Why do we laugh? That’s the question Neuroscientist Dr. Sophie Scott has spent years trying to answer. She says our laughter has less to do with humor and more to do with communication. We talk the origin of laughter, the meaning behind different kinds of laughter and why laughter really might be the best medicine. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Types of Donuts.
Dr. Sophie Scott: 01:16
Pointless: 39:32
Top 5 Donuts: 54:44
Interview with Laughter Expert and Researcher Dr. Sophie Scott
Nick VinZant 0:00
Nick, welcome to profoundly pointless. My name is Nick vinzant Coming up in this episode, laughter and donuts.
Dr. Sophie Scott 0:19
We laugh primarily for social reasons. So we laugh most when we're with other people. We're starting to learn about the ways in which people differ in how they engage with laughter. It's certainly in terms of the timing. It's very interesting. People tend to laugh at the ends of sentences.
Nick VinZant 0:37
I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance subscribe, leave us a rating or review. We really appreciate it really helps us out. If you're a new listener, welcome to the show. If you're a long time listener, thank you so much for all of your support. So I want to get right to our first guest, because she studies something that is fascinating and common to all of us, laughter, why we do it, what's happening in our bodies when we do it, and why we think certain things are funny. This is neuroscientist, Dr Sophie Scott. Why do we laugh? If
Dr. Sophie Scott 1:17
you ask people, Why do you laugh, they'll talk about jokes and comedy and humor, but if you actually look at people, just observe their behavior. We laugh primarily for social reasons. So we laugh most when we're with other people. You are 33 zero times more likely to laugh if there is somebody else with you than if you're on your own. Now we do laugh at things that are funny. It's not that we don't laugh at jokes, but actually most the time, we laugh during conversations. We're talking to other people, and we do all sorts of quite complex things with laughter in that sometimes we're laughing just because someone else has laughed. Sometimes we're laughing to show affection and affiliation. Sometimes we're laughing to show agreement and understanding. We'll laugh to try and deal with stressful situations. It's actually a really complex social behavior. So us laughing at
Nick VinZant 2:05
something. Being funny is more of a side effect of the real reason we're laughing, which is kind of communicating with other people.
Dr. Sophie Scott 2:11
I think so. Laughter is older than us. We're not the only animals that laughs. In an evolutionary sense, laughter was part of the sort of our inherited kind of range of possible behaviors, lots of other mammals seem to laugh, and, you know, other apes laugh in a way that's distinctly like our laughter. And one argument about why humor exists is that it's maybe it's a way of getting to laughter that kind of doesn't require you to sort of have physical games with each other and things like that. You can actually, it's like a shortcut to finding reasons to laugh together. But
Nick VinZant 2:48
what's like? Okay, so when, when you look, as a neuroscientist, when you look at our brain like, what's happening in our brain when we're laughing?
Dr. Sophie Scott 2:56
Well, it's a very good question, and I we still don't know exactly, because it's actually very, very hard to look inside somebody's brain when they are laughing. It's hard for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's really hard to get people to laugh in the lab. It's not impossible, but it's difficult. And they move around a lot when they do so the sorts of techniques that we normally use for looking at brain function, a lot of those are messed up by people laughing. There are some chemical things that we know happen, and that's easier to say for certain. So you get a reduction in adrenaline when you have been laughing very quickly. And adrenaline is the fight or flight hormone, and laughter reduces that really swiftly. In fact, if you measure your heart rate when you before you've been laughing and after you've been laughing, you'll notice that your your heart rate drops after you've been laughing. When you're laughing, it goes up because you're doing quite a lot of work. But after the laughter has happened, the heart rate's gone down, and that's the effect of the adrenaline. But if you're watching something, for example, you're expecting to make you laugh, you actually see that reduction in heart rate occur before it starts. That the outcome of this is that you are more relaxed when you've been laughing. That's the reduction in adrenaline. And on a longer time scale, you get a reduction in cortisol. And cortisol is the sort of stress hormone if you're having a really difficult time at work. If you're worried about lots of things, you know that kind of nagging feeling that you get that is cortisol at play. It also has a really important role in waking you up in the morning, which is why you sometimes feel a bit grossy and unpleasant when you wake up. And you also get an increased uptake in what's called your endorphins. And the endorphins are the body's natural painkillers. They are your brain and your body increase taking up endorphins when you've been exercising. That's why you feel good when you've been exercising. And the same thing happens when you've been laughing. It's one of the reasons why you feel good when you've been laughing. And also, they are the natural painkillers. So actually, you have a measurable increase. In the pain you can tolerate when you've been laughing because of this sort of increased uptake of the endorphins. So these are all kind of associated with mood and experience. There's one last No, it's too mad. I won't go into episode. Well,
Nick VinZant 5:14
now I'm too curious. Now I'm too curious,
Dr. Sophie Scott 5:18
so I'm a bit cautious around it, because sometimes people say, Oh, if you laugh every day, you'll never get cancer or something like that. And we just don't know this. But there is another thing that happens when you've been laughing is you get an increased production of human growth hormone. Now human growth hormone is very important when you're a baby and a child and you're physically growing. It's driving those physical development of your body, and by the time you're an adult and you're not getting taller, it's not the case, you know, it's not the case that human growth hormone stops being important. You continue producing it, but now it stops being something that changes, like your skeleton, and it starts and it kind of maintains a role in in your immune system. So we don't know what that is. The link is there with laughter, but that is a possible route before laughter to have a beneficial effect on your immune system. Given that we don't have any good data showing that there is a positive it's hard to do the studies, so there's a reason why they're not out there. But does laughing every day make you less likely to be ill? We don't know, but there is the potential at least for that kind of association because of this role with human growth hormone.
Nick VinZant 6:30
So can you kind of look at somebody's brain or their health or whatever and say like, oh, that's probably a person who laughs a lot
Dr. Sophie Scott 6:38
at this stage. No, but we do have we're starting to learn about the ways in which people differ in how they engage with laughter. So we've recently published a questionnaire which is trying to capture how humans vary in their experiences of laughter. And we find there are four factors that seem to be very important features of people's the way people vary in their experiences of laughter. So the first is frequency. How often do people think they love and people vary a great deal in that. The second is liking. How much do you do you like laughter? People a bit less varied on that, but they do still vary. And then the last two are sort of more about understanding laughter. So one is how much you understand other people's use of laughter, and the last one is how much you understand your own use of laughter. You sort of can reflect on that. Now really interestingly, on that frequency of laughter, as I say, People vary a great deal. Every study that has looked at people's how often people think they laugh, finds that people are inaccurate on that everybody laughs more than they think they do. And in our study, we developed this questionnaire, and then we try to test it, see if it's, I think it relates in any way to people's, what people do when do they laugh? And what we found was that the score people's rating for how much they think they laugh did not correlate with how much they laughed when they were talking to a friend. It did correlate with how much people laugh when they're watching something on their own, and in contrast, that liking variable the more people rate themselves as liking laughter, that does correlate with how often people laugh in conversations with a friend. So there's, there's a there's a really kind of interesting dissociation between how much we actually laugh and where we're laughing and how much insight we have into that. And to go back to your point about, how does that relate to the brain? Well, at some level, of course, it has to people, because people do laugh more and less than others, and people do like laughter more and less than other people do. We don't know what the the reasons why we end up with that kind of variation means, where does it come from? So a very good guess is almost certainly your developmental experiences. We know from experiments with rats that rats were tickled a lot when they are babies. Laugh more when they're tickled as adults. And that's, you know, I can You can absolutely see a, you know, a strong hypothesis that that would be important for humans, humans who've had the opportunities to develop in families where there's a lot of laughter and a lot of kind of sharing of that laughter in a positive way. You might imagine, maybe they are the ones who end up laughing a lot more and maybe liking laughter more when they're adults. We've also found that boys who are at risk of psychopathy, so teenage boys who show a triad sorry, teenage boys who show a kind of psychological profile where they have conduct disorders, so they don't they behave badly, they might hurt other people. They should have conduct disorders, and they also are high in what are called callous and unemotional traits, so they hurt other people. People, and they don't care if the other people are upset. They don't find laughter as contagious as other people, so they're not sort of primed to join in when they hear laughter the way that people generally are in the population. And they also don't show a response in the brain that seems to track that contagion. But that would be an example of how we can see one developmental trajectory that might end up with an adult who is highly anti social in their behavior, and part of that is they don't use laughter or react to laughter like the people around them.
Nick VinZant 10:33
So we could really kind of use laughter as a good gage of how sociable somebody is, absolutely
Dr. Sophie Scott 10:39
it's it's such a basic social cue. It's one that you it's really interesting. Babies start laughing really early. They start laughing at around three, four months old, and long before you know that, when they're kind of going around the age of one, they're going into the world of being a toddler, they're still not talking, but they understand by that age a great deal about laughter, and they will do things like use do things to make their parents laugh, deliberately to make their parents laugh. And they will also use their parents laughter to work out if a situation is one they should be worried about or not. So the parents laughing and we're probably okay so long before we're talking to each other in a skilled way, babies and very small toddlers have got a pretty sophisticated understanding of some of the ways that laughter is being used, and the things that you can do to kill to cause laughter, and that is something that just gets built and built and built upon. So by the time you're an adult, it's probably one of the more important social skills that you've learned. So
Nick VinZant 11:45
I'm a huge numbers person. If you were to kind of put it on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the highest, where would you put our ability to laugh?
Dr. Sophie Scott 11:53
I would say it's right up there with talking to each other and maybe slightly more important than that, because one of the beauties of laughter is that it's this positive, social, sort of joyful emotion that lives in social spaces. And crucially, you don't have to share a language to be able to share it. You find it in all human communities, but within those communities, it can be used in quite different ways. And some scientists did a really interesting study a few years ago where they looked across the world. They looked in terms of where they've been higher and lower amounts of historic migration. So if you went to parts of the world, like Western Europe, where there's been humans for a very long time, and they've been humans moving through those spaces for very long times in those parts of the world you get laughed and smiling. That's both more common and less ambiguous when people express it. Whereas if you go to a part of the world like, you know, say, up until recently, Japan or China, you have lower levels of historic migration. People have not been in fact, you know, people were kept out for centuries, and what you find there is there is less public smiling and laughing people will do so a lot when they're at home, but in public, you don't as much. And and the smiles and the laughs can be a bit more ambiguous. And in the paper, they argue that if you are in a cultural setting where you it's very multiple, multicultural, there's been a lot of sort of historic migration. You can't assume you use the same language as everybody you meet. Then positive social emotion expressions like laughter and smiling become really important, because they're ways of showing positive intentions, or, you know, kind of good intentions. I'm not going to harm you. This is what we this is showing that you understand each other without having to use words. But I thought was really interesting. They then replicated it in North America, because in different states in the USA, you've got different amounts of historic migration, and they get the same phenomenon.
Nick VinZant 13:58
Do different kinds of laughter affect us differently. Like, I can think like, my wife has kind of like a, huh, like a quick laugh, and then sometimes she has, like, a really long laugh, and then sometimes it's just kind of like a, like, do different kinds of laughter play different roles?
Dr. Sophie Scott 14:15
Definitely, from my perspective, and I'm using a kind of brain's eye view of this, there are two different ways that your brain controls noises, that you make vocalizations, and it's voluntary and involuntary. So humans are quite unusual in that we've got very high levels of voluntary control over our voice. That's how we can talk to each other or sing or beatbox or do impressions, and we have parts of the brain you just don't find in other animals that let us control that. And we also have a much older, evolutionarily older cyst pathway, neural pathway for controlling sounds, which actually runs down the middle of the brain, and it's the one that we share with other mammals. And. We use that when we make sounds in a more involuntary way. So something frightens you and you scream, or something makes you laugh and you absolutely cannot stop. You know, when you something pushes you over, you just absolutely uncontrollable laughter. Those on those involuntary vocalizations are in a different pattern of neural control in terms of how you make the sounds. And we think that what that means for laughter in particular is that sometimes when people are laughing, they are laughing really helplessly. It is completely involuntary, and those laughs are quite different from when la people talk in conversations, when the laughter is much more communicative and affiliative, and it's under some greater degree of voluntary control to some amount. And those laughs can be really like, as you say, just like a Ha, or, you know, the whole world basically, of sort of more social laughs, but they sound different from the spontaneous laughs, and people are very good at telling the difference. So
Nick VinZant 16:00
then if laughter, though, is a lot about communication, like, how are we deciding when to laugh? Like, how do we know? Like, okay, there's like, how do we know in social situations? Oh, I should laugh here, or I should laugh like this here.
Dr. Sophie Scott 16:15
It's certainly in terms of the timing. It's very interesting. People tend to laugh at the ends of sentences. Fascinatingly, this is even true of people having a sign language conversation where they could laugh all the way through they want to. They're not talking, but they still laugh together at the ends of the cent, at the ends of sentences. So that seems to be something that we learn to do. It's it's a it's obvious when you think about it, but it wasn't at all obvious until the first scientists actually did studies to look at this, because we just I would have never agreed. I would never thought it was so highly orchestrated. And one of the things that you do is you laugh together at the end of the sentence, then you don't take a breath in, and one of you then carries on talking. So it's almost like part of kind of coordinating, this cycle of how we take turns laughter is playing a really important role in that.
Nick VinZant 17:02
And then when people kind of can't pick up on that, is that something that can really have an impact on their life, if somebody doesn't kind of speak this laughter language,
Dr. Sophie Scott 17:14
okay, I'd say elements of neurodiversity that or mental health issues that are sort of intersecting with this, then that can really change how these things operate for you. So for example, and this isn't a study we finished yet, but we've been looking at how people with depression hear laughter, because anecdotally, they often find particularly conversational laughter really irritating, and they don't find like an invitation to join in or be part of the conversation. They just they all they hear is the fakeness. They're not really laughing. What do they you know, that sounds stupid, so that's like your mood massively compromising your ability to sort of engage in these positive aspects of what people do when they're having a conversation. And if you think about what that then means for the kinds of social interactions you have, nothing is going to happen that's going to help your mood. It's only going to continue downwards, exactly in contrast people. We've done some work. My PhD student now postdoc, Cecily Kai has worked with adults with autism who prefer the term autistic adults in her studies, she she has quite good data showing that, you know, Joel, generally, people with autism do laugh. It's not that they don't laugh. It's just that they are generally stuck with a lot of neurotypical people who laugh in a neurotypical way, and it could be a bit confusing for them. If they were allowed to spend all their time with other autistic adults, they might find it different, but nonetheless, you see some interesting similarities. So we did a study showing that if you add laughter onto the end of jokes, it makes the jokes seem funnier, and that was exactly the same for our neurotypical group and our autistic adults,
Nick VinZant 19:01
are you ready for some harder slash, listener submitted questions? Definitely nervous laughter versus regular laughter.
Dr. Sophie Scott 19:09
This is my hypothesis. Okay, people will use laughter. And we know this scientifically, people will use laughter in stressful situations, particularly with someone that they're close to, like if you're with your partner or maybe with a friend, you will use laughter to kind of manage a way to a better mood in a stressful situation. And if both of you laugh, you share that laughter, you will become less stressed. You will feel better. And in fact, certainly for couples, romantic couples, you're also more likely to stay together and you are happier in your relationship, and it's because the laughter is almost like an index of the strength of that relationship. And I think one of the things that happens with nervous laughter is because it's a very well learned skill, by the time you're an adult, to use laughter in this way, is people trying to use laughter in a difficult. Situation, maybe they've done something wrong, and other people don't join in. It doesn't work. So you're laughing and you're laughing on your own. And we know from the scientific literature that actually laughing on your own makes no one feel any better. Only works if it's shared. So I think part of it is that I think also sometimes nervous laughter can be where people have been pushed into more extreme situations. So, you know, really bad situation where you think of when, you know, make a car accident or something. We are now well beyond the area where this is sort of polite social laughter. I think that can almost be more of a shock response.
Nick VinZant 20:34
Has our laughter changed?
Dr. Sophie Scott 20:36
It's really, it's hard to know. I was really struck. I was listening to a load of old like radio comedies from the 1950s and some of the laughter just sounds exactly the same. It's extraordinary. You can just edit it out and drop it into something Haven't you know, on the TV or the radio now. So I think in some ways, no, because you're hearing something that has this kind of very ancient element to it. It's probably humans have probably been laughing, in some ways, in similar ways, for their whole, you know, for the entire existence of humans. But I think it probably also has a route through which it can change, which is that when it is this more kind of social communicative laughter, it's under the same, I think, same kind of neural control as speech and speech changes. People don't talk the same way they did 50 years ago. No matter where you are in the world, there are changes, and it's always funny whenever you go back to hit list. So when I listen to those old radio programs, everybody on it sounds really posh, and they probably didn't at the time, I
Nick VinZant 21:39
always kind of wondered, like, what were cavemen laughing about?
Dr. Sophie Scott 21:42
I can't emphasize this enough, it's really interesting that you find all this laughter in lots of different animals, but only humans have humor, so they probably were doing things to try and make each other's laugh.
Nick VinZant 21:53
Well, is there any instances that other animals will try to make other animals laugh
Dr. Sophie Scott 21:59
in the wild? No, so in the wild, the closest you can find is teasing so like one monkey goes up and pulls the tail of another monkey, and that you can see the basis for your humans do do something like that, and it can bleed into sort of, not necessarily a particularly nice form of humor, but, you know, humor, but it's not reacted to with laughter by the monkeys, either the teaser or the teased no one's laughing. Things get slightly different if you look at animals that have contact with humans. So there's a zoo somewhere in the US, where the chimpanzees learnt to do this thing where they'd throw rocks and stones at humans. And the humans, being curious, stupid animals, would go, Oh, look, that monkey's throwing stones at us. Let's go and look. And when they got like a biggest group of humans together and looking at them, throwing little pebbles at them, they then switch to throwing feces. And this would make the humans all start screaming and running away, but they also would laugh, and I wonder if that was the thing, because again, the chimpanzees weren't laughing, but they were interested in the humans. When they were there was a gorilla called Coco who lived in a facility in the US, and she'd been taught to do, to sign, and she would there are complexities about how much she was actually trying to really intentionally sign, but certainly there were examples given at the Institute of her signing things that look like jokes. And interestingly, again, she didn't laugh, but she may have been doing it to get the humans to laugh. Does that make sense? She understood the importance Well, potentially, potentially so. Animals that have contact with humans may, in some circumstances, engage in what looks like human like behavior to get the humans to laugh, but they themselves never react with any positive emotion. So there's something really, um, kind of intriguing about that. Maybe humans are just nicer. You can get them laughing. Maybe they're That's horrible.
Nick VinZant 24:11
Can there be a strategy to social laughing? Like, could somebody figure out, like, oh, I can strategize when and where I laugh with people.
Dr. Sophie Scott 24:22
So when I was a kid, my father was a salesman, and he sold carpets, and he was very funny man my father, but when I saw him like at work, he was always making people laugh and make his customers laugh, and he'd make his colleagues laugh. And I used to genuinely worry that people were buying carpets they neither wanted nor needed, because they got kind of so caught up in all the laughter that they were making decisions that they weren't even thinking about. And it is interesting that there is some science that backs elements of this up. So I. Sorry, people just talking outside my office. Is that okay? Can I carry
Unknown Speaker 25:02
on? Sorry? Oh, you're fine.
Dr. Sophie Scott 25:06
So some Robin Dunbar and colleagues in Oxford did a study where they they got people laughing, and if you can get people laughing, they will tell you more intimate things about themselves. You know, they if you think about it, laugh, we laugh to make and maintain social bonds. And you you don't laugh randomly. You laugh with people you like, and you laugh with people you experience closeness with. Basically you can hack that. If you can get people laughing, they will feel like they have that kind of closeness to you. They kind of reverse engineer to that. So there is something strategic about this. My brother used to be a journalist, and he had a colleague. It was like in a press a trade paper, he had a colleague who was always getting better stories than him, and so he paid a lot of attention to her, because he wanted to know what she was doing, and what she did was she laughed a lot. When she was on calls with people, she would laugh a great deal, and people, presumably were laughing at the other end of the phone, and they were sharing more information with
Nick VinZant 26:09
her. I can't think of anybody funny I've ever hated Exactly, exactly.
Dr. Sophie Scott 26:13
Or if there are comedians out there who you don't like, I bet they never make you laugh. It's a very strong tell. It's telling you about your reaction to people. So if you, if you think of somebody who's got really irritating laugh, I bet you don't like them. You know, I have a relative with a really irritating laugh, and I was always just thought, Oh, they've got a stupid laugh. And then I realized, when I started working on laughter, it's not them, it's me. Oh,
Nick VinZant 26:37
are there people who don't laugh like they just don't.
Dr. Sophie Scott 26:41
It's very difficult to say, because, as I say, one of the worst things you can do is ask people. People just don't accurately report their laughter. I'm sure it has to be possible. I think it would probably be often associated with something like depression, which does seem to have this very kind of said, as I say, anecdotally, have a very profound impact on how people engage with laughter. And instead of finding it enjoyable and fun and sort of socially motivating, they find it irritating.
Nick VinZant 27:11
Is there something like, is there any studies in terms of like, okay, people find this funny. This thing is funny.
Dr. Sophie Scott 27:18
There are. And what you find is that, over time and over place, there is no one thing that everybody finds funny, and that's because finding something funny is more like a kind of a an esthetic response. You know, we don't all like the same music. We don't all like the same books. World. We all like the same comedy. Now, there is some science looking at what might underlie elements of this. So the more barriers there are to you understanding why something's meant to be funny, the harder it will be for everybody to understand that. So a barrier could be linguistic if you don't speak the language, and of course, that's why slapstick and silent comedy can be so extremely you know, universal. And even with verbal comedy, you still need to have a kind of cultural understanding. So there's, there's a joke which some if written down in ancient Sumerian which is about between 3006 1000 years old, and somebody thought it was so funny that they stamped it onto clay tablets, and we know what the words mean. It goes, a dog walks into a tavern, and he said, I can't see a thing. I think I'll open this one. It's the way I tell him, you know. So that's the hot and you can see the start of that joke is even that would work. Now, you know, a thing goes into a bar, right? That's absolutely recognizable, that's But beyond that, we don't know why it was funny. Some people have suggested, well, maybe the dog's got his eyes closed and he's talking about opening his door eyes. Is the bar? Is the tavern? Also, is it also like a brothel? Is there something, you know, is a dog actually a dog, or is that a kind of human, you know? So there's, there's so many possible interpretations, and even if we work them all still through, we're probably never going to work out why it was funny. This
Nick VinZant 29:19
one's not, I don't know if this, I think this is your area, but this one's not, unless it's necessarily laughter related. But why does emotion change our voices?
Dr. Sophie Scott 29:28
Oh, it's a really good question. That's because we when we speak, it's a very physical thing. So you're squeezing air out from your lungs, and then you that air you squeeze out from your lungs you use to vibrate together your vocal folds, and they sit in the void in your voice box. And actually, in evolutionary terms, they they're there initially to stop things from falling down into your lungs and choking you. So you all mammals, basically found a way of bringing those vocal folds together and then pushing air through and making. Sound, and then you shape it all with the stuff that's going on up here. That's very human. We make all these fancy sounds, but it's very physical, so anything that has influences the state of your body can affect what your voice sounds like, because you're making, you know, it's like a, you know, it's like a living musical instrument. Effectively, it's the human body when you're thinking about voices. So to go back to that example of adrenaline, it's a fight or flight hormone, if you are scared by something, that blood gets redirected around your body to help you do things like run away, and that will affect what your voice sounds like. It's one of the reasons why your voice goes very high pitched and wobbly when you are scared, when you are laughing, you start getting these very big changes in how your your breathing works, because laughter involves these really big single contractions of the rib cage just pushing air out, and these Ha, ha, ha. And if you're trying to talk to somebody, when that's happening, what you'll find is that you're the the laughter is kind of overriding the speech, such that you will produce you might you might talk, but your speech will be really interrupted, and we may even actually completely collapse. You just can't get words out because the laughter starts coming through. So actually, when you're talking, your mood, your emotional state, is pretty much always actually influencing what you sound like. There's no way of I don't think you ever really talk in a way that's neutral.
Nick VinZant 31:36
This is like a is this true or not? You burn three calories every time you laugh.
Dr. Sophie Scott 31:43
Um, I think it's probably not true. Um, I've, I've heard people say, oh, you know you, you burn as many calories and
eight minutes laughing as you would going for a three mile run. And as far as we can see, that's not correct. So you, I think if you laughed solidly for 15 minutes, you use that the same amount of calories as in, like a quarter of an apple. So it's probably not that efficient a way of burning calories, tragically, and that's not reason to do it. Laugh because it's nice, not because it's it's not bad for you. It's not gonna make things worse.
Nick VinZant 32:22
Can you get any of the same effects if you just force yourself to laugh like I always remember the thing about like, look, you can just make yourself smile and you'll feel better. Does that work with laughter?
Dr. Sophie Scott 32:32
It certainly does for the painkilling effect. So even forcing a laugh will affect your sort of uptake of endorphins, and you're able to tolerate pain better, so and also, because laughter primes laughter. You If you force yourself to laugh, you start pushing yourself along the line of which the laughter also starts to just become easier.
Nick VinZant 32:54
What do you consider to be the most interesting thing about laughter? Like, what thing fascinates you about it.
Dr. Sophie Scott 33:01
I think there's the sheer complexity of how adult humans use it. So if you hear somebody laughing, they might be laughing spontaneously. They might be laughing non spontaneously, but they might then that means they might be laughing because they're caught a laugh from someone else, or because they want someone to like them, or because they're covering up feeling angry or upset about something, or because they're feeling a bit stressed out, and they're trying to make everyone feel better. They're embarrassed about something. They might be laughing to try and get someone to like them. They might be laughing to try and get information from somebody. You know, it's just an unbelievable hall of mirrors, and it's happening all the time. People laugh really frequently in conversation. So how, how do, how do we in between talking to each other, which is unbelievably computationally complex, we keep dropping into this ancient mammal behavior play vocalization, which we use with phenomenal complexity. How do we develop that skill? How do we we know a lot about how you learn to understand speech. We know almost nothing about how you go from a baby laughing because it's been tickled through to an adult laughing because the guest has just dropped a wine glass on the floor. And actually, they cross, but they don't want to make their guests feel bad so they're laughing. You know, it's, it's extremely complex and and actually, that trajectory, it's, it's dizzying. Actually, what we learn to do when we learn to laugh, it's
Nick VinZant 34:29
interesting though, that even though there's so many different ways of laughing that you just described, like, I can also I know exactly what each one of them means, yeah, like, there's no fooling people
Dr. Sophie Scott 34:39
with it, no, no, no, no, exactly. You read it very clearly. Do you
Nick VinZant 34:43
think that there's something that's fundamentally going to change our understanding of it, like if we could figure this out, we'll know everything about laughter.
Dr. Sophie Scott 34:51
I think if we could get a really good grip on both, how does. Going from when laughter first appears for babies through to say teenage years, how laughter develops and how understanding of laughter develops, and how, crucially, how different sorts of family environments or genetics or environmental factors influence that I think that could be really useful for, well, for many things, but to be able to understand the variety we see in adults, which I'm just guessing has a lot of its roots in those early years, that would be something that would really, really good ways of looking for that. And actually, the money and the time to do so is what we really need. Is
Nick VinZant 35:42
there, like when you look at it, is there a point in our lives where you say, oh, people generally laugh the most at this age? It
Dr. Sophie Scott 35:48
has different meanings. So like when you first laugh as a baby, you can you don't just laugh randomly. You laugh with the people you love who are trying to do something to make you laugh. They're playing with you. They're tickling you. You are You know, you're engaged in something that's highly social and interactive, but is part of that kind of family network. And something really interesting starts to happen around laughter and teenage years, because when you you know, you hit adolescence, and then one of the things that's happening adolescence is your world's becoming bigger, and your your friends start to occupy a much more important element in your sort of social horizon. You know, it's not that you don't care about your family, but you know your world, you're becoming part of the the adult world is taking you on that journey. So how adolescents use laughter to bond with each other and to show their kind of shared relationship and their importance to each other. I can remember, again, anecdote, not data, but like, you know, kind of because I was not a cool girl at school. This may surprise you, but I'm sitting near, you know, be like, with a cool girl sitting in the classroom and telling stories, and I sort of sitting near the edge going, I fully understand this, you know, because I wanted to be part of that group. And that's, you know, took me years. I got in there in the end. But it's, you know, that kind of, the fact I even remember doing that so speaks to how much you know, obviously my radar, I need to be part of that laughter. I need to be in there, then I'll be in with the group. And I think so, I think that kind of your experience of it and your use of it, as you say, you usually understand it intuitively, but it fundamentally changes from what it's been prior to that and and I don't think it, I don't think ever stops being important, but I think it, you know, changes again when you're older and you have pet your own children, and then you're really kind of, you know, kind of, I don't know, everybody has children, but you kind of, you know that your your mood, somebody saying that your the happiness of your family is completely determined by the mood of your most unhappy child, children that are happy and laughing, that's kind of where you want things to be, because then everyone's going to be feeling better. And I know this is a cartoon, you know, that gives you a different kind of engagement with understanding what laughter means when you're seeing it from that other end of stage. And I'm very interested in how people use laughter and think about laughter in you know, much when we're much older, you know how I had a really interesting conversation with somebody who works in end of life care in a hospice and saying, there's just so much laughter, not and it's not just the staff laughing, you know, there's a lot of sort of, one of the things that people, you know, that they are haven't got long, one of the things they value is the opportunity to laugh with people, because you're alive and you're enjoying that moment, you know. So there's something really, I don't think it ever stops being incredibly meaningful. I just think that meaning kind of deepens and strengthens and changes of your life. I
Nick VinZant 39:06
want to thank Dr Scott so much for joining us. If you want to connect with her, we have linked to her on our social media sites. We're profoundly pointless on Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube, and we've also included her information in the episode description. And if you want to see more of this interview, the YouTube version will be live on june 13, at 12:30pm Pacific. Okay, now let's bring in John Shaw and get to the pointless part of the show. What do you think is your most annoying habit around people like a thing that you wish you didn't do around other people.
John Shull 39:46
That's tough. I don't think I have it annoying, huh? I think I can talk too much sometimes. Thank you. I think I can almost humble brag, even though I don't mean to humble brag, if that makes any sense,
Nick VinZant 39:58
I think I. Jump around in conversations too much, or I kind of ask questions in odd ways, like I've lost the ability to speak in full sentences and just kind of comment and talk in like phrases. Now
John Shull 40:13
I don't think I have, you know, a real annoying habit. If anything, I would say that I don't think I have enough annoying habits in public. If that makes any sense,
Nick VinZant 40:28
hmm, yeah, I guess your humble brag would just be that you said that you don't really have any faults that annoy me.
John Shull 40:36
See, there you go. I didn't even mean to do it.
Unknown Speaker 40:40
Let's, let's get shout outs ready.
John Shull 40:43
I do have them. I want to add one more thing to that is real fast is, I do think one of the annoying things that maybe, maybe that I could have personality wise, is sometimes I'll hit home on certain topics or things, and I can almost, like, just drive them home, if that makes any sense. Like, it can be annoying. Like, say we're talking about drinking, right? And I'll be like, oh yeah. I can one time in college I drink 60 beers and my pants. Like, you know that can be annoying, if you that that kind of person as well. So,
Nick VinZant 41:16
oh yeah. I tried it once the topic has been broached, I try not to talk about it again, but I jump around too much. I probably, I don't think I maybe have enough of a filter anymore, like I've lost a certain ability to care, and I'm just kind of will ask the question, even if it's potentially not the appropriate thing to be asking people
John Shull 41:38
that's actually a good question, a follow up question, since I'm interviewing you now, do you think as you get older, the filter is gone? And do you think you will ever be one of those old, crotchety folks where you just spew? You know, your mouth is just spewing whatever you feel, no matter
Unknown Speaker 41:58
if it's proper or not.
Nick VinZant 42:01
I worry a little bit that I'm going in that direction. I'm pretty sensitive to that kind of stuff, and I generally try not to do that, but I've had a couple of instances over the last few years where I've started to slip into the crotch of the old man direction, like I was at Costco this weekend, and my card wasn't scanning, and the guy was just telling me what to do, absolutely just doing his job. And in the middle of him telling me, like, what I needed to do, because I already figured out what I needed to do, I just walked off while he was talking to me, which is a huge jerk thing to do, and I realized it immediately. Would have gone back and apologized to the guy, but I couldn't find him, but I took that as a mental note, like, oh, I don't want to become that person. Like, dude's just doing his job. You can't become that person. So I'm, I'm hyper aware of becoming the crotch of the old man. So why?
John Shull 42:51
Why did you walk off when the person was trying to help you?
Nick VinZant 42:54
That was they weren't. It was one of those things that, like, it's something that I've never done before and probably will never do again. But we had ordered food with the family, me and one of my other sons were going to go in, grab something from Costco, come back out and meet them by the time the food was there, and it was a chocolate shake that we had ordered, and I knew there was going to be a fight between the two kids if one of them had the chocolate shake ahead of time. So I was kind of rushing to get to the basic point, okay? And I just left as the guy was talking to me. So whatever his name was there, if you were working at Costco and Issaquah, my bad man,
John Shull 43:36
itsa qua Where the hell is nevermind. It's by Seattle. Man, yeah, it's not a real city. Look, I'm not somebody who
Nick VinZant 43:44
lives outside Detroit and then claims to be from Detroit. I'm not going to sit there and city pose like you do, where you act like you live in a city like, Oh, I'm from Detroit, Detroit, this, Detroit, that, and you don't live there. You're poser. Poser. Don't city pose. People know the difference. If you don't live in the city, don't say you live in the city. You can add Metro. That's fine. I live in the Detroit Metro, okay. But I'm from Derby, Kansas, which is in the Wichita Metro. But you say you're from Derby, you don't class it up and say that you're from Wichita,
John Shull 44:15
feel like that. Poor Costco guy just getting it every side from it. Oh, I
Nick VinZant 44:19
felt bad, even, but I also, but as I was walking away, I was like, Oh,
Unknown Speaker 44:25
Should have done that to that guy. That was, that was my fault.
John Shull 44:28
All right, let's give some shout outs here. Gonna start off with Han Christian. I like that. I picked, I picked that name right out today, Han, Han, awesome name, Richard kaones, Deon Murphy, uh, Greg Van Volcom. I don't know if that's an actual last name, but
Unknown Speaker 44:53
I think anything, I
Nick VinZant 44:53
don't, I mean, I think anything could be a last name. There's some crazy last names out there.
John Shull 44:58
It's also some. Crazy AI things going on out there, but we can talk about that another point. Sorry, I don't like I just brought up, like a whole topic and then just shut it down. That's what I do. Alfred Lopez, Spencer, Eldridge, Steven Vance, Johan Carlson, and we're gonna end here with a good old, wholesome name, John Anderson.
Nick VinZant 45:30
Would you ever name your child after a popular movie character, like you talked about Han? Would you ever name your child after a popular movie character? Because I'm surprising as Star Wars is there isn't really any people named Han or Anakin that I have
Unknown Speaker 45:44
ever met. Maybe that's too much try
John Shull 45:48
something a little fun today. Okay, but okay, of course, i i effed it up, of course, par for the course, because I thought the Olympics were in two weeks, because I've been seeing everything regarding the Olympics, they are not until next month in two weeks. So they're not until the end of July. Yeah, it's like the middle of July till August. So in saying that, we're just going to pretend that the Olympics are coming in two weeks. We're just gonna have some fun here. So anyways, so I was doing a lot of research on sports that used to be Olympic competitions, okay? And I've come across some ones that I didn't believe that they actually were, but hot dog, they sure are. So anyways, I figured I'd just bring them up, and then we could just talk about them, have some fun, and maybe someone will learn something or two about the Olympics here. So anyways, for instance, in 1900 the only time that this competition was held, they did a taxi and delivery truck racing competition. I
Nick VinZant 47:00
have a huge vendetta against any sport that doesn't that uses something else as the main mode of transportation. And by that I mean NASCAR, any kind of equestrian thing, any kind of racing thing, if the human body is not doing night is the human body is not doing it, to me, it is not a sport.
John Shull 47:20
Well, that's funny. You say that because the next one I was going to talk about was, uh, gymnastics via horseback.
Nick VinZant 47:28
That sounds actually kind of awesome. I've watched a thing on ski ballet, ski ballet, which looks incredible if you've never seen ski ballet. It's probably one of the most amazingly ridiculous things ever. Like, oh, my God, they did this. Like, why are we doing this as a civilization? It was incredible. It's incredible. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard in my
John Shull 47:50
life. Let's see, firefighting has been an Olympic sport
Nick VinZant 47:55
that makes it was in the Olympics. I mean, I get it, but why was that in the Olympics, also in all this research? Why didn't you realize that the when the actual Olympics was
John Shull 48:06
I don't know, but maybe we'll bring it up next, next month as well. Probably not. Okay. And then the last, last two I had here cane fighting, so fighting with literal canes.
Nick VinZant 48:19
That sounds kind of awesome. Actually, I've watched that, especially if somebody's getting hit with a cane,
John Shull 48:26
and something that would never happen in today's world. Live pigeon shooting.
Unknown Speaker 48:33
Oh, they shot like,
Nick VinZant 48:35
yeah. I mean, I just don't know how that the problem with that would be. My problem with it isn't the hunting aspect of it. I think hunters are some of the greatest stewards of the land and just animal supporters that you can find, at least if they're proper hunters. But, I mean, you just couldn't tell, like, you couldn't make it uniform. What if this pigeon is this, and this pigeon is that? Like, I don't think that it's a standard pigeon. What if you got a bad pigeon? What if you got a good pigeon? That's my issue with it. You gotta, you gotta make it fair for everybody, even competition.
John Shull 49:05
You got a pigeon that was fat and lazy and just didn't want to run very far, right? Well, they probably flew well anyways. So as I was, as I was doing that, then I then I thought I had done something so fun and gratifying. And then I looked up and saw that the Olympics were actually in a month and a half. So nice, nice. I love the Olympics. I love them. I love them. Competition.
Unknown Speaker 49:29
I love them.
Nick VinZant 49:31
I like the sports that are the less mainstream sports. I don't really care about any of the big sports, like I don't care about the basketball. I don't really care about the gymnastics that much I like to see. I want to see some like triple jump, Decathlon, steeple chase. I want to see the weird sports. That's what I want to see.
John Shull 49:52
I do find it enthralling. So there actually, there's two other things I want to get your opinion on. One, okay, speaking of can. Caitlin Clark was left off of the US women's basketball team, and without getting into anything that we don't know about, my problem with it is it seems like it's a lost opportunity, at least to make a profit and to sell jerseys. I don't know why you leave her off the team I get while
Nick VinZant 50:21
you leave it off. I don't know if that you could say that the people who did get selected, or some of the 15 or 12 or however many people they got, those were the best players. Like, if you had a consensus, okay, these were the best players for that. But I think one of the few things in life that you get is a good wave. Ride the wave, and I wouldn't really understand why other people in the business would be mad about that, like that's going to make you money too, so you should take it and run as far as you can go with it, and maybe your feelings get hurt, but too bad, cash the check and then there'll be a lot better. The
John Shull 50:56
second thing did you see this video floating around of a Taylor Swift concert in Europe. Did you see that or Rita, anything on it?
Unknown Speaker 51:05
Do you think that I did?
John Shull 51:08
I mean, it was kind of like the biggest news story virally last couple of days. But never mind, never
Speaker 1 51:13
even heard of it. Didn't see it, didn't know it was a thing. Didn't know anything about it, all
John Shull 51:20
right. Well, it's gonna seem really lame. Then if I, if I bring it up, so I'll bring it up, and then we can move on. Okay. Well, then to look it at it,
Nick VinZant 51:27
you bring it up while I look at it. What should I look? What should I google? Taylor Swift.
John Shull 51:32
Taylor Swift, mystery, man. And it should bring something up, um, and while Nick's looking that up, essentially, for all of you out there, what it was was she was doing a concert somewhere, I believe, in Europe, and in the rafters, in an area that is not accessible to humans. Usually, there was somebody that was standing up there, a silhouette of that person just looking down watching the concert. But it's awkward. It just seemed weird. And I don't know if it's aI generated. I don't know if somebody was actually up there, but nobody has any answers, and it's freaking me out. Oh
Nick VinZant 52:06
yeah. I mean, it's kind of a crazy picture, but it's just probably a dude just standing there watching the concert, like he probably works there. It looks to me like, Okay, I see what you're talking about. It's basically a guy silhouetted, in the background, because there's a whole bunch of light coming in from what's windows are an open area, and he's just kind of silhouetted there. It's probably just some random dude who just happened to be walking past there. Like, I don't know why people think that there's such a huge mystery about things. It's always the simplest explanation. This is my philosophy in life, it is always the simple answer. It's always the simple answer. It's never this big conspiracy theory about things. It's the simplest answer. Right? So who is this mystery man? Probably just a dude who works there who was walking by stop for a second to look at the concert.
John Shull 52:55
Well, regardless, apparently she has a song called Dancing phantoms on the terrace. So people are wondering if it was a plant. And then, obviously, the other things that the internet blows up with are just hilarious, that it was a sniper, you know, that it was Travis Kelsey up there all alone, just watching her, right?
Nick VinZant 53:17
Like all of those are ridiculous theories, like, it's a sniper. Well, I mean, he looked like he had a pretty open shot. So if he was going to do it, why didn't he do it? Right? Like it's time? Why? Because he could have free tickets. He could be a lot closer. He doesn't need to be back there. And he seems to like the fame, so you probably want his face to be right there. Like all of these ridiculous conspiracy theories have immediate answers. If you just stop and think about him for a second, it's the simple answer, like, who was he? Probably a dude, like, cleaning up.
John Shull 53:46
Probably a guy just taking a smoke break. And he's just this
Nick VinZant 53:51
guy on a smoke break. That's what he was doing. Like, just taking a break. Back there, they're gonna find him and be like, what were you doing? Were you trying to send a symbol? Were you trying to speak out on this? He's like, No, I was just taking a break. I just happened to be walking by, that was it.
John Shull 54:08
I just didn't want to smoke out in the smoking area, so I thought I'd go up a little ways. No problem.
Nick VinZant 54:14
Can I finish my rant? Can I finish my rant? Can I go on a whole rant about this sure old man? Everything in life always comes down to the basics. Just do the simple stuff, and you're going to be fine, right? Like you want to work out and get big. How do you do it? Well, you do squats and bench press and pull ups. There you go. That's all you got to do. Like, life is so much simpler than we were allow it to be, but we look for the most complex answer, because doing the simple stuff is hard. Just do the simple stuff. Let's
John Shull 54:43
go to our top five, which is something that I enjoy a lot, actually. So
Speaker 1 54:48
our top five is top five male prostitutes. Said it was something that you enjoy. Well, I. I mean, I can
John Shull 55:00
list. If you're ready, you're not ready for it, you
Nick VinZant 55:03
have them. Top five men. Men find attractive. We should actually do that. Oh, but anyway, our top five is top five types of donuts. What's your number what's your number five?
John Shull 55:17
The bear claw, like a good old bear claw.
Unknown Speaker 55:21
Oh,
Nick VinZant 55:22
I don't know if I had that's a donut that I look at and go, Why did they even make that? Oh, man,
John Shull 55:29
it's, uh, there. I know a lot of people are gonna say there's a lot better almond pastries out there, but I'm not sure I've ever really had them. Other than a bear claw and I bear claws are just, they're delicious.
Nick VinZant 55:43
I just would never buy a bear claw. Like, at no point in my life would I ever be at the donut shop and be like, You know what? Let me take the 10th best option you got and get a bear claw. My number five is lemon filled. I think a lemon filled donut is the only time I would ever have something lemon flavored. That's how good a lemon donut is. It's the only appropriate use of lemon in my opinion.
John Shull 56:14
Yeah, I can't, I can't agree with you. There can't. Can't do anything lemon at all, actually, um, my number four, and I think this is going to be a very unpopular pick, just because I think this could be number one or two, but at my number four, I'm going to go with just a regular glazed donut,
Speaker 1 56:37
but not flavored. Just regular donut. Yeah, just regular flavor to it.
John Shull 56:42
No, just glaze on it, just sugar icing, or whatever, you know, just a glazed donut as my number four.
Nick VinZant 56:48
That just doesn't make sense to me, though I understand the idea of glazed donut, but put some flavoring on it. Like, why have this thing as bland as possible? Because you could still have the glaze and then get another flavoring on it, like, why does that even exist? But don't
John Shull 57:04
get me wrong, probably the best mixture of of a donut is apple cider in donuts. Like, plain donuts, delicious. Don't, Don't roll your eyes at that. But I mean, just regular glazed donuts. I mean, they're iconic. You know what? I mean, you have to have them on the top five list.
Nick VinZant 57:21
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that they can be in the donut shop, and there can be one of them, and then I would proceed to get all of the better options. Glaze donuts should have been phased out the second other flavors were invented. Like, once we had other things that were better, we can get rid of this thing in the past. That's the way that I look at it. Uh, my number four is a Long John, mainly because it's the biggest donut. If you're like, I just want the biggest thing that I can find. Well, get the Long John.
Unknown Speaker 57:49
See,
John Shull 57:52
I don't know if I know what a Long John is, yeah, yeah,
Unknown Speaker 57:55
I bet you don't.
John Shull 57:59
Anyways,
Nick VinZant 58:01
neither does your wife.
Unknown Speaker 58:05
I said that small job, Mini John,
John Shull 58:10
are you done? Are you done? Are you done?
Nick VinZant 58:12
I can keep going, uh, dwarf John, uh, micro John.
John Shull 58:18
Um, I'm just, I wish I could, like, just mute my video. Was I gonna say? Oh, but I can't have too much of a donut. Like, if I get a punch key, if I get, like, a super sized donut, it's just not it kind of takes away from me. Like, I I can't have, I never can have more than one donut, usually at a time, and I can't, definitely can't have a gigantic donut.
Nick VinZant 58:45
Oh, you like small donuts. You're only going to go for small donut flavor,
John Shull 58:49
like the little donut holes from Dunkin Donuts, whatever they're called. Those are, those are perfect. Those are amazing.
Speaker 1 58:57
But you wouldn't just have one donut hole? No.
John Shull 59:01
But I mean, I, you know, one donut to me, having five or six donut holes.
To me, five or six donut holes is one donut. Now, that could be wrong. Probably is. But anyway, what's my number? Uh, what's my number three? So I actually have a tie as my number three, because these are both delicious things. So apple fritters and cinnamon buns
Nick VinZant 59:35
is a cinnamon I wondered if a cinnamon bun is considered to be a donut. Is a cinnamon bun considered to be a donut.
John Shull 59:43
I mean, it's probably a way of pastry. If I have to take it off, that's, yeah, I mean, if I had to take it off, I'm fine with that. I'm not going to fight anybody over it, but I'd like to include it on the list. And it, it's up there, but it's not, not top two.
Nick VinZant 59:59
Oh. Okay, um, my number three is something that I never honestly thought that I would put on the list. This was something that previously I would have looked at and thought of as be a complete waste of time. But that's a fruit fritter. I had a blueberry fritter from a donut shop here in Seattle, dojoy that changed my life. Changed my opinion of fruit, of fruit related donuts. It was the best. It was the only time I've ever had a fritter that I was like, wow, that's a good fritter. Changed my life. I would get it again, and I would never, ever order something like a fritter.
John Shull 1:00:34
This donut talk is something, man, I love it. I don't know why. It's just, it's just just making me smile. My number two is Boston Cream. I love me a Boston Cream. Boy, I love it.
Nick VinZant 1:00:52
My number two is chocolate glazed. My number one is Boston Cream. I think Boston cream is the best donut that you can find it's chocolate and it's cream. It's like chocolate with a surprise. I don't know how you could ever top that. It's
John Shull 1:01:12
I'm just hold on. I'm just thinking about it. I'm just taking it in because they are so good. So my number, my number one, I just have chocolate on chocolate. I can't get enough chocolate. Give me a chocolate donut with chocolate filling with chocolate icing with chocolate sprinkles, anything chocolate, all chocolate, all day.
Nick VinZant 1:01:31
I have never understood why other flavors exist besides chocolate. Like, why would you ever get anything besides chocolate that I don't understand that. Like, do you want the best? Or do you want something that's like, Okay, well, no, I want the best, so then we should have only chocolate flavored of all desserts.
John Shull 1:01:52
I mean, yeah, chocolate, by far, is the best. It's not even close. There are no other flavors or additives or anything that's even close. But man, anyway, this is making me hungry.
Nick VinZant 1:02:04
If I was vanilla or strawberry, I would be embarrassed. I would be I would be embarrassed if it was the Olympics. Because we were talking about Olympics and I was vanilla or strawberry, I would not have the audacity to even go onto that platform and try to stand in the second or third place. Chocolate. Should stand alone in that and no one should even be close. It should be chocolate. And then we can talk about fifth place. You
John Shull 1:02:31
know what they should do? They should have, uh, eating competitions. But as an Olympic sport,
Nick VinZant 1:02:37
I mean, they've had other things, right? Like, if they had, what did you say it was car racing? Like, like, they're gonna have flag football, they should have heating this. I'll bring up my theory again that we should have one completely average person in every Olympic sport, just to remind them. Like, how much better.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:57
Like, I love that.
John Shull 1:03:00
I do think that that is that would be important, because I do think a lot of people feel that some of these things are attainable, and it's like, no, they're not. You can't do it even close. And myself included, like, I'm not trying to humble brag about anything, but like, you know, I could sit there and say, Yeah, I might be able to throw a shot put near what, what they do? No, I couldn't even come within 40 feet of how far they throw those things. I
Speaker 1 1:03:28
don't think you'd come within 100 feet. I don't even know how they farthest. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1 1:03:34
you can't even walk, that's true. So yeah, you couldn't come within 100 feet. You can't even go to how long did it take you to go down in your basement?
Nick VinZant 1:03:44
25 minutes exactly. And you think that you can compete with the Olympic shot putters. It takes you 25 minutes to go to the basement,
John Shull 1:03:52
and that was with like a full boot on with a pillow wrapped around it, like it was, it was sad. Actually, I don't know how I'm gonna get out. I think I'm gonna have to call the fire department to, you know, like, wheel me out of here.
Unknown Speaker 1:04:05
All right. Well, we'll
Nick VinZant 1:04:06
update people next episode. Okay, 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. We really appreciate. It really helps us out and let us know what you think are some of the best donuts. I don't know how anything beats Boston Cream, but if you really feel strongly about a donut, let us know what it is, and it better be chocolate like don't we're not going to acknowledge vanilla. Not going to acknowledge it. We're.