Fear is one of our most powerful emotions. But where does it really come from and how can we overcome it. Dr. Kerry Ressler has spent more than 20 years studying fear, phobias and anxiety. We talk what fear does to our bodies and brains, the best ways to overcome fear and anxiety and why our lives may now be ruled by fear. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Sports Nicknames of All Time.
Dr. Kerry Ressler: 01:13
Pointless: 32: 44
Top 5 Sports Nicknames: 52:46
Interview with Fear Researcher Dr. Kerry Ressler
Nick VinZant 0:00
Nick, welcome to profoundly pointless. My name is Nick vinzant Coming up in this episode fear and sports nicknames
Dr. Kerry Ressler 0:19
that takes about half a second to be consciously aware of what we're saying. So our awareness is about half a second behind reality. And how can you train your body to calm down, train yourself to believe your behaviors and the facts around you and not your emotions? That about a third to a half of your risk for having really severe fear is genetically inherited.
Nick VinZant 0:42
I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance subscribe, leave us a rating or a review. We really appreciate it. It really helps us out. If you're a new listener, welcome to the show. If you're a longtime listener, thank you so much for all of your support. So I want to get right to our first guest, because he studies something that has a huge impact on all of our lives, fear. This is fear researcher, Dr Kerry Ressler. So why do we feel fear?
Dr. Kerry Ressler 1:14
I would say we feel fear for several different reasons. I think the most straightforward is it is probably the most important emotion for survival, and thus the most important driver of evolution. If, if we cannot be afraid, we would not we would be quickly eaten by predators long before we evolved as humans. I think the human condition is about, how do we have this emotions like fear that can totally take over. And how do we regulate them so we use them when we need to, and not be completely driven by them all the time? You mentioned,
Nick VinZant 1:48
this is something that we share with other animals. Do we feel it differently than other animals? Do we seem to feel it more or less or about the same?
Dr. Kerry Ressler 1:56
I don't know that we know, you know? I think we can. We can, you know, that's the thing about animal research, is we can learn a lot by observing their behavior, but they can't talk to
Nick VinZant 2:08
us. A significant hurdle, right? Fear
Dr. Kerry Ressler 2:10
in humans is mostly a subjective thing. One person's fear is not the same as another person's fear all the time. So we really need to talk about about threat related behaviors, or fear behaviors or fear responses. Because we really do need to separate sort of the subjective consciousness of fear, which can have a lot of the components of anxiety and anticipation and all those things, from sort of the very behavioral component of fear, like that sense of panic, that sense of I'm just running for my freaking life,
Nick VinZant 2:40
do we feel fear in the way that we used to? Because I would imagine, like, back when we were prehistoric times, I was afraid of the lion coming to eat me. Now I'm afraid of social interaction. You
Dr. Kerry Ressler 2:53
know, I think that's both one of the very exciting components of fear and also one of the problems, where I think it gets really interesting, is where we are today as a species. We've gone, you know, in the last 100 years, has been more social evolution than probably all history before, and now we're doing things like online podcast and 24/7 news cycles, and we've got all our smartphones and our computers and everything, and we're all exposed to the whole world all the time. And we're not just exposed to our immediate family or our tribe or the hunter gatherer situation, we're just sort of overwhelmed with what potentially could be fearful events. So that might be everything from feeling scared about a war in another continent, being scared about the potential of the politician that we don't trust going the wrong direction. And so much of current politics is driven by fear or or being scared that people don't like me on social media. And so there's all of these components where there's still this base emotion of threat and fear, but there's now this sort of secondary things on top of it. And I think that, you know, is a large driver why we have such high levels of anxiety and stress today? Yeah,
Nick VinZant 4:03
are we kind of using it in the wrong way, like this thing that was supposed to warn you about the lion is now responding to, oh my gosh, am I going to use the wrong word in this email to my boss? Exactly,
Dr. Kerry Ressler 4:13
I think. So we didn't evolve for the world we live in, and so we had these basic emotions that are really hundreds of 1000s of years old in their circuitry, there's minimal evidence that that human evolution over the last several 100,000 years has changed much of anything particularly related to basic emotions. Is
Nick VinZant 4:34
the flaw with the foundation and the design in it, or is it the flaw with the application that we are now using it for? Does that make sense? I
Dr. Kerry Ressler 4:41
think the simple answer is that we've evolved past our social our social evolution and our technological evolution has evolved past what our biological evolution prepared us for. The big irony, I think, is that the. The evolutionary drive that may have been most important beyond like mating and having babies for survival, may be the thing most likely to kill it to the species, because it's also, I think, underlying fear that drives xenophobia and drives cycle to violence and drives wars. And so it is, I think, quite an interesting observation thing
Nick VinZant 5:23
getting back into, like, less existential questions, what's like when we feel fear, what's happening in our brain? It's cool,
Dr. Kerry Ressler 5:32
because it's one of the best understood neural circuits of how brain connectivity leads to a specific set of feelings or emotions or behaviors. So I'll walk you through an example I often show when giving a talk. Let's say you're walking down so my favorite sort of somewhat funny metaphor to you that my wife is deadly afraid of snakes. So what's going on at these distant we start with the sensory emotion. So in the case of seeing the snake, your eyes are, you know, constantly pulling in information from the world around you on a microsecond, millisecond level, in the first place, the eyes and information is a brain, middle brain place called the thalamus. And the thalamus then has two projections. One of them goes to the visual cortex, higher multiple levels of visual cortex, and then finally up to sort of frontal cortex, and where we have what we think is consciousness and awareness that takes about half a second to be consciously aware of what we're saying. So that, by itself, is an interesting observation. We're always our awareness is about half a second behind reality,
Nick VinZant 6:34
some more than others, I think,
Dr. Kerry Ressler 6:36
some maybe minutes. But at the same time, that middle thalamus region, the first part of the brain that gets information from the eye, sends a project, another neural projection, down to the amygdala. And this is this area just inside the ears, and the amygdala is, is really the part of the brain that that evolved for very rapid emotional, sensory detection of the world around us, and so it's getting the sort of pre processed information, and it very rapidly within two sections within the amygdala sends hardwired projection to many different brainstem and subcortical areas that activate the temperature response, the breathing response, the stomach upset response, the startle physiological response, the sweating response, increasing blood pressure. That all happens in about 100 milliseconds. So before, well before, hundreds of milliseconds before you're consciously aware of seeing that thing, your amygdala, that's that's prepared for the snakes of the world has already set off. This might be a snake. Fire, fire, fire. Will Robinson run, you know? And it actually felt and then you come back, then you kind of become consciously aware, oh, why am I feeling this way? It's just a stick, but your heart's already racing, you're already sweating, you're already doing anything. So that's kind of the thing we all go through all the time.
Nick VinZant 7:54
So we're reacting to it before we even consciously recognize exactly,
Dr. Kerry Ressler 7:58
exactly. It's a driver of our behavior, and it had to be, because it, you know, the systems evolved to have an extraordinarily rapid fight or flight system, right? So that you can get get the hell out of dodge before you get eaten. And you need to be reacting faster than you can think about whether you should run or not. So that's the basics. And then when you think about people, and we all have some level of that, and we all can think of a story in our head, but if you think about things like post traumatic stress disorder, that's a case where somebody had a severe trauma and now they are responding like that all the time, inappropriately, overly generalizably. They can't get out of the house. They're avoiding things. So if that fear reaction has just gone to 1000 and they can't control it. Or with like people with significant general anxiety, they're sort of always feeling on edge, even if they don't quite know why, and it's because that amygdala system is just sort of always ramped up and always feeling like they're at threat, even with or not. So
Nick VinZant 8:57
then how can we control something where our body's reacting before we're even aware of it.
Dr. Kerry Ressler 9:02
You often can't in the moment, and a lot of our therapies, you know, are about that process. So some kinds of therapies, one's called dialectical behavior therapy, DBT, but it's really just emotion regulation, and it teaches you ways of okay, even if I'm feeling out of control. If you know, if I'm feeling like I'm dying, I have to cognitively know that I'm not. And this is the whole range of cognitive behavior therapies. And how can you train your body to calm down, train yourself to believe your behaviors and the facts around you, and not your emotion? So part of it's really just psychoeducation. Your Your emotions will lie to you, and they're often not that accurate that, I think, is, you know, again, sorry for keep coming back to politics. But as you say, We're prisoners of the moment. I think that's part of the issue. You know, politicians that can speak to emotion are much more successful in getting votes than those who speak to cerebral and logical issues. At the end of the day, we may. Decision to buy our emotions, and that's really well trained out through other kinds of therapies, and where we can trigger things like post traumatic stress, you essentially retrain the brain that those cues and the things in the world that remind you of the trauma are not actually dangerous, and you do that in part, just by re experiencing them. So if you're afraid of snake, I keep trying to convince Betsy to do this. You have to, you have to have exposure therapy with phobia. So you would start by maybe sitting in a room with a snake, going to a zoo with a lot of snakes, then holding a snake, maybe having a pet as a snake. You know, you're retraining the brain that these things that I'm naturally afraid of, I don't have to be and with trauma, it's that that was a horrible thing that happened, but it happened that that time by that person in that place. And it's not all the people who look like them, and it's not all cars or whatever. So general idea, when
Nick VinZant 10:50
you kind of look at exposure therapy, is it something that like, Okay, this really works, or this works better than anything else we got.
Dr. Kerry Ressler 10:57
The latter. You know, most things in mental health, nothing you know, don't work as well as we'd like them to work. Yeah, and so exposure therapy is has the best evidence of the types of therapies we use in the phobias, in post traumatic stress disorder, in obsessive compulsive disorder and those sorts of things. And we really think now that our what we call, traditionally, anxiety disorders, and those be like phobias, OCD, social anxiety, social phobia, and then post traumatic stress is sort of the most extreme. We think of all of those as really fear related disorders, or disorders of the fear system
Nick VinZant 11:36
is, is fear more nature or nurture in the sense that like, can you look at someone's physiological makeup of their brain and say that person is going to really struggle with fear, or is it a thing that we like learn as we go throughout life, both
Dr. Kerry Ressler 11:52
nature and nurture, we're starting to be able to answer that more quantitatively by doing large Scale genetic study. So twin studies where you take, you know identical twins, and you follow them over a lifetime, and people did a lot of this in the 70s and 80s, and then now that genetics has gotten a lot cheaper, we mostly do large scale genetics, but the twin study suggests that disorders like post traumatic stress disorder or severe anxiety, that those probably have about a 30 to 40% genetic basis, so that about a third to a half of your risk for having really severe fear is genetically inherited. But that means at least a half to two thirds is environment, is nurture, right? And that's and we know that the environmental component is both, is both early development and that's childhood trauma, childhood adversity, childhood neglect, are often the biggest risk factors for almost everything in psychiatry. But they're certainly not alone, and there's certainly people who have some of those things and turn out fine, but, but it's certainly one of the big risk factors. Another is just level of level of trauma or threat or stress over one's lifetime. So, you know, living in a lower resource environment, having less mental health resources, having, you know, broken families, you know, all the things that are bad with higher risk for all these things, and part of that's because the more unstable, the more uncertain your life has been in the past, the more your fear system is. Sort of like, I don't know where I'm safe and when I'm not. Yeah, it's interesting.
Nick VinZant 13:33
I'll kind of divulge some personal information. I came from a very stable environment, and I'm generally not very afraid of things, and I don't have very much anxiety. Other people that I know who have come from less stable environments have way more anxiety.
Dr. Kerry Ressler 13:48
And just one thing, you know, we so we did a study of about 15,000 people in inner city, Atlanta, and we asked literally 1000s of questions, and we did imaging, and we did biology, we know, inevitably, one of the biggest variable, most powerful variables of significant depression or post traumatic stress in adulthood was a very simple so we'd ask a lot about different kinds of childhood trauma. But if you simply ask, Did you grow up in a stable or unstable household? However you interpret that that was a huge predictor. So saying whatever would make somebody say no, it was pretty unstable in that sort of force. Yes or no. Question was highly correlated with much more risk.
Nick VinZant 14:28
Does it seem to be when somebody develops like one of the more extreme negative reactions to it? Does it seem to be a quality or a quantity thing like this needs to happen a lot or no, you just have to have one or two really bad experiences.
Dr. Kerry Ressler 14:41
It's an additive process which you could probably get through multiple ways, right? So I think one or two really bad experiences may be sort of equivalent to a lot of sort of minor experiences. Yeah, right, but it's some total dose response curve that we don't really understand, but we one. One term in the field is called trauma load. It's how you know, the loading of how much trauma you've had over your lifetime seems to shift you to more and more risk. That said, there are certainly some examples of what we call traumatic growth, or, you know, basically building resiliency, that if you have some level of maybe not so much trauma, but unpredictability or stress, but that you can overcome it or have the right social supports, parental supports, other that those can build resiliency and can build confidence, that you can overcome difficult things, right? And so that's, I think, one of the interesting dialectics of discussion between, well, all trauma is bad, versus okay. Now we have a snowflake generation in which nobody can handle anything, right? Something about independence, something about overcoming difficult situations. But that's very different than obviously being, you know, being physically attacked, being sexually attacked, being bullied all the time in school. So, so it's all about, I think, part as you say that the quantity or the or the level of of of trauma, yeah. It kind
Nick VinZant 16:01
of sounds like you got to get to the proverbial number 10, and whether you get there through two fives or 10 ones, once you get there, you're there. Yeah.
Dr. Kerry Ressler 16:11
And that that's mediated in part by and that's kind of how we think the gene, by environment, the nature and nurture work, the nature the genetics probably partly sets what that threshold is for how much you can take, and the nature and the nurture is, how many you know, how do you get to 10? Or for one person, it may be 20, and another person it may be five, yeah, for the threshold.
Nick VinZant 16:34
So when we feel fear, like, what is it that our body wants us to do? There's
Dr. Kerry Ressler 16:40
several different sort of hardwired reflexes to the fear response. So the classic terminology is fight, flight or freeze, and that, you know, pretty much wraps it up. So first is, you know, is defend yourself if you can't escape. The second one is run away if you still can escape. And the third one is if neither of those are going to work, freeze and maybe they won't see you. And so this makes a lot of sense, like with rodents, right? So if you're a little mouse, and there's a you know, you see a snake coming near you, well, they they've evolved, and a lot of this is because your predators use use motion to detect the prey, so that's why they just sort of freeze and hope not to be seen. But once the once the predator is close enough that that's that it's clear they're seen and they're not going to free, they're not going to freeze, then emotion will cause them to startle and run. And so a lot of the circuitry is starting to be figured out about what's the difference between when that same fear input is telling you to startle and run or to freeze, or if it's another animal that might be wanting to attack you again when they're far enough away, if it's maybe two males fighting over territory, when are they far enough away you can ignore them, freeze them or run away, versus when are you going to have to fight? And so yeah, there's a lot starting to be understood about that. Now, as far as humans, how does that work? You know, the fight one kind of makes sense, and you can, you know, certainly see people who are more disinhibited or afraid or fighting the cycles of violence, I think come to that the freezing is a little harder, but an example of that is, you know, giving a giving a talk, or, you know, be on a first date, and your mouse dry, and you can't think of what to say, and you're just kind of stuck and in more severe PTSD, that was like, what we call dissociation. People's eyes may roll back. They're sort of almost feel like they're in an out of body experience. They're just so entirely separated from the present moment when
Nick VinZant 18:33
we feel that fear emotion. Can other emotions override it? Or is this like, nope. This is the only thing you are playing paying attention to that kind of like, when I'm cold, all I think about is the fact that I'm cold. Nothing else matters.
Dr. Kerry Ressler 18:50
Yeah, it can be though it's hard. So panic attack is a good example. So that's we. I don't know how, how familiar folks are with the panic attack, but the idea is, you'll you might be fine, you might be a little anxious, and then all of a sudden it feels like you're you got to get out of there. You're dying, you're you're sweating, your heart's racing, and you just got to escape. But in that panic attack, the treatments that we can tell people are one, there are things like meditation, but it can be really hard when you're when you're all your cylinders are firing to meditate. And then you mentioned being cold. Actually, one of the most interesting techniques is, is ice diving. And you may not go whole body, but they'll, you know, tell people to put, you know, get a bowl of ice water and stick your face in it. And in people who are really suffering with a lot of distress and sometimes complex trauma, they might cut themselves and, of course, not A, not a positive way of dealing, yeah, these are all things that basically bring the sensory world in so strongly that they help you get grounded and kind of take yourself out of your mind. That is right now. Being so much in this fearful space,
Nick VinZant 20:02
you know, have a family member that they can kind of get going, for lack of a better word, but then they'll grab an ice cube, and it seems to like, reset. Yeah,
Dr. Kerry Ressler 20:12
that's exactly, I mean, that's, that's what's about, you know, that basic ideas behind a lot of the tools that are really about grounding tools or distraction tools that are essentially taking a really strong sensory cue and having you focus on that so that sort of takes that attention away from the fight or flight motion. And it doesn't always work 100% but it can. It can be a helpful way of pulling yourself back down.
Nick VinZant 20:41
Are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions. Go, sure. Does fear change throughout ages? Like, is there an age where we seem to be more fearful than other ages?
Dr. Kerry Ressler 20:51
Most anxiety disorders and therefore most severe fear, you know, have to start in earlier in life, and whether that be, you know, probably the peak of when it really starts to get impairing is in the, you know, teens and 20s and but, but it seems again, back to the kind of nature, nurture thing. Anxious kids often grow up to be anxious adults, you know. And really shy kids often have to grow up to be kind of introverted, you know, kind of quiet adults. And so it doesn't things like PTSD is probably the only one of this beds that seems to go where people are kind of fine and a horrible thing happens, and now they're different. Most of the other spectrum anxiety spectrum disorders have been there at some level, so it's usually pretty early in development. The two differences are postmenopausal, because estrogen has such a huge effect on everything that women who may have had some anxiety or depression pre election, but who were doing pretty well sometimes in the postmenopausal period, a lot of that can come back, and that's what sometimes feel similar to a post partum with the change event, and then with early dementia, also, as people lose some of their cortical ability to sort of control their their emotions, they'll start to get more dysregulated and fearful and agitated. And a lot of agitation in people with dementia is really, I think, anxiety and fear.
Nick VinZant 22:16
What is the difference between fear and anxiety? Is that the same thing or just kind of like, No, this is just a lesser version of fear.
Dr. Kerry Ressler 22:25
The simple answer is, they're more alike than different. But there's interesting other answers. And so there's two different brain regions. I talked about the amygdala. There's another brain region that's a little more forward in the brain and a little smaller, that's kind of in the middle of the brain, and it's called the bNSt bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. You know, you get a neurology lesson today, but so it turns out they both get similar inputs and they have similar outputs. So both regions can drive that panic attack, but the amygdala is more activated by by things that are more close to attacking, that sort of almost immediate attack, and that's what we think of more sort of that immediate fear response. The bed nucleus, the bNSt, seems to be more activated by by distal threats, or more general unknown threat unpredictability. And in rodents, you can model this by the amygdala is more activated if the if the mouse is right up to it, if the AfD attack was right up to it, that's going to more attack. The amygdala, the bNSt, is more activated if there's like a looming bird, or a sound of a something off in the distance, but they can't see it. And so it seems like there's some evidence that these that unpredictability is more anxiety, and that's more of the bNSt, and it's more about distal threat. You know, there's something going to happen, but you're not sure what to do. And that may more activate slowly going away, or going down in your burrow, or kind of hiding out from other people. And the amygdala, which is the close up threat, is what the more fear is about. And that's more than jumping the response, a lot more of the immediate physiological reaction,
Nick VinZant 24:02
is there kind of another shoe to drop, or another cost to pay, and that if we're feeling this same fear and anxiety so much more than we potentially were at the past, or somebody is feeling it a lot more than somebody else, like does that take a toll on our brain or our body in a different way?
Dr. Kerry Ressler 24:18
Yeah, well, at the at the extreme level, well, I mean, I can talk about this in multiple levels. Right anxiety disorders, particularly PTSD, are some of the highest risk for suicide. I also think that a lot of violence is I think about fear and anxiety, and particularly fear. I think the in biologically, people with severe anxiety disorders and PTSD have higher risk of dementia when they grow older. So there's some nature, nurture effect of Alzheimer's and other dementias as well. There's both a biological component, but a lifetime of stress increases that risk as well. And then what we're starting to understand a lot about is the intersection. Of emotions in the brain, with the immune system. And it turns out that people with with severe anxiety, PTSD and fear, are more likely to have a more inflammatory state. They're more likely to have, perhaps, alterations in their appetite. They're more likely to be at risk for other kinds of biological and physiological disorders like cardiovascular disease and even cancer. So that chronic stress, which is often the outcome of dysregulated fear, can be a risk factor for many other biological component disorders too.
Nick VinZant 25:32
Are we more fearful than we have been in the past? I think the emotion of fear
Dr. Kerry Ressler 25:35
is probably similar, but I think the number of things, the number of opportunities we have to be afraid, and the number of things that can drive our fear are much, much more. You know, it's not, not to take away from, you know, obviously being in a war zone, anytime in history, is a horrible thing, or being in an abusive relationship or a dangerous family or something, but, but I think for the average person who may not be in a war zone, etc, your exposure to fearful cues because of social media, because of 24/7 news, because of the increasingly, you know, small size of the world. While that has many positive things, it really has a lot of activation of our fear circuits as well.
Nick VinZant 26:18
What is the reason like, why do we like scary things?
Dr. Kerry Ressler 26:23
I think that's where we're kind of the adrenaline rush. And there are some people who they like that the really, you know, the feeling of the rush, the feeling of their body, the feeling of the adrenaline, but they can also know that they truly are safe. So they're able to both hold both of those things true. Yes, I'm feeling all this as if I'm not, but I know I'm going to be okay, and that actually feels very exciting or rewarding to them.
Nick VinZant 26:46
Have you ever seen anybody that was like incapable of fear, like they just didn't have that emotion whatsoever?
Dr. Kerry Ressler 26:54
I personally have not. I mean, there's stories. So there's some very interesting examples of people who who who have a inborn disorder, where, actually they their amygdala degenerate, and they've they, they don't have the same sense of fear that the rest of us do. They know that there's this concept in the literature about fear, but they don't seem to feel it physiologically or the same way. I think the more common is, at some level, things like, you know, sociopathy, they've been shown to, you know, people with very severe narcissistic personality disorder or associate or sociopath that they don't seem to activate the amygdala in the same way that others. And what that's about, I think, is still not quite sure, the thought that most of those folks probably had a very early trauma, and they sort of probably dealt with it somehow, by just sort of flipping the whole thing. And not, you know, but for the most part, it is very rare.
Nick VinZant 27:51
How does a fear? How does a fear become a phobia? Like, not, not a phobia. That's, you know, I'll use this word. I don't mean this word legitimate, but like, I'm afraid of doorknobs. Like, how does something like that happen?
Dr. Kerry Ressler 28:05
Yeah, we don't really know. Actually, it's because most data suggests that people with pretty significant phobias had them from very early on, so that people with fear of heights had them from very early on. People with fear of dogs or snakes, have them from very early on. So then there's the question of, well, the traditional learning and memory theory is that that phobia is really just an overly learned fear, but as opposed but, but it's very specific in the cues, but there, and there's definitely people like that, for whom, you know, they can say, okay, yeah, I remember when I saw a dog, a dog chased me down the street. And Ever After that, I was I would just get so upset when I saw a dog or whatever. And the but, but the others are less clear. And one thought is that, so there's certainly the possibility that one of the one of the stories in the field is that we perhaps don't, while we're not inborn with specific fears, we maybe have evolved to be more fearful of certain kinds of things than others. So we're generally more likely to have phobias of predators like canines or sharks snakes than we are of, you know, gerbils. Yeah,
Nick VinZant 29:23
that makes, I understand. That makes sense,
Dr. Kerry Ressler 29:27
yeah. And what's interesting is, you know, we're not, there aren't any phobia some guns and cars, and that's what kills everybody. So there's some, maybe some, you know, evolve, evolve predispositions with certain kinds of things and others. The other is that thinking about development of emotion, there's a lot of data that our amygdala is active from very early in in birth, right? And you can see that with brand newborn babies, they're just kind of all emotion. They're either giggling and happy or they're crying and screaming or very easily startled, and it. Mean, but we don't actually develop the parts of the brain for our more explicit memories and our declarative memories until about three years old. So we have three or four years of developing emotional memories and social memories and experiential memories before we have any definitive memory of them. And so you could certainly not plenty of time to have been chased by a dog or seen a snake or gotten too close to a window and gotten afraid without really having a declarative memory about that event. Is
Nick VinZant 30:30
there anything that it would be considered like? What's the universally scariest thing
Dr. Kerry Ressler 30:35
in MRI scanners when you're looking at the brain activation, it is actually seeing another person be afraid. And so you can have people look at all sorts of scary pictures and horror movies, but if somebody has the look of, you know, this full tear that most traditionally activates the fear system. And so the thought is there that, you know, we socially we socially empathize, we socially mimic. And that may be one of the most universal things that make us afraid, is seeing somebody else be afraid. And that's also one of the thoughts about maybe how phobias and some anxiety works, is that it may not be so much. It doesn't have to have been experienced yourself, if you saw a family member or somebody else, you know, you saw a parent, be really afraid of something you have observational fear.
Nick VinZant 31:20
That's pretty much all the questions I got. What are you kind of studying now? How can people learn more about your work?
Dr. Kerry Ressler 31:28
Let's see, I'm at McLean Hospital, so you can look me up at the McLean Hospital website or our Rab website, rescorab.com and we're studying both on the human side, large scale studies of genetics and neuroimaging and post mortem studies. It's a very exciting time in the field. You know, people have known about post mortem studies of neurological disease for a long time, like Alzheimer's and other ways to understand the brain, but we're now have the molecular tools to understand the molecular aspects of brain regions related to mental health disorders, and so that's really leading to a next generation of tools and approaches and understanding, and then we also study at very basic mechanisms, how these regions, like the amygdala work, and can we develop new new medications and other kinds of therapies for decreasing the fear response in a therapeutic way.
Nick VinZant 32:17
I want to thank Dr Ressler so much for joining us. If you want to connect with him, we have linked to him on our social media sites. We're profoundly pointless on Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube, and we've also included his information in the episode description. And if you want to see more of this interview, the YouTube version will be live on october 17 at 12:30pm Pacific. Okay, now let's bring in John Shaw and get to the pointless part of the show. If your car was a transformer, would it be a cool transformer or a lame transformer?
John Shull 32:56
Oh, that's an easy question. It'd be a lame transformer because I drive a 2013 Chevy Cruze that I can barely fit in anymore.
Nick VinZant 33:06
Oh, yeah, that would be a lame transformer. But
John Shull 33:09
if I, if I was a transformer, like I transform into a vehicle, which I feel is the better question. Oh, okay, okay,
Nick VinZant 33:18
all right,
John Shull 33:19
I'd be like a fire truck or a dump truck, some kind of big truck. Oh,
Nick VinZant 33:23
I'd want to be a plane. Why wouldn't you just be a plane? You could be a jumbo jet.
John Shull 33:31
I'm just simply going by, like my body mass, and what I would be if I turned into a vehicle, and that'd be some kind of big front loader or something.
Nick VinZant 33:40
Oh, yeah. But even if, okay, okay, even if you had a different body type, would you still want to be like a fire truck? Transformer like, what would car would you want to be? If I
John Shull 33:52
could be anything, it would be a boat.
Nick VinZant 33:56
Are there transformer boats? I don't. I'm sure that there is. I'm not familiar with any transformers. Who are boats, though,
John Shull 34:03
I am not versed enough in Transformers to really talk about it, but I'm sure there is a boat transformer. Let's see.
Nick VinZant 34:12
Okay, so I have a Subaru Crosstrek because I live in Seattle, and if you live in Seattle, you are required to own some sort of Subaru. And I don't think that my if my car was a transformer, it wouldn't become it wouldn't be lame, but it wouldn't be one of the cooler transformers on a scale of one to 10. It would be like a five or a six, I think is where my car would sit in terms of transformer coolness or lameness.
John Shull 34:41
I mean, I feel like, unless it's a sports car or a giant truck or something decked out, everything's going to be kind of in the mid range, like, I don't think it's going to be too cool. And yes, there is a transformer boat, by the way. Uh, legacy is its name.
Nick VinZant 34:56
Oh, what kind of boat is it?
John Shull 34:59
Um. Um, didn't get very hard question. It's a double propeller boat. I have no idea.
Nick VinZant 35:05
I have no idea of a thing. I feel like I know less about boats than any other mode of transportation.
John Shull 35:10
Bet you wish you knew about submarines.
Nick VinZant 35:14
How many books on submarines Do you have? Just a quick check right now. How many books on submarines do you have at the moment?
John Shull 35:18
I don't know, probably about a dozen. I just gave, just gave away a bunch of books, actually.
Nick VinZant 35:24
Oh, that's very nice of you. You know, you don't really have to even buy them. You can just go to the library,
John Shull 35:31
yeah, but, you know, I'd rather support the writing community.
Nick VinZant 35:36
Oh, yeah, I guess that's a one way to put it. Okay, that's but I polled the audience, 55% of people think that their car would be a relatively lame transformer. So you're not alone in thinking your car would be a lame transformer.
John Shull 35:51
I don't think enough people realize that having a car isn't that cool. Anyways, in terms of like, having a really nice sports car. Most people like that's not, that's not a sustainable vehicle for them, No,
Nick VinZant 36:06
I've never really been a car person. To me, the only thing about a car that matters is doesn't have four wheels and will get me to the where I need to go. There
John Shull 36:15
was one point in my life where I actually went to a Lamborghini dealership. And I was young. I lived in Orlando, right before I met you, actually, and, yeah, it was quite embarrassing. Now, looking back on it, I don't know why they even let me get to, like, the pricing option.
Nick VinZant 36:34
Oh, you actually, like, started having a conversation, like you were going to buy the thing. I
John Shull 36:39
mean, I lied pretty much every question they asked me from from the get and they knew as soon as I sat down that I was lying real bad.
Nick VinZant 36:50
Why did you let it get that far, like eventually? Didn't you know that you were just lying to these people like you had no means of affording this thing?
John Shull 37:00
Well, you should go absolutely, absolutely, but I Well, for one, I didn't realize that you can't lease Lamborghinis. They don't let you like they're at least the place I went, they didn't have any leasing on them. It was like, buy them or nothing, um. But they anyway, as soon as I sat down and they were like, Okay, start filling out this paperwork. That's just like, can I test can I test drive one of them real fast, just to see how I how I feel in it? And, yeah, they, they didn't buy any of it. Oh,
Nick VinZant 37:30
my God, you actually went there thinking, Well, I guess there's only one way to find out. I mean, in hindsight, like in my age now, I would look back and be like, Man, you were a dumb kid. Oh,
John Shull 37:41
I mean, I mean, I walked in there probably wearing the cheapest clothes with the cheapest car, and, you know, I mean, but I that I always wanted to, like, you know, I just wanted, I never got what the price was, by the way, like, you didn't even get that far. Oh, no, as soon as they started, like, like, as soon as they handed me, like, a slip, you know, to fill out for, like, a loan or whatever, I was like, What am I doing? What am I going to put my income as 40 grand? Like, what
Nick VinZant 38:13
could you imagine? Like, what they would just tell you to leave? They like, Hey, man, you can't afford this anyway, but you never know, with people like you got to be nice to everybody at the onset, at the Lamborghini dealership, well,
John Shull 38:25
I want to publicly, this is the first time I've done this. I want to publicly apologize to David if he's still there, because I wasted an hour of your time.
Nick VinZant 38:34
Oh my, you wait. You were there for an hour with the guy.
John Shull 38:38
I mean, he wasn't with me the entire time, we'll say, a good half an hour. He was with me still.
Nick VinZant 38:43
Dude, that probably happens to David all the time. Man, he probably went home and complained about you okay on it. Like, how many people do you think in a work setting have gone home and complained about dealing with you as part of their job? My God, this guy
John Shull 39:03
I don't know about. I mean, I'm a pretty fair employee, a pretty good and, like, I don't think they complain, but I feel like everyone says that, so I'll say probably, like two out of every 10, probably okay,
Nick VinZant 39:17
like 20% of people who you have to deal with in a work capacity probably complain about you when they get home. That's not good. It's not terrible. Mine's probably a little bit lower than that, but I could be biased. I would say Mine's probably like five to 10% of people who have to deal with me in a work capacity complain about me.
John Shull 39:37
I mean, you know, but they'll never complain to my face. That's the thing. You know what I mean? Like, oh yeah, I
Nick VinZant 39:42
don't usually cause enough problems that somebody's going to complain to my face. I would agree with that. Okay, alright, let's move on. Alright,
John Shull 39:50
time to the everyone's favorite part of the production, the shout outs. Let's see. We'll start with RJ baldinelli. That's a good. Name, Dan fight star, uh Emiliano Botello, Chris Welch, Daniel gallineia, Liam Kelly, Sam Woodward, or Woodward rather, Tommy Foley, Jonathan Madison, Tari Stefan, Ron Harrow and Braden Brown. Um, even though I gotta tell you a basement story for 30 seconds, I got freaked the hell out over the weekends because I came down and we had turned off for air conditioning. It's getting cold in Michigan now. Um, so it hasn't ran in a couple of weeks or a couple of days. I come down and I smell, it's kind of a weird smell in the air, like a stale air smell. And I walk over towards the refrigerator, and there is a just a puddle of water. And so I freak out naturally. And I go upstairs, and I ask my wife, like, you know, the kind of weird I think the refrigerator, something's wrong with that. And she says, No, I asked our youngest daughter, who was four, to get some ice, and apparently when my daughter got some ice out of the refrigerator, it all went onto the floor instead of in the cup, and that's why there was water everywhere. So heart attack averted.
Nick VinZant 41:15
I'm glad to know thank you. Any point story that people really needed to know about that. Essentially, a four year old acted like a four year old and you had a puddle, a small puddle, of water in your basement.
John Shull 41:25
Any parent out there understands what I'm saying, just because you have I understand. I'm like, you're not involved, dad. I get, oh
Nick VinZant 41:32
no, I'm such an involved dad that that's not even a thing that registers in my brain, like that's just a daily occurrence that you're gonna have to deal with as a parent. If that's the kind of thing that gets you flustered, you got toughen up, man. I didn't say I got flustered by a small you can't be flustered by a small puddle of water. I
John Shull 41:46
just wanted to be known. I regret. I regret the last six years of this podcast with you. Let's move on some Halloween related questions just for you, if you were trapped in a room and the person holding you in the room said you can leave, but you have to leave without a body part. Which body part are you giving up?
Nick VinZant 42:13
Oh, well, my little toe, that's easy. Okay,
John Shull 42:17
let's narrow it down. Uh, both arms, both legs, which, which, what are? What are you giving up to get out of there?
Nick VinZant 42:25
I would give up both legs because I am really hoping that medical science will advance in the next couple of decades, and that I can kind of get some of that back. That's what I'm hoping. I'm really, really in my life, counting on an exoskeleton in the next 20 years.
John Shull 42:43
I mean, I laugh, but apparently they're going to start releasing some kind of robot that's like a partner, like a Sex Robot. You're going to buy it commercially, I guess.
Nick VinZant 42:52
Oh yeah, that's the first kind of robot. It's interesting, though, that of all the robots that we could have designed for humanity, the first one that's going to be released is The Sex Robot. I don't count automation in, like, warehouses and stuff like that, right? I understand that, like, the first personal robot that you can buy is going to be The Sex Robot. Nobody even bothered. I mean, really, if you think about it, the robot really doesn't have to do anything. Kind of has to be there, does? You know, it's not as complicated as, like, doing daily chores. So I kind of understand it, but also think that it's ironic
John Shull 43:24
lazy ass robots always getting off the hooks, right?
Nick VinZant 43:27
That's the problem is that we designed the robots. They're ultimately going to be just like us and lazy. We have to get robots for the robots,
John Shull 43:36
alright? If you were in a horror movie, what would be the scariest form of a killer coming after you to you, would it be like a like a Michael Myers? Would it be like a Chucky doll, a ghost? Oh,
Nick VinZant 43:50
anything like supernatural, any kind of supernatural thing? Because if it was just a human, like, I'm even if you're talking about like Michael Myers or Jason or whatever. Even though they're supposedly, like, superhuman, they're still human, like, I would be the most worried about some kind of supernatural thing.
John Shull 44:10
See, I think it would be them. I mean supernatural. I mean just, you know, I don't know. Guess I've never been that afraid of them, but somebody who, like, stalks you and just never leaves and you can't kill them. That's a, that's a, unless you're Buster rhymes, of course, rip Ah, you just can't, you know, can't do it,
Nick VinZant 44:27
yeah, but they're still a human, you know, like they're still going to do human things, like they're going to forget where you were, maybe they're going to get distracted, maybe they got an appointment that they got to go to, right? Like, if you're human, even if you're in evil thing, like, you still got stuff you got to do, like you got to go wash your clothes. You can't just be there forever.
John Shull 44:48
You know that's I had this conversation with a girl that I dated a long time ago. We were watching Halloween, and she goes, What if Michael Myers? Like, when does he take a shit or. Piss like, I
Nick VinZant 45:01
mean, plenty of that what he has to go to the bathroom. That's why I would ultimately always go with the human enemy, because they have to do human things. How long did this relationship last? Right? How long did it go?
John Shull 45:15
Oh, I don't know, maybe three, four months. It wasn't a good one. It wasn't, I'm, I'm
Nick VinZant 45:19
always slightly shocked that you bring up past relationships while when you're a married man, I don't talk about him at all. I don't bring him up. I don't mention it. I don't even say girls names around my wife. Oh, I
John Shull 45:33
mean, every relationship's a stepping stone, right? Some, well, not everyone, actually, some are terrible to be honest, but they're just memories. Man, they're just things from the past. You can't take them back, so why bury them?
Nick VinZant 45:44
I do always find it interesting that you can have really intense relationships with people and then they just kind of disappear, like there's been relationships that I spent a year or two of my life with somebody and then never talk to them again. I do think that that's interesting. Like you don't just kind of check up on each like you still spent a lot of time with that person, even people at work where, like, you sat next to somebody for eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, in some cases, for years, and then just never heard from them again. Like how people just disappear out of your life,
John Shull 46:23
you know? I mean, look at college roommates. I mean, you are in the formidable years of your youth, and you graduate, and a lot of times you don't even talk to them, you know, anymore, like they're just gone. I
Nick VinZant 46:33
did have college roommates, people, three other guys that I lived with for two years, and then we just fell out of touch, and none of us have spoken to each other in almost 15 years, probably, which is crazy, when you think about it, that people just go in and out of your life like that.
John Shull 46:51
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's crazy. It's just once again, I just think every it's just memories. You move on and, you know, look at us. We've been, we've been friends for a decade now, over a decade.
Nick VinZant 47:04
Oh, a long time.
John Shull 47:07
Too long. Actually, way, Dragon.
Nick VinZant 47:09
Dragon, a little bit. Okay, alright, let's move on.
John Shull 47:13
This is kind of a two fold question, but really it's just one answer. Would you ever get in a taxi that is not driven by a person.
Nick VinZant 47:23
Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm not going to be the first one to be in there. I'm probably not going to be the first 1000, or maybe even the first 10,000 but ultimately, I trust machines at this point more than I trust people.
John Shull 47:38
See, I don't know, I don't know if I could do that, to be honest with you. Just not, not sure I can get it, you know. Well, I mean, if I'm really inebriated and I get in a robotic car, I'm not sure. Like, I wouldn't know what was going on. Like, I just have no idea, I think, yeah, but
Nick VinZant 47:53
you can say that with people, yeah. I mean, that exact same thing would happen with a taxi driver, right? Like, if, least, if you look at it, the robotic taxi probably is more affiliated with the company, or has more involved in, like, not getting you killed than a person does.
John Shull 48:15
Yeah, I don't know. I I'm, listen, I am not against autonomous vehicles. I'm not but it would, you know, I'm kind of like you. I wouldn't be the first one, first 500 but you know, it's, I don't know, it still gives me the heebie jeebies. I guess, thinking of getting in a vehicle that isn't operated by a human,
Nick VinZant 48:32
I do also find it fascinating that I went from like, not trusting an Uber driver to being like, no, I'll just take the Uber driver and I trust them more than a taxi cab driver. Things switch around, man, telling you we're all going to be, we're all going to be with the robots here pretty soon,
John Shull 48:49
exoskeletons. Um,
Nick VinZant 48:51
I can't wait. I can't wait. I would do it now, honestly, like my back hurts a little bit, I would probably get it all replaced at this moment.
John Shull 49:00
Um, all right. My last thing I want to bring up was a not candle of the month. Oh, okay, Bath and Body Works made some I
Nick VinZant 49:10
saw that some headlines. I wondered if you were going to talk about it. Tell the people
John Shull 49:16
they were. I don't want to say they were forced to, but there was a lot of backlash. They released one of their winter candles called snowed in. And it's, it's up to interpretation. But some people say that the design, which is supposed to be snowflake, the the arrow prongs of the snowflake. People are saying, look like clue. Sorry. Ku Klux Klan hoods,
Nick VinZant 49:42
it does. I saw it. It does, um,
John Shull 49:46
I mean, it's, it's not, not. But, I mean, I think I feel like you go 5050, but I think the company did the right thing, and they removed them from stores, and they're not. Selling them so good on them for listening to their consumers. However, like, whoever I mean, you couldn't find. My first thought when I when I read that story, was, you couldn't find, like, a better snowflake, like, that's what you get. That's what you picked. It's,
Nick VinZant 50:16
it's incredible. So I've worked for big companies, like companies with 1000s of people, and the number of people who see something before it goes out, and the amount of attention to detail that goes into things is kind of mind boggling to me. So the idea that that could happen is is incredible, like nobody looked at that and thought, right, oh, that looks like a bunch of KKK members. Is kind of crazy.
John Shull 50:50
Like no one was sitting around the table when they were drawing this up, going like, guys or ladies or whatever, um, that looks like a hood and that looks like, how old Michigan? So
Nick VinZant 51:03
it looks exactly like KKK hoods. But I do wonder if it's one of those things that you don't notice it until somebody points it out, and then you immediately notice it, like you only see it if you're looking for it. But it's also the kind of thing that when I saw the story, I was like, oh, what's the issue like? Oh, that's the issue that looks exactly like that. Did you?
Unknown Speaker 51:26
Did you
Nick VinZant 51:27
buy some that goes could be collector editions? You should go sweep them up. Candle connoisseur.
John Shull 51:31
I did not, actually. And the most articles, eBay did get involved. And there's a response from them, saying that if any of them are sold or found to be sold on eBay, they that user selling them will be banned because of the rate, you know, the suspected racial undertones of why they are being sold. So have
Nick VinZant 51:53
you ever made, though, like a huge work mistake? Huge work mistake.
John Shull 52:01
I mean, I haven't, because I always triple check myself, but I've been a part of decisions that are not correct, sometimes working in the media. I mean, I'll admit this out loud, because I think we all have, you know, there have been some things information that has been wrong, not always our fault, but no, nothing, nothing like this, you know. And unfortunately, if you go online, there's still obviously a pretty strong community around the country of people who are unfortunately into these types of things, because it's just, it's just insane with that. But regardless, um, yeah, no, I've made mistakes. I don't know if I would have made something this big. Okay,
Nick VinZant 52:46
so our top five is top five sports nicknames, specifically people, not teams. Those would be team names. But anyway, spilled milk under the bridge. There's something for that, where you mix two things that are not correct, supposed to be like spilled milk under the bridge or whatever, anyways, anyway, what's your number five?
John Shull 53:08
Wonder, five is Thomas the hitman. Hearns, love the hitman.
Nick VinZant 53:13
Oh, that is a good nickname. Boxer, I believe correct
John Shull 53:19
Jesus, yes, one of the
Nick VinZant 53:21
greatest ever, right? And he's not Thomas. He's Tommy. Tommy. Hearns, nobody calls Tommy. Nobody calls a boxer. Thomas. Okay, that's Tommy. That's a good one. My number five is the Todd father. I love the nickname, The Todd father. I will never not laugh about the Todd father nickname. Real name is Todd Frazier's a baseball player. It's fantastic. It's amazing. I'm
John Shull 53:52
going to stick on the baseball train here. My number four is the big unit, Randy Johnson. That's
Nick VinZant 53:59
a good one. Also for people who are not familiar with him, he's like six foot 10, and if you ever see a video of somebody throwing a baseball and killing a bird like exploding it, that's the guy who did it, like
John Shull 54:13
a one out of a million chances, and he did it.
Nick VinZant 54:18
My number four is he hate me. Rod smart.
John Shull 54:23
I mean, what a what a career he had.
Nick VinZant 54:26
You could make an argument his whole career was his nickname, really. That should be a problem. If he was a more famous guy and he had stuck around, you could put that, that up way higher, because for people who aren't familiar, like when the XFL started, he was he hate me, and he had that on the back of his jersey, and I think that's still one of the only things that people remember from the entire xxfl Is that guy's nickname
John Shull 54:54
and the weird ass kickoffs where they would both run at the ball and hit each other. But.
Nick VinZant 54:59
Like, Oh, mean, amazing. Didn't they try to bring the NFL back in, like, two different leagues recently, in the spring, and, like both of them, nobody ever heard of it.
John Shull 55:09
Well, they did. I think the rock actually bought, I think he bought both or something, and now it's like one league, the AFL or something, I don't know.
Nick VinZant 55:17
Oh, they combined him, All right, what's your number
John Shull 55:20
three? Chocolate, Thunder. Daryl Dawkins, that's
Nick VinZant 55:23
a good one. That's really good actually.
Unknown Speaker 55:26
Oh yeah.
Nick VinZant 55:28
Chocolate Thunder is amazing. Love it. It's not on my list, but I could put the white Mamba. Brian scalabrini from basketball,
John Shull 55:40
which, for some reason, he has red hair. I don't know how he got to be a white Mamba, but sure it's amazing,
Nick VinZant 55:46
because he's called the white Mamba, and he looks like the guy least qualified to be the white Mamba. Like, that's the guy we picked. Like, our best nickname is that guy. Like, okay, it just, it makes us look even dorkier. No offense. He's probably a great guy. Um, what are we on? Number three,
John Shull 56:06
yep,
Nick VinZant 56:07
I don't actually know what this player's name is. All I know is their nickname is The Time Lord Robert Williams. He plays for the sentence the Celtics.
John Shull 56:17
Yeah, and big old Robert Williams isn't Is he dead? No,
Nick VinZant 56:21
he's the Time Lord man. You can't kill the Time Lord. He's still playing. He's like 97 I think, all
John Shull 56:29
right, I wasn't sure. I feel like he could have been dead, but I
Nick VinZant 56:34
he's been around for a long, long enough time that they call him the time lord.
John Shull 56:42
Um, alright, you know my number two. It's such a tough list, but this one is one of the more, one of the more famous nicknames, and that is prime time Deion Sanders.
Nick VinZant 56:54
Is that really that great? Though, I feel like that's massively overrated.
John Shull 57:01
No, I feel like he was everything, and then some like it would have been different if somebody was nicknamed prime time and just farted out. But he, I mean, he lived up to all the expectations, like he was even now as coach of Colorado, he is prime time, uh,
Nick VinZant 57:17
my number two is Calvin Johnson, aka Megatron. That's a great one. So I
John Shull 57:24
have that one on my honorable mention. That's, I mean, that's a great one, because he, if you ever met Kelvin, I mean, he is a freaking robot, like he is a mountain of a man, and
Nick VinZant 57:35
you have met him, we don't even go into your story, but we don't your dancing partner.
John Shull 57:39
I mean, he wasn't my wasn't my partner, but whatever, we just went to same dance studio. Did
Nick VinZant 57:45
you ever, did you guys ever dance together?
John Shull 57:47
No,
Nick VinZant 57:48
did your wives ever dance together?
John Shull 57:52
No, no, I don't think so.
Nick VinZant 57:54
You missed an opportunity. You said you could have Tangoed with Calvin Johnson.
John Shull 58:00
Yeah, he's only about nine inches taller than me, and had like, 4% body fat. Ah, yeah,
Nick VinZant 58:05
he's a gigantic person. Uh, what's your number what's your number one?
John Shull 58:11
So if you don't know hockey, you're not going to know this name, but it's awesome, and it's the Grim Reaper. Stu Grimson, who was a a defenseman known for fighting his opponents. That was his nickname the Grim Reaper. I mean, how awesome is that?
Nick VinZant 58:28
That is a really good nickname. It's really even that much better when the name kind of matches them, matches who they are. Like,
John Shull 58:37
yeah, for sure,
Nick VinZant 58:38
my number one is Charles Barkley, round Mound of Rebound.
John Shull 58:44
See when I think of that, when I think of him, I don't think of that nickname. I think of Sir Charles, I don't think of the round mount of rebound, which is freaking awesome, though,
Nick VinZant 58:52
the round Mound of Rebound is one of the best nicknames it. I think the round Mound of Rebound is the best nickname because it it it suits him perfectly, even though I could hear that Sir Charles might be his more prominent nickname.
John Shull 59:09
I mean, the problem is, is there are so many good ones. Like, if you just go with the ones that are household names, you could say those are top five. I mean, yeah, there's so many good ones. What
Nick VinZant 59:20
do you have in your honorable mention? Give me a give me a couple too many.
John Shull 59:26
Uh, King James, Teddy ball game, the Black Mamba, salt of swats, the hick from French Lick. That's
Nick VinZant 59:36
good. That's a really good one. Larry Bird
John Shull 59:41
couple that I just put on at the bottom as I was rushing through my list that are personal favorites of mine, penny for Penny. Hardaway, yeah, mailman. Carl Malone, even though he's a I don't think he's a very good person, but whatever,
Nick VinZant 59:54
I think he's pretty widely known as a terrible guy, uh, the night
John Shull 59:57
train, Dick Lane, the the free. Raider, William Perry.
Nick VinZant 1:00:01
That was the one that I really thought about, was Night Train lane. And then I realized that his real name is Dick lane, which almost is better, right? Like, your two names are Dick lane and your nickname is Night Train Like, that's an amazing, just all around set of names.
John Shull 1:00:22
Then a couple others here. I had to go. The Intimidator, Dale Earnhardt. I mean, that's just cool, especially because he drove a race car, the big the big fundamental for all of you scholars out there. And then we'll end here on the Great One Wayne Gretzky. Because, I mean, if you're known as anything great, that's just awesome.
Nick VinZant 1:00:44
That's pretty good. I don't have anything else, ow,
John Shull 1:00:49
can I just keep going? Then, because I have like, five I didn't get to,
Nick VinZant 1:00:52
oh, keep going. I mean, all yours are the ones that have got covered by mine. I mean, pretty much.
John Shull 1:00:57
I mean, Super Mario, Hakeem, the dream. That's good. Charlie hustle to the late great Pete Rose, white chocolate. Jason Williams, that's
Nick VinZant 1:01:09
a good one. And then,
John Shull 1:01:13
you know this one, I guess I'm just a boxing fan, but marvelous. Marvin Hagler,
Nick VinZant 1:01:20
did Mike Tyson have iron Mike? Iron my, I
John Shull 1:01:23
mean, it's okay, great.
Nick VinZant 1:01:25
We Yeah, well, that's one of the worst ones for a big time person. As
John Shull 1:01:31
you said earlier, it's, it's fit him right, iron Mike, but it's just okay. It's not like great or anything.
Nick VinZant 1:01:40
They I would say basketball and baseball have the best nicknames.
John Shull 1:01:45
Um, basketball for sure. I'd say yeah, basketball, yeah, that's a good yeah, basketball and baseball for sure. Uh,
Nick VinZant 1:01:51
okay, that's gonna go ahead and do it for this episode. Ran out of breath. That's gonna go ahead and do it for this episode of profoundly pointless. I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance, leave us a quick review and let us know what you think are some of the best sports nicknames. The round Mound of Rebound just makes me laugh. But Night Train is amazing. Dick lane is also pretty good.