Disasterologist Dr. Samantha Montano

Dr. Samantha Montano studies disasters. And from Covid-19 and Climate Change, to hurricanes and wildfires, we've been having a lot of disasters. We talk pandemic preparedness, looming threats and disaster movies. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Most Important Things in Your Bathroom.

Fetish Wrestler Miss Scorpion

She'll pin you down, rub her feet on your face, put you in a chokehold and you'll pay her to do it. Miss Scorpion joins us as we explore the world of Session Wrestling. We talk wrestling holds, ballbusting and Peter Pan requests. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Kinds of Nuts.

Interview with Session Wrestler Miss Scorpion

Nick VinZant 0:11

Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant coming up in this episode, a unique kind of wrestling, and the best nuts.

Miss Scorpion 0:22

They want to be overpowered by a strong, perhaps muscular woman using some elements of martial arts skills. And some people, they just want it, they just want to feel it a little bit, but then other people that you are like, you're really putting him in a lot of pain, especially. And this is any men listening, especially for the ballbusting clients. He wanted me to run over his penis with my car.

Nick VinZant 0:51

I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it, it really helps us out. Our first guest is fascinating. absolutely fascinating. There's no other way to put it. So let's get right to her. This is session wrestler Miss scorpion. What is session wrestling,

Miss Scorpion 1:13

I would put us in the wider domination world. And a typical exchange would be somebody coming to see me for an hour. And they want to be overpowered by a strong, perhaps muscular a woman using some elements of martial arts skills.

Nick VinZant 1:35

How did you kind of get into it?

Miss Scorpion 1:38

I had a good business. I was running a cookery school and catering business. But it left me very tied as to where and when I could earn a living. But in the meantime, just for my personal interest I'd gone on am a dominatrix course just for because I wasn't home in London, I want to explore like the kink side of things. So I've gone a dominatrix course with a lady in London called Kim Rob. And I thought it was going to be like, Oh, this is how you spank somebody, this how you tie somebody up, I thought was going to be quite generic. And this is how you do things sort of for a home user. Obviously, I really, really really hadn't read the course material at all. And I got to hit and it was really about becoming a pro Dom like a professional dominatrix. Like to our core. beginning I was really like, have my notebook and I was like, Okay, yeah, Uh huh. So I need my name. Okay. Yep. Mm hmm. Being a good girl taking all my notes. And by the end of it when she was going into like, and these are the sorts of thing sorts of services that different people are offering. I was literally like, jaw on the floor. You're like, I am in way of my head here. It was like a certain aspects of it. I was like, this sounds really good than others when she was like, okay, yes. So some people they offer like cysteine as a service, or they're doing like water sports or hard sports, and I was just literally like, the greenest person on the planet. Like, what's that?

Nick VinZant 3:13

You didn't quite know what you were getting signed up for? Hmm.

Miss Scorpion 3:17

I was literally like, she must have thought you Why did you not read what this is gonna be about? But I was we talked more she said, you know, you could be really good at this because I was used to running my own business. I'm used to dealing with people like a one to one like consultation aspect. I'm really highly motivated. And it would sort of tick the boxes for me regarding what I wanted from a business. And so I explored the sort of more what I would call the more traditional dominatrix work world a little bit. And, but it wasn't really for me, mainly because Nick involves wearing high heels a lot. And I really, really, really hate wearing high heels. I don't if you ever have you ever worn high heels yourself? I have not. I have not even just tried them on one day. And you'll be like, Oh, yeah, okay. Couldn't do this professionally.

Nick VinZant 4:18

So because of that you kind of trained you geared more towards the wrestling side of it, then.

Miss Scorpion 4:23

Yes. As Kim said, oh, there's this thing called session wrestling. I was like, Oh, what's that? And she explained it to me. Okay, so it's more of like a physical domination. And I trained jujitsu and Thai boxing and boxing in my early 20s. So I was like, Oh, it's just jujitsu. She was like, Yeah, I was like, right. Okay. I can definitely do that. That for me is just such a natural fit for me is just you just bullying people which I do used to do for free anyway, like rugby, tackle your friends when you're on a night out and things like that. You're just doing it. You're getting paid, and you're wearing really, really good outfits that don't involve heels.

Nick VinZant 5:04

So like a typical, is it? Is it a session? Was that the the correct word or what word? Should I use them?

Miss Scorpion 5:11

Yeah, a session. Yeah.

Nick VinZant 5:13

So a typical session, kind of walk me through that, like, What is? How does that go?

Miss Scorpion 5:19

Let's go for Nick as the newbie as an example. So Nick, when he gets in touch, he says, I've seen loads of your videos online, but I've never had an in person session before. I will be in London. In two weeks time, please, book an appointment with you? And I'm like, Yes, of course, you can, you've already really got in touch with a really kind of nice polite email, which is very important. If there's any guys listening who are thinking about sessioning, the initial email, very important. So I will go back and say, okay, the specific so Okay, you've watched some videos with a thing, some things in a video that you really like that you want to try. So you might say, Oh, and I really like, like legs and feet, I'd really like to try what we call like these things called head scissors, where you're basically getting your neck crushed by some nice firm legs. And very popular in my world. They want to feel like my feet on their face and be forced in what are their little abbreviation remarks before quote, unquote, to like, worship my feet, like kiss my feet and things like this. So we'll already have before the session starts, I'll have an idea of what you want to try. So and then you might have an outfit request. I am. So lots of people have come to me like shiny pantyhose, you guys would call it in America tights for us. So I will, within reason fulfill an outfit request. My best outfit request ever has been to dress as Peter Pan.

Nick VinZant 6:57

That's really injured. That's a good one, though, right?

Miss Scorpion 7:00

I think in in the American market. There's lots more cosplay requests than in the UK. In Europe. It's not so much about the outfit. Yeah. So when I got the Peter Pan requests, I was like, Oh, this guy's really thought about this. This is good. Did you do the hat and everything? Everything? He ordered that outfit for me and brought that outfit? I was had top to toe in Greenfelt,

Nick VinZant 7:24

that is a strong look.

Miss Scorpion 7:31

Yeah, I mean, I, I haven't had to wear it for anything else yet. But you never know.

Nick VinZant 7:38

Now, is it? Do you just tackle them? Like, are you wrestling back and forth for control necessarily?

Miss Scorpion 7:46

Like it seems like an adult. And so in the Wrestling World, there's sort of different degrees of how intense your exchange will be. So what are the main categories or main categories are like a fantasy session that the newbie might be like, I'm not going to resist at all, I just want the fantasy of maybe you want me to wear my jujitsu uniform, that's a popular request as well, especially for someone that's into feet. So I'd be wearing my like jujitsu gi, and you would offer any resistance at all, I would just put you in positions, I'll be putting my feet on your face. And that's at a level that some people are really interested in, they don't want to feel any pain. They just want this real fantasy, this, this feeling of domination, but it's very much more emotional. And then after that you would go to semi competitive where, for me the rules for that are and you can you will actively defend yourself. But you don't try and put any moves on me. Very often. When I'm setting with people, they don't have any martial arts experience. So for them to try and put submissions on me is actually really, really dangerous because they don't know how like, joints operate properly, and what is the correct amount of like, okay, we start off with gentle pressure and then gradually increase. And so generally semi competitive is the level that I would, I would allow a new person to wrestle at, because it's much, much safer. And that's so the next option after that is like a fully competitive session where you could put attacks on me as well. But that's where you're most likely to get injured. Like I've had a few injuries when I've allowed people to do competitive sessions, so I generally don't take competitive sessions anymore.

Nick VinZant 9:46

In a competitive session. Is it really like you and another person potentially really, like trying to wrestle each other? Or is it still kind of like,

Miss Scorpion 9:56

yeah, I'm trying but I'm not really trying all the people That sexual muscle they know like someone comes in and you just see it in their eyes that they're like, this is like the UFC to them and no girl, no, go for it. And you just think, Oh, I'm gonna have to like, you give them a talk at the beginning. It's normally someone that's new and you say, Listen, you know, this is a fantasy scenario. We don't want anyone to get hurt. Yes, we want to have like a really physical session. But just like, breathe. But you get into it. And you can tell especially when you they're so hyped. they've watched so many videos for so many years, and they're really, really hyped. And then you just have to say, like, Whoa, like, timeout, like you need to, you need to relax. I've had people like, I had a guy and I was I had his back and I had him down on the, like, he was facedown on the floor. And he just, he was like a power lifter. He came up and he I was still on his back. And he slammed me onto the floor with him on top of me. Did that to me like three times. And I was just like, okay, you damage my shoulder? Thanks. Yeah, that was the last competitive session. I did. Actually I was about two years ago. I was just like, now like, I don't need to do this. The most annoying thing is like the flying elbow to the teeth. Ideal.

Nick VinZant 11:15

Now when you when you kind of do the wrestling moves, are we talking about like college wrestling? Like Olympic wrestling kind of stuff? Or are we talking like WWE? off the top rope? Kind of wrestling?

Miss Scorpion 11:29

Good question. There this again, it depends on the person. So I, I have training, I have some training in what you would call your college wrestling over here we would be at court like our Greco Roman or something, or freestyle, and I have some Brazilian Jiu Jitsu training. So that's more your submissions. Like an like people have watched UFC they've seen like a rear naked choke or an armbar or something like that. And by also have some pro wrestling training as well. And in the fetish world. There's particular moves, which people really like, and they're probably the more like old school moves. Like, did you watch any pro wrestling when you were younger? Uh, huh. Did you watch like the Iron Sheik and he was like, with a camel clutch.

Nick VinZant 12:20

I the camel clutch is familiar, right? That's the one where like, the person is on the ground, and you've got their chin and their arms are like, on your knees or something? Yes.

Miss Scorpion 12:30

Yes, exactly. So that's a really popular one people like things where their bodies stretched out, or you great find them and like split their legs is anything where they're in some sort of like tortured agony? Yeah, because then quite a lot of my clients will be like a masochist as well. So they're quite like some pain element to it.

Nick VinZant 12:54

For those kind of clients, like, on a scale of one to 1010 being the highest one being the lowest, how much would you say that you're necessarily hurting them?

Miss Scorpion 13:05

Again, it depends on the person, some people, they just want it, they just want to feel it a little bit. But then other people that you are like, you're really putting them in a lot of pain, especially. And this is any men listening, especially for the ballbusting clients. This there's there's a lot of pain being dished out there. And even sometimes I'm thinking, Wow, you can really take it.

Nick VinZant 13:29

So you're really kind of getting after it.

Miss Scorpion 13:31

Oh, yeah. I've had like people, a guy on all fours and like soccer kicked him to the nuts. Oh, yeah.

Nick VinZant 13:40

So look, we don't that will be a request. This this is something that our personal views on this podcast is whatever you want to do, you're not hurting anybody against their well. However you get down is however, however you get down. But in I think the thing that stands out to me is I'm not are they? Are your clients deriving pleasure from the pain or from the domination? Like what is it that keeps them coming back?

Miss Scorpion 14:08

Are we talking specifically about the ballbusting guys, or just them in general? Or the months in general?

Nick VinZant 14:13

The ballbusting is something that I have not heard of before. So I'm, I'm curious. I'm not. I always I mean, I've seen things I didn't think it was one of those things that like oh, people actually did that. And again, like however you get down is however you get down. I guess I don't I don't quite understand it. They're just looking for the pain of it.

Miss Scorpion 14:35

Yeah, yeah, but they wouldn't be it's the pain and then they'll have specifics about who is administering the pain as well. So I think it's like a big hairy man offer to kick them in the balls, it wouldn't be quite the same as like, what they perceive to be like a hot woman. Ah, is is that a common request? Um, I'd say maybe like one in 2120. But I do make ballbusting videos and they are very popular. I think the fantasy of the ballbusting is a lot more popular than the actual reality of it is like, because I guess that's a big thing. Like when when they say a woman has you by the balls, that is like her. It really means every single man knows what that means.

Nick VinZant 15:30

Right? You're, you're in total control of your most prized possession. Yes,

Miss Scorpion 15:35

exactly.

Can you like from a physical standpoint? I don't know what words to use here, necessarily. So give me like, some leeway on this phrasing. I think you know, you can ask, are you? Are you uh, are you a bigger woman? Like? Are you physically imposing like, do you? Do you look more? Or is it more that you look like you could really do something? Or can you really do something right? And in terms of like, dominate?

You asked me if I'm Matt hench. I'm all for the mice. I'm five foot seven. And I weigh about 70 kilos, which is probably like 150 pounds. I'm probably I know, I guess some people would look at me and think I'm physically imposing have pretty hefty size or like 25 inch thighs. In the summer, I have a six pack, not now because it's cold. And I like eating chocolate cake in when it's cold. And yeah, I'm reasonably buff. But also i'm, i'm really trained in martial arts. So my favorite thing is, guys, they'll come this like a guy. And I forget it was when I was working in Switzerland one time, he was this young, like kind of cocky French guys about 25. And he was like, in his email, you can always tell them the email, they can be a bit cocky. So be like, I'm very fit. I play football, like four times a week, and I go to the gym. And, you know, you can tell in between the lines of saying, so I'll kind of let you beat me. I would like, Okay, all right. And then we get into the session. And it always happens like about, I have like a bit of a I like to start a session in a certain way with a guy like that. So I like to score the first point really, really quickly, like literally within 30 seconds. And you can tell they're like, Oh my god, I thought they were gonna have to like, let me score a point. But I'll just really like stick it to them early on. And then the next point, I like to really kind of make them suffer. So I'll have them pinned down in a really awkward position. And maybe they'll think they can get out. But I'll just keep them there and really tie them out for about five minutes. And then I'll like, maybe shit, talk them a little bit. And then I'll put the submission on a bit. And then I'll see they're about to tap. So I'll let it off a little bit. They'll put it on a letter or put it off until they're like begging. And then I'll like I'll score my second point. And then you just see that eyes just this look that I just like, Oh, fuck.

Nick VinZant 18:25

Good for you. Good for you. Yeah, you're

Miss Scorpion 18:28

just like, Oh, no. And then. And then they always say the same thing. They're like, I thought the videos were fake. And I'm like, I see that in your face. And now you've got another 55 minutes and I'm gonna fuck you up.

Nick VinZant 18:43

Like, so I'm probably would be one of those guys where I'd be like, all right, sure. Right, because men are just naturally we're used to being a woman. Right? We are definitely like that. And I don't know, if I was there ever. Like, oh my gosh, she's fucking me up. Okay, I'll just kind of ask this directly then necessarily, like, if it's a sexual thing. How are they? Where are they getting the release? Like, are you doing that? Are they going home and doing that? Do you have a like a side room? They go do that or how does that kind of work?

Miss Scorpion 19:16

And that is in my presence. There is no release whatsoever. What I'm sure the very second they step in their house. They're doing whatever they need to do. But no, I do not. I remember someone emailed me and they were like, Oh, so I'd like to wrestle with you. And then after you've beaten me, could you like, get me off? And I was like, Listen, Mister, I will beat you. But if anyone's gonna get off after I win, it would be me. I when I get what I want. However, I will do whatever I want my own private time. You are just getting beaten and then hoof out the door.

Nick VinZant 19:56

Is that is that your personal um code so to speak, or is that kind of common throughout the industry are the different, different wrestlers do? Do it differently? Like some might engage in that?

Miss Scorpion 20:09

Everyone's totally different? Yeah, everyone's totally different. Like, for example, and that is one thing I really, really love about working the fetish interest industry, because they're like, the options for what you can offer are gigantic. And you can literally just pick and choose. So for example, I used to offer competitive wrestling, which very few wrestlers do. So that was like something unusual that I did. And then I have some experience with bondage wrestling, where you like wrestling, and then you tie your the person actively tie them up as you're going, which is something that other people wouldn't do. But then other people might do more stuff in the what I would call like, the sexy end of things. And so, and then maybe they do like strap on and stuff as well, which is something I'm just like, no nudity, anything that involves clothes on, I will consider, I might still say no to some requests. But that is my like, big limit is the the nudity.

Nick VinZant 21:13

Was that always the case? Or was that something that developed later on?

Miss Scorpion 21:17

No, that's always been my limit. When it comes to me doing this work. Like I really, really love it. And it's always been this, for me is just a really natural boundary that is makes it very, very enjoyable for me. Like I know that anybody could walk through my door, and I could have a session with them. But if there was like, oh, what about if it was like slightly sexier? I'll be like, Oh, well, not him and not him and not him and not you either. And now not him either. So that just makes it is. Now I don't want to do that professionally.

Nick VinZant 21:57

How do you kind of protect your safety? Like, are you doing this out of your house?

Miss Scorpion 22:03

So I either session from I have a studio in London or a session when I'm like touring, which could be in Europe or the US or further afield. I get deposits from people, which will be so that's traceable, you know, like electronic payment is traceable. And then I have like, other screening processes as well during your initial email phase.

Nick VinZant 22:27

Have you ever had somebody show up? And then you just been Nope, nope, sorry.

Miss Scorpion 22:32

I had I think I've only ever had I had one guy turn up and his personal hygiene was really bad. And even though so when he arrived I said to him, okay, so there's a shower, in you go and I heard the shower go on. But he came out and his personal hygiene was still really bad. And I was like, Oh, they have a tricky one really, because I I looked at his skin and I thought maybe he has some sort of like medical condition because some people, especially if you do Jiu Jitsu you know that some people, people smell different. However, I was okay, because for that session, he requests I wear a cat suit. So I knew we wouldn't have any skin on skin contact. And he'd also requested to get tied up. So I just tied him up really quickly and sort of like died around the place. So I didn't have to have any any contact. Now how much what are your rates essentially?

Nick VinZant 23:20

Like how much does somebody charge for this?

Miss Scorpion 23:24

Do you want my rate in euros? shekels pounds dollars?

Nick VinZant 23:30

Well, as an American, I am solely I am ignorant of anything else going on? Can I have any other thing in the world?

Miss Scorpion 23:43

That sentence ends that the the my dollar rate, I think at the moment is 375 an hour. So that would be in pounds, you're about 250 maybe 260.

Nick VinZant 23:57

So this can this can be a pretty comfortable full time living, I would assume

Miss Scorpion 24:02

you have to work hard at it because it's there's quite a lot of people doing it now. And you can't just I can't expect to sit in London and like it maybe if I'm in London for a month I'll I'll have maybe maybe 10 hours of clients in a month. But I'll be in London to film. So that's like my main income is the filming.

Nick VinZant 24:25

Are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions?

Miss Scorpion 24:30

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Nick VinZant 24:31

What is your typical client like?

Miss Scorpion 24:34

Are there's really I think there's I think there's a bit of a myth around the type of man that goes to see a dominatrix or you know, somebody like me who's in the domination world. My clients, I won't see anyone under the age of 21. So my clients age from 21 up to the oldest person I've ever seen, which was arranged for me by somebody else was 75. I didn't really Who's gonna be 75? I got there and he was 75. And I thought Damn, I do not want a session with you again, because I was worried that he was going to like die.

Nick VinZant 25:11

If they if they fit a certain professional kind of model like, are they usually more or?

Miss Scorpion 25:17

No, there's no particular socio economic grouping, you will see slightly more people who have got slightly more money just because of you know, it's in the day, it's a luxury service. But I've had someone come to see me that worked as a, like a pop washer in the kitchen. He would just save up and he would have like one session a year. What is your fate? Do

Nick VinZant 25:38

you have a finishing move? And if so, what is your favorite? Ooh,

Miss Scorpion 25:43

okay, good question. My favorite move is the rear naked choke with the body triangle likes my ultimate favorite, because you're like crushing their ribs. And then you're like, crushing their neck as well. And you're in such a dominant position when you're on their back to. It's really, really good. I used to use that. And I remember when I was training Jiu Jitsu at my, at the gym in London. And I mean, this guy, we're about the same standard is this. This French guy, we're both blue belts. And so we'd always have like, a pretty good like, ding dong match. And then we were rolling, but the other people in the class like watching us, and I caught him in this move. And you could tell he didn't while it's happening. He was making nice noises for like a minute like that eventually taught, but he said a really funny comment. He was like, Oh, I feel like I feel like that's my terrible French accent. I felt like James Bond when it we think it's Xeni on a top like, crushes him to death, I don't remember during mid scene. But I couldn't stop laughing because in the session Wrestling World that is like, a scene that got a lot of guys into session wrestling, because it was like, they saw this like sexy, powerful woman, like crush this guy. And they were like, God, damn, that is like, that's what I like. I've just seen what I like on film.

Nick VinZant 27:11

I would imagine it's kind of a world where people would be like, I did not know that about myself.

Miss Scorpion 27:17

Yeah. And I think it's like, suddenly you saw something and you're like, Oh, hold on a minute. This is I've had these feelings like, especially when, because those people who were like kinky that they that these feelings have been coming up from when they were very, very young. So you kind of had these feelings, but you can't, you can't really like put your finger on it. And then suddenly, you've watched a movie or you've read a comic or something. And you're like, Oh, that is that.

Nick VinZant 27:46

Are your clients? Are they shy about it?

Miss Scorpion 27:50

I'll give you some examples. So so one guy, he really really loved pro wrestling. And so I would meet him like a pro wrestling ring. And I would wear like, the shiny wrestling boots and the shiny tights and the shiny leotard. And we do some of like the like the camel clutch and things like that some of the progress and moves that we discuss. And, and I was like to like, chat to people. Afterwards, I was chatting to him. And one of the things he said he was like, all cold like really, really enjoyed this. But I'd be so so ashamed if my friends found out what I was doing. And I was like, you'd be ashamed if your friends found out you like rolling around with a hot woman in a sexy outfit. He was like, Oh, well, when you put like, that doesn't sound quite so bad. I was like, exactly.

Nick VinZant 28:38

I've never understood this social stigma around people's various kind of kinks. like everybody's got something. Yeah,

Miss Scorpion 28:47

yeah, I think there's, there's there's so much there's so much shame and stigma around desire. Yeah, they base it really hard for people. I know, like a guy that I dated like a little while back. He was really, really, really, really submissive. And he grown up in this like, tiny little town in Devon. And he was literally like, before the internet, and he lives literally like, I'm the only person in the world that's like this, you know, especially when we're in such like a male dominated society, like he would have been growing up in like the late mid mid to late 70s. And to be to say, Oh, I want a woman to be in charge. Like, what's wrong with you?

Nick VinZant 29:32

I would imagine can it be therapeutic for people?

Miss Scorpion 29:35

Yeah, he ended up having some like massive addiction problems because of because of these desires. And him literally been like, I'm the only person on the planet, there's must be something wrong with me. And then he went through a lot of therapy. And he's like, Oh, it's okay. I'm submissive. This is this is alright. Obviously it's slightly longer process than that. But yeah, hugely cathartic for him? Good for him? Yeah. Yeah. But sadly, there is a lot of shame around it for people for some some of my clients and like, I'm sure it's the same for other session methods I know. And dominatrixes and other fetish providers will be the only people that our clients will really speak to about their desires. most frequent request, most interesting request. most frequent request, I'd say it's definitely like this scissor hold thing. So it's just wanting to feel like the power of the killer. sighs Yeah. So maybe they want to feel like your legs, like crushing their ribs or their neck. Yeah, scissor hold. Google it. And then most interesting requests was the second one.

Nick VinZant 30:57

Yes, yes.

Miss Scorpion 30:59

Does this mean most interesting requests that I have fulfilled? Because you get like, you get loads of like, requests that you're like, Ooh, that's a bit kooky, but then you think you're probably a time waster. So yeah, some of them are like, madness. Yeah. Like the man, I'll give you the Okay, I'll give you one which was definitely a time waster but hilarious. And he wanted me to, he wanted me to run over his penis with my car. Which is, when you really think about it, I was like, Well, how are you going to do that? Like, I'm assuming he's an, you know, even if he's a very well endowed man, yeah, you'd have you like, on the edge of the pavement? And I'm gonna think, or am I gonna have to bury him? And then that's just sticking out. I didn't reply to his email, but I have saved it in the special folder, which I will be creating my book from.

Nick VinZant 32:04

Yeah, that's logistically, how do you even you'd have to be you'd have to be gifted in that regard, I think. Yeah. And also, like, you got to do it in a you couldn't do it like in public, necessarily, at least not without a lot of people wondering.

Miss Scorpion 32:25

Yeah, yeah, I was like, I think logistically, that's gonna be tricky, so I'm gonna say no. And yeah, so most interesting quest that I have fulfilled. I think the thing is, once you're in this world for a while, everything becomes like okay, yeah, so, okay, I get maybe maybe the pizza pan won, because the outfit was really like, really cool. And I had to be pizza pan. But I also had to do like pizza pan impressions. Which I will not do for you now. Because I haven't you know, warmed up my voice or anything. By to pizza pan impressions. Yeah, and he had a real foot fetish, then he would like the game was he would try cuz I had like the green tights and then like the green felt shoes, he would try and like wrestle, and he would try and take my felt shoes off.

Nick VinZant 33:15

Oh, that's another one I've like I've never quite just under was never my thing, necessarily was. I don't really have one at least so that's why I'm kind of like, come on. I want to know what it's gonna be. Like, someday.

Miss Scorpion 33:35

But they just think they just think it's normal. So like, in British culture in like, the 80s and 90s. It was like, big tits. Everyone, like big tits. And it was like, if you'd said, Oh, but that girl's got like a really like a really she got a really nice but like a nice big, but people have been like, but really like, a big tits culture here. So you're a bit strange. And she said, Oh, I think she's got really nice big feet ever been like, Whoa, okay. Now becoming accepted. And also in the 80s. If you'd said, Oh, I like that girl. She's really muscley people have been like, oh, you're gay. But now CrossFit. And everyone's like, Damn, that girl is like Bob, she's so sexy.

Nick VinZant 34:19

In it strange how things change like that. Right?

Miss Scorpion 34:23

So Nick, that is your homework to work out what your thing is.

Nick VinZant 34:28

Oh, I'm like, oh, someday I'll have a thing of like, I did not know that about myself. Um, um, is this a growing or shrinking industry?

Miss Scorpion 34:40

kink in general is becoming more acceptable. Like we're kind of discussing like, I think I was having this conversation like 30 years ago. People have been like, Oh my god, I heard the craziest, craziest thing. And now people be like, Oh, sure. wrestler. This is interesting. Oh, I was talking. I have another friend who's a sex worker. can go, it's like, people are becoming a lot more open. So I think there'll be more people who perhaps would have kept it as like their dirty little secret will now be getting like brave enough to explore it.

Nick VinZant 35:13

That's really all the questions I got. Do you have anything, anything you think we missed? Or what's coming up next for you? How can people get a hold of yet,

Miss Scorpion 35:21

because at the moment, the corona situation in the UK is really, really bad. So I'm just sort of sitting it out. So maybe I'll go back in session in May. But in the meantime, I'm making films again. So I'm back filming. And I'll just do that until, until I can go back again, filming the bigger part of my business. Anyway, I'd

Nick VinZant 35:42

say that's maybe 70% of my income. I want to thank Miss Scorpion for joining us if you want to connect with her, we have a link to her on our social media accounts. We're Profoundly Pointless on Instagram and Twitter. And we have also included her information in this episode description.

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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.