speaker 1 okay so there you find lucy but again i mean still very ape-like as far as we can tell in terms of diet and and stuff, eating almost all plants.

Speaker 1 There's some interesting ideas these days that they might have had some very simple tools maybe.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Any individual bear, for example, will eat fruits and will hunt a little bit. And so they're generalists.
But there's no other species that half of the group does one thing, acts like a carnivore.

Speaker 1 The other half acts like an herbivore and gets plant foods. And then so you get the advantages of both.
And then you have to share it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Animals don't like to share, right? Very rarely. And in fact, even apes don't share much.
Well, for sex trade, they do. Yeah.
Very specific context and very little in terms of total amounts.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Almost every animal just keeps it. That's what usually works the best.
Yeah. Yeah, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then what's fun about that is it's just this snowball of social complexity, intellectual complexity.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Then you have all the forging stuff on top of that, and the complexity just snowballs. And you see the tools develop with that.

Speaker 1 So over the past two million years, you can like literally track from simple stone tools to more complex to multi-piece tools to iPhones. And And wrap it up quickly.
Yes. Do we have any sense?

Speaker 1 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 in hunting, aptitude in gathering?

Speaker 1 The easiest way to track that would be size dimorphism.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 it just keeps going up.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So Lucy is still pretty significant sexual dimorphism. She's tiny.
The males are not tiny. Right.
And so there's probably a lot of male-male competition. That's what you'd have to infer.

Speaker 1 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 that we see today. Is it only 5 to 10%? It depends on the metric.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.
There's status. So females, in chimpanzees, they leave.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Female groups are dominant to males in bonobos. A male's rank has everything to do with mom and his best female.

Speaker 2 Matriarchy.

Speaker 1 Kind of more so. Yeah, in terms of where the power dynamic lies.
Interesting. Okay, so we do see that dimorphism start to shrink.

Speaker 1 You could call that a move away from 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 No other species is like that. You were saying at your daughter's seventh birthday party, all the seven-year-olds there, if they were any other animal, would be grandparents at that age.

Speaker 2 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 That's right. That's so wild.

Speaker 1 Isn't that fun? That's a great way to think about it. It is.

Speaker 2 And our frontal lobes aren't even developed until 25, so it takes us 25 years.

Speaker 1 So there's this long period where adults are working harder than they have to 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.

Speaker 1 It's kind of a 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.

Speaker 1 So it changes the whole economics of all the calorie gathering, basically the food gathering.

Speaker 1 And we have these extended childhoods because of how much there is to learn, because of how complex we get.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Charles, what's his name? Charles Murray. Charles Murray.

Speaker 1 But what people, I think, get wrong about it is to understand how the human brain works, you're born unfinished.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It 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.

Speaker 1 It won't be adaptive. That's right.
So your brain comes in completely unfinished.

Speaker 1 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 together.

Speaker 1 You're building this neural network.

Speaker 1 We measure something like IQ and we think, oh, that's something inherent about the brain. It can be.

Speaker 1 If it's a really controlled study, you could begin to understand how well a brain builds or doesn't build those connections.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then you factor in nutrition too. We were with Bill Gates in India, and one of his main thrusts is these gaps.

Speaker 1 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 pretty dramatic, the impact of nutrition.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 beams.
Yes.

Speaker 1 And inside what's going on, it's even more active than it would be as an adult because of all the connections that are being made. It's organized

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Stress.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Okay, so are you leaning towards, because in 2000, the two most promising explanations for our explosion intelligence was one is our Groups were 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I think that's a false dichotomy because we're doing both things. We're in this really complex social world and you got to be good at that.
You suck at that. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 Your reproductive success is not very high. Yeah.
You get excommunicated and you die very quickly. Yeah.
It goes really fast.

Speaker 2 Or you become a tech bro.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's right.

Speaker 2 That's working out pretty well for a lot of them, actually.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Oh, right, because they're like homographized baboons. Yeah.
Bigger groups than exactly. But that doesn't mean that in any one case, it's not a combination of things.

Speaker 1 You get these big trends and then the one-off cases. Like humans are the extreme extreme one-off case.
There's nothing else like us. Right.
So there's no silver bullet explanation.

Speaker 1 It's just perhaps some combination of this. Yeah.
And speaking of tech bros, I'll say that in my line of work, you get emails regularly to your Dr. Ponter.
Yeah. I have figured it out.

Speaker 1 Here's how it all works together.

Speaker 1 And here's the silver bullet thing that nobody's thought of. And it's just the one thing.

Speaker 1 And the proportion of those emails from engineers and retired doctors is disproportionate to their numbers on the grade.

Speaker 1 So there was something about that training of seeing things in a black and white way.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 And I give them credit for spending time thinking about this stuff. It's fun to think about and doing a good job.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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 grafted?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 The hockey stick inflection point is when you start hunting and gathering. And then from there on out, it's been just a climb.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Okay, and so what have you observed in them that seems to confirm what you learned on the biological side?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then they're busy all day long. They don't domesticate any animals, any plants.
They're doing it. Right, right.
You think of yourself as burning a couple thousand calories a day or something.

Speaker 1 I hope. I mean, that's what we're told.
What would you think they're expending?

Speaker 2 I don't know enough about these types of things.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that would be a very natural, common guess. They're five times as active as me.
Yeah, I would imagine double. That's right.
Yeah, yeah. But nobody measured it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Because, well, we're not burning as many calories as we should be. Maybe we should be burning like hunter-gatherer level calories.
Yeah. But we're not.

Speaker 1 And then that also gives ride to a whole paleo movement diet. Yes, all of it.
So looking into it, I was like, wait, this is all based on nothing. These are just estimates, you know?

Speaker 1 Like, 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. You're all on my own.
Okay, great.

Speaker 1 He must be a genius.

Speaker 1 Yes, of course. Of course.
He's spent more nights in a Hadzi camp in the past 10 years or 20 years than he's probably spent at home. He's there a lot.

Speaker 1 We go and we do this project and we're measuring energy expenditures. They're measuring how many calories you burn every day over about a week, week and a half.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Because I find that fascinating. Maybe it's too nerdy, but you're measuring carbon dioxide.
I'll go as deep as we want to go. I love it.
Let's put these people to sleep. Let's go.

Speaker 1 Exactly. It's called doubly labeled water.
You drink a half glass full of water. So water is H2O.
Some of the H's are different. Some of the O's are different.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's a machine that would measure how much of those different elements were there. You can use it like tracers, basically.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 All the water you lose, the hydrogen is the marker of that. The oxygen you'll also lose as H2O.

Speaker 1 But it turns out you also lose oxygen that you drink.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So those oxygen elements, oxygenized soaps, get lost two ways. The hydrogenized soap only gets lost one way.

Speaker 1 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.
Wow.

Speaker 2 That is cool.

Speaker 1 Carbon dioxide is the exhaust

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, not like bedridden, but I wasn't running the same. So you probably eat more like 3,000 a day.
Typical American male burns 3,000 calories a day.

Speaker 1 Typical American woman is going to burn 2,400 calories a day.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 Yes, Mark. Because you're lazy.
If I had to guess, that's what you're burning.

Speaker 2 I'm not lazy.

Speaker 1 I know the real answer. What's the real answer? The only real real relation hardcore is your non-fat mass.
So your muscle and your organs.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That men have X amount. Well, in this case, 24 divided by 3,000.
Yeah. That's probably the exact difference in non-fat body mass.
That's right. That's right.
Anyways, back to the Hadza.

Speaker 1 So we go there, we do this study. We live in Hadza land land for a summer.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Hadza cuisine is not really a thing. It's not fatty any of those animals.
A, and B, it's just the meat.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's a seasoning.

Speaker 1 There's no salt.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's kind of crazy.

Speaker 1 Do they have any elevated rates, probably less, of animal-born bacteria?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Oh, right. So we haven't gotten 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. 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.

Speaker 1 And he said, no, no, no, the data, because there's internal checks they can do. The data look great.
And I said, then what's going on? And he goes, well, we see this sometimes. They're more efficient.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I go, that's not an explanation.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for more armchair expert

Speaker 1 if you dare.

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Speaker 1 A diamond is forever. Here on on the show, we talk to guests about their past, where they are today, and what they want for the future.

Speaker 1 And it kind of makes you realize you're never really done, are you? You're constantly changing, shedding old versions of yourself to reveal someone stronger, smarter, funnier even.

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Speaker 1 But it doesn't reject the hard fast rules, calories in, calories out. Not at all.
You're embracing that.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 I think what it does is it helps explain why people have such trouble doing the calories and calories out thing. First of all, it's hard to know how many calories you're eating.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 Is it because they are expending so much energy that the body is figuring out a way to conserve the oxygen?

Speaker 1 It's figuring out a way to conserve energy on other things. When we were there, we brought up this sort of briefcase-based respirometry system where you can put a mask on a person.

Speaker 1 It's hooked 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.

Speaker 1 They're burning tons of calories on the activity. There's no secrets there.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that's interesting. So an analogy to that would be really physically active people here in the States versus inactive people.

Speaker 1 Right. When we look at them, what we notice is people who are really physically active, they have less inflammation.
Oh, what's that? Your immune system isn't as active. Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Or this is why you have Olympic athletes that don't get their period first. Yes, that's for sure.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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, but less.
You're going to have a smaller stress response.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Have we gotten good at monitoring how many calories the brain is consuming while intensely active?

Speaker 1 I have to imagine if you're crunching numbers and computing, that activity is going to burn more calories than watching TV. It's kind of a disappointing amount.

Speaker 1 They do these tests where they have people play like chess against a game that's tuned to be just a little bit better than them. Okay, cool.
So they're working their asses off and they're struggling.

Speaker 1 They lose anyway. It must be very frustrating.
And it's like four calories an hour. It's nothing.
It's like a couple MMs.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You can't really mess it. Again, that's because most of what your brain is doing is completely off of your radar.
It's all the organizational stuff, housekeeping stuff.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So that's where I'm wrestling with, like, as I read this stuff, I'm like, well, no, I upped my thing and I've had all the results one would expect.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So you really are burning the the extra calories that you expect to burn. And the body hasn't found its way to homeostasis yet.

Speaker 1 But if you're doing a lot of weight training, we get into this non-fat body mass or we are going to see a direct result to your muscles.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so when we say no more calories than somebody else, those are all sort of size-adjusted comparisons. Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so when we do these population components, comparisons, we don't want to just compare sizes across. We want to compare, adjusted for size.
And so that's right.

Speaker 1 If you build more muscle, for example, then yeah, you'll burn more calories just because you are bigger. Yeah, your body can only adjust so much.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I did the math really quick. Can I tell it to you? Because it was great.
They're doing 7,000, 8,000 calories a day for three weeks. So 21 days straight.
That's 150,000 calories in three weeks.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.
We see it with... Pregnancy, interestingly.

Speaker 1 Yes. 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 It's all proportional. That's right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You're burning those calories right then.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we know it's directly related, but we've never had a great explanation for why. Yeah.
My explanation was always like, oh, we were designed to go do physical activity and get a serotonin reward.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But this one's interesting and compelling as well, which is just we don't have the energy to do that. Right.
I would like to see people think about exercise in a different way.

Speaker 1 It's not just about putting your foot on the gas pedal and raising the calories burn. You can do that in a short term and your body's going to adjust and juggle the calories.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like the rhythm section.

Speaker 2 But if, okay, so instead of working out, you could just get scared a lot.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, you could pay someone to

Speaker 2 have the same output.

Speaker 1 You need to drink the isotope, though, so we know exactly. Like, is it 80 calories?

Speaker 1 Yes. 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? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God, that'd be good.

Speaker 2 Wait, so people who have high anxiety or panic stress and stuff, do they burn more calories just being anxious?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 That's wild.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Right. But then you have them do this survey afterwards, whatever the scale is about how anxious you are in general.

Speaker 1 And people who are pinned out on being anxious have higher expenditures just resting. Their body is just

Speaker 1 dealing with the whole thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay, so really quick, blast paleo, because this is on the surface something that seems really logical to people.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 100% 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you said 10 to 20% of their calories are straight honey. Yes.
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.

Speaker 1 I hate to break it to you. It is sugar and water.
Tell us about what is unique about us humans, heart and air supply.

Speaker 1 How did this system come about and what's unique about it? Well, kind of your typical mammal setup for hearts and lungs, right? We have a four-chambered heart. All mammals got that.

Speaker 1 Our lungs are driven by a diaphragm, the muscle below your lungs, it kind of pushes them out and brings air in or pushes air out. That's all the same.

Speaker 1 But what we've done is we've taken your larynx, that's the little voice box, a little cartilage cup that you can feel in your throat, and we've brought it down in our necks low.

Speaker 1 And that's because of the way that we've been adapted to speak. It's a very appropriate discussion for this.

Speaker 1 All of this right here, where I'm making air sound waves at you, that means something to you. That's crazy, first of all.
Oh, I know, yeah.

Speaker 1 Transferring what's in your brain to my brain with air waves.

Speaker 1 But to get this range of sounds, and particularly the vowel range, AEIOUs, 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.

Speaker 1 And you shape those different things 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so the likelihood of them swallowing something and it gets dumped into their lungs, way less. God, I experience this almost daily.
Joking. I'm eating and I take a deep breath for some reason.

Speaker 1 I suck some food in there and then I'm dealing with it for 30 minutes. An even cooler, deeper history, which is that, have you ever wondered why food and air go in the same place?

Speaker 1 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 that helps fish stay buoyant.

Speaker 1 Do you ever wonder how they stay upright and know how deep or shallow to be? Yeah. It's because they can adjust how much air is in this swim bladder.
And for them, it's not lungs.

Speaker 1 It's just a little pouch. But then as vertebrates move onto land, that becomes lungs.
That's the structure that gets all, you know, vascularized. Isn't that fun?

Speaker 1 Because gills are no good anymore, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 And it all connects out to your mouth. And now we want to have this vocal communication.

Speaker 1 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.
It's a big cost. Sure.
That's a problem.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So that ties into when you run, you can run and talk and you can run and kind of breathe in different schedules.

Speaker 1 If you ever have some fun with this, you can take a breath in every two steps and out 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 out of its lungs, and then every time it stretches back out, it sloshes it back and they pull air back in.

Speaker 1 So there's this idea that actually my PhD advisor built on this idea.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Because there are some cultures even to today that will run an animal to exhaustion. That's how they hunt.

Speaker 1 Like 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 how 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.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 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 to even get it removed, it's not a big deal.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Their spleens get a little bit bigger because it becomes this extra reserve red blood cell thing for their blood to, your red blood cells are the ones that carry oxygen. They're hemoglobin.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 And then there's this amazing case, it's kind of documented in 2010 or so. There's a population of folks called the Sama.

Speaker 1 You hear them written about as the Bajao as well, but they call themselves the Sama. And they are basically hunter-gatherers in the ocean.
They spend their lives on. What oceans?

Speaker 1 This is South Pacific. So Southeast Asia, the Philippines and islands up in Indonesia now, they forage underwater.
So they just kind of free dive. There's no scuba or anything like that.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 On what order? 30% bigger? Yeah, something like that. It's not double, but it's just enough, right? And evolution is always working on the margins like that.
Yeah. Isn't that so cool?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 People are always looking for adaptive stories about why this population is different than that one. Usually there's nothing there.

Speaker 1 Usually the selection pressures are kind of the same, like a heart and lungs. It's kind of the same for everybody.

Speaker 1 And it's only in these really small particular cases like underwater foraging, like living at altitude. Because think what has to happen.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So that now things change. Most of what we see when we look across populations is kind of just slush and slop and noise.
Right.

Speaker 1 And maybe not even consistent long enough for it to have have a big impact. Exactly.
Okay, what about how we eat? We're kind of talking about it already.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We talked about how once cultural complexity gets out of hand and it 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.

Speaker 1 So you have this cultural inheritance, in other words, you call it the dual inheritance sometimes.

Speaker 1 You've got your DNA inheritance, but you'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.

Speaker 1 There's no genetic varying for for fire, but our bodies need cooked food. So the biological inheritance is a digestive tract that requires cooked food, actually.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I don't know if you read Sapolsky's book. I've read Sepolsky I read parts of Behave, yeah, yeah.
But that one does a really great job of the nature-nurture debate, it is really a false dichotomy.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 your muscles you can change sizes and even change kind of fiber types if you're slow twitch or fast twitch power or endurance that's a really flexible system and i think is 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.

Speaker 1 The jobs you have to do change too quickly. So evolution has to solve that problem by creating flexibility and creating adaptability.

Speaker 1 So over the course of a lifetime, if you grow up someplace where you're doing a lot of running, you'll get good at that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I love it. You're like, look at a powerlifter, look at the ultramarathon, or look at the sprinter.
Every sprinter looks the same. Every beach volleyballist looks the same.
That's it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And there's a narrow, prescripted 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think they've observed that, but I don't know if they would necessarily know so. The molecule that makes skin dark is a molecule called melanin.

Speaker 1 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 melan.
That's their job.

Speaker 1 And And the more they make, the darker you are. And so we all make it.
Here it is. Less.
We're melanin challenged. We're lazy melanin.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Sorry. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I feel it. On a sunny day, I feel it.

Speaker 1 But even the baseline's 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.

Speaker 1 You see more melanin, darker skin in populations that have more ultraviolet light exposure.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You are making two miles of DNA every second or something like that. Oh, it's crazy.

Speaker 1 And so if you don't make that right, that's a problem. There's omitosis or there's cancers, or if you are pregnant and you are building a fetus, there's a lot of DNA being made there.

Speaker 1 And if that doesn't work out, that's not good, obviously. So you need the exact right amount of UV.
You want to make vitamin D, you want to protect your DNA.

Speaker 1 And that balance is why if you're at a high sunlight area, you're going to be inherently adapted to be darker.

Speaker 1 Populations farther away, you're going to be adapted to be lighter and get more of that UV because that's the other part of the seesaw. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So there's less light, there's less UV, there's less opportunity to make vitamin D, and then the skin gets lighter.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 a Lamarckian.

Speaker 1 So my question to you is, do we have every ingredient at the disposal and we are turning on and turning off certain things?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's one of the big discoveries of monogenetics, is that those variants, the same variants that make some people darker, some people lighter, they're all there in the population.

Speaker 1 Even if no one's black? Potentially so, because what will happen is they'll just be a much lower frequency.

Speaker 1 So maybe only 5% of people have, for one gene, have the variant that would make you darker skin.

Speaker 1 Since it's a 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.

Speaker 1 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 frequently.

Speaker 1 Yeah the two darker kids of the hundred kids survived and they made it and one had a third of this recipe and another had a third and now we're two-thirds of the way there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so Lamarck would say anybody in their own lifetime can achieve that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I might be misunderstanding, but I guess what Darwin was missing was the epigenome. So he also had no idea about genes, and he thought that traits mix like paints mix.
Right, right.

Speaker 1 And if you do that, then you just get blocked. Recessive and dominant.
Yeah, he didn't have any idea about that. So he was out to lunch on how any of genetics works.

Speaker 1 But the epigenome, which is hovering above your DNA and deciding what RNA is going to send out. That's a big factor.

Speaker 1 This is where I get into the recipe thing, right? Yeah. With this enormous amount of detailed data for the epigenome to choose to use or not use.
And there's a lot going on there.

Speaker 1 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, right? Yes.

Speaker 1 And this has been a big breakthrough in the last 15, 20 years. It'd be just how this works.
The moment you're born, and maybe even before you're born, which is crazy. Mom's uterus passed on.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That extra little patch isn't doing you a whole lot of good, first of all. But if you're upright all day.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So why is her hair not falling out? Exactly. Okay.

Speaker 1 How do we explain male pattern pattern boldness 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

Speaker 1 right skull shape is a great example of this back in the bad old eugenics days people were measuring the skull shapes of eastern europeans and facial proximity all these things and right and they're trying to figure out who's a good person who's a bad person yeah yeah yeah and it was all really ugly guess who is great arian 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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? It's just no real pattern to it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 is just simply scientifically

Speaker 1 very, very weak.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I think 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.

Speaker 1 It just means nothing if you were looking at it scientifically. Yeah.
But what's crazy to me is that's that's still how we do it, not just casually. It's how you doctors do it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There's a thing called an EGFR, estimated glomular filtration, 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so the question is, how'd they get this rate of hypertension?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 an asymmetrical salinity count.

Speaker 1 They were able to hold on to the salt in their body. Then they put them on boats.
Half those people died of dehydration.

Speaker 1 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 a half a second that was true.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I'm a doctor and I measure the salinity count of someone's body and I see that it's elevated.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But 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,

Speaker 1 but they grew up in America where there is racism. They have the effects of that.
So race becomes biological.

Speaker 1 Meaning if someone flew from Nigeria here tomorrow, within some time they would have the predictable.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 People dying of dehydration, I'm certain they weren't handing out water. Let's do more of the heart rate thing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Accept it. Accept it.
Move on.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That isn't a thing that all the folks have downstream.

Speaker 2 It's a stress thing.

Speaker 1 It's a stress thing. Yeah.
Wow, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Same folks, but they aren't living in a world that has

Speaker 1 oppressed them. And so guess what? Healthiest hearts in the world in Bolivia.
No signs of diabetes. So it's true that in this environment, that gets triggered, that set of sequences.

Speaker 1 But what we're looking at is an environmental.

Speaker 1 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 right it's the what can we do throw up your hands yeah that's a very different response and you say holy shit, this group does have an issue.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 How we deal with all these problems.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for more armchair expert.

Speaker 1 If you dare.

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Bump a bon out. Wow.

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Speaker 1 Here's a fun one. My mother-in-law just had a DEXA scan done because she had her bone density checked, and they give you a bone density score, how mineralized your bones are.

Speaker 1 And then I was reading the report with her because she wanted some input. And they had this thing at the end.
Your frac's likelihood, F-R-A-X is this sort of algorithm they run the data through.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 robustus.
Yeah, good.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Like around 47 or 48, which is earlier than

Speaker 1 maybe it wasn't six, but it was several years. I don't know.
Yeah, I wonder if that's a nature nurture sit. It would be interesting, yeah.
I don't think we have a great answer.

Speaker 1 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 equality

Speaker 1 up but if everyone so why do you run out of eggs early

Speaker 1 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 well what well hold on we did this a diagnostic test and here's the numbers but then it looks pretty bad.

Speaker 1 But the good news is you've got a blue car. Well, what the hell are you talking about? We do this.
Well, which cars?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 If you bring a Toyota in that's got a Rod Nock 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.

Speaker 1 But that has to do with how that actually is built. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's the relative.

Speaker 1 this is literally as dumb as saying two thyroidas, one that broad knocked one's black and one's white.

Speaker 2 Those are exactly. You won, you won.

Speaker 1 You're gonna win most of these, but I'm gonna keep going for it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 If they're making identical copies, how does aging even really happen?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Well, first of all, some species are getting pretty close. So you've got bristle cone pine trees that live 5,000 years.
And aren't there some sharks that are like... Go to 600 years, I think.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. 600.
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 heard this story? No.

Speaker 1 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 bristlecomb pine trees for some reason.

Speaker 1 I think he's using the tree ring data to figure out environmental changes over deep time. This is in the 60s.

Speaker 1 He buys 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.

Speaker 1 He's starting his research, and he gets up there into the forests, probably somewhere here in western U.S., and he starts drilling into a bristlecomb pine, gets the thing stuck.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And is 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.

Speaker 2 That's risky.

Speaker 1 And it was a 5,000-year-old tree. It was.
5,000-year-old tree. I love when you go to Mirror Woods and they've got the cross section.
And then fucking Jesus is on

Speaker 1 one of of the rings. Yeah.
Oh, it's incredible.

Speaker 1 When people argue for like a 6,000-year-old history of the earth, the really serious anti-evolutionists, I think, man, we've got tree ring data older than that.

Speaker 1 For sure, it's older than that. But anyway.
Yeah, how do we age? What's unique about how we age?

Speaker 1 Obviously, we live quite long for we're the oldest living primate for sure, and we do a better job not senescent. So there's been selection there to push that process off.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Everything's a trade-off. So if my body is spending energy keeping myself alive, well, then I'm not spending those calories on reproduction.
And that's the balance of that.

Speaker 1 And really the reproduction part is what evolution really cares about. How many copies of your genes do you get in the next generation?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So that's the standard story about why sustainance happens. The mechanism of exactly what's happening at the cellular level, what's breaking down, why, that still is, I think, up in the air.

Speaker 1 The stuff I find convincing, too, is that it's kind of entropy.

Speaker 1 The wild number of chemical interactions that actually become at that scale, physical interactions of molecules bouncing against molecules, things get wrecked and broken.

Speaker 1 You have to put them back together.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 You got to play two games to try to live forever. One, we know the rules too, and we can do something about, which is make sure you're exercising, eating a healthy diet.

Speaker 1 We can talk a long time about what that would look like.

Speaker 1 Don't smoke. Don't do things that are going to, we know, lead to early drinking.
hate to say everything. Drinking for the hot.
All these things that we know how to do.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But once you push into the kind of the 80s, 90s, then you got to hope you got good genes. Who's the guy that's trying to live forever? It's Brian Johnson.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 1 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 dock.

Speaker 1 I kind of keep up with him a little bit on social media because I think it's interesting.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He's going to beat the four horsemen, as Attia would call them. The preventable cancers.
Metabolic disorders. Yes, he's going to do great.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But then you start hitting the genetic limits of what's possible.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And what's really troubling for vaccines is they are a victim of their success.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But a modern person hasn't seen a generation of kids in wheelchairs and on crutches.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's completely using this natural system that your body has evolved.

Speaker 1 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. Just all such bullshit.

Speaker 1 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? No.
Then what are we doing?

Speaker 1 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.
It's driven by a notion of purity in the natural world.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I believe it. That's really troubling because people are shopping.
Whole foods are also more often college educated. They're upper socioeconomically.
Yes.

Speaker 1 It's a great example of this thing that's become associated with the political right since COVID, but actually before that, it was very much on the political left.

Speaker 1 Well, this is where the circle meets. Exactly.
The sense of purity, the sense of

Speaker 1 nature, natural.

Speaker 2 It's all about everything being natural and non-toxic.

Speaker 1 The 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.

Speaker 1 So, just because polio exists in the natural world doesn't mean that we ought to just say, yes, let's have that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you naturally can't see at a certain age and go get glasses. People are very a la carte about what they want to accept and what they want to write.

Speaker 2 But a lot of people really think that it causes the person to change.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's like, because they were either protected against COVID.
They were happy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. They were smiling.
No, it was wild. And I believed that that's what they saw in their head.

Speaker 1 That's fair.

Speaker 2 I don't know how to tell someone like, like, no, you didn't. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, back to anthropology and cultural anthropology and cultural relativity. I grant people their reality.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There has to be some agreement about an evidence. based way of making decisions.

Speaker 2 Fine, but when it starts impacting other people's realities, that's where I think we have to say no.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And it'd be like branding them your religion when you're born or branding them your political identity.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And they're below that.

Speaker 1 They're powerless to voice a different view and yeah yeah we're seeing outbreaks that are preposterous that we would see in this 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 the National Science Foundation is going to run.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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. Right.

Speaker 1 So that worries me a little bit. Well, Dr.
Poncert, 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't see it. It's a great name.

Speaker 1 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 Permian.

Speaker 2 Hermium. Hermium Permian.
So that's close.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So Hermion 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 of biology like I am.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Thanks for having me. Really fun.

Speaker 1 Next up is the fact, Jack. I don't even care about facts.
I just want to get into your pants.

Speaker 1 Do you want me to bore you with some mechanical stuff? Oh, boy.

Speaker 2 We're already so tired, but sure.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 We are both drowsy. I know.
What's your explanation? Well, yours is the weather.

Speaker 2 I guess I don't even need to add. But yesterday the weather was

Speaker 2 top tier, gorgeous. And I was exhausted.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so my explanation is I flew

Speaker 1 7 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.
Receive my pontoon boat.

Speaker 2 Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 that I've ever heard.

Speaker 1 So many creature comforts. It's, oh, I love it.
I did put up the

Speaker 1 Vimini and cranked 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.

Speaker 1 I bet it's big in the boating world, but I'd never heard it.

Speaker 1 He said,

Speaker 1 it's the most fun you can have on a floating patio.

Speaker 1 And I was like, that is what a pontoon boat is. It's a floating patio.
It's just a perfect rectangle. Great.
Okay, bored. And then

Speaker 1 a lot of busy work readying stuff to depart, whatever. Then I drove.
Also,

Speaker 1 my nose blowings back a bit because my nose was so full on day two of the motorhome drive back.

Speaker 1 So clogged. Really clogged.

Speaker 2 Well, maybe you have a bug.

Speaker 1 No, I think I might have a bug. I think I have a bug.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's probably a bug. So, yeah, I then drove 2,000 miles and

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 Oh, that wasn't it?

Speaker 1 No, nothing's happened so far.

Speaker 2 Oh, I thought just the mention of the boat was mechanical was enough about the bus.

Speaker 1 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 shade in it.

Speaker 1 That thing came off. So that was floppy.
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.

Speaker 1 Okay, it's not the switch. Get home, start reaching out to the dudes I know that build the bus.

Speaker 1 Okay, this is a gratitude and a grievance. Okay.
So grateful they talked to me and they helped me every time. So grateful.
But

Speaker 1 I'm talking with a newer guy and I don't, I feel like he underestimated my mechanical ability. Okay.
So I'm like,

Speaker 1 where does this plug into? Maybe the module's bad, blah, blah, blah. He's like, oh, no, there's a fuse panel under the bed.
And I go, okay, I look under the bed. There's no fuse panel visible.

Speaker 1 So now I'm going under the bed and

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I think he thinks I just can't find it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Plugged it in. I have power in the back.
Flushed it. It popped the fuse.
TBD, more to come. Wow.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 Can't wait. There you go.
While I'm boring you, let me bore you.

Speaker 1 I didn't get to a couple things last fact.

Speaker 2 Well, I want to talk about my toilet. Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 Tell me about your toilet before we move off the toilet topic.

Speaker 2 So my plumber is at my house

Speaker 2 doing some repairs. Now, I had to leave

Speaker 2 in the middle.

Speaker 2 And of course, I'm...

Speaker 1 That's a tricky sitch.

Speaker 2 It's a tricky sitch. What do you think about that?

Speaker 1 I mean, I think you just had to do what you had to do, which is go to work.

Speaker 1 There's really nothing to think about. Is it ideal? No.

Speaker 2 It's not ideal, right? It's not ideal. And I, I mean, I can.

Speaker 1 But I don't think he's going to steal from you.

Speaker 2 Neither do I.

Speaker 1 He's too obvious of a suspect.

Speaker 2 Neither do I. And he's a very nice man.

Speaker 1 Do you know him prior to this? Or is this his first trip over?

Speaker 2 No, he's come over before. He's like the building

Speaker 1 plumber.

Speaker 1 Okay, then I'm not too worried.

Speaker 2 I'm not too worried. I just, you know, it is weird to leave your apartment or house and

Speaker 2 leave a stranger in there.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't think I'd recommend it, but it is what I did. And I do feel a little uneasy about it.

Speaker 1 It's fine. What do you think could happen? He'll look through your stuff.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 There's nothing even specific. It just feels weird.

Speaker 1 A little icky. Yeah, icky.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I already have anxiety, as we talked about. Right.
I have anxiety today.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Death and premature death anxiety.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I heard a very sad story.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I'll tell it.

Speaker 2 I'll tell it quickly. You told that.
I can tell this.

Speaker 1 Well, mine didn't make you sad, did it?

Speaker 2 Sad that I had to listen to it.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 Okay. So yeah, I, um, there's a makeup influencer that I follow that I really like that I, she had a new makeup video.
So I clicked it and it wasn't a makeup video.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 spark like a spell of anxiety for me.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's just like everything comes to the surface of all the bad stories I've ever heard, the scary stories, the unexpected.

Speaker 1 So it's just rumination on scary stories.

Speaker 2 Oh, like the way life is so scary and unfair.

Speaker 1 God, I'm sorry you have that.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 this is what happened. You heard this story and it's why you're feeling like this and it's okay.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 2 I'm also like, I'm pretty smart. So when I say it's okay,

Speaker 1 you start poking.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 This is a smart mouse wearing glasses.

Speaker 2 Yeah, obviously.

Speaker 1 And a graduation gown.

Speaker 2 And holding a little pen, like a quill.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, right.

Speaker 1 Very studious. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the stupid mouse is just wearing undies.

Speaker 1 Sure, that are inside out. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And she says, the stupid stupid mouse is like, it's Monica. It's, 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.

Speaker 2 This is life. This is what happens.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then the stupid mouse is like,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The acceptance isn't helping me

Speaker 2 feel better.

Speaker 1 See, I would reverse those two mice. I think it's the dumb mouse.

Speaker 2 Don't say that about the quill girl.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but it's actually not, it's not as pointed as that. It's not like,

Speaker 2 well, it is, 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.

Speaker 1 That the world

Speaker 2 has very upsetting things happening all the time. And I can walk through life ignoring that most of the time.

Speaker 2 But then when it's like shoved in my face, I am forced to remember that that's part of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And that's what's happening. It's like just overwhelmed.

Speaker 1 But even, I hear you,

Speaker 1 but even that, if you took your 37 times 365 days, you've been alive.

Speaker 2 What if I just was doing this the whole time?

Speaker 1 Just gently knocking the whole time as you heard this.

Speaker 1 But I can't do that. You've hit the limits of my fast.

Speaker 1 I mean, I could, but it would take me five minutes.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 1 We don't have to do that. But suffice to say, over 37 years,

Speaker 1 that's 3,700, 37,000. It's over 150,000 days

Speaker 1 that no one you love has died.

Speaker 2 Well, that's not true. Oh, your grandpa died.

Speaker 1 Well, no people. One day.

Speaker 2 I know people who've died.

Speaker 1 Out of 100.

Speaker 2 This isn't that helpful.

Speaker 1 Like, it's not helpful to be. I just think the smart mouse should be the one that points out the actual odds in the data you've accumulated so far.

Speaker 2 That's not how emotions work.

Speaker 1 Right. The emotions are for the dumb mouse.
No. I'm just asking you to flip the roles of the mice.

Speaker 2 I know. I know what you want me to do.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There's seven billion of us. You're seeing

Speaker 1 it's very misleading.

Speaker 2 But it's not misleading that the world has pain in it.

Speaker 1 No, that's true. The world is

Speaker 2 the smart mouse to say.

Speaker 1 The world is is suffering.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so there's

Speaker 1 Buddhist.

Speaker 2 Well, obviously. The smart mouse is

Speaker 2 like, yes, this world has so much pain and suffering, and it's part of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 that's hard. That's overwhelming for me.
Yeah. Even though I know it's true.

Speaker 1 And I know you can't think your way out of it. I get that.
But also, another angle I would framing is: yes,

Speaker 1 life

Speaker 1 is scary. it has moments of heartache and pain so

Speaker 1 when you're not in those they're coming

Speaker 1 that's yeah 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

Speaker 2 no that doesn't help i know it doesn't really help it's okay Sometimes you have anxiety.

Speaker 1 That's right. Some things I saw and thought of on my trip.
Okay. I was at an In-N-Out in Barstow,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 on a tour of conceivably the USA.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Wow. So they had already gone to New York.
Clearly. Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 And I don't know what that means.

Speaker 2 Brooklyn vibes is like you're chill. Yeah, it's more hipster.

Speaker 1 In New York Dreams, you want to be on Broadway? New York Dreams is

Speaker 2 big city dreams. It's like big city dreams.

Speaker 1 Big city dreams.

Speaker 1 Backwater vibes. Yeah.
I don't know about backwater, but like,

Speaker 2 it's like saying Hollywood dreams, Los Felas vibes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know if I would add that.

Speaker 1 Sure. 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

Speaker 1 Cold War. No, you're going to like this one.
Okay.

Speaker 1 This is about the power of media. Okay.
Okay. So Ronald Reagan

Speaker 1 was ratcheting up

Speaker 1 the nuclear arms race

Speaker 1 really dramatically. Okay.
He really wanted to get leverage over Russia. He was war hawking.
I've talked about this before.

Speaker 1 This is the only thing my mother never let me see in my whole childhood, the day after.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was a movie.

Speaker 1 It was a movie about what the day after a nuclear Holocaust would look like. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And 100 million Americans watched it. Wow.

Speaker 1 It still has the record of the most viewed TV movie ever made. Wow.
A hundred million Americans watched it. Ronald Reagan watched it.
He was profoundly moved

Speaker 1 and he changed his course.

Speaker 2 Really? Yes. And he backed off.
He did.

Speaker 1 And so began

Speaker 1 a more collaborative approach to nuclear disarmament. And I was like, we want to talk about the power of fucking movies and media.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 1 A hundred million people see this thing and then the president completely changes course. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Right. So this circles back sort of to an ongoing debate we have.
Not really, I because I think we sort of agree, but I the power of media is

Speaker 2 very extreme.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 I don't think so. I think you make what you're drawn to.
This, whoever made the day after was into making that kind of movie. Right.
You know, and then so they did that well.

Speaker 1 But I think to give yourself a call. Now we have, I have one that's clear to me here.
Yeah. Um, which is

Speaker 1 openness, vulnerability, poops, trauma, poop, yeah. But, um,

Speaker 1 I don't think any, I don't, do you think people have to have a no?

Speaker 2 I don't think you have to have a cause.

Speaker 1 I don't really trust everyone's thing that they're doing.

Speaker 2 No, I actually 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,

Speaker 2 what if it had made Ronald Reagan like blow up everything?

Speaker 1 Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 That's possible.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this one clearly 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.

Speaker 1 That's happened several times.

Speaker 1 Think this Russian dude,

Speaker 1 he just refused to do it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 His computer was telling him that we had launched 200 nuclear warheads that were inbound and would be there in eight minutes.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 you just got to pray that no one ever responds because like if i'm i hate to tell everyone this but if if if i'm in that job and i see that russia has launched the entire arsenal on us

Speaker 1 my reaction is not to kill all them people right like

Speaker 1 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 i feel i hope that's how everyone feels they don't

Speaker 2 a lot of people are like yeah you got

Speaker 1 hate. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Did you finish Paradise?

Speaker 2 James Marsden's friend of the pod. Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 Friend of the pod.

Speaker 2 So it was, it had an element to that. Spoiler.
I won't say many more. Remember, like he decided.
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Yeah, you're right. You're right.

Speaker 2 That show was great. And I've heard a lot of people talking about it.

Speaker 1 Last thing on my trip, I watched the

Speaker 1 disappearing and murder of one of these girls.

Speaker 2 Gabby Petito or something.

Speaker 1 Gabby, yep, yep.

Speaker 2 That's the one. I haven't seen it.
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.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 Okay. I forget

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They're going to live in a van and they're going to be YouTube people.

Speaker 1 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 they pull up on them or they pull them over.

Speaker 1 He was swerving. He's got some cockamame 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.

Speaker 2 He's like trying to be like

Speaker 2 PC about it.

Speaker 1 Well, I just, it's so weird. Like, you call a woman a girl, and then you call a guy's beating the shit out of a woman a gentleman.

Speaker 1 He really flipped this.

Speaker 2 He did. It was an accident.

Speaker 1 I think maybe, yeah, you go into like police speak. Like, you think that's how the cops talk?

Speaker 2 Exactly. I think that's what is happening.
He's like, feeling.

Speaker 1 Then he should have said the gentleman was hitting the victim or something. He shouldn't have said the gentleman was hitting the victim.

Speaker 2 I don't think he was equipped to really do that.

Speaker 1 I was probably nervous being in it. I just, I heard that line.
I was like, oh my God, hold on. on.
Did you just say the gentleman was hitting the girl? I don't think

Speaker 1 that you could say that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that should, yeah. That guy should be canceled.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 you're now relieved of all my housekeeping from the bus trip.

Speaker 2 No, I loved those last ones. Okay, good.

Speaker 1 The crazier part of that story is like he comes home.

Speaker 1 She's missing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The parents. Of the gentleman or the girl.
The gentleman hit her. The gentleman abuser.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 And they let him live at home for two weeks. And then when the cops come, they go, You can't

Speaker 1 talk to our lawyers. Like they, they get very involved in protecting him.
Oh. And then they find this letter between the mom and the son that predates this.
That was like, I love you so much.

Speaker 1 If you killed someone, I'd get a shovel and bury the body with you and all this stuff.

Speaker 1 It's really kind of like a look at what people do for their kids.

Speaker 1 And I would, I would do, I would do some terrible stuff for my kids. I would.
I can relate.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert.

Speaker 1 If you dare.

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Speaker 2 I don't like that.

Speaker 1 I know, but I have girls,

Speaker 1 it's a little less scary.

Speaker 2 I know, but like, okay, on the pit.

Speaker 2 Show I watch.

Speaker 2 There is this woman,

Speaker 1 girl, woman. gentlemen.

Speaker 2 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 and

Speaker 1 lives in the basement, maybe.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 I've been poisoning myself

Speaker 2 to come so that he would bring me here because i i think there might be something going on with him

Speaker 2 and then this is a crazy plot line no

Speaker 2 call the cops no because she feel she feels like that's a huge betrayal so taking so the she feels like the hospital okay can't like get him arrested of course they can but continue she doesn't know that okay the husband has passed away all right

Speaker 2 now

Speaker 2 so then

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Robbie, Noah Wiley, he goes chasing him. But then

Speaker 2 he's like, he's so hot. And

Speaker 2 he can't find him. And then,

Speaker 2 but he has like a list of the older mother found this list of girls he had like written about.

Speaker 2 And so, Dr. Robbie is like not, he's kind of taking it seriously, but he's like, He's kind of an investigator and a doctor.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's kind of taking it seriously, but he's like, I don't really want to, I, if I go to the police and ruin this boy's life for no reason, right? You know, that's this whole thing.

Speaker 1 That's the conundrum.

Speaker 2 Now, I don't want to spoil, okay. If you're, if you're watching the pit and you're not caught up, pause right now.
Or fast forward. By the end,

Speaker 2 there's a mass shooting. Oh, fuck.
And obviously, it's, we're meant to believe it's this kid.

Speaker 1 Of course, red herring.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I don't know if that's the way it's going to go, but

Speaker 2 the things you do for your kids, like tell me, please, if you saw, I mean, yeah, it's not going to work for your kids because it's like two hours. We know them.
We know them. So it's trickier.

Speaker 2 But let's play it. Let's play.

Speaker 1 This is a worst case scenario.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 And that's not a problem. I don't think that.
That's not my hangup.

Speaker 2 Okay. Well, then let's say that you found a list

Speaker 2 of kids in the class.

Speaker 2 What if it says like, I want to kill them? And it's a list. Yeah.

Speaker 2 What would you do?

Speaker 1 I would ignore it. No, I'm teasing.
I'm teasing. Sorry.

Speaker 1 I would.

Speaker 1 Sit down and we would talk for a long, long while.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then you're also trying to evaluate: do they have the means to do this? Well, how seriously are they?

Speaker 1 If I had an inkling at all that this was a possibility, I would

Speaker 1 move.

Speaker 1 I would take the kids. I would move away from all these people.

Speaker 1 I would get her in therapy, hardcore, and I would get a tutor to come finish her schooling

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 Well, how fast are you going to move that day?

Speaker 2 Because, like, I think if they have this like need to kill.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I also take them to school, so I could definitely pat her down.

Speaker 2 That's true.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They can't fix, that's not what they do.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But there's no services that the city offers that are going to help her in this situation.

Speaker 1 And I just would want to help her.

Speaker 2 Oh, I guess I don't know enough about that

Speaker 2 to know if that's true.

Speaker 1 Homicidal teens.

Speaker 2 We'll know about like what the police could do preemptively.

Speaker 1 We'll think it through. Let's think of what they could possibly do.

Speaker 2 I mean, if they have a list like that,

Speaker 2 I think they could

Speaker 2 arrest them. I don't know if you can arrest them based based on that.
I don't know, actually. I think you could because it's like premeditated.

Speaker 1 Attempted, I don't know. Intent versus attempted.
It's not attempted if she made a list.

Speaker 2 I don't know. No, it's not attempted.

Speaker 1 But regardless, sending her to jail is not going to help.

Speaker 2 Well, it is going to, it's, it, it is going to help

Speaker 2 protect the other kid.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm going to remove her from those other kids.

Speaker 2 I just think removing her from the situation isn't going to, it's, it's going to, so yes, I guess it would protect those kids. Maybe.
I mean, she might just like leave and go go kill them.

Speaker 2 Like, how can you know for sure? Just because you moved?

Speaker 1 Well, I'd be moving to many states away.

Speaker 2 Okay, but what if then she kills at the, oh, you said you're going to do a personality?

Speaker 1 I did a Jonathan Haidt really quick. I thought of all the ways that.

Speaker 2 But kind of, but like,

Speaker 2 if you really did, like,

Speaker 2 in real life,

Speaker 2 if you moved some states over, unless you like literally kept her in her bedroom,

Speaker 2 she's going to be out in the world.

Speaker 1 Well, yes, at a later date with a lot of therapy and assessment.

Speaker 2 The therapy is going to be interesting.

Speaker 1 Do you think

Speaker 1 this is a broader, dicier, scarier question? Okay.

Speaker 1 Do you think it's possible that a kid could have those feelings and intentions in 11th grade and then grow out of that?

Speaker 1 I think I'm inclined to think yes.

Speaker 1 I'm not saying everyone would, but I'm saying, do I I think that's a possibility?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 I think that is a possibility.

Speaker 1 I think my main obligation is to protect any innocent kids from getting hurt. Yes.
And once I've achieved that,

Speaker 1 I think I'm... 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But the question is, what would I do?

Speaker 2 Yeah. But I guess I, if I

Speaker 2 had a kid at that school and I, my kid was on that list,

Speaker 2 you then just taking her away, I don't think would cause me much peace. I think I would have more peace

Speaker 2 knowing that kid was in Juvie versus their parents decided to take them a couple states over and like take it on and get therapy like look in

Speaker 1 five states over okay

Speaker 2 five states over and and also arizona i

Speaker 2 i

Speaker 2 am conflicted because also i agree that i think like a good therapist and a different

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 a safer environment for that kid is actually going to probably result in a better outcome for that kid. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And all hands hands on deck.

Speaker 2 Like I get that.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I get, if that's my kid, I'm like, fuck that. That kid needs to be away.
And like, oh, that's it.

Speaker 1 And for how long? So you're buying yourself like a temporary peace of mind.

Speaker 2 Well, all of it's temporary. If you go and you take your kid there.

Speaker 2 Again, they're not going to like live in their room for another 50 years.

Speaker 1 Right. So that's.
A kind of time's out the same. It's like by the time they'd be letting a kid out of Juvie for having made a list,

Speaker 1 would be the same time Lincoln would be entering the real world as an adult.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So I guess,

Speaker 2 yeah, I would feel like I think there needs to maybe be some

Speaker 2 putting away during that time.

Speaker 2 Just to make sure.

Speaker 1 I get it. I get it.
I get it.

Speaker 1 I'm just being very honest about what I would 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I would steal.

Speaker 1 I would do anything.

Speaker 2 I don't think I'd be able to kill another innocent

Speaker 2 person.

Speaker 2 I don't think I could do that.

Speaker 1 Innocent.

Speaker 1 They have to be threatening your child for this to work.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't. If my kids said, I don't like the grocer, will you kill him?

Speaker 1 I would not do that.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right. This is feeding into your anxiety a little bit, I think.
What if, okay,

Speaker 2 what if at the grocery store?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 She

Speaker 2 pulls a gun.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Okay.
This is a lot. So at the grocery store, Lincoln has a firearm.

Speaker 2 I hate this story.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay. Yeah.
She has a firearm. She hates the grocer.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Mainly because he

Speaker 1 doesn't sell ripe pears.

Speaker 2 No, there's something about his face she just really doesn't like.

Speaker 1 Okay, that reminds me of turning point.

Speaker 1 Continue. Okay.

Speaker 2 And she pulls

Speaker 2 out a gun and is about to shoot him.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I tackle her.

Speaker 2 No, no, no. This is.

Speaker 2 The grocer then pulls out a gun.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 To protect himself. Yeah.
You're there.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 With your own gun.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 What do you do?

Speaker 1 And I have the opportunity to shoot him before

Speaker 2 he shoots her.

Speaker 1 That's a good one. You came up with a good one.
Like, that one's really hard. It is, right? That one's really hard.
Good job.

Speaker 2 Would you ever, would you ever maybe shoot her in the foot? Oh. So that like she drops her gun?

Speaker 1 I would just tackle her so he knew the threat was over and that he didn't have to shoot her.

Speaker 2 Okay, that's your your plan. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it'd be very hard to kill the grocer if she pulled out a car.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 But also, he is a gun to your kid.

Speaker 1 Like, I, yeah, okay, turning point. Oh, sorry, you started.

Speaker 2 This is what I learned.

Speaker 1 So, when Ukraine had their first elections,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The pro-Western candidate was leading by a lot.

Speaker 1 They poisoned him.

Speaker 1 They poisoned him. Who did? Russia.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Duh. And his face.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Have you ever seen this guy?

Speaker 2 No, but they use that

Speaker 1 poison a lot. Drew it.
Ew. But his whole face became inflamed and atrophy.
I mean, they turned him temporarily into a monster.

Speaker 1 So awful. Can you fucking believe that's what they?

Speaker 2 Yes, they do this.

Speaker 1 I know. It's maddening.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's horrifying.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. Oh, so what are the ethics of this? I wish someone would assassinate Putin so bad.

Speaker 2 Yeah, me too. Yeah.
But he's a, but he's inflicting.

Speaker 1 He's killing so many people. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Now, do you think I could go to jail for saying that I want Putin dead?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 You're just not allowed to say that about our president.

Speaker 2 But it's kind of the same as the boy saying. The list.
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 1 So what if they found in my bedroom a list and I said must kill and I intend to kill Putin?

Speaker 2 What can they do?

Speaker 1 I think they'd probably give me 100 bucks for a plane ticket.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 1 That's the thing.

Speaker 2 Well, actually, no, not currently.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 2 Our government is not anti-Putin.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 our government is one, our leader

Speaker 2 who makes all the decisions. Yeah.
All right. Let's do some facts.
Let's do some facts. This is for Herman.

Speaker 1 Oh, Herman. I loved Herman.

Speaker 2 Learned a lot. Okay.
Gigantopithecus.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 I have largest ape to ever live, estimated to have stood about 10 feet tall and weighed over 500 pounds.

Speaker 1 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 I want to see one so bad. Yeah, I know.
I really want to see one.

Speaker 2 And when you do your time machine, you could go back and see one.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 It says they're wandering the thick forests of ancient China during the last ice age. So you'd have to go back there.

Speaker 1 That's not bad. This was 16,000 years ago or something.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Some definite North Face gear, like I were going to Antarctica.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Boy, I'd love to see one.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And maybe even rock to me.

Speaker 2 You wouldn't feel scared and threatened?

Speaker 1 I would, but if I noticed that they thought I was cute and tiny,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Well, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because you're just like, you're like a little piece of bread. Okay.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 malnutrition

Speaker 2 is bad for you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 School-age 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.

Speaker 2 The disadvantages last at least until adolescence.

Speaker 1 Yeah, at least. It's not they're not going to get better.

Speaker 2 Well, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Brain's organized.

Speaker 2 And that's when your brain is

Speaker 2 so mushy.

Speaker 2 Just trying to form is all.

Speaker 1 It's not a fair planet.

Speaker 2 See?

Speaker 2 See? That's what the smart mouse says.

Speaker 1 Uh-huh. It's not a fair planet.
Probably not.

Speaker 1 Okay, that's it. That was it.
Okay, that was light.

Speaker 1 Light and easy.

Speaker 1 Easy beasy. All right.

Speaker 2 We like Carmen and we like each other.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we like each other. You have some anxiety, but it's okay.

Speaker 1 It'll pass.

Speaker 2 It'll pass.

Speaker 1 It will. Tomorrow you'll be feeling 10 feet tall and bulletproof.

Speaker 2 Gigantopithecus.

Speaker 1 All right. Let me see.
All right. Let me.

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Speaker 3 Hey there, Armchairies.

Speaker 4 Guess what?

Speaker 1 It's Mel Robbins.

Speaker 3 I'm popping in here taking out my own ad. Holy Holy cow, Dax, Monica, and I, I don't want this conversation to end.
And I'm so glad you're here with us.

Speaker 4 And the other thing, I can't believe, Dax loves the Let Them Theory. He can't stop talking about it.

Speaker 3 I hope you're loving listening as much as I love having you here. And I also know, since you love listening to Armchair Expert, you know who you're going to love listening to?

Speaker 1 The Let Them Theory audiobook.

Speaker 4 And guess who reads it?

Speaker 1 Me.

Speaker 4 And even if you've read the book, guess what? The audiobook is different.

Speaker 3 I tell different stories. I riff.
I cry.

Speaker 4 You're going to love it because it's going to feel like I'm right there next to you.

Speaker 3 We're in this together as we learn to stop controlling other people.

Speaker 3 So, thanks again for listening to this episode of Armchair Expert and check out the audiobook version of the Let Them Theory, read by yours truly.

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