this reminds me of mad dog 2020 hi everyone if you are watching right now this is the live recording the live recording of the this weekend science podcast and everything that you see in this video might be cut out for the podcast i don't know what i'm gonna keep i do some editing snip snip snip i get in there cut things out clean it up a little bit but we will be talking and doing the show for a little while to come we're here do you see us you see us we're there it's time i gotta see your comments in the chat room there's always a little bit of a delay just making sure that we are out there identity force says we're live anthony says hello wait i forgot i got a question you have a question okay are we allowed to curse on this don't curse okay or or light cursing if if it's appropriate okay i always gotta ask i always gotta if you do curse i will cut it cut it okay yeah yeah i know i'm just like i know youtube youtube you can like uh you can curse after like the first five minutes you can say whatever you want for the first five minutes have to be we're just wondering you know like what platform we're gonna be good for the first five minutes ten minutes we'll see how long it lasts though yes we try to be radio show friendly which is okay what we aim for then there's the after show where we we're not doing the podcast podcast anymore and all bets are off for the after show exactly is everybody ready for an episode i think i'm ready i'm ready to go i have things set up it's not night attack no it's not shoe brew but we are ready to go in a three a two this is twist this week in science episode number seven hundred ninety six recorded on wednesday october 21st 2020 would you take the shot hey everyone i'm dr kiki and today we will fill your head with beetles bees and bio but first disclaimer disclaimer who knew aoc is a gamer she played among us on twitch the stream was so rich you know that i never would flame her because here lies the science we steer away from mmp or g violent violence and though my co-hosts are gone the show carries on you know you can always find this week in science coming up next got the kind of mine i can't get enough i want them every day of the week there's only one place to go good science everyone welcome to another episode of this week in science back yet again if you're watching the video i'm getting hugged by my son kai he's making an appearance okay go to bed we have a great show for you ahead yes my co-hosts are taking a leave of absence this week what happened blair got married this weekend and is on her her married moon it is go away and justin was on a plane traveling back to america from denmark so both of the co-hosts are other wearers at this time but the show goes on and tonight we're joined by dr jozaya zainer he's going to be talking with us about covid 19 and vaccines and biohacking it's always weird when people call me doctor i can't get along with it i know but it's still i can't get over it's like well it's weird that was after you are you are that's right i would forget well you're going to remind people tonight with all your knowledge tonight on the show of a bunch of science we're going to talk about asteroid benu b jeans and happy endings and we're also going to talk about that biohacking as we jump into the show i want to remind you that if you're not subscribed to twist yet you can find us all places podcasts are found spotify pandora radio dot com stitcher sprieker tune in you know google apple the big ones all the places look for this week in science you can also find us in video on youtube facebook and twitch you can find us online at twist dot org for more information okay let's jump into the science jozaya if you have any comments on these stories as i run through them feel free to react all right i'm ready okay you ready i'm pumped i love science i love science yeah we all do yes all right right those nasa's asiris rex mission to asteroid benu was successful yesterday yay nasa after four years and 20 million miles the spacecraft performed a touch and go maneuver in which it was on the surface of the asteroid for 16 seconds to collect up to 60 grams of regolith that's about a candy bar's worth of the surface material on this little asteroid and the craft has been orbiting benu since late 2018 taking images and all sorts of data but this little touch and go maneuver means it's headed back home hopefully it will return to earth by 2023 with this little sample from a rock that was formed around 10 million years after the birth of our solar system so very very very baby stages of our solar system this is something that has seen our solar system evolve so you think they were aiming for 20 seconds but only got 16 so they just said you know like yeah 16 seconds is good enough we're gonna get in there you get in you get the stuff and you gotta run out before the lasers no i mean it sounds like something that was a highly choreographed bank robbery but i know doesn't it seriously 16 seconds wow yeah 16 seconds they did a couple of rehearsals in the months leading up to this final routine where they'd i wonder you know that's crazy i wonder i wonder who played the lander do you think they got Morgan Freeman to do it with that voice yes you'd be like oh i'm landing on the earth i'm sorry it's a very bad joke like they had to rehearse and pretend like they were all the different things you know all right space from space let's move on to bees bees and climate change you know about killer bees right Josiah i yeah the Wu Tang clan killer bees killer bees yes also if you're a child of the 80s you're probably really aware of the terrifying spread of Africanized or honeybees or killer bees right according to a study out of UC Davis these bees can't go everywhere that they want to apparently they are limited by climate and unable to survive colder winters and a genetic analysis of the honeybee genome the european and african hybrid honeybee genome over multiple latitudes found fewer genes from the african origin with higher latitudes suggesting there is a genetic barrier to the bees that's based on climate which is kind of interesting i like a climate barrier i like being in colder winters i don't know why but killer bees took my imagination as a child and i've been terrified of them for my entire life so living in the pacific northwest this makes me happy see that's the only thing people in the cold got going for them though they're like what do you got in the warm weather i could do anything any day i want what do you got in the cold well they protect us from killer bees i think that's right now the good aspect beside being protected from killer bees up in the north is the positive aspects of the african honeybee genetic lineage so they have some really interesting behaviors that protect them from hive parasites like the varroa mite and they're also really aggressive which is the bad part but it can be very protective to the hive so along with other genetic factors this kind of genetic analysis might be useful down the line in the conservation of honeybees at large against pathogens and against climate change especially as climate change leads to areas getting warmer in lots of different places so protecting the bees it might be helped which would be good i like my honey and my flowers now from bees on to beetles this is the best name of a beetle that i have ever heard of in my entire life it's a southern california beetle called the diabolical ironclad beetle it went a little too far on that one they got some trauma some trauma or something just a little diabolical diabolical ironclad beetle yes diabolical because it fakes being dead ironclad because it has really really strong exoskeleton armor on its back and a new paper in nature details the microscopic nature of the materials making up its exoskeleton this exoskeleton can withstand forces up to 37 000 times the beetle's body weight which i mean that's a little tiny beetle but if this were the man man size protective armor you'd be you'd be pushing asteroids away from planet earth with your protective ability i'm a little confused it's diabolical because it plays dead i thought it was gonna be diabolical because like it sets bombs for its first place dead that's like the least diabolical thing i know no i'm not yeah like you said it's the name is a little it goes a little far whoever named the beetle might have had some issues yes come on so the elytra this is the toughened wing covers so when a beetle flies its wings are they open up and they've been hidden by these hard casing covers that are over the beetle's back that's called the elytra and the elytra is the key to the strength it has up to 10 percent more protein concentrated in its outer layers and the structures of the elytra at the midline of the back they interlock and overlap like kind of interdigitation is if you were to put your fingers together and the structures when they're folded that way add to the strength of the structure and so when you squish the beetle they all compress but instead of breaking apart the compression leads to delamination and like it is little bits of the laminate of the layers flake away and it stays strong it protects the beetle you can run over these beetles with a car they will survive another aspect they have rod-like elements called mitotrickia that the scientists think also act as frictional pads preventing slippage and the researchers actually went a step beyond just describing the molecular structure of the beetle back they took the molecular structure and used it to design carbon fiber 3d printed materials that they then used to test against standard aerospace fasteners and found them completely superior to what we're currently using in their ability to bind dissimilar materials man it takes a lot to get something published these days you gotta do everything we didn't just describe it we would one step further we're making new materials so as i was talking about that i was showing i have pictures that i would love to show you of this beetle because this beetle is super lump his back is super lumpy and he's just this kind of crusty lumpy looking beetle and then you can run over the beetle they did a test where they actually ran the beetle over and they found that the beetle just pretends it's dead and then whoop there goes i'm happy i can keep on ticking i'm still going look at me i'm an ironclad beetle i'm diabolical aren't i and the layers of these elytra these wings they they do have multiple layers that seem to be built upon each other and the way that they interdigitate is it's kind of like puzzle pieces that you could imagine locking puzzle pieces together and they also did some they did some electron microscopy to actually figure out what the back material looks like so that they could get into that 3d printing and when you look really close up the rod-like structures are they're fascinating and really pretty and i don't i don't know i'm imagining somebody getting like a motorcycle jacket with this kind of a material on the back prevents road rash oh yeah good idea you should start a company i could start right there well good i'll take this take this paper make a patent there i go moving on from being diabolical let's talk about your nose scientists may have discovered a new organ in your head behind your nose or maybe it's just some new salivary glands and not really a new organ but people really like to speculate on things like this and get everyone excited with headlines like there's a new organ in your head i know i feel like there's a headline like that like at least once a year yeah look a new organ a new no okay it's it's basically these are new salivary glands that have slightly different characteristics to your other salivary glands and they are kind of at the top of your uh your throat behind your your nasal sinus coming out and the researchers notice the structures in radiology scans and then did a bunch of further analyses on cadavers and they found they uh they propose calling them tubarial glands okay so now we have a new structure in our head called tubarial glands okay they're there why are they important the characteristics that are unique potentially uh if one of the issues with uh radiation for cancer treatment and other treatments is that you lose your sense of smell and your sense of taste and part of this is because of radiative effects to the salivary glands and the characteristics of these glands suggest that they could be protected during radiation which could provide an opportunity to improve quality of life for people so not just discovering a new thing discovering a new thing that can help that's always good speaking of helping sanctuary cities around the country have been attacked with the uh the uh the complaint that crime rates are increasing in in sanctuary cities because of violent criminals a research report published in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences p nas combines immigration and customs enforcement deportation data and federal bureau of investigation crime data with data on the implementation dates of sanctuary policies between 2010 and 2015 and finds that sanctuary policies reduce deportations by one third but the policies do not reduce deportations of people uh with violent criminal convictions so people who are committing violent crimes are still getting deported it's people who are not committing violent crimes and are just here um are being deported less often it finds that sanctuary has no measurable effect on crime and does not threaten public safety data people data use it to your advantage and then finally let's have a happy ending because happy endings are fabulous don't you know we all love a happy ending instead of a bad ending well there is a concept in psychology the recency principle of memory where you're going to remember things a little bit better the more recently you've heard them so if you have a list of numbers you're going to remember the first one that's primacy and probably the last one because that's the most recent that's recency well that happens also in how we track events and experiences through our lives and some researchers publishing in the journal of neuroscience using a very small number of only male volunteers uh they published their research their investigation into how two brain areas the amygdala and anterior insula are involved in tracking the value of experiences over time whether they're good or they're bad positive negative um and how they influence decision making so according to their very small biased sample they conclude that the amygdala encoded the actual value of a choice so that's like the real value if so if you're given a whole bunch of if you're given like here's a quarter here's a dime here's five cents here's a quarter you're going to be like super excited by the total number the amount of money that you're getting the overall amount as opposed to that last one was a quarter so i'm just gonna think happy about it because i got a quarter so the anterior insula encoded dislike towards a negative ending and so if that list of coins ended on five cents you'd be like cheap steak cheapskate if the interior insula was encoding that because it would just pay attention to something that wasn't as positive five cents isn't as good as 25 cents so according to the researchers they say good decision makers show a strong representation of the overall value in the amygdala whereas suboptimal decision makers encode the disappointing end too strongly so take note of how much the most recent experiences in your life might affect your choices and your opinions you you could just be morally predisposed to negativity rather than reality that's a good one i need to start using that one i'm just uh negatively predisposed to wasn't the end part of my reality i'm more predisposed to negativity than reality here we go let's think all those happy thoughts then this as a as a show producer it makes me consider the fact that maybe i should always leave the show on a happy note so that people when they finish listening i like that that's a really good one that's a really good one i like that you know like a happy thought at the end let's all sit here and think of the best ice cream that you want to eat right now and just eating it oh and it's so fattening but you don't care because it tastes so good oh ice cream for me it's lactose free but you know same same same very limited in my choices actually vanilla less limited than i was when i was a kid so it's better it's better oh totally like you don't just have you know like orange sherbet or whatever do you call it sherbet or sherbert what sure sherbert sherbet sherbet i don't even remember sorbet let's be french sorbet oh sorbet yeah yeah if you just tuned in you are listening to this week wait are sorbet and sherbert the same thing sorry i messed up i think so it's yeah except one is fake fruit and one is supposed to be real fruit juice oh gosh this is getting complicated timmy timid tenor yes there is such a thing as lactose free ice cream if you did not know now you do yes this is this week in science if you just tuned in if you are interested in a twist shirt or a mug or other item of our merchandise head over to twist.org and click on our zazzle store it'll take you to our zazzle store where we have mugs and hats and shirts and all sorts of fun things with the twist logo and also with Blair animal art all over them you can get face masks you can um get a tote bag there are very wonderful things in the zazzle store and a portion of proceeds do go to support twists additionally if you are interested in helping to support twists consider clicking that patreon link while you're at twist.org patreon.org is where our supporter community lives and ten dollars a month or more and you will get your name in the list of thank yous at the end of the show Josiah is one of our sponsors thank you oh for a while now yes i love you guys get in there i love i love that you love the show all right now it's time for us to get into this let's get in let's get into the the conversation you and me you me and you yes let's have a conversation everyone uh if you have not previously seen Josiah on twist he has joined us on a couple of occasions to discuss diy bio with crisper fecal transplants as well and he's also a global global leader in biohacker let me start that over and try and speak clearly yes he is also a i'm also a chicago bulls fan a chicago bulls fan and a global leader in the biohacker movement he's a scientist artist and founder and ceo of the odin which is a company enabling people in genetic design efforts thanks for joining me tonight on the show yeah no you know i always love doing this stuff like i said especially after apm i can't hear the kids so i'm wondering if they're asleep and i'm just like yes yes you hope the kids are asleep or they just get to hang out like what could be better yeah and you get to hang out we can talk about science i'm gonna ask you a whole bunch of questions right now because i gotta know things favorite colors blue okay um that's good favorite blue all right my favorite hair color was blue also but uh yeah anyway getting getting into those details what else all right so you started a project this year after the onset of the pandemic called project maciphe which you like that the name i i i saw that and i i laughed i lulled i know i feel like enough people didn't really get that and i'm super disappointed right because we were working on a vaccine for the coronavirus and john maciphe is like a crazy antivirus guy and this was kind of like a crazy antivirus thing and i was just like no nothing nothing oh gosh nothing nobody nobody nobody gave you a response i've ever heard like one like nobody and that's why i do these things right that's why i do the crazy science are crazy projects i do is just because like i want somebody to laugh that's it you know some happy well you made me laugh it worked for me so yes antivirus vaccine i love i love the comparison but okay making a diy vaccine for covid-19 why did you want to do that yeah that sounds crazy right initially i didn't you know when this whole pandemic things started i'm i was just like put your head down keep working um because i run a small business my company the odin and uh you know we had we had to let people go the pandemic affected us and everything and i was like you know what just put your head down keep working keep working on the stuff that's you know gonna help the longevity of the company in your life and stuff don't be on the ball man yeah don't focus on the short term like all this coronavirus things happen and let me try and make a quick buck and a lot of people have and there are a lot of people who have made a quick buck and uh people just jump in and like oh i made a test that can be uh test coronavirus in 10 minutes oh i made one for nine minutes oh mine's in seven minutes and uh i get it you know there's a place for that to help people but i think there's also a place for that to just be like a bunch of low quality stuff that doesn't contribute much to society so yeah i just kept my head down and then i saw this paper it was funny because it wasn't really in the press at all which that that's it was probably the most surprising thing to me was that it wasn't in the press um and it was published on like may 20th 2020 may 22nd or something like that in so early science magazine if i'm remembering correctly and what they did was they used a dna vaccine in macaques um non-human primates and uh they gave it the vaccine and then they gave it a challenge of COVID-19 um and what happened was that the monkey monkeys who got the vaccine um they were they had greater survivability and the virus didn't affect them as much and everything like that compared to the monkeys who didn't receive any vaccine and uh i was like that's super cool because like the best pre-clinical data you can get is basically non-human primates right like most people just have mouse data or something right and then they go to humans this was like non-human primate this is like you know it's a that's close i mean it's like it should work yeah it's you know nobody does experiment on gorillas really so you're not really gonna get like the primate like you know level or whatever it's all just like these monkeys but still it's uh i was it blew my mind that nobody was working on it um and i was just like why isn't nobody talking about this why is nobody working on this you can literally just take this data injected in humans and see what happens um why is nobody doing that and i i just wanted to do it i just felt really inspired you know like half my motivation is science because there's this great unknown and i want to see was out there because you know like nobody's seen it i just want to see yeah and the other is just because i'm inspired you know i just want to do it it's just like that sounds cool i want to try that out and uh so i contacted a couple friends of mine david ishii and daria danseva and i said hey you guys are you you're interested in trying this out with me and like let's see if we can inject ourselves with the same vaccine that they made for the monkeys and if it works in us you know we could try to measure all these different parameters and you know you'll see what happens um yeah it was really exciting to uh really you know do something of the scale i didn't yeah i might personally i i have never really done such advanced biomedical testing you know i did the the um the microbiome transplant i did a bunch of sequencing on my body but this was like blood tests and all this other stuff it was no more invasive and stuff right because you have to be able to measure all of the the antibodies and you have to be able to measure whether or not it's actually doing anything to your immune system whether there's any change right yeah that's what you would hope right like yeah you know that was the goal is just to see what happens and honestly even from the beginning i just expected this whole thing to fail because science is hard you know like usually the first time you do something you're you're just winging it and you're just hoping for success and sometimes you hit sometimes you weigh myths but it teaches you something usually that you can use for the future so uh usually i just go for it i'm like you know let's do this the exact same way they did in the paper and measure we measured our antibodies to so what the the vaccine actually was was it was a piece of DNA that encoded the coronavirus spike protein okay the spike protein is the thing it binds the ac2 receptor and it helps the virus get into the cell right yeah and uh so if you can get an antibody to the spike protein you stop it from binding this receptor and basically getting into the cell so that's what a lot of drug companies are targeting in their vaccines and so that's that's what they had the they had the the sequence of DNA for that spike sequence and so did you did you order that or did you isolate it how did you get that sequence of DNA no so at this time in may the NCBI you know the national center for bioinformatics or something like that um yeah um they actually the sequences were deposited in there um and available to everybody so we took the sequence we did the same thing as they did we you know human codon optimized it so we would have a better question to express in human cells and to put it in the same vector that they used and you know ordered it from a company to be manufactured on a large scale um yeah have a big enough dose that you could actually inject it and think that it would have a have an effect yeah yeah that's the thing um that's a big thing that that was a big unknown also because it's a big unknown in all these things like the first study you do basically besides safety in a clinical trial is dose dependence right like how much do you need to actually see an effect and we didn't really have that luxury because we were just three people and like doing some dose dependent study would be tough so we were just like you know the monkeys did 10 milligrams and generally vaccines don't scale by body weight necessarily right generally if you go to get a vaccine you'll get the same dose independent of your body weight um so we just kind of went for it you know in hopes that maybe it would work out so i'm i'm just thinking that i mean there is so much vaccine hesitancy right now and that people who don't trust vaccines because of possible adverse effects and did that thought ever go through your head of like oh what if i'm you know what if because of this i trigger an inflammatory response or like an extreme immune reaction did that did you think about that in terms of the vaccine injection injection oh totally a hundred percent my daughter uh she got a flu shot last year and uh she had a really bad reaction to it like oh wow her flesh was like bubbling and it was a crazy idea i didn't even know vaccines i was just like what is going on here this seems like some crazy movie you know where you see somebody gets infected and they're like skin starts bubbling and stuff it was gross yeah when you see that and you're like two-year-old you're just like oh good like what is going on um you know but like i'm i'm science and medical minded so i understand you know you there's certain things you check for fever other things if they don't have that you know it's just like talk to the doctor make sure they're aware of it but otherwise um there's not much you can do just let the immune system do its thing and you know went out the end um but yeah totally aware of this stuff and uh it it definitely um was something that i i think about in all these things i always think about the risk to myself and the risk to others the risk that me doing this will present to others maybe we'll try to copy me and stuff like that and uh yeah i don't i'm not i don't want to be a martyr or anything like that that's never my goal um so it is something i think about for sure yeah and i mean you did this whole process though the three of you live streamed you had your sunday broadcasts and you did the experiment totally transparently in front of an audience of other bio hackers and interested people what kind of um what kind of responses did you get from people and um but also what kind of input did did the did this community have input into your experiment that you took into account yeah so you know i i i totally live and die by the whole give a person a fish and you know you feed them for a day and teach somebody to fish and you feed them for a lifetime and i think right now there's this huge divide you know you you went to graduate school you got a phd also and you know there's this huge divide and science between you know those who have the knowledge and those who don't and were placed on different pedestals and all this stuff um but the gap is a lot smaller than i think a lot of us phds and these want to think um you know we invested a lot of time for sure but i think that there are quicker and faster ways to invest your time and faster ways to learn and progress and um you know people can do this stuff no matter what you know people of all skill levels and diversities can figure out how to do this stuff and learn how to do it and so um that was our our goal from the beginning just to show people this process and what we went through and like how science works and what and Eliza tested because you go for coronavirus and you go your antibodies tested Eliza like you don't even know what's coming like what is that what is it yeah you know and we actually wanted to show people like what that test involved and like you know the possible errors in the measurement and like what happens when you do this measurement how accurate it is because you know you go to the fda website and stuff like some of these antibody tests are all like not very accurate no not the best method and you know there's a lot of conversation about what the type one and the type two error errors right false negatives false positives and you know especially the pcr tests that are maybe a little bit longer to get the results back they're usually pretty accurate yeah for the positive but those false negatives if you get a if you're negative you could be positive you don't know yeah like the the whole situation is is just a mess but yeah to be able to understand how the tests work is so helpful yeah it really is then you know because some people come from this premise that people in society in the world are are dumb so we have to you know synthesize things for them and sugarcoat things for them and all these other things but i think the problem is that people just haven't been given the opportunity to learn because we just hide it from them right we use language that just hides it from people and instead of just being like hey look here it is you know look at it judge it like i want you to judge this because i think you're capable of judging it yeah and that's i mean that's why that's why there's like a huge political backlash about masks right now because one in the very beginning they said oh don't wear masks masks aren't good when really all they wanted to do was preserve the n95 supply for healthcare workers and if they had just said that you know it could have i mean who knows how it would have worked out who knows whether or not it would have ended up in a um you know ended up it with people taking advantage of it and making money off of it but at the same time i don't think we would have had as many people as angry as we do now if we'd just told the truth yeah a lot of it you know a lot of it is just really complicated i think the problem is we try to pretend like it's not yeah you know scientists because people want scientists just to have the answers and scientists fall into that trap every one of them does all of us do where you know we want to have the answers i know things yeah exactly i know things you know we want to have the answers i have the answer let me know when sometimes it's you know not much more reliable than just a guess and i think it's okay to be honest with people about some of these things you know and let people know and then they trust science more it's like one of the biggest reactions we got out of this experiment teaching people how to you know we went from straight up from how do you code the dna right to how you test expression in human cells to how do you measure you know draw your own blood and measure your own antibody levels and do all this stuff you know step by step i step through this whole process and one of the biggest response we got was like i would take that that vaccine like if you were providing a vaccine i'd take it and you're like wow you know like even people who will be like staunchly against vaccines i i take a no vaccine you know because so many times like i've taken no vaccine in my life but i would take this vaccine because you showed them how the whole process worked and i think that's a problem with our biopharmaceutical industry it's so like black box you know they don't even have to publish their their clinical data and stuff and it's just like yeah obviously it protects them you know stock market and monetarily wise and all these other things but like it's that money issue that's a problem it's that's the thing is that like people are anti-vax for sure and you know maybe you had somebody in your family die you know whatever who knows but like if you just have it all up front and you're just like this is all of it everything we have there might be some people are like you're still hiding something you know right yeah if i could go and look through all that and look at it and be like huh okay that actually looks pretty good that drug like wow that was that was pretty good like just a normal like it's gonna you know convince way more people i think just being open and honest yeah there's actually a study that just came out this week in nature they're looking they did a global survey of potential acceptance of a COVID-19 vaccine and it was totally related to if they had higher levels of trust in information from the government then they were more likely to take a vaccine um so it's really interesting like in in china it's like a super high percentage of individuals said they would totally take a vaccine and then it was less than 55 percent in russia and in russia additionally they were even less likely to take a vaccine if their employer was telling them to so it was like mandated no i do not trust you oh god people they know what's going on yeah yeah so it's they're you're right it's that it's trust and it's how much information people have um yeah i mean there's lots of different ways for it to work um so you you planned on testing it on yourself the whole time um but this whole process it seems like i mean aside from being processes that you had not necessarily done in terms of the the blood sampling the antibodies and that kind of stuff i mean this it doesn't sound like it was hard to do or was it hard i mean was it a difficult thing no it was a different you know it's all these things are hard for me to say because i have done a lot of these things before you know like i've done Eliza's in graduate school or whatever and uh you know maybe Eliza's whatever all this stuff so for me none of the the process was necessarily new um but i imagine extremely foreign to a lot of other people but the process is still um science is is not necessarily hard physically in terms of like me getting the supplies and doing the thing right if i have the knowledge and everything like that what is really hard is it's just complicated and going into it i don't think i mean with most first time you go into a project you probably don't understand how complicated it is no matter what is engineering science you know you know home improvement like like i'm just gonna go i see i can see this i'm gonna go do this and you're like oh i didn't know how complicated walls were no exactly i need that thing i need that you're just like oh my gosh i need all these like whoa um and i think in terms of that like especially with the coronavirus i think one of the problems we're getting into right now is that human biology is so complicated and um we're getting too much into like comparing country to country instead of just trying to figure things out and do stuff or do something right and everybody's comparing themselves to everybody else and they're like oh look you know france is this bad and you know italy is this bad and sweden is this good or bad and whatever and you're just like you know what like human beings are so complicated the culture can affect how the virus spreads you know the environment the people the genetics so much stuff can affect how this spreads and instead of just like let's figure it out here you know we're comparing ourselves and that's one thing we really saw was that like human beings are complex when i ran i went to a lab core you know which is a professional testing company and got my antibodies tested um and they came back as negative uh for coronavirus before this experiment started and when i started doing the aliases my serum like all my serum samples had background antibodies um i don't know what to i don't know if i had coronavirus in the past right it's really hard to tell those things i would have to like get the antibodies and sequence the antibodies or some crazy stuff to try to figure out and how specific were those antibodies were they specific to coat the SARS-CoV-2 or were they specific to another coronavirus like generally exactly so the Eliza we were doing was to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein okay yeah but that doesn't mean it couldn't have bound a similar spike protein from a related virus and just be able to bind to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein with lower affinity we also tested like viral neutralization so could it block the spike protein from binding to the ACE2 receptor and uh these background antibodies didn't do that so most likely maybe was from some other virus but it was also just really interesting that like some virus that i've gotten sometime in my life that i don't know when has generated these antibodies to me that like give a positive test on this Eliza and you're just like wow you know like biology is really hard and complex yeah i mean that's the when i when i when i think about a vaccine effort and all the different the different vaccines and the fact that companies have been trying to make a coronavirus vaccine forever we don't have one sure we do not have one um and i think it's something like 2006 the HWO said like you know we need people need to work on coronavirus vaccines like it's been a people have been thinking about it for a while yeah and the original SARS and then there was MERS and they started vaccine efforts on SARS and then that petered out uh because we did a great job on public health and controlling it uh and not letting it get out of control and and then money ran out and there was no money for anyone to do a vaccine and so it's like it's like dying a little backwater swamp of science land right and not funded not given anything to and you know people's money is going towards CRISPR research right now exactly yeah and and then SARS-CoV-2 showed up and everyone went oh what happened to those SARS vaccines where'd where'd those go can you can you pull those out of the freezer who's working on that yeah it looked up there was like a couple places and i ran um because it's like it's actually coronavirus is a thing in the middle east apparently um like more common it happens more commonly um that's where MERS got it uh emerged yeah so you know there was a thing there but like that's it and you know it's not necessarily like the habit of biotech development in the world right but it yeah it there is that complexity that's involved so did it work when you injected yourself i mean you said you had this low-level antibody background like what can you say happened yeah so you know that's where it gets complicated i mean the simple answer is we all had an immune response uh to the vaccine which was really interesting and and cool super cool but the complicated answer is it's way more complicated than that um and that's because uh there are a lot of things that um lead towards um like i don't want to say immunity because vaccines don't necessarily protection a vaccine providing protection for a person and obviously one of the hardest to test is actually a live challenge right which you don't really want to do in humans or anything like that necessarily um so the other things you can only really test are test it in a live virus um in you know a live virus system probably in cell culture or something like that to see if it can block the live virus from replicating you know which is like i'm not going to get a live virus and be able to do that once that one's on the door yeah no not doing that in my in my garage exactly and so the other one find somebody who's COVID positive get them to spit in a vial for you and there you go no that one friend you always know is always coughing and you're like hey buddy no um but yeah the other ones are uh which they did in the paper they call um a viral neutralization assay um where you're just testing if that protein that binds to the the human receptor you can block that from binding um and so you know we were kind of limited in the stuff we could test but we could have a surrogate test for viral neutralization and we could test antibody levels and in those two regards we did see an immune response in you know all three of us which was really interesting but it was more complicated um you know when you start talking about like antibody titers how high were the titers and how does that compare to all this other different stuff um and some of the titers were low and you just start realizing that like is complicated and you know if you're going to mass produce a vaccine of this type you probably need 30 000 people to try to um average out all these you know idiosyncrasies in human beings I yeah and I think that's one of the the big aspects of why we do these massive clinical trials when you get to phase three you know late phase two phase three because you you have to take people's physiology unique physiology into account and kind of figure out okay who are the people who either maybe should never get this vaccine or uh you know what is what is the what is the reactive immunotype like what happens there yeah yeah it's interesting you know um because if you're looking at it from a perspective of an individual outcome um you know which the FDA doesn't really cover like if I have a disease or illness and I'm trying to help myself just myself nobody else um it's it looks really interesting because you're like we are capable on some scale of creating some drug that will affect our body our immune system or something like that right and if say I'm dying of a disease that there's no treatment for it is possible maybe perhaps that I could follow a scientific study and apply it to myself um which speeds up the level of drug development astronomically now am I recommending people do that no but this kind of proof of concept just kind of blew my mind in that way that like wow damn that worked like yeah the fact that you were able to take this bit of DNA from from the study and basically follow the instructions follow the follow the scientific cookbook and it worked you got a you had a biological reaction yeah yeah it's it's pretty it's scary you know yeah because it's like what does that mean that's always the scariest question right yeah yeah what does it mean but that I mean that yeah where does it go what can you and in science what does an n of one or you know for the three of you and n of three your sample size beings what does that what does that actually say versus yeah no you know like what does it say for us for us it's you know we're not recommending anybody to take this vaccine or try and protect themselves obviously I don't know if it works I'm not going to test myself or something like that don't do that um but you are capable of doing advanced biomedical research like if I'm capable if David you know who he works in the oil fields in rural Mississippi and he works in his shed he doesn't even have a high school diploma yeah if he can do it and Daria you know is in the Ukraine um yeah where she has a more advanced lab than her universities like I've met David he is brilliant so not knowing exactly you know it did something what would you I mean in terms of this kind of thing I mean I think I see something like this and it immediately makes me think of all the science fiction movies and television I've watched where oh this person has this disease go to the lab and isolate the genetic mutation and we will and we will fix it we will come up with a vaccine or a treatment like an hour or so yeah it takes it takes an hour and they're done you know but I I feel like you know and they're you know on some either some crazy planet that has no resources and they're in you know a bubble tent or something with just what they crashed to the planet with or you know maybe they're an advanced futuristic lab but usually they're not in these sci-fi programs and it kind of makes me feel like okay somebody there they call them the doctor maybe or they're just somebody who has information and becomes the becomes the scientist becomes the doctor and fixes it for someone and is is this gonna happen is this our future I hope so but really what I hope is that you know it's I always say that like if the zombie apocalypse happens you know there's gonna be a lot of people who'd die from the zombies and there's gonna be a whole bunch of diabetics who'd die like you know within the Uyghur month after work because like we are so dependent on pharmaceutical companies and the government and all these places for all of our medicines and biologics and stuff like that and it's great they can manufacture stuff to great purity and provide it to us you know and it's consistent too because it usually if you're getting it from a good pharmaceutical manufacturing source and not some crazy weird lab out of you know I don't know some field in in India or 100% you're going to be getting consistent quality which is going to be safer as well yeah totally and it's just like but like what if that system breaks down you know I'm not saying it is but if you look at this pandemic especially a lot of things broke down right um and much yeah and it could leave a lot of people in very vulnerable positions and again I'm not saying that like I want people to produce drugs um and inject themselves with stuff I want I want knowledgeable people to do stuff that they can really contribute with that's that's the difference I want knowledgeable people to do it like injecting yourself with something because I did it or somebody else did it or because you want to be cool or something yeah you know like we're better than that as a species we're better than that as human beings we can do stuff very thoughtfully and um I think trying to get independence in some way like that medical independence you know you can get a generator to back up your house if the power goes out or something like that you can have a garden to have food and things like that but the way modern medicine is right now you know if you get a cut and uh you can't go to the doctor and get antibiotics you can't and like antibiotics are cheap all all over the world like there's this thin line between us the system failure and like you know in a lot of a lot of death because that crumbles yeah so you know it's it's this whole thing of like providing people with the means to help themselves if they need to help themselves in general we're pretty good as a society right now right don't go and make your own insulin like if you need money talk to me talk to kiki talk to somebody you know I'll help you do the best I can to help you get insulin or something like that you know you don't try to make it yourself there are ways you can get it that are really good that'll help you but like in the chance that there's not or in the chance that maybe you do live in a country like India or something like that and there's no way to easily get it and there's no way to easily manufacture it like what if and uh I like to provide things and knowledge in case of those instances you know just like let's bring people the power back so they have that knowledge just in case what if you know yeah get rid of the the fewer black boxes that there are and the more that we understand the more that we'll be able to continue continue forward and it's funny I I ran across some article or someone sent me an article earlier this week about a biohacker who and it wasn't it wasn't biohacking in the sense of hacking DNA and biology cellular and in a laboratory it was you know people who put butter in their coffee and they're hacked their physiology have you tried butter in your coffee yet I am never going to put butter in my coffee I just know I've never tried either but now I know I actually if I think about it I'm kind of curious no it's probably just like this layer of oil on your lips right no the butter probably just melts and separates the oil on top you know and you just got this like thick layer of oil like yeah but so there's you know the the the different uses of biohacking as in hacking but I feel I feel like the use the the biohacking that the community you work with does is very similar to computer hacking and right now we've got all these devices that you know you touch the touchscreen and it does its thing or it makes your house warm or you know Siri says something to you and or you say hey Siri and Siri gives you all the answers to your homework and you have no idea how it works there's no radio shack anymore there's no you know there are these we're missing we're missing a whole chunk of technology because things have made a jump forward but that doesn't have to be the case in terms of science and medicine and health and like you're I appreciate the fact that you're trying to keep that knowledge external to people who can pay for college yeah no I mean that's the big thing is that you know I never should have gone to get a peak I like the my life trajectory is one of those ones that I think is just like you know one in a billion or something like that I never you know I grew up dirt poor on a farm in Indiana you know extreme level poverty right we ate eggs from our chickens and drink dehydrated milk like you know we weren't this was my childhood as well yeah and you know to move from that to end up going and getting my phd or something like that and you know even at my phd and being around people who um you know as simple as their their parents weren't divorced or not divorced twice you know and they had lugged certain luxuries in life that I was never exposed to or experienced at all um yeah and it really opened my eyes to that like wow you know like I I I don't think I won the genetic lottery or anything and I'm like extra smart I really don't you know the the the my greatest attribute I could probably say is that I can even work hard when I need to but uh that's about it and I imagine that uh there's a lot of other people who can work hard but didn't have a lot of opportunities that would be really great at science just like me um because I grew up with these people and I know them and you know some of them like David are brilliant and it's just like what if these people had the opportunity like what would they create and that's the coolest thing because these people aren't encumbered by a system that we you and I got trained into yeah got trained in you know they're not encumbered by any of those thoughts and things we were taught and everything like that they are just free to do whatever they want for the sake of it and never worry about anything and it's just like that can't do anything but I think benefit science yeah I mean as at some point people within the academic infrastructure will have to take notice of things that are happening in the in the biohacking community and you know actually maybe change the way they do things as a result yeah no I mean well two two things I have to say one is there's only about 250,000 biomedical PhDs I looked this up and I did a bunch of research on this and I wrote an article on my blog about it there's about 250,000 research PhDs I think in the US that are actively employed and like research positions right and you're like so if you can train 250,000 people that to be at the level of PhD or working at that level like you already have the majority population right and if you add in you know people with master's degrees and bachelor's degrees I think it's closer to a million total people that have bachelor's degrees or higher who are working in science and you're like a million people I mean million people's a lot don't get me wrong but if you're just talking about normal people all over the world or just even in the US right if you can convince a million people to do science and and double the population of people actually doing science in the US like hands-on research science people how much more could happen people can't help but take note like to me it's just like a when you know because like I see these people who are doing this stuff you know human cell culture and all these things you're just like oh my gosh I could never imagine that this would take place and you're just like it's only a matter of time before these people outnumber and size and buying power and everything academic science um and then I don't know what's going to happen it's going to be weird I bet but it happened in computer science right it happened in computer science um it's happened in a lot of fields where it's just like it totally shifts where it's like this is a really good skill and it's really useful um you know and now most computer scientists don't work in academia the the large majority don't right right like if you're a brilliant computer scientist you go to google or something you know some place where you can actually make money yeah yeah so it's it's going to be interesting to see what happens because you know biology is a lot different than computers for sure um but I see enough similarities that I think we're going to eventually start to see that shift um towards like science is changing and it doesn't matter if I like it or don't like it or agree with it or not how is this change going to affect me what is this change going to be all all these things and I'm really excited for that like I don't know I don't even know but I'm really excited for it I remember the uh the conference in Vegas that you that you threw and invited me to come speak at I was supposed to be this year our coronavirus killed it oh man that was crazy no virus has killed many things this year we were we were going to be at the uh we moved to a hotel in the strip and we were set up it was going to be awesome rented out a bar like a night it's going to be crazy uh that would have been amazing but I was really taken by the the the community of people and starting to see the there there seem to be various factions among the community which was interesting there was very much the kind of uh biopunk factions uh oh yeah who are you know pushing the edge of things and then there's uh people who may have been there but just starting to go toward more um looking at possibly taking their garage experiments and turning them into companies or see if they could take them and do something with them and then there were people coming from academia and industry and coming in you know and they're like oh yeah I do biohacking in my garage on the weekends it's like I leave the lab to go to my lab and so it was just fascinating to see all these different types of people coming together and and working together and and fighting sometimes and oh definitely fighting yeah that was I thought you know that's healthy yeah I remember I remember as a scientist one of the first conferences I went to was this gordon conference I love gordon conferences yes yeah they're they're amazing um and all everybody did it was on something really dumb also type three secretion systems well no it was on like uh bacterial you know cell to cell interactions or something like that but the main discussion was type three secretion system which is like uh you know bacteria of these giant pili that they like stick another bacteria and they can transfer genetic information all this other stuff and these people were like yelling at each other all this stuff and I'm like oh my god you're crazy like they're going crazy over type three secretion system well when you're passionate you're passionate got a lot of out so since then I've always known that like it's not a good conference unless there's people yelling at each other the more insignificant the better you know I love yeah it was it was it was great I just I really I really enjoyed getting getting to hang out with everybody and getting to meet so many people who are everybody working on so many different kinds of things I mean okay there's you go to you go to Twitter and people are like biohacking that's like you know putting butter in your coffee but you know people here there's the oh you're biohacking you're doing you're doing um bacteria art or yeast art and there's there are people who are doing that and then you're making uh making bacteria or yeast glow and then there's going from there I saw that you're going to be moving on to a project developing chicken meat or eating you know we do genetic engineering we're always trying to push into new things and do new crazy things um just because uh that's what interests me you know like and there's so many here's the thing is like science has always been um you do this thing you publish a paper or whatever you know you spread the scientific information and sometimes I get a lot of criticism that's sometimes all the time I'm gonna be honest here right now I always get criticism about how people are like oh you're you know you do it for the attention you do it for the press and all this stuff um which no matter how hard you try to convince people you don't like pressing attention it doesn't work so it doesn't matter but uh I'm like why can't science be about that like why can't science be whatever it wants to be if I want to be very dramatic in the way I do science why can't science be dramatic if I want to be funny and stupid in the way I do science why can't it be that like people have pigeonholed science to this thing it's supposed to be and I just have started asking the question why does that have to be science you know why does what you say have to be science have to be science like why can't I just do science whatever way I want if I want to live stream it and be ridiculous and set it to dubstep or whatever not that I necessarily have maybe one maybe one time you know it gets to you it just it helps the pipetting rhythm it's fine it's great but science should be able to be that and that's what I think is amazing right is that science can just be an expression of yourself however you want it to be whatever you want it to be and um that just led me to explore a lot of different things like you know trying to grow animal meat in a petri dish there are a lot of companies that do this or that are trying to do this and it's you know becoming a popular thing and I'm just like well why can't I do it you know why can't other people do it what's stopping us from trying and I want to taste chicken meat that's grown in a petri dish like I don't know why not let me see and let me do and let me try and let me have a good time doing it um yeah that's that's I think the the main thing is that science should just be fun enjoyable um we're all brought up that like science is so boring oh my gosh ph meters and stuff what do they make you calculate you know like all this titrations so many titrations remember in like undergrad chemistry when they made you do like electron equations and stuff like who uses that I don't even know it's part of the process you must know these things remember the concept yeah there's a yeah in the educational system I think there's a lot that um I don't know yeah it it just kicks the fun right out of it and just you know how do you deal with that with your memorization and how do you deal with that with Kai like you know my my kid's only two and a half and I'm trying this figure stuff out but like how do you like a school like I just haven't figured it out yet I'm in the middle of it and I'm still oh yeah you're teaching right well I mean that's good it's a whole it's a whole thing yeah but I think it's um I think he's learning a lot more like in so many things that conversations we have with him and the interactions that we have and oh okay here I have to I'll be like I have to use math right now Kai I'm using multiplication to figure this out you know and he'll be like oh all right you know it's so I can like kind of let him know when certain things are useful so that he knows it's useful to learn it at least part of it part of it though there's definitely there's definitely a you just have to do the work and be yeah there's a great part of just like learning stuff I mean some learning is just you just have to put your head down and just do it there's nothing there's no shortcut like you only learn the alphabet by saying it a thousand times oh my god let me tell you how many times yeah yeah but then you start getting into it you really need to get rid of fractions you know I if if I ever ran as a politician my first thing would be like we're outlawing fractions you don't need fractions give me the decimal place you know like I don't even know why we use it like what's you know three sevens plus four eights I don't know just give me the decimal point I could add it up really easy like I don't get it I don't know how to yeah I don't even know what you do anymore like I don't remember how do you add fractions I don't know I have not had I think I think I think my son gets fractions starts fractions this year and I am terrified I love fractions no fractions fractions for cooking I got I've got fractions for cooking that's about it but then you just go to uh not American standards and you just use a scale the kitchen scale and it's all ounces oh gosh that's scientific I hate these things I hate like teaspoons and stuff I'm just like ah it's so complicated can we just why don't we just do grams of everything like just do grams that's right grams and milligrams of everything like ah teaspoon I don't even know what that is I don't even identity for the chat room says fractions for our stupid inch things that's right inches exactly for stupid inch things oh my gosh yeah don't even start there's too much fun there I spent I spent like half of my life trying to teach myself the opposite you know the metric system so that so that you never have a spacecraft to go missing on Mars it's just always the conversion you're just like uh it's like what 2.54 centimeters per inch for my 2.2 kilograms per pound and like uh see uh Fahrenheit to Celsius is always that one's the rough one yeah so you have to have like I generally just have a couple points so like 25 C is like 76 or something 75 and 37 C is 98.6 right and 30 which is very useful for doing body temperature water baths yeah 30 C is like less than that so you're just like pretty much set right if somebody if you're like it's cold outside you're just like well is it freezing if it's below freezing then you say you know negative it's above freezing you're just like it feels like it's 5 C outside or something like nobody knows the difference not at least not here if it's warm if it's really hot you can say like 37 but if it's not really high you're just like it's like 30 C outside or something right I'm covered you got like four Celsius temperatures you memorized you just said you're good you're good forever we don't have to convert oh my god uh further going back to your um to your vaccine project whoo all right jumping backwards in time I love it yes going back in time uh do you what do you or how do you think a project like yours affects trust in vaccines overall do you think it helps all I've heard is like positive stuff um you know we're literally like taking a vaccine you know I remember I I'm one of the streams we did somebody was like um we were talking about vaccines and how vaccines can be dangerous and stuff like that you know and we have to understand that and take that into account and somebody is like you sound like your anti-vax or something like that and we're like we're literally taking a vaccine live like here like I don't think we would be more opposite of anti-vax for you you know yeah um and no I think it really helped people understand the process of this stuff and how it goes on um and then use that information to judge things you know that's my favorite thing it's like if you want to be anti-vaccine anti-gmo anti all these things have all the information exactly if you have all the knowledge and information then like all right because you know that's all you can hope that somebody has that are judging it on the knowledge a complete knowledge and information you can't do anything else otherwise right it's like that's all I can give you I can give you all the knowledge and information on this and then it's your decision to make after that I can't force you to do it I can't you know you know do anything then it's up to you um and I think that's that's what it is it's it's giving that knowledge and information to people so then they can make a informed decision yeah when you did your crisper injection you later said ah maybe I shouldn't have done that like that um do you have the same feeling about this vaccine trial or are you are you glad you did it or would you do it again no I'm a hundred percent you know it's like it's weird and I'm sure you experienced it over the years you know it's like there's a point in time where you could tweet something and you got no response and you just like tweet tweet this is into the void yeah nobody sees it nobody responds and it's just like oh gosh why do I even do this um and then you know after you start building up you know your podcast and all this other stuff or whatever you work on for me is the science stuff I do um then more people start responding and you get like this audience this interaction that you didn't have before um and for me that was pretty abrupt uh you know it went from like with with that crisper thing um it went from like nothing to like a lot really fast um of people interacting with me and uh I didn't expect that I I wasn't I mean how could anybody predict that or think about that it's it's really tough unless you experience it it's really tough to like look ahead and be like oh yeah if I do this thing and I accidentally you know a bunch of people write articles about it it's gonna affect some people like come used to nobody like at all responding to me ever you know just like yeah you know you post something on facebook and you get like you know three likes or something yeah and it was uh after I did that crisper injection um you know it was wow for me it was such an interesting you know so much went into it thought and just like inspiration and emotion and everything um and it affected a lot of people and I did not expect that I did not expect so many people to be influenced affected other people to try similar things you know uh people just to respond negatively um and it really you know that it really changed me a lot because I realized that like oh gosh now if I say things it affects people um you know like people are listening to me whereas before they weren't and that's really a hard thing to come to grips with because they're like I don't I don't like what am I gonna say why you listen to me what do I gotta say like I don't know and those those potential those things that were just maybe flippant comments or just like just like you're just like throwing off a comment what suddenly it's something that somebody takes seriously oh totally yeah yeah people are just like wow and you're just like no like I'm just an old person also like you know I'm just completely normal and uh yeah and so it's like hard for me to come to terms with that after you know I injected CRISPR DNA you know the first human to modify or try to modify their cells with CRISPR um yeah it was uh hard nowadays I go into it understanding that and I that I definitely take that into account and weigh its impact um on the thing I'm going to do because I understand that there's people who will try to copy what I'm doing or um you know there could be potential negative consequences from the thing I'm doing and I try to be cognizant of it it's hard I just want to do what I want to do and it's you know you just want to live your life but it's it's hard yeah yeah I mean yeah once you once people do start listening to you and maybe trying things that you're trying suddenly it becomes a question of is this is this something that I should do publicly or should I try it privately and then you know maybe tell people later if it worked or not or um you know yeah it's a it's a I I think it's a very interesting place for you to be I don't yeah it's complicated because you know it was like there was a time when I could just do whatever I wanted nobody cared and I could post it on Facebook and there's a lot of stuff if you look into my past that I did do before all this stuff before no journalist followed me and wrote about me and all this stuff and uh yeah it was you know it was I enjoyed it um and it's become completely different I'm not saying I don't enjoy it now it's just become really different it's now um for public consumption and uh yeah it makes it different it makes it interesting um but is there also I mean trying to take biohacking kind of into the mainstream and make it something that is for everybody's consumption as opposed to you know the the fringe hackers who want to try something extreme or do something extreme I mean if you want to have you know a million two million three million garage kitchen biohackers you know suddenly or suddenly you're talking to mainstream America right oh a hundred percent a hundred percent um yeah it's so complicated you know it's because you you know especially as you progress through these things and reaching people and reaching different levels of people it it's also like the way you present it and it that changes also you know when I'm talking about this stuff to you or to a friend it's totally different than if I'm speaking to a hundred people or a thousand people or whatever um yeah yeah and it's just uh you know because reason you probably got into science and I got into science because like I thought it was cool and I like doing it you know this is fun oh I get to ask questions and try and work things out awesome great I get to work with birds yes okay yeah exactly I have to slice up their brains well that's cool too kind of okay I have to chop off their heads first yeah oh okay maybe not as cool as I first thought okay yeah definitely that it's tough it's tough I mean it doesn't matter what you do though you know you're always going to be set with these decisions in your life where it's just like I don't know I don't know what the right answer is I don't know what the wrong answer is you know I'm just trying to do my best to be a human and like live my life yeah and uh it's hard sometimes you know yeah yeah it is hard especially when you do have an audience suddenly and yeah what do you think I really wanted to do all I really want to do is teach people um and that's you know I get a lot of criticism from academia especially you know they're just like all this guy wants attention all this stuff um and I've had friends that I've known for like 10 years you know went to phd together spent a lot of time with them we've like just turned their backs on me and been really mean to me and all this other stuff um because of this public person that's displayed by the media and uh it's hard it's hard because uh all I really want to do is teach people all I really want to do is people to learn science and do science and do science myself and have fun doing it and um the fact that it gets construed to be this like evil crazy thing that I'm like some tension seeker and all this other stuff it's just like ah but yeah I just want to teach people science there you've been in a bunch of documentaries and not just having articles written about you but I've seen you on netflix yeah I've seen you on Netflix I've been on Netflix too yeah um so but in in these documentaries do you do you feel like your story's getting told do you feel like it's coming across well or is it do you feel or maybe it doesn't matter what you feel how what kind of responses have you gotten it's it's never you you know that's the thing it's like obviously as human beings we're really complex and trying to portray anybody in any way the only thing you can do it is super simplistic um and so it becomes really complicated and especially you know I always run into this thing where it's like it's this tough battle with the media because the media wants to portray you you know there's even a New York Times article that was written it was funny and um it was about like biohacking and other stuff and uh they mentioned me in there and uh they didn't put doctor or phd or whatever before after which I don't usually care about or anything like that but then you read the article and every other scientist in there they put it in there and you're like oh god this is like further narrative right like they're trying to make me see like some renegade guy who didn't have any you know training or anything like that um to fit their narrative I even talked to about it and they just didn't change it um and uh it's crazy because there's this narrative that you know has to be fit right it just doesn't work like things need a story if you do a documentary you need a story you can't just be like here are some people talking like nobody I mean there's some documentaries like that but they're really boring I can need something to happen you need these characters to be heroes or villains or something like that and uh yeah so you always get you know stuck in this little hole um yeah what character are you how yeah how do they want to tell you yeah what character are you in the story and uh there's a new documentary coming out actually on uh October 30th on Showtime that I'm in um about Biohackers uh but yeah it's uh yeah it's tough because it's not me obviously um but it is me right but it's just like small bits and pieces of me that are you know cut up for the audience yeah it's also whatever happens to have been caught during a certain that certain filming period and yeah it's this it's a snapshot yeah yeah and it's really hard because you also really have to trust these documentary people because you know I've had crews that'll follow me around for like eight hours a day and there's no way you can be on film eight hours a day and just like always be on like you know you're gonna do something or stay something or mess up or look dumb or at the end of the day you find yourself locking yourself in the bathroom with that bottle of whiskey no there's no way two ways about it and that's the thing is that like uh so you really have to trust that they have the best intentions in mind and they're not gonna take you know that time after you know at midnight when you were still filming and you're exhausted and you said something really stupid and they wanted to put that in because that made their film better yeah just hard because so many people you don't even know at all so you're just like I don't know I don't know if I'm gonna trust you well hopefully your trust ends up ends up good for this new documentary and yeah I'm sure it'll be great but people should check it out show time it's called Citizen Bio October 30th yeah the Halloween so I'm wondering if they made it made it like a little Halloween feel or something I don't know making those zombies Gaurav Sharma in the chat room wants to know how you deal with conspiracy theory anti-government wackos that your work probably attracts oh gosh I I I don't want to actually talk about some some like these things on here because people might be listening and I've definitely had some serious threats and other crazy things and it's just like you I you know I think anybody who attracts a certain amount of attention you're gonna get uh some crazy I exist on that boundary between like weird interesting and weird crazy so you get like probably more weird crazy than weird interesting um and uh weird crazy sometimes it's you know a little a little much and you get you know threat people think you're like part of government conspiracies and stuff and like you get that threats and all this crazy stuff and it's just like I think I run a small business I'm just some guy living in an apartment in Oakland like uh yeah it's uh now I just try to avoid it you know um I'm all for a good conspiracy theory don't get me wrong but you know uh I just have to avoid that stuff because it attracts the wrong type of attention and people and stuff yeah I mean uh do you try to reason with people or do you have a you're like I've got can't I've got some radar and I'm just gonna say thank you very much and then yeah exactly even that you know you can't sometimes because then people want to respond it's just uh difficult I've learned the the action of no action a lot in my life um which is just you gotta let things go you you know you don't know who this person is you you you're probably not going to help them or save them you're not a trained therapist or anything like that um you just kind of need to let this go and you know if you can diffuse the situation if it needs to be diffused but otherwise just like you know block this person remove yourself from the situation as much as possible um yeah it's just there's no yeah I'm not a trained therapist I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do the correct thing I've actually looked that up because I've had some people send me some crazy stuff like people people who will say they're gonna commit suicide or something and you're like what do you say to somebody who says they're gonna commit suicide and you're like type that into Google that's when you know it's going too far and you're just like you shouldn't be talking to me about that you should be talking to somebody else but like what do you do so that's like so heavy what do you do somebody send you a message like that you're just like that's a lot yeah you're just like it's a lot to take do I not if I don't respond what if they're serious like no don't send me messages like that like I will not respond I I won't I don't respond to those anymore sorry yeah you can't be responsible for that and it's just like it gets things get I've got not a hand and yeah government conspiracy stuff aliens I love them yeah so uh yeah identity four in the chat room says so you're not a lizard person sure I know I was actually from a Mark Zuckerberg parama lizard children he's my lizard dad lizard dad did you know snakes have two penises I think Blair must have told me that at one point I wonder if it's lizards also but like so weird they're like animals that have two penises I didn't know that bifurcated yeah bifurcated that's how you know I'm just saying do you think somebody's a lizard person pull down their pants and check there's always a way you will not go to jail for that at all no don't do that I'm just joking don't do that kids if you're listening it's not don't do that yeah good tell me about the Odin what's going on at the Odin right now can are you doing classes still are you just are you selling products what are you doing at the Odin yeah the Odin you know it's my company we sell biohacking slash genetic engineering molecular biology science supplies for you know as cheap as we can sell them to people and still stay in business uh you know because we believe in just getting science out there getting people doing this stuff because like you said you know I just love when I get that feeling that like this seems really sci-fi like wow I just love that feeling so I just want to like help build it I want things to be more sci I want to just like walk into some random person's house and then you know be like doing science and I don't it you just be like what do you do like what there are people random people that I don't even know doing science that's crazy yeah but uh we got classes online classes that are you know pre-recorded because I'm lazy and I don't like to do live classes because you're smart and efficient with your time let's think of it that way there we go um but it's great you know uh we got a lot of stuff for anything you're interested in doing from engineering human cells to bacteria yeast um you know doing you know PCR tests you can figure out ways I know people have used similar supplies to like try to run tests for COVID and stuff like that you know buy kits online not saying that you should do that it's probably not the best way to figure out if you have coronavirus but you know it opens up so many doors just learning how to do this um it's it's really cool and crazy uh yeah we have a great community developing around all this stuff uh you know doing genetic engineering on all types of organisms you have plants you're looking at now um yeah so what is the what is the plants what is that there these are compounds yeah they're chemicals so plants uh the way you work within genetically modified plants a lot of its hormones um yeah plants are really hormone based that's what tells them to like put down their roots grow shoots like do a lot of different stuff um so you know if you want to work with plants genetically modified plants um hormones is the thing yeah awesome yeah 24d is actually it's really interesting it's actually what what I think is the main component of roundup um what roundup actually does is it when you spray it on the plant it starts um de-differentiating the cells this is I think I got this correct but I could be making it it de-differentiates the cells so that they just start forming like weird tumors and the cells go crazy and they all die so that's like why it's a weed killer you can spray it on like any plant and they'll basically just like freak out and just be like uh I don't know what to do I'm like de-differentiating and um yeah it kills them but what you can do is you can use it to form what they call a callus which is like a de-differentiated mass of cells which then you could grow into a whole plant right because they're like stem cells um so at certain concentrations you can actually just get some stem cells to grow into plants and stuff so instead of just killing the plant you're harvesting its cells to make new ones it's pretty cool but yeah I know I mean like I said we had a hard time with the coronavirus but uh you know we're kicking it we're surviving I got a bunch of great workers Pete and Jill and Gabe and um yeah you know it's uh we're we're doing it we're making it I'm you know I I'm just I'm I can't believe we survived this coronavirus thing honestly like I thought we were just gonna totally go out of business um the fact that we didn't I'm just like like I was planning for the company to go out of business a few months ago um do you think people started trying up and everything like that right like all schools shut down we lost right so schools that we're buying from you they were they were not able to anymore a ton of schools were buying and they just you know stop because schools shut down and still now and yeah we just the community really supported us and bought stuff and people bought stuff and yeah are people taking classes more yeah that's our most popular thing is people take the classes you know our classes we have a special Facebook group which you know I'm actually on and I answer people's questions which is crazy and uh you know it's like our own private like uh you know you get your own private class tutor you get people to answer your questions including me who help you out to just like help you along the process of learning genetic engineering and biotechnology got office hours basically where you can go yeah I mean it nowadays you know shoot my office hours are when I pick up my phone and when I put it down I'm here most of the day would be terrible you know I try to I try again to shut it off it they're just like not answer emails or things like that after a certain time but you know you know how it goes sometimes yeah yeah goal desater says can I sequence DNA I want my ACTG in a big file I think it's probably better for you to go to another company but could you do could you get like a we don't do that and I would recommend against doing that for yourself right now um I think genetic privacy is going to be a big thing I mean it should be a big thing you know I I had my DNA arrayed with with 23 and me gosh we're talking like 2008 2009 mine read that far back also yeah and I just thought wow this is so cool and stuff like that and you know a couple years ago I you know closed my account and asked them to delete it obviously they're not going to delete it like no this is data I know and that's the same like with all these companies they're basically commoditizing your genetics and your genes um and like I don't think we realize the implications of that right now because it's just such a brand new technology is probably like when they first started social security numbers and people were just like whatever and nowadays people are like uh don't don't just ever mention your social security or email write it down ever nothing right and uh because it's really valuable it has a lot of implications for your life and I think genetics is going to be the same way and most these companies the reason that they're able to sequence your DNA for so cheap or whatever else is because they commoditize they turn it into data and they use it and uh they make money off of it and they can do whatever they want with it um and you may not want that in the future that may be something that's really important to you and your family so unless you have a very specific reason like you think you have an illness and you want to identify the genetic cause of it I would suggest against um sequencing your genetics obviously it's fun and I hate to be such a downer and you know it's okay to do you're probably not going to destroy your life but uh probably not yeah but I mean where is your where is your information going to be used is it going to be used for uh you know pharmaceutical development yeah what's it going to be used for we don't know I do there was an interesting uh use a friend of mine took her ancestry DNA and sent it to a website called uh protease or something oh let me see if I can find the link here it was uh but basically it's a database that cross references all the mutations uh the single nucleotide polymorphisms against um published research and yeah promethias that's what's promethias and it'll and it basically tells you like gives you a list of all the research like cross referenced for you know your uh your mutations for inflammatory disease so you you know that you're predisposed to inflammatory autoimmune diseases and suddenly you're like can she's like publishing she's posting all this information she's like I found out this about myself and I found out this about myself this blah blah blah and my my ancestors probably survived because of malaria but because they they survived the malaria because they had the genetic mutation it predisposes me for this now and it just made the whole you know she's able to put all these things together in a very interesting way so there's I don't know it's so interesting the access to the information in our genes is fascinating but yeah on uh the IRC chat sugar he's talking about criminal I think that's the scariest thing is that like once somebody has your your your DNA information and it becomes part of any database fbi whatever um you could potentially be flagged for committing a crime and like these things oh gosh you know the code is 13 alleles that the you they don't even sequence these genes right they're just alleles right so they just look at like copy number variants in these alleles using PCR and you're just like oh gosh like oh man um like the fact that you could be matched to something like this that's you don't want to be part of one of those databases and accidentally get matched like so DNA evidence is not what they say it is yeah well I mean yeah oh no like what I was just in my house and all my family can verify you're arrested you're going to jail anyway having to so many people I watched too many Netflix shows I guess yeah maybe we all need to copyright our DNA as thunder beaver in the chat it's just like you know it's yeah it's you know I tend to be more libertarian on all these things you know um so don't mind me but like yeah I tend to be like you know especially in my life I don't have a lot of privacy um I guess some guy just like showed up in my place business today which is fine if you're watching this I you know I appreciate that you enjoy the stuff I do but it's also like you know it's like yeah I don't get that privacy freedom I had somebody who sent me a text message who said you know the YouTube video uploaded it has your license plate and your address in it and I was like how did you get my phone over to send this text message I think I'm more scared about that than the license plate and this video on the YouTube like oh it's funny yeah no so there's information out there if people know how to look for that yeah whatever privacy I can get you know like uh I'll take that keep your privacy Goldisator says DMV probably got it from the DMV yeah so genetic sequencing at home is still not really happening you don't need to here's the thing is that like um like yeah the thing is is that companies do it so well and so inexpensively um that uh you really don't need to do it at home it's one of those things that like we're at the point right now where it's become so uh I don't know just widespread you know anybody can buy a machine you just have to invest the initial 50 or 100 000 dollars or whatever you want to invest and then you can do it really easily so uh there's just so many companies that do this type of thing it's generally not worth it to try try to do it yourself unless you for an intellectual exercise you know there's a lot of cool things you can work out um for that but otherwise you know pay the people who do it for a living and uh it's not that you're not going to save much money trying to do it yourself yeah yeah do you want to tell people anything else i'm gonna bring our bring our show to a close anything you want to share with them more more secrets phone numbers i mean somebody found them sure the thing is i try to be really open you know i have like my email online and all this other stuff it's like i can't start it um no i like i don't i don't this was a great chat i i love chatting with you as always um um yeah uh feel free to reach out to me i can't say i always respond to people but i'm really easy to find online um yeah so feel free to reach out to me uh i try to be open and talk about things with people and i'm interested in people's points of view so yeah very cool thank you so much for coming on the show tonight i really appreciate it i know you've been tired oh yeah i mean it's just it's been an overwhelming year for everybody yeah yeah it just gets added to all right everybody thank you for joining us tonight and if you want to help twist grow get a friend to subscribe today i do have one letter from the mailbag this week in science question from paul lambardi phd associate professor of music theory and composition says last week you brought a story about how genetic variants can determine whether we can smell certain things such as fish and cinnamon in my house we eat a lot of vegetables including grilled asparagus after eating asparagus my urine has a distinct odor i heard that some people's urine doesn't have that distinct odor after eating asparagus a friend of ours told a story about sharing a bathroom with someone who couldn't smell that odor after eating asparagus and this leads me to wonder if some people process asparagus in a way that their urine doesn't smell or if some people are incapable of smelling that distinct odor does science have an answer to this question yes paul science does have an answer and you're right in both respects it's multiple genes involved and there is a gene that makes your pee smell and there is another gene that influences whether or not you can smell the asparagus smell it's true olfactory genes and i guess asparagus metabolism genes would that be specific yes but yes science science does have that answer it is definitely genetically controlled and there are two there are multiple genes involved so yes you are on to something there so you may want to figure out whether or not you are one of those people who is an asparagus super smeller or whether it actually is uh whether there are other factors involved thank you for writing in and if anyone else has a question out there feel free to write in kirsten at thisweekinscience.com or send us a message on facebook all right time for shoutouts to everybody i have shoutouts galore thank you to fada for helping with the social media and the show descriptions every week thank you also to gourd for manning the chat room thank you to identity for for recording our show jozaya thank you for joining us today really wonderful and if anybody wants to check out the odin and those offerings the website there is the hashtag odin not hashtag it's a hyphen it's what it says within the hyphen odin odin.com and i would also like to thank the boroughs welcome fund and also our patreon sponsors for their generous support of this show thank you to chris wasniak dav bun vegaard chefstad he wrote a very nice letter this week to help me figure out how to pronounce his name hal snider donathan styles aka don stylo john sheoligium john lee alikoff and matty paren gore of charma mike shoemaker sarah forford donald mundes steven alberon darryl myshack stu polyc andrew swanson fred s 104 corin benton sky luke paul ronovich ben bignell kevin reardon noodles jack bryan kerrington matt bass joshua fury shonan neenall lamb john mckay greg riley marqueson flow gene telly a steve leesman aka zima ken haze howard tan christopher rapin richard brendan minnish melissand johnny gridley flying out richard porter christopher drier mark mesaru sardium greg riggs john atwood melania is a russian super spy rudy garcia dav wilkinson rodney lewis paul matt sutter philip shane curt larson greg landon mountain sloth jim drapeau sarah chavis alex wilson john ratness wami sue dostor jason olds david neighbor matthew litwin eric nap e o kevin parochan erin luthan steve debel bob calder marjorie paul stanton paul disney patrick pecker raro beg ben rothig gary s tony steele ulysses adkins bryan kondren jason roberts and dav fridel thank you for your support of twist and if you are interested in supporting us on patreon you can head over to twist.org and click that patreon link on next week's show justin and blare will be back and i know they're going to be sad they missed this interview tonight and we'll be back live wednesday eight p.m pacific time broadcasting live from our youtube facebook and twitch channels and from twist.org slash live if you are not listening to this as a podcast right now you can just look for this week in science wherever podcasts are found and if you liked the show you can also ask your friends to subscribe as well for more information on anything that you've heard here today links and show notes are going to be available on our website twist.org let me say that one more time twist.org you can also sign up for our newsletter that we send occasionally when we get around to it we really do try you can contact us directly email me kirsten at kirsten at thisweekin science.com justin at twistman and at gmail.com blair at blairbaz at twist.org just put twist in the subject line so emails don't get spam filtered into oblivion you can also ping us on twitter where we are twist science dr kiki jackson fly and blairs menagerie we love your feedback there's a topic you'd like us to cover or a suggestion for an interview please let us know we're gonna be back here next week and really hope that you'll be back again to join us again for more great science news and if you learned anything from tonight's show remember it's all in your head if i can do all the things that was creepy this week in science it's the end of the world so i'm setting up shop got my banner unfurled it says the scientist is in i'm gonna sell my advice show them how to stop the robot with a simple device i'll reverse global warming with a wave of my hand and all it'll come in your way so everybody listen use the scientific map and i'll broadcast my opinion all in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science i've got one disclaimer and it shouldn't be news that what i say may not represent your views but i've done the calculations and i've got a plan if you listen to the science you may just understand that we're not trying to threaten your philosophy we're just trying to speak in science this week in science this week in science science science this week in science this week in science this week in science science science i've got a laundry list of items i want to address from stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness i'm trying to promote more rational thought and i'll try to answer any question you've got the help can i ever see the changes i seek when i can only set up shop one out to what we say and it can science this week in science this week in science this week in science this week in science that's the end of that we did that we're still on the air but we did that it's the post show people but you don't we don't have to have a post show because we just talked for like two hours it was great though yeah it's been really really great to get to talk with you it's been a year yeah i don't know aside from social oh yeah i guess by way of the planet because when we saw each other last time yeah that was pretty nice i know i was gonna go to the thing in portland but i never did or whatever but it we cancelled the in person so we went totally virtual we yeah we ended up going virtual but yes okay so you know i made the right decision you made the right decision to not come to portland for the conference yeah would have been no conference it would have been like that's nice you can stand on the sidewalk and i'll shout at you we don't know what's going on oh yeah totally was it in march or february um end of march oh end of march yeah i flew to dc in february i was like the last time i flew yeah in february dc yeah like february and then it was just like everything canceled it's crazy yeah i was i went to a conference i went to triple as in seattle in mid mid february like valent around valentine's day and did that for a nice long weekend which was awesome but then that was it came home and i had all these other plans and we were doing our conferencing and i'm like i'm gonna do all these things i'm gonna go down to la in the beginning of march and i'm gonna do this festival and i'm gonna do that it was like oh by the way i'm i'm moving to austin in february so you're moving to austin oh my god yes come out there south by southwest so great i'm gonna i'm gonna call you up and be like so do you have a place in your in your house you'd be like yes because houses in austin cost real normal people prices yeah in oakland it's like here's this one bedroom for 750 000 i keep wondering if everything all right so many people so many people have been moving out of the bay area oh it's like our rents crashing or things they sent us a new lease for our apartment and uh they dropped the rent price four hundred dollars i never in my life had experienced a rent drop much less four hundred dollars a month like i was just like whoa there are a lot of people and i mean every weekend you just see moving trucks everywhere wow yeah people are just fleeing because nothing's open i think it's still like one of the most lockdown areas in the u.s um so like nothing is open uh and everybody's stuck in these tiny apartments that they're paying ridiculous rents for they're just like i'm gone i can work remote i'm going someplace where it's cheaper yeah yeah yeah that's exactly what i can't even imagine yeah people i mean you and and so many people in the city that do work at places maybe down in the peninsula so they're get they're in their little tiny apartment and then they get on a bus or they sit in traffic on the on the freeway and they go down to or they used to go down to a campus somewhere google facebook apple wherever and and then you know they stay there all day work work work work work work and then go back to their little tiny cubicle apartment and yeah no yeah i think it's gonna be really interesting to see how things change after the coronavirus thing you know um it's gonna be really interesting because it's not you can't just snap back to normal so it's just um yeah it's gonna be interesting and this isn't gonna be done it's it's not gonna be done this year it's gonna be next year maybe the year after that we really start seeing it yeah i have no idea and yeah i just can't eat i'm just i'm just sitting here like i have no idea you know i thought it would have been over already much less you know yeah going to 2021 and longer right like i mean there's just so many industries just like i know south by southwest is trying to do a virtual version this year but it's like just the effects that that has in the economy of austin and other stuff is crazy right yeah the impacts of these things are we're gonna be a little bit before we see it all of them yeah i don't even think i i mean i've had so many conversations with people who are like i don't need to go back and work someplace in an office again or i can go i don't need to do it every day like i can work for home from home why not you know if banks can figure out how to make it possible for their employees to work securely with bank information from home then you know anybody can work from home exactly exactly you know and everything you know everything's robots now too so like gonna be robots doing all of the the maintenance work and and then people calling in and it'll be like robots with people faces talking to each other yeah it's really accelerated a lot of stuff i mean there's so much that we've just learned not just like medically but socially and you know from the coronavirus uh you know even even legislatively bureaucratically you know so much we've learned about so many different things you know the previous fastest vaccine was four years um took to get approved by the FDA yep and and so you know uh somebody's gonna get one approved in less than a year or get a new way or something and uh yeah that's uh you know what do you go back to after that it's gonna be interesting to see a lot of stuff is gonna be interesting to see like how people try to shift back or if they do shift back or if they don't shift back or like what actually you know it's all it's all people and the different i don't know i have i love people but when it comes to the economy i think it's driven by greed mostly oh yeah capitalism you know it's great and terrible yeah and as much as it would be okay if it were you know okay because people start going back to work more then there's more money in the economy and you know you know you think of like just the trading goods and the just kind of doing business kind of part of it like that's great that that works fabulously but then when you start thinking of like the the bigger forces at play where some people might not want it to go back to normal because it's benefiting them and some forces can't wait for it to get back to normal and they're gonna push really hard to get back to it right people make billions and that's just like and then there are people who do the short the stock shorting and do all the futures like there are people who thrive off of the uncertainty so you're telling me you wouldn't kill somebody for ten ten billion no what they put it put a gun in your hand put a random person in front of you and said here's ten billion dollars all you gotta do is pull the trigger nobody will know nope nope i would know i have no idea but all i know is that you know like there's a lot of people who probably have to answer that question and a lot of people who choose the money because uh you know we a lot of suffering and death and a lot of people making a lot of money off of it i just can't help but think though like if you're really watching the people who are really paying attention i think this pandemic has really highlighted what people can do well together how when we really work hard at something like the the the speed at which science is happening because money and resources people time money all that's getting put in those places like it's happening so fast and discoveries about this virus are just like like so many papers being published right yeah it's amazing and we like you said we're gonna get a vaccine faster probably than any other vaccine we've gotten before and can we take this and can we apply this to climate change can we apply this to changing the way that we manufacture goods can we apply this to totally i mean most drugs take 10 years i mean to get approved by the fd the average timeline for a drug to get approved by the FDA is 10 years so you know like how does this affect that you know just as simple as that but yeah it's just the one thing it's also shown though is that like we can't work together as a world which is terrible you know you think everybody'd be like oh there's a pandemic that's like all pitch in and like work together there's like 50 different vaccines from 50 different countries which is ridiculous i mean there's a there's a part of it where it's like okay not one company is going to be able to produce one vaccine for everybody like there's gonna be have to be some kind of sharing but because this is all money and capitalism yeah my country is gonna get there rush is like i don't care if we haven't tested this we're gonna test it on everybody just by making it available let's make that happen hey you know we're number one this is what makes me worried is when the aliens come visit you know because like they're gonna go and they're gonna try to attack like i don't know the uk average is gonna be like hey destroy the uk we don't really care about that much you know they're not coming for us yet so we're cool right yeah we're like we can't work together as a society and i think it's really terrible right now that like all there is is just a lot of conflict and we need to figure out how we can all work together um we need to figure out how we can break down these social class race whatever barriers and just because it's not like you know if this was actually a really bad pandemic like not saying it's not bad but i mean you know let's say it wiped out 10 20% of the world's population or something right you know like we'd all be sitting here fighting with each other still nothing would have got done it's like we need to we need to do better as human beings yeah yeah yeah we're i mean i know a lot of very wonderful people why can't we all why can't we all just get along i don't know like i know there are good people there are lots of good people doing good work in the world yeah maybe we should just like you know whiskey make it available i don't know i think this i like this plan legalized marijuana in all countries get happy people somehow mm-hmm yep how do you get happy people that's right weed and whiskey yes no i'm not saying it's the wrong answer identity forces make earth scotch again yes exactly you know i would not be disappointed i would not be disappointed in that yeah i mean it's just crazy too i mean people in the audience some people are parents you're a parent i'm a parent like we are looking at this world that our kids are gonna be coming into and oh gosh i'm just like i mean i'm like i'm partly responsible for for this mess i mean you know even though i'm not like you know i'm a part of this and i'm a part of this older like middle age generation that didn't get things to change when we were younger you know and i'm like okay all right gotta get some gotta do some work can't just put it all on the show time to get to come our time to get to come is it yeah for sure yeah the one thing i'm really concerned about though is like uh social media and not like as much you know people are like oh likes and all that stuff which is i get it but i think it's just more that there's like so much misinformation and propaganda and yeah there's so much polarization out there that it's it's oh gosh i mean i try my best not to use social media nowadays post something and maybe interact with one or two people but otherwise it's like gosh it's so polarized it's so just like boom and uh you know it's realizing that my children are going to use this someday and i'm gonna have to convince them that like don't believe any everything on there like you know don't go there you don't trust you know random articles that people should like i'm gonna have to teach them all this stuff and make them extremely skeptical of all the information that's fed on there and all this and that's just like wow that's yeah well i mean it's not just literacy it's media literacy it's digital digital in in my son's school they've actually had instruction in digital citizenship and they are starting to teach digital media literacy but but oh wow that's pretty cool yeah yeah it is good but he has a lot more to learn he's pretty he's pretty on it we talk we we talk about it a lot because i'm on social media all the time yeah yeah but he's he's good i was i was putting him to bed last night and i like i was like okay good night and then i like leaned back and started um scrolling through twitter and he's going to sleep and he like looked up at me he goes are you on twitter yeah he goes don't do that it's not good for you i'm like you're right okay yeah my daughter and she always be like no don't look at your phone no don't look at me don't but it's the truth it's like you know um and it's it's it's not necessarily bad you know like social media isn't necessarily bad there's a lot of good things about it allows you to connect with people and all these other stuff but i do a lot of it yeah but also you know for me and i'm sure for you where you have an audience and people want to interact with you there's a lot of negatives and it's it's uh you know a lot of trolls and stuff like that and a lot of people who just out there looking for i don't know what you know excitement fun torment release some anger um i think there's probably a bit of that that anger release or like frustration and they people are like i don't know what to do and it's just easy to take it out online and so it just makes it this social media powder keg gaurav i did finish my taxes thank you last week last week i ended the show and i was like i still need to go do my taxes because it was like the extension deadline was coming yeah it took me a while i did it i did finally finish my taxes carol ann in the youtube chat says there's a norwegian word for when people come together to do something for the community it's called dugnad dugnut dugnad dugnad do good it sounds like do good yeah dugnad more of that more community stuff more more more do goods more dugnads yeah i mean that's one of the reasons we want to move to uh austin you know like a smaller city smaller neighborhoods and stuff like that is that a lot more community um i'm just a community you know like we've broken all the coronavirus lockdown rules and my family is hung out every saturday since the lockdown started because it's just my family like we have to see each other we have to hang out um my brother and the sister and there are three kids and my mom and my other brother and um you know it's just like yeah we need that community it's like that important to us you know that uh and we have talks with my mom and stuff like that about you know like there's risk and all this stuff and she's just like whatever i'm strong that's my mom but she wants to be with you she wants to see you yeah she's like i'm strong she wants to see her grandchild too yeah you survived a lot i know you are strong but i mean there's a certain there's a certain part of it that is that it's also like you've got you know these are the people that you hang out with so it's kind of like your bubble oh totally yeah totally but yeah it's uh it's definitely um something that matters a lot you know i think that's there's some people like that and i think that's one of the issues with the lockdown and i mean the person you're probably most likely to get coronavirus from as a family member right or somebody you live with um yeah and so uh i think that's one of the big problems is like you know some people need community they have community it's really hard to like take that away from people um you could lock them up you know and they still try to find a way to form community with other people and throw away the key like it's they talk to the guard they do something try to form some sort of community it's who we are as humans and yeah that's one of the tough parts is it's just you know you can't you can't perfectly not interact with nobody for a long period of time yeah though i couldn't i couldn't do that we have another family that we hang out with that you know we don't have family up here so yeah they're kind of our family and we go and hang out with them on the weekends and that's kind of you know we're like okay this is this is what we're gonna do and how we're gonna we're all gonna support each other and make it through this and not yeah not you know i'm sorry to be your own little bubble yeah and i'm not just gonna live in my basement me and my cats yelling at my child taking a boom hitting the floor you know we're in like a you know oakland i don't know a thousand square foot apartment or something with two kids like you know you know it's like with a child that isn't locked out like it just doesn't yeah the kid wants to go outside and then you're like i need to get outside yeah but you like can't go anywhere you can't go to the park it's so funny because you know there are other you know young families and stuff around us and you go to the park and like all these kids you know just running around trying to get the kids to you can't use the park equipment though so but yeah just all these kids running around because all these parents are just like i'm stuck in my tiny apartment like it's so hard for cities like how do you do lockdown in cities it's just like so oh you can't use the park stuff no it's like lockdown here yeah oh what they weren't allowing us to like use the slides at the park and stuff so you're like stuck in a city where you can like walk on sidewalks nothing's open you can't use anything at the park like you're just like can't go to the beach yeah the beach was closed too huh yeah everything so it's tough yeah it's been tough um as you can imagine yeah yep california has been tough the bay area um that's hard yeah yeah hot rod is hot rod is saying did you hear about the crazy rules for the christmas season in cali i have not yeah i don't know let us know what it is let me know i don't know about the christmas rules i've been trying to figure out my my dad lives in california and so in the in the bay area and i've been like trying to figure out i i want to go visit my dad or i'm trying to get or get him to come up here or something i don't know i have to figure out something yeah yeah for sure me like i will i will isolate for two weeks i mean i pretty much isolate as it is because i never leave my house but i will isolate for two weeks so that i can either drive down there and visit for the holiday or he can come up here or something yeah for sure sure make it make it work yeah i know it's it's tough i mean that's basically what we're all trying to do is just figure it out and make it work you know like what can you shubrew's shubrew says and then my idiot family went to vegas in the middle of the first spike because they were bored of being locked down oh shubrew they're waving the red flag in front of the bull vegas was really weird you know because that's what we're going to have our conference did you go there for to check it out or i mean since lockdown or anything you know this work conference this was we're yeah really close what was going on and uh it just you know they opened up uh casinos and stuff like 50 percent and you know but closed down like restaurant it was like the ruling the rules were really really really weird obviously because of capitalism right they're like all right well casinos gets tax dollars and most of our money so we can't close casinos so you can stay open um yeah is it ridiculous you're just like gosh vegas you're a mess but i mean the whole economy is that like surviving tourism right so it's like what do you do when nobody's visiting and yeah it's just it's an and it's a town that is an entertainment town i know there's a bunch of stuff there that has been developed in the last 20 30 years that's more technology or business focused they've really like been focused on developing like a downtown area and stuff but i mean if all that tourist money goes away then people don't have money to put into the downtown for the whole economy to run yeah yeah it's tough so they were just like whatever i remember them telling us that like you could still do your cop like our conference was scheduled for june and though like are you sure you want to cancel your conference you can still do it i'm like are you serious like come on i had to fight with them to get a refund like like i'm like a freaking pandemic going on what do you want me to do like like yeah they are i think our venue we pushed it off and i think we've pushed it off again so it's kind of just rescheduled so they still have our deposit which we probably won't work they have our deposit but yeah yeah we sold tickets and stuff and that was just like you know like i'm gonna have to refund these tickets there's something and like that's hard yeah that was so many events like i heard the south speaking of south by southwest like they had a they almost went out of business like they had to fire a whole bunch of people and they were doing gosh i mean they make like probably a hundred million dollars off that conference city of all then probably makes you know more yeah it's like 50 000 people descend on that town for like a month like gosh the effects of that are just just astonishing and i'm sure it's not the only place that's affected by that but yeah yeah no this is scary you know it's just like our economy is somehow being propped up and nobody knows how wasn't that twelve thousand twelve hundred dollars stimulus check let me tell you that no it was not we'll give you give you a stimulus check twelve hundred dollars i'm supposed to last you nine months oh my god yeah well i took you know i took a hundred dollars a month and applied it to my rent and it kept me going for a whole year yeah i mean yeah we'll we'll see what happens this crazy town it's crazy town we're we are officially living in crazy town and it's being propped up by people who never stop working anymore because they have no separation of work and life and their work life balance because everybody's working from home and it's yeah so pretty much it's being propped up by millions of people trying to homeschool and work and who are on the brink of a schizophrenic meltdown so that's how we're doing whiskey sales are up though we got that going for us if only i were a whiskey maker that's what i need all right i'm gonna take off i need to be in yes it was so good chatting with you yeah as always but we have to you know we have to hang out in person as friends or something i would like this it's always weird how you slip in a friend professional yeah it's like the only time it's so funny i have some friends like that that like the only time we get to talk is when it's like on stage at a conference it's the only time we get to talk is like when we do a podcast together oh geez no we'll make it we'll we'll make either someday i will end up in austin and we will hang out because it'll probably be after you've moved there or after the pandemic's over you'll be in portland i would like i would like to get you involved in um science talk at some point if possible because i think you're yeah totally i would like to offend everybody there you're all wrong let me tell you how it is let me tell you something that's right yeah uh yeah but yes we will hang out in the real lifetime world i r l that's right i r l faux show everybody thank you so much i'm checking the chat room right now so many so many conversations people talking about tourism and yes identity four it is that time it is it is that time uh yeah oh we could buy your wine that's right you make identity four makes wine that's right yeah he made a banana wine which i'm still very skeptical about that one yeah that seems suspicious yep very suspicious very skeptical about that one he said it tasted like bananas which sounds about right but everyone thank you so much for joining for another evening of this week in science we'll be back next week we will have Justin and Blair back we can talk with Blair about her not science wedding and talk about how her nuptials were and we'll talk about how Justin enjoyed his traveling on planes in the middle of a pandemic that could be a comedy skit actually like comedians in cars but oh gosh people on planes in a pandemic they're gonna be making fun of it so much so much they're gonna have so many like oh gosh all right come on back next week everyone thank you so much really wonderful to see you all in the chat really wonderful to have you here watching and i can't wait to see you again good night we're good morning whatever you are