Algorithm Expert Marc Faddoul

From social media stardom and job applications, to crime prevention and bank loans, algorithms are playing an ever greater role in our lives. But do we really understand what we've created? Algorithm and Artificial Intelligence Researcher Marc Faddoul joins us. We talk social media algorithms, disinformation and computerized bias. Then, a special online Top 5.

Star Researcher Dr. Anna Frebel

The secrets of the early Universe are locked inside their ancient cores, she's trying to find them. Astronomer and Stellar Archaeologist Dr. Anna Frebel joins us. We talk discovering 13 billion year old stars, what the beginning of the Universe was like and which star would require the most sunscreen. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Space Related Things.

Ice Climber Will Gadd

Hanging hundreds of feet in the air, Will Gadd swings his axe into an icicle clinging to the side of a frozen waterfall. It's a world filled with danger, self-discovery and unimaginable beauty. We talk Ice Climbing, managing risk and his next big project. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Deli Meats.

Blake's Naked Story

As a Nudist, Blake lives in two worlds. One where he feels free and another where he's confined. It's what inspired him to become a leading Nudist Advocate. We talk nudism, judgement and inspiring the next generation of nudists. Then, we bare it all in a special Top 5.

World Champion Tree Climber Mark Chisholm

Whether he's racing up a rope, leaping from limb to limb or skillfully swinging a saw, Mark Chisholm has spent his life in trees. We talk the secret to competitive tree climbing, life as an arborist and the best trees in the world. Then, it's a special sporty Top 5.

Marine Archaeologist Peter Campbell

Ancient shipwrecks, sunken cities, pirates and treasure, this is the life of Marine Archaeologist Peter Campbell. We talk ancient discoveries, dangers beneath the waves, stolen artifacts and Atlantis. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Things You Know You Should Do But Don't.

Fetish Companion Katana Thorne

It's an old profession but she's added a new twist, fulfilling fantasies on the edges of imagination. Professional Companion Katana Thorne joins us. We talk sex work, fetishes and more. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Scary Monsters.

Wildfire Researcher Dr. Mike Flannigan

Lives lost, forests burned, billions of dollars in damages. We are facing a future filled with flames, Wildfire Researcher Dr. Mike Flannigan is trying to figure out how to stop it. We talk climate change, fire tornadoes and historic wildfires

Interview with Wildfire Researcher Dr. Mike Flannigan

Speakers

Nick VinZant: Profoundly Pointless Host

Dr. Mike Flannigan: Wildfire Researcher

Nick VinZant 0:13

Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, fire tornadoes and Nicolas Cage

Dr. Mike Flannigan 0:23 on average, we're going to see a lot more fire. And the thing is, there's no vaccine for wildfires, we have to learn to live with these fires, and associated smoke. These are high intensity fires. And flames can be hundreds of feet in size. And these are the ones that are possible to extinguish. And this is where we're moving. Because you know, people say, hey, if we keep on getting more fire, the trees won't be able to handle it. And they're absolutely right, the trees will disappear. But what will replace it shops or grass. So in some respects, we're moving to a grass world as we see more and more fire, grass is gonna be the winner, and grass can burn every year.

Nick VinZant 1:05 I want to thank you guys so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it, it really helps us out. So I don't want to sound dramatic. Because I think if you turn on the news, if you look at social media, the world is ending every day. Right? But the more I talked to our first guests, the more I learned about this subject, the more I just kept thinking, Man, this sounds really bad. We should really be doing something about this. Because it is something that we've heard a lot about recently, historic fire after historic fire lives lost forest burn billions of dollars in property damage. But there is a solution. It's just going to take a lot of work. Our first guest is an expert in wildland fires, and what we can do about them. This is Dr. Mike Flannigan, when we look at wildfires now I keep hearing this, it's historic, its historic, are these really historic? Or is this the new normal for us?

Dr. Mike Flannigan 2:13 Now, I would use the term unprecedented, as well as historic for some regions like California and Australia should go back in time before our modern records. There are indications that, you know, the landscape did burn frequently. But, you know, there was a lot of grass in the valley. It's now a culture. So it's kind of comparing apples to oranges. So yes, these are, we're in uncharted territory. You know, some people like to say new normal, I don't like that, because there's nothing normal about this new reality, perhaps things are going to get worse and worse. So that's why I don't like normal,

Nick VinZant 2:54 when you say things are going to get worse and worse kind of helped me understand in terms of Alright, one, everything's fine. teen, this is the worst it could possibly be. Like, where are we at right now? Where do you think we're gonna be in the foreseeable future?

Dr. Mike Flannigan 3:11 Where we're, you know, we're probably seven or eight. But there's, there's room in the scale may go beyond 10. That's what we're afraid of. And I don't want to give the impression now, like, there was terms like apocalyptic in the newspapers, when those orangey reddish guys from all the smoke. Not every year is gonna be like this year, okay, some years are gonna be cooler, some years gonna be wider. But on average, we're going to see a lot more fire. And the thing is, there's no vaccine for wildfires. We have to learn to live with these fires, and associated smoke. So you know, why am I saying all this? Well, the research that I have done, and May my colleagues have found a relationship between temperature and wildfire. And here I'm talking about the warmer get the more fire we see. And people say, Well, why is temperature so important? And here I'm not talking about individual fire like the campfire or the Creek Fire, where wind and the day to day weather plays a major role. I'm talking about a larger area, like California, over a longer period of time, like a month or fire season. And there's kind of three reasons and you may find out fire people love threes. The warmer it gets, the longer the fire season. The fire season stirred earlier this year in California, as it did in Australia. Last year's fire season for them. The warmer get the more lightning you see the more lightning you see the more lightning talk fires. You see, enlightening played a major role in the Australian fires. And in this historic unprecedented California wildfire season. The third reason is probably the most convoluted the probably the most important as that Pure warms. And this summer, it was a record breaking heat wave for the southwestern United States, including California, the more efficient The air is, it's sucking the moisture out of fuel. And unless there's some rain to compensate for this drying effect, our fuels will be drier. And this is critical because the drier the field, the easier it is for fires to start, whether it's by a lightning strike, or by a campfire, it's just easier to start and spread. And it means more fuels dried out, that means there's more fuel to burn more energy to be released. higher intensity fires, like those Pyro cumulonimbus, we've seen fire generated thunderstorms, very intense, erratic, dangerous, these are difficult to impossible to extinguish. So as we continue to warm, our fuels are going to be dryer or lightning. And California has moved to a year long fire season. So that's why we say we're going to see more fire in the future.

Nick VinZant 6:03 And just to kind of clarify, when you say fuels we're talking about basically like, plants and trees, right?

Dr. Mike Flannigan 6:10 Yeah, so you know, when a fire starts, I'll use the forest as an example to start from the forest floor. And there's usually a bad needles leaves, it's dead stock, that's where the fire typically start. And so that can carry up into the shrubs. And then right into the trees, particularly the conifer trees in Scotland. And then the Crown's of the trees, the tops of the trees get engaged. And we call these crown fires, these are high intensity fires. And flames can be hundreds of feet inside. And these are the ones that are possible to extinguish directly through retardant or foam or water from planes. Even though it makes a great pitcher. It's like spitting on a campfire. If the fire is large, and the conditions are dry, and the fuels are dry, the only tool fire magic has called a burnout operation, which is very effective, you get in front of the wildfire, where it's going to go, you start a new fire, but backing into the winds, what's lower intensity, and you can manage it, and the wildfire and the burnout meet, it's got more fuel. So very effective, the problem becomes, if the winds are shifting, then it's a dangerous operation because the fire you start may slip to a head of fire, the higher intensity fire that you may no longer be able to control. So now you've got a wildfire and new fire that you can't control. It's fire management's challenging. And it's gonna be even more challenging in the future with climate change it climate change is definitely the cause, right? When we look at this, is there any serious debate about this? Or have basically all the researchers like yourself kind of coalesced around this idea? Like, yeah, this is climate change is fueling this, I'd say there's consensus, there are still some people who do not believe that climate change, I want to make this distinction clear. It's not solely climate change. But climate change is the biggest player, here we go, the way we manage our landscapes does play a role. And I'll give you an example. There's been a drought in California, a multi year drought, and millions of trees have died. And sometimes this happens with outbreaks of path. And so you now have large volumes of dead fuel, a fire come through, it leads to these high intensity fires. So managing your landscape does play a role as well. A research done by some of my American colleagues suggests that about 55% of the increases we've seen, are responsible to climate change. So it's the biggest player. Now, to give you perspective, what's going on in the western United States, every burn has quadrupled, that have increased by a factor of four since the 70s. California has increased by a factor of five since the 70s. So we're on this trajectory of more and more fire, and I don't see anything changing. And you know, if you are downtown Los Angeles or downtown San Francisco, the likelihood of your place burning down to a wildland fire is almost zero. But that smoke from these fires can smoky out for weeks and air quality can go you know down the tube. And the more we know about wildland fire smoke, the more we know it's really bad for our health. Is there anything we can do there any good news? Absolutely, that there are things we can do. So, you know, maybe I'll start here with you know, whether you're in Australia, the Arctic, the Amazon or California, there's three ingredients for wildfire to Know how you need these three things. It's just like the recipe, the stuff that burns the fuel, needles, the leaves, the shrubs, the trees, how much you have, what type, how dry it is all important aspects of that feel factor. Second, ignition. We've talked a bit about lightning, but people also start fires. And the third is hot, dry when the weather or conducive fire weather dry and windy will work as well. And you get all three and you get a wildfire.

Nick VinZant 10:32 So what can we do?

Dr. Mike Flannigan 10:33 Well, first thing, from a climate change perspective, we can stop emitting greenhouse gases, or at least reduce greenhouse gas emission. But the thing is, even if we stop today, emitting greenhouse gases, we're the earth is gonna continue to warm for 50 years or more because of the lags in our climate system, particularly the ocean. So we're going to continue to warm. So taking away the climate change aspect, we really can't do much about the day to day weather, look at the ignition, we really can't do much about lightning. But human caused fires, we can do something about and we can reduce every human caused fires preventable. And a number of these fires in California, Oregon, this year and other years have been started by either people directly, or our infrastructure power lines, for example. These are preventable, we can bury powerlines Yes, is expensive. But how expensive was it? What's the cost of burning downtown like paradise, California, all human caused fires are preventable. Things like building materials, and how you plan your community. You want fire breaks around the edge of your community, whether it's golf courses, baseball, diamonds, green grass is a very effective firebreak. So you can plan it so that you have this buffer zone where it's unlikely to burn or if it does burn is lower intensity and fire management. So around communities, you can reduce the risk by reducing the fuel load, or the fuel type if it's particularly flammable. And you can do this with prescribed burning, cutting down trees, you can use goats and other animals for grazing just to reduce the amount of available fuel for that fire. Now, there's been a lot said about prescribed burning. And yes, it does produce smoke. And but the argument is a little smoke now versus a lot of small player. But in those areas that are particularly sensitive. Like some of the parks, where you have a lot tourists, you can use mechanical treatments and reduce the field load.

Nick VinZant 12:51 When you talk about like, you know, the development aspect of it, are we building in places that we really shouldn't be building? Or are we just getting bigger, and this is kind of the natural process of that

Dr. Mike Flannigan 13:03 It's both there was something that LA Times about three or four years ago that we're continuing to build in wild lands and fire prone lands. And and they kind of used the analogy of building in flood plains. And it's not a complete analogy. But we are building in areas that we should think twice about a bridges, what we call the wildland urban interface. That's, you know, at the edge of communities, you're in the woods, and I've lived places like that. And it's gorgeous. You've got trees, you got wildlife, you got flowers, wild flowers. But the problem is that some of these places, you're at much greater risk from wildfire, unless you take some precautions. You have a much riskier environment and insurance companies. if they haven't already, they will say, No, we will not insure your home for a wildfire. Because the risk is too high.

Nick VinZant 13:59 Is there a general way that a fire is going to spread? Like is there a pattern to it? Or does it just burn everything around it?

Dr. Mike Flannigan 14:07 So it depends on how dry the fuels are, as to know where where it will spread, how intense it will be. And the wind helps the wind and topography help dictate where it will spread. So if you were a grass field, and the grass is all bad, it's yellow. You drop a match, there's no wind, it would be a circle. It just spread out in all directions. But once the wind starts to blow, well that takes the shape by the lips. And the most intense part is that the head of that fire, and that's the directional spreads. We have miles of fire growth that were quite well most circumstances so we can have a pretty good idea. If you have a weather forecast. We know what the topography is and we know the fuels.

Nick VinZant 14:56 Do fires generally like to go uphill. downhill,

Dr. Mike Flannigan 15:01 generally uphill. And that's because the winds generally during the day met the fact that burning period, normally is the winds go up Valley upslope. And that's why canyons are so dangerous. Lots of people. You know, I was in San Diego County last year, you know, I was in a number of canyons. And if a fire started the base of that Canyon spread up, you're trapped, you have no escape route. So yes, fires typically spread up hill, and you think about the flames are bent over closer to the ground, depending on the slow so that it gets more radiation. It's more efficient, spreading up hill as opposed to downhill.

Nick VinZant 15:43 Are we developing new firefighting techniques? Or is it just more people, bigger trucks, bigger planes? Like Are there new ways of doing it? Are we just improving upon the old ones

Dr. Mike Flannigan 15:55 Going back in time there was programs Smokey Bear program, and not Smokey the Bear but Smokey Bear. And you know Smokey Bear has a couple of messages on is that fire, only you can prevent forest fires. And that's a great message. So that's talking about human caused ignitions. The other part is that it's inferred that fires bad fires are enemy we have to put out. And that's not the case at all. Okay? fires natural in many of our forests in Canada. And that's just Mother Nature work. Anything is beneficial, it kills disease, and insects. And it's the cycle of life that just resets the clock, lots of trees and other species are adapted to fire. And we've been okay, we don't want more fires, we put them all out. And that's creating a real problem. Because these systems are used to fire you've now removed it. But with climate change, fire is coming back, and we can't stop it. So principle behind fire management is to determine if it's a wanted fire or unwanted fire death, I actually said wanted fire. And then places in Canada and national parks and in the States and Canada, and some of our jurisdictions say, make a determination would that fire be beneficial, then we'll monitor now a fire starts two kilometers or two miles from Redding, California takes half a second to state that unwanted fire and UI hit hard, you want to hit fast, you want to report it right away. So that if you get to the fire when it's small, you know the size of an office or a typical yard. It's easy for for fire match. But once the fire gets the size of a football field as hot, dry and windy, the fuels are flammable, like conifer trees, we now have a serious problem. Okay, so there's a window, sometimes that window is as small as 15 minutes, you got a 15 minute window, think about structural firefighters, they get a call and your house is on fire. If they get there within 15 minutes, they can put that fire out. If you get there after 15 minutes, your house may be lost. The same thing about a wildland fire if you get there quickly you can put up to get there layer the horses out of the bar. And that fire is now running. And you know, you got to start planning accordingly. But you your opportunity to put out greatly decrease that your you'll be able to pull it out anytime soon.

Nick VinZant 18:39 We have some listener submitted questions. Are you ready for some listener submitted questions?

Dr. Mike Flannigan 18:45 Sure.

Nick VinZant 18:45 What is the worst place for fires? Currently,

Dr. Mike Flannigan 18:48 this is kind of a value judgment here. The worst place in terms of how frequent they are or how much impact in terms of impact, I would have to say. Currently California and Australia not too far behind on Arctic for different reasons. And Amazon, okay. You know, if we think we continue to burn the Amazon, and the land clearing tool for agriculture and grazing for cattle, this forest with all its biodiversity may flip to cereda, which is like a Savanna. And this is hard to imagine but that's where we're heading now in the Arctic. Because there's a lot of peat fires going on. And Pete is organic material is 40 centimeters or more in depth. And if you've done any landscaping, sometimes you've got bags with peat, peat moss. Well, these are carbon that has been building up over thousands of years now they're burning and releases significant amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. So the argument here is you know, the warmer we get more fire with the more fire we see the more greenhouse gases As we get which feeds the warming? So that's why I said that in Australia. While there's lots of people, number of people die, the smoke impacts that call from smoke was actually higher than the direct fire death toll, which was in the 30s.

Nick VinZant 20:17 How is the Arctic burning?

Dr. Mike Flannigan 20:19 So these are mostly lightning fires. And they, I'm not sure if you're aware, but there was a record breaking heat wave in Siberia. And once again, that relationship between temperature and fire, and there was a lot of lightning fires. They detected lightning near the North Pole now, because there's lightning detection since global systems. So if this virus Dart, and this peat, the fire can smolder and actually burn through winter, we call they've been coined zombie fires because they keep on going, even though they should, they shouldn't. And so they just continue to smolder, smolder. And when conditions right, it's flaming combustion, and it just burn and burn and burn. And in fact, in pea fires are common in Indonesia. And some of those peat fires have been burning for 30 years or more. And they just continue to smolder until the water table reaches to them, which maybe never, so I didn't see, it sounds pretty bad. And, you know, I do want you to be aware and your listeners, that the amount of area burned globally, it's about 400 million Hector's that's the size of modern day India. Okay. It's a huge area. And much of this is done in Africa, Australia. And, unfortunately, the Amazon. I love its cultural and some of its clearing fields. And the actual Larry Bird numbers, different estimate from remote sensing, you know, have been trending down globally, because it changes primarily in Africa, converting wild lands, to egg culture or urban areas, and some new policies to restrict burning of fields. So the numbers gone down, but we're seeing increases in places like western United States, Australia, Canada, Siberia. So even though the actual area bermed has been decreasing, globally, the impacts are increasing significantly. And 2020, maybe turning the corner, because 2020 seems to be higher than previous years. But these are estimates from satellites, and you have to take them with a grain of salt.

Nick VinZant 22:41 So is it just are the trees and plants changing at all? Is that contributing anything?

Dr. Mike Flannigan 22:48 Yeah, it's situational. It depends where you are. I'll give you some examples, or at least one example, from Hawaii. Hawaii is a great place. And but they have fire. And when people say fire, and if you've been to the Big Island, dry sighs Yeah. Well, that makes sense. But no, almost every island in the chain has had fire. And in part, so it's natural, but some of its more recent due to human caused fires. And because invasive grasses, okay, they're competing with native grasses. But these grasses are very flammable. They live and then they get, they die. And then they burn, but their root system survives. And then they come back even stronger, and the native species aren't used to fire are competed. And the worst thing is a change from a species to these, you know, invasive, exotic species that's promoting fire that's happening in western United States that's happening around the world. And this is where we're moving. Because, you know, people say, hey, if we keep on getting more fire, the trees won't be able to handle it. They're absolutely right, the trees will disappear. But what will replace it? shops are grass. So in some respects, we're moving to a grass world as we see more and more fire grass is going to be the winner, and grass can burn every year. Many of our forest systems in North America are used to fire but fire is too frequent. They cannot regenerate. So we may lose some of our forests in the process here if we continue to see more and more fire and arguably it's already happening in places

Nick VinZant 24:29 is there have been any place where you thought like oh, there's no way that place is gonna burn. And then it it has recently like it's changed so much that places you didn't think could burn are burning.

Dr. Mike Flannigan 24:41 So some of the dip into Australia a number of times some other rain forest. Yeah, this is never gonna burn. But you know, I guess the same could be said we're close to where you live. There's some temperate rainforest. You know, this will never burn the dripping wet as hell So green, but severe drought actually can burn and Wilburn. And we're starting to see that on Vancouver Island. You know, on the, on the west side is, you know, like the Olympic Peninsula, it's very wet, typically, but in the summer, you get these bunkers, of dry weather, you get some lightning strikes, which seemed to be more common now than they used to be. We do get fires in these areas where, hey, you know, it's too wet.

Nick VinZant 25:30 Or at least I thought it was. Have you ever been in a situation where you thought you weren't gonna get out of it? No. And this is interesting. Firefighters in Canada do not carry emergency shelters. Okay. Our Americans, cousins usually do. And the reason is, we believe we should never be a position you have to deploy, you should always have your safety routes. You should never be a dangerous spot that you have to do emergency shelters. So it's a little different philosophy. I've never felt unsafe. I think I've seen extreme fire behavior. Pyro cumulonimbus just incredible. But I was on this, I was upwind downwind from the from the system. So I was, you know, like watching a tornado. From a distance you find it and you know, it's moving away from you. But if you're on the other side and so No, I've never felt threatened. what's what's Pyro?

Dr. Mike Flannigan 26:44 Pyro CB for short. It's a fire generated thunderstorm. And you may have seen pictures of it from some of the recent California fires. In fact, the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning a fire generated tornado warning this summer in California for the first time and on record. So the pictures you would see would be kind of smoky, you know, close to the earth. And then you kind of see that white below we call a flower look of a cloud sometimes with an animal sometimes not. That's a fire generate thunderstorm. Pyro cumulonimbus, Pyro being fire cumulonimbus being the term for thunderstorm. So fire generate thunderstorm, these are erratic, high intensity, very dangerous and difficult to well, essentially impossible to extinguish through direct attack.

Nick VinZant 27:42 What do you what are you working on? Not right now research wise, what are you looking at?

Dr. Mike Flannigan

So I do a lot of climate change work and I'm still working on climate change. I'm also looking at using machine learning artificial intelligence if you have a smartphone if you use any of the software, if using artificial intelligence to have a way of doing an early warning system, to identify when we're going to go through those periods of severe extreme fire weather, and where we can expect new fires to occur. So we can put resources on whether it's planes, helicopters crews, in the appropriate spot. So we're ready for it. And let's get the resources there. So we can deal with these fires quickly. So we don't have homemade escape buyers, threatening communities.

Whiskey Critic Richard Thomas

From $11 bottles to $100,000 dollar glasses, Whiskey Critic Richard has tried over a thousand different spirits. We talk hidden gems, great values, industry secrets and more. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Cheap Beers.

Interview with Whiskey Critic Richard Thomas

Speakers:

Nick VinZant: Profoundly Pointless Host

Richard Thomas: Whiskey Critic and founder/editor of website The Whiskey Reviewer

Show notes and topics covered

• How should you drink whiskey

• What is the best value whiskey

• What does a $100,000 dollar whiskey taste like

• What are the best whiskeys you have tried

Nick VinZant 0:12

Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant coming up in this episode, good whiskey and cheap beer.

Richard Thomas 0:22 And it was just very good stuff, not great stuff, but very good. And it was only $11 a bottle. And for $11 a bottle, it was the best buy on the planet. A lot of times what a novice in particular is doing is they're Miss identifying the effect of too much alcohol on their senses as being this, you know, like kind of harsh taste. And this caused the whole business to crash. Both in Scotland, Ireland, United States, Canada, everybody was sitting on top of a ocean of whiskey.

Nick VinZant 1:04 I want to thank you guys so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it really helps us out. So if you're anything like me, you've been drinking at least a little bit more over the last couple of months. Now I I always go cheap. I drink the cheap stuff, because I'm just generally a cheap person. But it got me thinking about Alright, well, what's what's really good? What do the experts say? Is the really good stuff to drink. Our first guest is an expert in whiskey. He runs the website, the whiskey reviewer, and he has tried thousands, thousands of different whiskies. And not only does he have this fascinating insight into what makes us particular drink good. But he's also got some inside secrets about really what goes in to making all of the different drinks that you see at the liquor store and at the gas station or wherever you buy your alcohol. This is whiskey critic, Richard Thomas. So how many whiskies do you think that you've tried in your lifetime?

Richard Thomas 2:21 That's a difficult question to put a finger on. But I did a book called American whiskey, which was about, you know, distillers from coast to coast. So I've done notes on over 800. And so therefore, including the stuff I haven't done notes on, because it hasn't been commercially released, or, you know, I was just enjoying dinner and didn't want to bother with it, or what have you. That would probably push it into the four, low four digit number range, somewhere between 1200 and 15.

Nick VinZant 2:52 Wow. But how different are most of those? Right? Did they all kind of run together eventually?

Richard Thomas 3:00 Yeah, well, within a particular category, maybe? You know, it's kind of like if I were to be talking about comparing bourbon to scotch, which are the two big ones. Yeah, I mean, basically, if you try to do 300 Bourbons, and then you try to do 300, scotch whiskies, they will be very different from each other. And you will not be mixing the two in your head in any way, shape, or form. Our own perceptions of what we taste and smell and experience can change with a lot of other subjective factors, like basically, you know, what did you eat? How are you feeling physically? And then of course, there's just simply what you like, what you don't like, some people have genetic issues, like, you know, there's a genetic tag i was i was reading about last year. And I would point to people about this if they didn't like particular things that really, really amps up the negative response to bitter flavors, which means there's a whole, you know, swathes of food and drink that just, they don't like it, period, and there's no way that they can, because these things are very variable, and you have to try to take your time with them in order to, you know, mitigate that.

Nick VinZant 4:21 So when you like when you evaluate a whiskey, what are you doing, kind of walk me through the steps that you're looking at, like, how do you go about tasting it, that kind of stuff?

Richard Thomas 4:32 Well, you know, basically, I will pour now pour a simple DRAM size or shot size, so we're talking like 30 to 50 milliliters. And the first thing I will do is give it just a preliminary nosing just to see if the alcohol content is too strong. This is especially the case because cask strength, and entry proof whiskies which can be very potent indeed, have become more and more powerful. popular in recent years, and sometimes No, basically, it's a, it's a good bargain, especially if the quality of whiskey in question is quite high, because you've got more stuff in your bottle, you know, like a concentrated cleaner, as opposed to the regular strength, I mean, you know, bring it up, and it burns your nostrils. So there's that check, which is basically like, Okay, do I need to dial this down or not. And then, you know, you do the same kind of thing that you would be told to do on any distillery tour or guided tasting with a brand ambassador with someone like me, which is, you know, you start by nosing it, you keep your mouth open a little bit to allow for that olfactory circulation. And you get acquainted with it that way. And you take a little sip, and then you notice it some more, and then you start sipping on it. And, you know, you draw that out, because as you proceed through it, you know, you'll pick up on things that you didn't notice at first, it's, it's really much like, you know, you get acquainted with people, especially with a new whiskey, it's basically like going out on a first date, getting to know someone, so you take your time with it. When I'm doing an evaluation of something that's new, it usually takes me 45 minutes to an hour.

Nick VinZant 6:21 So the first step necessarily, like that's not really gonna give you an idea of what it tastes like.

Richard Thomas 6:27 Yeah, I mean, spirits in particular, are very high proof. Even, you know, like basic spirits that are bottled up like 40%, alcohol by content, or 80 proof. They do have a tendency to, at least initially overwhelm your senses. A lot of people, for example, when they're dealing with bourbon, there's this flavor call that they like to call barrel char. A lot of times what a novice in particular is doing is they're Miss identifying the effect of too much alcohol on their senses, as being this, you know, like, kind of charish taste.

Nick VinZant 7:10 So why whiskey? What about whiskey drew you into it?

Richard Thomas 7:15 Well, that's, that's very much tied into my youth. I mean, I was born and raised in Kentucky, and I am a Gen X her. So you know, I'm a very mature kid of the 70s in the 80s. Now, in this state Back then, I mean, that was like the Nadir of the whiskey business around the world in the 70s. The taste of the boomers in particular began to change. It's something that people in the alcohol industry talk a lot about, actually, you know, they moved away from whiskey and towards clear spirits like vodka, and got more and more into wine as well. And this caused the whole business to crash. Both in Scotland, Ireland, the United States, Canada, everybody was sitting on top of a ocean of whiskey that they couldn't sell, you know, it was looked at as a very kind of working class blue collar kind of drink. So it wasn't a celebrated as this, you know, source of regional and national pride the way that it is today. And so for me, the beginning of all of this was one day when I was 17 years old, I was looking at feature on a map called Glen's Creek. And I thought that that would make for some good outdoor exploring. So I drove my car over there, I parked it on a road called McCracken pike and I got off my bicycle a lot of back and began pedaling around for way that I thought I could safely access Glen's Creek because it was all on private property. And I didn't want to get you know my mind, but shut up rock salt, by some angry local farmer. So I'm trying to figure out how to get down there. And as I'm pedaling along, I came across a trio of what looked like abandoned industrial sites, one of them very industrial looking, but the other two were quite different because they had these you know, one of them was a kind of pho castle that was falling into disrepair. When I came back from this trip to like, what the heck was going on down there? I discovered that these were three distilleries and the fact that two of them were even as you know, kind of, you know, already falling into disrepair, semi ruined, you know, complexes were quite beautiful. And that kind of gave me my first hint that there was more to this story of Kentucky bourbon than I had been led to believe. And those three distilleries in the road today are now Woodford Reserve, capital and key and the Glen Creek distillery. They're all they've all they've all been renovated.

Nick VinZant 10:00 So how do you tell the difference between something that's bad necessarily or just not for you?

Richard Thomas 10:10 Well, that actually is a really good question. And my usual answer to that, because I'm not a snob, is, um, you know, basically, if you like it, it's good. That's, that's the simplest way to get at it, if you will like it, it's good. And, you know, it's I encourage people to not let people like me, for example, influence their thinking on things too much. You know, I, in fact, I think that, you know, if you find a critic who is very snotty about these things, and insists that I know the difference that everyone should adhere to, as far as what's good, and what's not what's excellent, and what's terrible, and, and they tell you that only one type of glassware is really all that good. I mean, you know, Jimmy Russell, he was, you know, quite an institution in the Kentucky bourbon industry. I mean, you know, he's the master distiller wild turkey for decades. And the first time we ran into Jimmy was hanging out at keman, which is the local horse track, you're in Lexington, Kentucky, and he was drinking as well turkey out of a Dixie cup. So some things you know, are good tools that help you get the most out of your experience. And of course, having nice trappings is fun. But at the end of the day, snobbery is defining how much you love something by how much you hate it. So, and I would rather not spend any time hating on anything. So as far as what's bad, I mean, I tend to approach it from I don't think most people will like this, you know, as you're reading, but different people say about different things, and developing your own tastes, you should try to gravitate to the people who mirror you the most. And then you have a good buy.

Nick VinZant 12:05 I mean, I remember when I kind of first hit legal drinking age to go into a store and actually buy it. It seemed like there was just a couple of brands, you know, jack daniels, Jim bean, and maybe one other thing. Now you go in there, and there's aisles full of it. Like how do you sort through it all?

Richard Thomas 12:23 Oh, well, that's, that's where the having the internet around is certainly a big help. Because you know, as you're sitting there looking at it, you can just whip out your phone and plug certain stuff in and find out what's what. One of the bigger issues these days with the plethora of brands that are sitting on the shelves and liquor store now is, you know, who made what, which comes up a lot. I mean, basically, just because it says that we're from old timey whiskey distillery doesn't necessarily mean there really is a old timey whiskey distillery. A lot of companies are basically just bottlers. You know, they'll buy stock whiskey aged out of distillery. And that isn't theirs. And, you know, they'll take charge of blending it, which is an underappreciated art in the United States. I mean, basically, you know, when you ate a barrel of whiskey, how it's, you know, to always come up within certain parameters, but exactly what you'll have at the end of that process, you know, it's not necessarily fixed proposition, the best example, in fact of trying to control for that would be Maker's Mark, those guys spend a lot of money on labor, in terms of doing what's called barrel rotation. So they have their warehouses, and they're moving their barrels around the warehouses in a pattern that is designed to achieve, you know, the most consistent maturation possible, so that the difference from one barrel to another is almost nil. And so when they dump all those barrels into a tank, and the tank feeds into bottling, they don't actually have to do this process of trying to try and tune it. So you know, they put a lot of investment in how they age it so that you know, in terms of moving stuff around in the labor that's involved that so they don't have to do a lot of work at the end of the process, when they have to bottle this stuff. Most other people do it kind of differently, where they'll have like a nine floor warehouse. And you know how the barrels at the top of the warehouse come out will be very different from how the barrels at the bottom do and that's predictable. But two barrels that are sitting right next to each other because of wood or any other factor could also come out quite differently. And taking like 500 of the things in a batch and fine tuning that so you wind up with a consistent product but you know bottling run after bottling Run after Baldwin is both uh, you know, there's a lot of skill and a little bit of art to it. And a lot of Americans don't appreciate that very much the way that the Scots do because the Scots the idea of buying whiskey from like, you know, 20 or 25 separate distilleries, each with their own separate identities, and putting it together into a single product is normal. So over here, you don't get that. And so you have a lot of companies that do this business, they'll source the whiskey and they'll bottle themselves. And, you know, if you don't actually look up who they are, what they're doing, you don't really know what is what it is that you're actually getting.

Nick VinZant 15:40 I didn't know that I just assumed that whoever's name was on the bottle was controlling the whole process of making it all the way to shipping it.

Richard Thomas 15:48 Now there's a there's a distillery in southern Indiana these days, they call it MGP. It's leftover from the breakup of the secrets Corporation, some 20 years ago. And basically, they are at this point, the single largest producer of basically, I guess you could call it whiskey available on the open market, I like to call that stock whiskey. So more or less if you're, if you want to start up your own whiskey brand, and you don't want to build a distillery and you need to get hundreds of barrels of whiskey that's been aged for at least a few years to get started. More than likely, you're going to go to MGP and ask them for a lot of brands that are around especially in rye whiskey are based in this way. And for a long time, they were pretty much the only source for this stuff. But as demand for their own products picked up. They increasingly had to close that spigot, because they needed their stock for themselves and for their own products. So there was no need to sell to anyone else. But nothing, you know, because the demand is so high other players have entered the market. I mean, there's a distillery. It's now one of the largest in the state down in Bardstown Bardstown bourbon company. And their primary business model is being a contract distiller for sourced brands, um, you know, basically, they've, I think the last time I talked to them, they had 30 something clients, and, you know, more or less, they were just like, you know, they, they, they make a deal. They make what the client asks them to make they agent in their warehouses, and they either ship it to the client for bottling or arrange bottling, you know, themselves. And, yeah, that's, you know, like, when you look at the liquor store, and they're, if they're doing 30, something brands, it's a pretty good bet that several of them are now customers of Bardstown bourbon company, and several more, our customers GP up in Indiana, and a few more or sourcing from somebody in Canada or sourcing from, you know, some small, smaller distillery that might be closer to them, or what have you. So a lot of brands, you know, they don't actually own a distillery, or they want to, but they, you know, that's another thing that's a part of this, you know, a lot of the smaller companies is basically, you know, they want to get it still in business. But that's a lot of investment, and hardware. And then you have to make the whiskey and you have to put it up for maturation for two years, four years, six years, eight years. It's a lot of money to tie up with the process. And certainly you don't want to start building up your brand. Only once you have a good product to sell. Because that could be a decade later.

Nick VinZant 18:51 That makes sense. Because I always look at these companies and like, wait a minute, this is a new thing. Yeah, they start making this 10 years ago. And that kind of exact question, right? Like they just so you can essentially start up a brand and six months later, you've got a 10 year old whiskey.

Richard Thomas 19:08 Yeah, yeah, you can do that. At this age finding 10 year old whiskey that's, you know, stock whiskey, you know, in barrels is available for that kind of thing. That would be hard to do and very expensive. But you could find four or five year old stuff, and you know, buy a bunch of it and bottle some of it now and then do your 10 year old A few years later, something along those lines. That's what a lot of people are actually have been doing. Since 2014 2016. You know, a decent American whiskey, it's mature at about four years that's properly aged at six to nine. middle aged at about 9012. And it's really old about 15 years, and scotch and Irish. is even more so. So it's a business where you really kind of you can't even, you don't have to be thinking about stuff that's so far in the future that you have no way of really knowing what's going to be happening by the time that you get there.

Nick VinZant 20:15 Yeah, that would be a definite challenge, right? Like, let's make the product for 2032. We actually have a bunch of listener submitted questions that I think kind of cover a lot of topics as well. So Okay, are you ready for some listener submitted questions?

Richard Thomas 20:31 Hit me,

Nick VinZant 20:32 most expensive whiskey you have ever tried.

Richard Thomas 20:39 Just a few weeks ago, I was writing a piece about what the most expensive scotch whiskies in the world are. And one of the things that got like, at the top of this list was this 50 year old MacAllan. But you know, it was it's both 50 years old and a 50 year old collectible, because the version that I'm talking about was bottled in 1983. So basically, it's like, I think when this stuff the market, it could be remembering this wrong. But like in 1983, it was being sold for 50 British pounds a bottle. And nowadays, if you want to get this stuff, it's over 100 grand. Holy. Yeah. I've tried that. And I think that is the most expensive thing that has passed my lens. Was it? Was it worth it? Like, I didn't buy it. I didn't buy it. And in fact, at the time that I tried it, it wasn't where it was, it was worth five figure amount of money, but not a six figure amount of money. But yeah, it was one of these things where I was at a show and someone was like, Hey, I have a little flask of the 1983 50 year old MacAllan. And so we sat down, and he's the kind of person that would have it would be bringing it to this kind of place. And so yeah, I got to try it. And it was the blind. But you know, keeping in mind the fact that the amount of money that it costs them was the equivalent of buying a nice new car. And now it's the equivalent of buying like a super luxury car. You know, the questions of whether or not it's worth it entirely and scaled what your disposable income is. I mean, you know, if you have the kind of money where you think that dropping 300 or $3,000, on a bottle of alcohol is, you know, not going to hurt you. It's not going to be painful. But yeah, it's totally worth it. But if that is a lot of money to you, and it's a painful expense to park with it, then No, it's not. You know, those things are very relative whether or not it's worth it. You know, is it was it worth it? Yes, it's worth it. Is it worth $100,000? a bottle? I don't have $100,000 to spend on anything. So no, not to me.

Nick VinZant 23:17 That makes sense. And I guess like the person, the person buying it for $100,000, that's probably like, 100 bucks to somebody else.

Richard Thomas 23:24 Yeah. You know, people are just fazed by things like that, not me.

Nick VinZant 23:30 Is, is when you look at though, like the price range of whiskey, is there a sweet spot in there where you can get something that's a really good quality, but not that expensive? Like, is there a sweet spot pricing wise,

Richard Thomas 23:44 there are certain items that are a little pricey, but I think they're worth the amount of money that you would pay for it. One example of this is, mixers, 10 year old rye, which is a single barrel. I love that stuff. And if you can get it for $150, because some retailers will mark this up steeply. But if you can get it for 150, I think it's worth 150. And there are a lot of things that you know, that are in that kind of range where they're like $100, or $150 or $200. And for most people that is like, you know, a birthday present to sell, or Christmas presents itself kind of price range. You know, it's it's expensive, but it's not terribly so it's not you know, it's the kind of thing that you know, you can splurge on it realistically,

Nick VinZant 24:35 what's your favorite, cheap whiskey, like the kind of rott gut stuff?

Richard Thomas 24:44 Um, my drinking is, I guess you could call it subsidized because, you know, people sent me things that they want me to try them. But let me try to think I that's the question I haven't thought about in a long time, like what's actually really, really cheap. You know, like, sometimes Simple like Jim Beam white label, you know, it's I treat it as sort of the benchmark for what bourbon is supposed to be because it is the best selling of the bunch. And it's not very expensive. You know, where I live, it's about $13 a bottle. And I mean, you know, seriously, there's there's craft beer, getting a six pack will cost you more than that. And it's not remarkable, but it's still just plain good stuff. You know, when I get asked, like, what is an example, right gut, one of the things I like to point to is this stuff called Kentucky gentleman. And there are actually two different types of Kentucky gentlemen, one is a bourbon and that is a very subpar bourbon. And then underneath it is blended whiskey. And the blended whiskey really is just awful. I do not like it at all, but there's a lot of cheap stuff that is good. And presents big, big bargains for the amount of money that you spend. Of course, the best examples of that are disappearing one by one, there used to be this thing here in Kentucky, it was the kind of it was something that you know, if you're coming, coming from out of state, you should go to a liquor store trying to find it and buy a cap case and take it home. It was made by Heaven Hill, it was Heaven, Hell, six year old bottles bought, which was only a Kentucky really, you couldn't get it anywhere else. But here. And it was just very good stuff. Not great stuff, but very good. And it was only $11 a bottle. And for $11 a bottle, it was the best buy on the planet. They don't do that anymore. You know, worried about it started to get around. And so more and more often, you know, you weren't sure people had it, because tourists would grab it. Which, you know, I appreciated that very much. I was basically like, well, it makes my life a little harder. But that's okay, you know, more people enjoying it, that's fine. And, you know, I I know how to take care of my needs. So that's okay. And then, you know, haven't held caught on to how popular this stuff was getting and decided that they could do something with that in terms of marketing. So they would do it. They turned it from a six year old into a seven year old. They released it nationally and they raised the price from $11 to 40. And that's that's the kind of thing that happens with these, these sleeper whiskies that are really cheap, and they're really good. These days, they can't stay that way for very long as a few years of people buzzing about them.

Nick VinZant 27:57 better better way to add water to whiskey straight water or an ice four.

Richard Thomas 28:04 Oh, well given that I spend a lot of time not you know, out in the summer and not in air conditioning, I have absolutely nothing against putting big blocks of ordinary ice into a glass of whiskey. And I do tend to look at that as primarily a climate thing. You know, like when it's when it's wintertime, you know, autumn early spring I'm not drinking chilled anything. So I switched strictly to putting a splash of water

Nick VinZant 28:43 coolest person you've ever had a drink with

Richard Thomas 28:47 just just the most all around cool time I ever had drinking somebody before. was a you know I was up in Scotland and I was meeting with Alan Winchester is the master distiller at the Glenlivet and that was just one of those situations where between him and who else was there that was the coolest you know bottle of scotch at overkill just simply because you know the conversation was so great. The time was so interesting you know it's just a very very well spent kind of thing where you came out you disrespect that was that really hit the nail on the head that was just an awesome time.

Nick VinZant 29:32 Last last question for me if you had to give a top three what would be in your top three?

Richard Thomas 29:41 Well, my top three I get that a lot like what are your favorite things to drink? What are your things to do this that or the other thing and I tend to think of it in terms of go to you know, it just basically like because go twos are more accessible, right? Like I could I could talk about the the all time mind blowing experiences like you know, the the super expensive MacAllan that I just mentioned before or drinking 28 year old Irish single pot still whiskey straight from Port pipe at the new Middleton distillery, things like that. But you know, that's not like normal stuff that everybody can appreciate. And what's on my shelf right now in terms of go to what have I got out? Let's see Well, before I mentioned the mixers, 10 year old rye, I've the mixers, 10 year old, single barrel bourbon, and that's on my shelf. And that's the priciest thing that's there. Right now I've got a large toasted barrel because it's new, and it's wonderful for kind of like a desert whiskey. I've got conus brimstone, which is super smoky. If you're into that kind of thing. Wild Turkey Rare Breed rye. And I brought this up because they just reinstituted it. knob Creek, small batch nine year old. And you know, any of those things would be on my list of go to favorites.

Nick VinZant 31:14 That's really all the questions I had. what's coming up next review? How can people kind of find out more about you?

Richard Thomas 31:21 Well, let's see. So my writing is here, there and everywhere. I'm the owner and the editor of the whisky reviewer, which is this point of fairly well known whiskey issues website. And of course, they're the books that I've written or contributed to the last one, which, like I said, we launched that aquarii is American whiskey. And right now in writing fairly steadily for chilled magazine, and Vine, Pear.

Nick VinZant 31:52 I want to thank Richard so much for joining us if you want to connect with him. We have a link to him on our social media or Profoundly Pointless on Instagram and Twitter. And we have also included in the RSS feed that's on this podcast

Evolutionary Biologist Dr. Corrie Moreau

Some insects lick each other's butts. You’ve probably never seen a male ant. If that sparked your curiosity, joins us as we explore the natural world with Evolutionary Biologist Dr. Corrie Moreau. We talk evolution, biodiversity, conservation and animal behaviors that will blow your mind. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Insects. 

Interview with Evolutionary Biologist Dr. Corrie Moreau

Speakers

Nick VinZant: Profoundly Pointless Host

Dr. Corrie Moreau: Evolutionary Biologist and Entomologist

Show Notes

• What is the most evolved animal on Earth

• What is happening to the Earth’s biodiversity

• What do Evolutionary Biologists study

• Why does our world look the way it does

• Why are certain animals only in certain locations

• What is the most interesting ant species

• Why is there only one male ant

• What is the most dangerous ant

• What can insects tell us about ourselves and our world

Nick VinZant 0:13

Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, insects and evolution,

Dr. Corrie Moreau 0:22 we're just trying to understand how the natural world around us came to be. So how did all the species form? Why are they distributed where they are on the planet, many of their baby behaviors are so similar to behaviors that we ourselves exhibit that it was easy to connect with them, right? They wage battles, they care for their young, they gather food, they build architecture, so long ago, ancestor some primordial sludge in the you know, soup of the sea. That's where all of life on this planet came from their big conspicuous ants, they actually will actively watch you in the forest. So it's always a little freaky to like, stumble into one of their nests.

Nick VinZant 1:03 I want to thank you guys so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it, it really helps us out. So do you ever just kind of look around and wonder why. Why did these animals live in these places? Why does this insect look the way that it does? Why do we look, the way that we look? Our first guest studies exactly that. And she has this fascinating insight and a masterful way of explaining things that I just during this whole interview. I just found myself going. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. That's amazing. There's so much that goes into the world around us. And I think that, that just kind of peeling back that little bit, even a later layer of that just reveals so much fascination, I think and you can kind of walk away with just this marvelous wonder at the world around you. After listening to her, oh, and she knows a lot about ads. Like a lot about ads, stuff that you had no idea could possibly be true. And this makes you go what this is evolutionary biologist Dr. Corrie Moreau. So when we talk about evolutionary biology, like what, what exactly are we talking about?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 2:28 In my mind, when we're talking about evolutionary biology, we're just trying to understand how the natural world around us came to be. So how did all the species form? Why are they distributed where they are on the planet? I mean, if you think about it, why isn't everything just equally found across the globe and an equal numbers and all of the different organismal groups? I mean, if you think about just insects, there are more species of insects than there are of mammals. So trying to figure out those sort of patterns and understand the processes that lead to the diversity of life we see

Nick VinZant 2:58 when when you kind of look at like evolutionary pressure. Is it evolutionary pressure from outside of the organisms group, like other organisms? Or is it from within, like, they're competing against themselves, so to speak,

Dr. Corrie Moreau 3:12 both of those things, plus one more thing, which is the environment itself, right? So you can think about, as you know, aerification happened in some of our desert regions, we had animals that had to now adapt to an entirely new environment, or they didn't survive, right. So things either went extinct, or they changed to live in these new habitats. But again, we also know that there can be interspecies competition and conflict, which might sort of drive either species to diverge away from one another, if it's things like, you know, conflict, or they might become well adapted to living together and become a mutualism. And even within species, you know, sort of conflict and cooperation can lead to this divergence, right? So now two populations may no longer interact, which in the longer term might lead to a speciation event.

Nick VinZant 4:01 I don't know how to ask you this question necessarily, but kind of give me some leeway. Like how big of a pressure does there have to be before something becomes an entirely new species?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 4:12 Yeah, that's a great question. Usually, what happens is you need some amount of time. So the way I like to think about it isn't imagine had a population it was all just one species. And it was distributed across a wide geographic range. And maybe a mountain rose up in between them or a river change course and split them into two populations now, but they're still the same species, right? They're just in different locations. But now if they have some sort of a barrier that doesn't allow them to mix anymore, mostly, of course, thinking about their genetics, what will happen is, each of them will start to accumulate new mate mutations, either by random chance, or maybe because one of them is on the drier end of the distribution, right. And so you start accumulating more mutations that help them be successful in this Dry adapted environment, and maybe the others in a wetter part of the environment. But either way, you need some amount of time for those populations to become so incredibly different from one another that if they were reintroduced to one another, they no longer can even mate anymore, they become distinct species. And so the amount of time that needs to pass, of course varies. Many people think it's probably on the order of a million years, sometimes it happens really quickly and could happen in you know, hundreds of thousands of years. Sometimes it might take millions of years for those populations to drift far enough apart, that they're now no longer one species.

Nick VinZant 5:36 Is there one species that you look at and say that's the most evolved species of all?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 5:41 Well, that's a misnomer, because in evolution, nothing is more evolved than anything else. And so it's this idea that all of life on planet is equal, it's just who they're most closely related to. And so you can have relics that don't have very many close relatives around anymore. So they'll seem kind of bizarre. So if you think of something like a field account, right, it's, there's not a lot of things that are very highly similar to a seal a camp, where other things like you might think of fruit flies, and they kind of all look alike to you. But there's lots and lots and lots of species. And so, you know, how would you sort of decide which is is, you know, more at the pinnacle of evolution, they're just in different trajectories,

Nick VinZant 6:24 they kind of each go as far as they need to. Right. Is that? Does that make sense?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 6:28 Sure. And of course, you also have to keep in mind, lots of things are going extinct through evolutionary time as well.

Nick VinZant 6:33 When you look at kind of, from the aspect of biodiversity. Do we have as much biodiversity as we used to? Is that just going away? Like what's happening to all these species?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 6:46 Yeah, that's a tough one. I mean, I would say, unfortunately, humans have a pretty negative impact on biodiversity. And we know that we're losing species because of, of, you know, our involvement on the planet. And not always an unnecessarily intentionally bad way, right. And so we know some organisms just don't do well around human built environments where others actually thrive, right? So we can think about things like cockroaches and, and they've done extremely well in the human and made environment where lots of species actually go extinct, either locally or globally, when, you know, their environment is perturbed too much. So do I think our planet holding all the biodiversity? It could? Absolutely not. And unfortunately, that's probably our fault at this moment. But if we were to sort of back up, you know, a few thousand years, I would say that we probably were, you know, holding quite a bit more biodiversity.

Nick VinZant 7:38 I mean, is there something that we, as a human species can do to save this? Or is it just like, our mere presence is going to have some kind of effect, right, like, no matter how much we tip toe, something's bad is going to happen, so to speak?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 7:52 Well, I mean, of course, if we tiptoe, we're gonna cause less than negative pressures on on biological diversity. Then, of course, there are things that individuals can do right, you can be quite mindful about how you live on the planet. But I really think to sort of stop the the large changes that are happening, and we'd have to invoke policies at the global level, right? We know that climate change is one of the leading factors that's currently impacting species on the planet, but we'll certainly continue to in the future, where, you know, a lot of us have now thought about things like, you know, planting native plants in our gardens to attract pollinators, right. And so I think there's a level of knowledge that each of us individually can gain to make sure that we're promoting and helping support biodiversity. But then there's also things that just because of the sheer number of people we have, we're going to always have industrial farming at this point, right? As much as all of us would love to eat locally and shop locally, it's like impossible to do that entirely for the majority of the planet. So I mean, I think that each of us should do our small part, but we should also be advocating for policy change at the highest levels.

Nick VinZant 8:59 What kind of policy changes do you think that we need the most?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 9:03 I think we need to think about, you know, how do we how do we get our sources of energy, I think we need to think about how do we feed people effectively while still being mindful of the planet and not just being greedy? I think that we have to be thoughtful about where people live in reside. And, you know, and, and recognize that not, you know, not everyone can have, you know, equal sizes of property and, and, and still support, you know, biodiversity on the planet.

Nick VinZant 9:42 How was this something that you got into what attracted you to it?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 9:46 to biology, or thinking about our impact on the planet.

Nick VinZant 9:51 Well, I feel like one is just an existential crisis that we all have. So let's go with biology.

Dr. Corrie Moreau 9:58 Sure. So growing I loved nature, I thought it was just the coolest thing. I grew up in New Orleans. But I didn't. I didn't know scientists, my parents didn't go to university and or college. And so it wasn't like I had this idea like, okay, step one, you do this, then step two, you become a scientist, it was more just that I thought nature was cool. And back then, you know, I'm older than and then probably many of your listeners, we didn't have the nature channel and animal planet, we just had PBS. And I remember every single major show that came on on PBS, I was glued to the TV. But I also thought that, you know, that PBS had all the scientists in the world on it. And that's probably all the scientists that we needed in the world, I didn't realize all the ways that you can use research and science. And so it wasn't until I went away to university that I, my eyes were open to just all the cool things that you could do. And, and maybe it's because I grew up in an urban environment, I just love bugs, because I could find them anywhere. And so, for me, I went away to university and thought, Okay, I'm going to study nature, but I really want to focus on bugs. And I don't know what I'll do with that in the end. But, um, you know, I sort of thought maybe I could teach high school or maybe work for a pest control company. But you know, I didn't know that there were so many ways that you could use insects to study important questions on the planet.

Nick VinZant 11:18 What can insects tell us about our lives?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 11:23 Well, I mean, of course, in lots of different things, in one way, you know, many species are bio indicators for whether we have healthy habitats. And so that's important, of course, we also know that if you think about the impact of, of organisms, on human commodities, of course, insects are a giant pest, but they're also important pollinators, right. So they have lots of beneficial and harmful roles for things that humans care about. I don't do applied research, most of my research is actually much more fundamental, or basic. And what I'm trying to just understand is, why are there so many species? And why are they found where they are? And and how does species interactions explain how they may shift into new habitats or onto novel diets? And I'm just trying to understand the world around me.

Nick VinZant 12:08 So from an understanding standpoint, let's say one, is we basically know absolutely nothing about the world around us, the species around us. 10, we've got this all completely figured out. Where do you think that we are right now?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 12:25 Oh, goodness, maybe at a three. Yeah, I mean, think about the fact that how many species of invertebrates there are in a rainforest that we know nothing about are all the bacteria that are found globally distributed, we know almost nothing about. And let's not even talk about the bottom of the oceans, there's so much diversity down there that every now and then we get a glimpse of because maybe we send some sort of a submerge vesicle down there, or a fisherman find something bizarre, but I guarantee you, there's 100 fold more diversity out there than any of the things we've even just began to sort of study. I mean, I imagine biodiversity in my mind as much like an avalanche. We are only seeing what's above water right now. That's all the scientists have been able to discover and describe. And the majority of it's still hidden underneath the ocean. And really, like, you know, there's so much incredible knowledge to gain from studying that diversity.

Nick VinZant 13:22 So what was it about ants that appealed to you so much?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 13:25 Oh, well, I think for me, it was that even as a kid, I could watch them engaging in behaviors. So not that I was asking sophisticated questions, I might have been just putting out cookie crumbs and noting how many came and how many, how long it took them to carry them away. But I loved that I could actually studying them doing something in real time. And despite the fact that they often weren't as beautiful as some of the butterflies or beetles I saw. Sometimes in one summer, I might find one beetle and not see it again till the next year. So I couldn't actually like observe things about it. So I think that's what first captivated me to answer. I also think it was that many of their baby behaviors are so similar to behaviors that we ourselves exhibit that it was easy to connect with them, right? They wage battles. They care for their young, they gather food, they build architecture. So I think I just was naturally attracted to them, because they, they did all these amazing things.

Nick VinZant 14:20 I mean, they are kind of the coolest, right?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 14:22 Yes, definitely.

Nick VinZant 14:24 Which one? All right, though. Well, I'll ask you this later, because we have some listener questions that are kind of focused on that a little bit. But I was reading just some of the research that you did that the ants were 100 and 40 million years old or something.

Dr. Corrie Moreau 14:38 That's right. Yeah. And so we use a set of statistical, you know, tools to help us figure that out by using both molecular data DNA data coupled with the fossil record. So ants have an incredibly rich fossil record. There are 10s of thousands of ant fossils, and the oldest ant fossils about 100 million years old. And what's interesting is that belongs to a group that's still around today. So really, what it appears is that amps sort of appeared on the planet from their closest relatives. And we're kind of, you know, doing okay, probably not in high density or high species numbers. And then as the flowering platform is sort of expanded across the globe, this was a perfect niche for them to live in. So if any of you've ever spent time in tropical forests, you know that answer everywhere. And so it really provided a niche both in the places they could live, but also in all kinds of new food resources for them. So ants really sort of went through this explosion in species correlated with the expansion of the flowering plant for us across the globe.

Nick VinZant 15:42 Do we have any idea how many ants there are on the planet?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 15:47 individual or as a species?

Nick VinZant 15:50 I guess both.

Dr. Corrie Moreau 15:54 So, species wise, right now, scientists have given names to about 15,000 species of ants, we know that numbers at least double and maybe triple. So there are a lot of species of ants. And I want to sort of contextualize that, there are more species of just ants than all the birds and mammals add it together. And so, you know, there's a lot of really interesting behaviors and structures to study within them. Now, if we talk about individuals, there's been some like, you know, crazy back of the envelope calculations, and it's in the trillions that we actually believe are probably on the planet. Now, some people have speculated that between ants and termites they, they have more biomass than all the humans on the planet right now. Meaning that if we put all of the ants and termites on one side of a scale, and all the humans on the planet, on the other side of scale, the ants and termites would outweigh the humans. What, why are there so many? Do we need that many of them? Are they this that good at reproducing? Like, why? Why are they so dominant in that regard? Yeah, so they are living social structures, right? So since their social species, every nest is essentially one individual, right? So you have a queen in there, who's laying all the eggs, and then you have all the workers in the nest that are performing all the important roles, whether it's feeding the on or building the NASA or gathering the food or waging the battles, right. And so each nest is essentially one super organism with lots of individuals in it. Now, as to whether we need them all, I would argue We absolutely do. They're important ecosystem engineers. And so, you know, I often tell people that they're really important for soil health and likely more important even than earthworms. So you know, they're whenever you see an ad going into a hole in the ground, there's essentially an upside down skyscraper underneath that soil, right? So they are building tunnels, they're aerating the soil, they're letting nutrients flow in into the soil, they're bringing nutrients up towards the, the, you know, soil surface, they're letting water permeate that. And that's just the answer. They're living in the soil. And so they also perform lots of important roles for plants, like dispersing seeds, and breaking down and helping decompose organic matter. So I think we need them all,

Nick VinZant 18:06 when you look at kind of the evolution of species necessarily, is it still the remaining like, did we all come from the same place at the same time, and it just branched off, and eventually, we got all of us.

Dr. Corrie Moreau 18:18 That's right. So all of life on this planet, is from a single, you know, long ago, ancestor, some primordial sledge in the you know, soup of the sea. And that's where all of life on this planet came from. Now, of course, it broke off into different branches of the tree. So we can think about fungi and animals are more closely related than they are to plants. And of course, then there's all kinds of microbial groups that, you know, also, you know, diversified and have lots of species and important roles on the planet. But yeah, all from one evolutionary origin.

Nick VinZant 18:49 So I'm going to use the proverbial they in this, but like, how, how are they able to determine the difference between like, okay, we all originated, I'm just gonna name my hometown. We all originated from Derby, Kansas somehow, as opposed to like, Oh, no, no, this happened to different places at the same time, and they all came, like, how did they separate out the difference?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 19:10 Yeah. So of course, there's all kinds of hints of you look at external anatomy, but really the and so people had long been speculating that that was probably the case. But the DNA data is actually what's really sealed the case. So we can actually use DNA. So just like if you imagine if we wanted to say, Okay, how are all are you in all of your relatives related to each other? So you wouldn't have to tell me, you could just give me a sample of all of your DNA, I could figure out who your Dad Mom was, I could figure out who their dad mom was, I could figure out who their siblings were right, from using that genetic evidence. Well, that's just at the scale of one family. Now, we can sort of do that across the globe. And we can ask the question, how is life on the planet related to one another, and there's, of course hints in the fact that the genetic code is all highly similar, but in addition, we can reconstruct that family tree and actually see how life evolved on the planet. It's called phylogenetic, it's actually really an amazing tool to sort of understand the diversity of life,

Nick VinZant 20:10 Do human beings have much bio diversity, are we pretty much all right in the same place? Or is that a big controversial loaded? Question?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 20:18 Oh, I don't think it's a controversial loaded question. I mean, we're all one species. That's for a fact. Of course, just like lots of other species, we have population genetic level differences, right. It's becoming blurred, the more global and more mobile we are, we're mixing a lot of that diversity more and more. But of course, we know that, you know, humans originated from Africa, they migrated out some, you know, individuals sort of landed in Australia, right, essentially, became isolated there for quite a long time. So if we look at the DNA of them, we can see the distinct signatures of being from Australia versus being from North America. But we're still all the same species, right? If we put this back together, we can interbreed quite easily, we still share much of our DNA, it's, you know, some obscene amount, like 99.999% of our DNA between any two humans on the planet is identical. I mean, that's pretty remarkable.

Nick VinZant 21:15 When scientists first figured that out,were people shocked that it was that high.

Dr. Corrie Moreau 21:23 They were shocked. But then, of course, you know, coming back to that question you'd asked me earlier about, like, you know, which is the most evolutionary advanced species. When we first started having the technology to sequence genomes? Well, people had made predictions that because humans had these sophisticated social structures, because we had language because we had art and music, we knew that we probably need a lot more genes to encode for all of those unique things that make us human. And once we started sequencing lots of genomes and looking at gene content, we were shocked to find out that our gene content isn't much different from almost anything else. And that was something that people hadn't expected, we now know and even knew, then that one gene doesn't coat for one trait. Usually what you have is many genes contributing to particular traits. And so any one gene is more like a letter of an alphabet, you might use an E to spell one word this, you know, in this sentence, but you're going to use an E again, and then st next word in the same sentence. And it doesn't give you the same word. And so now we just know that sort of the interplay and communication between all of our genes is what leads to complexity, not the number of them,

Nick VinZant 22:37 like okay, how much of our DNA do we share with an ant? Like, do they have somebody measured that?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 22:45 I am, I'm not sure if anybody's measured it, we could measure it, I mean, but to give you perspective, like our next closest relative is a chimpanzee and we share like 97% of our DNA with our closest relative. So if we were sort of to extrapolate out, I would imagine, we probably share something like 60% of our DNA with ants, I mean, they're an animal, you have to remember that. So you know, all the things that are animal share a large proportion of their DNA.

Nick VinZant 23:12 So I'm dating myself a little bit, but in terms when I was growing up, evolution was still kind of this big thing. And full disclosure, I went to a Catholic school, and evolution is not real, is that still a thing that is around or people I've scientists pretty much dispelled that. And

Dr. Corrie Moreau 23:29 I would argue scientists have long dispelled that there are still people who question it. And you know, it's always interesting to me that people question evolutionary biology, but they don't question astronomy. Because really, we're not trying to solve How did the, you know world come to be and like, what's the origin of the universe? That's astronomers, but nobody pickets astronomy conferences, but they still do come to evolution conferences from time to time and try to, you know, say that, you know, our work isn't real, because they can't be related to a monkey. Right. And, and that's not how evolution works, Nick VinZant 24:08 Are we talking about just the same one person ormultiple people

Dr. Corrie Moreau 24:13 Oh, it's usually a very small group. And, you know, it's, it's definitely decreased through time. I think that you know, it's funny, because people who even question evolution, they have no problem trusting medicine. And where do you think most of that medicine comes from? Or how we understand how epidemiology happens, or how we have you know, pandemics that's all through the lens of evolution, we're watching how these things evolve. Nick VinZant 24:42 Are you ready for some of the harder slash listener submitted questions?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 24:46 Bring them on?

Nick VinZant 24:48 most overrated ant Dr. Corrie Moreau 24:51 oh, that's an interesting question. most overrated and maybe army ants. And I think it's because people like you know, they've seen You know, like, Temple of Doom or Raiders of Lost Ark, whichever one were supposedly like a human was consumed by army ants. And so people often ask me like, could army ants kill me? And the answer is no. So I think that's why they're overrated.

Nick VinZant 25:16 If we're an ant High School, what ant is the jock? Who's the nerd who's the cool guy? Who's the loner.

Dr. Corrie Moreau 25:27 So first, I'm gonna say if it was an ant High School, it would be a high school be an all girls high school. Because all the ants you've probably ever seen in your life, our female males are only produced once a year solely for reproduction. So if you've ever seen an ant out, waging a battle, or carrying food back to the nest or building the nest, those are all females. If you saw an ant without wings, it's female. So only once a year are males produced, they have wings, and so did the new queens and they go off on a mating flight, the male's never contribute to the care of the colony or gathering food. Their only job is reproduction. So after they copulate, or reproduce, they die almost immediately. So now you have a new queen, she flies off to find a suitable habitat to start her whole new colony of all females, and then digs down in the dirt and starts laying eggs. So if we go back to your high school analogy, that's a tougher one. Because thinking about the dynamics of an all girls high school, of course, you'd have the the jock would probably be the soldier ants, right? The ones that are just brute force. If we had the nerds that would be the scouts that are out trying to figure out where's the next best food source to come from? I don't remember all the other categories

Nick VinZant 26:41 who would be the cool kid of ant high school

Dr. Corrie Moreau 26:46 I think all of them. Nick VinZant 26:48 What if there was a coolant amongst cool ants, you had to pick one like this, this species of ant or this, this ant is the cool one.

Dr. Corrie Moreau 26:58 Oh, gosh, I guess I'd have to pick the queen, because the colony doesn't exist without her. That being said, I think she has the worst job of the entire colony because remember, once she sort of mates, she digs down the soil and then just lays eggs the rest of her life. She never leaves the nest, she never reproduces again, she never gathers food. She just sits there and lays eggs.

Nick VinZant 27:20 Yeah, kind of sounds awful for the Queen and the man doesn't. Yeah. What what would be the reason though? Like, what's the biological or evolutionary reason while only having this one man? Why? Why would that be advantageous to them.

Dr. Corrie Moreau 27:37 So this has to do with several things. One has to do with their meeting structure. So when we meet or reproduce, right, we have one set of chromosomes that comes from our mothers, our maternal line, and one from our paternal line or father's. And we could do get some mixing, but more or less, you're kind of getting one chromosome from each parent. Well, in social in the hymenoptera, which are the ants, bees and wasps, they have a different meaning structure. So when a queen lays an egg and sperm is united with it, it becomes diploid. So it has two copies of all of the chromosomes, and it becomes a female. If she lays an egg and does not unite sperm with it, it becomes male. So males are halfway, they only have one copy of all their chromosomes. So first, the genetic structure of determining sex is actually quite different. In addition, now you have these females that are deployed, right, they have two sets of chromosomes. And because of that system, all of the individuals in the nest and up highly related to one another. So they're invested in sort of taking care of both the Queen but also the older sisters, because of that high relatedness. So it's turned into this odd system where males are really only utilized for essentially reproduction.

Nick VinZant 28:55 Guys, kind of the same with us. In some ways. I feel like you really, you really don't need men. I mean, you really don't. Is that kind of true throughout the species? Like you only need one man for every how many women?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 29:10 That's I mean, reproductively. That's certainly true. I wish we could tell our global leadership that that

Nick VinZant 29:16 best movie about an ant.

Dr. Corrie Moreau 29:18 Oh, interesting. Wow. I mean, so I have so of course, my first thought is all of the movies that are not done well. Yeah. I mean, think about things like Bug's Life and ants, right? It shows this whole male Task Force on these strong male soldiers. And all of that is totally not true. Those are all females. I'll say that. Of course, I like classic movies. So of course them is really exciting to me. There's a few things I really like about it, partially because they use scientific names for ants, which is, you know, pretty nerdy, but I appreciate and they make the entiende, the entomologist studying them really an expert in ants, which of course i think is cool, but at As much as I often complain about Ant Man, because it's not at managed to be at woman, I did appreciate that a lot of storytelling around the skills and tools of these different ants actually was based in some amount of reality of what those species actually can do. So I liked that they did a little studying and so that you're actually learning a little bit about and diversity while watching the movie,

Nick VinZant 30:23 the species with the farthest evolutionary journey. I guess, technically the furthest because it's not a measurement of actual distance. But anyway,

Dr. Corrie Moreau 30:36 That's an interesting, there's lots of ways to answer that question. Because again, as I sort of explained earlier, no species is more evolved than anything else. So we could sort of talk about species that are these anomalies on the tree of life, right, meaning that they didn't leave a lot behind a lot of species and that we still don't understand much about them. So there's a species of a couple of pieces of ants that are early divergent lineages of ants that left not a lot of clues about what their life was like when they first evolved. So those ones are pretty interesting. Of course, the first thing that jumped in my mind was the Bulla ant, which is para poner cavada. And this ant is amazing, because it's just one species, but it has a distribution, essentially, from southern Mexico through all of Central America and all of South America. They're big conspicuous ants, they actually will actively watch you in the forest. So it's always a little freaky to like, stumble into one of their nests. They are incredibly painful things. So most people try to avoid interacting with them. That's why they're called bullet ants. It feels like you were shot by a gun. But what's really interesting is there's only one species in that not only the just the genus and the entire sub family, just that one species that survived. So it begs the question, sort of, why did the sort of relatives of that go extinct? yet? This one has been incredibly evolutionarily successful? Is that the Siafu ant? I still remember some documentary that like they carry away children or something. Oh, no. Siafu is the African army ant I think there's been like one case, supposedly, it's never been fact checked that a farmer had a newborn and put it out in the shade, but in the field, and then wandered off to do some work in the field. And then the army ants came along and found this plump, little juicy child sitting there, and stung it and bit it but didn't carry it away.

Nick VinZant 32:38 Oh, that makes me feel much better. Biggest thing you learned from E.O Wilson?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 32:45 Oh, that's a nice question. I think it's to appreciate curiosity. And to cultivate it in yourself. I think that we often think of science as this really rigid process where, you know, everything was sort of has to conform to some experimental expectations. And what he really promoted was that observing the natural world, and getting to know what's happening around you actually informed your questions. And so you can ask better questions when you actually know what things do in nature and, and being curious about organisms or being curious about habitats actually will lead to the most powerful insights. So I think that's probably what he taught me the most. Let me follow up that great question with would you rather be a wasp or a hornet? Well, a hornet is just a type of a wasp. So I guess the question is, doesn't matter.

Nick VinZant 33:48 Man, right, when our audience was looking really smart, then they came across this way to let us down. Um, I don't know if this is your area of expertise. But I remember I said our audience is a little quirky. It just says, What's going on with a platypus?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 34:05 Oh, that is a great question. I mean, I totally agree that has to be one of the most bizarre looking animals. And, I mean, with some really interesting life history, but I mean, I think to me, what sums up the platypus is that the first time one was collected by European explorers and and sent it back to to England. They thought it was a gas they thought that literally the as a joke, the Explorer had taken multiple different animals and glued them together, and then sent it on as if it was a real species. And what's interesting if you look at what now it literally looks like you've glued connected pieces of animals together still, even when they're alive, and I've seen one a live and it does not look real. So I agree the platypus is crazy.

Nick VinZant 34:53 I'm looking at one right now. Like he really does like what like Hey, watch this guys, I'm gonna send this out, see what this thing looks like? What are your research right now? What are you working on?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 35:09 Yeah, so we're doing a few different things. What I am most excited about is we're trying to understand how symbiotic interactions actually helped ants become so successful. So ants have symbiotic relationships with other animals, with plants, with fungi with bacteria. And what we want to understand is, when they engage in those symbiosis, is it always beneficial? Is it always negative? And then what impact does it have? So interestingly, some work in microbe we've looked at and plant interactions, but we've also looked at microbe interactions. And so the micro work is revealing some interesting new insights. So lots of animals, as we all know, now if you hear about the microbiome, we have bacteria that live in and on us that are important to our own health, right, of course, some are not helpful, but many of them we need in order to be healthy. And so we've been studying in groups of ants that have actually transitioned from their earliest diets, which were predatory. Some have become generalists, but then some have even become entirely dependent on plant based diets or vegetarians. And so we tried to understand, how do you make that shift, and in almost all the cases we've been able to study, they actually have to take on the symbiotic bacteria that synthesize the essential amino acids or proteins that they don't get in their own diet, in order to survive entirely on a plant based diet. But what's cool about that is that by transitioning on to this entirely plant based diet, you have opened up all these new niches that you no longer have competition with other ants for food resources. So now you can diversify or speciate again, so it's this sort of interaction, but the environment and the with the symbiotic microbes in this case, that have led to some groups of ants being incredibly abundant and incredibly species rich.

Nick VinZant 37:00 If you were wanting to impress somebody at a party, and you were going to hit him with your single greatest, in fact, what are you going to go with?

Dr. Corrie Moreau 37:11 Well, I probably would go with my fact that almost every am they've ever seen as a female, but since I've already shared that one with you, I'm going to go to my backup question my backup sort of an fact. And I'd share that, and that have these gut microbes that they need, they have to have a mechanism for ensuring that their gut gets seated with them whenever they you know, sort of our new individuals are born. So how do they do that they engage in something that's called truffle access. And so truffle Ax is is just sharing liquid sources back and forth. So you can have oral oral, social travel access, which is just social food sharing from, you know, one mouth to the other. But in the case of the ants that need these gut microbes, they have to do oral anal truffle access. So they have to have another individual to acquire the right microbes. Nick VinZant 38:03 So basically ants go around licking each other's butts.

Dr. Corrie Moreau 38:07 just the vegetarian ones.

Nick VinZant 38:11 hey, look, however you got to survive is how you got to survive.

Dr. Corrie Moreau 38:15 Exactly.

Nick VinZant 38:16 Um, anything else you think we missed or anything else like that? Dr. Corrie Moreau 38:21 Um, I would say that I hope all of you have developed a greater appreciation of the little things that run the world. And, you know, maybe in the next time you see an ant running around, take a moment to actually watch what it's doing, try to observe what it looks like, because they're actually remarkable animals.

Nick VinZant 38:38 I want to thank Corey, so much for joining us if you want to connect with her. We have a link to her on our social media accounts, where Profoundly Pointless on Twitter and Instagram, and we have also included her information on the RSS feed that's on this podcast.

Kinesiologist Dr. Joel Seedman

What works.  And what are we really capable of. Those two questions are at the heart of this conversation with Kinesiologist Dr. Joel Seedman. In an in-depth interview, we talk training and nutrition secrets, optimizing your performance and the latest research on the human body. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Things Kids These Days Wouldn't Understand. And remember, leave a review for a chance to win a free t-shirt.

Interview with Kinesiologist Dr. Joel Seedman

Topics addressed in this episode

• How many sets, reps and exercises should I be doing. What is the ideal number of sets and reps

• How low should you squat. Is ATG (ass-to-grass) squatting overrated

• How fast should I lift

• Do I need to do cardio

• What is the best overall exercise

• What is the best exercise people aren’t doing

• What is the most overrated exercise

• Can I wear jean shorts to the gym

• Can you make someone into an athlete

• The benefits of eccentric exercise

Nick VinZant 0:14 Hey, everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, we're getting in shape. And going back in the day.

Dr. Joel Seedman 0:23 most people never even come close to optimizing their human potential, because their training is not ideal. Our body really doesn't know if we did three sets of 12. Or if we did 20 reps, or if we did 10 reps, all it knows is quality tension. And so instead of rushing through the exercises, rushing through the repetitions, one of the best things individuals can do is just slow things down. You know, I think that that's the key is the basics are still the basics, because fundamental principles, the foundational elements that have produced success for decades, are still kind of the go to methods. And if we deviate too far from that, I think that's where we start running into issues.

Nick VinZant 1:02 I want to thank you guys so much for joining us, if you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it, it really helps us out. So recently, I have realized that I am a shell of what I once was, physically speaking, I can barely bend over without my knees hurting. I can't catch up to my four year old. And I'm a shell in the sense that I'm a much bigger shell, like 40 pounds bigger shell. So trying to get back into some decent kind of shape. And looking at different websites and watching things. It seems like all the advice is contradictory. You're supposed to do this, no, you should never do that. You're supposed to really be doing this. And it seems like this endless back and forth about what really works. So we wanted to take this episode and find out all right, what really works. Our first guest is an expert, in terms of what really works for exercise and nutrition. He has a PhD in Kinesiology and is the founder of advanced human performance, or he trains everybody from regular people to professional athletes. This is Dr. Joel Seedman. When you look at exercise, basically what are people doing wrong?

Dr. Joel Seedman 2:20 Oh, that's a good question right there. So I think one of the main things that people, I wouldn't say do wrong, but maybe they just don't have the education and the knowledge from you know, mainstream fitness, because they tend to rush through their workouts, they tend to think that, you know, if they get the quantity and if they get the you know, number of steps in, if they get the particular amount of volume and say, you know, four sets of 10, or three sets of 12 on an exercise, that they're they're completing the necessary workout, and they're creating the proper stimulus, and they're going to get the results they want. And unfortunately, you know, the muscles in the in the body and our physiology. It's not that simple when it comes to you know, how our muscles and how our body responds. And the stimulus that we create, our body really doesn't know if we did three sets of 12. Or if we did 20 reps, or if we did 10 reps, all it knows is quality tension. And so instead of rushing through the exercises, rushing through the repetitions, one of the best things individuals can do is to just slow things down, really focus on creating a smooth control, lifting tempo, taking out the momentum and feeling those muscles really do their job and trying to target the muscles that they're they're intending to hit instead of just kind of mindlessly going through the exercises. So, you know, I just what we've kind of heard for years now from from bodybuilders really, even back in the day is you know, squeeze the muscle feel those muscles work, don't just mindlessly go to the exercises

Nick VinZant 3:45 is it as simple as if, if I feel like I did something I did something,

Dr. Joel Seedman 3:51 you know, it is to an extent when it comes to caloric expenditure, and just trying to, you know, kind of burn calories so to speak. It is however, when we're trying to change your body composition substantially, that does require additional muscle growth, whether you're a female or a male or you know, General populations, increasing our lean body tissue or lean body mass is one of the best things that we can do for health, for injury prevention, for increasing our metabolic rate at resting and during working conditions. So when it comes to actually stimulating that, that hypertrophy or that muscle growth mechanism, it does require higher quality of work for the most part, unless you're kind of a genetic freak, muscles can respond to a lot of different stimuli.

Nick VinZant 4:39 I mean, when somebody kind of approaches it is it is case where I do three sets of 10. But if I did four sets of 10, I would be completely different. Like do you have to just take it that extra little bit? Or like can you screw it up basically?

Dr. Joel Seedman 4:57 The answer to that is no. You really can't. There's a lot of research on different training protocols, what the ideal rep ranges with ideal number of steps is, and there's really no conclusive empirical evidence suggesting that one particular rep range or set range is optimal over another. In fact, they've done some research showing that if the intensity is high enough, if the quality is high enough, that one set of a really effective movement can actually produce very similar usually not quite as effective. But it can produce similar results to two or three sets, or even four sets of an exercise. So it's not like oh, you know, if I do one set, I'm only going to get 30%. If I do two sets, I'm going to get 53 sets 75%. And then to get 100% of the benefits, I have to hit force that actually it's about 80 to 90% of the benefits can be reached with one really hard set. And then you know, you do a second or third high quality set, you get the rest out of it. If you've done high quality, and you're taking everything control, you're not using a lot of momentum, if you're really focusing on that muscle mind connection and your technique is proper force that usually for an exercise is too much two or three really good stuff is going to be more beneficial for most individuals, provided their quality is higher.

Nick VinZant 6:13 From a kinesiology kind of perspective, do we pretty much have the body figured out? Like, do we know how it works?

Dr. Joel Seedman 6:20 Wow, that is such a, a deep question right there, it would seem simple. And I would say, on one hand, we learn a lot the last 10 years in kinesiology, Exercise Science is kind of a new field, relatively speaking to a lot of other fields, you know, medicine, and, you know, biology and biochemistry and all that. So it's really, really the last, you know, few decades, Exercise Science has kind of emerged, and we've continued to learn a lot. But at the same time, because it's kind of new, and it's still in its relative infancy stages, I would argue, there's still so much that we don't know and, and even the research that comes out, there's so much mixed research, there's there's a lot of conflicting data. And it kind of creates this confusion in the industry where, you know, some people say, Oh, well, there's, you know, all this research showing that, for example, I was like used to squat analogy, because that's a big one. That's one that I'm known for creating a little bit of controversy over. You know, there's some research out there that shows that astagraf squatting or squatting as deep as you can with maximal range of motion is suggested or beneficial. And then there's another group of research that shows that that's not the case that actually squatting to 90 degrees or parallel is, in fact, the best way to do it. So you kind of have these mixed sides of things. And you really have to look deeply at the research to kind of see, hey, why didn't Why do we have these conflicting views? And this is this is for many different topics. And then you have to say, Okay, why is it that and then you have to examine the research. And you can usually kind of figure out which side is ideal, but you have to examine it pretty intently. So I think we have so much learning and field of Kinesiology is exciting, because, you know, we still have a lot of potential growth.

Nick VinZant 8:09 Like when you look at how much we know about the body, one is absolutely nothing. 10 is we've got this thing locked down, figured out, like, Where do you think we are right now?

Dr. Joel Seedman 8:20 Oh, I would say a four, or a five. And I think we have just enough knowledge that if we don't use it just right, it can actually put us in a little bit of jeopardy. And we can we can abuse it because it's you back even the SWAT analogy, you have a lot of people taking some of this information, and they use it. And they they destroy their joints, and they have to get surgery and it's you know, people will say, Oh, well I heard this from you know, mainstream fitness or from fitness experts or fitness gurus and the research substantiated, but now my my knees are shot, my neck, my hips were low back is fried, what's going on here. So we do have to be very careful. And taking the research and saying, well, based on some of these studies, it was suggest that this might be a potential potential way to do something. But yeah, I would say four or five. And I would say even the same thing for nutrition because it's funny. Every few years, there's these nutrition recommendations in the industry. And then several years later, we see different recommendations that not only disagree but actually recommend the exact opposite. It's kind of a funny parody in the field, but it's actually similar in the field of Kinesiology too. So I think we have to be careful of, you know, realizing that we still have a lot of work to do and a lot of research to be done.

Nick VinZant 9:41 Even though that you know, that kind of high end necessarily seems to be changing all the time. Or the basic still the basics, like the basic stuff works, right like you want to lose weight, eat less calories, you want to get stronger lift weights, like are the basic still the basics or does even that change

Dr. Joel Seedman 9:59 you know That's that's the key is the basics are still the basics, because fundamental principles, the foundational elements that have produced success for decades are still kind of the go to methods. And if we deviate too far from that, I think that's where we start running into issues. In, you know, some of these kind of extreme diets that we see are these extreme training protocols are these really exaggerated? Kind of methods that we've seen in really unique programs, it's like, Okay, this is deviating so far now, and maybe, you know, it doesn't have to necessarily be purely old school and looks simple, it just has to rely on kind of foundational elements of the practical sciences, you know, you have to look at basic elements of, you know, muscle physiology, for example, and human physiology things that we've known now for for decades, even possibly, you know, close to a century now, things in the field of biomechanics that relate to physics, which we've known for decades, if not centuries now. I think dealing with neuro muscular physiology, and then neurology, and then we have to say, Okay, now let's take some of the current research and compare and contrast it to what we know to be true about some of those foundational elements. And if they match up, I think we're good to go. If they they really contradict each other, then I think we run into issues. So I think, you know, on the head, I think, you know, we do have to stick to the basics, we can't deviate too far. But that doesn't mean we can't gradually improve, improve on the basics, as long as we don't go too far away from them.

Nick VinZant 11:29 Are people's bodies really that different? Like, do they really respond that differently to certain things? Or is it more of a mindset kind of thing?

Dr. Joel Seedman 11:40 This is this is a topic of much debate in the industry, among strength coaches, and practical of kinesiologist. And I would argue that the human body from person to person is very, very similar. And you'll have different fitness experts and different researchers, they will everybody's different. There's individual differences, individual differences with anthropometrics, and joints, and, you know, our anatomy or structural anatomy and, you know, the way we function, you know, I mean, some people are more fast, which some people more slow twitch, some people more carbs messages from people or, you know, have great insulin sensitivity where they handle carbs really well, from what I've seen, in my condition going on 17 years now in this industry, is that generally speaking, the human body is the human body in, you know, you kind of maintain 90%, of what you do with clients and with individuals and athletes is actually going to be very similar. And if you start to have to, you know, adapted so much, where it's like, oh, my gosh, this is totally different for this person compared to, you know, this other client of mine is like, Whoa, why is that much different? The human body is still the human body. Functional anatomy is still functional anatomy, physiology is still physiology, yes, there are some subtle, individual differences, but they're much, much more subtle, as I said, and much smaller than what a lot of people in the field suggest, you know, some people will say, Oh, well, this person should only squat, you know, 90 degrees, but this person, because they can, they should squat, you know, astagraf. And I think that's one of the things that we have to watch out for. Just because we can do something doesn't mean it's optimal. And just because it's possible, doesn't mean it's ideal, we have to kind of find and hone in on what are more for the human body. When we do that. We see that is very, very similar across individuals, particularly when it comes to strength training, and even even nutrition to a certain degree.

Nick VinZant 13:39 What is you basical philosophy when you look at exercise in nutrition?

Dr. Joel Seedman 13:45 Well, I guess I can touch on the more simple one first, which would be nutrition. I like to recommend foods to clients that pretty much have not been processed or have been very minimally processed. I usually like to recommend a slightly higher protein diet, but not too high. You see some pretty extreme recommendations out there. So typically, one gram per lean pound of body weight or per pound dependent, halleen, individualized, and then moderate carbs, you see also a lot of suggestions, you know, taking the carbs down to a very bare minimum, and then some people not even touching carbs, I like to go moderate on the carbs, and then even on the fat kind of moderate, so I like to play things a little bit more conservative, because as we've seen with these huge fad diets, and even some of the research is so mixed and conflicting. And as soon as we start eliminating the food or really going overboard and a certain food and in hardly touching another food or you know, just barely even eating it. I think that those extremes are where we start running into issues. Strength training, on the other hand, my approaches is probably a little bit different than than most I really like to focus on biomechanics and muscle functioning and quality of movement. And when we lock that in, we teach a person how to move correctly how to fire their muscles properly. and activate them in their proper way, that's when we start opening up all these doors, that's when we start, you know, we can get a lot more advanced, we can get a lot more creative with them, we can push them, we can really progress them quickly because their muscles are performing their job well, when it comes to anything from, you know, increasing muscle mass, if the muscles not activating properly, it's very, you know, you really can't grow muscle if it first hasn't been activated. And then even from a health longevity standpoint, and joint health, if the muscles are not doing their job properly, which a lot of people you know, they run into these issues where they've been training six months, a year, two years, their their bodies are banged up, their shoulders hurt, their knees hurt their hips are and a lot of that comes down to technique, and biomechanics. So if we can, if we can fix biomechanics, and really correct them and perfect them as close as we can, in a realistic fashion, enables us to train long term without running into these, you know, plateaus or run into these obstacles of, you know, having our joints hurt having to take multiple steps back because it's getting injured. So for me, the biomechanics and the movement patterns and learning how to move correctly is a key foundational aspect of things.

Nick VinZant 16:11 How do you kind of create that, that mobility and, and being able to move correctly? Because it sounds like a lot of, you know, exercises in themselves seem to like, lock into the machine so to speak?

Dr. Joel Seedman 16:25 Exactly. No, it does. I think, you know, machines are great. And a lot of people do use machines, I have nothing against machines provided that they're biomechanically sound, which a lot of them are not, it does lock you into a specific path, which is why I prefer using freeways for the most part because it forces the individual to have to basically create a strong mode reprogramming their central nervous system. For example, kind of go back to squat here, if someone does not know how to squat properly, chances are, those issues can be seen and observed in their basic walking gait and their basic movement in their in their posture, the way they pick things up off the ground, if they're playing sport, we can probably see how it transfers into the running form into their jumping. So if we can correct their movement, with strength training with basic, foundational, you know, movement patterns, such as the squat, and unless they have a neat collapse to the ankles, class, they don't know how to load their hips, well, if we could correct it on the squat, we see start to trickle into everyday life. And as well as competition, playing on the field for sports, you know, if we can teach them how to fire their hips, during a squat, it transfers and translates into other things in the other movement patterns, because it's foundational, almost, that's why it's so important that we take foundational movements such as squats, hinges, lunges, presses, rows, overhead presses, pull downs, and basically perfect the movement on that. And I'm a big believer in not using excessive range of motion, but using optimal range of motion. A lot of people think that, you know, maximal range of motion and maximal mobility is the goal. It's really not just like everything in physiology, there's a balance, we never want too much or too little of anything, we always want the optimal amount.

Nick VinZant 18:10 Can you create an athlete? I mean, can you can you like take somebody and really create them into an athlete? Or are you just basically improving somebody?

Dr. Joel Seedman 18:22 That's a good question. I think there is that there's a range here, I think, when it comes to high level performance, I think there is an element of genetics that have to be in place, because we know now that yes, we can cause muscle fibers to adapt, they can become more fast twitch and slow twitch, you know, we can improve, you know, motor unit recruitment, we can we can improve, you know, intramuscular coordination, we can improve all these different elements of performance, but there has to be certain genetic elements in place not With that said, most people never even come close to optimize their human potential, because their training is not ideal. And so if you take an athlete who let's say they have decent genetics, but not great genetics decent and you give them incredible train, and they do everything to the tee, and they follow, you know exactly what you lay off for them, chances are, they may actually be able to play at a pretty high level, provided they continue to stay consistent with their training. Now, you could also have an individual who has incredible genes, and just everything kind of fell into place with their genetic pool and their DNA. But if they don't have the right training, you know, things oftentimes don't work out for them. We see this with, with athletes in every sport, you know, you have these people who should have been superstars and they never pan out because they didn't put the correct work in then you have other athletes who, genetically were not as gifted, were not as blessed. And they actually have great success because their training was so much better. I think that the flip side of that, too, is if you take someone who just has really poor genetics, and you know, I know it's probably not the most politically correct thing to say But they just didn't get blessed with the optimal gene pool. They're not, you know, you can you can train them to the hilt, and they still aren't gonna be able to maybe be that high level athlete, will they be athletic enough to be able to have fun with their sport and do it recreationally without injury? Yes. 100%? So that's a good question.

Nick VinZant 20:18 How do you kind of evaluate both you and both researchers in the field? Like, how do you evaluate what works necessarily? Are you like measuring the size of the muscle the weight that's lifted? Like how do you tell what is working?

Dr. Joel Seedman 20:35 There is such a complex answer to that seemingly simple question. But there's so many assessment methods out there, there. You guys trained coaches that will spend hours assessing folks, I used to actually be one of those, I used to do a lot of assessment, say, we're going to go through all these different muscle screening processes and, and really look at your movement and analyze and go over deeply before we start training. And what I realized is that the need to assess, and to only assess, I should say, because basic assessment is good, the need to really assess is oftentimes a little bit unnecessary. If we teach the person how to move properly, let's say they let's say they come in, they have, you know, really bad hip pain and knee pain, you know, we could spend hours and hours if not days, analyzing them and assessing the daylights out of them and sending them to 20 different, you know, experts and getting 20 different results, you know, the recommendations would be, and you could just drive yourself nuts with that. And they could still walk away having no solutions, still having the same amount of pain, still not having the ability to have high level of function and do their athletic events that they want. But in contrast, we can say, hey, let's just take a real quick look at your movement here and kind of see some underlying things. And then once we just kind of take a blank slate, teach them how to fire their muscles properly, teach them how to, to set their their biomechanics, set their hips to work on their alignment, to get their feet locked into to create those neutral positions, then we have them start moving and firing their muscles. And literally within a, sometimes a session, we can start to see some improvements where the client is saying, Wow, my hips feel better, my knees don't hurt as much, I'm starting to see improvements, like it feels so much better, I can squat out without having pain, you know, I've never been able to squat, or at least the last five years have been able to squat without pain. And now they can do that. And they start buying into it and they start to see those immediate improvements. I think for me, that's one of the biggest kind of measures and indicators that I look at is the level of function, the level of pain and how you know, it feels for the for the client, because of our sense of feel is so important. So underrated in the feedback that clients give you from that sense of fuel, that progress or feedback is so important.

Nick VinZant 22:48 I was looking at your Instagram, which is fantastic. And some of the exercises like I've never even seen that before. Do I? Do I need to be doing that kind of stuff? Or can I just like, I just get by on the elliptical machine

Dr. Joel Seedman 23:05 I do put up a lot of unique exercises. And I always say that, and I get a lot of haters out there who was like, Oh, this is ridiculous. Why don't you do the basics, like, Hey, I often state and I often put in my post that 80% of about 80% of what I do with my athletes or my clients, even myself are the basic foundational movements and nothing too crazy. And then the other 20% we do get a little bit crazy, we can get a little bit unique depending on their their levels and their their capabilities and where they've progressed to. And oftentimes, those really advanced variations, are they absolutely necessary? No, they're not absolutely necessary. If people just focus on the basic math in them, that would that would do the job generally speaking, but sometimes, those really advanced unique movements, they do a few things. First off, it can oftentimes expose issues that we may have not seen with something else. Like if we do a really difficult single exercise and maybe is offset in a certain way where we have load on more of more on one side of the body and the other it makes those a weakness in that particular side of the body or that region of the hip or the ankle that we may have not seen with other things. But the other thing that I The reason I like to post some of these advanced exercises is it shows what's possible when you have mastered the foundations when you have mastered the basics. It opens up all these doors and like I tell people, the reason my clients and my athletes and any myself can do these kind of crazy and wild and advanced stabilization drills that require a ton of coordination and a ton of precision is because we have spent so much time mastering the basics even just a basic bodyweight squat, a basic goblet squat, a basic launch. If you get those down, you become so common and with those you open up the doors and then any other movement that even closely resembles that your body is capable of doing that kind of movement in a nutshell is like hey, if we mastered the basics We can go play any sport we want, we can go run, we can kick, we can throw, we can we can jump, and our bodies will be capable of it as long as we've mastered the basics. So that's one of the key things that I like to focus on.

Nick VinZant 25:11 Are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions?

Dr. Joel Seedman 25:15 Oh, okay!

Nick VinZant 25:18 Let's start with the easier ones, I guess. Um, best exercise, people aren't doing.

Dr. Joel Seedman 25:24 Ooh, best exercise people are doing, I would say, well, I've just been recently using these a lot myself, just an overhead power holder are really good at basically taking a heavy weight and holding it overhead for you know, 15 to 30 seconds period, really simple. Everyone can do it. It really strengthens just about every muscle in the body, especially the core and the upper body, and it produced a lot of good strength and muscle hypertrophy.

Nick VinZant 25:46 most overrated exercise.

Dr. Joel Seedman 25:50 Ooh, most overrated exercise. Ooh, I would say the front squat. I would say the front squat. The front squat is a lot of people advocate that saying that, you know, easier to do for me. And for a lot of folks, that can be awkward if they've mastered the other squat variations. The front squat is not as necessary.

Nick VinZant 26:08 Do I need to do cardio?

Dr. Joel Seedman 26:14 Ooh, interesting question. I would say it's not necessary. Although it is beneficial, do it. If someone is training very intensely with their strength and conditioning components in a lot of my clients in the law that I work with the train is pretty, it's pretty intense, we go to a pretty good pace, I don't think it's necessary to have to do a lot of additional cardio provided that they're still physically active. What I mean by that is they still have to be moving throughout the day. And I always like to tell people to try to accumulate 30 minutes of walking every day. Everyone's trained, trained intensely several days a week, and they also walked 30 minutes every day, the need to do cardio probably wouldn't be quite as great. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, because it is very beneficial, but absolutely necessary. Probably not.

Nick VinZant 26:58 Can I wear jean shorts to the gym.

Dr. Joel Seedman 27:04 you can I wouldn't recommend it on upper body days. Probably not a bad probably wouldn't be a big deal. But you might get some unusual looks that could throw off your confidence. You know you that confidence is a big thing. You don't want people looking at you like you're a freak though.

Nick VinZant 27:19 This is I like this one. You trained a lot of athletes, most athletic person you've ever trained just somebody that you looked at and like wow, that they are different.

Dr. Joel Seedman 27:30 Amir of doula. He's a player of the Vikings. He's a genetic freak. He's, I mean, he just watched him do any exercises like wow, this guy is 3% body fat. He's got incredible muscle control even before we started training. Yeah, I think he can have a genetic freak. Nick VinZant 27:50 You can just tell right when they walk into the gym.

Dr. Joel Seedman 27:53 Yeah, totally. Totally. There's certain indicators certain certain telling signs for sure.

Nick VinZant 27:58 How do you feel about bro scientists on social media?

Dr. Joel Seedman 28:05 Well, I mean the bro scientists we have a love hate relationship that I think on there and what they feel is probably more of a hate than a love I'm pretty I'm a pretty loving caring guy, you know, at least I like to think so. But I you don't hold a hard feelings or I don't like to disrespect people, but they tend to be a little bit overly zealous in their training methodologies and they like to rip other people's methods who are different than theirs and I think they tend to maybe get a little bit insecure as well. If they feel I don't know maybe threatened or, you know, like your your what, what you're saying is, you know, kind of telling them that their methods aren't quite right and that my methods are better but you know, they tend to get a little bit of a chip on their shoulder so I don't mind them I think a lot of the the methods and protocols they put out maybe aren't the best or beneficial for a lot of people but at the same time a lot of what we know in the field of Kinesiology actually can stem back to bro science like you know Arnold's things that which a lot of what he did was still pretty solid so I can't rip on the bro guys too much.

Nick VinZant 29:13 This this is assuming pre COVID do i do i need to wipe down a machine if I don't sweat?

Dr. Joel Seedman 29:22 Oh man. I am kind of guilty this but I would say yes. I think out of courtesy and just general gym etiquette. I think it is important especially now as I said before, probably guilty a few times not doing it myself. But I'm a pretty big sweater. So once I start sweating, I definitely wipe down but nowadays got to

Nick VinZant 29:42 what do you think of the kind of thing that I see the lifting every day fad? Is that is that a real thing? Because I remember growing up is like you work out once and then you wait a day.

Dr. Joel Seedman 29:54 Yeah, it's, you know, I A lot of folks can't do that. It's just not practical. For schedule. So I don't always like to recommend that I think it is, can be beneficial. I personally do it because I, you know, I pretty much live in the gym so to speak. So I have the luxury of being able to train every day, it's not necessary, I think, you know, three times a week of work working out and training hard will do the job, if you have the luxury of training 567 days a week and you programmed correctly, and you're providing enough rest, you know, for certain movement patterns. So basically, you wouldn't want to crush the same muscle, the same movement patterns every single time with maximal weight. But if you if you ever want to be able to train everyday you can do and it can actually be very beneficial, but it has to be done right. And technique and form have to be locked in. Because if it's not, you're setting yourself up for disaster with a lot of injuries.

Nick VinZant 30:46 strangest exercise you've ever seen someone do in a gym.

Dr. Joel Seedman 30:51 Oh, man. Shoot. Oh, there was one on posted on Instagram. Somebody brought in like a sword like a real sword. And they were on the elliptical machine. And they were like, flinging it around and doing like, I mean, it was like hardcore combat Lee and they were either training to be an extra in like Game of Thrones, or they had some serious anger issues. They wanted to take advantage. I don't know, man. It was a little freaky. I remember seeing on Instagram, probably about three or four months ago. So that was that was that was pretty crazy right Nick VinZant 31:25 there. Is there like an age where you can see like, oh people this is when somebody's gonna physically declined. Like, is there an age where you can almost pinpoint like, 31? Man, you're done?

Dr. Joel Seedman 31:37 Yeah, it's I would say there is definitely ranges because you will see some some pretty unique. You know, some people can go into their 50s and 60s with bad form and get away with it. You got some kids now you're seeing even high schoolers or even middle schoolers actually start to get injuries. It's really weird that we're seeing so many injuries in young population. So you know, I think people would have said, you know, a decade or two ago, as soon as you hit, you know, your 30s or 40s, you know, things really start to break down. I mean, that's still true. But it's it can start to varying degrees as young as 10 1112 years old now, it's insane. But I would say generally speaking, what I've seen with my athletes and populations, and even in my own body, mid 20s, once those kind of mid 20s hit, if you've been been training hard and you haven't been doing it right, if things start to break down, it's exactly what happened with me it's actually kind of was a blessing in disguise. That was what kind of prompted me to, to go further in this field. Do my own research.

Nick VinZant 32:33 That's really all the questions I've got what's coming up next for you. I know you got a lot of things happening.

Dr. Joel Seedman 32:40 Yeah, no, it's it's an exciting time right now. I've got some good good products on my website I've worked over a long time on I have my book that came out not too long ago, a little over a year ago, movement redefined. I literally spent eight years on that it kind of represents my life's work when it comes to the strength conditioning because it kind of documented everything that I've done over the last 17 years and all the research I did the last eight or nine years and it includes all my training methods and really everything that I do with my athletes and clients including the practical side of it, as well as the the science with hundreds and hundreds of studies to kind of support and explain why I do things the way I do them. So that's that's a big one. It's really been a big seller for me. You know, I got a lot of different athletes I work with baseball season, there's one up here so get someone baseball guys back. And then you know, there's a lot of, I think right now the thing that I'm kind of interested with is we have a lot of injuries going on in the NFL. Fortunately, none of the guys that I've worked with, but I was saying this when COVID hit several, you know, well, I guess months ago now I was thinking this to to all my athletes and to really everyone I would have this discussion with is Watch out when the NFL season and all these sports come back there's going to be a lot a lot of big injuries because guys were not prepared, right, they took a lot of time off and then combined with a lot of the training methods that we see in these professional sports which are subpar. In my opinion, it was just a recipe for disaster. So I think we're gonna have a lot of guys that we got that we got to work on. Hopefully I'll be able to get my hands on some of these guys that got injuries and help them kind of rehab and get back to where they were in beyond with proper training methods. So I think a lot of IT professionals in this field and kinesiologist are going to have to work it off in this next year with all these injuries that we're seeing.

Nick VinZant 34:32 All right, last most important question. How much you bench? Oh,

Dr. Joel Seedman 34:39 man, I mean I haven't maxed out for so long. It would be over 200 pounds let's put it that way. I rarely max out, if I can't do something with a good ecentric isometric hold and and really be able to lock it in for good quality. I rarely touch any more just because the consequences are They outweigh the benefits. So I just don't even I don't even do it.

Nick VinZant 35:05 I want to thank Dr. Seedman, so much for joining us if you want to connect with him, we have linked to him on our social media accounts, or Profoundly Pointless on Twitter and Instagram. And we have also included his information on the RSS feed that's on this podcast. He has a lot of really cool information. I mean, even if you're just checking out his Instagram, some of the exercises there, they just, they give you different ideas, besides just hopping on an elliptical machine walking endlessly, basically, it's cool to kind of check out.

Political Violence Researcher Chelsea Daymon

With the Presidential election fast approaching, tension are rising everywhere. But when do those tension spill over into violence? Political Violence and Terrorism Researcher Chelsea Daymon joins us. We talk domestic extremists, religious terrorists and the internet's role in all of it. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. 

Interview with Political Violence Researcher Chelsea Daymon

Show Notes and topics covered

• What is the most dangerous terrorist group

• What is the most dangerous extremist group

• Is the United States seeing a rise in domestic terrorism

• How are terrorists using the internet and social media

• Is terrorism increasing

• What is the goal of political violence

• Is the United States seeing more far-right terrorism

Nick VinZant 0:11 Hey, everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless, my name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, we're going to take a look into the dangerous world of political violence, and then count down the top five Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

Chelsea Daymon 0:25 And since then we've seen more religious violence, which there is a theory that violence that has a religious angle to it tends to be more lethal. There are a handful of elements broadly, that are looking at the concept of governments and their ideas that the government is too big or too involved in American society. And therefore it needs to change. And more extreme elements may say that it needs to change by bringing down the whole system. And I don't feel like in my lifetime, I've witnessed a time where people are so divided.

Nick VinZant 1:11 I want to thank you guys so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it, it really helps us out. So we usually stay away from politics on this show, just because people get mad, and I don't think that you're going to whichever side you're on, I don't think that you're going to convince anybody. But it's also that mindset. That is something that our first guest studies. Because when you when you look at the current world today, I don't think that anybody would make an argument that tensions aren't high. And those tensions can spill, this can spill over into political violence. Our first guest has some fascinating insight into that world, both domestically here in the United States. And also in terms of terrorism all over the world, and the way that terrorist organizations are using the internet to really get their message across and to recruit people. This is political violence researcher, Chelsea Damon, when you look at political violence right now, are we in a more violent time,

Chelsea Daymon 2:22 We can't really say that we're in a time that's more violent or less violent, there's always been political violence and terrorism throughout history. And today, of course, we see a lot more, mostly, in part because we're so connected as a society. So it's much easier to see what we see on TV or on the internet, and think we're in a time of increased violence. Of course, we have seen a bigger uptick in certain types of political violence, or, as we like to call it terrorism as well, especially since 911. And the whole al Qaeda period that we saw. And then, of course, more recently, in the last number of years, we had ISIS come onto the scene, which really increased a lot of the publicity that we heard about terrorism as well as attacks, both mostly in Iraq and Syria, of course, but also overseas in European countries majorly.

Nick VinZant 3:27 So when we talk about political violence, like what constitutes political violence and terrorism, exactly,

Chelsea Daymon 3:33 so there's debate on that there isn't really an agreed upon definition, although many experts and academics will agree that there are certain elements that equal political violence or terrorism. And that usually includes using violence, most of the time against a population of civilians, and sometimes also government entities or areas, say like a embassy or a base, a military base, but using violence to create either political change or get a message of wanting political change. So using it also almost as what they call a theater of terrorism in the sense of many groups know that if they commit an attack, or what we saw years ago, and especially in the 80s, of hijacking airplanes, that that will get news and it will make the news and it will help the group's message whatever that message might be get more publicity and reach a broader audience that potentially can help them with their cause or gain supporters to their cause.

Nick VinZant 4:51 When you look at kind of the main groups behind political violence all over the world, like who are the big ones that we're talking about,

Chelsea Daymon 4:59 well, that's it. Very loaded question because there are many groups with many different ideologies across the spectrum, currently, or seeing violence that is both causal in the sense that there's a cause back behind it, as well as violence that is based on causes, but also with a religious tinge. But when I say religious, I don't necessarily mean it represents the religion that a group is saying that they're representing. And so there have been waves of terrorism, as they call it. And right now, we do see an uptick in jihadist terrorism, which we've seen for a number of years. And since then, we've seen more religious violence, which there is a theory that violence that has a religious angle to it tends to be more lethal, because there is less restraint in the sense that it is something that potentially in a group's ideology is condoned by a higher power. So there's less restraint in the sense of victims and the types of victims. However, we've also seen political violence that does have angles of more right wing, white supremacist leanings, that's something we're also seeing an uptick in. But it also gets quite complicated because, of course, in the States, for something that may be from the outside looking at it, from seeing it on the news or hearing about it in a newspaper, we might think right away, well, oh, that's terrorism. However, our justice system, sometimes it's much easier to try someone in the court of law, not on terrorism charges, but more on Hate, hate crimes and so forth, just because of the way our justice system works. Some of the shootings that maybe someone would say, No, that's terrorism, because they do have an angle that's trying to change some sort of part of the political society, however, isn't like a, an attacker isn't charged on terrorism charges. So

Nick VinZant 7:12 when you kind of look at what's happening in the States, is domestic terrorism, the biggest, the biggest kind of cause for concern? Are we still more worried about foreign terrorism,

Chelsea Daymon 7:23 I would say that foreign terrorism is always a potential issue. I mean, we do have a lot of implementations that we've established here in the States since September 11, which does make it a lot harder for groups to overseas groups, let's put it that way to stage attacks in the US. And I think that's also partly why we saw less ISIS or ISIS inspired attacks here in the States versus what we saw in the last number of years in European countries. However, that doesn't mean that we won't see potentially threats that are either called homegrown threats, or lone wolf is another term. There's a lot of debate on what we should really call them. However, we also have seen a huge uptick since Obama was elected in more right wing extreme right, whatever you want to term it groups or militias here in the States. And we have not actually seen those groups or even leaderless movements reduce, we have seen an increase in attacks that needy it might be on the part of one individual or a couple of individuals. However, it falls under some of the ideas of this extreme right. And the concept of like a leaderless movement. And it gets very tricky, because in the States, we of course, have the First Amendment and freedom of rights and freedom of speech. And when it comes to foreign groups, we have a foreign terrorist list that groups are designated on that list. And when you get into more propaganda and things found on the internet and content on the internet, it's a lot easier to take down content that is attributed to one of these groups on the foreign terrorist list.

Nick VinZant 9:26 When you look at those kind of groups, the ones here in the States, the right wing, white supremacy, like what are they trying to accomplish? What's the goal behind the violence?

Chelsea Daymon 9:36 Once again, that is a loaded question, because it's, it's hard to say that each group or each movement has the same goals. There are multiple branches if you could call them that, or narratives or ideologies that stem from a greater Greater concept, but that all have sort of different things that they're aiming for, I can highlight some of the main things that we see broadly over the more right wing, white nationalists, and all of the other things that fall under that spectrum. One is, of course, the issue of race, and, of course, white power. So a lot of the things you see with neo nazi groups, etc. There are a handful of elements broadly, that are looking at the concept of governments and their ideas that the government's is too big or too involved in American society. And therefore it needs to change. And more extreme elements may say that it needs to change by bringing down the whole system, and then rebuilding. So it's this idea of almost a utopian idea of create or escalate violence, or elements that will escalate unrest so that eventually the system falls, and then a group of individuals will come in and rebuild society into this idea of what they think it should be. And there's a lot of debate in the field about a concept of acceleration ism. And I am not an expert on that. But I can kind of give you a brief idea of the main concept, although there's a lot of elements within that that certain scholars and academics debate on. But acceleration ism is this idea that you accelerate the process of a societal collapse. So therefore, you can rebuild the society into what you think it should be. And while we see that with groups here in the States, we also could say in a sense that certain jihadist groups could also fall into that. And I know this will be very controversial. But if you look at ISIS per se, ISIS had its goal of creating a caliphate during its heyday and ruling land and having this so called state. Of course, the lost the territory, as we've seen now, although the trying to regain some of it. However, ISIS also had an apocalyptic angle to its message and its goals. And will McCants wrote a great book called ISIS apocalypse that's all about this. And if you think about that, the idea of bringing on the apocalypse or the collapse of society, it's almost something that a lot of groups, at some point have in the back of their minds of collapsing society or having an apocalypse then therefore, you build a utopian society afterwards.I mean, a lot of the narratives here in the states that we're seeing is also very anti immigrant, anti the other, there's this concept of othering, in psychology and social sciences of groups, look at themselves, as you know, you're a member of a group, but everyone else that's not a member is outside of the group, they're an other and when individuals take othering to the extreme, because of course, we could say, looking at as an analogy of sports teams here in the state, someone could say that they like baseball team a. And then you have a friend that likes baseball team B. And you know, each one is a member of or supports a different group. And yes, you can see that your friend that likes baseball, Team A is the other and it's more a fun thing. And you know, you joke about your team that you better and so forth. But if you take that to the extreme, and we see this with violence, in general, and in terrorism studies, you can actually look at the other and start dehumanizing them as an individual, we see this with hate crimes as well in terrorism. And when you look at someone so much as an other and dehumanize them, then it's much easier to commit acts of violence against them because you don't really see them as human. And we're seeing some of this to an extent, like I said, with rhetoric on anti immigrant, and so forth and individuals from different nationalities and races, unfortunately. And it's it's hard to times separate some of this rhetoric with things we do here in in coming from politicians, because we have seen a lot of debates on immigration here in the States. And so I think while that comes from more of a political debate, sometimes these ideas She will, more extreme elements to take on these narratives and adjust them to their own liking and their own messaging to gain support.

Nick VinZant 15:11 So when I look at some of the ones, you know, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, but some of the ones here in the States and other places, it seems almost as if like, it's the dog chasing the car, so to speak, like with these groups, if they got what they want, would they really even know what to do? Right, like, let's say, this movement in the states takes down the government. Well, now what? Like, did they have any kind of organization? Are they just kind of trying to start the revolution and see what happens?

Chelsea Daymon 15:41 That's a really great question. And I personally cannot answer that. I don't think I mean, some will probably disagree with me. But I don't think that a lot of these movements in the States, at least in their current form, are strong enough have the resources and the manpower to actually overthrow the governments. I think some of them have capabilities, enough to create more civil unrest.

Nick VinZant 16:08 How were some of these different groups using the internet? I know, that's one of the things that you kind of study.

Chelsea Daymon 16:13 Yeah. So it's interesting. Once again, it's similar and different, depending on the types of groups we're talking about. I'm sure some of your listeners at least have heard about the Islamic State ISIS. And their use of the internet, because they really kind of took the internet and what it had to offer to the next level, ISIS came on the scene, of course, during this age where there is much more fluidity, and you could be your own propagandist and own content creator, where they were actually very smart with their media capabilities. And this was from everything from using these platforms, to also using software and creating videos that were actually really most of them really well done. Not all of them, but they they had capabilities, where the editing, and the way that they the stories within these videos, and the way the videos were done, were very dynamic. And depending on where you stood on the spectrum, like if you were someone that potentially was looking at ISIS as a group that you might want to join the videos, in the heyday of ISIS were really well done to the extent that they were engaging. I mean, even as a researcher, you can see the difference between older groups and how they used media and videos between ISIS group videos and groups, as well as using platforms like they used to use more social media platforms that were not as heavily encrypted. They later moved to encrypted platforms, but before they were on Twitter, and had a very strong presence on Twitter until about 2016, when Twitter heavily crackdown on ISIS accounts in any ISIS supporter accounts. But before that, you know, they were disseminating content links to content across other websites and and sharing sites and other social media platforms where you could also get content. And so they really knew how to utilize these platforms to spread their message spread their propaganda, hijacking, hashtags like for at one point, they hijacked a Justin Bieber hashtag and flooded Twitter, with ISIS propaganda. So if anyone went to this Justin Bieber hashtag, they started seeing ISIS content, change the game a little bit. It made ISIS and its supporters move to encrypted platforms, which their favorite one was telegram and on telegram, it still allowed them to disseminate all of their content, including everything from the videos, to newsletters to magazines. ISIS inspired gifts and memes. And so it gave them an environment of supporters and like minded individuals. It also cut down on how much they could recruit because it was or it is telegram is an encrypted platform and therefore, you need to have access to it. And then when you have access to it, you have to find access to channels or chats that are ISIS supporters or ISIS news agencies and so forth. But as as researchers and the tech companies and industries realized what was going on, through the years it's they've become much better at getting rid of content and preventing From being spread across different platforms, there's a organization gifts si t that works with some of the big names like Google and YouTube and also smaller entities to share information when when something is posted on one website. So say like a video was posted on YouTube, they can identify that content through digital hashes. And then the digital hashes are shared amongst a whole consortium of tech companies and social media companies, etc, which can take that content off of all the platforms all at once. But they do tend to try to go to platforms that are a little bit more secure, that have some sort of encryption. But they also are on platforms like Tick tock, and we've seen them on WhatsApp and rocket chat is another one. So when we think of content from more of the right wing, white supremacist groups, once again, that gets a little bit more complicated because of freedom of speech and laws on being able to post things, especially here in the States. So a lot of content tends to stay on platforms unless it violates their terms of service, or use, which as a user of say, Twitter or Facebook, when you have an account, you agree to abiding by these terms of service or use. So that's a whole nother can of worms.

Nick VinZant 21:38 Are you ready for the harder slash listener submitted questions?

Chelsea Daymon 21:44 Oh, my Oh, okay. Yes, let's let's try this out. Hopefully, I'll be able to answer them.

Nick VinZant 21:48 What scares you?

Chelsea Daymon 21:51 Hmm. Wow. You know, no one has ever asked me that question. And I think that's a fabulous question. And it can go in so many directions. But I, for me, personally, what scares me is not necessarily related to say, terrorist groups political violence. It's, it's more looking at, especially here in the States, I'd say, I feel like there's a greater division of society, then. I remember growing up, I mean, I'm American citizen, I've lived overseas as well. But I've spent most of my life in the States. And I don't feel like in my lifetime, I've witnessed a time where people are so divided. And I feel like Unfortunately, the division is creating. I wouldn't say culture, that's not the right word. But it's creating an environment that it's it's very hard to have a rational conversation with individuals about topics, whether it might be politics, or say, like the protests we've seen here in the States. And I feel like facts and entities and individuals that we used to be able to look at as figures that would provide straight facts and reliable facts. Like we don't always have that anymore. And and as someone that kind of sometimes does a deep dive with extremist groups and cycle psychology of individuals involved and narratives and propaganda and so forth. If you do see that, somewhat. And so I think that scares me is that that lack of rational thinking that I'm witnessing in our society here in the States?

Nick VinZant 23:51 Is there a kind of a common theme among people who get sucked into these different groups?

Chelsea Daymon 23:57 Ah, you know, that's something that all of us, including researchers from years ago, before my time, people have always wanted sort of a profile of someone that will become a terrorist. And I think maybe people that watch, especially TV shows that have to do with true crime or shows that are based around investigations and so forth of crime. You know, there's this idea that there's a profile of a serial killer or proof profile of a race, rapist. And people have tried to come up with a profile of someone that will get involved in in terrorism or political violence. And to this date, we do not have one. It's all the research we've seen. It's very much a personal process and very individualized. There are some things that people might have in common, but once again, it's not everyone. It can be everything from we've seen people that are disgruntled about something that they see in their society or their their environment and and this level of disenfranchisement or or disgruntlement can lead to more feelings of anger, where they get to the point that they think the only way they can express these feelings is through violent actions. We've also seen where, especially, for instance, with individuals that traveled to ISIS from foreign countries that were not involved in Syria or Iraq, so what we call foreign fighters. Like individuals, we saw a handful of groups of friends that went from countries like the UK, and they traveled together for ice to ISIS to join the group. And, and this kind of falls into this idea of sometimes people, it's, it's going with a crowd, or going along with their friends, or looking for an adventure, or also the concept of being involved in something that they think is bigger than themselves. So when you kind of look at individuals that have relayed their story of getting involved in groups, a lot of the time you can actually point relate to some of the things they say like sometimes people truly thought that a group and their motives was for a good cause.

Nick VinZant 26:30 feet to the fire, you had to pick one. Who's the most dangerous group out there right now?

Chelsea Daymon 26:35 Oh, wow. Um, I'm not sure I could say there's a most dangerous group, because they all are. There are a lot of active groups, they all have different motivations and different things that they want. I mean, if you had asked me that question, say a couple of years ago, I would would have said ISIS just because they're highly active and fairly well organized in the sense of getting individuals and motivating Angel individuals to join them, and then also commit acts on their part. But now, I don't know if it's necessarily a specific group, I do see the rise in this extreme alt right, right wing narratives that we're seeing as dangerous. I wouldn't necessarily say they're dangerous on the level of attacks. Like, I don't I don't see that. It's on the level of like, what we saw on 911, and so forth. So I, I couldn't really say that there's the most dangerous group, I think there are a lot of active groups. And we will probably see groups across multiple spectrums take advantage of governments that are preoccupied with COVID-19. Because that is kind of what's putting a strain on a lot of countries right now.

Nick VinZant 28:03 That's pretty much all the questions I have what's coming up next for you.

Chelsea Daymon 28:07 Oh, next for me is continuing my PhD, which I'm highly involved in. So that's a long process, of course. So dissertation research and writing and so forth. And then continuing research, of course, specifically on groups use of the internet and platforms. And other than that, I guess it's it's kind of like a day by day thing at this point.

Nick VinZant 28:33 I want to thank Chelsea so much for joining us if you want to connect with her. We have linked to her on our social media accounts. We're Profoundly Pointless on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And we have also included her information on the RSS feed that's on this podcast.

Backup Singer Sara Mann

From touring with Miley Cyrus and performing with WIllie Nelson, to singing in Rogue One and Frozen 2, Sara Mann is the renowned voice behind some of your favorite entertainment. We talk the life of a backup singer, touring with pop stars and singing in movies. Then, we unveil a criminally good Top 5.

Interview with Back Singer and Session Singer Sara Mann

Speakers

Nick VinZant: Profoundly Pointless Host

Sara Mann: Backup and Session Singers

Episode notes

• How do you become a backup singer

• How do you become a session singer

• How much does a backup singer make

• How much does a session singer make

• What’s it like to tour with Miley Cyrus

• Are backup singers better than the main star

• What are artists looking for in a backup singer

• Backup singers that became major stars

• Do backup singers also do solo work

Nick VinZant 0:12

Hey everybody welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant coming up in this episode, we're gonna go on a musical journey and count down a criminally good top five

Sara Mann 0:24 as a backup singer. There's more to it, I guess than just the music part of it. There's also I guess, a look and an energy on stage. I mean, like frozen to shore. I knew that was gonna be a big one. And those those were probably the most stressful sessions to date for me of my life. Like that was more nerve wracking for me to go into that room and sing on that that movie than being in a stadium singing in front of 20,000 people as Miley Cyrus is backup singer. There were so many screaming kids, it was just kids and like glow sticks for days and miles. And it was amazing.

Nick VinZant 0:59 I want Thank you guys so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it. It really helps us out. So our first guest has done just an incredible amount of stuff in the music business. And she's someone that you have probably seen and heard and just not realized it. Because she's been on tour with everybody from Miley Cyrus, Sheryl Crow, Willie Nelson, and appeared in movies like Rogue One and frozen two. This is backup and session singer. Sara Mann, what essentially are you doing? Like what's the purpose of having a backup singer?

Sara Mann 1:40 I mean, the music has been pre recorded, usually and there are already harmonies and things that have that are on that record. So then if you go live and you go see the concert, you kind of your ears used to hearing whatever you heard on, you know, on that record, you're used to hearing the melody And then there's oohs and ahhs and all sorts of stuff and obviously the lead singer can't do that on his or her own. So then there are backup singers and backup singers fill in the other harmonies and the other parts that are that were written in the song, but I just wanted to add as a backup singer, there's more to it, I guess, than just the music part of it. There's also I guess, a look and an energy on stage. You know, there's, there are stereotypical backup singers that are you know, we're dancing and we're smiling and we're in tight, you know, maybe some are in little black dresses. And, you know, there's kind of like a stigma to it, where it's, it's also adding part of the show. So there's, there's that as well. Part of the entertainment of it. In regard to what I'm doing now, I do less backup singing than I did 10 years ago, because I'm a mom now and I have kids. For the past at least 10 years I've been more of a session singer doing recording stuff in studio, instead of going out on the rode, I don't go I don't tour as much. I do a little bit, but not like I used to.

Nick VinZant 3:04 So a session a session, I'll be able to pronounce this eventually. session singer is what

Sara Mann 3:13 Basically a session singer is a studio singer, where basically we are, we go into a recording studio or like right now we're singing from home in our own home studios. And there's either music put down in front of you and you sing what the composer wrote or you're singing, you know, some backgrounds that maybe you came up with on your own or were discussed, and you're recording it into a microphone, as you know, versus being on stage live singing. session singing also, you know, when you hear when you're watching a movie, there's you know, choir going on in the background in the score. I don't know if you've ever noticed that or not. But that is there's a group of singers that's actually recording that choir sound

Nick VinZant 3:59 I was looking at that in your bio. You've worked in some really big movies recently. I mean, alita battle angel, venom predator, Rogue One.

Sara Mann 4:08 That's all yeah, those are all choir. Those are all big, big choirs with lots of lots of singers. So do you ever go back and listen, you'll go Oh, because when I was younger, I sang on a couple things when I was in elementary school, like home alone, I think on those movies. And that was, that was my first I was well, first of all, I was in choir when I was in elementary school and high school and college. So I learned how to, you know, that's how to blend and you know, you start reading music when you're young and doing that. And then I had a choir teacher at my high school who knew the vocal contractors in town who knew the composer's in town and they said, We need some kids to sing on a couple films. And so I was chosen with a couple other kids to go and sing. You know, like, I kept that bell sweet sour bells like that kind of stuff. So I did it when I was younger, and then my career kind have changed I wanted to be on Broadway in the middle after after high school and then I decided I wanted and then I fell into backup singing and you know,

Nick VinZant 5:07 can you go back in and can you pick out your voice like that? That's me on Rogue One. That's me, right?

Sara Mann 5:13 Oh no, not at all. There are no not for something like that. There are movies that I can that but I was paid, you know, more as this or hired more as a soloist? I have some friends that do. I think a lot of like, I'm not a soprano, but a lot of Sopranos. There's more solo opportunities for choir film, work solo stuff, like there be one beautiful lilting soprano voice kind of you know, soaring above the others. You've probably heard that in a film maybe not even realized it just to I'm not going to demonstrate it because that's not my forte but that is something where you would be able to go Oh, that's me. You know if that's me, I got to do that. I don't do that. That. That's not my my wheelhouse, but I've done a lot of voices and stuff so there are times there are things like for example saying the movie saying and I know you have kids there are I did I did a lot of different little voices in that movie with a couple girls and we did primarily the most well known one are the three bunnies that go out my gosh, look at her, but

Nick VinZant 6:25 I know exactly what you're talking about.

Sara Mann 6:27 Yeah, that's it. That's a moment where the first girl that talks the way that they mixed it we didn't i didn't know for sure who was we didn't know who's gonna get picked for what but the way they mixed it in that movie. The first Bunny is me. And then the second Bunny is another girl and the third Bunny is another girl. And we did so that's that first funny I know is my voice so I can always go That's me. And then we also did the spiders and we were there's these little foxes that come out and they sing. I think in Japanese that they're like okay and IKEA, IKEA. They do this. They keep trying to audition to be in To show in the movie and that's us. We did. We did a handful of stuff and we sang backgrounds on all those songs. So yeah, that's the movie where I'm like, Oh, that's me, I can hear me. There's some Disney like, teen beach, those that like, you know, those kind of movies where this team I can't talk easy movies where, you know, once in a while like I might have been alone on my part, which is an alto part or something and I'll go Oh, that's me because I was the only one singing that note. But I'm the only person that would really know that. Really? Yeah. A recent thing that's kind of cool is frozen to the making us that's on Disney Plus, they we sang on that there were some different sessions with group singers. And if you watch the making of you'll see me in there, which was kind of fun because I know they had cameras on us he so now I don't know what Episode Episode Three or four and there's some there's a couple of shots of the choir, I'm standing in there.

Nick VinZant 8:02 So when you go into these different projects, like do you know if it's gonna be a big thing or not? Going into it

Sara Mann 8:08 not always no. I mean, you obviously you hope that even big thing meaning monetarily speaking,

Nick VinZant 8:16 I would say just overall, right like it's gonna be big a lot of people are gonna pay attention and it's gonna be big.

Sara Mann 8:22 I mean, like frozen to shore. I knew that was gonna be a big one. And those those were probably the most stressful sessions to date for me of my life. Like that was more nerve wracking for me to go into that room and sing on that movie than being in a stadium singing in front of 20,000 people as Miley Cyrus is backup singer like that. That wasn't like singing in a recording studio for frozen two was more scary for me. But that's probably because of the stigma with that movie. But we don't a lot of the times we don't know what we're going to go into saying the day we go in. We have no idea what it is. They don't generally try not to tell You've just for, you know, NDA purposes you go in, and then there's usually some kind of announcement like, this is what you're singing on today, sometimes, you know ahead of time.

Nick VinZant 9:09 So I'll be really direct, like, how much do you get paid for this?

Sara Mann 9:14 That all varies. It depends on if it's a if it's a film, or if it's TV pays differently if it's a giant choir of singers you get paid less than if it's just you by yourself, you know, solo, there's a solo singer scale, and then there's a three to six and then, you know, are you asking like specific numbers?

Nick VinZant 9:36 Sure, if you want to give them yeah,

Sara Mann 9:38 I don't think I know that, um, off the top of my head.

Nick VinZant 9:41 It sounds basically like a comfortable living.

Sara Mann 9:45 Well, that depends on how often you get to work. If you if you're doing one session, and honestly, I do think many of us have other jobs that we do. For example, my ex husband and I opened two restaurants together while I was on tour as a backup singer for Miley Cyrus, so while that was being a backup singer certainly paid the bills and was able to support both of us during that time, he was able to go open the restaurants while I was on the road singing. But now, I mean, there are times when I'm not on the road, you're not making any money at all. So that money, usually, you know, you have to be smart with it, put it in the bank. If you go on tour for three months, you're not going to go on tour again, right after that. And artists generally tours, maybe a couple times a year, or maybe one big tour a year and then they go home and they record a whole record. And then they release that record and then they have to do promo for it. And then maybe comes a tour assuming that the record does well or if it's a big artist, there's always a tour. But those are like once a year kind of things. So you're making a big chunk of money for three months. And that's all you have for that year. Let's say if that's the only artists that you work for, this is the backup singing world. Talking about. So, you know, having another job is not a bad idea. The same thing goes for session settings. If you do one session or maybe two sessions a month, maybe you're making, maybe you're making $500 on that day for that one session, and maybe the next time you do it, you made another 500. So that's you made $1,000 that month, you probably need another job, whether whether it's residuals coming in from other sessions you did or you sing in a choir that pays or you teach on the side, I think many of us do other things, which is why I was going back to the restaurant thing for me. That was my, you know, I was always I did waitressing and hostess saying and I was a receptionist. I had so many jobs like, my resume looks fortuitous. But I also I also did a lot of things that that's not on my website. You know, if I were to be like, Oh, yeah, look, I was on tour with Miley Cyrus but I was also a receptionist at Tata yo in Hollywood. Nobody knew.

Nick VinZant 12:00 Did you ever get discouraged throughout your career? Did you ever feel like you needed to try something else?

Sara Mann 12:06 I have done quite a bit of pounding the pavement throughout my life. You know, wanting to out of college, I wanted to be on Broadway. I moved to New York. I lived in New York, I auditioned for everything. I got called back for everything. I didn't get cast in most of those things. And there was a lot of disappointment there for me and then you kind of have to pave your own way. With one No, you know, comes a yes in a different form. I auditioned for Aida on Broadway. I didn't get the part. But the piano player liked me and said, Do you want to come audition for Harry Belafonte? And I was like, Sure. So then I went audition for Harry Belafonte. And I got a job as his backup singer. So I was like, you know, they're my, my lifelong dream of being on Broadway flipped to Okay, well, at least now I'm making money as a backup singer from for, you know, an amazing humanitarian and activist. So I'm not going to complain about this. But you know, I There's but there's still that little thing inside of me. It's like, I wish I would have, you know, stayed in New York and tried test a little bit harder to, you know, so I don't know, maybe it's that kind of thing. Maybe it's you maybe I should just go back to New York and but Broadway's not really working anyway.

Nick VinZant 13:17 Damned if you do, damned if you don't

Sara Mann 13:21 just become a doctor 60 by the time you graduate from med school, but that's okay.

Nick VinZant 13:27 As my as one of my uncle's said, you can always just sell drugs. Thanks. Thanks, uncle. That's really helpful. Um, how did you kind of get started?

Sara Mann 13:39 Well, that was it in a nutshell. I Went, went to college for musical theater. Once he graduated, moved and worked at a couple recording studios because I was still this is the thing I was still in college, but I'm still playing guitar and piano and writing my own songs. I got a record deal right out of college with MCA and recorded some stuff for them moved to New York. still wanted to be on Broadway. I mean, I was kind of doing this chameleon thing where I was, you know, whoever wanted me, whatever, whatever was going to pay the bills I would do as a singer. And then I had this, you know, audition, and the, like I said, the piano player was like, hey, Harry Belafonte is looking for a backup singer. Right now. We're having auditions tomorrow, you should come. And so my agent got the materials and they were messengered over to me, and I learned the stuff and it showed up the next day and I went through series of callbacks for that. But I ended up getting that gig and that led to, you know, more opportunities. For me, like I'm on an airplane going. I remember coming home from Puerto Rico or something with Harry Belafonte. I was sitting next to a guy who, when you're on the road, you always have luggage tags, numbered like luggage tags. So it's like You know, maybe there's 50 people on the tour, everybody gets a number one through 15. Usually, let's say Harry's number was number one, and I was in the band. So I had number eight, and I had all my bags have these tags on them. And the guy sitting next to me, whom I didn't know, had a number tag on his bag from a different tour. And it was a low, it was a low number, meaning, the more important you are, the lower the number is. So I knew this guy's was like number two or something on his bag. And I thought, okay, I wonder what I'm saying. And so I started, of course, he probably didn't even want to talk to me. But I started talking to him, and just got out the information out of them. He's the tour manager for Brian Setzer. And I was like, you know, in my head, I was like, Ding ding, ding, meaning, you know, this is a good opportunity for me to network, although I hate doing it. But I started talking to him. I got his name or he, you know, he said he might be looking for a new backup singer in a couple months. And I was like, Okay, great. You know, here's my info and I followed up with him. I got the audition. I went down to some recording studio in LA met Brian Setzer saying for him, didn't get the job. But then six months later, they had fired the girl that they did hire and they hired me. So, there's just another example of like, you know, right place, right time or right amount of, you know, the bigger the balls. I don't know, that was just me going. Okay. I better say something to him.

Nick VinZant 16:24 When you're auditioning when people are looking for a backup singer. Yeah, I would imagine that they, they want somebody who's obviously really good at it, but did they want them to not stand out too much at the same time?

Sara Mann 16:38 You mean vocally or physically?

Nick VinZant 16:40 Both, I guess.

Sara Mann 16:41 Right. Yeah. Vocal, you know, that's a that's a tough one. I don't know if I want to go on the record with any answer to that. I think it depends, I think, for look for Harry Belafonte. I had was just coming out of college. They, I mean, he, he must he has the biggest heart because I don't think I was really in an attractive place in my life. Like I think I was wearing this is like during Kurt Cobain, like Doc Martens and Levi's and flannels, I cut my hair really short. I were really dark brown lipstick. It was like the late 90s. And I thought, you know, I probably had like 15 pounds to lose. So but but vocally you know, I went in there and I was the right one for the job as a singer. So I but physically, I'm not sure if it really, you know, they kind of had to do a little bit of a makeover on me. I remember. They took me to like the Mac makeup store in New York and I got makeup lessons and they bought me all this stuff and they asked me to grow my hair out. I was asked to lose weight, actually, not specifically by Harry but somebody else on the team thought that it wouldn't be a bad idea if I maybe dropped 10 pounds. That was the first time in my life I'd ever heard something like that. I think that then there are other jobs that I've had where I was asked to double the lead singer. So, yeah, I had to be if just as good if not better than the person that I was singing with. And then physically, I mean, you kind of have to, you definitely don't want to stand. I mean, I don't know, I don't think anybody stands out that more than the star that's on stage. I mean, they don't have to light you that much. You can be in the dark if you want. But then again, you know, a lot of those backup singers are a lot better than who they're the lead singer is. You know, I but I know a lot of these people. So I really can't. I mean, I think, right. I mean, there's a movie called 20 feet from stardom that really touches on all this stuff. And if you've seen it Yeah, I mean, a lot of times the backup singers are a lot better than the person that they're Behind but that's that's just the, you know, I've had a couple of those jobs to where I'm, I'm just going, Oh my god, you know, you're just trying to help the person stay in tune that you're singing backup for.

Nick VinZant 19:12 But there's definitely instances where the backup singers would be better than the main singer.

Sara Mann 19:18 Oh, yeah, i a lot I'm sure a lot of the time, it's like that. I'm usually I think saying back up for Katharine McPhee for years. And I still, you know, anytime that I would be on stage with her, I would just be standing there with my jaw dropped because her voice is so gorgeous. Just like oh my god. So that mean that's an instance where I'm like, oh, God to have her voice, you know, like, I don't sing I don't sing like her. But I also you know, that you know, you can't sing if you think back for Celine Dion, you're definitely you're probably not better. You know what I mean?

Nick VinZant 19:53 That makes sense. To me. They're like, there's there's probably some people that are kind of studio creations and then there's Ones that like oh, wow, they are. Oh, they are the real deal

Sara Mann 20:04 Yeah, I mean I don't know if there are really studio creations anymore. I mean that because the the music business is so different now. I don't really know if I've given much thought to that to be honest because we're all up there. Even if somebody's not the greatest singer, like to be, to be really honest, I think Billy Eilish is super amazing and, and genius and talented and all of those things, but do I think she's the most amazing vocalist? No, I mean, she's, I think she's just got a package of all of this stuff, these amaze these songs and she's self produced all those and, you know, there's a whole thing there, but do I, you know, I don't think it's that hard to say, you know, do you do some of that kind of singing is like, okay, you know, I don't but she can't, but I would, you know, sing back up for a second. You know, because she's, she's an artist. And that's valuable.

Nick VinZant 21:02 Are you ready for some of the harder slash listener submitted questions? You've been a part of. Let's see Harry Belafonte, Miley Cyrus Billy Ray Cyrus, Katharine McPhee, Sheryl Crow, of all the tours that you've been a part of which one was the funnest tour for you?

Sara Mann 21:24 I'm gonna say Miley. That was just I mean, those being on tour with Miley is like an upper echelon of touring that I hadn't had a chance to do yet. Just flying private and being in like the most amazing hotels for seasons and you know, staying in these hotels and go we really went around the world, which and I had done that with with other people as well. But I think Miley the group, the band, we were all kind of little family and there were only seven eight of us and it was you know, it was fun we had we had some really good good times good tour bus parties and stuff. It was at a good time in my life. I was newly married but having you know, just just feeling like you're kind of in you're in the swing of things, you know?

Nick VinZant 22:21 Yeah, kind of prime of life so to speak.

Sara Mann 22:24 Like 30 years old and just sort of really in you know, no kids yet no major responsibility.

Nick VinZant 22:31 Like the world is yours kind of I know. The feeling right? like everything's kind of clicking was when Wait, which tour was that one was that the wrecking ball? Sara Mann 22:41 tour time was fine. wonderworld Miley worlds I think it was Miley world, or wonder. No wonder world. I'm calling it Miley world, but that's not right. This was like the tail end of the Disney stuff. So we did the climb, which was from her Hannah Montana. The movie We did party in the USA and then wreckingball was after. Okay, so this was a tour like right before that stuff. This is right before she the hair she she went rogue. It's Yeah,

Nick VinZant 23:15 that's like, right. It's kind of before she got really, really super famous, but also when she was kind of in her prime before people were like my Miley,

Sara Mann 23:24 I mean, she was super famous when we were on tour there, but it's a different there were so many screaming kids, it was just kids and like glow sticks for days and miles. And it was amazing. And stuffed animals and like all sorts of stuff. And I haven't been on tour with her in years, but I'm sure it's a totally different group of those kids now grew up, you know, they're in there, whatever they, you know, some of them are in their 20s because she's, she's what in her 30s now, I think so. So Low Earth, Earth 29 or something she was like 18 or 19 when we started when we run tour together it's been 10 years.

Nick VinZant 24:02 So when you go on these tours, is it like people imagine like Rock Star Tours? Who's having fun all the time and alcohol and drugs and crazy stuff? Or is it something else?

Sara Mann 24:13 Definitely a little bit of that? With Yes, but it's it. There's a lot of hard work though that I think people don't, don't realize that we're also doing like, for example, we maybe wake up at, let's say 4am for a lobby call. You drag all your stuff down to the lobby, you go you get on a bus or you Whatever it is, you get to an airport you get on an air first flight out at seven, you fly wherever you need to go if it's you know, sometimes it's like not a private plane, it's just a normal flight. And then you know, you get on and you land in Detroit and then you do as you know, you could go directly from the airport over to soundcheck which at the venue so it's like two o'clock and you do some kind of soundcheck for a couple hours. And then you might maybe have like an hour of downtime and then you go and you have dinner, then you kind of do hair and makeup, you get ready to go. You're really tired so at some point you'd probably tried to catch a nap whether that was on your tour bus if you had one or in the in that like I've I've literally taken folding chairs and put them together in a row like four of them in in my dressing room. And like take in my piece to take when with Harry's to take my costume was so big, it was like this big fluffy dress with different ruffles and stuff. And I could lay it over my body like a blanket and fall asleep like that. Or if it was winter, I would just use my winter coat. But like that's you know, you need if there was no couch for example in the room because a lot of these are like locker rooms for at stadiums and stuff. They're not like cushy dressing rooms the artist now has like they have all their furniture and stuff but you know, I'm just we're stuck in some room that like maybe some hockey team was playing in. So anyway, you could take like four folding chairs so you do that you get a nap you go then you get You've maybe you go have dinner, you go, you do your show the show's over at 11 o'clock at night, and then you finally get to go to bed. And maybe that's only for like five hours. And then you have to get up again and do the whole thing over again. If it's like if you're flying around, or sometimes you fall asleep on the bus, and you wake up that next morning at 7am or something and you're parked in Las Vegas where your next show is and you haven't taken a shower yet and you're not going to take one on the tour bus because nobody does that. But you have to wander inside the venue find you to find a cup of coffee, if you can, I mean, it's there are parts of it that are very, that can be rough, you know you're up there. I don't know how to explain there's, you need food, you know, there's sometimes there's food on your bus, but sometimes you know, you have to get an Uber and go find somewhere to eat breakfast because there's no breakfast on your bus. There might be some cereal and milk or something. But then there are moments where you have a couple days off and you're put up at four seasons insane St Louis or something, and you know you could to go and just see the town for a couple days which is lovely. And then that night you'll probably go have a nice dinner with your band and you know, go to the pool or whatever you know. And so it's, it's, there's a lot there's a lot of hard work there that traveling stuff, the scheduling, the lack of sleep, the lack of food, you don't really know when you're going to get it from where I used to just have snacks in my bag all the time. That kind of stuff. Even down to like when you're going to do your laundry, you know, I would wear my underwear inside out if I had to if I didn't have a chance to do laundry because you're doing it at the venue in a washer and dryer that you find or you have to find the time to go to the laundromat and do your clothes which is also not that glamorous. You know, it really varies. Or you throw down 20 bucks at the next hotel that you're at if you have two days there and you let them do your laundry which is nice to do or you go buy yourself some new clothes and just leave the old ones in hotel rooms. I would do that to get so tired of wearing the same things. I would just leave them somewhere, go here. Here's some jeans

Nick VinZant 28:08 Your favorite song that you've been on?

Sara Mann 28:10 favorite songs that I've been on?I say Hang on. Well, I sing on lady in the tramp, the remake of that recently. And we got to sing some of the original cues over again, which was like a really amazing moment for me that was one of my favorite movies as a kid. So I would say that stuff I also think some of the demos so I didn't get to sing. It didn't go final or anything but I got to sing all the he's a trained and I love him done.Hey, the trail. You know, all that. Janell Monet ended up doing it for the movie, but I got to sing all the demos for it which was like really cool for me.

Nick VinZant 29:00 So, this one's kind of interesting.Um, you don't have to say if this person is good or bad, but person who is least like their public perception,

Sara Mann 29:12 a person who is least like their public perception. I don't think I've worked with anybody that's not quite true to who they are. You know,

Nick VinZant 29:22 obviously you've done a lot of backup work, but you put out some solo stuff as well, right?

Sara Mann 29:28 Yeah, I have. I have a couple of different records over the years but I have a couple singles that I put out recently I did. There's one called human there's another one called the rack like these are just songs that I write and then I we produce them and I just put them out just because I feel like I need to keep keep the wheels turning, you know the other stuff, which is my my own creative stuff. It was, you know, always more of the dream for me to be the lead singer, not the backup singer. But you know, life works however it works. And I did put out a record, which is super close to my heart called lullabies, which is, I did a duet with Billy Ray Cyrus on it actually. And that's on iTunes also. That's a whole other story, but it the proceeds for that record, go to the Polycystic Kidney Disease Foundation, my ex husband and I had a son who died from polycystic kidney disease. So, at the time that all of that was going on, I wanted to do something kind of healing for myself. I felt like I had singers block like I just couldn't make sound after he died. And there was a good year where I was kind of, you know, not silent, but just couldn't sing. It made me want to cry every time I had to sing. It just brought up that that emotional stuff I guess singing in itself can be very emotional and anyway, so I decided to make a lullaby record and I, that's, that's another thing that I've done. That's there. That's my solo stuff.

Nick VinZant 31:08 Pretty much all the questions that I have, honestly, we kind of covered everything else. what's coming up next for you?

Sara Mann 31:16 Well, I'm gonna be doing some banana bread later. And

Nick VinZant 31:21 sounds really good actually. Can't go wrong with banana bread.

Sara Mann 31:25 I'm cooking some banana bread and dinner for my four children I'm singing on I'm doing some home record stuff. It's a lot of hard. It's a lot of work to that we've, you know, been so grateful to have but there's that's uh, you know, just that kind of stuff you know you're given a song and they go okay sing it you have to record yourself now. So now not only am I supposed to have my voice on this, I also have to engineer it. And you know, that takes input you know, kind of self produced the vocals and It takes it's a whole other skill that I've, luckily I learned how to do some of that a few years ago when I started doing voiceover work. But now we're like everybody's recording from home. So it's there's a real learning curve.

Nick VinZant 32:13 I want to thank Sara, so much for joining us if you want to connect with her, we have linked to her on our social media, or Profoundly Pointless on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And we've also included her information in the RSS feed that's on this podcast. I just think that her story is so fascinating. Because here you have someone that has just been a part of such huge musical and entertainment moments. And there's so much that happens behind the scenes that you just don't know about. And I think that she just has an interesting perspective on all of those things.

Paleontologist Ashley Hall

They've lain untouched for more than 70 million years. Now, Paleontologist Ashley Hall is putting some of the largest animals Earth has ever seen back together. We talk dinosaur discoveries, reassembling fossils and the most underrated dinosaurs. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Worst Flavors of Ice Cream.

Interview with Paleontologist Ashley Hall

Speakers

Nick VinZant: Profoundly Pointless Host

Ashley Hall: Paleontologist

Episode Notes

• How did the dinosaurs die

• How long did dinosaurs live for

• How do paleontologists find fossils

• What do paleontologists learn from fossils

• What is the best dinosaur

• What is the most overrated dinosaur

• What is the lamest dinosaur

Nick VinZant 0:12

Hey everybody welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant coming up in this episode, dinosaurs and terrible ice cream.

Ashley Hall 0:21 It is the most satisfying feeling piecing a turtle back together. It clicks in the most satisfying way if the bone is a good texture, it's a very cool feeling to put something back together that's not been together for 75 million years. There are so many cool and known dying like dinosaurs. We are just scratching the surface. Right? So, I mean, there's dinosaurs like Criollo for Saurus that lived in Antarctica. It says that volcanoes actually helped rewarm up the atmosphere after the asteroid hit the Earth and cause basic nuclear winter. So it was a very, very interesting kind of time on Earth.

Nick VinZant 1:06 I want to thank you guys so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it. It really helps us out. So does anyone not like dinosaurs? Has anyone ever looked at a dinosaur and just thought, Nope. Not interested in that thing? No. Our first guest is a paleontologist and she has this fascinating insight into not only what it takes to find these fossils, but to put them together. And also what we're now learning from them using the latest research techniques. This is paleontologist Ashley Hall. So did you just kind of never grow out of the dinosaur phase or how did you become a paleontologist?

Ashley Hall 1:51 You know, I was one of those kids at age four that just knew I you know, grew up loving dinosaurs. I don't remember When but my parents took me to the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, which is one of the best museums in the entire world. And my passion just was ignited as soon as I walked into the, because when you walk in, it's so grand and it has a specific smell. I am, it's very difficult to describe. But if you've ever been into a natural history museum, you probably know what I'm talking about. It kind of smells like marble and taxidermy, which I find really appealing for some reason.

Nick VinZant 2:31 What was it about it though? Was it just the size? Was it the fact that they're not here anymore? Like, what was it about dinosaurs that really sucked you in? Ashley Hall 2:40 It's a little bit of everything. I think as a kid, you're just awestruck that something that large can live or did live on the planet. And the fact that we can still find the remains is just awe striking. So dinosaurs really spark in our imaginations,

Nick VinZant 2:59 something that always jumps out of me is, you know, I have the impression in my mind that they live. All right. I know they live 65 million years ago, but they live for hundreds of millions of years. Like how long were dinosaurs around? That just blows my mind.

Ashley Hall 3:14 They're definitely one of the longest reigning groups of animals definitely, you know, fish have it over them. So fish have been around for for much longer about 400 million years or so. So it goes kind of fish reptiles, amphibians, dinosaurs are a specialized group of reptiles. So they have been around for Gosh, 100 and 80 million years. So from the Triassic 250 2 million years ago, to the Late Cretaceous, which is now 66 million years ago, which is when the asteroid hit and caused the demise of many non avian dinosaurs.

Nick VinZant 3:55 Is that still pretty much I mean, that was the thing that I remember learning as a kid and we're about this Is that still basically the rock solid idea of what happened to them?

Ashley Hall 4:05 You know, over the years, there have been lots of different hypotheses that have been kind of looked at to figure out well, was dinosaur diversity. Kind of waning? Were they on their way out anyways. But no matter what, what it comes down to is the asteroid. So, you know, this giant, massive, massive rock hit the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and cause mass devastation. So that is still the reigning hypothesis of the mass dinosaur. We call it the kpg or Cretaceous paleogene extinction. The main hypothesis as to why the dinosaurs are no longer with us now. There have been papers recently so you can look at Alessandro Alessandro Kidron says paper. It says that volca Manos actually helped rewarm up the atmosphere after the asteroid hit the Earth and caused basically nuclear winter. So it was a very, very interesting kind of time on Earth. It's kind of reminds me of like the reset button where it's just, all right, we're starting over again, scratch on the slate clean.

Nick VinZant 5:20 So the asteroid hits and when it hits, but it's not like, hey, two weeks later, everybody's dead. Like, what kind of a timeframe are we talking about before they were gone?

Ashley Hall 5:29 No, the actual timeframe, so it wasn't like a split second and everything was gone. Obviously, because the asteroid hit in the Yucatan Peninsula, the other side of the globe wasn't directly impacted. Now, I feel so bad for the dinosaurs that were in the Yucatan because Can you imagine being a dinosaur in that area in Mexico, and not even getting a chance to like think twice?

Nick VinZant 5:56 It's like, what's that? Oh, Ashley Hall 5:58 Just I mean, you see these cartoons of dinosaurs looking up into the sky and kind of seeing a star or something. And you know, they're saying like, What's that? What's going on over there? But for those dinosaurs that were directly around that impact zone, it would have, like they wouldn't have done what hit them. It would have melted them before they had a chance.

Nick VinZant 6:20 Were they smart? Do we think that dinosaurs were smart? Ashley Hall 6:24 Absolutely. Well, depends on the dinosaur. So when you say a dinosaur, what do you think of for example,

Nick VinZant 6:30 I mean, I think of Jurassic Park dinosaurs, T Rex, Brachiosaurus? Triceratops top Stegosaurus. I mean, I think the big ones, the ones that capture everybody's attention.

Ashley Hall 6:43 Sure. Yeah. Um, so actually, we do know and can tell if dinosaurs were or were not smart. So by looking at dinosaur skulls, you can actually see where their brain was inside of their skull. And you can actually do CT scans in a hospital just like you would On your knee, and you can see the inside of their skull. Now that's a really cool thing because we can actually image the sections of their brain. So how big their optic lobes were, how big different regions of the brain were compared to other dinosaurs, right? So we know that T Rex, for example, had a really, really good sense of smell. Maybe couldn't do math very well, of course, you know. But when we when we say smart, you know, what does smart actually mean? When I think of smart I think of an animal being able to have cognition to be able to you know, reason, I think of corvids, I think of crows, ravens, magpies being really really smart animals. And we know that dinosaurs shared some of those same characteristics and actually to clear up everything right away. Birds are dinosaurs. So the corvids, ravens, magpies crows are the smartest group of birds.

Nick VinZant 8:07 I mean, I've always heard the old kind of saying is like, you can't, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb, climb a tree, you're gonna think, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna think it's stupid. Exactly. If we were to compare their intelligence to like an animal alive today. Yeah. What would you probably say like, oh, they're about like that.

Ashley Hall 8:27 So what's your favorite dinosaur? Maybe we can start there.

Nick VinZant 8:30 I'm a triceratops, man. Ashley Hall 8:32 Okay, so when you think a triceratops, Triceratops had not the biggest brain for its size. So when you think of something like an elephant, elephants have the massive brain right there a mammal, they're warm blooded. So they're not to be compared to a dinosaur really. But for all intents and purposes, let's compare like a triceratops to a rhino. Right? They're about the same size. So they weren't, you know, the smartest dinosaurs. But they definitely had the capability to protect themselves. They sawed off these amazing giant predators like T rex in their environment and they reproduced and they survived and we think they probably moved in herds not to quote Jurassic Park, but I'm gonna quote Jurassic Park. And so, you know, a lot of these group animals hung out together, they have social interactions, so they were just about as smart as I don't know, a lot of the animals we probably have around on the Great Plains today.

Nick VinZant 9:33 They're not stupid, basically right. To survive that long, you're obviously doing something right Ashley Hall 9:39 talk about, you know, sort of the idea of dinosaurs being stupid. That does come from a kind of the 1800s kind of antiquated thought of like, you know, Stegosaurus for example. Stegosaurus is a great example because Stegosaurus has a brain the size of two walnuts. So if you imagine Holding your hand out and having two wallets in your hand that's the size of Stegosaurus his brain which was a multi ton animal. And that is the animal that people saw had two brains for a while and if you remember that

Nick VinZant 10:14 Yeah, I do kind of remember that like one was in the tail or something.

Ashley Hall 10:18 Yeah ones in the butt and ones in the front so that they can kind of operate the whole animal but yeah, that's been actually disproven so they just said one brain

Nick VinZant 10:28 so Stegosaurus was kind of a big dummy then.

Ashley Hall 10:32 Yeah, I mean, when you're when you're an animal that's got plates and spikes and everything on the outside of you. I mean, you know, that's pretty much a protection you need workers you know, the smarter dinosaurs and we think of quote unquote smart being predatory dinosaurs, right. If you're a predatory dinosaur, you don't have to just leisurely eat your food right? Plants are everywhere. So herbivores have the pick of our And they kind of Can, can graze and have plans with their leader but you know when you're a carnivore that really takes a cutting skill, the predators like T rex the drama soars, which are rafters. And a lot of the, like Allah soars the predatory dinosaurs were definitely the smarter quote unquote dinosaurs if you want to talk about smart in that sort of respect.

Nick VinZant 11:24 So when I imagine paleontologist like yourself going and studying animals, like I'm just imagining you out digging in a field somewhere, like how do you actually do this?

Ashley Hall 11:34 So I was actually in my career I've been more of a lab paleontologists and as of more recent years, I've been specializing in the educational aspect. So when I started my career in paleontology, which I graduated from IU Bloomington with a degree in anthropology, and then it got a job working at excuse me, the remenham Museum of paleontology in Claremont, California, which by the way, you ever get to declare California. The rails museum is situated on a high school campus. So it's a public museum that is on a high school campus. It's a boarding school. So there's actually kids that are high schoolers that get to go to a school with a museum. So I spent five years at the rails museum as assistant curator, which means that when everybody goes out to the field and they bring everything back, so we bring the fossils back and plaster jackets and plastic bags. I would go through and sort out all the little pieces, make sure everything had labels, and make sure the, you know, the specimens stay with what they were brought back with, right. So if you have, you know, five bags together, make sure those bags stay together because they might go to one animal. So a lot of paleontology when you think of paleontology is done in the field, digging up Jurassic Park, right? But there are so many different aspects of paleontology and mine was focused on the creational aspect, right. So what happens to dinosaurs after they get back to the lab?

Nick VinZant 13:13 How doyou guys then figure out, like, learn about them just from looking at their bones? Right? Yeah,

Ashley Hall 13:20 so that's like the biggest coolest thing about paleontology is a giant puzzle. And mind you, I was not a fan of puzzles as a kid. So I just I'm actually a perfectionist. So when I'm looking at a bag of broken fragments, all I can think about is just putting it back together. So for example, turtles make the best puzzles. So in the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago, and actually about 75 million years ago, where our field site was in Utah grand staircase Escalante national monument and it is the most satisfying feeling pieces Turtle back together, or any bone for that matter, because it just it clicks in the most satisfying way. If the bone is a good texture, it is extremely cool. It's a very cool feeling to put something back together that's not been together for 75 million years.

Nick VinZant 14:19 I would imagine. That's crazy, right? Is it? Do you get used to the idea that you're holding something in your hand? That is that old?

Ashley Hall 14:26 Yeah. And that's, that's part of the intrigue, right? So, you know, my whole, my whole career, whether I'm in a museum or out in the field or whatever, if I pick something up, you might be the first person to touch that fossil, right? If you're in the field. If you're in a museum collection, that might also be the case because a lot of these specimens are brought back in bulk. A lot of them are brought back and plaster jackets and we don't get to excavating them for maybe 510 15 2030 years even right, so, when you're uncovering something in the lab, you're maybe seeing it for the first time, ever, that any human has ever seen

Nick VinZant 15:12 Mammals changed alongside them though right?

Ashley Hall 15:16 Oh, yeah.Yeah, mammals evolved right alongside dinosaurs. So, I mean, it's kind of funny because you think of dinosaurs. And, you know, they're so big. And then mammals were just the little things, you know, that didn't get bigger than a raccoon, and they were kind of scurrying around the feet of dinosaurs because they were, they were living at the same time and dinosaurs definitely had the edge. So mammals went from these very small creatures that were, you know, pretty, pretty poor vision. They lived mainly at night, but our vision is not as good as birds not as good as reptiles. fish have amazing vision or visions. Okay. And so when mammals were running around under the feet of dinosaurs, you know, they didn't really get their chance to shine until well after. So, I mean, you just have some pretty cool adaptations evolving. They were seed eaters, they were carnivores. You kind of have those niches still so, you know, imagine like squirrel like animals, a possum like animals, otter like animals, but it wasn't until dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago that mammals just took off. And then after that, you know, not even 10 million years later, you get and I say only 10 million years in the grand scheme of time. But you know, you get these amazing you know, whales evolving my goodness when the marine reptiles died out the big Moses or is like we see in Jurassic World that jumps up in the shark. You know, Moses soars, died out, leave. A room essentially for mammals to fill that. So we see the same sort of pattern right? So after dinosaurs died out mammals kind of took those niches over and thrive.

Nick VinZant 17:13 So then who's gonna who's gonna take over for us then?

Ashley Hall 17:16 Oh, man, you know, I am really voting for cephalopods like the octopus to take over

Nick VinZant 17:26 their time, their time might be coming up fast

Ashley Hall 17:31 Do you remember this meme going around the tree octopus,

Nick VinZant 17:35 it was like a fake thing.

Ashley Hall 17:38 It was. It was kind of like a, I don't know, like a fake internet thing back in the day, but I think it was in the Pacific Northwest, but I feel like if cephalopods I mean, they can change color. They can. Oh, gosh, be all different sizes. They're just restricted to water. So I feel like if we could get them up on land, they might.They might take over

Nick VinZant 18:00 Are youready for the harder slash listener submitted questions?

Ashley Hall 18:03 Absolutely.

Nick VinZant 18:04 We got some good ones better fictional paleontologist Ross in friends, or Alan grant in Jurassic Park.

Ashley Hall 18:12 Oh Alan grant hands down. Absolutely. So Elon grand Rosa Park, which by the way Jurassic Park Favorite movie of all time, I saw it when I was nine years old in a theater and literally walked out of the theater that day and was like, seeing the world differently. It was insane.

Nick VinZant 18:31 As a paleontologist though, what about that movie? Like makes your eye twitch?

Ashley Hall 18:35 Oh my gosh, like, in a bad way?

Nick VinZant 18:37 Yeah, like, they got that wrong. Um,

Ashley Hall 18:41 it's actually the latter movies. So Jurassic World makes me crazy. Jurassic Park had amazing, just groundbreaking science that hadn't been done before. And animals that had never been shown that way on the big screen or pretty much ever And jurassic world has had every opportunity to grow on that and to actually incorporate real science but they actually went the opposite direction and what the genetically mutated monster movie way. So they took our beautiful, lovely dinosaurs that were sort of like a frog hybrid, right and just sort of, you know, while they're made in the lab, it's maybe not like how dinosaurs really were and maybe they can change their sex. But then they just took that and ran with it and made these mutants so it's no longer you I can't I can't even like I'm stuttering. I can't even talk about Jurassic World because there's nothing it's so hard for us as paleontologist to watch that movie.

Nick VinZant 19:47 What is the most overrated dinosaur?

Ashley Hall 19:51 T Rex. And the reason I say most overrated is because it's everywhere, right? You like Google Search dinosaur and tiara Pretty much comes up not to say it's not the most interesting dinosaur because it is fascinating and is amazing. And I love it so much. But it is definitely overrated. There's so many more cool carnivores.

Nick VinZant 20:11 What do you think is the most interesting dinosaur?

Ashley Hall 20:17 Oh my gosh, there are so many cool and known dying like dinosaurs we are just scratching the surface of right. So, I mean, there's dinosaurs like Criollo for Saurus that lived in Antarctica, right? So they lived at the very bottom of the world, and we barely know anything about them. They're super, super cool. They had a crest on their head that kind of made them look like

Nick VinZant 20:41 Oh, I know which ones you're talking about.

Ashley Hall 20:43 Yeah.

Nick VinZant 20:46 Yeah, that's the problem though. That crust made him look kind of kind of goofy. And then I think people lost interest. Yeah, this kind of leads me into this one question we got sent. Let me make sure I get this right because it's actually like too intelligent for me to screw up on a percentage basis? How many dinosaur species Do you believe have been discovered, relative to the total number of dinosaur species that have existed?

Ashley Hall 21:13 This is a great question. Thank you to whoever answered that. Okay, so let's put it in perspective. So on earth today, there are 10,000 plus species of birds, dinosaurs that we have right now, I think, and someone can correct me if I'm wrong. I think it's in the thousand range. Maybe we have 1000 describe species. And by the way, I can't keep up with dinosaur paleontology. my inbox every day gets filled with new papers and there's new groundbreaking stuff that happens just about every week. So we're in a really awesome time for paleontology. So, you know, if you're interested in paleontology, definitely read up and you know, subscribe to these different channels and outlets for For paleontology news, because there's like something new every day. It's crazy. So I think the percentage is very low. Right? I think everyone would agree with me on this. Because when you look at the different numbers of species that we have, right lizards, snakes, birds, mammals on earth currently, and we're only looking at a fraction of time, you know, dinosaurs were around like, once again, 100 and 80 million years, and we only have 1000 some species that we've ever found. So I think it's drastically drastically. I mean, maybe we've discovered I'm so bad at percentages

Nick VinZant 22:39 it sounds like five, like five to 10 almost, is what it sounds like.

Ashley Hall 22:45 It's very, very, very low. And it depends on if you are a splitter or a lumper because I'm really indology you can say okay, these animals even though they look pretty different are probably one species, or you can say they look so different. They're probably different species.

Nick VinZant 23:05 Oh, I see.

Ashley Hall 23:07 So you can say, well, this one may be a female, and this one might be a male. Or you can say, well, this one's obviously different species, you know. So it's very, very difficult because these are not a living, breathing animals that we can go study. So you have to look at geology. So you have to look at the rock layer in which they were found, because if they were found in the same rock layer, they could be, I mean, the same species, it could be male and female. It's really difficult to tell but if you found let's say, a triceratops because you said that was your favorite tracer tops down. Oh gosh, in one layer of the hell Creek formation in Montana where they're found, and then you find a similar looking Sara tops in which looks like tracer tops. But it's millions of years later. Can you still call it Triceratops? Or is it Triceratops and a different species name? Right? So it could be that you have Triceratops horridus in one layer, and Triceratops persists and another layer and maybe one evolved into the other one. So it's crazy, right? So this is like, part of the fascinating, like tangle of web that is paleontology. You kind of have to pick apart and really analyze dinosaurs in order to not overblow you're like, you know, we have 2 million species of dinosaurs.

Nick VinZant 24:37 Are there any places on earth where paleontologists would like to dig, but cannot because of you can't get to the environment. The government doesn't allow it conflicts. Is there like a place that oh, we could only get there?

Ashley Hall 24:51 Oh, oh, luckily the government does allow paleontology so we are lucky enough to be able to dig on Bureau. Land Management lands so any national like grand, grand staircase Escalante National Park is an amazing place Bears Ears. We've got all these different places in the south west and sort of the Central Plains areas that have these amazing fossils that we do have access to because of the government. But the fossils that are hardest to reach are actually because they are out in the middle of nowhere. So, the area where we're I've worked which is grand staircase Escalante national monument is the most rugged place. I think you could find fossils in the United States. I say that because when when you go out to excavate there you have to camp about six miles from the dig site. Oh, wow. Yeah, my first time out. You know, it's my very first excavation and I was so excited. And we get to the campground and it's beautiful. And there's rocks everywhere. And, you know, just the most gorgeous landscape. You know, huge, huge rocks and canyons, and it's like, all right, well, the morning got to get up super early because the dig sites like, you know, three, four miles This way, you know, it's like six miles round trip. So, you know, the reason for that is because you can't, you know, when you think of something like a canyon, you can't get a vehicle down into the canyon. And in the return aspect, you can't get heavy dinosaur fossils back out unless you helicopter them out. So paleontologists have to find very creative ways to get, you know, these really amazing beautiful fossils back to the repository.

Nick VinZant 27:00 Lamest dinosaur

Ashley Hall 27:02 Oh, everyone's gonna hate me. So the lamest dinosaur I think, is camp to Saurus and camp disorders. So there are these there is a group of dinosaurs called ornithischians. And they are sort of the plant eating dinosaurs that you walk into a museum and you kind of walk past them because they don't have any crazy like, you know, head ornamentation or sharp claws or sharp teeth or anything. They're just kind of like the goats of the Cretaceous, so I'm not like a huge fan of camp to Saurus I know a lot of people love them, and I'm sorry, but, but there is a best dinosaur. Do you know the best?

Nick VinZant 27:46 Who's the who's the best? Who's like the biggest badass?

Ashley Hall 27:50 The best dinosaur is parasaurolophus. Do you know which one this is?

Nick VinZant 27:55 No,

Ashley Hall 27:56 Okay. So imagine so this was actually in Jurassic Park. So parasaurolophus is the big duck billed dinosaur with the crest. Oh, crap. I know what you're eating back. Yeah, on its head. So parasaurolophus has been my favorite dinosaur since I was little. And I don't know why small things you like as a kid, you're like, yeah, this is my thing. And then I grew up and started working at the rail museum. And guess what? On my first dig, I got to go dig up a baby parasaurolophus

Nick VinZant 28:34 like, that's still like a size of a human being though, isn't it?

Ashley Hall 28:37 Yes. Yeah, it's it's exactly the size of a human being. It's actually the size of like a really big dog. So, you know, it came full circle for me. And it's what's really cool about learning about dinosaurs is that when they're babies, they look different than when they were adults. So you get these little baby parasaurolophus imagine like a baby Rhino. You know how they're born was like a little tiny note Instead of a big horn,

Nick VinZant 29:01 yeah,

Ashley Hall 29:02 yeah. So baby parasaurolophus hashed out of an egg with a little teeny tiny bump on his head. And then as they get older, they grow these huge huge tubes on their head, which are basically nasal cavities. So imagine having your nose or AB super super long and up through your skull. They actually pushed air through that so they took in air and pushed it through their head. It was basically a big resonating chamber and made sounds for communication with one another. Oh, so it was like communicating by tuba.

Nick VinZant 29:39 They do they look like they look like a tuba kangaroo basically.

Ashley Hall 29:44 Yeah, they really do.

Nick VinZant 29:48 They do look like a cross between a tuba and a kangaroo.

Ashley Hall 29:51 Yes. I'm never gonna think of it in a different way

Nick VinZant 29:54 If you discover a new species. I need you can you tuba kangaroo.

Ashley Hall 30:02 I love it. Speaking of new species, like I said, there's all sorts of new things being discovered all the time. But did you know that you can name a new dinosaur off of anything?

Nick VinZant 30:14 No.

Ashley Hall 30:15 Yeah, so if you are a paleontologist, you can name a dinosaur off of a Star Wars character. If you like Star Wars. There was a lizard that was named Obama Don after President Obama.

Nick VinZant 30:32 Obamadon

Ashley Hall 30:35 There are dinosaurs that are named after the land they were found on the person that found it you just can't name it after yourself because It's seen as kind of tacky.

Nick VinZant 30:43 So the co host of this podcast does not believe in dinosaurs because enough fossils haven't been found. That is my reaction as well. Can you can you please educate this man

Ashley Hall 30:58 I didn't mean to laugh to like I know but it's we have so many Oh my gosh. So I spent I spent five years at the elf museum cataloging fossils and i think i catalogued like 10,000 fossils. And that's just in my time at one museum dinosaur paleontology started in the 1800s. With cope and Marsh These are two very distinguished paleontologist back in the day professors and they actually tried to outcompete one another because when they were first starting out in paleontology, and if you can imagine, there were just there are fossils everywhere in the American West because no one had collected them before. And so you have whole skeletons laying on the surface, Triceratops T rex duck billed dinosaurs edmontosaurus. And so they were actually able to get the best of the collection right right off the bat, and I wish I could have seen what it We'd like for them because it I mean, you can go into areas today where that happens. But, you know, like in dinosaur Provincial Park up in Alberta, Canada, which is an amazing place to go, by the way, if you ever want to see fossils, they're just fossils laying everywhere. And it is one of the coolest things to look around and just see them laying around you like they did in the 1800s. So, you know, we've we've started doing paleontology, the 1800s. It's only about 200 years old. And the technologies we have now to learn about them are absolutely incredible. Like, for example, we have CT scanning, which is, you know, one of the coolest things to see inside of a dinosaur bone, but did you know that we actually now can get proteins and collagen out of dinosaur bones?

Nick VinZant 32:53 Like 65 million years later, we can pull it out of there?

Ashley Hall 32:56 Absolutely. Yep. So at the Museum of the Rockies, Here, so I live in Bozeman, Montana. There are there's a very, very cool cutting edge lab here. museum of the Rockies is known for kind of pioneering this. So it's called histology. And it's done by the medical professionals today, basically, where you take a thin section of something and look at it under a microscope. So Excuse me, what you can do today is if you take a dinosaur fossil, let's say, a limb bone of a T Rex. And if you make a very, very thin section, imagine slicing through a log, right? So taking a very, very paper thin section, and then we grind it down. And if you look at it under a microscope, you can actually see how old the animal was when I died. So we can count growth rings inside of the bone that does that are basically lines of growth so they're seasonal. So dinosaurs have seasons just like We had seasons today. And they had periods where they were growing more than other times. So we can actually look and see, oh, this dinosaur was five years old, or this dinosaur was 10 years old, or this one was just hatched, right? But then the even cooler aspect is you can actually, like mind blowing stuff. There are chemical analyses that we can do now today, to extract protein in certain dinosaur fossils. This is so cool. And I'm happy to provide links for listeners if you want to read more about this. So I know everyone's thinking Jurassic Park, right? So Oh, can we you know, recreate dinosaurs. And, you know, DNA actually doesn't preserve for more than about 500 to 700,000 years, and dinosaurs lived 66 million years. But what we're seeing are proteins that are still left over in some of these fossils that are that old. So we're starting to get better idea about preservation. And hopefully this can give insight into more about their biology. So, you know, the biggest thing I want people to know about dinosaur bones is that they're not rocks. That's kind of a thing that we're taught as kids is like, oh, bones or, you know, rocks or whatever, you know, it's just like a rock in the shape of about No, they're actually bones. You know, bones, your skeleton, my skeleton are made of minerals. And they're produced by our body. And so sometimes we can get chemical signatures from those things that are just

Nick VinZant 35:38 incredible. That's pretty much pretty much all I got is anything what's next coming up for you? How can people get a hold of you?

Ashley Hall 35:45 Yeah. So I have a brand new book out called fossils for kids, which is I think how you found me in the first place, right?

Nick VinZant 35:51 Oh, my son loves dinosaurs.

Ashley Hall 35:54 Oh, good. Yeah. So how old is he?

Nick VinZant 35:57 Four

Ashley Hall 35:58 Oh, awesome. So My book is for ages five to nine, or as I say, five to 99. And it's called fossils for kids, a junior scientists guide to dinosaur bones, ancient animals and prehistoric life on earth. And you can find it pretty much every big retailer online. Amazon target Barnes and Noble and it is the most comprehensive guide for kids who love fossils and really want to dig in and you know, take a big bite out of the science. So you can find me on Twitter at lady naturalist you can find me on Instagram at lady underscore naturalist and yeah, pretty much all social media.

Nick VinZant 36:39 I want to thank Ashley so much for joining us if you want to connect with her. We have a link to her on our social media accounts where Profoundly Pointless on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and we have also included Ashley's information and the RSS feed that's on this podcast.

Microbiologist Dr. Susanna L. Harris

Your eyes can't see them, but they're on you, inside of you and impact everything from your health to the food your eat. Microbiologist Dr. Susanna L. Harris takes us inside the microbial world in this episode. We talk microbes and your health, probiotics, bacteria modified plants and fabulous fungi. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Things We Don't Understand Why Other People Like.

Interview with Microbiologist Susanna L. Harris

Speakers

Nick VinZant: Profoundly Pointless Host

Dr. Susanna L. Harris: Microbiologist

Show notes

• Microbiologist explains microbiology

• What is the microbiome

• Microbiologist on if probiotics actually work

• What bacteria do for our immune system

• What is the most dangerous virus

• What is the most dangerous fungi

• What is the most dangerous bacteria

• What are bacteria modified organisms

• Bacteria modified plants

Nick VinZant 0:13

Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, we're talking about microbiology, and the top five things we just don't understand why other people like

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 0:27 bacteria control our entire lives like they control my life, of course, but they control just the world and that's why they're the coolest things ever. We've known for a while certain bacteria, certain viruses make people sick, certain fungi, fungi make people sick. But we're really understanding now that it's the entire microbiome. So the entire group of bacteria and microbes living in a certain spot that cannot control the health of their host. Most of the probiotic supplements that people are taking are absolute garbage. Very happy To put that out there at the most, they might have 10 different strains of bacteria and your gut, you have thousands of different types of bacteria. I really think that our definition of microbiology and possibly our definition of life is going to change in the next couple of hundred years, especially as we start exploring other planets.

Nick VinZant 1:21 I want to thank you guys so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it, it really helps us out. So I have always been fascinated by the unseen world. The things that we don't see and maybe don't even know about that just have this huge impact on everything that we do. microbiology is a great example of that. And our first guest is an expert in microbiology and she has this fascinating insight into what exactly is in the microbial world and what that means from everything. For our Health, to the food that we grow and more. I want to caution you though, if you don't know anything about microbiology, like I don't know anything about microbiology, this conversation can be a little bit like a beautiful hiking trail that starts in a swamp before it gets to this amazing mountain. And I mean that in the sense that there's some concepts that we talked about at the beginning. That can be a little bit hard to get through. But once you once you have a grasp on these concepts, the impact of them is just unbelievable, because there is so much there. This is microbiologist Dr. Susanna Harris. What is microbiology

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 2:46 you can break it down into micro and biology, right. So it's the study of tiny life, generally the idea of tiny life meaning that you can't see the individual components without a microscope.

Nick VinZant 2:59 So When I think of it, I kind of think of Alright, there's viruses and there's bacteria. Are those the two main things? Or is there a lot more than that?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 3:07 It's kind of an interesting question. And same with everything in biology, right? There's not really a clear line anywhere, but we've got viruses and bacteria. There's also an entire kingdom called archy. Which for a while, people lumped in with bacteria, but they're so different. They're basically aliens compared to bacteria, but they're about the same size. And also included in microbiology are single celled eukaryotic organisms. So you can think about the little tardigrades little water bears, which I think are adorable or there's like different kinds of fungi have very small individual cellular life versions. So microbiology is cool because it does overlap into all of these different spaces and even so my degree is Microbiology and Immunology. So a lot of microbiologist also So study individual cells and different components of human bodies that you couldn't otherwise study.

Nick VinZant 4:07 So when we talk about these, these these micro organisms, Are they alive? Like we're alive? They think they have a goal so to speak, or are they alive like machines? And they're just trying to accomplish what their genetics tell them to do?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 4:23 Oh,wow, I am loving this because now I'm having an existential crisis over here. So I guess it kind of goes back to the question of how much decision making do we even have? Are we just going off of our genetic programming and what does that mean? Are we programmed to think the way we do? The question of life in microbiology is pretty contentious. So going back to those two things you brought up originally the viruses versus bacteria, bacteria we know are alive some of the requirements of being alive are maintaining some homeostasis, being able to replicate themselves. Being able to have a metabolism. So they take in energy and they use it. And viruses are kind of interesting because they can't do a lot of those things without having a host cell. So they can't replicate on their own. They can't make or use their own energy. And so it's a question of do they exist as life forms? Are they just hijacking cells? Then there's questions of there's actually bacteria that hijack other cells. But in short, most of these bacteria are functioning on kind of just external stimulus. So whatever they're experiencing on the outside, they are programmed to have specific responses to and so we don't really think about them having a motive a lot of times we kind of give them these these ideas of Oh, the virus is trying to wipe out the population or the bacteria is trying to get in. It's it's really more of a fact that Bacteria the virus is only going to survive if it does certain behaviors in certain contexts. And so I don't know though I don't know how you can break that apart from let's say, a goldfish or your pet dog or even people

Nick VinZant 6:15 that makes sense butt, you know, like, dogs will run and play together, so to speak, but bacteria aren't necessarily they're not doing things like that, right? They're just kind of being bacteria. Does that make sense?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 6:29 It totally makes sense. It's absolutely what what most people think of, and actually, this is what got me really, really, really interested in microbiology past the point of just wanting to go to college and study it. So in in, in high school, I took an AP bio class and we spent a couple days learning about bacteria and viruses and specifically bacteria phages, which are viruses that infect bacteria, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. And I found out you know, hey, I want did go to college anyway, I knew I wanted to study science. Let's go get a peach or let's go get a BS in microbiology. And while I was there, I got an offer to work in a research lab that was studying this bacterium called myxococcus xanthus. cysts and mixshow is something that lives in the soil, it doesn't hurt people, it doesn't really help people that much. You know, it's not gonna be the cure for diseases and it's also not going to make people sick. But it was really fascinating to learn about because Mexico is known for having these extremely complex multicellular behaviors. So each individual bacterium can survive on its own. But when they get together in clumps, what will actually happen is that they will divvy up tasks. So it's sort of like they create their own little city where some of the different cells are doing things like catching nutrients and digesting them and other of the cells are creating little spaces that are extremely protected in case some sort of maybe Amoeba. By and tries to eat them or gets really dried out. And so in this case, the cells are signaling to each other kind of similarly to how dogs would when they're playing of, Okay, we're going to go this way, or we're going to share this behavior. And that's, I think what's really cool is that it does cross over into that point of, are these actually individual bacteria that we should study all by themselves, you know, one by one? Or do we need to understand how these could exist as a group or even eventually how they could exist as groups of groups all together?

Nick VinZant 8:32 I guess the better way for me to, to phrase that would be Do they have intelligence?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 8:40 Um, I don't think I mean, they're there. They don't have. We don't think of them as being able to understand the future or necessarily making decisions based on what they anticipate will happen. It's much more based on the the behaviors that they exhibit the things that they do are Kind of pre programmed based on in the past one of their ancestors face the same choice. And the ancestor who made, you know, the specific decision that allowed them to live, ended up making a bunch more bacteria. And so that pre programmed choice is kind of hardwired in as part of what is going to allow them to make a decision. So I guess, I don't know. It's one of those questions. I think you could ask any microbiologists and we'll do this sort of horrible back and forth thing where they're not they're not sitting around having a convention saying like, let's make somebody sick. But they do actually communicate with each other so that they can make someone sick.

Nick VinZant 9:40 You mentioned that the rk what's what's so unique about them that you think of them as like aliens?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 9:47 Yeah, so this kind of gets into the differences of what we can see under microscope and kind of how we're looking at it and saying, Oh, these are basically the same size shape, they're probably the same. It would Be sort of the same as if we looked at lizards and cats, right? Where on the surface we look at them and say, okay, they're, you know, about 15 to 20 pounds for a really large iguana. They have four feet, they have a tail. So this is the same exact thing, right? But if you if you showed someone a lizard and a cat, they would say No, those are definitely very different. That sort of the same thing with Rk. And bacteria, where they're often similar sizes. They're really tiny. rk are interesting, because a lot of them can live in Super extreme environments. So these are the things when we talk about can we find life at the bottom of the ocean or encapsulated in the coldest places in the world or in those deep sea events or near volcanoes, it's oftentimes archy that are known as extremophiles, meaning that they love extreme conditions. But they're so different in terms of their DNA. Yeah. It basically, it, it looks like that if you started off in in one place, like let's say you were making, making a meal and you had a handful of ingredients. If you mix them together one way it's going to turn out into a soup. If you mix them into another way, it's going to end up being a pie. They're so different. That would be like having completely different starting materials, but still ending up with a soup, if that makes sense.

Nick VinZant 11:32 Is that kind of where life started? Is that what they're thinking?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 11:37 So it's a good question. Basically, they're thinking that the branching point between these groups was really, really really long ago. So if we look at them, we might say, okay, they have similar behaviors are the same size. So they're probably pretty similar but we can trace back there lineage and say, Wow, these were not connected with each other. Almost all the way back to When we can try to figure out what that origination point was. So when we're looking at when did you carios split off from bacteria. So one of these, we call them eukaryotes, because they're called True cells. They have membranes and they have organelles. If you've ever heard mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. That's what they're talking about that these little organelles exist in these eukaryotic cells. When they split off from bacteria, it was around that time, and maybe even further back that rk split off in their own direction. So it's sort of these different families of when, when they started being distinct when they started moving away from each other. And instead of them being kind of like siblings, they get closer to being cousins, and then Far, far family members. And it's, it's so interesting. I think it's a really great example of how science is constantly changing and our definitions are changing is that a lot of people that I know Who are around my age? I'm 28 right now are right on that cusp of being taught that archy and bacteria are basically the same thing. And you know, this tree of life is constantly being redrawn. refigured because we're getting this new knowledge and we're saying, okay, we're not classifying by how they behave anymore. We're looking at their DNA and understanding where all these things changed.

Nick VinZant 13:24 So when you look at bacteria, like how much do we really know about them on a scale of like, one to 10 one we know absolutely nothing. 10 we got this whole thing figured out. Where do you think that we are now?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 13:37 Huh? That's, that's a great question. I I guess it's it's one of those things that I just wow, this was tricky. Well, let's, I guess we could put it this way is that 100 years ago, we didn't really know what viruses were for. Like understanding what viruses are versus bacteria, that's been a relatively new thing to realize that those are so distinct. And then it was actually less than 100 years ago, that we found out that DNA was the the molecule that contained all the genetic materials, and it wasn't any other part of the cells. So knowing that DNA is really important is only, you know, 80 years old, I think, at this point. So I guess in terms of that, it's, I think, we know increasingly more about certain things. I I really think that our definition of microbiology and possibly our definition of life is going to change in the next couple of hundred years, especially as we start exploring other planets. We definitely understand a lot more about the microbes that affect human health more than before and a big change is actually going back to that idea of community. interactions where we've known for a while certain bacteria, certain viruses make people sick, certain fungi, fungi make people sick. But we're really understanding now that it's the entire micro biome. So the entire group of bacteria and microbes living in a certain spot that cannot control the health of their host. So it's not just the case of, I end up getting some sort of bacteria while I'm on a trip and it upsets my stomach. And then I take antibiotics and I clear that out. And we're all done. Understanding that there's also a ton of really healthy bacteria that are helping me to be more healthy. And that disturbing that balance could actually be really damaging. For those pieces. We know that it's important, but we really, really don't understand a lot. You're talking

Nick VinZant 15:51 What do you think of probiotics. Does that work or is it a waste

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 16:10 So there's two pieces. One is that like we definitely were covered in healthy bacteria, we need our bacteria. The last thing we want to get rid of all of our healthy flora, so the little living creatures in us. Most of the probiotic supplements that people are taking are absolute garbage. Very happy to, to put that out there because it's sort of similar to the vitamins situation where if you're not getting enough certain vitamins, you definitely need to supplement those. But most people who are eating fruits and vegetables and some proteins are probably getting all the vitamins they need. And so those extras are at the very least just getting washed out of your body. What we know there's about probiotics for human health. We know that you need these good bacteria We know that certain foods might allow your stomach and your gut. A lot of these bacteria live in your intestines allow that balance to be maintained better. But if you look at probiotics, at the most, they might have 10 different strains of bacteria in your gut, you have thousands of different types of bacteria. And so it'd be a bit like having a forest fire and saying, well, we need to repopulate this forest let's throw in a ton of squirrels. So you'll have a population. But that doesn't mean it's a healthy environment. And so you're a lot better off eating these fermented foods and eating like fiber rich food, organic types of vegetables and things and those are actually called prebiotics. So the conditions the nutrients that you add, that allow healthy bacteria to live are called prebiotics. The bacteria themselves are probiotics. I personally would never spend money on probiotics. There's a really cool study showing that if you take antibiotics, which are going to kill all your bacteria, right? If you take antibiotics, and then you take a probiotic, it takes your body longer to get back to its normal state than if you had just taken the antibiotics themselves. And you kind of change that bacterial environment within your body, or is it basically always going to be the same? Oh, yeah, our microbiome changes constantly. And it seems like little changes can affect it pretty drastically. So if you're eating a bunch of sugar or a bunch of fat, or let's say you're eating a ton of carrots, maybe you take a certain type of medication, all of these different things are going to shift your microbiome. Even things like we know that babies who are breastfed versus formula fed have very different microbiomes including on their skin. The thing is, though, is that we don't know which of these changes really matter. We Know that a lot of changes can happen. We know that taking an antibiotic for an infection can change your microbiome all over your body. But we don't know which individual pieces are the most important. And so it's really hard to evaluate which changes you can make in your lifestyle or your diet that will be overall good for you.

Nick VinZant 19:22 So but is it a symbiotic relationship that we have with them? Or does one of us kind of get the better of the other?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 19:27 Yeah, so symbiotic relationships are really interesting because there's definitely a symbiosis where both are benefiting in their own way. The question I guess, is it is whether it's a mutualism re are both of them benefiting equally or is Yeah, is one winning. I think I mean, humans need a healthy microbiota. We know that. We know that if you don't have enough exposure to different microbes and different types of You know other whether it's bacteria or fungi, if you don't have exposure to those things, your immune system doesn't really know how to handle stuff in the future. So introducing, basically like letting your kids play in some dirt, making sure they have the ability to come into contact with different types of proteins, bacteria, all these different pieces. That's really important to train your immune system. And so we know in like, for instance, rat studies, if the rats don't have native microbiome, then they have a lot harder time dealing with future infections. So there's some component of this that humans have always evolved with microbes. We've never existed at a point where there haven't been microbes all over us. And so some of our natural processes depend on the microbes. We can't take up the nutrients that we need. We might have even changes in our biochem History, there's been an association with moods based on the microbiome. So I guess it's sort of a question of where do humans end and our microbiome begins? Or should we just consider our microbiome actually part of who we are. I feel like whenever any scientist really starts to study stuff, things just get really confusing. Yeah, that's basic. Basically, the art of science is just getting more and more unable to define things that that seems so simple, right? You know, like, What is life? Like? Ah, that's really complicated question, actually.

Nick VinZant 21:39 So what what kind of research are you working on right now?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 21:42 Right, so I just finished up my thesis work. So I've finished up the PhD in microbiology at UNC Chapel Hill, and my thesis work. I'm glad you brought up probiotics was actually looking at probiotics for plants. So a lot of companies and this is becoming a an even bigger field of study, a lot of companies are looking at whether they can improve plant growth. Instead of adding fertilizers or different kinds of chemicals, they want to know if they can add bacteria and improve how much the plants are growing or if they're able to survive certain environments. For instance, I mean, the the most studied mutualism between bacteria and plants is like with soybean plants and the rhizobium. These bacteria will come in and form little nodules on the plant roots, it's sort of if you're going to learn about it in a class, that's what you learn about is the soybean plants where you pull them up and the roots have little bumps on them. And that has something to do with helping the plants these bacteria are actually fixing the nitrogen so they're making the nitrogen in the soil available to the plants and the plant can eat them and then you don't have to add fertilizer into the soil. So that's one really good example of a clear symbiosis between plants and bacteria. What we know though The other plants in the soil, very interactions with soil bacteria can help them grow during times of drought, they can actually help them prevent infections from other diseases. And companies are asking how can we take those bacteria that exists in the soil? Can we put them onto plants and solve some of these problems? And it's a really big topic right now, because we there's been a lot of pushback to people using GMO plants or genetically modified organisms. There's been pushback about using chemicals and antibiotics and fertilizers. And so the idea is maybe using these bacteria, we can move away from using such environmentally expensive treatments. But can there be pushed back you know,

Nick VinZant 23:45 you mentioned GMO genetically modified organisms, is that right? That's the Oh yeah, I got that. Right. Um, but is there going to be pushback like Oh, they got with a GMO and now they've got VMO bacteria, modified organisms, as gonna be the same thing like, Is there gonna be a same reaction to this?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 24:03 You know, I think the idea is probably not. Because a lot of these bacteria that are being added most of them have not been modified themselves, which means that they were originally taken from the soil we took and we made sure that we only had one type of bacteria in our sample. And so we know what it is. But we know that it was originally from the dirt, it's natural people are very comfortable with the idea of this is something that already existed that could already have been with my lettuce anyway. So yeah, let's put it back on lettuce. That's really one of the big ideas is that it's maybe a little bit less Frankenstein. I personally try to eat as organic as possible because pesticides and herbicides fungicides can all stay on the plant for longer but I am very pro GMO. I have a sticker of that on my laptop because All of the genes that we put into plants are genes that are found elsewhere. And there's a lot of scrutiny on them. And I think that actually, it's a concern of mine that this push away from using GMO and thinking about can we use these kind of in parentheses, natural things, whether that's going to be, you know, whether that's going to be driven by science or driven by kind of public opinion that my project basically looked at these probe these plant probiotics, and said, Yeah, they can have a benefit, especially in a lab space. But is this benefit enough in the crop system? Or are we just selling farmers something that we think sounds good that they will be likely to buy that their consumers will buy because it's not GMO? Or is this something that's actually going to be helping them

Nick VinZant 25:53 you talked about immunity in immunology so what role do bacteria play in our immune systems,

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 26:03 bacteria control our entire lives, like they control my life, of course, but they control just the world. And that's why they're the coolest things ever. So I'm kind of I'm more, I'm more experienced with the plant side of some of this stuff, but like, bacteria change the plant's immune system, they actually, they can shape if a plant has no bacteria on it. And it encounters a new bacterium, what will happen is that it turns on all these different pathways, it'll put out hormones, it will change where it's sending us energy, what kind of chemicals it's producing, because it's having an immune response to this bacteria. But no matter what the bacteria is, it usually at least recognizes it. And so good bacteria can program the plant to have a certain immune system, meaning that it's putting out different types of those hormones and preparing for instance, this is one of the coolest things ever. I think that we can take a bacterium called bacillus subtlest, which is it's found everywhere. It doesn't hurt people, it doesn't hurt plants. If you put it on to plant roots, then all the way up in the leaves where it's not even touching, the plants have pre programmed their leaves so that if a pathogen or a bacterium that comes along to make the plant sick, if that lands on the leaves, that plant is actually more ready to defend against that pathogen than if it didn't have these bacillus subtlest at the roots. So it's sort of like that prep material of okay plants get ready to see some other bacteria because this is a bacteria space. Similar stuff is with humans, where our immune system is constantly kind of putting out different cells and saying like, hey, this this cell is meant to defend us against anything that has this little flag on it like this type of protein on it, and your body has to go through this whole process. saying, Oh, actually, no, we don't want ourselves to attack something with this little protein on it. We don't want our cells to attack this bacteria that's actually really good for us. So if we see that attack, we need to get rid of it. It's it's sort of this training program for your body to learn who's the good guys who's the bad guys? Who do we want to keep an eye on?

Nick VinZant 28:21 I would imagine that any of these kind of micro organisms simply because of their life cycle and evolution, that they're actually much more advanced in a way, is that true?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 28:33 they adapt more quickly, right? Technically, everything is as evolved as each other. Because everything, even if it's something that hasn't changed a lot for a really, really long time, it's still gone through the same amount of pressure, evolutionary pressure, but what I would say is that, let's say you have a guinea pig, you have two guinea pigs, and they have a guinea pig family and then the guinea pigs. Keep having fun. In over 10 years, you've had I don't know what the doubling time of guinea pigs is, but you've had 40 rounds of guinea pigs and you would look at them and say, how, how different are these great, great, great, great, great grandchildren of the first guinea pigs to those original guinea pigs? And you'd say, okay, there's been this amount of change, like maybe we've seen some changes in color or size, or, you know, maybe their eyes are slightly further or, you know, closer together. But with bacteria, they're changing so rapidly, that, you know, they can have a doubling time, which means that they reproduce essentially, in like 20 minutes totally depends on the bacteria. It depends on the environment, but the bacterium that most people think of immediately is called E. coli, or Escherichia coli, but we use it in the lab, it doesn't hurt anything. We use it to study things, though, and it will double every 20 minutes. And so what happens is that over 10 Yours. I don't even know that math right? But you've gotten, you've had so many changes that this, the final grandchild of that original bacterium could look completely different. It's had all of this opportunity to change. And it doesn't have to rely on a bunch of other cells. So for a bacterium, it could change significantly and its behaviors, it might say, Oh, I suddenly now prefer a totally different temperature. And that's not a big issue versus in a human. If you were to suddenly, like, if your arms were suddenly to mutate, it would probably affect a lot of your other processes. So it's this combination of really fast reproduction compared to everything else. And also, they can change so many aspects without really affecting their overall survivability in certain conditions. I think I just made that more confusing.

Nick VinZant 30:57 No, I get it. They basically can adapt quicker

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 31:00 Yeah....but.Oh gosh, I feel myself being really semantic

Nick VinZant 31:07 is that the the dumb guy interpretation they adapt faster than we can.

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 31:12 The tricky part the thing that I'm getting hung up on and I think it's just a sign of me needing to, to go back and think about the sitcom stuff that I do is that the word adapt is very different than evolve.

Nick VinZant 31:24 Are you ready for the harder slash listener submitted questions? Always, what is the most overrated micro organism?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 31:33 Oh, the most overrated micro organism. The most overrated micro organism is the bacterium that causes the plague. So it's called Yersinia pestis. And I think it's super overrated because, yes, it's like destroyed societies. And it's this huge player in like world's history. And so that matters. But it's actually pretty easy to kill right now. So I actually got to study Some of this as part of the beginning of my graduate school I got to work with you're sending a pestis and compared to some of the bacterial infections we're seeing that can't be killed by antibiotics. Yersinia pestis is so easily killed by like really basic antibiotics. And so when people get all freaked out about Oh, there's three incidences of the plague. Well, first of all, those happen like those infections happen regularly in Colorado, they're transmitted by fleas on ground squirrels, and every couple years, there's a handful of infections, but of all the bacteria that people think are going to take over the world like everyone thinks that the plague from your past this is gonna come back and I'm like, that is my least concern.

Nick VinZant 32:43 It's a glass cannon. Have you ever heard that phrase?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 32:46 I don't think I have actually. Nick VinZant 32:47 It's a comic book nerd, which I am kind of phrase where they described him as a glass cannon. Like it's very powerful, but it just falls apart as soon as you touch it.

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 32:56 Yeah.Yeah, exactly.

Nick VinZant 32:58 Who runs the world. us or them?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 33:01 Oh, for sure them. I mean, we, they could live without us, right? Like humans could be gone tomorrow and most bacteria would not even notice, including the ones on us, like most of the ones that live on us can live in a lot of other animals or just out in the environment. There's no way there's literally no way that we could survive without microbes. Without microbes, we would be covered in just just wastes like not just human waste, but just the world would be covered in detritus of old plants and dust and all this junk that we just think disappears, but it's really microbes doing all of this constant cleaning and production for us.

Nick VinZant 33:42 They don't need us at all kind of makes me sad, actually. They just taken take and take

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 33:50 I think we definitely have this human centric idea. So that question of like, Is it is it a mutualism? And it's like, I mean, because we're people we want to feel like we're giving them something But they don't really need us. They could be anywhere else.

Nick VinZant 34:02 If you had to transform into one of these, would you be an virus or bacteria or a fungi?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 34:10 Oh, you know, I really I like fungi, I think that they are under studied and that's because they're really hard to study. I'm particularly happy I didn't have to say them for my for my work. We know a lot more about bacteria than we do fungi. And so that's why bacteria get more press. fungi are super cool, you know, yeast, it makes beer it makes bread. You know, I don't think there's any higher calling than being able to make beer and bread. So yeah, I'm gonna go fungi.

Nick VinZant 34:38 They seem like the happier fluffier kind of version of it right? Yeah, you know, they're, they're pretty cool. They make hi fi so they're nice and fluffy or they can be in little individual, like spore shapes. And there's a bunch of them that can cause some pretty vicious diseases that are really hard for us to target because going back to that idea of Tree of Life and when they separate it out, fungi are eukaryotes. So a lot of our antibiotics work because they only target bacterial cells and humans aren't made up of cells that are bacterial. But the human cells are eukaryotic fungal cells are bacteria. Whoo. human cells are eukaryotic. fungal cells are eukaryotic. And so it's hard to make chemicals and treatments that are going to target fungi. That won't hurt humans. So I don't know I think, you know, fungi are the come from behind. We're we're not too worried about them now. But that's that's the thing that I'm keeping my eye on of like, if these decide that they want to take over the world, I'm not sure how we can stop them. You have to watch out for the fungi, huh? What are people doing wrong in terms of the world of micro organisms?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 35:58 I think that there is a huge pressure right now. And always, but I think it's growing, especially in terms of increased capitalism of who can have the most exciting finding who can create the one pill cure, who can have the rule that's going to be set in stone forever. Basically, we're trying to simplify it too much in terms of the science, right? It's one thing to be trying to simplify for the sake of communication. And I think we all need to be careful when we communicate with each other to to make sure it's understandable. But far too often, I see companies and scientists and academics try to make their science sound more exciting or more conclusive and saying, okay, we know if we add this bacterium, we get this result. And so we're going to take this bacterium and spread it around the world and we're going to fix whatever human health it's just getting to Grant I wish we could scale it back a little bit and have less competition for creating knowledge. So I guess that's it's really more towards the scientist studying microbiology. I think one of the things we're doing wrong is that we are overselling because we feel like we have to

Nick VinZant 37:19 Like every single research project has to change the world otherwise we're not interested you know, I'm speed flowing right into the next question, which is what is the most interesting micro organism?

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 37:34 Oh, most entering interesting microwaves. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna throw it out to listeria, Listeria monocytogenes. listeria is super cool. It's one of my favorite bacteria. I'm pretty bacteria heavy, like viruses are amazing, but you got to stick with what you know. So listeria are super interesting. First of all, like they're a big issue in terms of causing. If you hear on the news like oh, there's been a huge outbreak. I can't think of the word for this food poisoning. There we go. Food poisoning like Listeria monocytogenes causes a bunch of food poisoning, especially in like milk or different dairy products or packaged meat. A while back, there was a really big outbreak with cantaloupe farm. And the thing with listeria is that it's not it's a pretty hardcore food poisoning. where a lot of people end up hospitalized a lot of people end up dying, but it's so interesting because it is able to survive at cold temperatures and at human temperatures. So like it will grow at refrigerator temperature, and it's very happy there versus we keep things in the refrigerator so that they don't So they don't go bad but but listeria like to be there and they like to be in our bodies and I just think is really cool because no matter what we do, we're like, I'm smarter than the bacterium and put my milk in the fridge. It's like listeria doesn't care. It's it's gonna take a nap. It's fine.

Nick VinZant 39:19 Like the honey badger of bacteria.

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 39:22 Yes, yes. Perfect, Nick VinZant 39:24 um, most dangerous one.

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 39:29 Most Dangerous, you know, I'm gonna have to think, Wow. I mean, I guess we've kind of classified these with like biosafety level ratings of E. coli. The ones we use in the lab are like a biosafety level one and biosafety level four are microbes that we don't have cures for. So that's things like Ebola, the Ebola virus is just deeply terrifying. The thing with the Ebola virus right is that it is not super transmissible you have to actually be touching the fluid. So I think that man, what's the most terrifying I guess I love them so much. I think they're so cool. So even when they're scary like even during this time of pandemic where everything is terrifying. I'm also just digging into understanding Coronavirus. And so it's really exciting. I guess the scariest topic for me is antibiotic resistance, where we're just getting to the point with certain diseases that we used to be able to easily wipe them out and because of our behaviors and not not doing this responsibly, we're getting to a point where we're going to be set back 200 years and suddenly say, we can't treat with antibiotics. We've got to just treat your symptoms and not cure you of that bacteria.

Nick VinZant 40:52 Tell me about Ph. D balance.

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 40:54 Oh, Ph. D balance.So yeah, I found it Ph. D. Balance is In my second to last year of grad school, so this was back in March of 2018. And it came about because I read a paper saying that about somewhere between 25 and 40% of graduate students were dealing with signs of anxiety or depression. And this really hit home for me because I was a graduate student too, has always dealt with depression and anxiety. And I've had a really hard year that the year before. And I saw this, and I really wish I had known that statistic because I wish I felt like I could reach out and talk to somebody. And so I founded this page on Instagram, it was supposed to be just like a get a handful of people together to talk about our experiences and support each other. It was originally called pH depression, and shared some of my story and shared it with a photo of like, Hey, here's the person that you normally see. But here's the story going on behind it. And it just took off like people wanted to come and share their stories. They talked about anxiety about postpartum Depression, about bipolar disorder about traumatic abuse all of these different pieces. And it started spreading out to being something of just a place for graduate students to talk to each other about some of the taboo topics that everyone sort of feels like they are the only one to experience. It's something that they should be ashamed of whether it's problems with an advisor or difficulties with financial situations or difficulties with mental health, making places for people to actually talk about those things and learn from each other experiences.

Nick VinZant 42:33 That's pretty much all the questions I have what's coming up next for you.

Dr. Susanna L. Harris 42:37 So let's see.So I'm continuing to run PhD balance. I now have a team of about 20 volunteers all spread out over the world and they're the best people I get to interact with. It's an amazing group of folks. I'm also really leaning into my interest in science communication. I did some while I was in grad school through a local planetary And through Instagram and Twitter. But now working as a marketer for a company called grant engine that is pretty cool. They actually write government grants so they write the grants for a company to get government funding. And so my job is that I get to talk to scientists who we think could benefit from that government funding, I get to talk to different funders and explain why they should their companies should be applying to these sort of things. So I get to talk to scientists to business people and also get to play with some of my marketing skills.

Nick VinZant 43:35 I want to thank Dr. Harris so much for joining us if you want to connect with her. We have linked to her on our social media accounts, or Profoundly Pointless on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And we have also included her information on the RSS feed that's on this podcast.

Ultra Runner Ian Morgan

His body aches, his toe nails are falling off and he's hallucinating from a lack of sleep, but Ultra Runner Ian Morgan couldn't be happier. We talk 150 mile runs, training and nutrition secrets and the hardest run in the world. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Life Accomplishments.

Interview with Ultra Runner Ian Morgan

Speakers:

Nick VinZant: Profoundly Pointless Host

Ian Morgan: Ultra Runner

Episode Highlights

• What happens to your body during an Ultramarathon

• Ultra running training methods

• Ultra running nutrition

• Hallucinating during an ultra marathon

• Hardest Ultramarathon in the world

• Best Ultramarathon in the world

Nick VinZant 0:14 Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, we are going for a long, long run. And then we're counting down the top five life accomplishments.

Ian Morgan 0:27 When we say upwards of a marathon distance that can be anything from 30 miles to 50 miles to 200 plus miles. There's a common denominator of wanting to challenge yourself in a world where everything is so accessible. This is something that you can just buy. You start to get things like hallucination.

Nick VinZant 0:48 hallucinations, like you'll be out there just running and hallucinating at the same time.

Ian Morgan 0:53 Yeah, it's, it's actually quite common usually in the second night, trees, rocks and things come to life. You're look like a rabbit jumping across the path, you'll see people. And even sometimes they talk to you, you just gotta mentally say, Okay, I've got to put one foot in front of the other, and I've got to take some food and I've got to drink some water. And I'm just gonna keep moving forward, just like life.

Nick VinZant 1:15 I want to thank you guys so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it, it really helps us out. So I've always been fascinated by people who pushed the limit, push the limit in terms of what the human body and what our minds are capable of, whether that's running 50 miles, 75 miles, 100 miles, 150 miles. Our first guest is an ultra runner, who is really pushing the boundaries of what his body and mind are capable of. And I think that when you do that, you'll hear in this interview exactly what that does to your body and mind. And there's also this fascinating insight into the difference between being motivated and being driven.This is ultra runner Ian Morgan. What separates an ultra runner from just a regular runner?

Ian Morgan 2:09 I guess I could what distance are we talking ultra running? ultra running is any distance over the marathon distance, which is 26.2 miles for the US listeners and 42.2 kilometers for the metric countries that are listening. So any distance over a marathon distance is considered an ultra. Now, generally, ultras are usually run in trial type environments. So in the hills mountains, as far as I know, anyway, that's off road, but there are ultras that around on the roads as well. When we say upwards of a marathon distance that can be anything from 30 miles to 50 miles to 200 plus miles.

Nick VinZant 2:55 At this point, what's the longest one that you've done?

Ian Morgan 2:59 At this point 280 kilometers from memory, just Yes, I think 290 kilometers. So what would that be? 100 and 70 something miles.

Nick VinZant 3:14 But when we talk about running it like, are you running it running it like you're running the whole time?

Ian Morgan 3:21 No. For those that don't run ultras, it's not like a marathon where you go from point A to point B, and you're running at a reasonably consistent pace. And ultra, for instance, one I've run 100 miler, it had 10,000 meters of elevation gain throughout the race, which is about 30,000 feet. So certainly on some of those big climbs, you're just walking them even the the elite professionals walk or power height the climbs so so yeah, it's not running at a consistent pace all the time. It's a combination of walking running and sitting down and having something to eat now and again.

Nick VinZant 4:05 iIs there any crying involved? I feel like there would be a lot of crime involved.

Ian Morgan 4:10 There is some crying involved.It's different for everyone. I've certainly seen some interesting situations is there's crying, there's bleeding. There's secretion of various bodily fluids at different points. Yeah, that's an interesting type of environment to be in. However, it's also a very rewarding one.

Nick VinZant 4:34 What is it? I mean, you know, for me, somebody who hates to run more than basically down the stairs. Like what what is it about it that is attracted to you and to other people? Like why do people want to do this?

Ian Morgan 4:48 Again, an interesting question, Nick.I think it draws a wide variety of people. Certainly if you look at a bunch of ultra runners at the start line, we've got people from all types professions from doctors, lawyers, car mechanics, teachers, I think there's there's a common denominator of wanting to challenge yourself in a world where everything is so accessible 24 seven, you can just order stuff on the internet now, you can get a lot of stuff done for you. This is something that you can't just buy, you have to earn and you have to work hard to earn it. You can't just go out and decide to run an ultra. It does take a fair bit of effort planning. And, and and it's challenging not just physically but mentally,

Nick VinZant 5:37 When when you look at the different lengths of the races, is that a 75 mile race that much harder than a 50 mile race.

Ian Morgan 5:47 Well, once again, it depends on the terrain like a 50 mile race on the road is going to be a lot a 50 mile race sir right in the desert MikeA lot more challenging than a 75 mile race on a road. road course. So it really depends on the terrain. And yeah, that, you know, as the distance increases, it does push your, your physical limits a lot more, you start to get things like calorie deficit, dehydration. And also the longer the race if you maybe you might go through two nights where you don't sleep, you start to get things like hallucinations or or sleep deprivation. So, yeah, there can be challenges in different distances for sure.

Nick VinZant 6:36 hallucinations like you'll be out there just running and hallucinating at the same time.

Ian Morgan 6:43 Yeah, yeah, it's, it's actually quite common, usually in the second night. In fact, most people who have never run a really long ultra Yeah, be prepared for that. You'll you'll see trees, rocks and things come to life. Your look like a rabbit jumping across the path. You'll see people Even sometimes they talk to you. It's quite normal. And once you once you've experienced that a few times, you will learn to embrace it and just accept it.

Nick VinZant 7:10 Yeah, but it is interesting. Yeah, I've never heard that. Like, I feel like that's a sign that your body is saying, Hey, man, I don't know if you should be doing this.

Ian Morgan 7:20 While certainly your mind does play tricks on you after a lack of sleep, yeah,

Nick VinZant: like what what usually goes first for you? Is it? Is it the mental part? Or is it the physical part that you struggle more with?

Ian Morgan 7:31 I think for most for me, personally, I think it's, I think it's more mental. And I think for most people it is but it's not that it goes so much. Because after a while you actually learn to, to, to embrace it. And in saying that, you've got to remember I'm 50 years old now. So I've had a lifetime of business staff and the successes and failures and so senses, family issues. I've got four grown up kids.I've been through a divorce. I've been through personal health issues, you know, so. So I think life kind of prepares you in some ways for these ultras, in the sense that you mentally you develop a certain amount of, well, I've just got to get this done just like you do in life. There's usually not a lot of options.When you're faced with a lot of this stuff, you just got to actually do with it. And ultra runnings kind of the same physically, your body starts to get sore gets tired things get, you know, the wheels start to fall off, I guess. And you just gotta mentally say, Okay, I've got to put one foot in front of the other. I've got to take some food and I've got to drink some water, and I'm just gonna keep moving forward, just like life.

Nick VinZant 8:48 How did you kind of get started? What did you specifically set out to start in ultra running? Or did you just start running in this was kind of a natural progression.

Ian Morgan 8:56 Yeah. It was a natural progression. I just had it running.I was a, an overweight business guy. And I was under a lot of stress at this point in my life. Rest seven years ago, I think naffaa memory. We just had some we had some earthquakes a few years previous I was dealing with a lot of insurance issues, finding them in court, etc, etc. And I was just really unhappy in my life. My marriage at the time was falling apart, etc. And, and I just remember when I was a kid, their happiest moments was when I was running in the hills then and I just got up and started to run for no other reason than that. I just thought I just want to find some happiness in my life again, and all the things in my life at the time, just seemed to be stressing me and bang I just got up started to run wasn't very pretty at first. And it just grew from there and there was never a plan to travel the world and run ultras does this just so

Nick VinZant 10:02 are you pretty athletic before this? Like, did you do a lot of sports? Or did you just kind of develop this over time?

Ian Morgan 10:10 I did when I was a kid. That's a very fair and high school. But after that, I actually got quite fat.Serve Andrea, I didn't, I really did very little at all. I did nothing at all except eat and drink.So, yeah, I mean, there was obviously some, some ability there as a teenager, however, I think 20 odd years of bad eating and bad lifestyle and stress took their toll. And it was a lot of hard work to bounce back to what I'm doing now. It wasn't hard work in the sense I was. I was trying to lose weight or get a six pack or anything like this. It was just that I had such a passion to pursue running. That's what I actually enjoy. I enjoy something that seems impossible to me or group difficult from to achieve right now, and I think that's one of the keys.

Nick VinZant 11:03 You mentioned that you are 50. Are you older, younger about the same as most of the other people who do this?

Ian Morgan 11:09 Probably older. Most people get into this by sort of retired from the road running and get into this, and they're probably 30s. I mean, certainly the elite guys are now starting to get on in their 20s. And we're seeing a lot more of that. But as the sport grows, the popularity of the sport grows around the world.

Nick VinZant 11:30 What's your normal week of training look like? leading up to leading up to a race event?

Ian Morgan 11:37 really depends on the event but as a general rule, for example, last week, I did 150 kilometers. So what would that be I don't know about just under 100 miles last week, plus, that's just ramping plus strength training and some swimming. And that's even on holiday. It can go up to like you know, 100 plus My weeks for some of the bigger events, but I generally have somewhere between,let's say sort of, I think 60 miles a week will be an average 60 to 65 miles a week will be an average over the year, if you had like,

Nick VinZant 12:16 but if you had 100 mile race coming up, you're not going to try to run 100 mile race before not right?

Ian Morgan 12:23 No, no, not at all. Not at all. So so you're not going to put up with ultra running, you build up an endurance base with a lot of the work you do and you do a lot more strength training to build, like strength and stability into your body. So you can basically stay out right for that period of time while you're running or moving through the hills. So yeah, you know, it depends. I haven't coach so a lot of the time he'll study the race. I'm going to run and he'll sit my training. So some weeks might be quite light and easy. Other weeks might be quite big.

Nick VinZant 12:57 How many calories like the you go through a day.

Ian Morgan 13:02 For example, this weekend, I'd run run about the slot weekend just been I've run I don't know, about 90 kilometers. what's what's there now about 50 miles over the weekend plus some swimming and strength training, that will probably burn like 8000 calories just for that training alone plus my normal calories of walking around and doing other stuff. So yeah, I mean, you do have to eat.And, but it's really about eating the foods that that fuel you. So people usually say, Well, I guess I can just go and eat pizza and doughnuts as much as you want. Well, it's not entirely true. You have to like eat foods that that help your muscles recover and help your body recover and and fuel you for the next training session.

Nick VinZant 13:55 Man, what are your knees like though?

Ian Morgan 13:58 Yeah, fine. You know, this is a common question people ask runners, what about your knees? It's actually most runners I know have really good knees. You learn to do strength work, you learn to look after your body a lot more. I mean, I'm focused a lot on recovery, which involves things like physio strength training, stretching, drinking enough fluids and taking care of your body so you came to like take care of of small niggles or issues a lot sooner than maybe the average person would. So yeah, they no issues.

Nick VinZant 14:36 Is there like a certain body type that most ultra marathon or ultra runners have like, are they I'm imagining somebody that's fairly tall are they fairly short, like what's the kind of the common body type?

Ian Morgan 14:49 I do come in all shapes and sizes but it is a common role. I think you would say probably shorter and and skinnier along the way.Guys moment at the champion of the fair would be field would, would be, I don't know the weight in pounds, but in kilos, a lot of guys sort of between about 60to 65 kilos and a lot of woman are about 40 to 50 kilos. So very light very short usually, I'm there are exceptions to the rule. I mean I'm I'm six foot one, six foot one a bit, and 75 are best 74 kilos at the moment. So you know there are different types but as a general rule smaller and lighter.

Nick VinZant 15:36 Are you ready for some of the harder slash listener submitted questions?

Ian Morgan 15:41 Well, let's give them a go.

Nick VinZant 15:43 When is the last time your nipples have bled?

Ian Morgan 15:46 Um, it's been a long time actually. Generally what happens is, is they after a few races of them bleeding, they harden up it's like getting calluses on your feet.After a while, the skin just gets hot and I haven't had that issue for years.

Nick VinZant 16:04 Is runner's high really a thing?

Ian Morgan 16:07 Yes, it is. Most definitely, usually it happens in the earliest stages of running. When your body releases those endorphins and you get that rush and yeah, it has happened to me and it's amazing when it does doesn't generally happen so much as you become more experienced your body adapts and and and doesn't give you that. That feeling as much.

Nick VinZant 16:33 If you're on out there on like, let's say 100 kilometer race, like At what point in that race? Are you going to think like, Oh my gosh, I'm starting to feel tired.

Ian Morgan 16:45 That can vary between about 50 kilometers in to like the last five kilometers to go.

Nick VinZant 16:53 Just kind of depends on like the race itself or your mental state or what is it exactly,

Ian Morgan 16:59 it depends on the race, how much sleep you got the night before if you had to travel halfway around the world to be at the event, so there's a number of factors. Each race is so different bucket list race that you would like to do a bucket list. Let me see there is one that I was going to be doing this year, but it's been postponed to next year. It is the snowman race. It is in the Himalayan mountains of Bhutan, 300 kilometers. And with an I think an average altitude of 4000 plus meters, which is what for I think was about 12 to 12 to 40,000 feet. That's the base elevation. So you're going to be climbing up more than that at some points.

Nick VinZant 17:46 Are the organizers of these things basically just trying to figure out the hardest possible thing that they could do.

Ian Morgan 17:53 Sometimes it feels like that but no, this this event was the snowman race was put on by the king of Bhutan to celebrate his wedding anniversary.But looks like we'll be celebrating it next year instead. But yeah, I think the organizers they do tend to find something that's more challenging now, we're seeing more and more extreme stuff and more difficult events.

Nick VinZant 18:22 Is there a point though, where somebody's just gonna like Look man, we can't do this. We're gonna run 100 kilometers straight up Everest.

Ian Morgan 18:32 Yeah, well, I think what's gonna happen is there's obviously a safety issue involved in the sense that you can make a race quite extreme, but if you're gonna make it too extreme, you're you gonna limit the the ability of people to complete it and be completed safely.So I think races certainly have to look at the level of experience that some runners have in regards to what they can actually achieve. Say I think that there's gonna be a certain ceiling or limit, that that's not going to include the entire population. Just for the mere fact that that you don't want people having issues on the course.

Nick VinZant 19:13 Hardest race that you've ever done. Hardest race that you think is out there.

Ian Morgan 19:18 Hardest race I've ever done. Probably I did a desert race and I never ran in the desert before and running up and down sand dunes and hate was certainly a challenge. However, I loved it. I lost I think nine toenails in that race.Hardest race I think out there. I don't know. I guess they're bringing new ones in all the time. I hated the Barkley marathons. The one that it's in the US is quite mentally challenging. I think there's a documentary on Netflix about it. But it's challenging in a mental way more than a physical

Nick VinZant 20:00 I'm actually seen that documentary. It's pretty good. It the race itself doesn't look like I didn't look that hard. But it's obviously must be hard if nobody's really finishing it.

Ian Morgan 20:09 Yeah, that's the thing. I think it's a mental challenge on that one.

Nick VinZant 20:13 What happens to your feet when you lose nine toenails? Well, they swell up a little bit.

Ian Morgan 20:20 You actually get used to it, I end up taking usually a small knife with me to the events where I know I'm going to lose some toenails, and I just chopped them off. When they start to come loose that way. It's just so much easier to run. If you've got half an hour hanging there and it's digging into your skin hurts more. Whereas if you just get a knife and like, cut them out. It's just so much better to run. So yeah, you get used to it.

Nick VinZant 20:45 It's such an interesting dichotomy that some people hearing that will absolutely never want to do this and some people will absolutely be like, sign me up and there's no in between, right.

Ian Morgan 20:57 That's right. Yeah. You know, if you told me this before I started ultra running, I would say there's no way I could even handle them. It's like people think turnouts out for torture, you know. Then when it happens, your thing is not so bad.

Nick VinZant 21:12 What happens to your body on a long run? That wouldn't happen necessarily if you're running just five or six miles like something that would that was completely unexpected for you.

Ian Morgan 21:23 You started to get cramps in places you didn't know cramps could happen. Dehydration is a big one to watch.I don't know. Like I said the lack of sleep is a big one. But that's a that's a race not a long run. You get used to the distances that you train for. So you know, a marathon distance runner will probably their long run is what they 20 miles 22 miles usually, an ultra runner their long run might be a be 30 miles. So you get used to the distances you're trained for

Nick VinZant 21:58 what motivates you

Ian Morgan 22:00 I think motivation is a is an interesting word in the sense that, I mean, I certainly use it on Instagram and hashtags. There's these terms motivation Monday and all this kind of stuff. However, I think motivation is is something that wanes, a lot of people are motivated when they see a video or they see someone achieve something that they would like to do. I think, for me, consistency and discipline are probably more important words. I find, if I'm consistent with doing the work, and I'm disciplined enough to do it, then then I'll find the motivation. Motivation is the thing that sort of comes last off first for me. When you look at it, you know, a lot of a lot of ultra runners.

Nick VinZant 22:45 Are they kind of like, hey, somebody's gonna come in, they're gonna do this for a year or two, and then you're never gonna see him again. Or two people usually kind of stick around for the long haul.

Ian Morgan 22:55 Yeah, a lot of people usually there for the long haul, the only issue that are I've noticed in the sport in the last few years is maybe more some of the younger folks coming through is they are young, they're very strong, they're very fit and they push to the point of like burning themselves out. So you might see them for two or three years and then they're gone. And I think that's, that's something to look at. And that comes with life experience, too is, is consistency is the key not not just pushing to the absolute limit every single time and then burning out. So yeah, I'm seeing more and more people burning themselves out and more probably at a younger level than at an older level.

Nick VinZant 23:41 If you were gonna pick like one race one event, as somebody who said, I'm gonna do one of these, and that's, that's it. I'm just gonna prove to myself I can do this. Which one would you say like all you got to do this one.

Ian Morgan 23:54 For sheer beauty and an incredible scenery and a challenge, I would say La Sportiva Lavaredo Ultra Trail in Italy, it's just an amazing event. The dolomite mountains are simply beautiful and it's tough. It's not one you're gonna just jog through. But it is an incredible experience.

Nick VinZant 24:15 This is the last question for me. I mean, when you're running 100 plus miles, like what are you thinking about the whole time?

Ian Morgan 24:23 But actually, a lot of the time, you're just enjoying the process, one foot in front of the other looking at the scenery around you talking to other people checking in with your body, you know, what, how is everything feeling? Am I hungry? Am I thirsty? Am I tired? And the time passes very quickly, actually, you'd be surprised like you can be out there for anywhere between 13 to 30 hours and and the time goes really quickly.

Nick VinZant 24:52 That's really all the questions I got, man. What's the guy missed anything? what's coming up next for you?

Ian Morgan 24:58 what's coming up next. I have an event in the UK on September the 19th 125 kilometers. I think it's in the south downs, that's gonna be interesting. It's gonna be a lot of fun. There's a few good ultra runners coming to that as well. So I'm looking forward to the challenge, then I'm really not sure the rest calendar for them for the rest of the year is still up in the air, but most races are still waiting to confirm various events because of obviously, the you know, restrictions in regards to COVID or regards to the current pandemic, I should say, situations throughout the world. So yeah, I'm looking forward to my race in September then we will see I have quite a few events planned but I have to hear back from the races and my sponsors to see which ones will go ahead.

Nick VinZant 25:56 I mean, is this for a lot for yourself or for a lot of ultra runners like is this is this a full time living?

Ian Morgan 26:03 Probably not for a lot of ultra runners but yes certainly for myself and the pros or the elites, it's not a sport like professional baseball or football where there is a huge salary packages. It is growing and it is becoming more monetized. But yeah, I make a living out of it. I also do you know, like my social media work have sponsors which I'm very grateful for. And I have a lot of support from from the ultra running community and the online community. So I managed to get by doing this full time which I'm very grateful for.

Nick VinZant 26:43 We we just got this question this one isn't in but somebody just sent me this. I want to ask you this one better thing to come out of New Zealand, Lord of the Rings Flight of the Conchords or hunt for the Wilderpeople.

Ian Morgan 26:58 Oh wow.Yeah yeah oh very good our two good movies and TV show huh Flight of the Conchords is very Kiwi humor Lord of the Rings probably. I think half most of the world's probably seen it.For the world of people is hilarious.I'm gonna go to the Conchords because it's very key way and probably only Kiwis will get most of the jokes.

Nick VinZant 27:26 I want to thank Ian so much for joining us if you want to connect with him, we have a link to him on our social media accounts, or Profoundly Pointless on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. And we have also included his information in the RSS feed that's on this podcast. His Instagram is really cool. It's really interesting, even outside of an ultra runner perspective, perspective, because there's so much inspirational content that's on there.And it's also it's really cool for just seeing some beautiful places in the world.

Sleep Specialist Dr. Jade Wu

What's the secret to a great night's sleep, why don't we die in dreams, what are phones doing to our brains. Sleep Psychologist Dr. Jade Wu answers your biggest sleep questions in this episode. We talk the secret to sleeping soundly, how much sleep you really need, sleep disorders, circadian rhythms and more. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Things You Should Never Get Rid Of.

Interview with Sleep Psychologist and Sleep Specialist Dr. Jade Wu

Speakers

Nick VinZant: Profoundly Pointless Host

Dr. Jade Wu: Sleep Psychologist and Sleep Specialist

In this episode we cover:

• What is the key to a good night’s sleep

• How much sleep do you really need

• How your unique circadian rhythm can impact your sleep

• How are sleep disorders treated

• Why don’t we die in dreams

• Why people are biologically hard wired to sleep at certain times

• What are the signs of insomnia

• What is the best way to get to sleep

Nick VinZant 0:13

Hey everybody welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant coming up in this episode, we're going to sleep and we're counting down the top five things that you should never get rid of

Dr. Jade Wu 0:26 During sleep. That's one of the times that the brain is kind of repairing itself is doing some important janitorial work. So it's literally clearing out toxins from the cerebral spinal fluid which is literally your brain juice. We are also hardwired to be sleeping a certain time at certain times a day. So for example, I am a biologically hardwired night owl. So for example, if I need eight hours of sleep per night, and I get it from midnight to 8am I feel absolutely great. But if I get the same amount of sleep, so eight hours, but I get it from 10pm to 6am. I feel like total crap. So we're completely messing up the brain's ability to tell what time it is. And when the brain the SCN is confused about what time it is, is not as able to regulate our bodies.

Nick VinZant 1:21 I want to thank you guys so much for joining us. If you get a chance to like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it. It really helps us out. So something that really annoys me is when you see these stories on the news, and they talk about you need to get more sleep. Sleep is really important. Yeah. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows they should be getting more sleep and everybody knows that it's important, but what are you actually going to do about it? Our first guest has some real practical tips about what you can actually do about it. And as a clinical scientist, she also has the A fascinating insight into what sleep is doing to our brains and to our bodies. And what happens in cases where she has patients that aren't getting enough sleep. This is sleep psychologist, Dr. Jade Woo. So obviously sleep is important. But why is it so important? What is it doing to the brain into the body

Dr. Jade Wu 2:25 sleep is incredibly important. It's actually doing a lot of different functions for the body and the brain. For example, during sleep, that's one of the times that the brain is kind of repairing itself is doing some important janitorial work. So it's literally clearing out toxins from the cerebral spinal fluid, which is literally your brain juice. So you know, the the stuff that accumulates during the day that your brain doesn't need really needs to be taken out during sleep, and if it accumulates too much, when there's not enough sleep, then it builds up and builds have been built up and can increase your risk for something like Alzheimer's disease. Of course, it's not like if you miss a couple nights of sleep, you'll have Alzheimer's, it doesn't work like that. But prolonged chronic sleep deprivation can prevent your body and your brain from repairing properly. And aside from repairing itself, sleep is also just important for normal growth. So for example, in kids and in teenagers, especially, sleep is doing a lot of developmental growth. That's where a lot of the reproductive hormones are doing their work during adolescence. That's where the growth hormones are flowing for kids to grow their bodies and their brains. It's doing emotional processing, it's consolidating the memories. So all of the normal functions that we do as humans really have a lot of their bases in sleep.

Nick VinZant 3:58 Does anybody actually get enough sleep.

Dr. Jade Wu 4:02 Sure, yeah. My clients after they work with me. I'm only partially kidding there. I think plenty of people do get enough sleep. And the I think the more important question maybe to ask is, how do we know what is enough sleep? Because we often see the number eight flowing around right? The eight hours, you should get eight to nine hours or seven to eight hours. But I think that's a little bit misleading, because that's like asking, you know, how many calories should you consume? Well, it depends on who you are, you know, are you Michael Phelps or are you Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you know, they both do very important jobs, but one of them probably eats a lot more than the other and it kind of works similarly for sleep. For someone who is very physically active and maybe a teenager, someone who is doing a lot of physical work, they probably mean more sleep than someone who is older, like in their 70s or 80s. And not doing as much physical work and not doing as much brain development, you know, as a child. So it really depends on your your genetic predisposition, your age, your lifestyle, your physical activity, your circadian rhythm, a bunch of different things. So it's not actually too easy of a question to answer. But I think it's an important one to start with before you tell yourself all I'm not getting enough sleep or I am getting enough sleep. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah,

Nick VinZant 5:40 I think that the question would then be like, How do I know if I'm getting enough sleep or if I've just adjusted to the pattern that I'm in?

Dr. Jade Wu 5:48 Sure, sure. Yeah. So I think the only way you can figure out if you're getting enough sleep for you, is to see how much your body can consistently sleep without getting insomnia. So that means giving yourself plenty of opportunity to sleep. So not burning the candle at both ends, you know, making sure you wind down at the end of the day. So you can let yourself feel sleepy cues, like the yawning and the eyes drifting. Making sure that you can feel those cues when your body does get sleepy. But, you know, if you start to get insomnia as in trouble falling asleep or trouble staying asleep or waking up too early, then maybe you're giving yourself too much time to sleep. So it's a little bit of a trial and error.

Nick VinZant 6:35 When I hear insomnia, I'm thinking basically, like people sleeping one or two hours a night. Like what what exactly is insomnia?

Dr. Jade Wu 6:44 You know, I've actually have had clients with insomnia who slept about eight or nine hours a night, but they still had insomnia. So your question is a really good one. It's not about the quantity of sleep that you get. It's about Whether that quantity of sleep matches your need, and whether you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. So the official definition of insomnia disorder is you have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, waking up too early, or otherwise not getting the pattern, the quality of sleep that you like, that you would like. And this is causing you problems in the daytime, not just at night. And this is happening despite having enough opportunity to sleep. So this last point is really important. Insomnia is not someone burning the candle at both ends. a college student pulling all nighters because they're studying for exams or single mom working three jobs, they don't have enough time to sleep, those those situations are not insomnia. those situations are sleep deprivation. Insomnia is not sleep deprivation. Plenty of people with insomnia are actually getting enough sleep objectively sleep, speaking But they're, they're trying, they're either trying too hard to sleep too early or they're, they keep waking up and not being able to fall back asleep, or their body and their mind are just too hyped up so that they're not getting the restful type of sleeps that they would like. When

Nick VinZant 8:18 we talk about the amount of sleep that somebody should be getting. I'll just use myself for an example. Okay, I usually get seven hours of sleep. But could I be in a situation where like, oh, if I got seven hours and 15 minutes, I could be a genius or something like that is that you know what I mean? Like, am I missing out just by not getting enough sleep? Like, could I not unlock my full potential so to speak?

Dr. Jade Wu 8:44 I would say they are okay. There are two parts. In my answer to your question. The first part, the direct answer is sure it's possible. I doubt that 15 minutes would make much of a difference, but it's possible that you're someone Who actually biologically needs let's say nine hours, but you haven't been giving yourself the chance to get nine hours. So you know, your seven hours are just not cutting it. That's very possible. And you would know that if you are, you know really cranky during the day can't concentrate can't function really well. You're running on just an empty tank all the time you feel really Draggy all of these signs could point towards you not get getting enough sleep. Now one way you could find out if you have, if you're lucky enough to be able to do this is to just give yourself free rein to sleep more or give yourself time to be in bed more just in case you could sleep more. And play with that. See if maybe you can consistently sleep seven and a quarter, seven and a half, maybe eight even. And if you can consistently do that without getting insomnia. So again without trouble falling asleep. asleep or waking up too early, then it will have turned out that you did need more sleep. But if you start trying to sleep more, but you know, you're just tossing and turning, you're waking up a lot. You're waking up too early, then maybe seven was actually the right amount for you. So that's the first part of the answer. The second part is that I think one question, that sort of underlying your question that's not getting asked is about circadian rhythm. So this is your body clock. We all have a roughly 24 hour biological clocks that we run on. And our bodies and our brains run best when we when? Sorry, let me say that again. So our bodies and our brains run best when we're running on a consistent 24 hour cycle. And when our sleep timing matches what our body wants to do, so have you heard of people being like night owls or morning Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that's actually a biologically hardwired thing. That's not just people's preference. Oh, like I like being a morning person or, oh, you know, I'm a party animal. I'm a night owl. So I like to sleep in. And I'm lazy. It's not like that was partially like that, maybe. But we are also hardwired to be sleeping a certain time, at certain times a day. So for example, I am a biologically hardwired night owl. So, for example, if I need eight hours of sleep per night, and I get it, from midnight to 8am, I feel absolutely great. I jump out of bed and I'm ready to go and I'm on top of the world. But if I get the same amount of sleep, so eight hours, but I get it from 10pm to 6am. I feel like total crap for the whole day. It takes me like eight hours to boot up. So the timing of your sleep actually really matters. So when you say that you sleep seven hours a night And maybe you could be reaching more of your full potential if you got more. I'm wondering if you know, if you don't feel you're 100% maybe you don't need more sleep, maybe you need to sleep at a different time.

Nick VinZant 12:12 I had never heard that before. I never even thought of that. It's not just when how much sleep you get but when you get that sleep.

Dr. Jade Wu 12:21 Absolutely. It's such an underrated topic. I think all over the news all over, you know, these social media health campaigns. We're talking about how much sleep we need, and that is really important, but I think we're really neglecting to talk about the timing aspect. And that is actually more important than what I even just said. Did you know that out of all the list out of the whole list of probable carcinogens. The only item that is not a chemical is circadian misalignment, meaning your body not running on a 24 hour cycle. not sleeping when you should be. So this is born out of research showing that rotating shift workers and night shift workers are at a greater risk for cancer than people who would work day shifts and regular shifts.

Nick VinZant 13:14 All edit this part out but for years, I worked as a news reporter on the morning shift and I I am I am sure that I have taken years off my life.

Dr. Jade Wu 13:24 Oh,I'm so sorry.

Nick VinZant 13:28 It's just not natural. Like we should not be doing this.

Dr. Jade Wu 13:34 And I don't think you should edit that part of how or I mean, obviously it's up to you. But I think that our personal experiences are really valid. You know, when we say we feel like total crap. When we get up early in the morning. That's not just us. You know, being crybabies about it. We really truly don't function well. When we get up too early or get up too late for that matter. So knowing the timing of You need to sleep is really important.

Nick VinZant 14:01 When you see patients, what is the most common complaint, like what's usually the reason that they're coming to see you besides not getting enough sleep? Like what's the underlying cause of it?

Dr. Jade Wu 14:12 Sure. The most common complaint I get when they first come into the office is I read, insert, newspaper, article, magazine article, the book, why we sleep. And now I'm afraid that I'm going to get dementia, I'm going to die early, I'm going to have a heart attack. People are really, really anxious about their sleep, especially people who are otherwise high functioning, otherwise doing well on life. Otherwise more or less healthy. They tend to be the most anxious about their sleep. So they're the ones reading the headlines about how we should get eight hours or else and they're worried that they're seven and a half hours that's not cutting it. And because they were working They're seven and a half hours wasn't cutting it, they were doing things like going to bed too early or trying to sleep in, or trying to take naps or trying to meditate really hard. But meditating is not something you should be doing really hard. But they've sort of worked themselves up into this anxiety about sleep that ironically then fed into their anxiety. And now they've had anxiety for years. And they're dependent on some sort of sleep medication, and they would really like to come off of it. And that's why they ended up in my office.

Nick VinZant 15:33 What is all of this screen time doing to our sleep cycles.

Dr. Jade Wu 15:39 Yes, I like that. You said sleep cycles, because this goes back to the biological clock question. So our clocks run on, like I said, on about 24 hour cycle. But how do we know like, how do our brains know what time it is? Right? So the master clock in the brain called the super charismatic nucleus The cn for short. The cn is the master clock that the rest of your body looks to to see what time it is. And the only way or not the only way but the main way that the CN knows what time it is, is by how much light is coming into your eyes. So there are actually cells in the back of your eye eyes in the retina, that project directly to the brain to you know, almost directly to the CN to say, Oh, it's bright outside, or, oh no, it's dark outside. And our ancestors, you know, ones that didn't have iPads and didn't have electricity. When it was dark, it was night and when it was light it was day. So our brains had a very, very clear cue for knowing what time it was. But now we are watching our TVs and on our phones and on our iPads well into the night after sun has set and we are working indoors in offices that maybe don't have a lot of legs. Or, you know, we're working night shift or something like that. And so we're completely messing up the brain's ability to tell what time it is. And when the brain the CN is confused about what time it is, is not as able to regulate our bodies, and, importantly, not as able to regulate our sleep. And that's part of why we sometimes have trouble sleeping or don't get good quality sleep.

Nick VinZant 17:25 This night mode if like people put it on that, Does that help? Or is that just kind of like a marketing trick? Dr. Jade Wu 17:30 No, that does help actually. So if you think about it, our caveman ancestors, they did have some light after sunset, right? They had campfires or bonfires. So these fires are orangey and tone or red. So these lies actually do not set our biological clocks so having some orangey warm lights after sunset is perfectly fine. So having your phone on night mode wearing blue blocking glasses, which are basically amber colored, you know, lenses that filter out the blue lights, the blue wavelengths that do set our brain clocks. All of those things can help.

Nick VinZant 18:17 What's your recommended routine for people in terms of just getting ready to go to bed? That is better, like do they need to be doing something specific? Or do they just need to do the same thing?

Dr. Jade Wu 18:29 I think they just need to do generally the same thing more or less. As long as those things are pretty pleasant and more or less relaxing. There are no hard and fast rules about what you must do. It's not like you have to listen to rain sounds or have to read a book. Do whatever works for you for myself, I Well, right now may not be the best example because I do have a four month old so a lot of it revolves around him, but if he's sleeping Then my routine is to kind of wind down, take a shower, drink a little bit of water. And let's see, I have a little light snack, I do some reading or journaling, I hang out with my husband, I listen to an audio book, and then I go to sleep. So that's my routine. But you don't have to do that exact same thing. As long as you're doing something relaxing and pleasant. Don't try to do your taxes right before bedtime. Don't have an argument with your spouse right before bed. Or if you have to do that, don't do it in the bedroom. Try to do in the kitchen or something or saying that argument for the next day.

Nick VinZant 19:39 I've heard something that like you're not supposed to the bed is for sleeping, and for, let's say enjoyment and anything other than that you're not supposed to like be in the bedroom. Is that true?

Dr. Jade Wu 19:51 Yes. I think that's a really, really good point. And the reason is that our brains are just really good at putting two and two together. You know, like if we all ways. Let's see what's a good example. If every time you go to grandma's house, you get delicious cookies, then your mouth is gonna start watering every time you walk into grandma's house, right? Like our brains are very good at anticipating what's about to happen. So if you are arguing with your spouse in the bedroom, if you're playing Grand Theft Auto and your bedroom, if you are, you know, watching the latest political debate in the bedroom, you are now going to be relaxed in the bedroom. Because when you get in there, your brains gonna go, Oh, I know what place this is. This is the place to get all riled up and get frustrated. So then your body starts to automatically do its arousal, fight or flight thing, and you won't really be able to fall asleep. Well like that.

Nick VinZant 20:49 What's the most interesting Sleep Disorder you've ever dealt with?

Dr. Jade Wu 20:54 Huh? So there are a bunch of interesting ones called parasomnias. So this is Like the sleepwalking, the night terrors, the sleep paralysis, all of the freaky stuff that are actually quite scary and disturbing if you experience it, but are not necessarily that bad for your health. So I mean, there's a range. And I think the most interesting case I've seen is a sexsomnia case where someone Someone was having sex in their sleep and they were not aware of it.

Nick VinZant 21:30 Every time I see sleepwalking in movies, I was like, Okay one person has ever had is that actually like common stuff like that really happens to people a lot.

Dr. Jade Wu 21:41 It's not common, it's not common I off the top of my head. I do not know the prevalence, but I bet it will be less than 1% like far less than 1% in adults. It is not uncommon and children though. So I know that you have a four year old for example, it would not be super surprised. in a few years time, he has some sleepwalking episodes. And there's nothing wrong with that that does not predict sleep problems later on in life. children tend to outgrow these sleepwalking episodes and night terrors and things like that by adolescence. Sometimes I do see late teens, early 20s cases of sleepwalking or night terrors are really terrible nightmares. But usually there are some substances or mood disorders or other things involved there. So, long story short, you know, for kids, don't worry about it for adolescence, get it checked out for adults is very rare. definitely get checked out. But it's very, very unlikely to happen.

Nick VinZant 22:47 So when we go to sleep, Where are we going? Do we know what happens to consciousness like, do you do we know?

Dr. Jade Wu 22:56 Oh, that's a very interesting question. I think Think this question kind of assumes that there is a difference between the mind and the body. Am I right?

Nick VinZant 23:10 I just wonder like I'm asleep. But what's my brains not really asleep. So what's going on?

Dr. Jade Wu 23:17 Well, that part is correct your your brain is while your brain is asleep, in the sense that it's going through all of the processes, and it's exhibiting all the characteristics that we call sleep, but it's not turned off. So it's not like when you turn off computer or open a computer to sleep in a dormant state, right? It's like hibernating. It's not really on or doing anything, but our brains are actually quite active when we sleep. So there are different stages of sleep that do different things. But for example, like I said earlier during deep sleep, your brain is doing a lot of janitorial work and repair work. Releasing lots of growth hormones. If you're a young person, and another stage of sleep is called REM, which stands for rapid eye movement, sleep, and this is a very active stage of sleep is actually when you look at brainwaves during REM, it almost looks like someone's brainwaves when they're awake. And this is where your brain is doing a lot of editorial work. So it's taking snippets of information, whether it's, you know, information about, you know, knowledge that you learned or emotional things that you experienced, you know, movies that you saw interactions that you had, is taking all of these snippets that you gathered up during the day and trying to organize them, trying to prune them, you know, get rid of the ones that are not useful, retain the ones that are useful, make connections between disparate events to stitch it all together into a cohesive, cohesive whole All of this is going on while you're sleeping.

Nick VinZant 25:03 Are you ready for the harder slash listener submitted questions?

Dr. Jade Wu 25:07 Sure.

Nick VinZant 25:08 What is the best side of the body to sleep on back side or face down?

Dr. Jade Wu 25:14 Well, I wouldn't put your face directly into your pillow. Because that doesn't sound like it's good for breathing. And otherwise, if you don't have sleep apnea, sleeping in whatever position is comfortable, is fine. And you don't need to. Again, if you don't have sleep apnea, you can find yourself in any position of sleep, and there's no reason to correct it. If you're uncomfortable and change your position, if you're comfortable, stay put. Now I put in the important caveat of sleep apnea because this is a really, really serious breathing related sleep or a disorder where during sleep sometimes you stop breathing for 10 seconds or more at a time. And because your oxygen level drops, your brain wakes you up in order to breeze. So that means you're waking up a bunch during the night trying to breathe. Now this is a really serious problem because breathing is really important. And generally speaking, for people with sleep apnea, they tend to have less apnea when they're sleeping on their side, rather than on their back. So first of all, if you are a heavy snore, and if you're overweight, and if you're over the age of 50, and especially if you're a man, you should go ask a doctor about sleep apnea, chances are you have it.

Nick VinZant 26:38 What is the least amount of sleep one of your patients has ever had and operated normally?

Dr. Jade Wu 26:44 Oh, interesting. I think I'm remembering are we talking about on a consistent basis or are we talking about acutely because I've had people not sleeping All for a night and didn't find the next day. But long term, I don't think I've seen anyone sleep less than probably four or five hours consistently and be okay.

Nick VinZant 27:12 That's pretty much like that's the limit, right?

Dr. Jade Wu 27:15 When you really are generally speaking, I would definitely not recommend sleeping less than five hours consistently. If that's you, then you should definitely get that checked out.

Nick VinZant 27:26 What do you think about some of those, you know, weird or not? Maybe they're not weird, but some of those sleep patterns where, you know, I sleep for 20 minutes every three hours or something like that, that have been put out there from time to time. Is that really, is that a real thing? Like, could that really work?

Dr. Jade Wu 27:44 I will never say never, because there are genetic anomalies in almost any situation. However, I would definitely not recommend doing that. If your body is not well, let me let me say that again. I think I would definitely not recommend doing that. Because this is going back to the body clock. Once you're an adult, or even before you're an adult, once you're no longer two months old, you really should not be sleeping in little bursts of 20 minutes at all, because you should have a circadian rhythm you should have a body clock. And once your body clock is established and about the second or third month of life, that is the most healthy way of sleeping is to sleep mostly at night, and almost none during the day.

Nick VinZant 28:32 Should we take a nap is a nap good for you in the day.

Dr. Jade Wu 28:36 It depends if you're severely sleep deprived and consistently sleep deprived and there's no other way of getting you more sleep at night. Then certainly take a nap to make up for it. And I'm including teenagers and this by the way, almost all teenagers are sleep deprived because high school start way too early. Teenagers need about nine hours of sleep And their circadian clocks are biologically hardwired to be night owls. So really high school should not start until like 10am in my humble opinion so teenagers definitely take a nap if you can. People who are, you know, working night shifts, there are circumstances in which unmap could be very helpful. People who are long haul drivers take a nap, for sure take a nap. And otherwise, I would say don't go out of your way to take a nap unless you absolutely have to for safety reasons.

Nick VinZant 29:41 Can it be cumulative in the sense that like okay, what if I need seven hours of sleep consistently? Like that's more my average that's where I fit in. But I get five hours one night and nine hours the next night like does it balance out? Or if you don't get it, you don't get it and it's over with?

Dr. Jade Wu 29:58 No, it does not balance out, because this goes back to the circadian clock issue. If you're getting five hours one day and nine hours the other night, you're not sleeping on a 24 hour consistent pattern, or rather, your 24 hour pattern is not consistent from day to day. So lots of people do this, right? They sleep, not enough on weekdays because they have to get up really early for work. And then they try to make up for it by sleeping in for a few hours on weekends. So what you're doing is you're jetlag yourself. Like let's say you usually wake up at 6am on weekdays, but then you sleep in until 9am on weekends, and then you're back to 6am. On Monday, you just flew yourself from New York to California and back over the course of a weekend. And there was nothing to you know, make up for that jetlag that may even be worse than if you got on average, a little less sleep, but it was consistent all seven days.

Nick VinZant 31:00 One of the quirkier questions. How come we don't die in dreams?

Dr. Jade Wu 31:05 Ah, no, I don't know the answer to this question. That is a really fascinating question. And the, the one hypothesis that popped into my mind is that, generally our dreams are made up of at least little building blocks of things that we've experienced in real life. Often we do things like fly or swim underwater, and things are obviously not possible in real life. But we know what water is, and we know what flying is. So maybe we sort of put those together and we can create this new reality. But none of us who are dreaming have died because we're still alive. So we don't have any piece of that experience to contribute to the dream narrative. That's what I'm guessing that is not based on science at all.

Nick VinZant 31:53 That makes a lot of sense. It's actually a fantastic answer. Right? You always experience something that you have experienced before. It's never something new Dr. Jade Wu 32:02 We can't say colors that we haven't ever seen. Yeah.

Nick VinZant 32:08 I read something one time and maybe this is your area maybe it's not but that the brain cannot actually create anything new. It can only take things that is seen before and combine them in new combinations. But it can't straight up create something new.

Dr. Jade Wu 32:24 I believe that I would say it cannot create any new sensory sensory experiences. You know, like we can't see colors we haven't seen we can't hear pitches that we never heard before. And we probably cannot dream death because we don't know what that feels like.

Nick VinZant 32:46 single best thing we can do for our sleep. single worst thing people are doing for their sleep.

Dr. Jade Wu 32:53 Oh hmm single best thing Just because I'm on a circadian kick right now, and I really want to get up on my circadian rhythm , the single best thing you can do if you're asleep is to keep a consistent wake up time. That's like dropping an anchor into your 24 hour cycle that keeps you in line that keeps your body functioning on that 24 hour cycle. And the more consistent you get, the better you'll sleep, the better you'll wake. And the better you'll do pretty much everything. single worst thing you can do for your sleep is to not get your potential sleep apnea checked out.

Nick VinZant 33:38 Is an alarm clock a bad thing?

Dr. Jade Wu 33:41 No, no alarm clock is great because it keeps you consistent in the mornings. Really, I would think that it like pops you out of some cycle or something. It's actually not terrible to pop out of a cycle. I mean, sleep is not built to be this rigid set in stone machinery where you have to Do it in exactly the same way. Or else sleep is actually a very dynamic and very adaptable state of being because if you think about it, our ancestors, they couldn't just drop dead into sleeping like a log for eight hours and not wake up, right? They had to be able to be routed out of sleep if there was a predator around or if they got too cold or they got too hot. So, you know, these the, your awakening during the night is actually not a bad thing. This is natural stopgaps that your brain has built in to make sure that conditions are still good, and you're still safe. And in fact, I would hear let me ask you this. How many times do you think a healthy good sleeper wakes up during the night on average?

Nick VinZant 34:51 I mean, I would say I probably do it two times. Maybe but I would say like a healthy sleep would be none

Dr. Jade Wu 35:01 Okay, so interesting that you don't think you you have yourself as a healthy sleeper, but we'll talk about that later. So try 12 to 15 times

Nick VinZant 35:12 are you serious?

Dr. Jade Wu 35:15 Yeah, if you look at the eg, which is basically the brain, like a way of measuring brainwaves, if you look at the eg data of a full night's sleep for a healthy sleeper, you see, you know, all the different stages of sleep, you see the cycles of sleep, and you see like 10 to 15 awakenings. And that's very normal, but like fully awake or kind of a way, like their brain is fully awake, but they probably don't remember most of those awakenings because they're very brief. So they roll over, they fall back asleep, or maybe they get up to go to use the bathroom. So they vaguely remember getting up and then they roll around and go back to sleep. So it's healthy to Remember, probably, you know 123 awakening. So you're actually right on target with your two. Because you know, two or three or 112 or three, sort of more fuller awakenings that less a few minutes is totally normal. And then there's probably a bunch more brief awakenings that you don't know about that are also totally normal. If you had to pick one thing, what would you say?

Nick VinZant 36:29 Whether it's a disorder or it's something the brain the brain does or just something about sleep itself? What would you say is the single most interesting thing about sleep?

Dr. Jade Wu 36:45 Just that it happens, you know that for almost a third of our existence, we are in this interesting state of being alive and our brains are wired. Working in our bodies are working, but we're not conscious. Or at least we're not conscious in the same way that we are when we're awake. I just find that fascinating that this is built into biology that all complex organisms and some non complex organisms all have this thing that we do. And it's great, it feels great. That's what I love about sleep.

Nick VinZant 37:27 Could you imagine if we ever had something that could basically mimic all of the effects of sleep and we would have it completely normal, but we didn't actually sleep?

Dr. Jade Wu 37:37 Like we just stayed up our whole why's that would be so sad. Can you imagine that? That would be like you'd have no beginning or end to your day. It would be like a just a slog. Just there's there's no catharsis, it's like, like you hear one of those like EDM beats and the beat never drops last Like, that's how I would think of being awake for a really long time. And actually, I recently kind of experienced something like that because, as I said, I have a four month old. So, you know, as of, maybe a month or two ago, things started to get back to normal for me ish. But in the first month or two, I mean, I was around the clock I slept, but I slept in like two hour chunks, three hour chunks here and there at any time of day or night, just like my baby baby did. And that was really tough that first month felt like a year because the day never ended and I never felt refreshed. So no, if we had a technology that could mimic sleep that would make us feel that we don't have to I would not, I would not take advantage of that I would still do my sleep.

Nick VinZant 38:50 No, I wouldn't either. Um, that's pretty much all I got is what's what's coming up next for you. How can people kind of get ahold of you if they want to contact you?

Dr. Jade Wu 38:59 Sure. website is www.jadewuphd.com. So that's just my name, which is spelled j d w PhD comm I write blog posts I post on some of my podcasts episodes, which is the savvy psychologist podcast. I offer resources for sleep for both adults and children. And I show you some cool research I'm working on.

Nick VinZant 39:29 I want to thank Dr. Wu so much for joining us if you want to connect with her. We have linked to her on our social media accounts or Profoundly Pointless on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And we have also included her information on the RSS feed that's on this podcast.

Elite Matchmaker Michelle Apples

Like a headhunter for the heart, Elite Matchmaker Michelle Apples helps people find love. We talk the key to finding the perfect match, dating advice, the best/worst dating apps and what men and women are really looking for in someone. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Kinds of Soup.

Interview with Elite Matchmaker Michelle Apples

Speakers

Nick VinZant: Profoundly Pointless Host

Michelle Apples: Matchmaker

In this episode we talk about

• How do you become a Matchmaker

• How do Matchmakers find you a match

• What is the best dating app, what does a professional matchmaker think is the best dating app

• What is the worst dating app, what does a professional matchmaker think is the worst dating app

• What are men looking for in a woman

• What are women looking for in a man

• Dating advice from a professional matchmaker and dating coach

• Social media and dating

Nick VinZant 0:12 Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, we're finding the perfect match and the perfect soup.

Michelle Apples 0:21 And then I started a job that was an events club for single people. So I started with that, and then just would match people up. And from there, they ended up getting married or I was part of proposals, and now a bunch of them have babies. Well, I think we live in such an instant gratification culture, where people are just trying to go on like 10 different dates with 10 different people in one week, and they're not really looking at one person in front of them. Because a lot of times I feel like you like the idea of someone but don't actually like the person. So that's the number one mistake I think women make. There's three things that a woman is looking for. When she's looking for a man and I think that's communication, I think that's affection and security.

Nick VinZant 1:06 I want to thank you guys so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it. It really helps us out. So I think that everybody is basically just looking for love. Just looking for love. Our first guest helps people find love. This is professional Matchmaker, Michelle apples. So how did you become a matchmaker?

Michelle Apples 1:30 Well, I started into matchmaking actually, a few years ago, I was working mostly in events. And then I started a job that was an events club for single people. So I started with that and then just would match people up and from there, they ended up getting married or I was part of proposals and now a bunch of them have babies. So it kinda just fell into place. And then when I moved to Toronto actually knew a lady who owned a matchmaking agency and we reconnect After a long time, I used to do some modeling for her. And she and she had a job opening. So here I am as a matchmaker,

Nick VinZant 2:07 what makes you good at it, though? Michelle Apples 2:10 You know, I think I do have a gift of discernment. So I can tell a lot about the person without them saying a lot. So that helps a lot. But I think I've just had really a lot of relationship experiences not all good, but I've learned what not to do, because I've had a lot of head relationships. Or I've seen a lot of bad relationships in my life. So I've learned a lot of what not to do. Nick VinZant 2:33 Are you just matching like good people with good people, though, because I feel like, that's relatively easy to do. Like, what's harder is matching shitty people with shitty people. Is that, does that make any sense?

Michelle Apples 2:46 Yeah, I mean, it's definitely difficult because you're dealing with all sorts of personalities, and all sorts of like ranges of people from different, like avenues of life. So that's definitely hard, but it's really just getting getting to know people on a deeper level and knowing what they like made rather than what they want.

Nick VinZant 3:06 Do most people know what they need?

Michelle Apples 3:09 No. That's why it's my job to figure it out.

Nick VinZant 3:13 Why don't we kind of understand more about what we actually need and want?

Michelle Apples 3:18 Well, I think we live in such an instant gratification culture, where people are just trying to go on like 10 different dates with 10 different people all in one week. And they're not really looking at one person in front of them. So I think it's just that we want things right away. And we're not really willing to like have the patience and the persistence to like, go for the long run, right? When you match people, do they usually end up in a relationship that works when it's with somebody that they thought they would match with? Or is it sometimes the complete opposite of what of what they thought? Yeah, a lot of times it is the complete opposite where they're not sure about The person when I first send over, like their profile, and then I'm like, just give it a chance go out and see how you feel. And they end up being like, wow, that person was so amazing in real life. Or they'll look at someone and be like, I don't know, he's a couple years younger than me, and they'll go out and realize he's actually amazing person. So it's that Yeah, there's definitely a lot of that where people are very skeptical at first and then go out and realize they actually like what they think they didn't.

Nick VinZant 4:25 What are you looking for when you put two people together?

Michelle Apples 4:28 I think like, first off, I really look at like, are they wanting the same things like, you can't match someone with someone else and one person's looking for a relationship and other the other person's looking for something casual, it'll never work out. So I always look at like, are they both wanting the same thing? And if they are, then I look at interests I look at like who they are as people. My job is really a people job. So it's getting to know so much about them. Like I always say I become my clients best friends because I'm always gonna calling them I'm always asking them questions like our first meeting, I'm asking them things that you wouldn't ever ask someone the first time you're meeting like past relationships, like, give me all the drama that you've like been through in your life. So you get to know them on a deeper level.

Nick VinZant 5:14 So they're not just filling out a questionnaire, right, like you're actually going and having conversations and, like, personalized service.

Michelle Apples 5:22 So that's what makes matchmaking so different than like going on a dating app, as I'm getting to know you as a person as as an individual. So I'm able to personalize the service to you and what you're looking for and your character and personality rather than like, hey, just fill this out. And I'll like, try to find

Nick VinZant 5:40 What's your typical client like is your typical client who comes to you as a man? Is it a woman? Are they wealthier, average? What are they like?

Michelle Apples 5:50 I think this is the thing that surprises most people is it's such a variety, whereas like, my youngest client is 29. My oldest client is 67. I both male Some females, most of them are on the wealthier side or more successful side because of our service prices, and they're not cheap. So we are dealing with more elite people than not, but that, that being said, it's not close, I'm not closed off to working with someone who doesn't have that status. It's just usually someone without that status isn't willing to pay that price tag for that service.

Nick VinZant 6:21 When we talk about a price tag, like what on average is that is the cost of a matchmaking service?

Michelle Apples 6:26 Yeah, I mean, it ranges by packages. So the lowest package you could get is 3000. You can you know, and then it customizes up up from there. So most people, you know, aren't paying $3,000 for a dating app sort of thing. So you're, you're really investing in it. And I think that's really what helps it work and be so successful though is because when people are coming to me and paying that amount of money for the service, they're actually investing in themselves and looking for something serious, you know, they're not, they're being really intentional about it. You know, they're not just throwing them there. picture and profile on a dating app, but they're not actually really looking for something serious.

Nick VinZant 7:03 When you're looking for a client's significant other. Are you looking only within like your client database? Are you like walking around at restaurants, so to speak, like, oh, that person looks good.

Michelle Apples 7:15 Yeah, I kind of do all of the above. Whereas we collaborate with a lot of other matchmakers, which I think is really unique is we're not, they're not my competition anymore. We're just collaborating, which is really cool. But also, like, I'll go to networking events, I'll go meet people. I'm such a social person myself. So I've had clients where I've been like, Oh, I actually dated a guy, but I like it didn't work out for me. But I think YouTube would be perfect together and set them up with guys I've went out with in the past or just met people at different networking event. And then we have a huge database as well. So it's kind of like I'm like a headhunter for the heart. So I go out and I find it in any way I possibly can.

Nick VinZant 7:56 What quality Do you think that two people have to kind of share

Michelle Apples 8:00 Oh, that's a good question. I think, I think it's just you have to go into it with the right intention. So, being intentional is like a quality that I would say, like going and looking for in a relationship. That's what needs to happen. Because if one person's too casual and the other person's intentional, it's gonna fall apart. Or it's like you both have to want it enough to actually put the work and effort into it.

Nick VinZant 8:25 How many times though in like your matchmaking, have you made what you thought is a really good match, but then the people just blew it

Michelle Apples 8:33 It's happened a few times for sure. I don't know, like a specific number. But yeah, you just never you never know how people are going to connect or like I do find right now. It's such a sensitive time in our world where it's like, people are very offended over a lot of things. So it's like you kind of have to be careful in that sense, because someone might say something that offends the other person. And so people are very easily offended these days.

Nick VinZant 9:00 How quickly should someone know if this is gonna work out or not?

Michelle Apples 9:03 I'd say like date two, I would say like the first day everyone's trying to put on a like good impression or they're nervous or something. I always say if you're curious, then like, go on a second date and see if you're like, absolutely not. That was the worst experience of my life then don't. So, you know, I would say if you're curious at all, give it a shot. If it's a definite No, like, nobody wants to waste their time going out with someone that they know, it's never going to work out.

Nick VinZant 9:31 What is the most common mistake that men make? What's the biggest mistake that women make?

Michelle Apples 9:38 I'd say the biggest mistake that women make are is they overanalyze everything right away. Like they get so invested so fast, whereas like, I have clients that have been on like one or two dates, and they're just like, all in their head about everything that's happened. And it's like I would say, like the first day it's not, it's not like an interview to get married. It's Interview just in case you want a second date. So it's like, relax, enjoy. Do you actually like this person? Like, don't go away with it and be like, Oh my gosh, like, I'm like, I'm overanalyzing everything in my head. It's like, no, go away. And actually ask yourself these questions like, did I even like this person? Because a lot of times, I feel like you like the idea of someone but don't actually like the person. So that's the number one mistake I think women make. And I think for men, the number one mistake they make is they want all the options instead of looking at what's in front of them. Whereas like, all Macs, have like a man up with someone and they'll be like, send me more profile, send me more profiles, and I'm like, No, like, concentrate on what's in front of you. And then we'll move on if this doesn't work out. But I think like you can't be effective in 10 different places at one time. So you need to concentrate on what's in front of you if you actually want a serious relationship.

Nick VinZant 10:54 How do you get the guys though, to just basically look beyond what the woman or the whoever they're Looking for looks like

Michelle Apples 11:02 I like, I think like, it's building that trust with clients. So I have a lot of male clients that now trust that I've actually done the work to know who this person is. If I say, Hey, I think there's something there. I think like, they are a good catch for you, they'll usually trust it and go for it. But I think that it's hard because you're looking at a profile and I think, you know, it's just like online dating a picture only says so much, right? You can meet that person a, they might not look like their profile picture. They might not have a personality. Whereas like, I learned that lesson so so early in life, or I was once like obsessed with this guy for so long. And then I went out with him and he was like, the biggest dad I've ever met. And I was like, I wasted so much time thinking that this guy was so attractive and there was nothing else there. So I titled it, like help them understand who this person is and the character and why I think they would fit together better.

Nick VinZant 11:59 Is it easier Now or is it harder than it was a couple of years ago because of technology essentially?

Michelle Apples 12:05 Oh, I think it's definitely harder. I think that there are so many options out there. And so people always like, what's the next best thing? Is there something better out there? Like, I don't want to settle for this, because maybe the next one might be better. So it just makes it this just a rat race. So like, trying to find the best thing and knowing that there's so many more options still out there.

Nick VinZant 12:28 Have you ever had somebody that you are just, I can't look buddy, I can't do anything for you.

Michelle Apples 12:32 I definitely have like, I, I can always do something for you. But it's whether or not I think you're going to be successful at it or not. Or if I do have clients where I'm like, what you're looking for is not what you need. And it's this is never going to work out long term because of what you're asking me and the criteria that you've set. So I try to coach them but you can only help people who want to help themselves. So a lot of times they will appreciate it. But they won't take it and that's fine. We'll work together as long as your contracts up but like, you know going forward Other than that, I can't do much for you.

Nick VinZant 13:09 Is there really someone for everyone?

Michelle Apples 13:12 Yes, I think that there is someone for everyone but I think it's like not having this crazy expectation or this small box of what that person has to be. Where's like I think like, you know, even my past relationships sure I could have made them work but I didn't want to make them work or like they didn't feel right for me. But I think like you can you can find someone but I think you have to look at yourself first and realize like, hey, am I putting this like box around people whereas like people are real people are flawed people are human, and especially with technology these days and social media and, and how everyone looks so perfect and flawless. Well, that's not reality. So it's like realizing that people are real and flawed and like you're not going to ever have a perfect person.

Nick VinZant 13:55 So I always thought this was interesting. I don't remember if I made this up. I read this somewhere. But it's basically like this 80% rule that if you present a guy with a woman or a significant other, that's 80% of what they want a guy would be like, oh, wow, that's a great catch. But if you presented a woman with 80% of what she wanted, they would not think that that's that they could do better. Is that? Is there any truth to that?

Michelle Apples 14:22 gently? I definitely think that I find women more pickier than men. Like I've worked with both females and males. I do find women are way pickier than men. So I feel like men, yeah, if you have most of the criteria, they're usually pretty good. I mean, I definitely have some pickier clients that they're like, nope, 100% criteria. That's all I want. But yeah, with women, I think like they look at such small details. Whether it's like, oh, like for example, I was on a call with the client this morning. And she's like, Oh, he's he's younger than me. I've always dated older men. I don't know about this. And I'm like, but you just texted me this morning. said how amazing and good looking he was and how much how comfortable and natural it felt on your first date. And you're really going to risk that by having the wrong perspective of, oh, he's a couple years younger than me, like everyone matures at different legs speeds, right? So it's like, he might be a couple years younger than you, but he might still be like, those guys that you're typically used to dating. Is it harder to match ugly people or beautiful people? and relatively speaking, right, relatively speaking, is it harder to match the uglier people or the beautiful people? I think? I don't think it's either or I think it's more so how picky they are. Whereas if someone comes to me and they are drop dead, gorgeous, they usually have a lot higher standards than someone who is more of an average looking person. That makes sense, right?

Nick VinZant 15:53 Have you ever had to basically crush someone's expectations though, like hey, this, you're not Not gonna you're not, you're a two you're not you're not finding a ten.

Michelle Apples 16:03 Yeah, I guess I know, like, because we deal with a lot of wealthier people. Like, I have older gentlemen that are looking for very young women. And it's like, Yes, I can get that. I know it's not going to go anywhere long term like you're expecting it to. But I can find you that and I can find you a 10. who's really young, but she's not after you for the right reasons. Yeah, that makes sense, right? Like a 75 year old is looking for a 10 who's 25 Yeah, that's not gonna. That's, I can find you that but you're not going to be satisfied long term. And it's not going to last long term.

Nick VinZant 16:43 Should a working relationship ultimately be easy?

Michelle Apples 16:47 I think easy is a bad word for it. Like I think that people need to go into relationships, knowing that they're going to be work and hard, like, work is never easy, right? But it's like How are you looking at this? Are you looking at it like it's work? Are you looking at it like oh, this is a challenge and I like challenges.

Nick VinZant 17:05 What is the most interesting quirk someone has ever had as a deal breaker like person cannot have green eyes or anything like that.

Michelle Apples 17:17 Hmm that's a good question. I don't know if I've had really like in like anything specific that was like an ordinary I think your typical like the number one deal breaker is probably smoking. But other than that, I haven't had like weird things like I've definitely had like a shorter males like very particular on like, the woman has to be shorter because they don't want to feel short and they're already quite a short person. But yeah, nothing out of the ordinary so far. Once I'll get that now that we've talked about it. Now you'll pick one up,

Nick VinZant 17:56 it's like they have to have one green eye and one brown eyes. Like what? I can't I can't help you, buddy. I can't help you.

Michelle Apples 18:04 I mean, once I, once I read a profile, and it was a new client coming on, and it was like her, the woman he's looking for has to have like her, her dad has to have a German background and her mother needs to have like a European back. And I was like, excuse me. So like, that was kind of weird. But, you know, once I actually talked to him on the phone, it was like not so much like that. It was just him trying to get the idea of what he was looking for across

Nick VinZant 18:32 what dating app is the best. Which one is the worst?

Michelle Apples 18:35 I would say in my personal opinion, I would say hinges the best. And the worst, you probably match.com

Nick VinZant 18:46 that's how I met my wife.

Michelle Apples 18:49 Yeah, that's so funny. I just feel like I have the weirdest people approach me on match.com and they're like, I just want to touch your hair. I just want to like and they'll message like five times if they want to touch my hair, and I'm like, Where's this weird?

Nick VinZant 19:05 See, but I guess this was in 2011. So maybe they changed it right? Yeah, some of them are kind of like, Whoa, plenty of fish was the one that always that seemed like the bottom row, right?

Michelle Apples 19:21 Yeah, it's funny you say that actually I was when I was doing more events. I actually threw the birthday party for the guy who owns plenty of fish. So it's crazy that that all just kind of happened in my life before I was ever into the like, dating matchmaker world. What?

Nick VinZant 19:38 What is the guy who starts a dating app like,

Michelle Apples 19:42 like he was pretty nerdy, like he had a game of thrones birthday party. So everyone was dressed up there was like someone dressed up in a big dragon costume and like, it was interesting. Like, I was like, wow, this is such an elaborate party, but you know, he was definitely like he had a very hot one. But he was more introverted. So yeah, it was interesting.

Nick VinZant 20:05 Who ruins more relationships men or women?

Michelle Apples 20:09 I think women just because I think that women tend to like overanalyze everything or get upset and not communicate properly. And I think communication is so important in a relationship. And if you can't just communicate your thoughts, rather than make up stories in your head, like, eventually, you're just going to drive yourself crazy.

Nick VinZant 20:31 Do the good ones get taken early?

Michelle Apples 20:34 Yes, and no. I feel like good guys. Like, a lot of women don't like them too good. But I think like the good like, like if they're good, but not in a sense of like, good, but like too nice, then then they usually get taken really early.

Nick VinZant 20:49 Yeah. I feel like those ones. That's what what is that? Like the compassionate protector? Right? Isn't that what essentially every woman is ultimately looking for? Do I know what I'm talking about? Or am I just making things up?

Michelle Apples 21:03 Yeah, I think there's three things that a woman is looking for when she's looking for a man. And I think that's communication. I think that's affection and security.

Nick VinZant 21:13 What do you think is the hardest challenge that people have to overcome in relationships?

Michelle Apples 21:17 I think it's just finding new rhythms. Like you're, you're making a life with someone that is so different from you, right? And it's like, being able to really vibe with that person and, and just know that you're such such different people and to be able to like, not just accept that about that other person, but also encourage that because that's what makes them them.

Nick VinZant 21:40 What do you think is, is the most interesting part of your job?

Michelle Apples 21:44 I think the most interesting part is like really like, I feel like dating is so exciting to people you know, but also one of those things. It's a love hate relationship, like people love dating, but they also hate dating, because it is just like your time like finding rhythms with someone else and That's always challenging. I really love my job because it is such a painful job. I love people I like I love that the first interview I gonna ask you about your whole dating history before I even really know you.

Nick VinZant 22:11 Have you ever had some people that are just huge disasters? Just like oh my gosh, what am I gonna do with you?

Michelle Apples 22:19 I won't say no.

Nick VinZant 22:21 Makes sense. Unless I just had a lot of money like I would have definitely have to be really committed. And like everything else has not worked before I would turn to a matchmaker. Is that kind of how it works out?

Michelle Apples 22:35 Well, I think like, and again, I'm dealing with very successful people and people that have gotten to a certain level in their career, where it's like, I don't think the average person will go to a matchmaker but I do see that there's so much value in someone say that owns a company has 300 employees, they're not going to go just put their face on a dating app now because all their employees might see them on it and they have the reputation to maintain Or, you know, they or they have some elite status in the city and they don't want to just like, put themselves on a dating app. Right. So I think in that sense, it makes so much sense. Whereas like, yeah, if I didn't, if I had a reputation to maintain, I probably wouldn't go just throw myself on Tinder and hope that I don't see anyone I know.

Nick VinZant 23:18 Yeah, it'd be kind of weird if you were like a professional athlete on Tinder or a politician on Tinder, wouldn't it?

Michelle Apples 23:24 Exactly. So then they come to me instead

Nick VinZant 23:26 Now, do you deal with all sexualities? Or do you just specialize in certain ones?

Michelle Apples 23:33 Yeah, so we actually, I haven't personally worked with anyone other than male female relationships. That that's not me saying I would never but it's just not something that hasn't happened.

Nick VinZant 23:46 What do you do with your clients in terms of social media? Like do you tell them to scrub it? Do you tell them to clean it up? What do you tell them to do?

Michelle Apples 23:55 I think social media is a huge like, that's the first thing you do when you are about to meet someone is you look on social media and see who they are. So I definitely have a look and see like, the first thing we do is Google people and see what comes up. So it's like really hot. Like, I need to know that. Like, if someone if I'm going to match you with someone, they're not going to go on and be like, Who is this guy? What is he doing? Or girl, vice versa. I always tell people not to look up people in on social media before going out with them. I think it just takes so much away from dating. Because it's like you already know everything you need to know about this person you already have made up in your head, whether you're a year, you know, like low vibe with this person. So I always try to tell people like Don't, don't look them up if you can.

Nick VinZant 24:43 After a first date, though. When Can someone make like the friend requests the follow?

Michelle Apples 24:50 I would say wait a couple dates. Because again, you get like such an idea of someone and again, it's an idea where anyone can perceive themselves as anything on social media. Yeah. So do you really want to like go in and understand who this person is on a platform and then see them in real life and be like, wow, this is two different people or get to know them on a human level and then add them. So I would say like, give it a couple months and then have them.

Nick VinZant 25:17 Do you have any favorite pickup lines?

Michelle Apples 25:21 I don't really like pick apply. So no.

Nick VinZant 25:24 If you were to like, look at people, broad characteristics in terms of, they're nice, they're funny, they're kind. They're loyal. They're a jerk. Which broad characteristic of people is the easiest to find a match with which one is like the hardest one to find a match for?

Michelle Apples 25:42 I think the hardest would be like someone who's very introverted and stiff. Because like I've had clients where I'm just like, do you have any like non professional photos of you doing like, some sort of activity or something that makes you look like Like you're a little more fun and engaging because right now people are looking at you and saying he's an introvert. Now he All he has is professional photos. He kind of seems stiff.

Nick VinZant 26:09 Who's the easiest

Michelle Apples 26:10 I think like someone who's like a little goofy, because then you can you know, like going into it you can already be yourself.

Nick VinZant 26:19 Um, that's pretty much all the questions that I have what is there anything else that you think we missed? Or what's coming next for you?

Michelle Apples 26:27 Yeah, just working away. I mean, COVID-19 has definitely changed the dating game. So just happened to readjust with all that and do a whole virtual dating thing and, and so yeah, just working through this pandemic that we're in and knowing that one day we'll be back to normal.

Nick VinZant 26:47 I want to thank Michelle so much for joining us if you want to connect with her. We have linked to her on our social media accounts. We're Profoundly Pointless on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. And we have also included her information on the RSS feed that's on this podcast.

Professional Bowlers Bill O'Neill and Sean Rash

With four major championships and nearly 30 PBA titles between them, Bill O'Neill and Sean Rash are two of the best bowlers in the world. We talk life on the PBA tour, bowling techniques, the best bowling alleys and the secret to trash-talking on the lanes. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Life Decisions that Always Come Back to Bite You.

Interview with Professional Bowler Bill O’Neill and Professional Bowler Sean Rash

Speakers:

Nick VinZant: Profoundly Pointless Host

Bill O’Neill: PBA Pro

Sean Rash PBA Pro

Nick VinZant 0:11

Show Notes;

In this episode we we talk about:

• How Bill O’Neill and Sean Rash started bowling

• What makes a professional bowler good

• How much do professional bowlers practice

• Bill O’Neill and Sean Rash’s favorite places to bowl

• How much do professional bowlers make

• Professional bowlers share their best bowling tips

• Best bowling joke

• How many 300 games have Bill O’Neill and Sean Rash bowled

• What is the secret to being a good bowler

• Do professional bowlers trash talk

• Who is the best professional bowler

Hi everybody welcome to Profoundly Pointless My name is Nick VinZant coming up in this episode, we're going bowling and then counting down the top five life decisions that always, always come back to bite you

Sean Rash 0:28 so you know, it's a way different life than another sports

Bill O'Neill 0:34 is it really really fine line between being really great and just being really, really good?

Sean Rash 0:39 So you become really good at something because of practice because of motivation because of confidence, where some people think is arrogance and cockiness. But in an individual sport, you have to have that

Bill O'Neill 0:53 Oh Kingpin is the worst. Yeah, worst. Yeah. Well from a bowling perspective, because it Just it makes us look so horrible.

Nick VinZant 1:03 I want to thank you guys so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it. It really helps us out. I'm really excited about this episode. Because who doesn't like going bowling? Honestly, like even if it's something that you don't do that much, everybody still likes bowling. But the amazing thing that we learned in this is that what makes a professional bowler special what makes somebody really really good at it is so much different than other sports, because it's something that you can't really see even when you're watching it on TV. You don't realize what what one of the main obstacles that they're kind of going against is. Our guests for this episode, our professional bowler, Bill O'Neil and professional bowlers Sean Rash. They're both on the PGA Tour and they're both Some of the best bowlers that are out there. Real quick though the format for this episode is going to be a little bit different. We asked both bill O'Neil and Sean Rash the same set of questions in alphabetical order, you'll hear bill O'Neil first and then Sean Rash. What hooked you on bowling?

Bill O'Neill 2:19 It was kind of like how anybody really gets into anything really like I, when I grew up my my dad bold, my grandfather bold. A lot of my family were involved in it. So you know, I didn't really know that it was, you know, a niche sport until, you know until I was you know, probably in high school like I just did just what I did is what my family did so, you know, wasn't so much later in life that I realized how you know how rare it is to kind of, you know, be in the position that that I'm in now.

Sean Rash 2:52 You know, really bowling started back in Anchorage, Alaska. In my use days. My parents did it as a family activity. Kind of a night out for them. But then my my brother and I got involved in the ELD kids Saturday morning league. I got hooked on it pretty early, and then started following them to the bowling centers on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday nights. And then I started bowling a junior league on Sunday nights with my dad a junior adult league and just became something like I said, a family activity and it was fun to do.

Nick VinZant 3:24 Were you good from the start?

Bill O'Neill 3:26 Um, yeah, probably. Yeah, I guess so. Um, you know, I guess in the, you know, my local youth youth leagues, I was probably always you know, kind of near the top and average at it at a young age and it you know, it helps when you have people in your, in your immediate circle that are that are good as well. They also are smart about, about the game so they can teach you so I, you know, I kind of had a leg up in that, you know, in that regard from the very beginning.

Sean Rash 3:51 I don't know if anybody's ever good from the start at anything they do. Personally, I think it takes you know, a lot of practice, a lot of dedication, a lot of money spent In hard work, but I was told I was a natural athlete, you know, hand eye coordination, I played baseball growing up as well. And probably could have pursued that if I had maybe lived in a different state other than Alaska. But you know, just something that I did every day. So you know, you got thousands of reps in practice in you, you learn a trade of skills and, and whatnot, and you take your talent with it and, you know, support goes a long wayas well.

Nick VinZant 4:31 Why are you good at it? Is it? Is there something about you physically? Is it a mental thing? Like why are you good at it?

Bill O'Neill 4:38 Yeah, hand eye coordination is really important. So I think like if you you know, most most bowlers are at least fair at stuff like golf. You know, the one of them the most accomplished bowler in the world is also one of the best horseshoe pitchers of all time, just because, you know, the same kind of idea, you know, with the with the hand eye coordination and you know, you find a lot of a lot of guys who can you know, there's a A lot of guys who played like high school basketball and you know things like that, especially with the you know that the hand eye coordination stuff but you know, you don't need to be you know, it's not the run fast jump high type of sport. So you're not you know, the the you know, and like brute strength doesn't really helping you. So it really is the really is the hand eye coordination stuff that is, you know, pretty important. I think every athlete in every sport has their different positives and negatives, right.

Sean Rash 5:25 So you become really good at something because of practice, because of motivation because of confidence, where some people think is arrogance and cockiness. But in an individual score, you have to have that, you know, because no one else was really cheering for you besides your family and the select group of close friends. Physically, I think as a kid, and even through my college days, and my first couple years on tour, I was stronger than most had a higher reverie, higher ball speed, and kind of overpowered things as I've gotten older and have dealt with injuries. I've had to learn from my path, you know the positives and negatives and learn from failure more than anything on how to be successful at an older age

Nick VinZant 6:12 On the kind of flip side about that, when when you look at like the best bowlers of our of all time, what separates them from you?

Bill O'Neill 6:22 That's a tough question because there's a lot of there's, there's just so many factors that go into it, like, you know, your, your, the way you like your natural ability, the way that you're that you just kind of throw it dictates a lot, you know, your ability to put revolutions on the on the ball, like how much you know, as people would say, you know, most people don't do what they refer to as spin. You know, that kind of the amount that you're able to put on there, the amount of torque you're able to create is very, very much natural. And so we're really, really hard to increase it. As you progress in the game to just kind of the way you throw is the way you throw it then you kind of tweak things here, they're so you know, people have certain games that you know, the way they develop, they match up certain arrows. You know, we have technological advancements in Bowling, like every other sport does. So things, things evolve and change. And, you know, there's a certain like, you know, some circumstance that would dictate to where people get, you know, whether they're great or just kind of like really, really good. And so that I think, like, kind of a long winded answer to your question, but it is a really, really fine line between being really great and just being really really good.

Sean Rash 7:34 You know, the biggest thing about I think the greatest of all times, compared to where I stand in our sport is the amount of majors I've won. I've only won twice and I say only one twice. I've been in position to win pride, a half dozen to a dozen more. I bowled for the title and all of them unfortunately lost in the title in the three that I'm missing. I have two of the five majors and You know, so you start looking at the greatest of all time like norm Dukes, Walter Ray or Anthony Jason Belmonte. p. Weber, they have, you know, multiple majors 810 1213 you know, whatever it is, and they've dominated in, in certain areas as well. So Jason has dominated over the last decade. And then I would say followed by myself, ej tackett. And now I anytime soon as probably had the best, you know, next couple of decades, so to say. And quietly Bill O’Neill had a resurgence over the last couple years where he's, you know, him and I have very similar resumes. Since we've came on tour. Again, you know, I can go into any event thinking someone's better me, you know, when you have a dominant run, and I've had a couple of them. I had a really good run last summer in the summer swing through the fall with the US Open and winning in China. I just, you know, you walk into a building and you go, Man, I'm gonna make this cut. I'm gonna make this And anything can happen then. And there's a couple guys that are going through that right now where they have a mental edge over others where they go oh, we're not being him this week we're bowling on his favorite pattern

Nick VinZant 9:10 How many hours a week on average are you putting into it between just practice practice in any kind of physical training?

Bill O'Neill 9:17 When I was when I was just starting out I was younger like, you know, late teens early 20s, mid 20s and I was just trying to get my feet wet you know professionally and I was I was competing and bowling a lot I was I was in the bowling centers every day practicing and you know, several hours a day bowling because you know, there's just a lot of different aspects to the game that most people don't know you have to really be able to change your speed vary your angles, understand how to like slightly increase in disk in decrease your you know, your reverie which is the you know, the amount of spin you put on it. Because the the way the environment is it's they put oil on the lanes, and He put it on the lanes in different volumes in different ratios, different shapes to make it easier or harder to you know, to strike. So you have to be aware of all those things and be able to alter your game.

Sean Rash 10:12 So in the beginning, I was putting in a ton of time now that you know I'm in my late 30s now and I understand the game at a pretty pretty high level, I understand my game. So I've you know, in order to preserve my body and be able to do it for a little bit longer, I've slowed down the practice a little bit. But, you know, I still when we're in season, we bowl a ton and then you know, when I'm getting ready for the, you know, for the start of the tour again for like, you know, probably six weeks beforehand, you know, I'm in there three, four days a week for a couple hours. Well right now, I'm going to tell you that I'm not gonna throw a bowling ball for probably the next month. I've been home a week so I'll give it very another three weeks but because of the injury to my lower back, when I stretch and rest and in try to work out at certain ways to strengthen it. We don't have anything currently coming up either to compete in that unless something from the PVA miraculously shows up in August and September. So our next season is the PBA league into September as of right now. So, about three weeks prior to that.Basically the first of September roughly, I'll start getting all my bowling balls in order, make sure I have an arsenal between you know, 10 and 20 bowling balls that I want to travel with and I know what they do from top to bottom, what hooks more what hooks less in, start going after, you know, three, four or five games a day. I'm not a real long practice guy. I'd rather stretch and throw shots in a quality type way. Like a half hour 45 minute practice guy and I'm done. And that incorporates shooting spares. You know playing different parts of the lane and throwing different bowling balls and and make it make it be done with it. I feel like sometimes you can practice too much

Nick VinZant 10:33 when you look at somebody who's just like a really really good local player or a college player how much difference is there between them and you?

Bill O'Neill 12:12 pretty big difference you know you have different physical tools that that separates the pros from just your regular league bowlers. You just you know there's so many so many people that bowl that are like over like say like a 215 average in your local league. They're able that they have honed it on like one skill that they're that they're good at and they're able to you know, they stand in a certain spot they you know, their their axis rotation is the same their speeds the same that it never changes but for us as professionals You know, we've gotten really really good at doing you know, four or five different things and changing angles and speeds and rotations and things like that and that's really what what separates the good league bowlers from from the professionals. is, it all really comes down to the patterns, you're bowling on the competition that you currently have,

Sean Rash 13:08 You know, so I bowl a recreational league on Tuesday nights at Parkside lanes with my wife, and my brother and some really good friends. And we do it for fun, but we're also very competitive. But when we're bowling on the recreational pattern, my wife can beat me. You know, I can have a night or I can just go nice, very nice, very nice, very nice burn, she can throw a six or seven bagger and my friends can beat me that I will leave with on Friday nights where they can just string a bunch of strikes because the blame pattern is so forgiving. You know, people strike a lot and they won't 250 to 300. So but when we get on to the PBA patterns that are a flatter ratio, it comes down to repetitiveness, so I'm way more accurate than most I should say pros and myself are way more accurate than the recreational bowler where, you know, we're hitting our target way more often, and asking for so much forgiveness when they see it for recreational patterns. So on a recreational pattern, even I can go bowl, we're both going to be able to 30. And I would probably do it for how many games we both for and you're going to do it for, you know, 678 games out of 10. I'm going to do probably nine out of 1010 out of 10 all the time. Now we go on a PVA pattern, you're going to go to 30 but it's going to be one out of 10 times I'm gonna do it seven or eight out of 10 times depending on what the pattern is

Nick VinZant 14:42 to correct me if I'm wrong but the the oil basically on the lanes dictates kind of how the lane operates.

Sean Rash 14:49 That is true to some ex tent. There's also a thing we call topography. It's a lot like golf, right. So if you saw my beef with Max home on Twitter recently, we're going back Back and forth about the differences in golf and bowling and in our sport we play on an invincible field, right they put oil pattern down on the lane, but we have no idea what it's going to do. Now sometimes they'll give us and most of the time they'll tell us what the pattern length is and the shape of the pattern. But the lane topography itself will tell you what part of the lane price should be playing in as the lane pattern does as well so every time you throw your bowling ball, the lane changes it doesn't matter if you're right handed or left handed the oil you know transitions from front to back or goes on your bowling ball and soaks in. The one thing I always joke around with golfers is it's always 72 degrees inside and we're not worried about wind and rain but we have those events outside that we've dealt with the the outside elements, but you know it's there's so much into it. The bowling ball you throw itself has a core in it and a cover how it's drilled. It's gonna go longer hook earlier if service on it makes it hope sooner if you can polish on it makes it go longer. You know you're playing first arrow and everybody on your players playing fit there. Oh, there voluntee 15 you're going to 10 then you probably should change part of the lane.

Nick VinZant 16:12 When you're in a competition one lane be different than the other.

Bill O'Neill 16:17 Oh certainly. Yeah, all the time. It's because of a couple different reasons you're, especially for us we bought one game on a pair of lanes and then the next game will move to another one. So it's can be determined by who is on the pair in front of you, you know, you have a lot of different you know, if you have guys who have a really really low rep right in front of you, they're not going to pull as much oil off the lane but if you follow a bunch of guys who have a lot of freight, they're gonna pull a lot off. So you know, that can really affect the way you know how your ball is gonna react to the lane.

Nick VinZant 16:48 Can you tell like immediately as soon as the ball leaves your hand if that's a strike or not.

Bill O'Neill 16:54 I will I will know if I if I throw it good or not. If I throw it physically good. But like you know as explaining it's the environment is is invisible so can make you make your best educated guess of where you're supposed to stand and throw it and you can make the perfect shot and have a really imperfect result because you were you know you were standing in the last spot

Nick VinZant 17:18 we got a bunch of listener submitted questions and Are you ready for some of the harder slash listener submitted questions? Of course, what size ball Do you use and why? Bill O'Neill 17:30 So the maximum you can go is 16 pounds I use and most professionals and most people who bowl leagues will use lose 15 pounds you know, it's a forever we use 16 everybody use 16 but the balls got so powerful that the deflection wasn't nearly as great with the with the powerful balls so people took the you know, one less pound to kind of, you know, avoid the extra weight in the event. You know, the thousands of shots that we throw, you know, that extra pounds Over time can can cause some some injuries.

Nick VinZant 18:02 So that's something that were like I immediately get it. And then I think about it, and I don't get it. So what's like the difference between using a 14 and a 15? And a 16 pound ball besides the weight? Like what's the, what's the what's the point there?

Bill O'Neill 18:17 So when you when you when the ball hits the pins, you want it, you want it to drive through the pins, you don't really want the ball deflecting so when you like, it's like so if you see like, you know, if you go and you're bowling recreationally and you see like young kids and they're throwing like six or eight pound balls, when they hit the pins, they immediately fly towards the gutter, because they're just reflecting on you know, the pins way. Something like three and a half pounds. So you know, when you have an eight pound ball hitting those pins, they deflect off until like when you get to a point where you know, 14 is probably the minimum that any competitive bowler would throw in B, it's because if you just don't you don't want that much deflection, you won't have as much drive to get to the pins in the back. Sean Rash 19:04 What size ball I would tell you is what weight. So you have six to 16 pounds, I threw 16 pounds all the way up to 2015 2016 season. After I injured my hand, in Dallas, the US Open, I had to drop weight to 15 pounds. really didn't notice much of a difference, but I use a 15 pound ball.

Nick VinZant 19:28 what is your best average Joe tip like average guy, you're going to give them one tip that's going to help them become better What do you got?

Bill O'Neill 19:37 So what I see all the time with with people who are just, you know out for a night of fun, what they they they try to overthrow the ball with their upper body too much. And that's where the inaccuracy comes from and trying us ends up in the gutter a lot because when you're whipping it around your body, it's impossible to repeat. So if you watch anybody who's you know Over 180 average bowler, they're using their legs to create the power so it's a you're kind of walking by the ball instead of pulling it behind you. And that would be the you know that the thing that separates anybody who does it and people who don't is that you just try to, you know, muscle it when you try to take, you want to try to take as much muscle out of it as as humanly possible.

Sean Rash 20:23 Well, it's kind of like a three kind of tip process, right? You got to have good balance. every athlete has great balance in every sport, you need to follow through towards your target. So it doesn't matter if it's first arrow, third arrow for there, whatever it is, and then you need to hit the one in the front, on your first ball or a second ball depending on whatever it is. Those are kind of the three things that recreational bowlers we try to teach them more than anything is great, bounce, follow through. hit your target hit the one of the front,

Nick VinZant 20:52 favorite place to bowl least favorite place to ball.

Bill O'Neill 20:59 I like traveling I really like getting around around the world.I like I like bowling and I believe we'd be bowling Japan like at least like once a year. And that's a cool place to go. It's just such a different cultural experience to what you know to what we do here. So I always find it really, really interesting and fun and I enjoy being over there I think must say my least favorite place finally have any like, I guess it would be depending on the time of the year sometimes you know, we'll bowl in Houston sometimes in July and it's very sticky and hot and I like that or I've been to Scandinavia in January, those would be places I was. I would try to try to avoid just simply because of the weather.

Sean Rash 21:39 Oh, favorite place the bowl over the last decade. Realistically last three or four years has been Shawnee, Oklahoma. I've won three times there since 2013. I've had a lot of success in that building a shop 302 89 to win this year in January. Another place would be South points original Bowling Center did a lot of dominating the World Series of bowling back in 2010 1112. It's not my least favorite place the bowl, but my ball doesn't strike there a whole lot and that's in Columbus. It's one of my favorite places to go because my mother's from that area. The owners Wayne and alien Webb are some of the best proprietors we have in our sport. But I do not go well in that building. I've had some moments, but it's a it's a tough place for me to go to.

Nick VinZant 22:33 Is it a comfortable living? like can you make a pretty good amount of money doing this?

Bill O'Neill 22:38 I mean, I guess that that question is relative to what people think is a comfortable living.Yeah, I mean, it's I I'll answer it this way. I it's the only job I've had for 15 plus 15 years. I don't have a secondary source of income. Yes. I mean, it's you know, there isn't a ton of guys in my in my situation. I've been fortunate to be you. No at the at the, you know, in the top 10 or 15 for, you know, 15 years. So there's a lot of guys who have like, operate Pro Shops in their downtime. But for me, it's been mostly, you know, all bowling stuff the last 15 years.

Sean Rash 23:17 For a handful and 10 guys it is the guys that are really good with their money I've not I would have been very good with mine where I started some, you know, set accounts and IRAs and stuff for kids and college funds and stuff like that. But we've had some guys that have made millions of dollars, not a whole lot, you know, three, 4 million a couple million here and there or missing a zero maybe two zeros compared to every other sport in when it comes to earnings.

Nick VinZant 23:45 That's a fair way to look at it. Right. I mean, I guess when I think about it in terms of major sports, maybe right below tennis, in terms of growing,

Sean Rash 23:56 we're way below tennis.

Nick VinZant 23:58 Really.I mean, I think See you guys on TV though all the time.

Sean Rash 24:02 Yeah, just yet. But so our number one player in the world currently right now is Jason Belmonte. He's one of them. ej tech and Anthony simonsson. Myself and a couple others, you know, top five top 10 Jason has made right around 240,000 I think this year on tour, I can look it up here real quick. I've made between January and March I made 45,000 roughly and I just made another 40,000 in the last few months during some special events and finals of stuff. So I've made almost 100,000 this year, which is great. You know, I also have some sponsors that help pay me but I pay all of my expenses and nobody else does that. You know, you go play a golf tournament. Those guys are not paying for golf.They own injury feats. We have entry fees. We have hotelYou know, so we have, you know, we have our expenses, we have to offset as well.

Nick VinZant 25:05 Do bowlers talk trash to each other? And if so, who's the best trash talker?

Bill O'Neill 25:11 Oh, certainly, yeah, certainly.It's tough because a lot of us are friendly. And I think that's something that hurts us, especially on television. Because we all travel together, we're all we're all kind of next to each other all the time because we compete in the same events and it's hard to to create those kind of like rivalries because we're all kind of friendly. It's different than team sports, where everybody's separated, you're just kind of hanging out with your team. So, but we do certainly, you know, give each other at least at the bare minimum, give each other you know, really, really hard time and, you know, we never let anybody slide on something that they do that's, that's, you know, stupid on the lanes for sure.

Nick VinZant 25:52 If it's, you say it's you who's probably the best bowling trash talker.

Bill O'Neill 25:58 It's always the people who are Good obviously it's uh you know Pete Weber has been really good for a long time the guy who's the best in the world right now Jason Belmonte. He's He's pretty good at it because it's easy to be the one doing the doing the trash talk when you are beating people that say it doesn't resonate as much if you're, you know, if you're a middle of the pack type of guy.

Sean Rash 26:20 We should do more of it. I think we'd we create more rivalries for fans to think there's rivalries it would show some different sides of people. Some of the best trash talkers on tour though are guys like Stu Williams. Chris Barnes is a real real quiet Tommy Jones Do you know SEO there's a few more in there but those guys they've got the great one linersand he just never see it coming.

Nick VinZant 26:52 What number would I have to bowl for you to be impressed?

Bill O'Neill 26:57 Oh, there's no number. Yeah. I've seen the best and the worst of all types of people throughout life. So nothing really nothing at this point really impresses me or I don't, you know, because I will get from people when I show up at the local Bowling Center practice. They're like, I'm nervous to throw the ball around you. I'm like, I don't care what you do. Like there's nothing that you're going to do that's going to like, make me think I go like this guy shouldn't be around here because I've seen it all.

Sean Rash 27:27 Well, I'd have to watch you bowl first. To actually gauge what kind of bowler you are. You know, like, I've never seen you throw a bowling ball before he told me he averaged 130. And he threw a couple shots. And I would be like, well, it's full, you know, be full of us. He would tell you, you know, you're 181 90 average bowler, but then he said you ever see 38 throw club shots and I go, okay, you're really full of it, you probably only averaged 180.

Nick VinZant 27:58 how often will you bowl a 300 game?

Bill O'Neill 28:06 Well, I don't, I don't bowl much in leagues anymore. So that's where you'll find a lot of the higher scores because the you know, like I was explaining about the the oil on the lanes, you know, there's a, there's an angle that you need to achieve to maximize the chance of striking. So when you can put oil on the lane to make it like almost like tracks where they just like, direct the ball right into the right into the, you know, into the pocket to where you're, you're just maximizing that chance to strike. And so when we go on tour, the lanes aren't oiled like that. So it makes a lot harder. So I usually I'm probably about a couple of year, maybe at this point

Nick VinZant 28:46 best bowling movie or TV show worst bowling movie or TV show.

Bill O'Neill 28:53 kingpins the worst. Worst, yeah. Well from a bowling perspective. Cuz it just, it makes us look so horrible. It doesn't really represent what it is that you know what we do or how we approach it. It's just a you know, it's just a movie that perpetuated all the bad stereotypes about about bowling so I hate absolutely hate that movie. How many other bowling movies with there being it?

Nick VinZant 29:25 I guess The Big Lebowski

Bill O'Neill 29:27 Lebowski but that was that I think I've only seen it like once a week was that really like a big wasn't really like a bowling movie though? I don't know. there really hasn't been a whole lot of movies about bowling, but I guess if I had to choose or certainly be thinking about

Nick VinZant 29:41 who is the best celebrity bowler that you've been around?

Bill O'Neill 29:47 Mookie Betts baseball player replaced with Dodgers He's the best. He actually competed. In a handful of our events. He actually bought a 300 game one of our events a few years ago. He He's exceptional. He would you know, he's somebody who could if he, you know, obviously wasn't one of the best baseball players in the world he could have potentially ended up on you know, bowling professionally. He's He's that good but there's some other guys who were who were who were good. Terrell Owens is pretty good. Jerome Bettis has bowled three hundreds before as funny as the best celebrity bowler currently would be. Mookie Betts

Nick VinZant 30:30 is there like is there a couple other people that you'd be like all right. All right. Thank you go.

Sean Rash 30:34 No, yeah, there's a con. There's plenty of great bowlers a guy named CJ Anderson who was running back to the Broncos friend of mine. You know, golfers Mark Calcavecchia, and Woodie Austin senior golfers but definitely can bowl as well. He's not the best celebrity bowler but Chris Paul, the third unbelievable basketball player but he's got a huge charity event that has ran for years with the PVA called the Chris Paul celebrity challenge. You can you can follow in watch a bunch of things through YouTube but a guy can go a little bit. And he's brought hundreds of athletes and celebrities and people to this event through the years but definitely another good celebrity bowler

Nick VinZant 31:17 Best ball related joke?

Bill O'Neill 31:21 Oh, I mean, when I used to when I used to work in the Bowling Center, when I was younger, you know, I was in high school. People would always call was the constant running joke of like, the prank call to the Bowling Center would be, you know, I'd say hello, given the name of the Bowling Center, and they would say, hey, do you guys have a 14 pound balls? And I would say, Yeah, we do. And then they would say, oh, how do you walk and then hang up. So that was the that was the running prank. I call when I was when I was working.

Nick VinZant 31:51 I mean, I bet that got really annoying, but that is pretty good.

Bill O'Neill 31:55 I mean, after a while, I would just like I would, I would I knew it was coming. And I would just like switch managers up by, you know, one pound. And then they would be like, Oh, yeah, they just have they were just waiting for the they would just, you know, wait for the me to say yes to 14 pounds and then they would drop the joke

Nick VinZant 32:13 so that's really all the questions I got me and anything you think that we missed what's coming up next for you?

Bill O'Neill 32:20 Like everybody like everything else. We're pretty pretty shut down at this point we have a couple of events that we might be doing scheduled at the end of September. We have a team event that we do in Portland, Maine every year. That's supposed to be at the end of September But yeah, I mean, with everything shut down right now we're, we're pretty shut down. So so we're just kind of, you know, wait for things to clear up a little bit.

Sean Rash 32:42 Ye ah, so next right now, for me would just be the PBA tour finals are two or five that just concluded the PD two early in September in Portland, Maine, September 27, and eighth at Bayside bowl. Really excited about that. But there'll be some small things that could possibly participate in but my wife and I just welcomed our third little girl laying around on the world, June 29. So I'm going to be staying home as much as possible, helping the wife with the kids. You know, trying to stay away from, from COVID, of course, and trying to stay healthy. There's so much going on right now, as always, but I'm very, very fortunate to be able to take some time off here over the next month or so.

Nick VinZant 33:29 And then you've got you got a raffle coming up, too, right?

Sean Rash 33:32 Yeah, so, about three weeks ago, myself, the PVA SIBO 100 Global, have come together to put together an all expense paid trip that I'm paying for, for a fan and a guest to attend the TV league baseball in late September, which is basically our next event on the PGA Tour. So it's really cool deal something to give back. The best part about it. It's raising money for breast cancer awareness. Our our charity is the striking is Breast Cancer Foundation down in Houston, Texas. lady named Donna Connors put together this event 20 plus years ago and just really excited to be able to give back. That's one of the best things about our sport is the things that we've been able to do. So we're selling raffle tickets for $10 apiece, six for 50. And all the money is being donated to help fight against breast cancer. So really excited about that.

Nick VinZant 34:29 I want to thank Bill and Shawn, so much for joining us if you want to connect with them. We have a link to them on our social media accounts, or Profoundly Pointless on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And we have also included their information on the RSS feed that's on this podcast. I have to say this. They are incredibly nice guys. Like just really cool guys. So if you get a chance, follow them support them. I mean, like I said, Who does it Like bowling.

Romance and Erotic Fiction Author Anna Lores

From wild nights with Werewolves to steamy scenes with multiple people, bestselling Romance and Erotic Fiction Author Anna Lores writes the secret fantasies her readers' crave. We talk sensual escapes, paranormal fantasies and Fabio. Then, a special attractive Top 5.

Interview with Romance and Erotic Fiction Author Anna Lores

Speakers:

Nick VinZant: Profoundly Pointless Host

Anna Lores: Romance and Erotic Fiction Author

Nick VinZant 0:13

Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant coming up in this episode, romance, erotic fiction and attractive men.

Anna Lores 0:25 your couple has to come together, even if it's many couples getting together at the end or a woman with five man or, you know, a man with five women, it doesn't matter. There's got to be that happy ending and it's got to be satisfying. You know, it is it's a tough industry, especially when people find out you write about sex in your stories. People can be really inappropriate, and you have to suspend a level of disbelief. With him being a werewolf, you know, it's like, I don't Anywhere we'll know anywhere we'll know. men cannot be perfect. women cannot be perfect all the time. But in your stories, they can be darn near it. And that's a great escape for a little while.

Nick VinZant 1:15 I want to thank you guys so much for joining us. If you get a chance to like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it. It really helps us out. So ever since I was little I remember going to stores like Walmart and places like that, and seeing these romance novels, and then you would see him people would be reading them in TV and movies. And I always just wondered who's writing these? And where are they getting these ideas? Our first guest is one of the authors who writes them. She's an international best seller that focuses on romance and erotic fiction. This is Anna Lores So did you read romance novels before? Or was this a That you kind of just jumped into.

Anna Lores 2:02 I'm an avid romance reader. And I was before I started this journey into publishing, but I have an English literature degree. So my background, his middle and Old English, so I translated and read, you know cuckoos of Old English and Middle English works, which really sparked my interest in the romance genre. I didn't understand what the romance genre actually was until I started writing it. I didn't know that there were all these rules that went along with it. That really, that really sparked my my love for romance and romance novels. And books and stories. So

Nick VinZant 3:02 what there's rules to it like what are them?

Anna Lores 3:05 Okay, so I didn't know this when I first started. They you have to have a happy ending, you have to have a happy ending. It's not a romance, unless there's a happy ending. The driving force of a romance novel is the couple and their relationship. So that's going to be the central driving force of a romance novel. If you're writing romance, you have to have those two things straight up. If you don't, you're gonna upset every romance reader out there. So, yeah, they have to, your couple has to come together, even if it's many couples getting together at the end or a woman with five men or you know, a man with five women, it doesn't matter. There's got to be that happy ending and it's got to be satisfying.

Nick VinZant 3:59 A man who has five women. I mean that does sound satisfying. Okay. So where do you get these? Where do you get the ideas?

Anna Lores 4:06 Okay. Well, you know, that's really interesting because I've got a couple stories on how a few of my story, a few of the novels that I've written and been published, came out. One is with a woman with five with three, three men. And it's called Ella's triple pleasure. And I was at my house. I was living in Memphis, Tennessee, I was at my house, all my kids ended up with the flu. And I had a, you know, it was awful. All I can say is, it was horrible. And my husband was traveling on for work. I was to come with three, you know, Sick Kids, and they finally got a law and I got on my couch and I thought, Oh my gosh, how wonderful would it be if I had a man Help me. And that's what sparked that story. It was just I was desperate. I was exhausted. I was every mom out there who had, you know, three kids with the flu or one kid with the flu.

Nick VinZant 5:15 So when you're looking at it like most people would maybe think the title is more from like a sexual thing. But you were just looking for some help around the house basically.

Anna Lores 5:24 I was and it turned into a sexual you know, in the story, because that's, that's what I was writing about. But it's sparked from just pure desperation of, wouldn't it be fabulous to have three guys helping me out at home, and then pamper me when the day was over? So that's, that's how that came about.

Nick VinZant 5:48 So is there a difference? Is there a difference between romance novels in erotic fiction, or is that the same thing?

Anna Lores 5:54 No, it's actually different there. You could have erotic fiction is is different than erotic romance. So I write erotic romance which ends with a happily ever after. And the story is about the couple. So it's got the romantic elements of a centralized story with the character's relationship. And then it's got a happily ever after. But it also includes sex in the bedroom. So your instead of the door closing in a novel that you might read from, you know, like a mystery or some other story and erotic romance, you walk into the bedroom or public room and you experience their sexual relationship

Nick VinZant 6:44 Do books have ratings. Can you only make it so? R rated or pG 13? Like how does that work?

Anna Lores 6:51 Well, erotica, it can be anything under the sun I mean, with erotic romance and erotica, the two things that they are that are the same or the steamy hot sex but there is not a day a PG rating. If it is considered a erotic romance or erotica, it pretty much automatically puts you into an over 18 category. So, you know, which makes sense. I have children, they don't need to be reading my books, you know, right now their lives. They wouldn't you know that, therefore adults. So Amazon has this special rating if you're if you are in the erotic romance, writing, you're pretty much not going to be shown to almost anybody. So you have to specifically search for that book. But if you there's a like 50 Shades of Grey has it's got an erotic rating, but it's also got a romance rating. So it is shown under contemporary romance as a lot of books, like I write are. So I have some that are more steamy that I have put it into the erotic category because I feel like that's where they should be. But a book like LS, triple pleasure or my paranormal series one night of love those have some sex in it, but not any more than you really more so then you would get in a contemporary romance. I mean, you might get a little bit more but it's, it's still in that adult range.

Nick VinZant 8:50 So how did you get started? What motivated you to kind of write the first one?

Anna Lores 8:55 Well, I I ended up with insomnia. It's, I've had it for about 14 years now. And I started reading. I read 400 to 600 books a year, at a minimum. Yeah. And I was homeschooling my children. So I was homeschooling during the day, I was reading most of the night. And my husband was like, why don't you just write your own book? Because I would tell him about these books. I'm like, I really, this is what I want to read. You know, he's like, just write one. And so I thought, I'm gonna give that a shot. And so I called a friend of mine, and I said, Who's, who's the big reader? And I said, I'm gonna probably write a lot of crap at first, but would you've read it and tell me what you think? And she was great. She gave me a really good feedback. I finally Got a couple of stories that I really loved. I ended up taking that encouragement, and then sending it to some copy editors that I knew, and some avid romance readers just that we all we all talked about books. And so it ended up being kind of like a book club of my books with my girlfriends. It brought me back to college where everything ended up being read on the page. And when I got the, the right story with the right characters, and it got picked up. It's been an interesting ride, but it all started with insomnia.

Nick VinZant 10:47 So when you write these novels, like what's the ultimate kind of goal behind them? Are you are you trying to arouse people? Are you trying to fulfill a fantasy or are you just trying to tell a good story?

Anna Lores 10:58 It's always The story for me, so it's the story and the characters. And I guess I'm an adult. So I write what I like to read. So when I am working through the characters, they fall into bed just like a normal couple would. Whether they're married or whether they're not married yet, there's something that drives them together. And usually the first connection is chemistry. So, that plays a lot into it. Am I trying to, you know, it's my, my initial goal always, oh, let's make this arousing. No, it's where are those characters? What drives those characters? What are their flaws? what? what pushes them into those, those places where they are together and what happens when it's their first time?

Nick VinZant 11:56 from the audience perspective, though? What is like what is most of the audience In smoking for, are they looking for the arousal for the fantasy story? Are they looking for kind of just to be entertained?

Anna Lores 12:07 I think for me, it's an escape for real life. And it's a central escape. So is there a sense? Yes, there is definitely a sense of arousal, but it's the story that makes it work. So it's the story between the couple and their relationship that makes that makes it arousing or makes it not arousing

Nick VinZant 12:30 what his family or friends said about it, right? Because you hear like, Oh, I'm a romance novelist. I'm an erotic fiction novelist. Is there a reaction to that? Or are people just kind of like yeah, and some people, you know, work as accountants.

Anna Lores 12:45 Yeah. But I my family does. They're like, my immediate family knows what I do. But yeah, my extent now. Just my like, my husband and my kids know exactly what Right about but outside that not so much I've got some friends. I've actually told a few people and gotten hate mail over it and it's been really weird to me. But I've also you know, but the fans are great. I got a great review the other day and it was you know, you get good reviews you get bad reviews you've been if you've been a writer long enough it's gonna run the gamut. You can't please everybody and that's okay. It's not every story is not for everyone. But a great review, like I got the other day is someone wrote, you know, I read this five times. I love this story. You know, it's like, wow, you hold on to those because you might get a, you know, a one and it runs the gamut with that with friends and family too. My family's pretty supportive overall of everything. They don't read my stories. They shouldn't, you know, my children don't need to be reading adult fiction like this and my husband is not a romance reader. You know, it is it's a tough industry, especially when people find out you write about sex and your stories. People can be really inappropriate at times, and you just kind of have to roll with it.

Nick VinZant 14:31 So between reading your book titles, billionaire 43, billionaire 44 Ls triple pleasure, curse to love. Which one is your favorite book title? Just the title itself like, Ooh, that's a good romance title.

Anna Lores 14:48 Oh, boy, I think one night of love. You didn't mention that one. But that probably is the winner. When I came up with that, I just was like, yeah, even now I'm actually looking at the cover of that book. I love that.

Nick VinZant 15:10 I love that title. So for people who are just listening to this, I'm looking at the book title one night of love. It has an attractive man and woman on it, and then a wolf in the background or the foreground. I get those confused. So he's a wolf. What's the deal?

Anna Lores 15:27 Is he and she doesn't know it. So she is just desperate to have a baby. Her husband is dying of terminal cancer and she's in denial. She goes, she's a massage therapist to the rich and famous. And she's in Las Vegas where people go to do things they would never do in their normal lives. And she hooks up with a wall. She hooks up with With a wolf unknowingly and then leaves, oh, no. And that's where things get crazy.

Nick VinZant 16:12 Just to be to be clear, it's it's a werewolf. It's not just a wolf. It's not that kind of thing.

Anna Lores 16:18 No (laughter) this isn't Greek Mythology?

Nick VinZant 16:23 So this is kind of my immediate reaction to that. It's right like, and just explain it to me the way it is. Like at one point, I think like, Oh, my God, that sounds so ridiculous. Why would anyone read that? And then the other part of me is like, Oh, that's an interesting story. Like, how do you balance those two things out?

Anna Lores 16:42 I think that is a great question.I think the story is within the balance, it is one of those where there's got to be a plausibility, you It's like Shakespeare, you have to be able to suspend your disbelief. And so you're reading about these two people. And you have to suspend a level of disbelief. With him being a werewolf. You know, it's like, I don't know, anywhere we'll know anywhere we'll go.Or maybe you do. I don't know if you do. Okay.That's the story itself is, is my own take on werewolf lore. So it's a little different than you would see and other stories. It's got a sexual take on it and the meetings, the mating ritual is a lot more intense and there are drastic consequences to being apart from your mate. And there's a I hope that the that it works with the storyline that her situation is so desperate that it's just plausible enough that you can suspend your disbelief with the other elements of the story.

Nick VinZant 18:20 best romance writing trope, worst romance writing trope.

Anna Lores 18:28 You know, I'm a fan of the billionaire's. So I'd have to say that's one of my favorites. Were for me personally, I am not a fan of theOh gosh, what is it called?Um, it's the one where the guys are jerks. They're just total total jerks. I don't know how to say that in a nice way.

Nick VinZant 18:57 Not like the BDSM stuff, but like the guys just a jerk

Anna Lores 19:01 yes there there is a romance trope where the guys just treat the women like total crap and the women just women just dig that. I don't even I just don't like that in BDSM you get the full range of a meal gut feeling billionaires PDFs you know, great guys total jerks you get it?

Nick VinZant 19:26 Is there like a section of the romance erotic fiction area that sells better than others like supernatural sells better than Western and that sells better than this or is there like a subset that people target the most?

Anna Lores 19:44 It varies actually, from year to year. So paranormal always sells. I mean, it always sells I love paranormal erotic romance and that's one night of blood. And kirsta love those two are both in that genre. Those always do well the billionaire series always do well. But it is up and down and it it depends historicals are huge historicals are huge. That's Yeah, the men in kilts. All those. Yes. Really? I just thought oh my gosh, yes.

Nick VinZant 20:32 What is it about the kilt? Is it the killed specifically or is it just like anything?

Anna Lores 20:37 It's just that genre of writing you've got, I think it's with, you know, royalty and there's this. There's the fantasy of, you know, being swept away, you know, by a Duke, you know, you're a lowly made or something, I don't know. And then if there's, I've read a bill And those books and I love. I love them.They're just fun. They're fun.

Nick VinZant 21:08 What is the best erotic line or best line that you've written?

Anna Lores 21:14 Nick I've written a lot of words but there are some times when I reread and I go Wow! I had a good day that day.

Nick VinZant 21:24 Is there one that you look back on though? You're like, Oh, that's that's a little cringy. Like I even maybe I even went too far there.

Anna Lores 21:38 No, I usually added this out. If I don't feel good about it.

Nick VinZant 21:42 How do you feel about Fabio?

Anna Lores 21:44 Oh my gosh, you know, he's an icon.And I love what he's done with his career and how he makes fun of himself now. I mean, he has been on a bus zillion covers. He was Mr. Romance. You know if you saw a book with his cover the you knew exactly what you were getting. He did a great job in branding himself. And then now that he's older, he's doing a great job continuing to brand himself and kind of poke fun a little at himself. I love those like, something about the butter. It's like the, I can't believe it's not. Didn't he do those commercials? Yeah. They were awesome. I would giggle over all those. So, you know, Fabio is one of a kind. And I I do enjoy Fabio.

Nick VinZant 22:50 Especially now that he's out there, who's who's kind of the heir apparent though is there a new man or woman that's kind of taken over that romance novelist cover roll.

Anna Lores 23:03 You know there's a guy Jimmy Thomas. He has been on hundreds of covers. He is pretty incredible. He lives in California. I think he's a weight training dude. And he seems like a No. Oh, yeah. He's got a good luck for it. Yeah, I just, I just

Nick VinZant 23:31 I just googled him. I'm now look, I'm a married man and like, Okay, I get it. Jimmy Thomas looks he definitely looks like he works out, doesn't he?

Anna Lores 23:42 He does work out. I think he spends his entire life at the gym.And that imposing so I actually saw him speak at a conference. And he seems like a, you know, a decent guy. So just seems like a normal normal guy. He definitely

Nick VinZant 24:01 you can see why he could get so many covers right because he could do multiple. He's kind of got like the supernatural look, and the kinda clean loo he's got a lot of looks.

Anna Lores 24:13 Yeah, he's got a lot of pirate looks too. I think he's been on a must have been on so many covers of historical romances.

Nick VinZant 24:23 Have you ever written something that made you blush?

Anna Lores 24:26 Yeah. Huh? Yes, I my husband, my head I write in my, in my bedroom. I have like, sectioned off. I've got a little divider. And my husband comes in and I'm writing fiercely on the keyboard and he's like, Oh, what's this?

Anna Lores 24:47 Like, oh, You're blushing. A naughty scene? I'm like, yeah, honey. Yeah, yeah.

Nick VinZant 24:54 I don't know what the follow up question for me. Should be All right, I didn't know if I should. I didn't know if I should keep going or if I should just drop that one.

Anna Lores 25:14 (Laughter) I think we can move on but it makes for an interesting life, that's for sure

Nick VinZant 25:19 I would imagine it does. Like what do you think though? What do you think is the the need for this? Like why do people kind of get drawn to these books?

Anna Lores 25:32 You know, from personal experience just, I can really only speak to my own and I think it speaks kind of to a certain age of women. The books that I write really appeal to women around 30 to 5560. You get to a point in your Life and it's just like any internet escape. These are not hard reads. They are. You don't have to work at them. You can pick them up, you know, enjoy an escape, enjoy reading about a very good looking man. You know, pleasing a woman and wanting to do all the things that are kind of unrealistic in real life. When you're married, you have life, you know, you've got kids, or you don't have kids, you've got dogs or cats or you're living alone and, you know, you're working. You're schlepping a job, you're, you've got all of these responsibilities and romance novels take you out of that. And I think that you know, I actually have a better relationship with my husband now that I'm a romance writer than I did prior to doing this. I talk a lot more to them are.And it's, there's a you know, knowing that I've got this book boyfriend to go, oh, wouldn't it be like I said, you know, with LS triple pleasure. Wouldn't it be wonderful if I had a three men to just do you at all? You know, that's not realistic. And men cannot be perfect. women cannot be perfect all the time. But in your stories, they can be darn near it. And that's a great escape for a little while.

Nick VinZant 27:52 Oh,that's a great answer. Um, that's honestly pretty much all the questions that I have. Is there any anything else like what's coming up next For you,

Anna Lores 28:00 well, I have three more stories and my fertile virgin short story books coming out soon my editor has them right now and she's working through them. And then I've got the my debut novels that I just got my rights back from the horseless series. That's going to be coming out in the next month or two. And then I've got I'm hoping to have two more of two more stories that no one has ever seen before come out by the end of the year, so I've got a lot to happen in. This is a big year for me. Big year.

Nick VinZant 28:49 I want to thank Anna so much for joining us if you want to connect with her. We have linked to her on our social media accounts, or Profoundly Pointless on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and have also included links to her books. And to her website in the RSS feed that's on this podcast. I think that she said something really interesting at the end, because you hear some of these stories and like what the themes of these novels are about. And maybe you think it's this and maybe you think it's that, but who cares? If people like them, if it's an escape, let people enjoy themselves.