Hello, I'm Chancellor Ronnie Green. Thank you for joining me for today's Nebraska lecture. This distinguished lecture series features some of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's most notable scholars, researchers, artists, and thinkers. At Nebraska, we believe in the power of every person. For about two decades, the Nebraska lectures have showcased some of Nebraska's finest scholars, people who embody the spirit of this institution and are committed to sharing their knowledge with the public. Our speakers are renowned experts in their fields. They are scholars who strive to collaborate, breaking down the barriers between disciplines. They are educators who are committed to mentoring and shaping the next generation. They are problem solvers who have spent their careers addressing some of society's most pressing challenges. I am so proud of their accomplishments and dedication to our university and the state of Nebraska. Thank you to the Office of Research and Economic Development, the University's Research Council, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and other partners for making this lecture series possible. I hope you enjoy today's Nebraska lecture. Well, welcome. For today's Nebraska lecture, we'll hear from Ray Hames, Professor of Anthropology in our School of Global Integrated Studies. In 2020, Dr. Hames was the fourth Nebraska to be named to the National Academy of Sciences. Membership in the Academy is one of the highest distinctions for a scientist or engineer in the United States as it recognizes distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. For more than 40 years, Dr. Hames has served as a leading anthropological scholar, both in the classroom here in Lincoln at UNL and through his research on Indigenous peoples in South America. Ray is an international authority on the lives of Indigenous peoples of the Venezuelan Amazon, who live in relative isolation. Before international politics blocked access in 1999, Hames spent almost three years living within and studying the Indigenous tribes firsthand. His research is primarily focused on their behavioral ecology, food and labor exchange, human ecology, marriage, kinship, and parental investment. Dr. Hames earned a bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, then joined our faculty in 1980, and if you do your math, that was 42 years ago. His most recent National Science Foundation-funded project is creating a demographic and genealogical database so social scientists can use it to test theories on kinship, demographic processes, and marriage. I'm eager to hear his presentation today, in which he'll describe the diversity of hunter-gatherers and debunk some utopian assumptions we may hold about these remote societies. If you have questions for Ray, please enter them in the chat. He will answer some of them during a Q&A session after the lecture. Over to Dr. Hames. Thank you, Chancellor. Popular writers proclaim that if we are to be in tune with our hunter-gatherers' selves, we will be healthier, have less violence, conserve resources, and maintain biodiversity, work less, have a better sex and marital lives, and create greater gender equality. There are kind of two views on hunter-gatherers, a kind of classic dividing line, a Hobbesian version which says that life was short, nasty, and brutish. A Rossoean perspective that says man is born free and everywhere, he is in chains. These popular writers that I'm going to talk about, and just not popular writers, but also scientific writers, are mostly Rossoean. Most are not scientists, but some are, but the reality of hunter-gatherer life is somewhere in between. The usual suspect for our problem comes from agriculture and the rise of civilization according to the Rossoeans. Here's a quote from Jared Diamond, the adoption of agriculture was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never fully recovered with agriculture, came the gross social and sexual inequality, the diseases and deposition that cursed our existence. But there's an important point about early agriculture that I like to make in that most of the Rossoeans point to the fact that the rise of agriculture and civilization has kind of led to a degradation of the human spirit. Skeletal analyses of early hunter-gatherers who were transitioning to agriculture show that they were about three centimeters shorter than they were before they started engaging in agriculture, and had higher rates of skeletal lesions and dental abnormalities because of diet, parasitic and other diseases of living in dense settlements. But through time that increase in stature and lessening of skeletal abnormalities indicating poor health kind of got back to normal. So here's a kind of early take home message. Most Rossoeans project their social views of the good life on the hunter-gatherers, which is really a means to critique current issues by using hunter-gatherers as paragons of virtue. Unfortunately popular writers tend to cherry pick examples while ignoring counter cases. And then the final point is that there is considerable cultural diversity among hunter-gatherers. So why are hunter-gatherers important? Well simply anatomically modern humans did not come onto the scene until about 200,000 years ago. Agriculture is only about 12,000 years old. Therefore for at least 95% of our history as a species we live the life of hunter-gatherers. And given the pace of evolution many assume that our basic biological, social, and psychological attributes evolved in a hunting and gathering lifestyle. Therefore there's a kind of mismatch between what we were for 95% of our history and what we've become with the advent of agriculture and civilization. Here by the way is a picture of an anatomically modern human dated about 160,000 years ago in Ethiopia. Herto is his name. He was basically like us anatomically except his brain was about 150 centimeters larger than ours. But he had all the attributes that we would describe to an anatomically modern human. So let's set the stage of that. You know who were hunter-gatherers, what were they like? Hunter-gathering and fishing was the main mode of subsistence. Generally men hunted, women gathered. They were nomadic to semi-nomadic people. Average local group size was about 30 but they existed in large regional bands of 50 to 1,000 people. And there was a lot of interaction in terms of trade, visiting, marriage, and celebration of festivals. So that kind of 30 seems like a small unit but in fact they had a really large encompassing social network. Low population density, also very little wealth differentiation. Everybody was about the same material existence, the same dietary kind of status. They were politically egalitarian except that men had more power than women and older had more power than the younger and very weak leadership. You know one saying that we anthropologists use one word from the head man and everybody does as he pleases. So what I want to talk about today largely are issues in the popular imagination of hunter-gatherers. Talk about their diet, physical activity and caloric expenditure, labor time, resource conservation, health, violence, and marriage and sexuality. So here is probably you know getting to what we ate and how we should eat according to people who promote the paleo diet. A number of them are anthropologists. Others are just popular people who want to earn some money writing diet books and so this has been going on for a while and what there's some interesting reasoning behind the paleo diet that is why it's promoted. Our body became genetically mismatched with the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry compared to what we ate during most of our history as a species and some examples are for example lactose malabsorption. It affects 36% of the people in the United States, 70% of people worldwide and it's because in hunting gathering lifestyle there was no milk after you you were weaned and so this is an example of a kind of mismatch. We've become ill some of us or most of us in the world if we can assume dairy products. The other thing for example is starch digestion. One shift has been a reliance on shifting from meat and nuts and berries to high plants high in carbohydrates and moderns have a kind of genetic change that occurred in the number of gene copies for amylase which is really good to digest carbohydrates whereas hunter-gatherers they have very little in the way of the expression of that gene so this is kind of the reasoning behind this mismatch hypothesis. So let's look at BMI body mass index and obesity obesity compared looking at us on one hand and hunter-gatherers on the other hand. In the United States the average BMI for men and women is about 28 for hunter-gatherers for females is about 24 males is 23 and if we look at it from the perspective of what is a claim to be obese using the BMI measures 43% of females 42% of males are obese but among hunter-gatherers only 4.6 for women and 1.2 for men so you can see there's a huge difference in the kind of our our stature and level of obesity compared to our ancestors for most of the our histories of species. So let's look at the empirical basis the paleo diet as many of you know it's the diet recommendation that's really high in meat overall one basic study from a dietitian at the University of Colorado Boulder noted that hunter-gatherers gained 45 to 65% of their diet from animal foods but there's a problem with a sample the data is not very good and a lot of these samples they used are the cases they used honey is not mentioned and I'll get to that in just a minute many hunter-gatherers consume less than 20 to 30% of meat with no ill effects the amount of fat consumed was unknown in these dietary surveys and the recommendation of the mean of the sample is not really a valid recommendation given the kind of variation we see with no variation in obesity or health aspects and so here's an example of some worldwide samples you can see that meat looms large in the paleo diet but there are some groups for example on the right hand side the kong and the gui whose diet is dominated by plant foods and so there's this kind of interesting variation that's found basically the higher you go north or south from the equator the more hunter-gatherer diet is composed of animal resources for example among the Inuit people 95% of the diet is from meat and fat and again no ill effects are noted I'll get to that in just a minute here's this what I want to talk about honey for the hodza who are kind of like our typical hunter-gatherers because they're so well studied 15% of the diet is from honey and you can see in this chart here that in some months and this is you know 12 month kind of dietary measure over half the diet is honey and but what you see is enormous amount of variation day to day so there is no constant hunter-gatherer diet in this sort of case so what's in the paleo diet well you see it's meat and fish dominating nuts and seeds fruits vegetables high fiber in the diet our diet the modern diet starchy greens dominate our diet legumes really rare in hunter-gatherer diet are important in our diet dairy absent from hunter-gatherer diet really present in our diet highly processed and energy-dense food again in our diet and very low fiber in our diet now what do we know about hunter-gatherer dietary choice the the assumption seems to be that they know what they should eat and that's the recommendation that we make for us one thing we know is that the macronutrients in terms of carbohydrates protein and fat vary with latitude higher you go north or south from the equator the more meat and fat are parts of the diet as I mentioned before what we know from economic ampologies hunter-gatherer is attempt to maximize their net rate of caloric return through foraging that means they're trying to be as efficient as possible in foraging so the resulting diet depends on the cost and benefits of pursuing various food types as predicted by a diet breath model in optimal foraging theory so the question becomes are some forager diets better or worse than others we have no idea all the diet seem to be adequate they don't seem to suffer from any of the kind of ills that we suffer from for example high BMI or they have very very little in the way are almost nothing in the way of metabolic disorders such as hypertension diabetes blood sugar high levels or abnormal cholesterol or triglyceride levels they're dietetically associated in our society so the point is despite the variation they have in their diet they don't have any thing that remotely resembles the kinds of problems that we have in terms of chronic illnesses now given their active lifestyle and relative lack of obesity do hunter-gatherers expand more calories this really recent research has been done heavily publicized in science and nature and if you look at the bottom chart it looks at total energetic expenditure for men and women the two dark bars for men and women represent the the haza the group that eats lots of honey that I showed you before in a group that's close to hunter-gatherers called the chimani what you see is that there's hardly any difference between men compared to South Africans US and Jamaican and people in the Netherlands only about 200 more calories per day and total energetic expenditure total caloric expenditure if you look at the women they are exceeded by women in modern societies but then if you look at the top so the point is that they're not more energetically active than we are on average or if they are just a little bit but if you look at physical activity in terms of moderate to vigorous physical activity you see the two dark bars there for men and women much much higher than what we expend in and moderate physical activity is essentially brisk walking vigorous you begin to up your heart rate and your ventilation rate and so this is a very interesting result a kind of unexpected result but a result that is really well documented and so we can call this I think it's frustrating it's called a constrained energy paradox and that is frustrating because we don't fully understand the reasoning behind it even though the data is there to suggest this is the case so there are limits to how many calories we can burn active people only burn about 200 calories more per day than inactive people the more active we are and a lot of people who experience this as they go through a dietary restriction the fewer calories we expend we are when we are in active so our basal metabolic rate goes down and so we have this constrained energy output that goes on so consequently the problem of dietary obesity is perhaps better solved through caloric reduction now we've been designed by natural selection to be a hungry species and eat whenever we can and one way to look at it is the calories for us have become really really cheap if you look at the figures on the haza and the shimane there you see that for every hour they work they only get maybe one to two thousand calories an hour okay if you look at us especially the change through time which essentially marks the increase in obesity we can get up to twenty thousand calories for an hour of wages and so that is a huge you know difference you know one to two thousand versus twenty thousand and so the suggestion I would make perhaps you know caloric restriction is the thing that we need to to focus on health status hunter-gatherers typically have high rates of infectious diseases and parasitism in fact their infant mortality rate that is the number of children who die before they reach one year of age is about twenty to twenty five percent now the good news is they have an absence of diseases of civilization or non-infected diseases included cardiovascular disorders I mentioned hypertension diabetes blood sugar abnormalities abnormal cholesterol triglycerides and the lowest measures ever of coronary orthodosclerosis of any population ever made and so there once they get through that childhood reach about the age of 15 then their average life expectancy goes up to about 68 years and of course we live longer but it has to do with modern medical interventions that allow us to do so there's some interesting research on cognitive impairment like the West about the age of 60 there's a bit of moderate cognitive impairment equal to moderns compared to hunter-gatherers but they have the lowest rates of Alzheimer's disease of any population ever studied and this is work on the haza and the and the chimone do hunter-gatherers work less than we do a lot of popular authors would say that we've been civilized to death we're kind of in a rat race another work by my sussman and so the common claim is that hunter-gatherers work only three to four hours a day seven days a week but this is largely based on a single incomplete study of the song bushman that live in the Kalahari a well-studied group and again this is an example of popular writers cherry picking their their evidence while they do work less than we do we got to put it in context and here's something I published about 25 years ago and if you looked at the left-hand column going from hunter-gatherers to Amazonians New Guineans agriculturalist and Western European peoples what you find is that hunter-gatherers do work less than modern Europeans or agriculturalists and I get to the agriculturalists in just a minute but other people like I said to them you know mama they work least of all and also and these people are essentially transitioning to early horticulture so they do work less than we do but there are other groups who are agriculturalists who who work even less now there's one thing that's really interesting and this bears further research if you look at all the orange bars they exceed the blue bars except for hunter-gatherers that means that women work more than men except in hunting and gathering society and what's really interesting about these time allocation measures is that they don't take into consideration child care now some of you may think that changing the dirty diaper is a leisure time activity most of us don't and so the what I would argue is that the the excess of labor time shown here in these studies by by women if they were to include child care activities they would far exceed the amount of time that that men work so I want to turn to now hunter-gatherer violence here's a picture I took outside my hut the group I studied the on a mama very warlike they're getting ready for a raid they're going to go up river and attack the village that had been bothering them for for some time and we've got this international bestseller called humankind a hopeful history by a writer called Rucker Bergman and it's an international bestseller and essentially says that once again agriculture and civilization is the culprit that's led to all the problems that we have today and he says that hunter-gatherer societies were inherently peaceful anti-war equal and feminist a really extreme was so in reviews as usual lots of positive reviews by non experts unfortunately experts tend not to review these books because they're really not worth their time and so we have a pundits doing these reviews and I want to kind of focus on this really sort of perspective what we know about warfare in pre-industrial societies and what I'm going to argue is that the Hobbesian perspective life is short nasty and brutish to some extent is true here's a book that was really really important war before civilization by Lawrence Keely and then a later much more popular book by Steven Pinker Pinker at Harvard who's a cognitive psychologist and our cognitive scientist and evolutionary theorist better angels of our nature but that data that he used to argue for a decrease in warfare is essentially based on this archaeologist by the name of Lawrence Keely here's something I published to kind of put things in perspective this came out a couple years ago if we look at causes of death we find that at hunting and gathering society 12% of all deaths are through violence either through homicide or warfare if we turn to agriculturalists or horticulturalists it goes to 24% so it is true that hunter-gatherers compared to many other pre-industrial peoples have less warfare is still pretty high when you think about it and let's put it in greater perspective if we look at pre-industrial societies and tribal level societies these are outside of state societies we find that the average are see the in 20% of all deaths are essentially through violence in World War two and this is the one that really kind of surprises people 1% of the European population died during the 1900s to the 2000 from warfare now we know the millions of deaths that were caused we know of the horrible situation in Ukraine coming today but again we're looking at really large populations and so even though we've got massive deaths they don't really compare to what went on throughout most of our history so hunter-gatherers have lower the lowest death rates in any of pre-industrial societies but is much higher than what goes on today at 12% compared to 1-2% in the 19th century causes of war among hunter-gatherers competition over scarce resources this is pretty common throughout the world abduction of women for marriage revenge against wrongs cycles a few that seem to go on largely because there's no central authority to kind of like authoritatively settle disputes among people and this is because hunter-gatherers are fiercely egalitarian they don't like to be told by anybody what to do or how to settle their disputes leadership is really weak so that leads to an inability to stop these fuse once they get get going now let's turn to another kind of I think is largely a myth sometimes called the ecologically noble savage I wrote a long piece in the annual review of anthropology on this topic but they claim that hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the environment and they the argument is they have a number of environmental practices that permitted prevented the extinction of species and maintain biodiversity they were called guardians of the rainforest in the famous Rio summit there you see a picture there of sting sitting next to these Brazilian Native Americans and the idea that you know we really have to follow their kinds of methods for dealing with the environment but I would argue and many others would too that their so-called conservation is simply a side effect of a simple technology and a low-demand placed on resources it's not by any kind of design practices like we have for game conservation only going after males you know roosters and not hymns and things of that now when incentives emerge to external demand of colonial powers then degradation starts so hunter-gatherers were kind of like not over exploiting the resources also the Colonials come in their area invading the land and then they want furs skins feathers etc etc so we see the evidence of widespread degradation largely caused by colonial contact but these native peoples really wanted the steel goods to make their lives easier so and they didn't fully kind of understand the effect that they would have on their only later on their own biodiversity and lack of conservation and so but what I emphasize if you look at biodiversity in areas inhabited by native people they've got the highest biodiversity in the world largely because they're shielded from external demands in the past they essentially went after resources for their own people not for some external market in in Europe or the United States there's an idea among my my paleontological colleagues geologists that native Americans when they first came over were responsible for the extinction of the megafa megafa are essentially animals larger than 100 pounds and what we know is about the time that that humans came to North America there were megafa they hunted horses they hunted mammoths and the argument is that these megafa disappear giant ground sloths that weighed maybe a couple tons all sorts of really large animals like giant bison it was a consequence of over hunting but I think this is probably wrong the this overkill as is called I happened much too quickly there was a decline historically in the megafa anyway as people were coming over so I would disagree with my geological colleagues some of them anyway who thought that humans coming over from North America encountering large game animals who are completely naive to the dangers of these two-footed predators led to their extinction now this book is really interesting it's called sex at dawn made the best seller list and was an inspiration to some extent for the polyamory movement or consensual non-monogamy they made a number of claims that we have in much in common with promiscuous chimps and bonobos bonobos are a kind of chimp a little bit smaller and that we were designed to have multiple mating relationships at one time so this is the argument they make for hunter-gatherers and then when agriculture comes on the scene then we kind of get to monogamy they also argue that sexual jealousy is not natural I get to that in a minute it challenges the centrality of pair bonding and monogamous mating as what is they call the standard model but most anthropologists believe the thing that really led to the transition or market difference between us and chimpanzees is that we had monogamous relatively long enduring relationships and not this kind of promiscuous mating that chimpanzees have is that most theorists would argue this is like a central step that kind of socially differentiates us from chimpanzees so they're challenging this and of course the invention of agriculture is the usual culprit and so anyway here's what I think is actually the case true there are some societies in which individuals are permitted to have extra pair extra-marital partners but they're exceptionally uncommon and they're highly restricted where they do occur and again among hunter-gatherers pair bonds that are relatively stable sometimes they're monogamous sometimes they're polygynous that is a man is allowed to have more than one wife typically there's only very few men who have this sort of situation also if you have this free and easy sexuality why isn't the case that most deadly internal conflict in small-scale societies is a consequence of adultery again doesn't make sense in terms of their models and then also women are highly selective and select their marital partners who help support their their offspring which is something that we've been able to demonstrate time and time again so what's kind of really irksome to me to some extent is that my research with my former student Katie Stark whether has been used to kind of make an argument for this polyamory sort of situation when we talk about polyandry which is relatively rare but we show that it was much more common than people thought which is a woman allowed to have more than one husband at a time again it does occur it's a lot more common after we documented but it has nothing to do with consensual non-monogamy these are very restricted kinds of relationships so I kind of have a personal stake in these popularizers who are trying to characterize the nature of hunter-gatherer life and suggest that we should be like them so here's some final thoughts there is tremendous diversity among hunter-gatherers they are source for you know popular writers who essentially suggest that we could cure our current problems if we were just to act like our ancient hunter-gatherer selves but you know this is really not the case because the practices hunter-gatherers have are in the context of hunter-gatherer society which is a different context than we have but also suggest that their impact on the environment was minuscule compared to our impact and that hunter-gatherer activity levels and some elements of their diet should be a model nevertheless for us all and that the risk of violent death is less today than it was among hunter-gatherers of course if we bring up the situation of Ukraine and the possibilities of tactical use of nuclear weapons and that is essentially off the table so thank you very much for your attention we'd be happy to entertain some questions well thank you Dr. Haymes for offering us this window into these remote societies and we should be proud as a university that you've engaged in this research and we're grateful for your expertise and to our viewers of today's Nebraska lecture who have joined us if you have questions you're welcome to submit them to Dr. Haymes using the chat button at the bottom of your screen I might start off with one or two Ray was there more sexual equality in hunter-gatherer societies compared to others it's a good question the the short answer is no but it depends on how you measure it you could talk about domestic authority within the household you can talk about power between households in the village or you can talk about village to village leadership roles etc etc and or then you can talk about do you have a choice of who you marry most women in hunter-gatherer societies don't have a choice some do in terms of a political realm again they tend not to ever have positions of authority within the entire village and so there's lots of dimensions you can use you know for example can they own property or how much can they own property so it's a kind of a multi-dimensional kind of question that we could develop to kind of make those measures but in general the answer is no but one area they they're pretty much free to divorce if they're unhappy with the marital arrangements made by their their parents then they can divorce and find someone who is more they're more comfortable with and you mentioned in your lecture chimpanzees which of course are our closest evolutionary correct you know on the evolutionary scale to two humans 99.9% right right right is and of course the human genome was shown us a lot about a lot a lot about that as well the what what role do they play in evolutionary evolutionary modeling about what's distinctive about human society well the idea and it's only really an assumption is that you know we at that time had a common ancestor and that was much like the chimpanzee where they had for example as I mentioned promiscuous mating one major transition that most scholars would argue is that the major thing that differentiates us is the development of non promiscuous mateys and then also another feature is that chimpanzee males don't invest in their own offspring human males do the reason they don't is because of promiscuous mating you don't know who paternity so that's one the other thing too is that chimps especially is the common chimpanzee the bonobo there's some difference between the two they don't they have antagonistic relationships with their neighbors it's a complete war one-on-one you know group-on-group a human hunter-hunter gathers even though they engage in some warfare have peaceful relationships they can have war-like relationships but peaceful relationships with many of their neighbors and they visit exchange marital partners celebrate etc etc so those are two main differences that kind of like mark our transition from chimps to what's unique about us so kind of back to the sexuality side one of our one of our listeners asked the question can you discuss sexuality and when in terms of age individuals were expected to become sexually active well again there's quite a bit of variation but typically until a young girl has pastor first men sees and typically they can't marry till then and they have their first child usually around 18 years of age and so when they're physiological capable of reproduction that is when they're allowed to get married so really then I'm a geneticist myself on the animal side right so really the generation link isn't dramatically wouldn't be dramatically different you know we usually think of 25 there's been a real trend in later and later marriage right but they typically don't have their first child till about 18 or 19 because they're a period of kind of a serility that goes on irregular cycling and so they begin reproducing about 18 or so right and another question from a viewer is what initiated the drastic change to a sedentary lifestyle from constantly being on the move and why I guess the real question they're asking is why maybe hadn't it happened earlier well it had to do with well some hunter gatherers were fairly sedentary where they had a super abundance of resource if you look at the Northwest Coast of North America salmon runs allow them to be sedentary but with the development of agriculture you have to stay in place and watch the fields nurture the crops protect them etc etc so that leads to what we call sedentism because you're essentially tied to locked on an area of of land that has all your food resource you still do some hunting and gathering so that forces you to settle down and not move around right so less nomadic exactly yeah and another question are hunter gatherer characteristics similar globally or are there geographic factors that influence certain patterns you mentioned a little bit of that in your talk as you go away from the equator if so what are some of those notable distinctions well you know we have a concentration of resources like I was mentioning salmon runs we get really large populations of hunter gatherers especially you know we're fishing aquatic resources are really important we mentioned the thing about diet and environment for you go away from the equator the more you spent more your diet changes to to heavy meat and so there's lots of little kind of ecological factors that can affect the size of a group how often they split up and re-aggregate and how often they fight whether they're kind of contested over resources that are locally fixed so there's lots of environmental factors that affect their lifestyle and our maybe last question for you Ray is given all the pressures facing all societies example of climate change economic pressures warfare you mentioned you mentioned among others what does the future look like for hunter gatherers societies well unfortunately they typically exist in marginal areas that are of little use to anybody like deserts and so they exist where moderns haven't found a way to exploit the environment they live in they are disappearing they are changing they are being integrated into the national economy and so they will disappear at some some time they're fewer and fewer as time goes on well great lecture Ray and congratulations on the body of your work or as we mentioned 42 years you know it just here at the University of Nebraska but congratulations on a great lecture for the chancellor's lecture series for this spring and and all of our our virtual viewers are giving you a big round of applause thank you very much thank you for having me


Item number, SCP-295. Object Class, Euclid. Special Containment Procedures. SCP-295 is to be contained within a 50 meter by 50 meter concrete room, with all surfaces coated with flame retardant material. All personnel entering and exiting containment must comply with level 3 contamination screening. Three flame retardant exposure suits are to be maintained on the premises and are required for any and all testing involving SCP-295. Feeding will occur once per week and consist of a meal of 20 kilograms of naturally grown pine wood, harvested near the Site-19 facility. Description. SCP-295 is a number of caterpillars, resembling centimeter epilace in appearance. A single specimen of SCP-295 is capable of creating an unidentifiable substance, which has several unique qualities attributed to it. SCP-295 possesses similar physical attributes to a common caterpillar, with a notable exception being SCP-295's incredible speed when in pursuit of sustenance. When flammable material is introduced into SCP-295's environment, it will quickly move to attempt to consume it. The substance produced by SCP-295, hereby known as SCP-295-1, is a viscous fluid that possesses natural bioluminescence of variable intensity, averaging at around 150,000 lumens. The intensity fades over time, but sufficient heat is capable of renewing its incandescence. However, the danger lies in its other quality, which is its ability to cause violent combustion in any flammable object it comes in contact with. All matter destroyed in this manner leave no ash or other byproducts behind, although an increase in mass has been observed in specimens of SCP-295 after combustion. A notable exception is living animal matter, which SCP-295-1 is incapable of affecting in all circumstances. SCP-295 is capable of reproduction given sufficient matter to combust, or when a specific mass has been attained. When this occurs, SCP-295 will pupate, forming a shell of dense carbon with a similar molecular structure to coal. Once a week has passed, both the pupa and the specimen will combust, the ashes reform into two additional caterpillars, after which the process begins anew. Occasionally, only one specimen of SCP-295 will reform from the resultant ashes, rather than a pair. These ashes will not always reform immediately, and can remain inert. Ashes left on personnel's clothing can reform later, and further spread SCP-295's population. SCP-295 was discovered in Ukraine, after a series of improbable and volatile forest fires had reduced a large swath of forests into barren wastes. Agent Krupp, who had family in the area, noted that the fires had left not a single thing in their wake. When Dr. Krupp was dispatched to investigate, he found a complete lack of life and vegetation, with the exemption of a species of caterpillar that was not local to the area. What had alarmed him more, however, was the sudden destruction of his clothing and belongings by a swarm of starved SCP-295s. After several attempts and more than a few changes of clothing, SCP-295 was brought to site 19 and safely contained. Addendum 295A Despite months of regular feeding, the number of specimens have neither declined nor have they increased since being contained. The cycle of reproduction has stayed consistent, with the majority of recorded combustion resulting in two new specimens. How the population has kept itself in check is unknown at this time. Addendum 295B It's possible that there are still wild specimens of SCP-295 out in the world, considering the trouble we have containing it in the lab. Any attempts to contain populations of SCP-295 in the field are to be made on location, with the intent to isolate and terminate. Note, this stuff has some serious potential for weaponization, if we could get enough of it out of the little worms. Find a way to carry and dispense it, and you'd put napalm to shame. Agent B Addendum 295C Experiment Log 2951A Experiment Log of Dr. Kondraki Testing Practical Uses of SCP-295-1 Date undisclosed Experiment 1 Human Consumption Testing Materials 5 ml of SCP-295-1 Procedure Class D personnel give an SCP-295-1 to ingest. Result Subject reported mild heartburn and nausea, but no serious adverse effects observed. Subject's digestive system temporarily operated at 25% additional efficiency. Experiment 2 Usage as a portable source of light Materials 20 ml of SCP-295-1 Glass tubing, rubber grip, lighter Procedure Glass tubing filled with SCP-295-1 Reinforced by rubber grip Result Device produced sufficient light to completely illuminate an area of 31 meters squared at 16,145 lux for several hours. Applying a lighter to the surface of the glass relit the solution completely. Experiment 3 Usage as an incendiary device Materials 200 ml of SCP-295-1 Glass globe Procedure Globe filled with SCP-295-1 and thrown into wooden test structure. Result All material that came in contact with SCP-295-1 instantly combusted, as expected. Remaining structure of the building burned abnormally quickly from secondary conflagration. Only 20% of the structure's initial mass remained after testing. Note, immediately following the conclusion of the test, approximately 56% of captive SCP-295 specimens began to pupate. Dr. Kondraki Experiment 4 Usage as lighter fluid Materials 100 ml of SCP-295-1 One bag of consumer-grade charcoal, mid-range coal grill, two beef burger patties. Procedure SCP-295-1 poured onto coal while beef patties are prepared. Result Data Expunged Note, I cannot fathom the lack of sense this required. Consider your position as an assistant terminated and your security level revoked. I hope that gives you something to think about in between skin grafts. Dr. Kondraki Addendum 295-D Experiment Log 295-1B Experiment Log of Agent T Testing Practical Uses of SCP-295-1 Experiments Overseen and Approved by Dr. W- Date Undisclosed Experiment 1 Usage as lighter fluid Revised Materials 1 ml of SCP-295-1 500 g consumer-grade charcoal, mid-range coal grill, two 100 g beef burger patties. Procedure Coals arranged in a standard rough cone. SCP-295-1 applied to three coals. Tester wore standard silver suit heat protection gear. Result The treated coals combusted almost instantly, as expected. Remaining coals ignited very quickly. Patties cooked in approximately half expected time. Cooked patties, when tested in laboratory, showed no evidence of any unusual components. Note, as expected, the secondary fires produce only normal combustion products and effects.  Perhaps next time you should do some research when you design a test. Dr. Kundraki let you off easy. Agent T Experiment 2 Possible Application for Rescue Work Materials 1d class personnel, 1 steel girder, 1 ml of SCP-295-1 20 g thermite paste. Procedure Class D's leg trapped under girder. A line of thermite paste was placed on the girder upslope from the pinned leg. SCP-295-1 applied to the thermite paste. Result The thermite ignited and combusted almost instantly, severing the girder with almost no splatter or spark. The upslope section fell to the ground. Water sprayed over the severed end, steamed only slightly and briefly. D-class was not harmed. Note, just what I'd hoped for. The thermite released its energy and burned through the steel it was actually touching, but the reaction was too fast for much heat to transfer to the rest of the girder. This could be a very useful intrusion technique, in addition to its rescue applications. Agent T Experiment 3 Effects and Oxygen Deprived Environment Materials 1 filled 10 liter aquarium, 1 lead weight, 1 100 g untreated oak block, 1 non-flammable syringe, 1 ml of SCP-295-1 Procedure The oak sample was weighted down in the aquarium, then injected with SCP-295-1 Result Over a period of approximately 2 seconds, the oak burned to charcoal. Note, interesting. Apparently there was enough air in the channels to support the very limited combustion. Next time, I'll try waterlogged wood. Agent T Lesson Complete If you missed the previous orientation, go watch SCP-294, The Coffee Machine, right now. Or for the complete course, watch this playlist.


Cajon Pass in San Bernardino County is no stranger to wildfires and neither are county firefighters. Where this started and then where it moved and how fast it moved was really unprecedented. We've never seen that kind of activity that fast and that widespread. The blue-cut fire started on August 16th and within three days exploded to 37,000 acres. 29 aircraft are assigned to the fight, including 17 helicopters that repeatedly make the round-trip flight from the pond at incident command to the east and west sides of the fire dropping hundreds of gallons of water each time. The overall effort is massive. 1584 personnel, 178 engines and countless volunteers. The blue-cut fire created complex challenges for emergency managers. It immediately damaged California's critical infrastructure, highways, power lines, underground gas lines and railroads. One of Union Pacific's trestles burned the first night. So one of the key components to California's infrastructure and economy is the railroad. And what you're seeing over here is what just burned. That is the Mojave Mainline Bridge. When that burned that severely crippled the railroad's ability to bring goods not only to California but to the entire country. When trains can't move, things going out of and coming into California come to a screeching halt, especially when those trains come right from the ports of LA and Long Beach. That really set a series of cascading impacts and motion. All the ships that were coming in from foreign ports were put on hold. What ships that were coming in to port, we had to stack up the material in the port which then created a big backlog. And it goes to show that disasters while they're local have a national and international impact. So the number one priority next to saving lives and homes is to get the trains back on track. UP crews are likened to worker ants. They swarm the damage and immediately go to work to fix it. The trestle burned so hot it warped the steel tracks to the point they can't be used. So they're fabricating the parts they need right on site. They expect the bridge to reopen in just a few more days. Not far away, a tanker sprays water on tracks threatened by fire. They've already lost part of that track. Up the highway, crews repair power lines taken down by the raging fire. And I-15, a major trucking and commuter route, was reopened after flames forced its closure. The constant pounding by mutual aid ground and aerial crews and the planning and strategy that put them there slowed the fires advance on this day three. And really, this team did a great job. But we were all working together. Sacramento, Washington, D.C. here at San Bernardino at the incident across the board working together. One team, one fight. The shelters are open for the more than 80,000 people in the evacuation areas, as is the local assistance center here at the San Bernardino Fairgrounds. It's also where more than 600 animals are being sheltered. The community came together to care for the animals and provide for those owners a level of comfort and knowledge that their animals are being maintained while they actually see to their own personal needs.  Dave Gross got the call from Animal Care and Control Tuesday night. Could he take any animals? I told him give me 45 minutes. Within a half hour I had buckets of water in the stalls. Within the hour I was receiving animals. And they kept coming as did donations by the truckload. We have 2000 pounds of hay that was delivered yesterday, which is 100 bales. We have another 150 bales coming in today. Everything has been donated. Nobody has asked for a penny. Dave and his volunteers have their hands full. All of these pens donated to Dave's cause caring for the animals of those evacuated folks who were literally in the line of fire. Dave says he's gotten 12 hours of sleep in just four days. It's a price he's willing to pay. Is it worth not getting any sleep? Absolutely. When you see these people reunited with their animal, nothing can beat that. Hello. Yes. Get on the camera. Like Becky Johnson and her horse Lincoln, who's obviously a ham. Becky has two horses here evacuating before she got the official order was the only reason I evacuated was because of them. Um, they're that important to me. I wouldn't leave them. Nevermind that Lincoln is a direct descendant of the legendary secretariat. Her two horses are family just like all of the animals out here.


All right, it's nice to be here. I was going to start by saying I'm going to stand still because a funny story is that yesterday I was going to a meeting. I'm the medical director for behavioral health for Solano County in Northern California. And I was going to a meeting. My colleague has a Jeep Wrangler. And we went to get in her car. And I was stepped up high. And when I got to get out of her car, of course, my back was not happy. Something happened. So I'll be fine in three days. But I have acute pain. So I laugh about it. But it's nice to be here. My brother was an RA at the building right there when he went to UCLA. So I've been down here. Of course, we had H.S. 11 here. So I was going to tell a little backstory. So in 2007, I started a blog, Health Care Epistemocrat, and was having fun writing. But mostly the best part was connecting with new people. And so I met Erin. And that was wonderful and many other people. And in December of 2009, Erin and I came here to UCLA to a conference called New Directions in Physiology. And it was a good conference. And we were also joined by our friend Chris Owens at the time. And after the conference, we were like, why don't we have our own conference? There's like all these people with the time we had connected with through different blogs and activities on the internet. And we were hoping to, almost similar to now, take all the interactions online and bring people together in person and have a gathering that would bring together in kind of an egalitarian way that supports diversity and inclusivity and discussion of ideas. The whole spectrum. So lay people with lived experience all the way to scientists and physicians. And so I had appreciated Nassim Taleb's idea for the envelope of serendipity. And I put on my blog a post after the conference saying, we'd like to do this conference. And we literally just posted the idea. And fortunately, Jake was reading my blog at the time and said, if you do it, I'll help you out. And that's really how we got to today. Because then from there, we had, like we still have, is a group of people who are passionate, volunteer, work together as a team to form the nonprofit, to bring together all the presenters who were passionate and eager to contribute. And then by August 2011, we had the first conference. So here we are 11 years later. So it's pretty phenomenal. And then I went down the whole of going to medical school. So I mean, I remember I came to the conference in 2011. It was early August. And I think within the next week or two, I was in Baltimore. And it rained for 21 days. And I was doing anatomy. So things changed rapidly, obviously, for me. But one thing I was going to talk about today that's interesting is as I went through my journey at Hopkins and becoming a doctor and becoming a psychiatrist is finding mentors there working in chronic pain who essentially were stumbling upon and utilizing similar tools that people have been talking about at AHS for the last 11 years. So really, I think that pain, chronic pain, is an interesting area of medicine because it requires a very holistic approach. There's a lot that we don't know. It's very individualized. And there's a lot of different tools people can use to manage pain and chronic pain to help them function and have quality of life. So my mentor at Hopkins, who I give a lot of credit to, is Dr. Glenn Treisman. And he talks about interstitial medicine. There's different areas where clearly patients are suffering or dealing with certain problems that lie at the intersection or in between the spaces of the specialties that we have in medicine because we have such a siloed, specialty driven health care system and the way things work. But clearly everyone here can appreciate and while we have AHS is that in that space that's where you need creativity, you need an open mind and you have to be able to collaborate among specialties and among the silos to bring people together. So to me, if you're gonna talk about chronic pain, ancestral health and interstitial medicine have a lot in common. So I'll share a little bit about what I've learned as a psychiatrist working in chronic pain.  But one of the reasons why this topic is important is this problem which does exist as a continuing challenge in our communities. So back in the 90s, chronic pain's not a new thing, obviously, there was a big push to treat pain and one idea that was proposed is thinking about pain as a vital sign. So you don't need pain to live, you need your vital signs to live. You need a pulse, you have to perfuse your organs, so you need a heart rate, you need a blood pressure. If you don't have those, you can't live. You need to oxygenate your blood, you need to ventilate your lungs. If you don't have a respiratory rate, if you don't have an O2 saturation, you can't live. You need those to live. You don't need pain to live, it's not a vital sign. But the push to make pain a vital sign within our healthcare system, before you know it, J.C.O. and all the regulatory bodies made the pain one to 10 scale so important and it started to kick off a cycle of utilizing opiates widely to treat pain. And unfortunately, opiates, while they may help acute pain and of course they have a role in medicine and they're very therapeutic and useful. We wouldn't be able to do the surgeries and all the things we can do that are definitely providing great value, but when it comes to long-term management of pain, for many people, opiates can be problematic because as I'll talk about is pain signals that are either amplified or malfunctioning don't go silent. They just get louder. So with opiates, which have a physiologic mechanism of essentially trying to block a pain transmission signal, we see tolerance, escalation of pain, dose escalation of opiates and we recognized that a few decades later and then we wanted to cut doctors off from prescribing opiates and it almost happened all of a sudden. So people still dealing with pain, dealing with opiate addiction, have found their sources of opiates. As you can see, fentanyl out in the community is sourced from all different manners and fentanyl, if you don't know, is much more potent. It's laced in many street drugs at the time and the big issue is the ease of taking too much without knowing it and overdosing and dying because your respiratory rate goes to zero. So this is this graph that was up to 2018 data and I put a line in because basically if you go get recent data, the fentanyl line just keeps going to the moon. So as a behavioral health medical director for a county, of course, this is something that's sad and continues to be difficult epidemic and then part of it is we don't have a healthcare system that's very good at managing people with chronic pain and with addiction and there's room to improve. But so if pain is not a vital sign, it's very important to realize that pain is an experience. So there's a lot of components to everyone's pain and that's very important to be empathetic to and realize that pain has a sensory component. Of course, humans are sentient beings, we've evolved fortunately, pain transmission signals, we can take in our environment, pain feedback, shapes our behavior, helps us avoid aversive or noxious stimuli, but those systems can go awry. But you can see how pain can be protective and so a good example in medicine is take someone with uncontrolled diabetes who unfortunately develops neuropathy in their foot, meaning the nerves in their foot are no longer sensing the environment properly.  And people can get bad wound infections, they can require amputation and this is like a very sad progression, but clearly in this case, that lack of having that pain information is harmful, I mean, so having pain systems that we have is a good thing, but just like any physiologic system, it can malfunction, it can provide misinformation and we have vulnerabilities as a result. And so when you experience pain, you have your sensory component, but there's a cognitive element, pain is frustrating, it's distracting, it affects your concentration, they say cognitive or emotional, see I have pain, I can't even remember what I just said, but so there's a cognitive component, then there's emotional component, pain, if you're in pain constantly, of course it's gonna affect your mood and then your mood's gonna affect the inflammation in your body and that's gonna affect your pain experience and I'll talk a little bit about, of course in psychiatry, if someone has major depressive disorder and how that can affect their pain experience and a behavioral component because it's gonna affect your mobility, it's gonna affect your daily activities, it's going to condition you in certain ways without even knowing it, so important thing to realize is pain, we wanna look at it holistically, it's not a scale of one to 10, it's not a vital sign, it's part of someone's life. And if you work in mental health for even a day, not that you don't get this elsewhere, but one thing you really quickly realize is that we have many vulnerabilities and our vulnerabilities when it comes to pain are going to feed back and you're gonna have cycles where comorbidities and pain create amplification loops. And so here's just a list of things that you might have heard about, but when someone's experiencing pain, you wanna think about is, and when you're experiencing yourself is how are things interacting to affect your pain experience. And here's a little more specific to opiate.    And then when they go to the doctor and they access care with this specialist or that specialist, depending on the specialty and how they deal with abstract kind of complaints like an experience of pain, you're gonna find in healthcare that this kind of false dichotomy of pain kind of exists. So it's even present in the language we use and if you look at just how neurology for instance, nothing against neurology but the words they will use to describe pain and if you look in the literature, you get this idea that somehow some people have real pain and some people have psychological or unreal pain or whatever. So one of the main things when I work with a patient is recognizing that everyone's pain is real because it's their experience and this false dichotomy doesn't actually exist, it doesn't even make physiologic sense but it is out there and so people get the sense that somehow they fall on the right that they don't have a medical problem, they have this other problem and unfortunately that gets perpetuated and it makes it frustrating for a person trying to access care to get support and treatment for a chronic pain experience. So partly why I think that you get this, this is this false pain dichotomy is kind of a reflexive way for a doctor who has a very specialized thing where they see this problem and they can fix it with this intervention and if it falls outside that silo then well it's kind of frustrating for them because they don't know what to do and this is a complicated thing and I don't have enough time so I don't know how to handle this but partly because when we look at pain as it presents to the healthcare system through people's complaints, experiences, symptoms and everything they say is you have to really think through the differential diagnosis of someone's pain experience and there's a whole spectrum of things that can be going on when you see a patient who's sharing about pain so you could be in an ER and there's truly someone malingering pain symptoms because all they want is a narcotic and that can happen but that doesn't mean everyone's doing that that's just one of the things on the differential diagnosis you could be in an ER and someone comes in with pain and it could be the other end of the spectrum they've already been to 15 doctors but they actually have an undiagnosed medical condition and that can be presenting similarly with the exact same kind of constellation of signs and symptoms as the patient accesses care so you really have to think across what I would call like an illness behavior spectrum not in a negative connotation just saying if someone has an illness or ailment or a pain syndrome and they're presenting with these behaviors and these symptoms you really have to take the time and energy to dig into the case and get to know the patient know what medical work has been done be able to come up with a plan work with people longitudinally and all that I just said is almost longer than what a typical doctor visit takes so making this happen is difficult in our healthcare systems so this is where there's clearly external vulnerabilities to developing chronic pain syndromes such as the pain amplification loop you can get caught in if you present with a pain complaint someone gives you a narcotic you come back you're saying I'm still in pain they give me more narcotic there's external vulnerabilities that patients encounter that feed into the development of chronic pain syndrome similarly pain is a vital sign was a big example of something where some of this was conditioned on people without them even knowing by how we were operating our healthcare system but then also each patient has their own and each person we all have strengths vulnerabilities and some are adaptive in some environments and some are challenging in other environments but everyone brings to the table vulnerabilities individually and in psychiatry depression is a large vulnerability that we see and if people have chronic pain and an affective illness this is a big vulnerability to feeding back and amplifying pain experiences and so treatment has to be holistic and oriented towards both so for instance they've done research people who have multiple sclerosis that's a vulnerability it's a comorbidity more likely to develop depression so something with the immune system obviously in the inflammatory process affects people's moods that affects the depressive syndrome and those interact but many things that we try to modulate through all the things we learn about in ancestral health such as increased sympathetic drive in our physiologies because of our modern environment stimulating our sympathetic nervous systems to the excess we think about when we're working with patients so you don't need to look at the detail here but if someone has an affective disorder what we found from that experience is that medications use to treat depression there's groups of them that modulate physiology in ways that actually help pain so for the appropriate case where medication is beneficial if you modulate the mood the pain gets better and the pain gets better the mood gets better and they're interconnected and that's where appreciating the interconnected nature of our physiologic makeups is important so here's an example many potions that you can use that can modulate the norepinephrine feedback in the neurocircuits in our brain that are mapping our pain transmission and how we gate pain inputs and how pain is transmitted back out to our bodies but there's many other things that do the same types of things whether it's meditation whether it's that amazing movement session we just did which held my back dietary modifications all the things that we think about with ancestral health and the holistic lifestyle view we do that with patients who are struggling with chronic pain because the end goal is to have multiple tools working together to help support someone to regain function regain quality life and some people can get really debilitated by chronic pain to where it's baby steps getting people back out of this cycle that has fed back on itself to limit people's lives and as you work on this as was mentioned by our previous speaker certain groups of people have particular vulnerabilities that put them at risk for developing pain so we see this in psychiatry and have recognized conditions where this just tends to happen more often but you can think about the physiologic vulnerabilities that would bring this together so I remember I don't know what year, when and don't quote me on this but there was a study that I found intriguing I think many years ago it was they did I think it was in Japan but they, you know, in PE when we were kids we had to do this presidential, physical and one of the things was a sit and reach test and then you had to like run and do a shuttle run and a long run and push ups probably, I don't know anyways, but the sit and reach test so they did a study I think in Japan showing that people who did better on sit and reach test had less cardiovascular disease so perhaps people who do better on sit and reach test just have more pliant tissues, right? I mean, I have the hypermobility kind of pliancy thing even with the bad back since I was like whatever age other people can hardly touch their toes and that's just how they come into the world that's how their body developed so if you have increased pliancy or tissues you can imagine that your arterial arterioles are more distensible and can deal with atherosclerotic changes more effectively and prevent heart disease over time but at the same time you, with those pliant tissues could also make you a better at being a gymnast but at some point pliancy becomes a vulnerability and you could develop a chronic pain experience because of that physiologic predisposition. So one of those is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, POTS, this one I joked it's like an infectious diseases because it's spread so fast but it became certain things have been recognized and we see that dysautonomia has become a very prevalent in terms of being recognized as a condition but it's been around for a long time so you go back through medical history and dysautonomia is nothing new it's just there's finally an appreciation for it and we have ways that we can modulate physiology to help people who when they try to stand up their heart rate doesn't kick up enough their blood pressure doesn't go enough and they can pass out maybe their tissues are too pliant the blood vessels pool too much blood and they can't respond fast enough so they're not gonna get as much heart disease but maybe they have more orthostasis meaning their blood pressure variability can't match what's needed when they move positions. Anyways this group we find a lot that we can help through a psychiatry lens with the right mindset of seeing that their needs fall at the intersection of different specialties. Rheumatologists can only do so much neurologists can only do so much medical doctors can only do so much and many of the people who have this constellation of needs can benefit from someone being able to look at the whole picture and put the pieces together and realize that the symptoms and experiences they're having are real and that there's things we need to do to support modulating physiology in ways that can help them function and ancestral health obviously many principles are relevant. So here's just an example of how like I might think about someone with chronic pain and how changes in their autonomic nervous system their dopaminergic function in their brain all interact in a very complex manner with their immune system and their genetic predisposition and their physiologic development and of course all these things are interrelated but we've had amazing talks at AHS over the years about dysbiosis and gut microbiota and the health of how your GI health affects your nervous system and all this we bears out in psychiatry and there's studies that show that if you have dysbiosis if you induce dysbiosis by irritating the colon of a study animal they are more likely to develop depression. If you cut the vagus nerve and there's no way for the GI tract to transmit that autonomic information to the brain they're much less likely to develop depression so clearly what's going on in your gut is affecting your mood affecting your likelihood of developing depression but we've been talking about this since 2011 here and now these kind of topics are like more mainstream in the literature which is really great to see. So I'm just stopping with this last slide just to drive home the point that if someone is caught up in the opiate epidemic they have chronic pain and they're struggling with opiates and what you're seeing is a very complicated picture behind the scenes when you actually dig into that person's lives and what they're experiencing what are their vulnerabilities, what are their strengths and we have a healthcare system that makes it difficult for them to get their needs met and our needs met as patients and there's constantly gonna be room to improve how we coordinate and tackle these more nuanced interstitial medicine kind of conditions but going back to when we started AHS the whole point was appreciating that in order to take on a challenge like that you need everyone working together and it has to be taking inputs from people all walks of life from different perspectives and trying to put the pieces together to see what are some practical tangible things that people can do in their day to day lives that can help them function and manage something like chronic pain which is of course a pain. So this is how you need to think as a doctor when you're trying to help someone with chronic pain and also as we try to model and think about how do we develop medical interventions for chronic pain and it's complicated but that's what makes it interesting as well. So I will stop there. Hi Brett, good to see you. Good to see you. After all these years. The reach, what's it called? What in reach? Sit and reach. Sit and reach. What is that a metric like a good score and a bad score? Is that a proxy for some other health issues and is it validated for children and adults or you don't know, I just, I'm very pertinent to what I do. Yeah, so in terms of the validation, I mean we, it was the government picked it as part of their pet, you know this, these programs that used to be in the schools, it was one of the tests that they picked obviously to assess physical health I guess but in terms of research protocols, this study, you know, I have to go back. I was just thinking about it today when I was preparing for the talk but you know, it's clearly measuring ability of stretch of tissues. I mean, and that's not, yes there's some, there's a scope of that to practice, makes better, right? You do yoga, you get better yoga but if you've ever been to a yoga studio you know that certain people can only stretch so far and other people they just show up and they just stretch. So there's clearly a spectrum but in terms of use and research I just don't know anymore like with the formality part but I view it as just a measure of tissue pliancy that it's more of a predisposition than anything, yeah. And what you said about pain. So reduced comorbidity for heart disease was what that study showed. Oh what, okay. Yeah, for specifically of heart disease. So then if you think about it, you know that would, but that group of people who also have tissue pliancy we see joint hypermobility, ilos danlos, that whole spectrum, much higher rates of developing chronic pain and GI dysfunction, the whole constellation at the same time. So I mean I've had patients who have ilos danlos, hypermobility, POTS, colonic inertia, you know you do a defecation study and they have essentially no transmission of fecal material over 24 hours, right? And we've had to give them IVIG to modulate the immune system to change the immune process. And so they also have this predisposition to autoimmunity but like it's, we notice that this group of people has more likely to have autoimmune diseases, more likely to have these tissue pliancy kind of syndromes and develops you know obviously depression and chronic pain. The, what you said about pain being a vital sign by the medical industry is the most useful thing I have heard in a long time. Thank you for that. I gotta know more about it. Yeah, yeah, you're welcome. I love your approach of integrating you know different areas of specialty.  He's had anxiety and gut issues kind of his whole life and you know I'm looking into like CBT and other things to treat as OCD. But my question sort of is you know the psychiatrist is like oh just keep taking the Zoloft and don't worry about the gut. You know and then somebody with a more holistic approach is like well you know he's probably gained about five pounds of belly fat and he has a lot of gas and sort of it's like where's the balance and is the goal to get him off the Zoloft as soon as possible or you know like how would you approach that? Yeah, so it's a good question but so I would start with you have to look at all the pieces of the puzzle. So if someone actually has OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, it's one of the you know when you think of psychiatry like defining states in psychiatry. OCD is a condition that is like defines the field of psychiatry.  Like if you see a seizure it's a real thing. It's a physiologic thing and there's a treatment for it. OCD I would say is similar. If you see someone who is manic in a manic episode you'll realize this is a real medical condition that is very you know. So treatment for OCD you know standard of care is high dose SSRI but high dose SSRI. We know that serotonin affects gut function. I mean that's basic and some people with SSRIs increase serotonin can have issues with affecting you know their gut health of course. So you have to kind of try to work on both things at the same time. So perhaps there's another medication that can help address the side effect of the Zoloft you know and I wouldn't give up on the treatment though because there are treatments for OCD that are helpful.  Right and I heard CBT is very effective. Yeah so the best thing for OCD is exposure and response prevention therapy. You know someone has to really, someone has to work with people to help them recognize their compulsions and prevent them and be able to sit with the discomfort and modulate the circuits in the brain that are on overload and are forcing people to have this need to do a compulsion. But again it's like trying to have as many levers as you can to help treat the condition. It is the best. Yeah. Thank you. Brett, hi nice to see you. Hi, good to see you. So I have a follow up on that. Yes. You know through your talk you mentioned the autonomic nervous system about five times. But you never mentioned the word serotonin until just now the last question. Serotonin is awfully complicated, but it affects the amygdala in a big way. And the amygdala is one of the things that basically is the gait for whether pain becomes an issue of coping versus an issue of breakdown and activation of the HPA axis and going out of control. Yeah. There's a lot of data on serotonin and SSRIs in chronic pain syndromes which you didn't mention. I would like you to address that question. And lastly you mentioned cutting the vagus nerve impacts pain and certainly does. But the question is, is the serotonin in the brain coming from the gut or is it coming from de novo production in the brain? There is this enter grade transport because 90% of the serotonin is in your belly from your gut microbiota. And in fact that after in Vegas is the transport mechanism to get it up to the amygdala. So do you wanna speculate on the role of serotonin and the role of the vagus in the interpretation of chronic pain and what weak as physicians can do about that? Yeah. So I can say that in practice something we notice is that SSRIs which are just geared towards serotonin you know these things are so complicated obviously but the medications used to treat that are affecting serotonin are less effective for treating chronic pain experiences. So if someone has and if you look at even just the FDA approvals for treatments of neuropathic pain syndromes, SNRIs are clearly in practice and in the literature more effective at treating most chronic pain syndromes and perhaps it has to do with when you think about chronic pain is the sympathetic over activation of the chronic pain state and norepinephrine being modulated by an SNRI somehow is reducing or modulating the pain transmission process, the signals that are being sent. So that's changing the pain experience because you might, you're taking in sensory information but the way it's being transmitted to the brain, interpreted in the brain is different because of norepinephrine's, the changes in the norepinephrine. Now I don't know any further than that, I mean that's as far as I can go to postulate but if you have a neurosurgery that is over amplified, it's a signal transmission cycle and if a pain signal is sending too frequently the amount of signal being transduced is too high. An intervention to break the cycle or disrupt the cycle could be done by just increasing norepinephrine at the synapse and then that creates a feedback to the system and how electrical chemical conductance is happening to send a signal. So clearly in other NTCAs, tricyclic antidepressants which also have a norepinephrine component are much more effective than Zoloft, Prozac, these SSRIs. So in terms of serotonin and pain, I, in terms of just thinking about chronic pain syndrome generally, I'm not so sure modulating serotonin is as effective to the experience of pain because we don't see that in practice. But when it comes to the gut, that's a whole different ballgame in the vagus nerve transmission. In patients who have either constipate, so in some of the irritable bowel syndromes, it seems like SSRIs can be more helpful. So I think there's something unique about gut health versus just chronic pain syndromes generally. So that's where it's complicated. Often the people that we see with chronic pain syndromes also have GI dysfunction. And yeah, I'm not like, I guess I'm not in a position to make any further scientific. But the way, but the thing I always go back to when I'm thinking about a patient is that this is an entire loop of information. And there are ways to modulate that loop so that their experience of pain is different. Thank you so much. We are now officially on break. And...


Today, we're going to be taking a look at the origin and history of Carmen Sandiego, so stay tuned Gum Shoes. The original game idea started in 1983 from Broadband Programmer Dane Bigam wanting to take the idea of text adventure games, but create a menu driven interface to be played on the Apple II computer. Work was done creating a game where the player would chase down various crooks. Broadband co-founder Gary Carlston suggested changing the concept to be focused on geography, anticipating shipping copies of the World Almanac to let players research clues and find the right answers for geography questions. Carlston hired David Seifkin to write the game's story. Seifkin came up with the idea of the player tracking down numerous criminals and developed several criminal personas including Carmen Sandiego. The other staff found this name to be mysterious and exotic, in addition to being a female character they could use to attract younger women to the game. The crew expanded upon Seifkin's idea with the name of the criminal organization Vile, also known as Villains International League of Evil and the ACME Detective Agency. ACME has generally been humorously known as an anachronism for a company that makes everything. The core gameplay was then established having the player as an ACME recruit to chase down underlings within Vile, following geography-based clues to complete their search and working up their ranks in ACME until they were tasked to go after Carmen herself. In 1985 the computer game Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego was released. It was followed in 1986 by the game Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego, then in 1988 by Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego, and so on. The character of Carmen Sandiego has been seen in multiple works since. Carmen Sandiego was loosely based on Brazilian singer and actress Carmen Miranda, who saw success in show business between the 1930s and 1950s. The game franchise led to three television shows with a fourth set to premiere on Netflix in 2019. The first was a game show entitled Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. This incarnation featured Lynn Thigpin, who starred as a radio DJ in the film The Warriors, who would eventually go on to play the moon in Eureka's Castle, and her final role as Ella Farmer in the crime drama The District. During her time on the game show she played the chief, comically no-nonsense figure with a strong sense of justice, who spoke with dialogue that was riddled with puns, alliteration, and other forms of wordplay. The chief's great-grandmother was Agnes Acme, the founder of Acme, who was also played by Thigpin. The host of the game show was Greg Lee. According to the show he was a special senior agent in charge of training new recruits. The standouts of the show, however, was the comedy acapella group, Rocka Pella. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego aired on PBS from September 30th, 1991 until December 22nd, 1995. It was followed with another game show also starring Thigpin as the chief, entitled Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego. The in time game show aired from October 7th, 1996 until December 12th, 1997. In 1998, Brotterbund was acquired by The Learning Company, and thus the series itself became redesigned. In 1994, Fox Kids Network premiered Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego on Saturday mornings. This series was an animated format similar to other shows Fox Kids broadcasts at the time. The lead characters of the animated series were junior detectives of the Acme Detective Agency, Zach and Ivy, a brother-sister duo who were voiced by Scott Menville and Jennifer Hale, under the guidance of the chief, a disembodied floating computer-generated head which resembled Egon Spangler from the real Ghostbusters animated series. The chief was voiced by Roger Bumpus, who eventually went on to voice Squidward in SpongeBob Squarepants. In this version of the series, Carmen was a former agent of Acme who left when she saw a greater challenge and has a strong code of ethics when stealing items. Carmen was voiced by Rita Moreno. Carmen's full name is Carmen Isabella Sandiego and is a Hispanic woman who always wears a red trench coat and matching fedora. Carmen was once a brilliant agent of the Acme Detective Agency until she left and formed a vial. Her organization seeks to commit incredible thefts and cause chaos while Acme tries to thwart and capture their agents. In the computer games, the henchmen are meant to keep Acme occupied so that Carmen can pull off the real crime. The Where on Earth series revealed a unique backstory for the title character. She was an orphan raised at the Golden Gate Girls School in San Francisco. The chief gave her a home at the Acme Detective Agency. By age 17, she solved more cases than any other Acme agent. However, she then disappeared and turned to a life of crime. Her partner when she was at Acme was a Japanese man named Sahura who left Acme after she did and appears to now be retired. Unlike in most of the rest of the series, the reason for Carmen leaving Acme is not specifically stated, although it is speculated by Sahura. In the latter seasons of the show, Carmen began to be portrayed as more of an anti-hero than a proper villainous, even teaming up with the show's protagonist to defeat criminals more unscrupulous than herself on several occasions. Additionally, it is made clear that she makes a point of refusing to steal something if the theft will cause anybody harm. A vow she frequently breaks outside this canon. Carmen was born March 1, 1968 and joined Acme in 1985. Carmen breaks the law at every turn, but her thefts are somehow forgivable in light of the fact that she does it more for the challenge and the thrill of it all than for any personal gain. And her main concern is always the preservation In fact, she even concerns herself with the kid detective's well-being and is known to step in on their behalf when there's danger. According to the episode Hot Ice, Carmen has been gone from Acme for 10 years, 3 months, and 7 days.  She used the money to travel extensively around the world until she was 12. Her partner when she was at Acme was Jules Argent, who still works at Acme and appears to be in her early 20s. Jules specifically notes that Carmen never talked about her childhood and aside from the mention of her winning the aforementioned game show, no details of it are given. According to Where in the Universe is Carmen San Diego, her favorite writer is Ursula K. Le Guin and her favorite astronomer is Nicholas Copernicus. Lynn Thigpen's final appearance as the chief was in the 1999 game show movie Where in the Universe is Carmen San Diego. The film was made to be shown in planetariums across the US, Canada, and Japan. In 2006, Sandra Bullock was lined up to possibly star as the title character in a Carmen San Diego movie which would have been produced by the Walt Disney Pictures Company. Jennifer Lopez was later in talks to play the character for a 2011 movie produced by Walden Media. It has recently been announced that Netflix will reboot the series with a 20 episode 22 minute order made and will premiere in 2019. Netflix's series will take an intimate look into Carmen's past where viewers will not only follow her escapades but also learn who Carmen is and why she became a super thief. Gina Rodriguez the star of Jane the Virgin will voice the title character. Lynn Thigpen succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage on March 12, 2003 at the age of 54. She has been entombed next to her parents at the Elmhurst Cemetery in her hometown of Joliet Illinois where the Lynn Thigpen Elementary School was named in her honor. So there you have it guys the history and origins of that notorious criminal and master thief Carmen San Diego. I hope you guys enjoyed this video and if you did go ahead and hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on future videos. I'm Shannon for Comic Gettin' TV. The only place on YouTube where all key culture collides. Take care my friends.


Does Thanksgiving favorite make your dog sick? Stuffing. Yup, it contains onions and garlic, which can be super toxic to your furry friend. Plain pumpkin. Nope, this is a tasty nutritious treat. Go for it. Pumpkin pie filling? Yes. This often includes xylitol, which can be deadly to them. Turkey. Depends. If it's on the bone or has skin on it, it's a no-no. If it's plain, they can enjoy it. Mashed potatoes and ham? Yes, these rich foods can cause pancreatitis or other digestive problems. Plain potatoes or plain sweet potatoes? Nope, these are fine. Alcohol. Do you really have to ask? Don't let your dog be part of the surge and emergency vet visits this Thanksgiving.


Whew, if my eyes look swollen or tired, it's because I'm exhausted. Um, I... This is one of the weird parts about having a YouTube channel where you talk about your life because, um, there are just things that sometimes you're not really ready to talk about, but you kind of... Not that I feel like I have to, but just I can't, I can't move forward. Um, until I talk about this, but... Unfortunately... Move passed away. I waited a little bit longer to film this just because... When this happened with Layla a month and a half ago, it was really like fresh and raw, and I just didn't give myself, I don't think, enough time to like process, so... I'm exhausted, um, Emotionally, and I'm just like so deflated and sad. Moe was 16, so he was definitely a senior cat, and he had been struggling with IBD.  We're still not entirely sure which one, um, and I would say in the last three, four weeks, we definitely had seen like a little bit of a decline. We had just seen a lot more signs of age and, um, maybe that like things were progressing, and I'm not gonna go into like all the details, um, but...  He just started declining a lot more rapidly, and he didn't have quality of life anymore. It was just so sad.  Drew and I went from having our two pets that we've had for most of our adult lives to no one, and like the house just feels so empty and quiet, and we were just starting to heal, you know, at least try to heal from losing Layla, and now this happened, and yeah, and I'm just exhausted, and I'm just so sad. I really, really don't want to cry. I'm trying so hard to just put one foot in front of the other and like keep going, but it's just really hard. Anyway, I'm not, I'm not gonna do that. Yeah, I know a lot of you cared for Mu a lot, just like you did with Layla, and that means so much to both Drew and me. It really does, and we appreciate so many of the kind words. By the time you're seeing this, I've already had it posted on Instagram for a few days, and I've just been getting non-stop comments and messages, and it's just so kind, and we appreciate it so much.  It's just so unfair, so I feel comforted with the, you know, what I'm telling myself anyway to get through the days is that Layla and Mu are together on the Rainbow Bridge with all of our loved ones, and that they're not in pain anymore, either of them. I'm trying to remember something that I saw one of you say when Layla passed away, which is that, like, your pets give you so many of the best moments of your life and one of the worst, and that's so true, and if you could just have, if you would just have any extra, like, love in your heart or brain space or whatever, if you could just send some love to Drew, he's just really, really hurting. He had moved since he was 19 years old and he's about to turn 35 and that's just such a long time to spend with a companion, and I mean, I've known of Mu for 14 of those 16 years, you know, when Drew and I met, he'd only had Mu for two years and it's, I just, I love him, I love him and I miss him so much already and yeah, anyways, just kind of wanted to unfortunately let you know that news and I'm just trying my best. I've been really trying to, like, get back into work and getting back into the swing of things, but man, it's just, like, it feels so hard. I'm just so cried out, like, I'm so tired of crying, my eyes, like, genuinely hurt. I haven't even finished crying over Layla yet and now it's just compound and it just sucks, so I'm just gonna keep talking in circles if I keep this going, but just wanted to say thank you for everyone who has sent love and support our way, truly means a lot and yeah, I'm just kind of doing my best so is Drew and it's all we can do, but I'm just so grateful that so many of you got to know Mu was my hair sticking out this whole time, whatever. So many of you got to know Mu and see little glimpses of him when he, you know, chose to grace us with his presence and in the last couple of vlogs, I feel like he was just much more, like, demanding attention and center stage and I just love that. Being so cute and sweet, and we just had no idea what was coming, even though we kind of did. Anyway, I gotta go and turn this off and cry probably, but thank you for being here and yeah, we'll just do our best to kind of resume at a pace that feels okay for me, but I mean I also like, I have to work to like pay the bills and Drew has to work to pay the bills and we just kind of have to keep going, so thanks for watching this vlog. I'm really sorry about the real buzzkill. I'm still in a little bit of shock to be honest, but it's just how life goes, I suppose, so anyway, I'm tired of talking and looking at myself, so thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next vlog. Bye.