Table Tennis Olympians Sam Walker and Kanak Jha

From National Championships to the Olympic Games, Professional Table Tennis players Sam Walker and Kanak Jha have represented their countries at the highest levels. We talk table tennis vs ping pong, the Tokyo Olympics and the best table tennis trash talk. Then, we countdown a special thirst-quenching Top 5.

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Interview with Table Tennis Pros Sam Walker and Kanak Jha

Nick VinZant 0:12

Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant coming up in this episode of Olympic Games and drinking games,

Sam Walker 0:22

I remember standing on a stool so I could see over the table and just play him and my dad and my granddad at the beginning. And he said, Yes, I was, too, when, when he first started, get got me playing,

Kanak Jha 0:34

the ball is traveling. It's such an intense speed that a lot of times you're not really thinking consciously or what's happening in that point, you're just kind of reacting naturally. And when you got the uniform, and you see the US flag on your shirt, it's a really humbling.

Sam Walker 0:52

But doing an Olympics was just that was so many specialists, we had to get through that first match against France, I think we'd be friends, three, two, it was like five and a half hours long.

Nick VinZant 1:04

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. We have two guests today. So I want to get right to them. Both of our guests are professional table tennis players who have competed at the highest level. Sam Walker competed for Great Britain in the 2016 Olympics and at the Commonwealth Games, and cannot jauh competing for the United States at the 2016 Olympics. And is the United States world champion. Just for some housekeeping, I'll ask a question. You'll hear Sam Walker first, and then cannot jaw. So what's your earliest memory? What's your earliest memory of table tennis?

Sam Walker 1:49

I've always played as far back as I can remember, I've played three sports. So table tennis, cricket, and football. And I remember I remember standing on a stool so I could see over the table and just play him and my dad and my granddad at the beginning. And he said yes, I was too. When, when he first started get got me playing,

Kanak Jha 2:10

I would say my earliest memories playing with my mom, actually the one local community center, like five minutes from my home in California. Where are you?

Nick VinZant 2:20

When did you realize you were good?

Sam Walker 2:22

I guess I've realized I was good was when I was like nine or 10. So that's kind of when I realized, okay, actually, you know what, like, I am quite good at this game.

Kanak Jha 2:32

The first time I played the tournament internationally was when I was 11. It was a 12. And under competition kind of for international for young players, I kind of had no idea what to expect going in there. I thought maybe I would be terrible. But no, I was okay, compared to a lot of the kids from the other countries. And that kind of gave me an idea that I was not bad for my age.

Nick VinZant 3:00

So what makes you good at it? Do you have like an impeccable strategy? Are you really athletic, like great reflexes? Like why are you good at

Kanak Jha 3:10

I think tennis in general, it's a sport that requires a lot of different qualities to be a good player. I mean, mentally, you have to be extremely focused on the table and physically have to be quite fast and explosive, with a lot of fast movements in the sport, everything is fine. As you know, there's not many long rallies, per se compared to tennis or badminton. But rallies are really short and intense. For me naturally, I've always had quite a good sense of focus and awareness of what's going on in the match. So I can kind of see the game pretty well compared to a lot of players. And I think that's one of my biggest strength. Now, there's

Sam Walker 3:55

a lot of different factors right now. One being simply the amount of hours I've trained for it, and the amount of experience I've got now. And you know, being just keeping that motivation, that dedication to go into practice every day for four or five, six hours, sometimes every day. And the mentality around that. And, you know, times when they are hard when you know you've put in a lot of practice, you're not seeing the results that sometimes are a bit demoralizing to then keep getting up to go to practice. And, you know, a lot of people say to me, like, oh, but you've got a great life, you know, you can you get to travel a lot for your job, you get to do something that you love, which is absolutely true. You know, I don't feel sorry for myself one bit, but sometimes it's really hard when you don't see. See the work straightaway. You know, like the results of the work you've been doing straightaway. Sometimes it can take you know, a couple of years to see something happen in a match that you've been practicing and the amount of time you spend on your own travel in Table Tennis in individual sport. So although you're playing for clubs and you're playing for your country, you spend a lot of time on your own. And you have you have to learn to, you know, enjoy that time being by yourself. And, and that's something that I think a lot of table tennis players have struggled with. And in terms of mental health as well, I think there's been a lot of like, people struggled with mental health in table tennis, that probably not a lot of people know about, because of the way the sport is. So there's obviously, when you say, how would you be good at table tennis, obviously, you have to be good at Table Tennis on one side, you know, through the training and everything like that. But you're also have to learn and understand that you're going to be, you know, doing a lot of traveling by yourself, you're going to spend a lot of time in hotel rooms by yourself. And you have to learn how to kind of deal with that and be be happy and enjoy that

Nick VinZant 6:01

when you go up against somebody. Obviously, you're trying to win the point. But what are you trying to do? Are you trying to put enough spin on it so that it puts them out of position? Are you trying to just blasted past them? Like, what's this? What's this strategy?

Sam Walker 6:16

It's kind of dependent. First of all, well, first of all, my strategies will be to go and try and play my game, which is an attacking game, I want to play in top spins, rather than, you know, the defensive shots. I want to, you know, try to be get playing aggressive, playing early, taking the ball early and, and you know, playing with a lot of spin but topspin rather than backspin and be an attacking. So that's my first game plan against anybody, then the rest of it in terms of the very detailed tactical stuff. So am I gonna serve? Sure, am I gonna serve long? Do I play more to the backend more to the forehand? How do I receive that all depends on which player I'm playing against, that comes with study in that player before you play them. Or sometimes you just know the players, you know, a lot of players, you just know, because you've played throughout the tournament and the leagues for so long. And you just know those players anyway.

Kanak Jha 7:20

I mean, in the end, you're trying to just win the point, however you can, I would say the basic strategy, especially in higher level table tennis is to try to kind of impose your game onto the opponent. For example, My style is I really like to stay close to the table and play with a lot of speed. What I try to do is not let the other opponent oftentimes have more power than me have more time to play their big shots and longer swings and try to put them under a lot of time pressure

Nick VinZant 7:53

table tennis more than any other sport that I can think of the difference between what reg, what it looks like when regular people play and what professional people play. It looks like a completely different sport.

Kanak Jha 8:06

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's, it's a special compared to a lot of people. Yes, it's really a different sport from what people imagine their heads, the professional stage, it's a really high speed and very physical sport in general. So much spin in on the ball and the players are so physically fit with a lot of power and precision. So it's really a really technical as well as physical sport. And I think, I mean, that's one of the things I love about it is that it has so many different aspects to the game, not just the physical side, the technical and mental side.

Nick VinZant 8:43

How fast is that ball moving? Does anybody ever, like clock it with a radar gun or anything?

Kanak Jha 8:50

It's really quite fast. I'll tell you that. Actually, it's fine. Today in my training, we had a kind of device that helped practice speed of the ball. And I mean, sorry for the people watching us because I mean, Jeremy, so these kilometers, but I mean, the ball is going at an average of 7080 kilometers per hour or even going to 100 kilometers per hour. So it's really fast sport.

Nick VinZant 9:18

I only know this because I live close to Canada, but 100 kilometers an hour is 60 miles an hour. So like you You must have very good reflexes I'm assuming.

Kanak Jha 9:28

Yeah, definitely. reflex is a huge part of the field. And it's I think it's one of the fastest reflex ports to be honest, you require a tremendous amount of reflex. I mean, the ball is traveling so fast and often with a lot of speeding that you have to be able to adjust and even less than a second at times. When you're judging the spin. Are you watching the ball itself? Or are you watching how your opponent hits it? To tell what the spin is going to be? Normally you're watching the opponent And first, of course, how he hits it. And also, in many cases, you can hear the sound if the racket makes of the opponent when they hit it, which helps give you a better idea of the spin on the ball,

Nick VinZant 10:15

you can tell the spin by the sound of it. Yeah,

Kanak Jha 10:18

I mean, the sound is, I would say a part of the way players read the spin on the Pro, for example, if it's a very brushing sound from the opponent, you can tell there's a lot of spin on the ball, then, of course, it also comes with a lot of just muscle memory, where naturally, you just know what's been a ball from so many different practice sessions with different players. I mean, in the master game, the ball is traveling, it's such an intense speed that a lot of times, you're not really thinking consciously, or what's happening in that point, you're just kind of reacting naturally and making small adjustments with your head during the point. But a lot of the techniques are just what you practice in the hall every day, and it's muscle memory.

Sam Walker 11:04

But it depends if if I've played a shot first, if we're in the rally, I played my shot first. And there's only so many different variations of spend that they could put on, depending on what shot I've done. So it's easier to predict when you're in the rally, because you can kind of minimize their their options. Whereas when they serve, and they've got the ball in their hand, and there's not been any shot, before that they have every single option that they are capable of doing. So that's when it's a lot harder. And that's when I will, and probably most players will then watch the ball a lot more closely, depending on see which way the ball experience. So there's a little, there's a little marking on the balls, which is like the brand of the ball. So there's always a marking to say which brand has made the ball. And you can always see that spinning. And the more you practice it and the more you see and the more you concentrate in on that, the easier and quicker it gets to read that spin and see that that marks been in in a certain direction or sometimes not speeding, which means there's there's not much spin on the ball.

Nick VinZant 12:24

So you're never like thinking, Oh, I should hit this to the left side, or Oh, I should hit this to the right side. It all just kind of happened.

Kanak Jha 12:31

Yeah, definitely, I think in the rally when you're attacking, it's normally the other players defending so you have a little bit more time. And then you're kind of thinking more to the point. But for example, the rally is going really fast and both players are attacking close to the table, then most of the time, it's really hard to think where to play the ball or how to play the ball. And it's more just reflexes and subconsciously trying to reach the ball in time

Nick VinZant 12:59

are most like in terms of a physical size, like is there an optimal size for a table tennis player

Kanak Jha 13:06

compared to other sports, it's a lot more open ended. Then for example, in gymnastics where normally they're quite short, and obviously extremely flexible and explosive. I mean, table tennis, there are some general similarities between all high level players. And normally you need a really strong, an explosive legs and kind of a strong lower body. I mean, the core is also extremely important because I mean, it feels like you're changing directions so fast and depends a lot on your style. Because in table tennis players tend to have a lot of different styles depending on their body type. For example, me I'm quite short and a bit smaller than most high level tennis players, which is why my style is trying to be a little more quicker and faster and staying closer to the table to give the opponent more time pressure versus some players that are taller and bigger. And they're generally not as fast as the smaller players and they need more time and they tend to play a more powerful game.

Nick VinZant 14:16

What's it like competing for your country

Kanak Jha 14:18

is it's always amazing to play for your country, you know, whatever, whichever tournament that is. But doing an Olympics was just that was something special. It's what obviously what, you know, I took up table tennis because I want to represent my country at the biggest stage in the world. And that's the Olympics for our sport. And yeah, it was just such an incredible feeling to be able to go out there and play in front of, you know, one of the biggest crowds we've had as certainly as one of the best crowds I've had as a player in Rio, and we're to get through that first match against France. I think We'd be France Three, two, it was like five and a half hours long, like the longest match ever recorded in table tennis, and Olympics. So it was crazy.

Sam Walker 15:11

I mean, it's an amazing feeling for sure. I remember the first time when I competed, and I was young. And when you got the uniform, and you see the US flag on your shirt, it's a really humbling feeling. Because when growing up you see on TV and a dream, you know that these are really a special group of people. So me to represent my country. It feels like the greatest honor you know, and I'm always so proud to wear the shirt. And it also gives you a bit of a extra motivation when you put on the shirt to know Wow. Now representing my country now, it's a great feeling. And a very proud feeling. Were you in Rio, I competed in Rio. I was really young at the time I was 16 years old. And so I say it was a really cool experience. I lost really early in the competition. The first, say the first preliminary round, I lost quite fast. And that was a really memorable experience for sure. And it gave me a lot of experience and confidence going forward. The Olympics is the biggest of events for me, for everybody in general. And also for table tennis. It's really the most prestigious event there is in the sport. I mean, it's really exciting. And looking forward to it and hope to compete. Well there.

Nick VinZant 16:36

Are you ready for some harder slash listeners submitted questions?

Kanak Jha 16:42

I don't know. But I think so.

Nick VinZant 16:44

So let's see, which title Do you prefer table tennis or ping pong.

Kanak Jha 16:49

I prefer table tennis Jessica gets it sounds a bit more professional. But I know a lot of people call ping pong too. To be honest, when I'm in the US, I called ping pong to people also, because they kind of have a better recognition of this word. But if you can, I would say table tennis,

Nick VinZant 17:06

hardest type of spin for you to deal with.

Kanak Jha 17:11

There's a lot of spins in the game. I gotta say the hardest type of spin to do is when you don't know what spin is coming, which is most often the case when a player is serving, and they have a really quick wrist motion. And you almost couldn't catch what they what they just did. And then if you don't know what spins coming, you can just touch your racket and fly off to the left side, the right side, just directly down. So the hardest spin is the one you don't know. It's on the ball.

Nick VinZant 17:43

I would imagine that that this is the type of sport where even professionals can sometimes look completely ridiculous, right? Like the ball just goes shooting off into the stands. Does that happen?

Kanak Jha 17:54

Yeah, I mean, a lot of times you can even top players they can look, I mean bad, you could say compared to what people would think. If you miss read the spinny can often times lead the ball going completely opposite the way you want the ball to go.

Nick VinZant 18:10

I can't say that I've watched a lot of table tennis or tennis. But it does seem to me like the person serving has a massive advantage, right, and the person who wins seems to be the one that can eventually break serve.

Kanak Jha 18:23

Yeah, the serve is a big advantage in sports. I mean, I would say like this, in general, when it's close, you want to be the one serving, especially when you reach a higher level, the players they're playing with so much quality on the ball that a lot of time what you're practicing is having to serve and protect the next ball. So what players especially the high level do is they're so knowledgeable about the spin they're putting on the serve, they kind of know what to expect on their sleeve. And that helps them prepare their shots beforehand, while compared to and once you reach the rally, I mean, it's more speed and reflexes and just kind of subconscious playing but especially in table tennis I'm not so knowledgeable about tennis is that with the server, you can really prepare how you want to rally to start. So the server definitely is a really big advantage. And for the most part, the server has the advantage because he can kind of dictate how the rally will start.

Nick VinZant 19:24

I've always wondered when I've seen it right. And you see some of those like long rallies and both players are like as far back as they can possibly go. Like why doesn't somebody just hit it short?

Kanak Jha 19:35

Yeah, I mean, when the both the pump both the players are kind of farther away from the table. In general, you're playing the ball with a lot of topspin because you need the ball to have the power to go to the other side. So you're playing the ball without topspin, which means when it bounces on the table, it kicks a lot to the underside of the table in general Yes, it is pretty much almost impossible. I won't say possible because everything is possible. But it's almost impossible to play the ball short, just because you have to normally play a lot of pops and back just to have the power to make it reach over to the other side of the table. I mean, what a lot of players like to do is when they're close to the table, and the other players kind of farther away in defending is they like just kind of call it a drop shot, where they just kind of touch the ball and make it go short over the table. So the player who's farther farther away from the table, can't run back in time to catch it. But it's a really advanced shot and quite difficult to do.

Nick VinZant 20:44

Do you ever name any of your shots? Like, the Jha express or something like that?

Kanak Jha 20:51

Yeah, I suppose it's a bad name. No, normally not.

Nick VinZant 20:57

Is there trash talking and table tennis.

Kanak Jha 21:01

I think there's trash talking and all sports. To the degree I think more than others. I mean, we're definitely not like maybe the UFC or NFL or something where we're just trash talking on the court. Most of us are quite polite, in most cases. I think one of the things to be honest, that has to do with that is sport is really dominated by Asians at the higher level, there's the Asian countries are really so strong in the sport, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan. And in general Asian cultures, they're really polite on the table in the way that they don't trash talker, kind of provoked better players, that's kind of guess how their culture is seep maybe a bit into other countries at a higher level. But there's definitely some trash talk and some seven motions, which always course makes it fun for both the players and the spectators, you can get this more kind of arguments with the umpire. Because

Sam Walker 22:05

there's a lot of rules around the service that you're not allowed, you know, you have to throw the ball up so high, you're not allowed to hide the contact. So when the ball hits your bat, you're not allowed to hide that contact from your opponent's like vision. So they have to be able to see that contact so that they've got a chance to read in the spin. And you have to have like a flat palm, you can't put spin on with your hand when you throw the ball up. So there's a lot of, you know, that is a tough thing that for an umpire to kind of have to judge all of those things. And it's quite a tough thing to referee. But you know, when you can imagine when you know, there's a big match in a big stage, and, you know, some guy's got a really obviously illegal serve, because he's totally hiding it, throwing it back, you have to throw the ball up straight. Because those kinds of things make it really hard to receive a surf. You know, if you throw the ball straight onto the bat, rather than up, you can generate so much more spin and pace on your surf. And it makes it very difficult to read the surf. And some players bring that out only in an important point. And that's when you can have a big argument because is not always easy for the umpires to see when when a player has not done it or match. And then suddenly, it's his nine oh, in the last set. And they need two more points to win and they've got two serves and there's bring out these two serves that are totally illegal out of nowhere. And it's quite tough for an umpire to stand up and say no, that's, that's an illegal serve. Because then your opponent, get their opponent or get the point. You know, so. And that's when you can have arguments in in table tennis. That's the main reason you get arguments and kinda, you don't really get trash talk. But between if you only do between the mace that they're like you say, I like if your friend is a really bad shot, you'll say oh, that's got his own plane ticket, you know, like he's missed a table by like miles that we tried to play a sharp and you say, you know, that was great. You're implying that it's got its own flight ticket or, you know, things like that. Yeah, there's there's some when I used to play that local league that everybody used to say like, if if I served off if I served off in local League, there's this against this one guy. So local league is when I was going back to when I was like 1011 years old playing against all these old guys, which is just like in a local league kind of competition. And this other guy, you'd always if I saved off it always go Happy birthday. Like you know cuz it's just like an easy it's like the easiest point to give him who is the greatest table tennis player who's the Michael Jordan of table tennis.

Kanak Jha 25:00

I mean, for me, and for most players, its name is Milan. He's from China. And he's the current Olympic champion, he wanted Rio, and he's the, the previous three World Championships, he has won, he's really something, there's something else in the sport, and he will also be competing in Tokyo. And if he manages to win there, I think he'll be the first or second seed going in there, he'll be the first player in history to win two Olympics. And that two, two Olympics in a row. So

Sam Walker 25:30

the Chinese players in table tennis is, you know, almost, you know, everybody knows that the Chinese are the best at table tennis. And they are incredible. And they haven't lost a team match for 21 years now. Which is incredible. When you look at any nation of in any sport, which, which nation has gone 21 years without losing a team match, you know, in any sport, if you can name me one, then that's just incredible. You know, when I hear people talking about are these are this is the best sports team in the world. This they are, you know, for me, the best sports team in the world has been China and table tennis because they've not lost a match for 21 years. And that's, you know, that's gone through three different generations of players maybe more.

Nick VinZant 26:27

This this being an Olympian or a table tennis pro help you with the ladies is the question.

Kanak Jha 26:33

I think being an Olympian maybe without more of us and saying I would say you're being punked, US normally doesn't have such a high connotation in someone's mind.

Nick VinZant 26:48

Yeah, you gotta lead with the Olympian.

Can this be a living for you? Right? Could you do this for 1015 however many more years and then retire,

Kanak Jha 27:11

I would say it is possible if you're, if you're at a really top and you really maximize your profits in terms of sponsorships and competing and prize money and the league. But in general, it is really difficult. And it is a lower salary sport compared to other other sports and in the US, it is impossible to be a professional tennis player.

Nick VinZant 27:31

How good are you at beer pong?

Sam Walker 27:36

You know, I haven't played beer pong, probably since I was about 16 or 17. house buyers, when I was like, still like, towards just coming towards the end of school. And I did actually used to be really good. So if anyone wants to challenge me, I'd be well for a game cuz I've not played for ages and ages.

Memory Researcher Dr. Colleen Parks

Memories are the stories of our lives. They connect us to our past and predict our future. But how are memories created and why do we forget? Memory Researcher Dr. Collen Parks joins us to explain. We talk how memories are made, the secret to improving your memory and if we’ll ever be able to download our memories. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Things We Always Forget.

Interview with Memory Researcher Dr. Colleen Parks

Nick VinZant 0:11

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

Dr. Colleen Parks 0:26

what's really happening is you are reconstructing things from bits and pieces that you have in the present. I think we're still quite a ways away from being able to download memory. Is it impossible? I'm not sure. At a just level, like just knowing what happened, you probably have it down really well. When it comes to remembering really specific details about something, there's a good chance you have a lot of those incorrect.

Nick VinZant 0:58

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 I want to get right to our first guest. Because this is absolutely fascinating to me. We're going to talk about memory, specifically, what happens in your brain when you remember something, why you remember some things and forget others. And if our memories could ever be downloaded, this is memory researcher, Dr. Colleen parks, how does memory work?

Dr. Colleen Parks 1:32

I would say the answer is probably to start with how it doesn't work. So it's not like a video. We're not recording things constantly. It's not like a filing cabinet, you can't go back in and just pick up the same file. What's really happening is you are reconstructing things from bits and pieces that you have in the present. So you might have somebody asked you having somebody asked you a question. And that serves as a cue to your own memory. Whether that will be successful or not depends a lot on how good the cue is. So, you know, if they're asking you a really a really vague question, then you might not be able to remember whatever it is they're trying to get at. Whereas if they asked you something very specific, like, you know what happened at the party last night, that you would be much more likely to be able to remember. But I think I think the takeaway is, when I say memory is reconstructive. What I mean is, it's kind of like you're getting these bits and pieces back, but it's not going to be perfect. So you're going to make little mistakes that most of the time don't matter at all. And sometimes you make a bigger mistake, that does matter. It's okay, it works most of the time. And the purpose of memory is not to record our lives. It's not to it's not even for us to reminisce really, or to think back specifically, it's really to give us an understanding of what's going on and help us you know, expect what might come next. So it helps us build predictions about our the world around us. And sometimes that means you need to remember a specific event, like, you know, how did this person act the last time I saw them, but other times, you don't need all the details in order to predict something, you know, I don't have to remember everything in my kitchen to know what your kitchen is going to kind of be like in general.

Nick VinZant 3:50

So when we remember something, what I'm imagining is, is there a physical change in our brain? Like how are we remembering it?

Dr. Colleen Parks 4:00

Yes, there is. So there is a structure called the hippocampus. It's kind of buried in the brain, it's underneath some cortical layers. That structure is really important for remembering previous episodes of something or a previous event. So what happens is, neurons fire in in that particular structure. And it kind of connects all of these different pieces together. So if you are remembering a visual component of something, this one structure the hippocampus is going to talk to the you know, visual processing areas in the brain. It can then connect up all of these kind of different sensory components of the memory and in conjunction with some other some other areas like that is how you remember is you've got this kind of indexing system. Right. And that's kind of what the hippocampus is doing.

Nick VinZant 5:04

When we decide kind of what we remember and what we forget, does our brain subconsciously make that decision? Right? So something happens, but our brain decides, hey, this thing is important. Or do we just happen to remember it,

Dr. Colleen Parks 5:20

I would say more often than not, there's something there. That makes it somewhat more important to remember than say what you had for breakfast yesterday. So if you spilled your breakfast in your lap, then maybe you would remember it for longer than you would if you had not, and it was just kind of a normal morning. So something that is important for what we remember are things like emotion, whether it's connected with some sort of reward, like we're going to get something out of it. And that kind of tags a memory as being more important than other memories. So what happens is, you get these little kind of tags, along with things that happen. So, you know, you spill your breakfast in your lap? Well, that's novel, right? It probably hasn't happened a lot. And so that's going to stick out a little bit more, it's going to garner more attention from you. And so you'll be more likely to remember it. Whereas when you normally eating breakfast, you're not really paying attention to what you're doing.

Nick VinZant 6:36

There's some subconscious thing that triggers even if we don't realize it, that's flags, this is being like, Hey, you might need this for later.

Dr. Colleen Parks 6:44

Possibly, yeah. And I think it can be both conscious and subconscious. So you would have some sort of emotional reaction that is conscious. But you it's not like you're trying to remember it, right? It's just that that little emotional tag is going to make that memory a little bit more important than whatever happened right? Before that was part of your normal routine.

Nick VinZant 7:08

I'll use this analogy of a computer harddrive. And hopefully for the more computer educated people, I don't mess this up. But I always remember them talking about like, right, if you delete a file, it's not really gone. It's still there somewhere. It's just a lot harder to find. When we don't remember something. Is it there somewhere? We just can't find it? Or is it really like the brain just says, we're done with this get rid? Yeah,

Dr. Colleen Parks 7:33

both I would say. So. There's a lot of times when you will forget something, and then you remember it later on. Right? In those cases, what happened is it's like you're just running up against a wall or something. It's your your, we call it blocking. That doesn't mean that the information isn't there. But for some reason, you're not able to get to it at that moment. But there are also times when it seems like the information is just gone. And we think that it kind of depends on what kind of information it is. If it's, you know, kind of simple information, say a face, recognizing a face, that is probably still there later on. But if you have to remember the connection between a face and a name, that's the kind of information that might just we don't know exactly how but somehow it disappears. Can you research how someone forgets? Yeah, actually, that's really interesting, because I am just starting to get into that kind of research. So one of the things that we're looking at is kind of how, how different types of memory processes decline over time. So more generally, what we're doing is just looking at how memory declines over time. And seeing if the way that it declines differs depending on like the type of information, again, like a single face versus a face and a name. Those two types of pieces of information might decline differently over time.

Nick VinZant 9:26

What are some of the other research that you're working on?

Dr. Colleen Parks 9:29

So I'm also looking at a way that memory changes over time. The technical term is reconsolidation. But essentially, it's just how does memory change? Well, traumatic memory is something that people are working on. This is not something I'm working on myself, but there is a lot of interest in this kind of memory change and how it might be beneficial for helping to treat PTSD because one of the main symptoms of PTSD is maladaptive memories. So if you can break the connection between somebody's conscious memory of this traumatic event, and their fear response, like their bodily response to it, you can help them with those maladaptive memories so that they can still remember what happened, but no longer have the anxiety and the fear. So that's the direction this kind of research is going in. When you

Nick VinZant 10:29

look at people's memories. Do we generally? Are they generally good? Or are we generally bad at remembering things? Like if you were to ask the average person about what happened? And then we went and looked at a surveillance camera of what happened, would we be pretty close? Or pretty far away?

Dr. Colleen Parks 10:47

Yeah, that's really interesting, because there was a recent study that came out, and they tested random people's memory for public events. And then they asked a bunch of memory experts, how well are these people going to do? And the memory experts massively underestimated? how well they did? So they actually remembered things pretty well. Now, did they get all the specific details? Right, that's another question. But did they remember that something happened? With pretty good accuracy? Yeah, they did. So I would say that, in general, our memory is pretty good. Right? It's just when you get into specific things, or special circumstances that it gets weird.

Nick VinZant 11:42

Kind of like What color was the car? We remember that it was blue, but we don't remember if it was like navy blue, or dark royal blue, or that kind of stuff? Is that? Is that kind of on the right track?

Dr. Colleen Parks 11:52

Yeah, exactly.

Nick VinZant 11:54

So are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions?

Dr. Colleen Parks 11:58

Okay, I'll give it my best shot.

Nick VinZant 12:00

How closely is memory tied to intelligence?

Dr. Colleen Parks 12:04

That is a good question, there is a pretty good link between the two general intelligence tests that we administer in a lab do have a significant memory component to it. But at the same time, you can have somebody who suffers from amnesia, and their intelligence, as measured on those tests, except for the memory part is fine. So on the one hand, there is a link, and on the other hand, you can distinguish between the two. So memory certainly helps us be more intelligent. But once you have developed, you know, as an adult, if you lose your memory, in the end, when I say you lose your memory, you lose the ability to create new memories. That doesn't necessarily affect your overall intelligence, any chance we will ever be able to download our memories. Oh, I have no idea. But that's really interesting. I don't think we're there yet. I think there's a lot of really cool stuff going on with AI and the brain and brain computer interactions. So we know that there's a bunch of stuff you can do, like people can play games with their mind when they have an ECG, or, you know, the kind of brainwaves. So an ECG that measures brainwaves and talks to a computer. But that's not memory. So I think we're still quite a ways away from being able to download memory. Is it impossible?

Nick VinZant 13:48

I'm not sure. But there is something physical in the brain that is happening. That if we could figure it out, like you could download this physical process as ones and zeros.

Dr. Colleen Parks 14:02

Yeah, potentially, because, I mean, it's all happening at really small scale, like, you know, you can get started talking about proteins folding when you talk about memory, but if you can find the right scale to work at, then Yeah. You know, something is happening there. You have chemical processes, you have electrical processes. And so there are ways to actually read memory from various brain imaging techniques, so you can kind of have somebody imagine something, or remember something, and they can take your brain activity and predict what that thing is.

Nick VinZant 14:50

Like, like, in a broad sense, like, Oh, this is a happy memory or I can specifically predict you're going to this is you in Disney World in 2012. Right?

Dr. Colleen Parks 14:58

more broad than that. Yeah. So it's more like, Okay, are you looking at a face? Or are you looking at a house? Or are you thinking of a face? Or are you thinking of a house? So are you you know, and you can say that with memory as well. So there's the opportunity to predict what people are thinking or imagining. And with that technology, I would imagine that eventually we'd get to something where we are if not able to write to memory, and download memory, we're certainly able to kind of read it better.

Nick VinZant 15:35

Do you think people how much faith should people put in their own memories?

Dr. Colleen Parks 15:40

I would say a decent amount, like, let's say 60/40, something like that. 60% confident 40%? I'm not sure about that. Again, I think it comes down to what we call the gist of something versus the details.

Nick VinZant 16:02

Can we intentionally forget something,

Dr. Colleen Parks 16:05

there is evidence that you can. And there's a debate about how that works. But if you practice not thinking about something, you can reduce the likelihood that you'll remember later on, you're not going to erase it from your memory, but you may be less likely to think about it at some future date. So if we take an example of something like the last really embarrassing thing that you did, right, you probably experienced that and then thought, Oh, I don't really need to remember this. And so maybe you whenever it starts to come to mind, you're like, Oh, no, I'm not thinking about that. Right? So you could replace it with something else, think about something else. The debate is over, whether that's the only way you can do it or not, because there's some evidence that says you just suppress it, somehow, you just, you know, stamp it down, basically stamp on it, and it reduces the likelihood that you'll remember it.

Nick VinZant 17:14

Kind of on that note are repressed memories are real thing. No.

Dr. Colleen Parks 17:20

No, they are not, um, has it ever happened in the history of humanity? Maybe. But the vast majority of them are some sort of false memory. And it's not that the people who are experiencing this are lying in any way, I believe they have this real experience of memory. But that is a subjective experience. It doesn't mean it's accurate, right. And there's a lot of different ways that this can happen. Some people just fall prey to suggestion. There have been a lot of cases of false memories, you know, so called recovered in therapy sessions. And I would say those we trust the least. There are also people who report kind of spontaneously remembering things. However, is it truly a recovered memory? Not necessarily. So there's this anecdote about a woman who was sexually assaulted. And she recovered the memory and told her boyfriend and was like, Oh, my God, this horrible thing happened to me. Her boyfriend said, No, you told me about that five years ago. So yes, it happened. But you it's not a recovered memory, you've already remembered it. So our ability to remember something like that, I told you something already. That declines to so my memory of my memory, can decline. So there are a bunch of different ways that people can develop these things. But the majority of the evidence really just does not support that they are real.

Nick VinZant 19:10

I heard one time that if you remember something, take a picture of it. And then let's say like your good travel memory, and then you see this picture, again of this great moment that you're actually remembering the picture, not the actual event. Is that true?

Dr. Colleen Parks 19:26

I think there's some evidence for that. Yeah. So it's, you know, it's probably a little bit easier to remember the picture because it's like this nice and capsulated scene. So yeah, there's also man, there's evidence that it it can not overwrite, but interfere with the original memory a little bit. So if the picture is more recent, maybe that's just me, you know, maybe you're remembering that better because it's easier to get to it was more recent. So I've had that experience, actually. So I thought that I remembered something at an improbably young age. But I didn't, it was that I had seen pictures of that event. Right? And that's probably what happens to a lot of people who say, Oh, I remember this from when I was two. No, that's pretty unlikely.

Nick VinZant 20:21

What is the earliest we're capable of memory.

Dr. Colleen Parks 20:24

There are certain memory systems in place when we are born, but they're automatic and unconscious. So the kind of memory that people are usually interested in is conscious, like my ability to recollect my ability to reminisce or something like that, that starts coming online. Probably at the same time, language starts coming online. And it develops over adolescence and probably reaches its peak somewhere around, I would say, 18 to 25.

Nick VinZant 20:58

When you look at, at older people and talking 70s 80s, did have their memories just faded? Or has their brain just age to the point where it can't quite get them as easily? Or is there? Is that even a difference? Really?

Dr. Colleen Parks 21:13

Well, I would say it has gotten to a point with all the changes that are happening to the brain as we age, it's gotten to a point where it's harder to get back to memories like to retrieve them, it's also harder to encode new memories or to, you know, learn new information. So trying to remember a face and a name, when you're at is going to be a lot harder than doing that when you're 20.

Nick VinZant 21:43

I never thought of that, like you would have difficulty making a new memory.

Dr. Colleen Parks 21:47

Yeah, and that's, um, that's really common. And that's what happens, actually, when we talk about amnesia is usually it's not that they can't remember their past at all, it's that they have trouble making new memories. What why would that make them seem like they can't remember their past? There is going to be some loss of memory from the past. But in general, those the older memories are actually more protected than the newer memories. So the newer memories are, you know, the older memories are there because they're it's kind of like survival of the fittest. Right. So you can get back to the older ones more easily than the newer ones, because the newer ones are decaying or declining over time. And they're declining much more quickly than the older ones are. But when when we get older, and we start forgetting things, usually what we're forgetting is, you know, we're forgetting something that I did yesterday, did I already paid that bill? Did I already tell, you know, my spouse, this piece of information, rather than let's say, forgetting where you live, where you grew up?

Nick VinZant 23:06

How our phones and screens impacting our memories?

Dr. Colleen Parks 23:10

Or are they there's no real evidence that we're seeing a decline in memory. Certainly, we are able to kind of what we call offload our memories onto these devices. And it's really helpful, but there's no evidence that that is going to hurt our memory. So I like the analogy of when novels first came out, people were all up in arms that that was going to, I don't know, hurt the youth somehow. And now, when paper came out, they were like, oh, people don't have to use a slate board anymore. So I think it's kind of the same thing. It's a new technology, there's always some fear that comes along with new technology. I don't think it's going to replace memory for us.

Nick VinZant 24:00

There's also you don't need it, right, just the brain basically, in terms of memory, just chuck anything it doesn't need.

Dr. Colleen Parks 24:05

It does a lot. Yeah. Which is not to say you're never going to remember something totally random and irrelevant. But it does kind of get rid of a lot of the unimportant stuff.

Nick VinZant 24:15

These are some more maybe personal questions, but not my personal. Um, would you rather remember every day or just one day? Yeah. And when I say remember every day, like everything about it, right, like you wear

Dr. Colleen Parks 24:32

everyday you can? Um, yeah, they're called highly superior autobiographical memory, or they have highly superior autobiographical memory. They can remember just a crazy amount of information from their lives. If that is what we were talking about, I think I would say Yeah, that would be pretty cool. Rather than just one day, however, you can also imagine a case where You have so much information in your, in your mind in your brain that you can't get back to anything because there's just too much there. For those people like what's,

Nick VinZant 25:13

what's different? Like, why is their brain like that?

Dr. Colleen Parks 25:17

We don't know yet, um, they are looking into it. So there have been some brain studies. And my memory of them is that there weren't a lot of differences that would be kind of immediately obvious, like, oh, there's, you know, the structure that supports memory for events, like what I, again, like what I had for breakfast this morning, it's bigger than them, that's not the case. It is possible that they just rehearse their memories more. And there is some evidence that they do that. It's just something they enjoy. So that could be a component of it. So it could just be that they're practicing a lot more. At the same time, it's hard to imagine that there are no differences in brain function between you know, them in house. So I imagine that that will come out at some point that there we will find differences, brain differences.

Nick VinZant 26:14

Are they smarter, generally, than most people?

Dr. Colleen Parks 26:18

No, they're not. What's really interesting

Nick VinZant 26:20

that they're not smarter than right, like you would think their IQ would be like 350, or something like that.

Dr. Colleen Parks 26:26

I know. Well, and that's what makes it so interesting is that when it is about them, they remember it really well. But if you put them in a standard memory test, where we have people learn a list of words, and then we ask them to remember them, like 20 minutes later, they do about the same as everybody else.

Nick VinZant 26:49

So there's just Narcissists, basically. So really, they just care about themselves.

Dr. Colleen Parks 26:55

That is a possibility.

Nick VinZant 26:58

We cannot scientifically rule that part out, right? Yeah, more important for the brain, remembering or forgetting,

Dr. Colleen Parks 27:06

that is a tough one. Because if you did not forget, you would probably not be able to remember either, there would be so much information, crowding your mind that you go and try to find, you know, that analogy of going and trying to find one piece of that information. It's like trying to find your keys on a messy desk. Like there's too much stuff there for you to actually see the thing that you need, I would say they're, they're both really necessary. Because the memory portion allows us to build expectations, and, you know, make predictions, even if they're unconscious predictions. And that's really important for daily life, like you have to have some idea of what's about to happen. Right? So I have to know that when I go into my kitchen, the table will be on the floor and not the ceiling.

Nick VinZant 28:02

How can two people who see the same thing, remember it so differently?

Dr. Colleen Parks 28:08

I think it has to do with what they're paying attention to. So, you know, we can experience the same event. And if I'm paying attention to one aspect of it, and you're paying attention to another aspect of it, we may come away with radically different interpretations of what happened. Very different memories of what happened. So and then your memory, like, you can kind of build on that if you remember it, you rehearse what happened, then those two memories can become more and more divergent from each other over time. But yeah, and the other aspect is, you were talking about narcissism, but like, how did that event affect me? Like maybe the event affected me differently than affected you? And so that is going to contribute to our memory of what happened?

Nick VinZant 28:59

What is the most interesting thing about memory to you?

Dr. Colleen Parks 29:03

Oh, that's tough. I would say that there are both conscious and unconscious forms of memory. And the unconscious forms are things like, you know, muscle memory, that's a real thing. And some of those, sometimes, those automatic forms of memory actually mess you up, instead of helping you. And I find that really interesting. When, you know, you do have memory for something, but it leads you in the wrong direction. So like I was saying, you know, you have a memory for these two people talking about the death penalty, one Republican, one Democrat, and sure you have a memory of it, but your automatic bias leads you in the wrong direction to remember who said What

Nick VinZant 29:54

does that happen a lot, or just more than we might think?

Dr. Colleen Parks 29:58

I say more than we might think. For example, a recent study we did compared images and sounds. And people are way better at images remembering images, and they are sounds. And so now we want to figure out why.

Nick VinZant 30:12

I mean, that makes a lot of sense, right? Like just thinking of it right now I remember, mostly pictures in my mind. I don't remember very many sounds.

Dr. Colleen Parks 30:21

Yeah, I know, it's it is, I think it is really intuitive. And what interests me is that it's really intuitive. But if I ask people like, why do you think that is, then the intuition kind of disappears. It may simply be attention. We're visual creatures. And so we're just paying more attention to the visual world than we are to the auditory world. But it could also be something specific about memory. It could be that, you know, when we remember something that's visual, we remember really precisely, but when we remember something that is auditory. Maybe we get more of the just information and not those specific details.

Nick VinZant 31:05

Something that I've always wondered is, I can remember in my mind, fantastic detail about my wife's face. But if somebody asked me to describe it, I couldn't. She got eyes like I couldn't describe it in any way. Yeah, that a memory thing? Or that's just me being an oddball.

Dr. Colleen Parks 31:24

Now, I don't think it's an oddball. And I don't think it's a memory thing, necessarily. I think it I think it has to do with visual imagery and conveying that to somebody. So I think it's just the communication process. So because the ability to remember, you know, exact detail of your wife's face, that seems just about right.

Nick VinZant 31:49

Do you have a good memory? As a memory researcher? Do you feel like you do? Know?

Dr. Colleen Parks 31:55

And there is a, you know, kind of a cliche in academics where they say you study the thing that you're bad at? And I wouldn't say that I'm bad at it, I would say I'm probably pretty average. But that is frustrating. I want it to be better given that that's what I study.

Nick VinZant 32:13

If somebody wanted to improve their memory, what would you say like, well, you should do this,

Dr. Colleen Parks 32:18

you can practice the kind of memory that you want to improve. So if you want to improve something like muscle memory, then you practice the skill that you're trying to try to get. If you're trying to better remember, like, if you forget your grocery list, and now you're in the store, and you want to remember what you needed. That's something you would probably have to practice specifically. What's interesting about training, though, is that it doesn't seem to transfer very far to other types of memory, like you get better at one kind of memory that you really practice. But you don't necessarily get better at everything.

Nick VinZant 33:00

That makes sense, right? Like you could you get great at remembering the grocery list, but not the to do list. Yeah, like that. I mean,

Dr. Colleen Parks 33:08

yeah, but yeah. But then there's also general kind of just general advice, and it's a little cheesy, but what is good for the brain is what's good for the heart. So nutrition and exercise, unfortunately, is really good. Exercise is has been shown to be really important for peak brain function.

Nick VinZant 33:37

I have one question that is more of a so I was born without a sense of smell. And I've always been told that smell is strongly related to memory. But I have a fantastic memory, at least compared to my friend, is his smell. How do like how does that relate to memory?

Dr. Colleen Parks 33:56

I think the key with smell is it doesn't happen all the time. Like, I don't notice smells a lot of the time. But I have like suddenly encountered a smell that vividly reminded me have something. So in fact, I remember the event, I was walking near some bushes, and all of a sudden I thought of my grandparents backyard, and was like, Wow, that's a really specific smell. And I hadn't thought about my grandparents backyard in years. So it's not that smell is necessarily happening all the time and creating, you know, these are great ways to get at memory. It's that when it does happen, and you get something really specific, it acts as like this really good cue, like I'm giving you a lot of information, even though it's just a smell. And it seems to work and there there are reasons for that that are brain based as well. That's

Nick VinZant 34:57

that's pretty much all the questions I have Is there anything you think That we missed or anything like that.

Dr. Colleen Parks 35:02

Not that I can think of without just giving you a lecture.

Sex Toy Designer Mike Blacksmith

Dildos, vibrators, cock rings, whatever you can imagine. Mike Blacksmith makes sex toys for Tantus Inc. We talk how sex toys get made, the best sex toys for you and customer requests. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Least Attractive Qualities.

Interview with Sex Toy Designer and Tantus Inc. CEO Mike Blacksmith

Nick VinZant 0:12

Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. Myname is Nick VinZant coming up in this episode, sex toys and unattractive qualities,

Mike Blacksmith 0:22

it's not what you think, you know, everyone thinks that I sell my soul to the devil and I'm gonna make millions of dollars. Well, the reality is, is it's manufacturing, we design a toy to hit anatomical targets and to create a sensation. Our toys are some of our toys are pretty damn ugly. But when you turn the lights off, and you use the toy for what it's intended, or close your eyes, or get blindfolded and tied up and use the toy for what it's intended for, we'll take the Pepsi challenge against anyone person wrote in and said, How about this toy, it's called the H bomb about this toy. frickin beautiful love the toy. It's just amazing. But I bought it for my wife, and she saw it and was scared. I want to thank you so much for joining us.

Nick VinZant 1:14

If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it. It really helps us out. So do you ever see something and find yourself wondering who designed this? And how did they make it? Our first guest is an expert in the design and manufacturing process. The difference is he designs and manufactures sex toys. This is the CEO and lead sex toy designer of tantas. Incorporated, Mike blacksmith. How did you get into this sex toy sexual health industry

Mike Blacksmith 1:51

my undergraduate is in is in art. I've been a fine artist since the day I can remember drawing and sculpting and these sorts of things that really had no bearing on how I got into it. But it is how I kind of stayed in it, I guess. It's a really actual funny story that I was high tech guy. I've been a senior manager for some really prominent high tech companies that are still around. And I had kind of retired in 2000. And you know, I hit that.com boom did really well and kind of retired in the mid 2000s. And a friend of mine called me up and said, hey, there's this company having problems with their internet? Would you be so kind as and they're networking, would you be so kind as to it's a small company, would you be so kind as to go down and try to help him out. So I went down to tantas, early 2000s and fix their computer system forum, I got chatting with the owner of the company, which I later married, we really hit it off. And I you know, I had been in manufacturing for a long time as a as a senior as a senior manager up to Vice President level. And so I ended up taking the job. And I've been here for 16 years as as the CEO of tannous. My art background led into also me being an graphic designer slash I was doing industrial design as well. Let me tackle the job of creating new parts. When you went into it.

Nick VinZant 3:26

Was there any kind of reservation? Because obviously people on the outside world might be like, do you want to work at a sex toy industry? Like Did you ever have those kind of not not? Not that there's any kind of value judgments that should be directed at it? But did you ever feel that.

Mike Blacksmith 3:45

It wasn't something that I said oh my god, I'm gonna jump into the the sex toy industry or the sack the adult industry and be pigeon holed for moral standards or moral compass. But it was plainly clear, right, right from the get go that that people or other businesses judged you on morality and these sorts of things, and that I've always been kind of a fighter. So that actually, that actually kind of perked me up a little bit and said, you know, you know, fine, you don't want to, you don't want to have my bank account. Us Bank, you don't want to have my bank account? Well, EFF you, I'll find a bank that wants my bank that wants my money. Some have been surprising. And the other way where it's been a company that you went, there's no way that XYZ will ever be a business partner of ours and they've been one of the best business partners. So going through it to a benefit dinner or something like that. And you're sitting tied up and someone comes up to you, Hey, I'm, you know, this person with global finance and blah, blah, blah. They're like, what do you do and I go CEO of a manufacturing company, and you just hope it stops there. Right? And then what do you manufacture and we we manage facture silicone parts. Oh, and then you hope it stops there and then that the next dig in what kind of silicone parts and then you say, dildos and vibrators, and usually, specially business people that are fascinated by the process, it seems like it's really profitable. And you say, It's not what you think, you know, everyone thinks that I sell my soul to the devil, and I'm gonna make millions of dollars. Well, the reality is, is it's manufacturing, it is literally the same except when you walk in the back of my building, the shape of the things in the back of my building are different than the shape of the things in the back of other buildings.

Nick VinZant 5:36

For you guys, like what kind of sex toys Do you guys make?

Mike Blacksmith 5:39

We started with a no plugs, and insertable still does, and vibrators and our vibrators are a lot different than than the traditional what you think of as a vibrator like a rabbit or these things, we believe that the toys should be able to be hygienically clean, because if you play with a toy, your hand, excuse me, your hands or whatever is carrying DNA around, right. And once you're done, you always hear the word foreplay, but you never hear the word after play, right. So you don't think about the cleanup and these sorts of things. You think about rose petals on the floor, or chains from the ceiling or these things, and you really think about that for a day. But when you're done, you're done. So when you got to clean a toy, you should be able to remove the vibrator and hygienically clean your toy. And then we migrated into cock rings and, and slings. They were all made out of metal at the time back in the early 2000s. And there were some safety issues with that where you could bio biological male could be fully in gorged and that constrictive ring or the teardrop would, would potentially and from time to time not let not let those vestibules ever drain. So now you had to put this on when you were soft, and then you got hard. And then you stayed hard, and you couldn't get the ring off. And so you'd have to go into the hospital and get the ring off. So we were the first company to make these out of silicone, which meant that if you had an issue where you call it was called locked up, you are fully in gorged and you didn't come down and couldn't get the ring off. You had to go to the doctor with a big giant purple penis and have someone cut this thing off. So making it out of silicone let you take a little pair of scissors, cut it and remove it. And then we've gone into we've gone into other other toys as well. Some really high end BDSM toys, some paddles, some rope, some rope rigging devices for like a Japanese rope shabari and that nipple clamps these sorts of things that we make that are really, really high end, we kind of pretty broadly diverse, but we started with essentially insertable dildos vibes and butt plugs.

Nick VinZant 8:02

How do you design it as a sex toy? like where do you? Where do you start?

Mike Blacksmith 8:08

Well, the business guy me starts in the business side. And then the passionate artist starts in other side, but usually medicine I or our salesperson, myself and Matt a swell say, hey, it'd be really fun to make my new vibrator. Brad is number one and XL toy category is really moving. And so we'll say hey, we should make an toy in the XL line. We already have a toy that hits the prostate, we already have a toy that really stretches but we don't have one that stretches and hits the prostate. Let's design something that way. So we really take out and try to try to hit sensations, right? Okay, so we're making a new dildo we have we have these toys that are kind of large, we don't have anything that's really small and non phallic. And that someone can leave in their drawer or do this or people that aren't into seeing a bio penis right. And and and, and let's design something that way that hits a target that works is like a G spot toy. But is non phallic and is actually maybe a little bit longer because we don't have anything that hits that works for people that are more full figure right both male and female. We design a toy to hit anatomical targets and to create a sensation. So I probably our toys I always say this that will take the Pepsi challenge with anyone but our toys are some of our toys are pretty damn ugly. But when you turn the lights off, and you use the toy for what it's intended or close your eyes or get blindfolded and tied up and use the toy for what it's intended for. We'll take the Pepsi challenge against anyone. we design our toy we design our toys to work in the body, not work on the retail shelf. Like

Nick VinZant 10:05

when you do that when you design things to work in atomically, do you have to have somebody go in? And like take measurements?

Mike Blacksmith 10:11

Oh, no. So well, we have a lot of experience of making toys, right of doing this for over 20 years. But we do have a bevy of people that we know that say, let's go back to that g spotting toy. Right? Yeah, we have a bevy of people that we can say, Hey, we know these people, they're very, they're their sex toy reviewers, they're bloggers, they're in the, they're in the adult industry, or they're just been customers of ours for a long time. And so we'll prototype a toy, right, we'll go through the whole process of manufacturing, essentially, well sculpt the toy, whether it's digitally, whether we still sculpt toys out of clay, we sculpt them digitally in CAD, we sculpt them in 3d modeling software that's used in the animation world, so they can get really skin texture and look really real, we can do it all sorts of ways. And then we'll prototype the toy will, will tool the toy. So we'll turn it into molten tooling. And then we'll make the version of the toy. And we'll send it to 10 to 20 people that we believe that, you know, their their their personal human form factor is larger than average, they left G spot play and they hate. They hate they don't they're not big into phallic toys. And we'll send those out, we'll send those out. And we'll get feedback in a week or two. And they'll say, hey, work for me too long. work for me too short work for me to smaller diameter, not enough curve. And so then we'll make the changes, right in the in the sculpture and the design, and we'll retool it, and we'll send it back out to those people. Here are your changes? What do you think? Oh, yeah, that that if it was just a little shorter, and if we get a consensus, right? We're trying to make it we could make a toy perfect for one person, we get this consensus. So it works with a variety of body types, a variety thing, but it hits its intended purpose. Then we go to final tooling, and we bring the toy to market.

Nick VinZant 12:17

And then would you make that let's say you come out with a new a new toy, would you then make it in different sizes? Like small, medium, large?

Mike Blacksmith 12:24

No, we don't. We do that on a few toys. There's a toy we have called the Amsterdam. This is a brand new, a new toy just launched off this but there's a toy called the Amsterdam and it's based on the traffic bollards in the city of Amsterdam. right the the big steel poles and, and, and we brought this toy out and it's a huge toy. It's like three, three and a half inches in diameter. We had a lot of feedback the toy has been around for god man, eight, nine years, we had a lot of feedback of Hey, we'd like this toy smaller, smaller, smaller. We never did it we but finally I think about four weeks ago, we made up four or five weeks ago, we launched a small version called the Amsterdam Junior that's based on the traffic bollard. And then we have some progressive things but we've we've specifically designed those for people who want to try animal triangle we have a progressive set of toys that say you start here and you go here you can go as big as you want. But you can stop here but this is kind of a you know a thing to kind of get you into get used to it. So for some toys, but they're designed specifically for a progressive set.

Nick VinZant 13:36

That makes sense, right? You don't want to start with the big guns.

Mike Blacksmith 13:40

Some people some people to some people go straight for it right out of the gate. Yeah, we we have this toy that's about four inches and four inches in diameter the toys it's literally I mean it's this big around and we had a customer service email person wrote in and said how about this toy? It's called the H bomb about this toy. frickin beautiful love the toy it's just amazing. But I bought it for my wife and she saw it and was scared Is there any way I can return it right like never talk to his partner right and buys this toy that is literally that like the king of what we make it thing is huge. It's probably four. Four pounds of silicone.

Nick VinZant 14:32

Are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions?

Mike Blacksmith 14:36

Sure.

Nick VinZant 14:37

Harder toy to design toy for a man toy for a woman.

Mike Blacksmith 14:43

toy for a woman. How come you matter pet matter pegs? I mean straight up this is this is true, right? It goes back to the must have baby. Right What once a man's brain is turned on. They're just they suck. They're just pigs and in a good way. Right? I mean If you play with men, you understand that that that male heat is freaking awesome. But but they don't care women. In the 60s men were the largest in the 60s 70s 80s 90s, early 2000s men were the largest demographic of purchasing adult toys, and they're still probably 50% whether they're purchasing it for their partner or, or not, men are men are a lot easier to satisfy because once once that gets going in the human brain, it's they're just on and ready. Women have become they are savvy shoppers, women are the people that know about theodolites cadmium bad things in their sex toys. So and they're and they're pretty specific of what they want for the human body for their body. And you know, women care much more about color guy doesn't give a shit. Right? Yeah, right. I mean, women want the women know what they want. And they're much more savvy and much more knowledgeable about their purchases. So definitely designing a toy for a woman even getting feedback from our viewers, because you could send a toy to a bunch of guys into what do you think is fucking great? Right versus at you send it to women, you're like, hey, the curve could be a little deeper, the toy could be a little longer could be a little less in diameter, right? Because men buy toys for women. They think that all women want these big huge twice because I can't satisfy her. She needs a bigger dig. And that's not the case at all.

Nick VinZant 16:35

Best Selling sex toy for men best selling tech sex toy for women.

Mike Blacksmith 16:42

I'm gonna answer this as a I'm gonna answer this as an industry broad. Not just my company. The best selling sex toy for women, I believe has always been the rabbit. And I think you know, you saw that from the TV show. But the rabbit is probably the number one selling sex toy for women. Not necessarily that works the best. There's some great rabbits out there but they're very far and few between. and best selling sex toy for a man man would probably be in my for me, it's definitely the COC are small cock rings are super soft COC rings, you can put those on when your art and then plugs as well.

Nick VinZant 17:28

Most interesting request you have gotten from a customer.

Mike Blacksmith 17:33

It's not hard for me, I'm not thinking how to answer this. Ah, without being insulting or because I have no, I have no no intent to be insulting. My what I mean, I've had some really outlandish, crazy requests. And I you know, I don't even I don't count those. But on general terms we've had, we have this multiple times a week. And it comes from men. And the request is, so again, I said we make these toys that are four inches, three inches, actually, we have one that's seven inches at the base. The requests and I always find these very interesting and fascinating. Maybe your listeners or viewers will comment below why they think this is. But we all get a lot of people saying hey, I just bought I'll use the H bomb, because that's the name I already brought up. And I'm sure that someone's going to go to Tennessee calm and look at the H bomb. I bought the H bomb and is four inches in diameter. If you made that toy at three and 15 sixteenths instead of four inches, and you brought the length down by 16 inch toy if you brought the length down to 15 and seven eighths and the second ring down the toy instead of being instead of being two and a half. You made that at two and seven eights. That'd be awesome. Right in my mind, I got what is your acid caliper?Right. I mean, like, I don't understand that. And it's a it's like a 16th of an inch. And I don't know, you know, for me personally, I don't know if it's because someone doesn't want to admit that they really like playing with this toy. And they use the clinical side of it to say I really don't like playing with the toy, but I'm only doing this for science. right or that that's just the way their brain works. But this is the most common request that I find very interesting. You know, if you made this toy to an eight, if you made it two and a quarter, it would be a much better toy. And there's no way that that a Muscle Band vaginally Anneli Going to be loosened up right? When you just, it's just like stretching, right? It's just like stretching before a workout or stretching before athletic maneuver, your muscles are going to be able to calibrate an eighth of an inch. It's just not, it's just not humanly possible. And he gets they get actually, some of them are really specific, like you're talking 100 of an inch. Instead of making it four inches, if you made it four point, or a 10th of an inch, I'm sorry, if you made instead of making four inch, if you made it 4.1, I think you'd hit your sweet spot, and you'd sell twice as many. And that's their, that's what we get, we get, you know, you'd sell twice as many. And I have no problem answering back and listening and sometimes taking their feedback and saying, Hey, you know, these people are right, if we made this toy just a little bit bigger, it would probably play better, but not when you're talking about, you know, 10th or, you know, a 10th of a 10th of an inch.

Nick VinZant 20:51

What do you think is the future of the sex toy industry? Can it change that much are we I mean, we only have so many places to put things right.

Mike Blacksmith 21:00

I you know that that obviously virtual virtual reality VR sex could take off, I don't know. I hope it moves more towards healthier, consistently progressive, as you know, we were the company that that changed an industry we Henry Ford, this sucker. And I hope it can, I hope that more and more toys move to move to healthier material and healthier pigmentation. So it's two components, it's the material and the pigment. And I also hope that you know, some of these little companies that are moving forward, I hope that more of the bigger companies start making toys. And that's going to right as the as the consumer gets more aware, they'll do more research. And makes toys that hit anatomical targets, you know, phones, working remote toys, working remotely, that's been around forever, we had a toy big thing that we that we had, we were one of the first people to ever do is called the audio and it would, you could put the vibrator in the toy and put this it looked like a page or go on your hip. And if someone talked to you every time their boy said it if you went to a club and you were dancing at the bass beats so that's been around for a long time, I think we were one of the first people to do that we no longer have that it just it didn't sell enough for a small business like us to keep producing it at at our at the cost we were making it I think it's just gonna go healthier as the consumer as the consumer gets more and more knowledgeable and more and more okay with their with their body and with their ability to talk to their partner and say, Hey, you know, or talk to you be honest with themselves and say, hey, I want to try this.

Nick VinZant 22:49

Oh, this I missed this one most popular color.

Mike Blacksmith 22:52

Purple.

Nick VinZant 22:53

How come?

Mike Blacksmith 22:54

You know why? Right? That's easy. Boom, hit me with another one of those. That was boy, yeah, purple. My farm purple is the number one selling color give you a great story on this. So we had this, we were young in our infancy, we had this. So this chain of stores in San Francisco woman found a chain of stores and the buyer for this chain of stores her favorite color was green. And she would buy all this one, this one toy in green. And we'd look at our spreadsheets and say my god green, great color. That's the worst color. So worst color in the industry is green. And we just thought based on numbers, right, the green was the best color and it was something that we really paid attention to. And so we ended up making all of our toys in green because it was such a great color. Because if you looked at the spreadsheet, oh my god green salt. But we had one buyer that bought for a whole bunch of stores. And so we made a bunch of green products that took us years to sell. But purple by far across the board for female toys is the number one selling color and red and black for men. A dark red and black for male toys. Purple for female toys. Now I'm not saying that other colors don't sell but the variants of purple. Literally 10 to one for female toys is purple.

Nick VinZant 24:18

what's the what's the worst?

Mike Blacksmith 24:21

Green? Yeah, or like green? Green or dull brown or? Yeah, these sorts of things, but green is by far the worst. I mean, you think about it you're you're having sex with a zombie, I guess.

Nick VinZant 24:32

Yeah, that would be kind of weird. I guess.

Mike Blacksmith 24:34

Now we do have a couple toys a green a very neon bright green that but I'm talking like hunter green, you know? Like Yeah,

Nick VinZant 24:45

What do you think? I mean, does that have any relation to the shades of people or do you think that's just, that's just an easy no

Mike Blacksmith 24:54

actually. So we make binary slash trans slash community. With all the modern slashes, we make a prosthetic device called a packer. And it's for people who want to put a bio walk around with a bio male organ in their pants to feel more true to their soul, which they have every right to do. And so we make this we make this so we make it in three skin tones. But one of our number one sellers of that is actually in a purple, just because it's like, Look, I want to feel it. But I don't necessarily need to exactly rapid replicate a skin tone. It kind of just says, This is fucking me. I'm sorry, this is me. I'm sporting Purple Man as my they're called Packers. I'm, I'm, I'm sporting purple. I'm packing purple. I don't need to pack some stupid skin town. I got purple in my pants. And I think that's really fun, man. I think it's really cool. I think actually skin tones. They're down there. I don't think people are necessarily as into, you know, it's what, again, that's a male question. You know, if you're a female interviewer, you'd be asking me a lot different questions. But a male buys a toy thinking that it's something that, you know, my partner is missing. And it needs to be real, and it needs to be larger than me or needs to look real. That's what my wife is missing. But if you literally pulled women on, which has been done by us, but if you were to go out and pull women on what they like, it's going to be a lot smaller than you think it's going to be smoother than you think it's going to so not represent a penis. It's going to be if you think about a male body, the ugliest most aggressive thing on a male body is an erect penis. frickin women don't want to see that. They don't want to see the heart on chasing them there. Something central something that's going to make me feel good. It's not necessarily it's aggressive, hard, giant penis. That's frickin trying to chase me down the alley and attack me you know,

Nick VinZant 27:03

the male penis does look ridiculous.

Mike Blacksmith 27:06

Hitachi magic wand number one another top selling toys. Just a large plug in vibrator, right. Good friends of ours. So the people that bring it into the United States there. It's just an amazing toy. Right deep, heavy vibrator. So we were asked to make a attachment that goes it's an external toy, right? So you play on the outside of the body not not really an internal playing toy, we were asked to make a head that you put on the top of this just looks like you know, just a massager. Just Right, yeah, we were asked to make a head that went around the top and then had a little bright came out like this. And you could use it as an insertable toy. Well, we had a lot of experience with G spot insertable toys. So we make this toy. When you we send it out to reviewers. When you put the toy in, if you let if you let turn the Hitachi off. And the toys now inserted the things up against up against the legs and clitoris and all that and up against kohtaro legs. And you put the toe and as soon as soon as the button was all the way up soon it was up your orgasm. It literally and it sucked because everyone hated it. Because there was no build up. There was no anything right? It would be it would be like a man waking up and before your mind even came on. You're already already assuming for the day. You're like, oh, god that sucked. Right? I mean it was so you can actually you can actually make things too well, it goes back to the designing part. Right so you you are actually designing a journey for someone and I think that that's that's what we do.

Nick VinZant 28:52

I want to thank Mike so much for joining us if you want to connect with him. We have linked to him and tantus Incorporated on our social media accounts. We're Profoundly Pointless on Instagram and Twitter. And we have also included their information in the episode description. Okay, now let's go ahead and bring in john Scholl. Okay, that's gonna go ahead and do it for this episode of Profoundly Pointless. I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share. We really appreciate it. It really helps us out. What do you think are some of the most unattractive qualities? It's really hard to be lying. I think lying should have been much higher on the list. But laziness just kind of incorporates all of that to me. I don't understand the fingernails thing that john was talking about. But man, however you get down is however you get down

Monster Truck Driver Coty Saucier

Growing up Coty Saucier dreamed of driving a monster truck. Now, he races them while backflipping over 60 foot jumps. We talk monster trucks, racing and more. Then, a special vehicular Top 5.

Interview with Monster Energy Monster Truck Driver Coty Saucier

Nick VinZant 0:11

Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, monster trucks and ridiculous cars,

Coty Saucier 0:21

it's everything from being on a roller coaster that you are in control of the track direction mixed with standing at the edge of a cliff with about 1000 foot drop off in front of you. So all that combined is just it's intimidating. It's exciting. It's it's just a rush like no other. we'd stop at a red light and I'd shut the truck off so wouldn't get hot and there's people pulling up next to me like the hills, a monster truck tune in and turning way,

Nick VinZant 0:51

can you look back on a spot on a moment in your life, where you could say I should have made a different decision here. I screwed my life up here. 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. So our first guest has one of these jobs, that I think anybody who's seen this on TV or in person thinks for at least a second. Man, it'd be cool to drive one of those things. He is the driver of the Monster Energy monster truck. This is monster truck driver, Cody Saucier, what's it like driving a monster truck,

Coty Saucier 1:35

it's tough to put into words. But the best explanation that I can give. It's everything from being on a roller coaster that you are in control of the track direction, and what loops it takes and what high speed curves it takes. And if it's going to go forward. And if it's even going to go backwards, mixed with standing at the edge of a cliff with about 1000 foot drop off in front of you. So all that combined is just the ultimate adrenaline rush. I've rented ridden dirt bikes before and I've jumped big on those things. But it just doesn't compare to the size and the power of the trucks because it's it's deceiving. You know, they're not supposed to do what we do with them. And then to get inside and strap in and do the things we do. It's it's intimidating, it's exciting. It's, it's just a rush like no other.

Nick VinZant 2:29

Is it because of like the raw power the horsepower? Is it because of like, this thing's hard to control? Is it because of the jump or just kind of like all of the above? Um,

Coty Saucier 2:41

They do you have big power. To me, they don't have enough power. But what they can be dangerous. I mean, it's not sugar coated, they can be very dangerous to the driver. So you got to respect the and and drive it with some respect and, but just to think like, Man, I'm getting ready to hit this jump that's in front of me, that's four times the height of the truck itself and send this thing, easily 100 feet in distance, that's nothing, and it's gonna go 60 feet in the air. And that's nothing. So just to think about what you're doing in the trucks is just, it's pretty impressive.

Nick VinZant 3:16

I didn't realize he was that those jumps with that hire that far. Like, he doesn't know quite like that on TV.

Coty Saucier 3:23

It doesn't, but you go to some of the events, you know, and they have these pit parties that are out on the track before the event. And you know, you could walk around and see the trucks up close and actually walk on the track and I get it all the time from from a lot of newcomers obviously like man, I jumped in look like that on television. I'm like, Well, welcome to our world. It seems like they get bigger every weekend for us. But yeah, man, they the dirt crew that that Monster Jam has is those guys are also man, they they try to nail it every weekend given us the same faces. I say faces the other the face of the ramp every weekend and things change. And especially during the freestyle events, you know, the first guy to go out can kind of make or break how the rest of the field is going to perform. Because if he goes out there and knocked all the ramp down will now you get to work to do to make yourself look

Nick VinZant 4:17

I would have assumed like guys like 15 feet high and maybe like two cars long. I did not read that's Damn.

Coty Saucier 4:25

Yeah, there's some big stuff out there, man there, you know, the piling up school buses side by side and stack and cars inside of them. And then they're piling dirt beside it. And they're like, Okay, good luck.

Nick VinZant 4:38

Have you ever gone up to one and been like, Hey, man, I don't know about this jump. I don't think we should add the lava and the flaming hoop and the alligators all the same time. Have you ever had like an instance where I don't know if I want to do this one?

Coty Saucier 4:51

Often Yes, but it's not to say that we don't go for it. Anyway, we'll make some changes. We'll tell the dirt crew like hey, Man that that that just looks a little too steep, you know, it's just not going to, it's not going to have the effect that you're looking for, you know, take it from us, we're behind the wheel, if if the dirt is cut out, then it's just it's not going to make for what you think it's going to do. So we constantly make changes and you're in control of vehicles. If there's something out there, you don't want to hit and by all means, you don't have to hit it. Some things are extremely intimidating. I, you know, I see it all the time. It's like, Man, that's, that's a straight up wall right there. I'm gonna go drive around that.

Nick VinZant 5:32

Is this something that you set out to do? Or is this something that just happened?

Coty Saucier 5:36

As a kid man, I have always been intrigued by the trucks in particular, I mean, I'm a gearhead my whole life, I've followed all forms of Motorsports. But just something about the trucks. I don't know as a young kid, if it was like a cartoon come to life kind of thing. And, you know, the trucks are big, they're loud and intimidating and scary. As I grew older, and like, you know, I got more mechanically inclined and knowledgeable. like, Man, these things really are frickin cool. So, at an early age, I just fell in love and like, man, I would like to try that one day and my love for that in baseball. I wanted to be a pro baseball player and make enough money to have my own monster truck. Well, that no none of that ever happened. I had to go work for somebody that had their monster truck and I could go play there. So here I am.

Nick VinZant 6:26

Do you fill out like a job application to be the driver? I mean, how does that you just work your way up? Or how does that process work?

Coty Saucier 6:33

You know, kind of like other forms of motorsport you work your way up from the bottom I literally started just kind of volunteering my time when the events would come around me I would just I would just go and hey, do you need any help doing anything? I've I've got two hands I'm willing to work I've got my work boots on let's let's do something so it was slow at first you know all I got was like a yeah kid Yeah, you can you can wipe the truck off if you like or at the end of the show you know come back and you can roll up extension cords for us and help us pack the trailer that went on for the longest of times. And finally it just it it picked up enough to where I got my face recognized and my name known so whenever the guys did come back to my area like oh hey man, call that one kid up Cody, you know you can come help us change that transmission or something that we get a knockout before the event even starts so little by little it led to a part time gig to a full time position to man 24 seven kind of thing you know, living and breathing out?

Nick VinZant 7:36

Is this the full time living like you could you can do this and someday retire just off of it or do you have to supplement in other ways?

Coty Saucier 7:44

You know, I know some guys that what they're considered in the industry privateer or independent teams guys that you know i footed their own bill doing this stuff. Their entire monster truck career, like for example is a gentleman that lives right here near me in Florida. Scott heartsong, he has The Gunslinger truck. And he's been in the industry since the late 80s. And he's just made a huge name for himself and I respect the guy so much because it's always been just the name of the truck on the side and not a sponsor sticker to be found. And he's still out there taking names and you know, kicking ass with TV trucks and he's got to figure it out, man. So to answer your question, there's definitely money to be made. Absolutely.

Nick VinZant 8:28

Like when when you're driving the truck, do you do everything else too? Like are you the mechanic? Are you the I don't know enough about mucking around with any other hidden mechanic? Um,

Coty Saucier 8:40

it used to be that way. Yeah, my first few years driving I started competing in 2014. And for the following three years or three tours, I guess you could say 1415 and 16 Yeah, I was the kind of built my own truck maintain it going up and down the road, I'd stay out on the road with it, you know, we'd pack and leave for three months and that that truck was priority. So every day you know, you had to be hands on it there was something that need to be adjusted and fixed and it's like a full time babysitting job with the trucks

Nick VinZant 9:16

are a lot of people kind of long time drivers or is this something that somebody like you're going to come in you can do this for two to five years and get go on to something else like is do a lot of people stick with it?

Coty Saucier 9:27

There's probably more guys that have been with it for you know, several years if not decades. Then there are newcomers that are just you know, fly by night here one weekend go on the next there's there's probably more guys that have been involving industry 1010 plus years versus guys that are here for a season or two for sure. Yeah.

Nick VinZant 9:49

All right. Correct me if I'm wrong here, I'm gonna reveal my my ignorance about the subject. So are you guys racing racing? Are you like racing like, yeah, we're racing, but really, we just We're just gonna hit the jobs

Coty Saucier 10:02

it says heads up as it comes man we really nobody out there wants to lose we're all out there to help one another when the helmets off when the helmet goes on it's I can't wait to kick that guy's ass and then buy him a beer later tonight.

Nick VinZant 10:16

What? What's kind of the strategy then when when when you're racing does it like depend on the track the dirt, the truck? The

Coty Saucier 10:24

Yeah, man, you nailed it a little bit, everything you got to know, you got to know what your your own equipment is capable of. So a guy like myself, mechanically inclined, I like to think that I have a one up on somebody that may not be in the shop all weekend long, maybe one of these flying guys that just braces, monster trucks on the weekend or something like that. So we can always kind of sneak in there just just like any other form of motorsport, do your little tricks to set up the chassis just the way you like it to compensate for what type? Of course it is. What's the dirt doing? Is it sticky? Is it too low? Me is a dry is it? What is it? So you take all that in consideration. And then a lot of times, man, you just got to drive accordingly. And drive your own race. Because if you if you look at the other guy, if the race course gives you an opportunity to look at the other guy in the other lane. And you just record yourself, you don't ever want to look at the other guy. So I try to always just run my own race and, and stay consistent. It's kind of like bracket drag racing. Austin trucks. Monster Truck racing is like record drag racing, you always just want to hit your marks. And you got to be fast, of course. But as long as you hit your marks, you should make it to the final round. No problem.

Nick VinZant 11:40

How come you don't want to look at the other guy just because that the moment of distraction or because maybe what he's doing on his side isn't the same as yours. Or

Coty Saucier 11:50

for sure. Just that moment of distraction almost like a jinx kind of thing. Like, oh, man, I looked at him now. No, I'm flustered and I'm ahead of him. Maybe I can back off a little bit, or I'm behind him not gonna catch up. Now I'm driving way too hard. I'll just crash the truck because I'm trying to play catch up. So I don't don't look at the other guy.A lot of times, I don't even know if I want like I'm telling my crew. I'm like, Wait, are we good? Can I stay strapped in? or? Yeah, no, you're good. Like, you went six rounds, right? You're going to the final like, okay,

Nick VinZant 12:21

we actually have a ton not a ton. A good amount of like listener submitted questions. So are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions?

Coty Saucier 12:30

Oh, yeah, man, bring it on. I love to hear that kind of thing.

Nick VinZant 12:33

Who is more who is generally more interested to find out? You're a monster truck driver, kids or adults?

Coty Saucier 12:39

Ah, man, that's a good question. I would probably tend to say lean a little bit more towards adults. I'm 35 years old. I guess I don't look my age. I look younger people say I'm trying to toot my own horn or anything, but I look younger. So whenever I'd say I do this, I've traveled to excuse me. Almost 30 countries, racing monster trucks professional and they're like you do What? Are you ever going to grow up kind of thing? I'm like, No, I get paid well, and I love what I do. And it's a blast and travel the world and I represent, you know, a huge household name or household brand and the kids just kind of they see it, you know, they come up to me at an event and they just know that I'm the driver of that truck. Like oh, that's him. That's Monster Energy. I don't know his name, but that's how

Nick VinZant 13:33

they're they're more the truck. The adults are more like me. And that's a current job.

Coty Saucier 13:38

Correct? Yep. He's like, man, how do you land this gig? Or? Oh, he's like, did you go to school for this? And then it's like, the adults the adults are always more intrigued by the driver. You know his backstory than anything.

Nick VinZant 13:52

Could you or could somebody else right like can some another professional driver for the NASCAR driver that I can think of right off the top of my head like Dale Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Could he come in? And like, I got this I can take this truck or is it a very specialized kind of driving,

Coty Saucier 14:10

he could probably run the throttle, no problem and get the hang of that pretty quick. But everything else man, it's, it just comes with time. If you have some motocross background or even some like dirt track experience, something that's you know, a lot of RPMs and a lot of drifting and, you know, with the late the round track, late model stuff and then this motocross stuff, the jumping and knowing the position or the attitude of the vehicle in the air. combine those two things. That's kind of what monster trucks is it's Supercross mix with late model mix with Top Fuel or top alcohol drag racing all in one. So it takes a it takes a different breed of cat so to speak to figure these trucks out. And I've noticed if there's a newcomer coming In, you can always tell if they do well, the very first time that they get in the truck, you know, they do well, I mean, they can operate the front rear steering, clearly, you know, in a controllable manner, they know when the hit the throttle and when not to hit the throttle. If they got that kind of fundamental stuff, they're golden. A lot of people man the first time in, so you can see him struggle. And right off the bat, I can say he or she is not gonna make it. He is she's not going to make it he's gonna have poor performance or they're just not going to like it and just OPT themselves out. That happens.

Nick VinZant 15:36

It's really like it's one of those things you can do it or you can't.

Coty Saucier 15:38

Exactly it's kind of like playing guitar. I wish I could play guitar. I'm a huge guitar fan, but I can't

Nick VinZant 15:44

how much horsepower? Does your monster truck have

Coty Saucier 15:47

horsepower, um, my particular truck is roughly at best and at best meaning you know, right conditions, you know, not high in altitude. Not too much humidity. I think the best we've ever gotten man out of our dyno guy Richard midges, our engine builder, is right at 1400 horsepower at the crank. Port horsepower can kind of multiply a little bit with the gearing that we have in the trucks, you know, their gear, there's so many gear reductions in the monster truck to make the huge tires turn that you could probably add a couple 100 horsepower, just to the gearing so we're close to 1500 horsepower as the truck sets race ready? It's a stick shift, right? No, it's a it's manual valve body. So you have to shift it high low gear. Most common is a Chevrolet based powerglide transmission, which is you know, low and high, fast and faster, I call it so manual valve body, you know, it's got a foot brake, there's no clutch foot brake you holeshot you take off. Click second. And that's it.

Nick VinZant 16:59

That kind of leads us into this question. What is your favorite sound that the monster truck makes?

Coty Saucier 17:05

Favorite sound? It's probably there's so many sounds I come from, but I'm just old school with it. There's nothing like just a big blown alcohol injected motor motor with just as gnarly can just Rob Rob Rob at idle you know, I mean, that's it sounds so healthy. It's so macho. I think that's the coolest thing. Just hearing those trucks idle.

Nick VinZant 17:30

What do you what do you do with the old tires?

Coty Saucier 17:33

That's a very good question. I've seen so many different uses with old tires that aren't being able to be used anymore. You know, the they're been cut too bad or the beads have broken on the on the bead lip or whatever you want to call it is broken that they can't even seat again on a wheel and hold air seem to be used as landfills. I've seen them be used as like flower pots. I've seen them be used as elephant toys, literally elephant toys.

Nick VinZant 18:00

How do you get them on? Like do you is it take a couple of couple of people to do it or do you have to use like a machine to do it.

Coty Saucier 18:10

We have a pretty gnarly electric over hydraulic jack that we reel around and we put under each axle to lift one end of the truck at a time. So we can put two tires on at a time. I can hire up a truck, you know a guy that's confident and knows what he's doing safely. I can tire up a truck and by myself in 20 minutes. Really? Yeah, you they're kind of you know, you use your use the weight of the truck and weight of the tires to your advantage. So you just kind of push them around where you want it and then use the electric jack to kind of work with you and lift the tire up onto the hub and then spin it to where you got it lined up on the studs and shove it on there. And then and it's it's a lot easier than you think.

Nick VinZant 18:54

But they're heavy as hell though right?

Coty Saucier 18:57

they're very heavy man they're probably around anywhere between seven to 800 pounds per per tire. The entire truck fully tired up culinaire driver in it ready to go racing as they're pushing about 12,000 pounds. This kind of leads into the next question that somebody sent us which aspect of the truck are you most impressed with? engine tires or frame I would have to put this in order I would probably say the chassis design the frame design engine then the tires themselves. I mean, the tires that particular size, the chevron pattern that's been a staple of a monster truck since the very beginning in the late 70s. So the progression of that has come a long ways from them again me wrong, you know, there's spec tires being made anymore, but the motors I mean these engine companies and an engine component companies are always coming out with something new always better and you know, the cylinder has always bettering the the rod and piston And so that's always changing. It seems like usually that kind of makes a change for the better. Put the chasse ease man The chassis is or anymore. That's what's, that's what making the trucks be able to do what we do nowadays, you rewind five, even 10 years ago, there's no way a 10 year old truck could compete with today's trucks safely? And do the crazy stunts that we do. It's just just fatigue, it's so bad that they would not last,

Nick VinZant 20:31

do you have to constantly rebuild the truck or is it basically the same truck.

Coty Saucier 20:37

so we typically get about three full years, which is quite a bit of shows, man, that's probably pushing over 100 shows on a chassis. And after that, we cut the chassis apart, take all the components off of the chassis and put a fresh chassis underneath it, you can only bend and twist metal so many times before it comes brittle. Breaks easy. You don't always want to be welding on the thing because it just becomes unsafe, you know, for the driver, you just, you can't you can't be replaced in bars and all the time. So every excuse me every three years we put a new chassis in it. Good bad doesn't matter. It's just insurance for us. less work in the long run. Yeah, that's that's how we operate? Is it?

Nick VinZant 21:25

Is it safe? Or is it like, as safe as we can get it?

Coty Saucier 21:29

The monster truck industry is, you know, I've never been in any other form of motorsport professionally. So I can't really sit down with their rulebook committee guys and say you're doing this wrong, are you doing this right, but man, I have been involved for many years and have followed for many years. And the progression has come from guys wearing open face helmets wearing a lap belt in these trucks way back in the day to now man we're doing this we're looking at we work hand in hand with like, the Navy and stuff and we're using very similar belts that these fighter pilot guys are using. And that's the kind of thing we're messing with any more containment seats that are built specifically for the driver. You get a suit made you get a tuxedo made for yourself for a big event. That same dimensions of your body were taken into consideration to get these seats built. So the seat and each truck is built for that driver just so he's contained. Archie is contained that much more and is that much safer. We're using seven point harnesses I mean, you know, ever since Earnhardt's accident years ago, everybody wears some sort of neck restraint. I personally use a Honda device you have to wear some sort of neck protection and not just a net collar some sort of neck protection device that is held on to your helmet held on to the restraints in the in the seat. Because man we're pulling some extreme G's when we take these these hits, you know even just a landing off of a big job is is insane. Have you ever been injured? Knock on wood, nothing serious. But I'm sore the next day for sure. Because I made every jump is is a car crash. In the beginning my first few years driving my very first weekend. I'll be honest, I didn't really have a clue what I was doing. But I remember getting in the shower after that night. And just my thighs around my, my thighs down my crotch and my shoulder blades. It looks like somebody beat me with a leather belt just for being strapped in the truck and getting tossed around.

Nick VinZant 23:30

I once accidentally jumped a Buick like a foot off the ground. And I still remember landing and thinking like, holy crap that is not what I thought it would be.

Coty Saucier 23:41

yeah, man I've hit and i've you know, I've driven the truck around like moving it and stuff and I've was totally unstrapped not doing anything crazy. I'm moving the truck and it was fully tired up. Get the shocks were gassed up everything ready to go racing so I just move it. I traveled along first gear. Alright, I'm pretty high in rpm. I don't want to hurt the motor. Click high gear. I'm going maybe 25 miles an hour. And I hit a curb and a parking lot. It literally almost threw me out of this like on the ground out of the truck. Just there's so much tire bounce. And you know it's so it's so rigid doing the little things. It's meant to be jumped in jump big. So it's crazy how much we rely on the belts and harnesses and the seat to keep us safe with E in the truck.

Nick VinZant 24:32

busiest road you've ever taken it on. Like you can't drive that. Can you drive that street?Like that's not legal? not legally

Coty Saucier 24:41

No, not legally without permits and stuff. I have driven them. Yeah, I've driven them quite a ways actually. enough to where we had to refuel and on public road. Oh man, this was years ago like 2008 something like that. We did a display at a Ford dealership in Oklahoma City. And our Big was having some issues so we weren't able to go pick the truck up, take it back to the arena. So we got with like, the local law enforcement, they gave us a police escort and it was like, it was like 10 city blocks away. Back to the arena. We had to obey, you know, streetlights and stuff like that. So I got this police officer in front of me, way in front of me because I told him to stay pretty far ahead of me because I can't see directly in front of his truck so tall. I can't just see over the hood. You need to stay 50 yards ahead of me so I can safely see you. And we'd stop at a red light and I'd shut the truck off so it wouldn't get hot. And there's people pulling up next to me like that's a hell of a monster truck tune in and turning way.

Nick VinZant 25:44

I knew this is the wrong day to drive through down. Yeah, I do it. Yeah. Okay, so obviously your truck is the coolest name truck. But if you had to pick a different truck, like who's got the coolest name?

Coty Saucier 25:56

Oh, man, there's there's some pretty catchy names out there. Man. You know I've always hated when people compare to to wrestling monster trucks and wrestling. I hated that. But there's so you can't help but there's some cool names and wrestling and there's some cool names and monster trucks and it kind of coincides that way. But I mean, how cool is the Grave Digger? Like, that's scary. That's scary as hell and it's like intimidating and the trucks just badass. Look in. It's got this Grim Reaper dude in the side of it. It's like, that's pretty damn cool. I mean, Bigfoot, that's just that's a staple. That's just cool. That trucks look like a Bigfoot. I don't know.

Nick VinZant 26:33

That, that is kind of like, in terms of a viewer to like rank things like that's, that's some of the best names for that thing. Like, great diggers gotta be up there. Right? Like, that's pretty good name for that thing. Um,that's all the questions that we got, man, there's anything kind of you think that we missed or what's coming up next for you?

Coty Saucier 26:56

Oh, man, we could sit here and talk, you know, the past the future reconsider for hours talking about it. But man, it's just, it's hit or miss right now with events with what's being allowed, you know, certain cities and venues as far as what we can do event wise. So it's been slow. It's been, it's been a waiting game for a lot of us, including myself. So I'm hoping by July, we're back out there. I know, there's a lot of events on schedule, without a truck and driver list. So I'm hoping to get back out there sooner than later. I'm working full time at a full drive shop here. I live in Tampa, Florida. So I'm working at a four wheel drive shop here in the meantime. But man anxious to get back out there for sure. I mean, it's been my life. For my entire life. It's been my dream to compete in Monster Jam and monster truck. So you can't come soon enough. It just COVID is messing everything up. But we got to stay healthy. And if it means sitting out for a little while. And that's what we got to do.

Elephant Researcher Dr. Caitlin O'Connell

We look different but we are very much the same. Dr. Caitlin O'Connell has been researching elephants for nearly 30 years. We talk elephant behavior, animal rituals and the battle between elephants and rhinos. Then, we countdown a special scary Top 5.

Interview with Elephant Researcher Dr. Caitlin O’Connell

Nick VinZant 0:11

Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant coming up in this episode, elephants and scary stuff.

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 0:20

It's really amazing how similar elephants are to us. You know, we talk about personality and character traits. Well, elephants have personalities too. And you know, there'll be the big softy the diplomat, they'll be the general, whatever's in their way, they walk in a straight line. And if something's in their way, you better get. And so that there's a big contention between elephants and rhinos. There's so many different subtle things that we can learn from elephants. And really, by looking in the mirror at another species, it's just a humbling reminder of our own humanity.

Nick VinZant 1:02

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. So I have always been fascinated by elephants, because they look so different, but seem to act so much like us. Our first guest has spent the last 30 years researching elephants in Africa. This is elephant researcher, Dr. Caitlin O'Connell. In your study of elephants, how much are they like us? Are they very different? Or are they very much the same?

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 1:39

It's really amazing how similar elephants are to us. They grow up in these very social large families. The males get that young adult itch to leave the family because they want their independence. And mom, she also sees that you're kind of being a pain in the butt to the family. And she also wants to kick you out. And it's a matriarchal society. So the mothers, grandmothers aunts, are leading. And really one older female is leading the family. But if you spend, you know even an hour at a waterhole watching the interaction between individuals within a family, they're so similar, you know, the little boys want to play with each other, and the older sisters there to make sure that the roughhousing doesn't get too crazy. It's, it's really fascinating how similar they are and how caring they are to each other and want to protect each other. It's kind of humbling to see how similar they are to us.

Nick VinZant 2:45

Do they have that kind of a social structure for a biological reason, like to survive as a species, they had to adapt this? Or are they just that smart, and that kind of flows from that

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 2:57

they are a social animal. And by being social, by nature, you depend on others within the group. And usually, you have to learn certain survival skills like for elephants, they don't know what to eat, when they're born, they actually have to learn what is safe to eat from the others in the family. So they'll go around and place their trunk in the mouth to see Oh, okay, that's safe to eat that safe to eat. So, elephants need to learn from each other to survive. And then the benefits of that is safety and numbers. They can deter predators, you know, if lions try and surround them, if there's enough of them, they can really push off the lions.

Nick VinZant 3:44

When I think of elephants, I always think of the big African elephant like on the savanna. Is that primarily what you work with? Are there other kinds of elephants I don't know about?

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 3:55

Well, there's the Asian elephant, which has smaller ears and hump on its back rather than settle back for the African elephant. But most of my work is done in Namibia, which is the country just above South Africa, on the west coast of Southern Africa. But I found that there's so much to learn from one population and returning to that one population is more informative for me than to compare between populations, just because it's kind of like being an anthropologist, and you go out to study a social group, and you want to see how the dynamics of the groups change over time based on environmental and social factors. So it's, it's been really fascinating to be able to go back and see the same elephants every year and you know, who's had a new baby and how does that baby change the dynamics of the group and with the male elephants, who's on top of the hierarchy and how does it change when that there's a changing of the Guard, because I can ask questions about, say, you know, we talked about personality and character traits. Well, elephants have personalities too. And you know, there'll be the big softy the diplomat, they'll be the general and they'll be the bully. And these character traits really are durable that there they are the same until you get some, let's say, an inciting incident where the dominant bull disappears, let's say and two bullies at the bottom of the hierarchy. This kind of happened in my situation. Two bullies at the bottom of the hierarchy decide they want to climb to be the number one, Bull. But it turns out, nobody likes a bully. And they had to figure out how to be born diplomatic, where the dominant boy was really a master at the kind of carrot and stick politics. Like, I'll be really nice to you. But I'm also gonna jab you if you step out of line. And so these other bowls when he left, he disappeared, they had to then change their dynamic in order to be more likeable, which is really fast. It is very human.

Nick VinZant 6:15

What do you look at? Like, who rises to the top, so to speak? Is it generally through sheer strength? Or is it more through kind of like politics?

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 6:24

Oh, it's character, the dominant bowl that we had, for six years, he had very small tusks, he was not the tallest. But his character was so intimidating, that he rose to the top of the hierarchy, you know, when these bigger characters want a bigger group, so they, they solicit these younger bulls to come and be with them. And, you know, literally, they'll take their trunk and kind of hold it over their back or say, Okay, it's time to leave and kind of push them out and force them to not force them, but invite them to follow them. And that means that they have to share all the resources with these younger bulls. So there's got to be some benefit. When a male elephant does not want a younger male to say adopt him as a mentor. They will not let them follow them. They'll shake their heads at them as they're leaving the waterhole, they'll make it very clear that they do not want this bull in their presence.

Nick VinZant 7:27

So then, where are the baby elephants and all of that, like, Who do they hang out with?

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 7:32

Oh, the moms, the mothers, the aunts, the cousins. They're all kind of tucked in to the family. And they extended family reunions are just thrilling events. All these youngsters get to run around and play with each other. And this huge, elaborate greeting ceremonies where the females place trunks in the mouth is a greeting ritual. And then they urinate and defecate because they're so excited to see each other.

Nick VinZant 8:02

I did not know that I thought it was all like men and women grouped all together in a big pack. But so it's really just a pack of women and their kids. And then the men are just kind of wandering around.

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 8:13

Yeah, in their own cohorts. They have very bonded groups just like the females do. And very similar rituals, you know, when the dominant bull wants to leave the waterhole, he engages in the same, let's go vocalization ritual that the females do. And then there's a volley of responses from the other males. So they're very much like an intact family. These bonded groups of males,

Nick VinZant 8:41

do the men have much of a role in rearing the child

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 8:45

No, they, they may be able to detect relatives through smell like we can, mice can, many mammals can detect a relative through what's called the major histocompatibility complex, there's a gene that actually has a smell associated with it. That is a relatedness gene. And, you know, mice have this ability so that they don't mate with siblings, you know, there's obvious reasons, to advantages to know who your relatives are. And I suspect that male elephants might be able to do that, since they don't stay around after the meeting event. You know, they don't pay attention to who their offspring are. Unless, once that baby is a young adult and is entering the male society, then there might be some favoritism and decisions made to have more of a related group than not. And we know we see very different culture going on in the desert versus areas where resources are more ubiquitous. where water is more ubiquitous?

Nick VinZant 10:02

When you when you're studying them? How do you study them? And do they? Do they acknowledge you? Do they recognize you? Well,

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 10:10

that's a good question. You know, as a scientist coming back to the same place over the years, it would make sense that they would recognize, okay, here are these crazy researchers setting up shop again. But as a scientist, I have made the very conscious decision to stay in the background, and not interact with the subjects, because that would change their dynamic, we're there to watch them live out their lives and not insert ourselves into their lives. And it makes sense in a zoo environment, because elephants really want to have a relationship with you, you know, they don't have their whole society and the hierarchy of elephants, especially when there's only a few of them in the zoo environment, then making having a relationship with that elephant totally makes sense. But in the wild, it really doesn't. Inserting yourself into their social environment means that they're going to make decisions possibly based on the fact that you're there. And so we try to remain as neutral invisible as possible. They know that humans are there, but we don't, you know, seek them out, as you know, oh, Willie, hi, great to see you again. You know, we don't do that. But we have an observation tower, and everything's behind this cloth, called Boma cloth, it's like a canvas, so they can't see our interactions and movements around the tower. And we have a whole database and data logger of measuring scoring behaviors as they interact with each other and different set for the females versus

Nick VinZant 11:56

the males show our elephants endangered still threatened? What's the status there?

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 12:04

For the most part, they are endangered. You know, in some areas, particularly in southern Africa, there are larger groups of elephants such that there, it's more of a space issue.

Nick VinZant 12:21

Are we actively doing something about that? Do we need to do more? Are people kind of just like this is what to do

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 12:28

We need to do more, you know, he especially protecting migration routes. There are areas in southern Africa that if we make the right decisions now, we could keep these large groups, transnational groups intact between Mozambique, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, there's these five countries that have formed a national park with a plan to keep these corridors and space for elephants. And we need to make sure that that actually gets implemented because it's one thing to have a paper park but to actually make it work takes a lot of effort and a lot of coordination. And fortunately, in the country of Namibia, they have shown that people can benefit from having wildlife in their area versus more cornfields.

Nick VinZant 13:25

Are you ready for some harder slash listeners submitted questions?

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 13:28

Sure.

Nick VinZant 13:29

Who has been your favorite elephant that you have studied?

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 13:36

Well, I figure I'd be allowed to favorite elephants, one female and one male. That's true. The male that I like the most is Willie Nelson, named after the singer Willie Nelson because of his long, scraggly tail and kind of tattered ears. But it turns out that Willie Nelson is the diplomat. He hates the bullies and will have no qualms about telling them that look, we don't want you here. And we don't want you even drinking with us because you're such a jerk. And I love that he spends a lot of time on this. And he's such a net, just natural, nice, all around sweet guy. But he will not tolerate the bullies. And I just I just love it. And my favorite female is Big Mama. She has an enormous family which may end up not being a smart move for these females in the desert. But she is also the diplomat and in my favorites are the diplomats because there's a lot of politics that go on to really caring about justice, you know, social justice. She will share the waterhole where Other very aggressive matriarchs will not tolerate other families being anywhere near the waterhole, they will chase them without a question, but she will, okay, well, we can move over here. And she's just a really gentle giant, she doesn't get ruffled by anything. And that really has an impact on the rest of the family, the character of of a leader, and you think about human society to the character of Big Mama means that her whole family is kind of chill. And that's just that's pretty cool. I love that.

Nick VinZant 15:42

Have you learned by studying elephants? Have you learned more about elephants or more about people?

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 15:47

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say both. I learned about myself, constantly reminded by elephants of turn taking behavior. For example, in a conversation, how many times do we overrun? Or do your friends over run the conversation? You think, Oh, my God, I can't get a word in edgewise? Well, when these females are leaving the waterhole, they will have discourse and sometimes heated discourse, but they let the other one finish their sentence first. And that is really cool. And there are some physical reasons for this, where if you one individual rumbles, and then the next one rumbles, and the next one rumbles, you're actually creating a much longer signal that will travel into the environment further, but also on a social practical level, it is letting the other person have their say, and, and that's really interesting. There's so many different subtle things that we can learn from elephants. And really, by looking in the mirror at another species, it's just a humbling reminder of our own humanity. And we can learn a lot about ourselves by really pausing and thinking about our behavior. You know, I watch elephants greet each other, I think, Oh, my gosh, we need to be that excited when we see each other. I mean, sometimes we are for a reunion, we haven't seen each other for a long time. But they do this all the time. And it's really important important hormonally it facilitate stronger bonds. Or sometimes even in your own household, you kind of forget, good morning, you know, don't even say good morning, don't look at each other in the eyes. But it's a really important ritual to greet each other. And, you know, I wrote this book recently, wild rituals, just because I was so inspired by watching all these different animals engage in ritual, and how important those rituals are to those animals and how they are to us. But we kind of forget their importance and just go, we don't need to be now because of the pandemic. We know how important seeing each other in person is and what we've lost by not being able to see each other not being able to smile at each other because we have to, you know, keep each other safe by wearing masks. There's all these things that that pandemic has reminded us of how important ritual is,

Nick VinZant 18:09

why do elephants make me cry?

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 18:15

I, I would say, it's because they are incredibly emotional animals. And, you know, seeing a young male shaking his head at you and having their trunk all flailing about, they're so excited they wear their heart on their sleeve. And just seeing how emotionally similar we are, is, I mean, they'll make me tear up really, I mean, they make me cry often. There's so special. And so I think the other thing is when you know, I also get very emotional when I see excess facial expressions on great apes, because there's so similar to ours, it's just oh my gosh, we are cousins. And so when, you know, directly evolutionary cousins, but for elephants, they look so wildly different, but yet we have the same emotion. So it's just a reminder of how interconnected we are with other animals in nature. And and we're not so special. We are on par with these other species, not above them. And elephants are a good reminder of that.

Nick VinZant 19:35

What's the deal with the elephant graveyard? Is that a real thing? Or did I like see that in a movie

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 19:40

There are a number of different explanations for an elephant graveyard, but that kind of segues into grief and grieving. So some elephant graveyards have been explained by early mass hunting, for one that elephants would be all killed. You know, 100 elephants in one place in the early days when early, the great white hunter thought that no animals were infinite. But other explanations are that no elephants like to when they're feeling ill, an aging elephant, they don't want to leave water when they're sick. And so elephants in an area that might have an ephemeral or permanent water pool in the middle of the jungle that could have dried out over evolutionary time, elephants would go towards a water source to die. So that's another explanation of how you'd get so many skeletons in one place. But on the point of grieving, elephants are very similar to humans, in terms of feeling the loss of a loved one, needing to visit that loved one, after they pass, to the point of even wanting to bury that loved one and have a ceremony for the loved one. And, you know, I write about this in wild rituals in my grieving chapter, How touching it is when to see how elephants really feel that deep loss that we feel and the importance of expressing that loss, and also the cultural transmission element of elephants who have experienced a grieving ritual in the wild, coming into captivity, and expressing that grieving ritual where others that grew up in captivity, did not express that did not have ever experienced agreement ritual, and did not engage in the grieving rituals as the others do did. And I talked about this in the grieving chapter. How to elephants from Mozambique were imported into the US, and they had experienced a wild culture in their youth, and knew what a grieving ritual was engaged in that grieving ritual when the matriarch of that captive group passed away. So they have grief and grieving rituals just like we do. And they know the importance of engaging them.

Nick VinZant 22:23

slightly lighter question. Who wins elephant versus Rhino?

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 22:28

Oh,that's a very good question. rhinos do not like to give way to elephants, they don't like to give way to anything, whatever's in their way, they walk in a straight line. And if something's in their way, you better get out. And so that has developed a real contention, whoever asked this question must know this, that there's a big contention between elephants and rhinos. And, in the end, an elephant, if it really wanted to, would probably win if it charged at the rhino, but really the elephants like whoa, okay, I'll go, I'll just step over here. You know, whereas the rhinos like, No, no, no, I'm not moving from my path. You're in my path. I'm moving forward. So I would say that in the end, the elephant is most likely to back down because that path is not as important to the elephant as it is to the right now.

Nick VinZant 23:36

It's not it's not worth it for the Rhino

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 23:41

Not worth it. You're having a bad day. I get it. I'm just gonna go over here.

Nick VinZant 23:45

rhinos do seem grumpy. They seem like a grumpy animal in general. Right?

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 23:50

Well, the problem. The reason is, black rhinos are territorial and very territorial. And the males are very aggressive. And when they come across another one when they're drinking at the waterhole, they don't want to see that other male and they're very grumpy about it and very vocal up to it. So it makes sense. But for the white rhino, white rhinos are very gregarious, and they're not nearly as aggressive. But I mean, a rhino is very similar to puppy dog. It they are credibly. just adorable. They, they communicate with their long ears. And when they're when they supplicate they flatten them against their head and they kind of mu and they have all these supplicating kind of puppy like behaviors. rhinos are really under sold in there in terms of personality. They have a lot of personality and they're really amusing to watch.

Nick VinZant 24:59

Favorite fictional elephantFace favorite fictional elephant?

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 25:02

Oh, I have one that I'm writing. But published fictional elephant. I love that Babar.

Nick VinZant 25:18

Yeah,

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 25:19

it's the story is so tragic. I mean, you don't realize as a child, all the books that you read are so traumatic and, you know, I suppose they're they're trying to help you process grief vicariously to be able to experience it in a safe way. But so many terrible things happened to him. But I do love the story. And Dumbo I mean, how could you not love Dumbo,

Nick VinZant 25:47

Dumbo? There's no way an elephant could fly, though. Did you discover that in your research? It's

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 25:53

wonderful, that those big ears, it'd be great if they could

Nick VinZant 25:58

best name for an elephant like, oh, maybe you didn't like it wasn't your favorite elephant. But that was a really good name for an elephant.

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 26:07

Oh, well, I do have a favorite there. His name is Guk kulu. He's a huge elephant and very gentle. In fact, he's not a diplomat because he doesn't like politics at all. So he just sidesteps our main dominant ball. But his name came from the Zulu word for very large. And he's got these really wide splayed tests. And one of them's his right test who's a little bit higher than left. So you can see him from a kilometer or two away, you know, that guy kulu is coming. It's a beautiful sight.

Nick VinZant 26:45

So tell me about wild rituals.

Dr. Caitlin O'Connell 26:47

Wild rituals, is a book about animal rituals and our own rituals, and the importance of ritual in our lives that we often forget or just are too lazy to engage in. And I show 10 different very common rituals, you know, play greeting, group rituals, grieving rituals, and how these rituals are expressed in different animal societies and how similar and sometimes different for our own societies, but just how important ritual is in general. And, yeah, that came out in January, and we're developing a documentary series and it's it's really exciting.

Meditation Coach Lodro Rinzler

Stressed? Anxious? Depressed? Your inner voice can guide you through the darkest times. You just have to be able to hear it. Meditation Teacher Lodro Rinzler can help you find your inner self. We talk meditation techniques, the benefits of meditation and calming your mind. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Pieces of Playground Equipment.

Interview with Meditation Coach Lodro Rinzler

Nick VinZant 0:12

Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, finding your inner self, and the top five pieces of playground equipment.

Lodro Rinzler 0:25

That meditation is, in this essence, a way of becoming more familiar with who we truly are. Every time we do that we are rewiring the brain, we are retraining it that we don't have to chase after every anxiety producing thought that comes up in our life, we can make a different choice choice to be present to choice to be mindful choice to be in sentence kinder to ourselves.

Nick VinZant 0:46

I want to thank you so much for joining us, if you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it really helps us out. So I have reached a point in my life, where I'm constantly trying to reflect. Problem is, I'm not really very good at it. Because every time I tried to do this, my mind just bounces all over the place. And it's been like that for a while. But I think that the pandemic and what we're all going through has just made it so much worse. I think so many more people are dealing with a lot of stress and anxiety, and there isn't time to just kind of relax, and think our first guest is an expert at dealing with that stress and anxiety, and really helping people find out who they really are. This is meditation teacher lodro rinzler. So I think a lot of people have heard about meditation, but what what am I actually supposed to be doing when I'm meditating.

Lodro Rinzler 1:55

So actually, we get a lot of meditation teacher trainings. And the funny thing is, I always have to give them the bad news, which is a large part of the work we do is like, re educating people around this word and what they should expect. Because most people have been sold a bill of goods, which is like you see the magazine cover, and you think, oh, if I meditate for a moment, I find everlasting peace and bliss. And it should feel just about as relaxing as massage when in fact, meditation is actually us, learning to know ourselves better. My favorite word for meditation in the Tibetan language is golm g o m. And that can be translated as familiarization or meditation. And it equates the two, that meditation is in this essence, a way of becoming more familiar with who we truly are. So there's the sense of, I mean, there's a million types of meditation out there. But since I come from the Buddhist tradition, you know, the types I talked about are often based in some form of mindfulness. So mindfulness of the breath, for example, we sit down, we meditate on feeling each in breath and out breath, when we get distracted, we come back, there's something very simple about that. And yet, when we sit down to do it, we often find that our mind is a little over the place. It's just ramping thoughts and sort of a bombardment of thoughts one after another after another, so that formerly after mentioned, bill of goods that we've been told, this should feel relaxing, this should feel good and only feel good. We feel like there must be something wrong with me, if I'm experiencing something other than that, when in fact, it's just about every human being out there, that when you sit down to meditate, whether it is meditation, on sound meditation on emotions, or meditation, breath or any number of things, it's actually this deeper experience of just getting to know how many thoughts we really have, and then starting to work with it over time, in the same way that we might learn a new language, we might train, learn a new musical instrument, the more we pick it up in little bits every day, the easier it becomes. And the easier part here, it was simple, but now it's easy to just sort of it's like the volume of the thoughts gets turned down, like the actual level of the volume. They become less alluring to us that we're more able to stay with our object of attention, such as the breath. And as a result, we feel more of a sense of peace.

Nick VinZant 4:20

I can't get this done in five minutes, right? Like, that's kind of how I feel. The normal approach now is like, I'll meditate but I got five minutes. And if I don't have everlasting peace after five minutes, probably not gonna do this again. Do you run into that?

Lodro Rinzler 4:35

Yeah, that's exactly it. It's like, we want amazon prime. for meditation. We don't want to wait the seven day day. 10 day shipping, we want it like tomorrow or it's not worth it. And same thing here. It's like the science. There's so much science these days around meditation. It's like every week there's some new study from some University saying if you meditate just a little bit every day after a period of some weeks, you start to see Increased gray matter in the hippocampus in the brain using more activity in the ACC the brain, which translates to were more productive, we're more efficient, we're more present, we sleep better boosts our immune system. We're a minute away from BuzzFeed releasing the 20 sexiest reasons we should be meditating, like, it's really getting up there. But the idea is like in that fine print, there's this marker of, well, you have to do it for a few weeks, you have to do it consistently for a few weeks, you can't just do it once or twice.

Nick VinZant 5:28

Can you do meditation without the spiritual slash religious aspect of it?

Lodro Rinzler 5:35

Yes, absolutely. So there's, I mean, you know, we always hear about these things within religions, like the Buddha wasn't a Buddhist and things like that, right? He was a person. He's a person who tried, actually a bunch of different types of meditation then settled into just being with the body breathing mindfulness of the body, and was able to wake up in a really big way, which is why we say, Well, here's a good example of what we could do with these simple practices. But the idea here is that that is not a religious experience, that is not a it's, you know, because his words were passed on. And we have this advice today, when we call it a religious tradition. But it's not a religion, per se, as we might normally think of some of them. But the spirit of it has never been do these things on this day, and then you are good. And do these, if you don't do these things, or you do these other things, then you're bad. The core of Buddhism in particular, and I know you're asking about meditation in general, but I'll come back to that. The core of Buddhism in general, in particular, is that there's, we are all inherently wakeful. We're all basically peaceful, basically good. As is. That's who we are. And if you I mean, have kids, if you have a nephew of God, child of some sort, you know, like any, any sort of kids in your life, you see them come into the world, and they aren't sitting around being like, Oh my gosh, what's wrong with me? Why am I like this? That's learned behavior. They come in from the sense of, Oh, I'm, I'm good, I'm whole and complete. And then they get picked on by society. And you know, all the other influences there have, and start to second guess that. So this is not even like a Buddhist teaching. It's like we see this in our in our life. This is just experience that we might have of Oh, yeah. You know, when I meditate, for example, I might have a moment to just resting with the breath, and I feel good and complete, and everything's okay. In that moment, I'm not mentally freaking out about my finances. I'm not freaking out about my friendship. But what it is, it's like, I'm just okay, I'm here and present. And that's not a religious thing. That's a human thing. And that's just something that we can discover for ourselves. I think, pretty much

Nick VinZant 7:42

any rational person. Here's what has been said, what you've been saying about meditation. Here's what they have read, right? I think that this is something that everybody would agree like, this is a good idea. I should do this. But we just don't like, I've done it before. That was fantastic. And I just don't do it. Why do you think that is? How can we change that?

Lodro Rinzler 8:05

I don't think do you exercise in some form?

Nick VinZant 8:09

I do. Yes. In the mornings?

Lodro Rinzler 8:10

Yeah. What do you do?

Nick VinZant 8:12

Running? Basically? Great.

Lodro Rinzler 8:14

So you put on the shoes, and you step out is super cold in that moment? And in that moment, you don't say I can't wait to do this. You say? No, I'm gonna do this. I know, it's gonna be uncomfortable as No, it's gonna take a minute for me to warm up. And I'm gonna be tired after that to stretch. But I'm doing it because you have your own Why? Right? Like, it may. Yeah, because I like the way it feels after because I want to lose weight. Because whatever it might be, it's always very personal. But same thing here. I think there's discomfort. And the payoff, if you will, is a little bit less obvious than some other things. Because we could measure Oh, I've been running for three months, and I lost this many pounds during that time. We it's harder for us to be like, oh, I've been meditating for three months, and I am 10% kinder than I used to be. Right? Like, it's just how would you measure? I'm a little bit more present with my family than I was before is, it's often something that we are sitting out with people and they noticed that we're acting differently to see what's going on. Because I don't know. Maybe it's because you've been meditating. It's sort of, it always gets mirrored back to us. It's so subtle.

Nick VinZant 9:23

I don't like refer back to my spreadsheet and say, Well, I'm 10% happier today than I was last week. You know, I guess you mean, right? It's not a quantum easily quantifiable metric.

Lodro Rinzler 9:35

Yeah, it would be a lot easier if it was, but it's the effects are huge. And they are I mean, I work with people for years at a time. And, you know, someone would come to me and say, Gosh, compared to when we started working together a year ago. I just feel like I'm handling this whole chaotic pandemic, family situation, work issue, whatever.

Nick VinZant 9:55

It is so much better than I would have if I hadn't been meditating. Do you think Though that is from the practice of meditation, or because we know ourselves more and become with our Okay, thoughts, like, Where do you think that peace kind of comes from?

Lodro Rinzler 10:13

With this bombardment of thoughts? Most people don't realize that they walk around with this little inner narrator, I guess that this is constantly chattering the way I think like, okay, after this, I'm gonna go do that. And then after this thing, I got that meeting and what's going on with that person? Right, I need to talk to them about this. It's just constant, like chatter. And it's, we're listening to our own inner radio station there. And sometimes that radio station is actually quite cruel. Sometimes radio stations self aggressive. Why do you say that? You know, you shouldn't have prepared for that as a jerk. Why are you like this. And meditation, to some degree is like turning the dial down. And either not listening to it or not like, it sort of becomes background noise. And we're more present. Often in meditation, the I was talking to a friend of mine, who's a colleague, earlier, Susan Piver, she's written many books on meditation as well. And my favorite definition of meditation comes from her, which is substituting your discursive thinking for another object of your attention. So the conscious act of saying, I'm going to stop focusing my attention on that inner narrator, that radio and focus it on something else is radically shifting the way like it's just rerouting the out of the whole operating system. Here. I'm saying no, this is not what I'm doing right now I acknowledge the thought, I come back to the breath. Maybe that same thought comes up again, oh, no, I'm acknowledging it, I'm coming back to the breath. Every time we do that, we are rewiring the brain, we are retraining it that we don't have to chase after every anxiety producing thought that comes up in our life, we can make a different choice, a choice to be present to choice to be mindful a choice to be, in some sense, kinder to ourselves. And that's really good training for the rest of our lives. So that we can learn to be present. In every other waking hour, we can be present with our tea, we can be present with our spouse, we can be present with a good meal, and actually start to enjoy it more. How often do you generally recommend like somebody should do this, this often this wall, it sometimes varies. But I would say for many people, I would recommend something along the lines of like 10 minutes a day, and trying to make it a daily practice. Now, I also acknowledge that most people have like their nine to five or some version thereof, Monday to Friday. And then the weekends are a little different. And so it's sort of hard to get into real rhythm. Because there's sort of two cycles, there's the a cycle of like my work day schedule, and then my B cycle weekend cycle. So if a daily practice ended up becoming five days a week, for example, because we get thrown off here and there. I think that's the end of the world. But I do think starting at that 10 minute mark is really powerful. Because quite frankly, we all do have 10 minutes a day, I work with all sorts of people who are, you know, hold really rigorous jobs, people who have kids and their kids are sitting on their lap while they meditate, like, people make it work, which is it's beautiful to see. But 10 minutes, we all we all can do it somewhere in there. It's interesting, right? Like jump times, your brain gets so tired that I feel like I've been doing all this stuff all day. I don't have time to think anymore.

Right? Like, can you just meditate just sitting on the couch?

Unknown Speaker 13:30

You can I mean, I often think it's a great thing to sort of have an established corner or an established chair or something that says that's where I go to meditate something that magnetizes and says that's where I go to do the thing. Absolutely, I think that can be really helpful. And again, it doesn't have to be elaborate. It could be could be meditation cushion, we can mark the space with an incense burner, a candle an image of someone we admire a statue, any number of things. But suddenly it's like, oh, yeah, that's where I get to meditate. That can be really helpful in setting up a practice. But to answer the question more directly because I've been all over I there's like always the simple answer, then there's the inspiring, but yes, you could absolutely meditate on the couch and you know, I often do you know, like that's in a finished the morning coffee or tea and I say, Okay, I've got some time and I just sort of settle in and I, I just practice there. But I think it gets a little chaotic if for example, we do have kids and they're running around and they want to play with us or whatever version.

Nick VinZant 14:26

You mentioned, you've been teaching for a long time, what generally, what generally do you find holds people back?

Lodro Rinzler 14:36

self doubt, is probably a good one. I mean, not a good one. But you know, it's a big one that many of us struggle with that there is some sense of disheartened meant once we get going like, as I mentioned before, something must be wrong with me if I still have thoughts. I thought I should be able to sit down, maybe even press something behind the ear and then all of a sudden like the mind shuts off like a computer shutting down. or something. And I should just be without thoughts. And because I'm sitting here and everyone else's looks so still, they must be completely absorbed in the breath. And I'm sitting here freaking out about it, because I'm not very good at it. And they get very disheartened very quickly. Or, they do it a few times because they actually listen to a conversation like ours, and they're like, Alright, I'll give it two weeks, I'll try it. And then two weeks roll around, and they're like, I'm still myself. Like, there's some sense of like deep self aggression for so many of us. And the sense of doubt that I'm talking about it's not like a, you know, a doubt like, Oh, I doubt I look like an orange. You know, it's a sense of this insidious. I mentioned the inner narrator before my friend, in a co author of one of my books, how to love yourself and sometimes other people. Megan Watterson. She has a great phrase in there, which is our inner bitch radio set little voice, it's like, oh, my god, you're a little jerk. Why are you like this? What? Why didn't you prepare better for both? Well, it's just that constant, like, Oh, you know, that self flagellation that so many people do, like really deep, painful voice that is constantly undermining us. That's the same voice that says, Oh, I can never meditate. Meditation does help us turn that voice down. Or not buy into that voice. So much, I should say. But we sort of have to do a little bit to get there. And so it's, you know, the thing that holds us back from a consistent practice is also the thing that we learned to work with once we started a practice, which is why it's actually really helpful to come full circle to work with a meditation teacher on a regular basis to have someone that you either connect with in classes or one on one or any number of things that might establish relationships that when these sorts of thoughts come up, or when we get disheartened. And say I want to leave the practice, I don't want to do it any more, that we could come back to some sense of support. And I feel like that's, it's not like we need to find, you know, the wise person on the top of the mountain, we just need to find someone who's a little bit ahead of us on the path and who's been doing it for a little bit longer. So that they they can be like, yeah, I've been there. I know exactly what that's like. And here's how I worked with it.

Nick VinZant 17:13

Are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions?

Lodro Rinzler 17:17

Sure.

Nick VinZant 17:18

What if I meditate, and I just find out that my life kind of sucks. And I don't want to meditate anymore? What should I do?

Lodro Rinzler 17:27

Yeah, it's a great question. So I mean, if you find out that your life sucks, then you probably want to make some changes in your life. So if we talk about becoming familiar with we go back to that phrase from however long ago, the sense of Okay, I'm getting familiar with what's going on with me. And natural discernment starts to arise out of our meditation, what aspects of my life Do I want to cultivate more of which ones might I want to cut out or, you know, at least cut down on? So if we're saying, Oh, my gosh, that friend, they're such a jerk. And we come back to the breath. Oh, he saw their friend, you know, what a jerk. And come back to the breath. At some point in my, you know, weeks of meditation, I might say, Hmm, maybe I don't want to spend as much time as I do with those people. It doesn't feel good to me. Right? It's like, even for the most dense of us, such as myself, we start to say, Oh, that's a choice I can make in my life, I can make a better choice. So we start to realize that some parts of our life are not so great, that we say, Okay, good. Now I have that information. Where do I want to direct my time and energy, and we can actually make, we can actually make good changes in our life. So I think that would be great. If you discovered, you know, here's some aspects of my life that I really don't like. And here's some ones I really do want to spend more time on. Turns out that I've got, you know, this group of friends that really inspire me, and I always feel like I have meaningful conversations with them. Maybe I spent more time with them can go both ways.

Nick VinZant 18:45

Ah, this person says, I tried to meditate, but I just fall asleep. Is that bad? Or is that okay?

Lodro Rinzler 18:53

I always joke that there is an ancient Buddhist remedy for anyone who finds himself consistently falling asleep in meditation. And it's really easy. And that remedy is to get more sleep. kicking a dead horse here, but like, if that's what you discover, and meditation, that's what you learn about yourself. Yeah, that's good information for you to have because probably you are exhausted, and you don't, you're probably not taking great care of the body. And maybe you do need to get more sleep, or maybe you need to prioritize rest and other ways as well. Like, actually, you know, taking long walks and not always being on screens, or whatever it is for you that might feel more relaxing. So that when we do go to bed, we have deep sleep, and finding that's actually a really big issue for many people in the pandemic. They're having trouble asleep. They're finding like, Oh, you know, I'm staring at this screen all day and I'm staring at that screen all night and then they get into bed. And there's all these worries, I never actually take any time to talk to anyone about them. And I've just stayed up and I feel wired and you know, I've been exhausted during the day and I Up all night. And I think if that is the case for this person or anyone out there, I think we really do need to do some deep body relaxation. And we always start meditation classes with, at least to me, work that I do with actually getting into the body and getting to know the body. When we get in bed, that's time that we might want to sleep. When we meditate, there's actually time that we're trying to be wakeful. That's the time that we might move into a sense of relaxation, where we are present and relaxed. The goal is to be relaxed and open and wakeful, to be present to what's currently going on so that we can become more present to what's going on in the rest of our life. But here, we find that we're like toppling over. In addition to getting more sleep, there are some things I would recommend one would be to do some simple stretching so that we get into the body early, even before we do the short body scan. Another would be to drink some water or some, you know, some green tea, something that isn't like going to like wire us but something that does wake up in the body a little bit, there are certain things that we can do. And even in the posture itself, like sometimes we find that people like slouched over a lot. And this, you know, that's actually not helpful in terms of rousing the energy in the body. So even lifting up through the top of the head, and elongating the spine can bring about some sense of energy, keeping the shoulders slightly back, keeping the palms down on the thighs. These actually make us feel a little bit more uplifted, even though we're also feeling relax. So that's sort of the less snarky answer. But I do suspect for anyone who consistently as far as the meditation, that they might need to look at their sleep cycle and whether they are getting the rest of the need, particularly as I mentioned, in this pandemic,

Nick VinZant 21:45

there are many different kinds of motivation or motivation, meditation, I mean, is one kind superior to the other, in your opinion.

Lodro Rinzler 21:53

It's a great question. And I'm going to be diplomatic. I mean, obviously, I've got a preference, but I come from a Buddhist tradition. So I'm gonna be like everyone should be doing mindfulness, mindfulness of the breath is a great place to start. Part of that is because it is so easy, so simple, the technique, right, we take an uplifted and relaxed posture, we connect to the body breathing, when we get distracted, we come back to the breath, you Those are the three steps, you just learned them. Congratulations, you can go meditate, which is a little bit different than some other traditions where we might need to go through a weekend retreat to receive a mantra, which is, you know, a particular phrase that we would repeat, where we need to create a particular situation that were listened to pleasant sound, or we, you know, focus on emotions and emotions are often very ephemeral and very difficult to focus on for somebody who's brand new to it until it's self worth. So I have a preference, but at the same time, it's a little bit like asking me is asking you a guitar player. what's what's the best musical instrument? The guitar player is probably gonna say guitar, same thing.

Nick VinZant 22:52

What inspired you to write the write your new book, take back your mind?

Lodro Rinzler 22:56

Yeah, so the new book, take back your mind Buddhist advice for anxious times? And it's, I mean, the short answer is anxious times. It's like the last part of the title. Right? Right, that we live in these ridiculous anxious times. Now, I grew up with anxiety, even though I started meditating when I was six, but like this was, you know, there was a lot of issues that came up from my life, different forms of anxiety that arose deep losses in my life that really pulled the rug out from under me. And even though I was a meditation meditator, and even a meditation teacher, I realized that I needed to also work with my mind, in all the post meditation hours to actually start to, like rewire around anxiety rewire around my response to the ways that I would hold myself back. And the more I started doing that work, the more I started noticing how many other people around me were also struggling in the same way. And this is a lot of what we work with in meditation, which is getting comfortable with not knowing, and uncertainty and discomfort. And like, for the first not the first time, but for maybe the first time in my life. It's not personal anxiety of like, oh, here's what I'm going through, or even interpersonal, like, you and your friend are having an issue. It's a societal anxiety. Like there's, even though we live in different places, the idea of when I say lockdown someone, you know, living in Australia, understand what I mean. And we're at a time where I just feel like anxiety is reaching all time high and yet, no one's talking about it. It's like this. He wouldn't be like, well, the second pandemic is blank, but it is like it's something that so many of us are suffering from.

Nick VinZant 24:37

Final question. What is the best advice you've ever given somebody? What is the best advice you've ever received?

Lodro Rinzler 24:44

Gosh, what an interesting question. I don't give him really good advice. You know, for all of my, it's, I don't mean to be self deprecating here. But for all of my years of teaching meditation, all I do is essentially share what I've learned. from teachers who were generous and taught me, so it's not like I came up with any of it. You know, whatever I share with people, it's something that actually comes from centuries and centuries of people who knew I learned, I learned with someone who currently is alive and to learn with someone, and they learn with someone, and they learn with someone all the way back for 1000s of years. So I feel like a lot of the advice I give, I'll just say maybe more recently around the book of in xiety, is to realize that we could actually make a choice around anxiety and working with our mind that we don't have to live in an HST. There's an analogy, an analogy in Buddhism, that you're in the woods, and out of nowhere, an arrow comes and hits you in the arm. And the thing we ought to do probably is to take that arrow out and tend to our healing. And yet many of us in that moment, when we feel wounded when we feel like oh, there's pain or stress or anxiety and stress in our life, we say, Ah, you know what, this is so typical, like, this is such a thing that would happen to me on a day like today, no one else gets hit in the arm by arrows. It's just me, like, this is no such a thing. I bet this was a you know, who showed me a bit it was that person who I don't like this is so typical them. And we just keep telling ourselves story upon story upon story. And that is holding us in that state of pain. And that is known as the secondary. So this is the two arrow analogy, first arrow, there's pain that comes up. As part of life, there are stressful situations that happen to all of us. The second arrow is the stories that we then read to ourselves to reify, that state of pain, to hold ourselves in that state of stress. And so I suppose the quote unquote, best advice I might be able to give around this particular book is we don't have to do the secondary, that we don't have to hold ourselves in that state of, well, what if this happens? What if that happens, we can actually retrain the mind to do something else to actually become more present. So that's the advice. And then the best advice that I have ever received? It's such a good question. I wish I could give a more thoughtful answer and give you the actual best advice. But the answer that comes to my mind, the first one that pops up, good advice that I have received was, my last book was on the topic of heartbreak. It was called Love Hurts Buddha's advice for the heartbroken. And I get more emails about that book than any other book, maybe not surprisingly, because that's another thing where people really feel like, no one knows my pain. No one's ever been through this before. And then they pick up a book like that. And they're like, Oh, this person, sort of highlighting all the things that happened when I have a broken heart. So it's very sweet actually, to be in touch with with readers about these books. I enjoyed that tremendously. But the, in that there was there's a lot of stories, my own heartbreak, and the learning and unlearning that I had to do, particularly in my 20s. And there is a moment where everything really fell apart for me that I had lost my job, my best friend died, and my fiance had broken up with me. And I called a friend, friend who coincidentally just had a baby yesterday. And I said to him, Brett, I need you to tell me that I'm going to love again, because I actually don't believe that's gonna happen. I think this was it. And he said, Listen, I know that you will love again, because that's in your nature. That's who you are. And I don't know if it will be a long term romantic situation that turns into marriage, I don't know if it will be other situations where people come and go in your life, I don't know if it will be lots of friends and family. But I know that you will lead a life marked by love. And that was so meaningful to me at that moment, in that deep, like state of despair. And when people reach out, there's literally, there's a chapter in the book where I tell the story and say, if you feel this way, send me your phone number. And I'll tell you the same thing. So I find myself calling people a couple times a week. This book came out five years ago, it's still a couple times a week, except for the people internationally who I have to I'm like, I'm sorry, but I'm just gonna email you back. That's okay. But I deliver the same message which is, you know, even these devastating heartbreaking emotions that we go through are impermanent, they're subject to impermanence, just like everything else, and that, ultimately, we do heal and the pain paid to some degree. And we do love again, that's not a low draft. And that's a human thing we all do. So that was beautiful advice I received and I'm happy now to be passing on to others.

Nick VinZant 29:41

I want to thank lodro so much for joining us. If you want to connect with him. We have a link to him on our social media accounts, or Profoundly Pointless on Instagram and Twitter. And we have also included his information in the episode description. Okay, now let's go ahead and bring in a man who's great at fun himself but in a completely different way. JOHN jaw? What does internal you think of you?

Travel Photographer Gary Arndt

Gary Arndt is a three-time Travel Photographer of the Year. He's visited over 200 countries, traveled non-stop for a decade and gone nowhere in the last year. We talk the future of travel, the rise of digital nomads and the best travel photography. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Popular Things We Have No Interest In.

Mindfulness Teacher Laura Saltman

Is your mind constantly adrift, always thinking about what you have to do instead of what you're doing. Mindfulness Teacher Laura Saltman can help you focus. We talk mindfulness benefits, focusing on the moment and self-care. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Kinds of Restaurants.

Neuroscientist Dani Beck

Your body is one age but your brain could be much older. Neuroscientist Dani Beck studies how our lifestyle choices may be rapidly ageing our brains. We talk brain age gaps, mental illness and if you really can get smarter. Then, a special bouncy Top 5.

Celebrity Hair Stylist Wendy Iles

From Heidi Klum and Jennifer Lopez, to Sharon Stone and Elton John, Wendy Iles is a hair stylist to the stars. We talk hair secrets, working with celebrities, building a company and finding the courage to chase your dreams. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Farm Animals.

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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