This is TWIS, this week in science episode number 569, recorded on Wednesday, June 1, 2016. It's really about the big picture.  But first... Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. According to the most cutting edge research in science, a term paper will not write itself. If a desk is messy today, no amount of waiting around will find it organized again without work.   But you won't wind up with a neatly unbroken egg at the end. You will end up with a dirty dish that you have likely left on your messy desk, where your unwritten term paper is still not finished. This is just one of the quirks of living in the universe with an air of time. And while entropy is a major obstacle to procrastinating your way to a completed term paper, entropy is absolutely necessary for a world in which term papers are possible. As the world becomes more complicated, it also becomes more interesting. And the more interesting the world becomes, the more there is to learn about. And the more there is to learn about, the more you will hear about it here on This Week in Science, coming up next. To find the knowledge I seek, I want to know what's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science. What's happening. What's happening. What's happening this week in science. Science to Beaky and Blair. And good science to you, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Science. We're back again with all sorts of science news. And we have an interview. It's getting philosophical in here tonight, I think. It's going to be fun. We are speaking tonight with Sean Carroll, physicist from Caltech University. And he's going to be talking to us about his latest book, The Big Picture, in the second half of the show. And we will be very much looking forward to that. Thanks for joining us, Sean. Thank you for having me. Everyone, stop yelling. Alright, I have stories tonight about cell phones, brain cancer, and I don't know, I've got some other stuff that maybe I'll bring up if I feel like it. I mean, what did you bring for us? I've got a marketing strategy for talking about global warming, as well as one of the first long-term studies of marijuana on health. And Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have unfaithful sparrows, right-handed crustaceans, and dancing insect hairs. Are the dancing insect hairs anything like the peacock spider dance? That's what I'm wondering. It might have some similarities. You'll have to wait and see. Okay, I can wait a little bit. Let's dig into this show, into the science, and get on with it. My first story is about a study that came out last week that had everybody talking about all the wrong stuff. So, we've talked about it before on the show. Lots of us use our cell phones, our smartphones, and there are many studies that have come out to figure out whether or not there is a link between cell phone radiation and brain cancer, gliomas, specifically. And many studies have found absolutely no link at all, or at least a very, very, very weak link that can't really be explained in any way. I think there was a very strange link that didn't really make any sense, and it was marginally statistically significant in an Australian study about a year ago. But anyway, last week, an American study, 25 million dollars in the making came out, and everybody got all excited about it because the study said, oh look, we found evidence of brain cancer and heart cancer in glioma and schwannoma in rats. Their entire study looked at rats. It also looked at mice. The batches of animals were about 90 animals in total. The rats got full body exposure to 900 megahertz frequencies of both CDMA and GSM radiation. I was concerned for a minute because I was like, those animals don't use cell phones. That's probably a bad place to study. No, they just radiated them. And the mice received the same treatment, but instead of 900 megahertz, it was 1900 megahertz frequencies. And they were radiated over stretches of 10 minutes over 18 hours. So over 18 hours of a day, like 10 minutes every hour, they'd get 10 minutes of radiation, totaling about nine hours of radiation a day for seven days a week. I don't know about you, but I do not hold my phone to my head for anywhere near that length of time. But do you sleep on your phone? I know. Lots of people do. They put their phone under their pillow or above their head when they sleep. Okay. All right. So, okay. We're starting up, Blair. Thank you very much. Okay. Anyway, they did find a low incident of malignant gliomas in the brain and schwannomas in the heart of the male rats who were radiated compared to controls. Female rats showed absolutely no incidence change of cancer at all. They still haven't even released the mouse data. Mouse data has yet to be released. What this is is kind of a preliminary study. And here's the kicker, not even really peer reviewed. They thought they had some interesting peer preliminary data, and they said, let's print it on the biology pre-print server, BioArchive. And so they went out and they found a few people that they got to read it and look at it and then said it was peer reviewed. Oh. Because they just asked their peers to read it. So, this is not really a peer reviewed study published in an accredited journal. Right. Not that all accredited journals. So, giant air quotes, peer reviewed. So, that is a problem right there. Secondarily, we have a biostatistician, Christopher Schmidt, from the Center for Patients-Based Medicine in Public Health at Brown University. And he told ours, Technica, that the statistics were a bit problematic and that they didn't really have enough individuals. Their sample sizes, 90 individuals they used, in these batches of 90 rats, actually it was a total of 2,000 rats and mice to these. So, it's a pretty large sample, but it still was not a large enough sample size to account for their results. And he said, quote, the results might just be random false positives. In fact, if just one more control rat turned up with cancer, it would have eliminated the statistical significance of the cancer in the male rats altogether and they would have found no cancer to report. It wouldn't have been statistically significant. So, this other interesting thing that ours, Technica has brought up is that the cancer rate in sprag dolly rats, which are the rats that they use here, historically, they have about a 1-2% chance of getting these malignant gliomas and schwannomas. However, none of the control rats got any cancers whatsoever. And in fact, they all died before at an age less than the death age of the radiated rats, even though the radiated rats got cancer. So, the question remains as to whether or not those cancers are possibly an age-related result as opposed to a radiation-related result. We've got some interesting factors popping up here and that and the mice results haven't even been released. And this goes back to, hello everybody, please don't jump to conclusions and let's really track down the statistics and the credibility of a paper before it is reported across all of media. Remember the chocolate story? Which wasn't even a real story. That was our lesson that we were supposed to learn from. And there's also the fact that everything in some form can cause cancer. I'm sort of picturing us going into the future. Probably not that far into the future even. This doesn't have to be like in the year 3000, this might be like 2050. When it's all electric cars and you're like, can you believe people used to worry about getting cancer from phones?  Those people were nuts. What were they worried about? Yeah, so let's not jump to conclusions yet. This is really a preliminary study. It has yet to have all the results come out and let's wait until they're all out and peer reviewed and all the statistics are complete before. And then we can add it to the body of research as opposed to cherry picking one study out of the many that have been done around the world to support our conclusions. Okay, this is all I'm asking. Although if we're going to run with this, right? Can't we say that cell phones are safe for women? I mean, is that the headline? I'm like trying to picture the headline that comes from this. This is the headline. Cell phones totally safe for women. Totally safe for women. Men should not use cell phones. Men use a selfie stick from now on to keep them from having to put it on speaker phones. This is their new recommendation. We just run with this one piece of... Yes, with the general results. Yes. However, maybe still not a good idea to sleep on or next to your phone just because it is going to upset your sleep cycle. We've reported on that before. Still, distance yourself from your cell phone. Although, we've also done studies that they further the distance of your cell phone. Oh, the higher the anxiety. Higher the anxiety. It might make it harder to get to sleep. See, I guess this is what happens. What do you even do? What a wicked web we weave. But if you do have malignant glioma, there is a possible cure on the way for you. There's a possible treatment in the works. Early clinical trials. Phase one clinical trial has been completed. This was published in Science Translational Medicine in which researchers have paired viral therapy with cancer drug therapy. And so, they've got a virus. It's called TOCA 511, which sounds like an app I would give to my 5-year-old for use on his iPad. It's not. It's a virus. It gets in there past the cancer cell defenses. It looks for breaches in the defenses. It digs into the cancer cells. And then once it gets in there, it tells the cancer cells to create an enzyme called yeast cytosine deaminase. And this is something that activates the second component of the treatment, which is the cancer drug. This cancer drug is not something that we really want to just be giving people because the side effects are terrible. So you don't just give this. It's called 5FU, or fluorouricil.  So what we do is we pair it with this enzyme, the virus to the enzyme, and then it is injected into the brain directly or it can be intravenously into the arm or something to go in and get to the brain, but you want it to get directly to the brain where it is activated by the enzyme. And so the enzyme then, it's found by the enzyme and it detonates the cells. Basically, the result of this is that it increased the survival time of patients with high-grade gliomas for a mean of 7.1 months after the first or second recurrence. And additionally, if this was before brain surgery, if this treatment was given to them after brain surgery, they then survived for a mean of 13.6 months longer. And so the big thing a bit of this is that there's no side effects. None of the patients in this Phase 1 trial had any side effects. They all were doing very well, much better than they would have done had it been just with the cancer drug alone. And they found the virus disappeared from the people's blood, so it wasn't like hanging out later doing weird stuff. And it stayed in the area only around the brain tumors. That virus just really liked that environment where the brain tumors were a little easy to get to. So now it's Phase 1 trial. We need to do more study. Phase 2 is currently in process. They are working on this. And it's a very exciting moment for people because brain tumors are a very difficult thing to get to to treat. It's hard to get the entire tumor. Very often tumors come back, especially highly malignant gliomas. And then the treatments for them have so many side effects that sometimes it's almost not worth it. So this is a very exciting thing. And especially if all men are going to get brain cancer from their phones, this is something that we might want to look into more. It's a virus instead. That's right. But it's a virus that did good things. Not bad things. All right, everybody. This is This Week in Science. Justin, what you got? So this is sort of an interesting concept. We've talked about this, I know, in different ways before. But this is another study sort of showing the same thing. That mentioning politics and environmental messaging may turn people off from the scientific solutions to those problems. We've talked to a team of researchers. They had, well, they had studied two basic conditions. They had normal condition attributed a water runoff problem to excess rain. And then they had another condition where it was the same problem, but they had terms like, you know, human-caused global warming and stopping global warming will require international agreements and sort of related it to this water runoff problem. The solution that they were proposing was the same in both instances, which is that we're going to create these sort of green roofs, which I suppose means, it doesn't explain, but I don't think they mean solar panels. I think they mean like putting like sod on the roof or planting plants on the roof of something that would absorb water runoff and or perhaps collect the water. It doesn't really explain. But what was interesting was among the solid or strong Democrats in this, the global warming condition, who had a high knowledge of the actual problem that was being described, they were more likely to support the solution. And the condition where the Republicans had no ties to the global warming interjected, they had support for it, modestly. When they added this global warming condition, though, dramatically the support fell off. Actually it increased a little bit if they had no knowledge of the actual problem. They actually supported it a little bit more. Those who were the strongest in support of it, who knew what the problem was that was being described, became much less likely to support the solution because it was tied to global warming. They also referred to some other studies when it comes to things like GMOs, nuclear power plants where they've seen Democrats do the exact opposite, sort of have modest support for an idea when it's just sort of being introduced without any of the political, and then with the political as added to it, they changed their support dramatically. So they're sort of saying that scientists, in a way, need to market their ideas better. And it's really tough because we've talked about this global warming thing as GMOs and these sorts of things on the show. From the scientific standpoint, knowing that there's political hype on both sides, arguing different things. So what do you think? How much can we just completely change terms when describing something like global warming and it can't call it climate change, that one's out there, or whatever it is we're going to do. Whatever we're going to change the terms to, then we'd have to rebrand and remarket these back to people in a way that they didn't understand that it was the same problem.  Well, it's called SPIN. It's been done in politics. But see, this is my wheelhouse. This is the thing that I've been working on for a long time and is not using political techniques that are dishonest or try to trick people, but using political techniques that help engage the right part of people's brains. So instead of trying to spin something or hide something or change what it sounds like your agenda is about, it's about activating a part of a person's brain that is not political. It's about activating the part of a person's brain who cares about the future. Who cares about... Well, it can be the right emotions though. So if you're talking about your kid's future or your grandchildren's future, you can do it in a way that is engaging and that is really hard to argue with. And I guess within the context of what they're talking about here would be is if you were trying to do a project that was raising awareness and trying to get support for an action of saving the coral reef, their advice would be not to mention global warming. Don't make it part of a larger issue that's already out there and politicized, but keep it very specific to that problem and leave the greater problems that may be under attack in the political field completely out of it. Which is annoying because it's a scientific problem as well as a scientific awareness of the problem that's created the thing. Well, what I've been doing is instead of saying I want to talk to you about climate change today, you say I want to talk to you about coral reefs today. And one of the threats to coral reefs is ocean acidification. Let me explain how that works. So you can talk about climate change without talking about climate change as your main point. It can be part of an argument and if you look at it that way, if it's couched in other scientific concerns and other environmental concerns, then it just becomes a part of something that's an argument that you agree with. And if you couch it that way, you're not hiding anything. You're not changing the way you talk about it necessarily, but you are putting it as part of a problem that people want to support, they want to fix. And if you make it local in nature, so specifically talking about the coral reef in Australia at the Great Barrier Reef, which just had a massive die-off this year, talking about the local effects that are going to happen to the economy as a result of these things and ways that people can actively become a part of the solution, as opposed to just a big overarching fear of something in the future that they can't really do anything about because it's so much bigger than they are, and you activate people into becoming proactive. And the other part of this is activating people that other people want to hear from about this. So that's part of it, is people don't want to hear about climate change from their politician because then it becomes a politically charged issue. But if you walk into a science museum or you walk into a zoo or an aquarium or your teacher talks to you about climate change, it becomes part of science. It becomes part of environmentalism. It becomes part of this bigger umbrella, and most people actually want to hear about environmental concerns and climate change from those people. I guess it's just also an attribution to the wonderful spin job that's been done on the global warming issue that we're in a situation where we have to not talk about the elephant in the room in order to talk about the elephant in the room. It sort of reminds me, perhaps if Sean, if your students came to you having learned everything in mathematics except division, because it was politically charged. It just weren't able to divide. It was considered too divisive an issue. So they left it out of curriculum and for all the way through, and they had to always work around it to get out of having to do simple division. It's ridiculous that we're in this position to talk about these issues. We have to leave out huge portions of it. I'm hopeful mainly because, and this might actually not sound hopeful, but I am hopeful because I now get way less pushback trying to teach kids about climate change. I get way more pushback still about evolution. The pushback I get on evolution is way more than the pushback that I got on climate change. People are super excited that I'm talking about it and climate change is in the new science standards that are supposed to be adopted nationwide. Because it's science. Unfortunately, I think this is something we might have to wait a little while for there to be universal acceptance of this problem because we might have to wait for the kids to grow up that are learning about it before they get jaded. We might need to wait until much of Florida is under water for it to really kick in. They do have special training and instruction to foreign professors that come to UC Davis, in the anthropology department at least, that prepares them for the fact that they could have resistance to core scientific understanding of evolution that they have not encountered in wherever they're coming from. They actually have this prep package of trying to explain why America is so insane when it comes to understanding their acceptance of evolution. You know what's not insane? What? Well, maybe it is insane. Yeah, I think you're going to eat those words in a second. I know, it's going to be totally insane. Actually, it's Player's Animal Corner. She's your girl Except for giant pandas That are all yours What you got, Blair? Well, let me ask you this.  No. Well, if you were a sparrow, you might. So sparrows, it turns out that the males can actually judge if a female spouse is cheating on them and they'll actually care less for their brood if their partner is unfaithful. So biologists were studying this really interesting place, the island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel. They studied sparrows there for 12 years. And this island is isolated enough that they were able to study 200 males and 194 females as they formed 313 unique monogamous pairs and hatched 863 broods on this island on Lundy for 12 years. So this is a pretty big sample size. And they were able to watch the dynamics of the sparrows, the way that they cared for their babies, who was faithful, who was not. And looking at all of this, what they wanted to figure out was they already knew that males gave less care to females who were unfaithful to their babies. But the question was, what was the cause for that?  Or were males seeing the females in discursions and then stopping to care for their babies? Were they looking at those babies and going, that's not mine. Or were they counting the number of feathers that were missing? I like the idea that they were just lazy to begin with.   I'm going to go out. Well, at the conclusion of this study, they were able to figure out that actually the males were able to make a decision. The males chose how much to provide for their chicks based on the tendency of their partner to cheat. And so then trying to look at that, they did genetic testing on these animals. They tried to see behaviorally if the males saw the female leave, all this kind of stuff. It really looks like the males pegged the females as cheaters or not. And then they take care of their brood more or less depending. So they don't actually watch to see if the females are cheating on them all the time or try to figure out how many in the brood is theirs. They actually just kind of peg a female. They go, once a cheater, always a cheater. And that female, their resulting babies, get less food. I know I'm not Chris Tarwick, Ben Rosig Plants who says in the chat room, I'm now picturing sparrows in a white tank top with a bottle of Old Crow. That's pretty great. Yeah, so just an example is some of the evidence that the males use to kind of come up with this idea of if the females a cheater or not is they look at how much time she spends away from the nest during her fertile period. And then they kind of make decisions based on that for the rest of their relationship. These guys are monogamous. They do usually spend most of their time together. There are a few situations where couples will quote divorce. But for the most part, if there were switches in the couples, it was because of a mortality. And this is really unique in the bird world. I mean, many species are monogamous during the breeding season. When there are different breeding seasons, they'll have different mates. We know that we've talked many times about the extra pair of copulations and how males and females are both taking time to go find something better that they don't have to take care of. Yeah, and so that's really the question here is we know why a male would cheat because he wants to spread his seed as far and wide as he can. But the females cheating here, there's not a great reason for the females to cheat because they're not particularly picking better males when they cheat. And they're going to have to lay the eggs and the male is not going to be around to help feed the offspring. The male is going to be going, those are somebody else's babies. I'm not helping. So they actually... Yeah, there's a deleterious effect of the female cheating. So this study is part of an overarching examination of why monogamy exists and where it arose and how it happened. And here they actually believe that being unfaithful might actually be a leftover from before monogamy. So the females are just still getting away with it by the skin of their beaks. They're getting away with it because it's kind of a vestigial trait from before monogamy existed in the sparrow community. However, there's a recent study out this week that suggests that humans are becoming more bisexual or at least... Are you talking about that on the show? At least in the United States. Do you have that study? Should we talk about it? We'll talk about it later. Let's talk about claws now. Great. Let me tell you. I don't have a handed preference. Let me just say. I'm a right-handed gentleman as much as I like the left-handed gentleman. I'm not biased. But if I was an amphipod, kind of like a sand flea... Oh, if you were.  So the amphipod, Dula Ciella appendiculata, they're related to beach hoppers or sand fleas, or marine amphipods. They have one large claw on one side and one small on the opposite side. Kind of like a lot of crabs. Fiddler crabs have one huge claw and one tiny claw. The claw is the kind of... The dissimilarity between the two sides is actually really unusual. There's a lot of species out there that have huge kind of... They have traits that might get in the way, like peacock tails or giant racks on deer and stuff like that. They can get in the way, but they have them because they're a sexually selected trait. These guys, having something that's huge and it gets in the way and it throws off your balance, and there's only one of them is super weird. So again, it happens at a few crustaceans, but we don't really see it in a lot of other places besides there. A recent study looking at these guys from University of Adelaide School of Biological Sciences found that the females prefer themselves some right-handed males. When they have a big right claw, that is top notch to a female amphipod. So the interesting thing about that, it's not clear why, but the right-handed males are more gregarious than the left-handed males, so they hang out with other males more. That might attract more females, maybe they spar, maybe they fight with each other with their big claws, and that's why they appear to be more hunky for the females. But what's really interesting is, despite this clear preference for the right-clawed male amphipod, there's still a 50-50 ratio of right claws to left claws. And most likely, I think this is fascinating, it's because the left-clawed males, they're not gregarious, they're very brooding and solitary. And they disperse. They're the emos. So they disperse rapidly. They go farther away to occupy habitats. So there's actually a greater chance of females coming across those males without competition.  And they kind of just hang out in the back and whenever the big male's not looking, they get their lady. But this is kind of like that, it doesn't seem to be intentional, unless the males know that they have a big left claw and girls don't like that. And then they go, silk off away, no. I'm pretty sure these teeny tiny crustaceans are not doing that, but it's fun to think about. But regardless, that's why these two different traits, despite one having a huge advantage with the female amphipods, it still persists. It's pretty interesting, especially because in this study, they also found that that claw, while being helpful, fending off other males gets so much in the way during fertilization. Like what do I do with this thing? What's happening here? But the claw persists, the ladies like the claw. The ladies like it, so it becomes a trait that's selected for and how interesting, an interesting result that just by chance, it stays at that 50-50 random. And it's not something that works too well in the rest of nature. It'd be sort of like in humans, your left and right leg grows differently. I was thinking of like one size six shoe and one like size 13.  You would see guys at the gym only doing their weights. Only building up one side, hiding the other side. But you know what, we are not going to hide. We are not going to hide the second half of our show. It's coming right up. This is this week in science and we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, Harold was here with us about his new book, The Big Picture. So stay tuned, don't go anywhere. It's going to be awesome. Hey everybody, if you are interested in helping twists out, helping twists become even more popular, which you should, you should do. That would be really awesome. Could you subscribe to us on YouTube? 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You're the ones who help us pay the bills for our equipment if it ever breaks for the bandwidth that we need to keep the show going, for hosting, for all the things that just are available to put it out there. Your funding is what keeps that going. So, if you can, we appreciate any amount that you're able to give. Whether it's $1, $100, it is all useful and keeps us running. So, we have a couple of ways that you can support us. Go to twist.org, look for the PayPal buttons on our website. Really easy click and support. Or you can go to Patreon, patron.com slash this week in science. Where you can support us through that platform. Whatever your preference, go to the website, listen to the most recent episode, make a comment, be a part of the community and make a donation. And I guess that does it for this break. We thank you for your support. We really could not do this without you.  Yes, we are. And we are joined by Sean Carroll, he's a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in 1993 from Harvard University. He's worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time and the emergence of complexity. Such, I don't know, a simple guy. He's written a few books. We've spoken with him on previous occasions, been lucky enough to talk with him about, from eternity to here, the quest for the ultimate theory of time and the particle at the end of the universe, how the hunt for the pigs boson leads us to the edge of a new world. And now he's written a new book, which I have behind me, The Big Picture on the Origins of Life Meaning and the universe itself. And it really is, I think one of the, it is the most philosophical book that you've written to date, Sean. What brought this on? Yeah, well I had the opportunity to do it. This is the kind of thing that I've been thinking about for many years. I always love philosophy, but also this is also the most biological book I've ever written and the most chemical book I've ever written and the most neuroscientific book I've ever written. There's a whole bunch of things in there. And even though it sounds sort of hilariously overly ambitious with the subtitle and all that, it's actually not because I rush to tell people that I don't know what happened at the origin of the universe. I don't know what happened at the origin of life and I don't know what the meaning of life is. But I do try to talk about how all the different ways we have of talking about these things fit together in one scientific picture of the universe. And it is really the Big Picture. I was watching your Google talk that you gave recently and I really liked the angle, the perspective that you took on it of trying to explain everything from this perception of what matters to the everyday person and that's kind of where we come from talking about all aspects of science communication. It's like what really matters? Where is it inside baseball and what really matters? Yeah, I mean the people who care about science who are not professional scientists, they don't care whether it's chemistry or biology or whatever or even philosophy. If you want to know what the world is, how it works, then you're going to be asking these big questions and many times professional scientists become successful by ignoring the big questions, by asking the little solvable questions that they can actually make progress on and write papers about and questions about what it all means and how it all fits together. You might chit-chat about this over coffee but it's not considered to be serious science. So at some point, if we're doing science for the sake of human intellectual curiosity and to tell people what we found, we have to make that extra step of trying to put it all together and encouraging the conversation between all sorts of different people. When you're encouraging this conversation between different people and you're coming from, in your book, you talk about poetic naturalism. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and what kind of bridges that might create? Yeah, naturalism is an old term that just means belief that there is only one world. The philosophy term for this kind of discussion is ontology, the study of being itself, what the world is made of. So you might have a super naturalist ontology where you think that there's sort of different realms. There's the physical world but then there's another separate spiritual realm and they can interact with each other somehow. A naturalist says there's only one realm, the world, the physical world, the thing we observe, the thing we learn about by doing science. But even within naturalists there is disagreement. Disagreement is a good thing. It makes people come up with better ideas. So there are sort of very hardcore naturalists who say there is nothing but the fundamental particles and forces of which we are made. Tables and chairs are just illusions, not to mention things like consciousness or free will. But then there's other naturalists who sort of aren't quite satisfied with the physical world. They want to bring something else in, like mental properties that matter can have but do not actually get explained in terms of the matter itself. So poetic naturalists are in between. They think that there's only one world, it's the physical world, there's nothing extra there. But all the different ways we have of talking about it, all the stories we tell about the universe, whether it's tables and chairs or consciousness and human choices, these are real. These are very real ways of talking about the world. Okay, so I come from a neuroscience background. I think of myself as a naturalist but I think I don't know if I fit into your poetic naturalist view as I am something of a, I guess a fundamentalist where I break everything down. So if we're talking about the brain, you said you've gotten into the brain in this book. If you're breaking everything down to its most fundamental characteristics, our consciousness, our thoughts, everything is a product of the electrochemical signals within our brain. That's right, I showed this picture. I was tempted to show this picture when we were talking about the cell phones. You know what this is?  I do. This is an MEG.  It's not proof of anything whatsoever but it's a reminder that our brains are made of the same stuff that atoms and molecules, the other things are made out of. They're obeying the same laws of physics. Out of that, where does the poetry come in? When we talk about emotions like love, they are a combination of the stuff, the things happening in your brain. I agree. There you go. The point is that if you're in love, if you have two people who are in love with each other, there's two different ways of talking about that configuration of stuff in the universe. One is there are two people who are in love with each other. Another is you could list all of their atoms, all of their particles and forces and give the quantum wave function for the whole configuration. That would be so beautiful. Caltech, that's what they do. That's the dating procedure. For the most part, it's much more useful and informative to give this macroscopic language to tell that story rather than telling the story of the underlying physical stuff. The poetic naturalist says that's okay. It really only becomes more controversial when you get to things like morality and meaning and things like that because there we're not just saying what happens in the world or what the world is. We're saying this is a good thing about what's happening in the world. This is a bad thing. There, there's a lot more choice that comes into how we're going to label these things. Can we talk a little bit also about emergent properties? You talk a bit about the emergence of reality from, say, fundamental physics principles, but then we also have the emergence of a complex phenomenon like consciousness from the brain. Yeah, and this is a remarkable feature of the world in that there is more than one way of talking about it that is useful and helpful, and that is exactly what emergence is talking about. Even though, if you were what we call Laplace's demon, Laplace's demon is this hypothetical, supernatural being that could know absolutely everything about the universe right now. The location or the quantum state of every single particle in the universe is smart enough to solve the equations of the laws of physics than to Laplace's demon it knows exactly what's going to happen everywhere in the future, and also what has happened everywhere in the past. But the wonderful thing about our real world is that we don't need to be Laplace's demon to, let's say, predict the next solar eclipse. We don't need to track all of the different molecules in the sun, the moon, and the earth to predict a solar eclipse. We can get by much less information. That's all emergence is in this what is called weak emergence. It's not anything extra, it's just a simplification in what's happening because we can look at certain aspects of the world and put aside other aspects. Do you think people are, I mean there's this interesting phenomenon in just human beings in the way we look at the world. There are a lot of people who this is, there are people now who talk about flat earth and I can't believe the internet allows something like this to propagate, but because somebody has only ever experienced a flat earth, they say how could it possibly be round? Is this part of this emergence and how do we get past it? Well that's right, so this is the tricky part of poetic naturalism is there are many stories we can tell about the world, not all of them are equally true. Some of them are just flat outfalls and what determines that is your purposes in the moment. If your purpose is to get an accurate description of the world that provides some understanding can be fruitfully used to extend our technological reach and so forth, then you're just doing science in a very straightforward way. If the purpose in the moment is to take your moral inclinations about what is good and what is bad and make them consistent with each other because our moral attitudes and instincts aren't always sensible right, human beings as we already talked about on the show don't always make the most rational choices. Then you're doing moral philosophy, but you're still making a choice about sort of which stories to tell and so that's we do that over and over again in all these different ways of doing science of doing philosophy of learning and talking about the world, of judging the world. These are all choosing different stories to tell, some of them aren't going to work and some of them are and that's the hard work of science and philosophy. Yeah, you've probably given this talked about your given the coffee example several times in interviews, but and also in your Google talk and in the book as well, but I believe this is really a fascinating aha story and it's a wonderful story to tell about the universe and how entropy is such a huge part of the universe and how complexity can emerge from the processes that happen as entropy increases. So we had the beginning, the big bang, right? Low entropy and we are moving toward a high entropy higher and higher entropy. So entropy is just like the disorderliness the randomness, the disorganization and it started out really, really low near the big bang 14 billion years ago and it's getting higher and higher and higher and nowhere near as high as it can be but as the universe ages it becomes more disorderly. So this is an ancient creationists argument, right? How is it possible that all these complex life forms came into being here on earth if entropy is just increasing and the universe is just winding down? And that's a silly argument we all know because the earth is not a closed system. The earth gets low entropy radiation from the sun, makes all these complicated things and it's high entropy radiation to the universe. But all that says is that it's allowed that complex things like living beings can exist here on earth. It doesn't say why they do. So the cup of coffee example is supposed to distinguish low entropy high entropy versus simplicity and complexity because those are very different things. If you imagine the cream sitting on top of the coffee that is a low entropy configuration. It's also very simple. The cream is on top, the coffee is on bottom. If you mix them all together so it's all mixed up that is now high entropy but it's still very simple. It's in between when your spoon is moving in there and the tendrils of the cream are mixing in with the coffee and you get all these complex fractal patterns that's when it's complex. So it's not that complexity appears despite the increase of entropy over time. The reason why complexity appears is because entropy is increasing over time because one of the processes by which entropy can increase is to make complex structures which generate entropy. So the cream in the coffee, the tendrils the little swirls are such structures but so are you and I. There's a whole theory of the origin of life that basically says the first living metabolisms were just clever ways to increase the entropy of the ambient environment. Right and then you get another one that's a little bit more complex and suddenly they're competing against each other complexity be getting complexity and higher entropy. Yeah and so if you're going to be a naturalist if you're going to make the claim that naturalism is a good way of explaining the world there's plenty of steps that we don't know the answer to. Like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, etc. the nature of consciousness but therefore what your burden is to do is to at least sketch out a plausibility that it could all just happen with the natural world, the laws of physics. It doesn't need help. The universe doesn't need anyone outside designing it or guiding it or pushing it towards some goal. Yeah and that would be annoying. You said to me you didn't have the meaning for life. That's right. You hadn't figured that one out. Because once we do, once we figure out that one thing that we were all supposed to be doing or striving towards this entire time I doubt there's any one of us who would have even achieved it. Like even by accident. Like it's probably something because it's based on the universe. It probably has nothing to do with what humans think is a good or a good use of time. No I think it's actually exactly the opposite. I think the point is that there isn't anything out there that we will discover or to be discovered. I think there isn't anything more than what we humans think constitutes a good time. And how horrible would it be though to find out that our goal is to be engulfed in a supernova or something that the universe just thinks is interesting. I think we're safe. I'm really worried about it. Not one of my existential anxieties. What are your existential anxieties? You get into some very deep issues in this book of the universe and human beings and what we should be doing here. Do you have existential anxieties that go along with this? One of the implications of this point of view is that we are all going to die someday. We haven't conquered super long life extension therapies yet. Therefore we're going to die sooner rather than later and then we're going to cease to exist. I think that's the biggest existential anxiety. That's a real one. That's the one we need to face it up to. But not necessarily stuff that I wrote about in my book, but human beings are really bad at planning for disastrous events that happen less than once per human lifetime. Things that are just rare but possible aren't the kinds of things that worry us. I had lunch the other day with a bunch of lawyers who were all absolutely panicked about solar flares because it seemed to be quite realistic. I'm not an expert. I haven't looked it up, but they're like solar flares a little bit about their distribution. It's very plausible that once every thousand years a solar flare happens that is big enough that it would essentially wipe out the entire power grid for the entire earth. We wouldn't know because we haven't had a power grid for the last thousand years. It's not something we ever would have experienced. But if it could happen, millions of people would die and there would be nothing that we could do to stop it. We could plan for it. We could spend a few billion dollars to harden the power grid. But no one's going to allocate those billions of dollars for something that has a one in a thousand chance of happening every year. These are deep issues. You asked. You didn't say you know. No. Speaking more about about entropy and how things work. Can you talk a little bit about how even just the system of the earth breaks down the photonic energy from the sun and then the entropy that is distributed from the earth and so on. Yeah. That is a great story because you can sort of know in principle that entropy is increasing and that nevertheless here we are these highly organized systems. So what is the relationship between like how do we take advantage of that entropy increasing and you know it's not something that is easy to figure out. Like this was the literally I knew that had to be true when I started writing the book but I didn't know how it worked because I'm a physicist not a biologist or whatever. So but you can trace it through. You know we get light from the sun. Some people might mistakenly think that the important thing the sun gives us is energy. But the thought experiment is if the whole sky were the temperature of the sun we would get a lot more energy but also all life would cease. Right? We would just come to equilibrium with the temperature of the sun. That's not a real existential worry. Don't worry about that one. But we don't want that. The point is that we get light from the sun that brings us energy in a low entropy form. That's the crucial thing. So we get visible light from the sun. We radiate out back to the universe 20 times as many photons, particles of light as we get from the sun, with one twentieth of the energy each. But therefore 20 times the entropy. So we take this very useful conveniently packaged low entropy energy from the sun and we use it. We use it to photosynthesize the plant captures a photon it uses that photon it squeezes it along an electron channel and it makes a little sugar glucose. And then we eat the plant so now we have sugar and that goes into our cells and we turn it into an ATP molecule and that ATP molecule travels down our bodies and goes to a muscle and when you actually want to lift up your glass of wine the ATP molecule releases its energy and contracts your muscles. And then all of that is generating heat and noise and we radiate that back out to the universe. So everything you do all of the energy that you use up to do useful things in the world ultimately comes from the low entropy energy from the sun, except for nuclear power. But okay, everything else. And then eventually I mean there was a paper this week I believe that came out talking about black holes increasing the heat of the universe but they're slightly adding to the heat of the universe. So we're all increasing the heat but then there's the expansion happening so how does the entropy and the heating lead to the and then we're cold and we're dark. It's a cold desolate future for our universe. This is something that modern cosmology seems to think it's true like when I was a kid we didn't know whether the universe was going to expand forever or eventually re-collapse. These days it seems as if it will expand forever. We have this fact that we discovered that not only is the universe expanding, getting bigger, distant galaxies are moving away from us it's also accelerating. The distant galaxies are getting away from us faster and faster. We think this is because of dark energy and it will never go away. Everything around us is just going to go away further and further, darker and darker, lonelier and lonelier. Except basically the local group of galaxies the galaxies that are actually gravitationally bound to each other. And in about one quadrillion years from now, 10 to the 15 years from now, the last star will burn out. The last star will have used up all its fuel and go dark. Then we'll live in a dark universe and those stars will gradually fall into black holes. It's already true today that most of the entropy in the universe is in the form of black holes and it's going to get worse. We're going to make bigger and bigger black holes with more and more entropy. But then even those black holes don't last forever. Black holes emit radiation. Stephen Hawking figured this out in the 1970s. And they emit radiation into a universe that by that time will be potentially empty. So the universe the radiation just keeps going away and dilutes away. And eventually the black holes disappear, puff of smoke and the whole universe is an extraordinarily unimaginably thin gruel of particles getting further and further away from each other. And that's very high entropy just because the universe is big. There's more places for the particles to be. And in that last infinity years as far as we know. So we live in an extraordinarily young and vibrant and lively part of the history of the universe to the best of our astronomical knowledge. That's great. And so it is okay to tell my five-year-old the quantity of infinity years. That's right. They are well-known PhDs and science who talk about infinity years. Yes, that's right. Thermal equilibrium. It sounds like a smart alecky response, doesn't it? It does. That's right. Well if you want to be even more smart alecky the last black hole evaporates away in 10 to the 100 years which is one Google years in the sense of the number Google before the sort tension. The Hangout Company took over. One Google years and then infinity years after that. Sorry. So everyone think about that while you're trying to go to sleep tonight. That's right. So as the universe is getting colder and darker and more entropic and gruely hopefully by then we will have uplifted ourselves into some kind of energetic form of consciousness that doesn't rely on human corporeal form anymore. Science fiction has promised me this future. Oh yes, the singularity is coming. That's right. It's still corporeal. There's still a silicon. There's still a computer. We'll all live in the cloud. It'll be fine. The cloud is not really a cloud. It's not how that works. It's not just a cloud of information floating out there above your head. But there's this idea that humans have been the species to emerge, uplift to become conscious. What do you got to say about that? Are we going further? Can we do it? We have very limited experience with other intelligent species in the universe. So one explanation for the puzzle about why we haven't yet noticed other intelligent species in the galaxy, extraterrestrial species, is that they do in fact all just join up to computers and they live lives of freedom from all sorts of want and they become bored and they stop existing and so they don't explore the universe. I don't think this is the most likely future for us, but on the one hand yes, I can certainly imagine that we could upload ourselves into computers someday. I think that if we did, we would be extraordinarily different than what we are now.  You wouldn't get hungry. What a time saver. I know, but then coffee would lose its charm. There's a whole bunch of things that would be different about us. At the same time the idea that we biologically could live a huge amount longer than we actually do is also very plausible. Just curing aging does not violate the laws of physics at all. Having life-spent of hundreds of thousands of years in our biological forms is quite plausible. I've heard a lot of people say that the person to live to be 200 years old is already alive. Do you think that's true? I'm very bad at predicting when things happen. All I'm good at is saying do they violate the laws of physics or not? It does not violate the laws of physics. That's all I can tell you. So Socrates didn't like to write anything down because he felt as soon as he wrote it down he couldn't change that opinion and it represented him poorly. It was as though it was misquoting him even though he had written it. It now becomes a misquote as soon as it's written. I sort of see that we've already gone to him so much of the written word was already a disembodied version of somebody. As we just put more and more information into the electronics that we can access, we've already been taking that step that evolutionary step of what's being called singularity. I think the physical aspect of it is the part that is more like the eight brain connection. We still want to drink coffee and live forever. We still want to do those human things that we're used to but I don't think it may not have anything to do with humans when the singularity actually takes place. It'll probably be artificial intelligence going oh got it from here thank you so much for getting this set up. Well it could be, we know how incredibly wrong Socrates was because everything we know about him was from words written down by other people much worse. But he would say that doesn't represent him at all. That's the thing. Exactly. But it's all we know now so you think that he didn't write anything down? What do you know? He didn't write anything down. I'm very humble about these kinds of things. I think that there's enormous room for changes in our biology, editing our DNA, our future generations. There's also enormous room for artificial intelligence and truly new kinds of conscious creatures that are not human at all. There's also enormous room for brain-computer interfaces and mind-body or body-machine interfaces more broadly. So I think that the differences between our lives now and 100 years from now are going to be much larger than the differences in our lives from now and I'm just curious about that interface where right now there seems to be a great advantage to this mind-computer interface. We can control all sorts of things without utilizing our thumb to hit an app button. We could also access tremendous amounts of information that we don't currently have. There's a certain point though when our interface with that computer isn't necessary. We're taking our desktop computer and plugging it into the computers of 1980 and Apple SE or something like this where it's not actually benefitting. This addition of this other piece of hardware or this other computer isn't actually adding anything of use or content or... When we get to this point, and this is the sort of thing I expect is going to take place when the first contact between two intelligent species in the universe make contact. It will be years after the biologicals have died off. Actually, perhaps billions of years. The artificial intelligence has sent probes out because it's remained curious and it sent these probes out and they'll pass each other through some vast area of space probing and discover each other and the communications will be a little off, but we'll get a few beeps back and forth as these two probes pass each other through the outskirts of some galaxy somewhere. But I don't know if the artificial intelligence of the future might not or even the human-generated intelligence of the future might not care about such things. Might be complacent. And if they're not if they're not complacent it's because they haven't learned from us because one of the things humans have done throughout our evolution is try to get further away from other humans. We left Africa and that wasn't for us. No. We kept going. We went everywhere you could go in the world to get further from humans and now we're looking to space. No, it's not getting further away from other humans it's looking for resources and good places to be. Have you seen us tribally stick together our entire evolution? You're just running down an opinion-ologist path here Justin. I don't know. The Inuits. They stayed in the iciest coldest conditions possible just because there were no humans around us. This is we walked across the planet. And now we're looking to do it again. I think if we can teach the AI to somehow not like other AI this will drive. This is what we have to do. We actually have to integrate these worse parts of ourselves into the AI to get away from the other AI on the planet. Otherwise it will become complacent and won't seek to go in search of other lands. I'm not agreeing with you at all. Madly. Oh my goodness. When you finish your book at the end of your book you do talk about what it is to care and what it is to be a human being on this planet. And I would love to end this interview with a little insight from you on how as a physicist you came and a poetic naturalist you have come to this point of describing I guess giving morality and caring to people who could be atheists or any kind of belief system just because they're human. Yeah, I don't think it's hard actually. I mean I think that it's just a fact that people do care about things. That people do have preferences and aspirations and desires and emotional reactions and the mistake is to believe that somehow those morals or preferences or desires need to be grounded in something else other than the fact that they are there. An atheists and naturalists have this misconception just as badly as religious people do. They complain that if it's just me and my preferences then I can't stop all the bad things from happening in the world. Why not?  If that's your preference then go stop it. They'll say yes, but what right do I have? And that's the mistake. There's the list of rights handed down by the universe. That's just not how it works. So the weird thing to me is when people claim that certain ways of acting, certain rights and wrongs are somehow derived from something bigger, from the universe or from God or whatever and you want to say so what are the things that you learned or were commanded by the universe or by God or whatever that you don't agree with but you go along with anyway? That you personally don't want to do, personally don't think are right but that's just what the universe told me so I'm going to do it. No one really acts that way. They actually act as if the things that they think are right are good things to do and the reason why is because the things we think are right ultimately come from within ourselves and really that's why the last chapter is called existential therapy because I'm not here to say what's right and wrong. I'm just here to say it's okay. You already have opinions about what is right or wrong. That's okay. Just go with them. Other people have similar opinions. They're not the same exactly so we can talk to each other and we can see where we're going to go but that's all we got and that's more than good enough. What was the Wayne's World or was it Wayne's World or Bill and Ted's Good Adventure? Bill and Ted's Good Adventure. Be excellent to each other. There you are. There we go. That's in the book. You can do better than that. You can do better. It's okay. It's a start. We should at least try to do that well. I'll put it that way. All right. Sean, where can people find you online and also find your book? I'm on the internet all over. My website is proposterousuniverse.com and that's a bunch of things including my papers and there's a blog there and stuff like that and also links to the book which you can buy, all the books and I'm also on Twitter at SeanMCarol. Great. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. It's been just absolutely enjoyable to speak with you. I really appreciate your time. My pleasure. Thanks for doing this. This is a good service to the world, what you're doing. Thank you and we hope that your ideas get out there and all sorts of people. It's great to start conversations. That's right. That was Sean Carol. He has joined us to talk about his book, The Big Picture as you can see and like you said, you can find him on Twitter and the interwebs. He's on the internet. All of them. Every single web. He's in the cloud people. Yes. We are going to move on to a few more short science stories. Sean, once again, thank you so much. Go be excellent. Have a great evening. I'll be excellent to somebody, probably myself. Tell Jennifer, I say hello. I will. My lovely wife Jennifer will at Jean-Luc Picante on Twitter. Yes, another great writer, scientist thinker. Blair, do you know about dancing insect hair? Yeah. Bees. They can sense flowers in many different ways. Particularly bumble bees, we know they interpret signals transmitted by flowers including electric signals coming from flowers. Did you know that pollinators send out electric signals? They do. The bees can sense them. The antenna definitely have something to do with it, but their hairs have a lot to do with it.  You kind of just want to squish them. They look so fluffy. Those hairs actually have a really important job, it turns out. Those hairs are sensors to those pollinators electric fields and those hairs are actually connected to their nervous system and the hairs will dense in the presence of the electric fields coming from the pollinators that signal goes through their body to let them know where the pollinators are. That's amazing. The kind of metaphor that they use is as if you're holding a balloon with static electricity up to your hair kind of pulls the hair. It's kind of similar to that. The hair on their body will kind of move around tune it in and head that way. It immediately makes me wonder if there is some kind of magnetic field noise pollution going on. Because you can sort of picture in nature before the industrial revolution before the 30s, whenever. There wasn't a whole lot of competition for that signal, so that's a pretty unique thing for a magnetic field to be like oh, and I'm tuned to it and I know right where to go. I could sort of picture that being much more confusing in today's world with all the electromagnetic fields we've been populating about. Yeah, so I think that's the next step of this would be. It would be really cool to figure out exactly what frequency the electric fields are coming from these pollinators. Seeing if anything we're putting into these areas could interfere with that. I think that's a really good point. So that's definitely something that we could see in the future fingers crossed. But in the meantime now we know those fluffy bumblebees, their hairs are telling them where their food is. I think it's just an amazing example of evolution to tune into the signals that are available in the environment where the pollinating, the plants with the pollen, they've got this kind of staticky electrical charge because of the pollen and different ions that are in play and so that kind of creates the magnetic field. And so that is a signal that maybe they aren't the plants weren't necessarily putting out on purpose. But then the insects maybe came to figure out how to tune into the signal and the communication over time. Yeah, well and it'd be very interesting to know also this hierarchy and what's related to there's lots of things that pollinators do to attract the sorry that the plants do to attract the pollinators. So the way that they look, the colors they are, the shape that they are, the way they smell, all these things could influence the pollinators coming there. So actually I think in that particular transaction the B is the pollinate T and the B is the pollinate tour it's the one giving but then the B becomes a pollinate tour when it moves on to the next. The next, it's bullet. It is a pollinate and or. Yes. It's all part of the pollination station. There's new news from Rosetta. There's a report that Rosetta has discovered the amino acid glycine and the mineral phosphorus on Comet 67P Garamovs Ceramisenko Ceramisenko. Anyway, these things are among the building blocks for life and so they give support to the idea that Comets brought such building blocks to planets like Earth in the solar systems formation and that possibly this could be the same kind of thing going on in other solar systems around the universe. Which is kind of cool. Yeah, and then my really favorite story this week is that is one about the peppered moths. Blair, we've talked about this before, where you have the gray, the white moths that turned darker the buildings became covered and the industrial revolution there was so much stuff everywhere. And thank you industrial revolution and so this has been the ongoing story of look. Adaptation, in evolution this is part of natural selection the white moths get eaten, the dark moths survive, blah blah blah. The big mystery however has been what gene is the one that gets mutated to actually control the trait and nobody's been able to find it people have been looking for it for years and they haven't found it. They found it. And there are two papers out this week one for the peppered moths specifically which people are saying this is a big deal because it's actually saying there is a gene called Cortex that is the mutation source for variation in wing color in these moths. Now a second paper dealing with the wings of butterflies was also published and they found the same exact gene controls the mutation and the differences in wing coloration in butterflies these moths and butterflies are kind of distantly related I mean although still kind of in the moth butterfly family they split off from each other hundreds of thousands million years ago so it's been a really really long time so to find that this gene is still responsible for wing color is absolutely fascinating the extra interesting thing is that Cortex not involved it is not supposed to be involved in wing color that's why they never found it before they weren't looking there looking in the right place this gene is actually involved in the timing of cell division and developmental traits and so what they're thinking it is is that Cortex might control the length of time each different cells are involved in growing the wings and thus give them specific traits based on differences in time of growth and development this is part of the question really interesting now they know where to look and this is going to change textbooks ground breaking hey Justin do you want to talk about weed quickly yeah we should have talked about this before Sean came on so they looked at 38 New Zealanders for a thousand years no it's the other way two thousand New Zealanders for their first 38 years birth to 38 people who smoked marijuana for up to 20 years of that time it turns out this was also by the health department funded by the health department of New Zealand turned out they have more disease if they've been smoking pot but that disease is limited to gum disease they've noticed they have more gum disease and everything else nothing else really jumped out in terms of lung function inflammation indicator for metabolic health nothing so this is one of the longest term studies to look at sustained marijuana use on humans and came back with too unhealthy maybe a little added dental this was smoking pot smoking the marijuana because that's the method of consumption probably has something to do with it they looked at a dozen measures of health including lung function systemic inflammation severe measures of metabolic syndrome including waist circumference HDL cholesterol, triglycerides blood pressure, glucose control body mass index these people were just normal and this was joints does it say how they consumed the marijuana so that's one of the kind of interesting things so the amount of use between these folks could be different the study statistical analysis found that a decline in periodontal health in pot smokers was explained by any of the other things some of these people smoked some of them had alcohol as well so none of these no test on humans is completely clean but it seemed like it seemed like they couldn't really attribute the gum disease to anything else interesting we don't want marijuana can't hurt me because other studies in the same sample show that it is associated with increased risk of psychotic illness IQ decline and downward socioeconomic mobility so it's not necessarily that there's no downside to long term sustained marijuana use in your life they're just saying when it comes to health effects they couldn't pinpoint anything outside of this apparent uptick in gum disease interesting more studies needed yeah more studies needed this is more studies everybody just come to Oregon or maybe to Colorado Washington here I'm sure the studies would be just fine alright everybody have we done it we did it we made it to the end of another hour of this week in time that's right alright everybody I am going to take this moment to thank our Patreon sponsors thank you to Paul Disney Kevin Parachan, Keith Corsale Steve DeBell, Melissa Mosley Jesse Moreno, Patrick O'Keeffe Jason Snyderman, Rudy Garcia Gerald Sorrell, Greg Guthman, Alex Wilson Joe Zier, Matt Matthew Litwin, Eric Knapp Jason Roberts, Chris Clark Richard Onimus, John Rhett Niswamy Byron Lee, 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yeah, they lived I came across them in Israel all the time they were like a pest to the zookeepers okay, let's see corvid juvenile Israel so let's see how that how that works out hooded crow hooded crow those aren't local though it was in a hooded crow it was in Israel there's a hooded column but I swear they're from other places too what is this it was really big too it was like the size of a crow I guess jackdaws are just all black what about babies though it was a juvenile I'm sure it was a juvenile look at those jackdaws they're little kittens oh my god the one next to the bunny look at that dead one I checked out with the bunnies Kiki, did you get a cat yet? no you didn't get a Scottish fold? no, I have no cat yet you have no cat yet it's a good thing I was out of town for a while when you get an animal it makes it harder to leave town ah, thanks for thanks for enjoying the interview Rarks, glad you liked it it was good and I'm guessing that's what you tagged me in on Facebook and I don't really want to watch that again what video? what's going on? it's the trials of a panda zookeeper but I don't think that's a panda zookeeper I think that's a volunteer that is in a breeding sanctuary in China for pandas it's a very different thing and there's so much wrong with it I couldn't even watch the whole thing I had to turn it off it's so frustrating to me pandas are good for kung fu that's right kung fu panda this is what we learned from cartoon movies why does everybody I had a cat a long time ago and then I moved I stayed because it wasn't my cat they were neighborhood cats they belonged to the owners of the house that I lived in oh, I didn't know that I wasn't just taking care of neighborhood cats I'm not a crazy cat lady like that no, but alright yeah let's see so Ryan Lore wants to know about network no, server stuff for the twist.org website um I don't know um I don't know I started talking to them and then I didn't get back to them and I didn't understand what I was talking to them about and so I didn't talk to them anymore and then they said this ticket is closed and so nothing happened so I need to get back in touch I guess we have to upgrade to a new server and I don't understand what is going to happen is my website going to go down I guess that's going to happen for a little bit oh no hopefully it will be 24 hours and that will be it right usually it's like they move stuff over but I don't but if they say I'm responsible for anything that means it's not going to happen right we're just going to have to work on an outdated version of WordPress because I I'm maxed out at the moment fair does a um um how? whiskey renegade liked the first half of the show thank you I never find words words have stopped I'm maxed out myself can't think don't know oh man what I think Justin left because we mentioned cats I was just giving myself a safe space what there was something we were going to talk about in the after show that we didn't no we're not going to talk about it if you bring it up I leave oh that's right we're not going to talk about it that's a way to shut down conversation right there it's not a power play it's just honest that's just the way alright that's fine not miss power play little miss power play buyer for your daughter today remember how being a woman sucks sometimes play with this doll you can find out how to use that womanhood for good oh my goodness what did you just say what is that I don't know I was confused now I'm very confused oh my gosh they told you words they're not working anymore that was pretty funny though what are you drinking is that all vodka that's all tequila that's a moonshine moonshine there you go that's why you have no more words that's not because I've been working 50 hours a week for months and I'm about to reach my breaking point as summer programming starts next week we did a couple of great video interviews at the zoo so there will be a couple of neat episodes coming out if I can get time to edit them in the next week or two so yay more twist shorts on the way yeah and I'm going to do a big big social media push huge I'm going to do a huge social media push on the Cabrio Aquarium videos next week for Ocean's Day ooh cool cause I don't think I've really shared them on my outlets yet what you're posting and you just have to sit there well I didn't even know the second one was posted until I went to the twist website two weeks ago when I started the show and I was trying to figure out how to start the show cause I had forgotten cause it had been so long and then I just saw like on the side part of our YouTube page like Cabrio Aquarium's Sea Rangers what oh that twist after dark yes there needs a vacation dot com speaking of I don't remember if I even told you guys this I'm going to Atlanta in two weeks on you turned into a Cylon by the way but so I'm going to Atlanta because one of my best friends in the whole world who hopefully eventually will interview her on the show but because she's been in a different time zone it's been really difficult so she's been doing research on monkeys and pormones and birth control and menopause and she is defending her PhD on the 15th so I'm going to watch that and I am really excited and I'm turning it into a little bit of a vacation so I'm going to fly out on Tuesday I have a long layover wait are you going next week the 14th two weeks I'm flying out on Tuesday I have a long layover in Denver and on the way back I have a long layover in DC but I'm going to try to make the best of my layovers, I'll see what happens and on Wednesday I probably won't be able to join the show because that's the day of the defense and so there's a giant party I think they rented out an entire restaurant so you'll be partying I'll see how it is I'll probably be back home in time because of the time difference to be on the show but you probably won't want me on the show because I'm going to have to wait oh yeah we do hahah hahah are you sure? are you sure that's what you want Blair after a party talking about traumatic insemination is that the last you want? is that the last you want? probably even better than the sleep deprived Blair that we had for 6 months oh yeah I honest Do not remember any of those. Any. I know. Oh my gosh. Stretching out my sciatica. Sciatica is the worst. Make a twist short of Blair at the post show. Yeah, I might try to join the post show. Especially if I can get it working on my cell. If I can get the hangouts working on my cell phone. I'll definitely do the after show. Or maybe... I'm just imagining you with your cell phone. Hey Kiki. I hold my cell phone here. Am I right side up? Oh my god. What kind of lush do you take me for? I'm an adult. I'm not some sorority girl anymore. Maybe standing there. Sorry I dropped you guys. Oh my god. Oh fungo man. She's got a Blair buzz when she talks about bees. It's true. It's true. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. But I hopefully will lock down. Because my friend is moving back to the Bay Area later in the summer. Since she's all done there. Hopefully I will be able to bring her on to the show. Because her study, her master's study is actually what I found fascinating. And that was about birth control in Sooty Manga Bees. Yes. Sooty Manga Bees. I don't want to give it away. But it was fascinating. And in some ways life changing. That sounds very much like my word of the day today. Kind of. What? Sooty Manga Bees? No. My dictionary dot com word of the day today was tickety boo. Tickety? What's tickety boo? I loved it so much. I'm like tickety boo. I mean it's chiefly British informal. Meaning fine. Okay. Tickety boo? It's fine. It's okay. Oh that sounds tickety boo. Why yes, I'm just tickety boo. How about you? I don't think that's a thing. Tickety boo or tickety boo? No, I think you've made this up. This is not a real thing. Sooty Manga Bees. Sooty Manga Bees. Let me be David Attenborough for a moment. The Sooty Manga Bees. The Sooty Manga Bees as it sits in the tree is just tickety boo. No. This is not a thing. So much yes. No. Sooty Manga Bees. I'm starting to sound like a monkey now. Isn't it just tickety boo when this Manga Bees grabs its tail and sticks it in its ear? It's not a real thing. Are you guys familiar with the film Monkey Bone? No. It's one of my favorite films. I love that movie and I use the word film loosely there. But it's one of my favorites. As I just made Monkey Sound, I started to picture Brendan Fraser doing Monkey Sounds and it made me smile. That's right. Brendan Fraser Monkey Bone. That was a pretty funny movie. Such a good movie. Not sciency at all. Not sciency at all. And no, I don't mean Bodhi McBoatface. Sooty Manga Bees. Tickety boo. The Bodhi McBoatface thing. I am right. It is a thing. Thanks, Fungaman. Thanks, Ben Rodin. Tickety boo? The Gem Doctor. Tickety boo is a thing. I mean, we're not British. That's why we probably haven't heard it. That was the number one. I just put tickety. Tickety boo is the first thing that came up. And then tickety talk was the second thing. Tickety talk. Tickety talk off goes the glock. These may be things, but these are things that shouldn't be. Tickety boo. May have, okay, so according to Urban Dictionary, always accurate. Always. This expression may have originated in Scotland. Oh, okay. They say it might have originated in the 1930s. It's the title of a popular children's song called Everything is Tickety Boo, recorded by Danny Kay as part of the film Mary Andrew. Danny Kay, the great Danny Kay. Hi, Larius. Or it might be related to the Hindi expression.  Did I turn into a robot? You were for a second. Weird. Yeah, so in Hindi you say ticky baboo, meaning everything's all right, sir. Ticky baboo. Ticky baboo. Dave Freidel has given us 30 awesome British slang phrases that we start using immediately from Life Hacker. We have mate, but mate is like British or Australian. Bugger, you know, bugger's good, knackered. Bugger all, knackered. You guys, I'm knackered. I actually use gutted every once in a while, which is so gutted. I can teach both of you how to have a really good Australian accent. And I use gobsmacked. I say gobsmacked occasionally. I'm going to have both of you talk in an amazing Australian accent. You did this on the show like two weeks ago. Did I already do it? Okay, never mind. You did it on the show. Oh, never mind. I don't remember it, though. Okay, so do it for Blair again. Okay, so Blair, you're going to repeat after me. You're going to say this phrase anyway. You're going to say raise up lights. Oh, razor blades, yeah. Yeah. Raise up lights. It's amazing. Raise up lights. There we go. Got to get me some raise up lights. Oh, my God. That was funny. Okay, so the plot. Lost the plot. I say that. I can give you a Boston accent, too. Do other views? Oh, khaki ace. Yeah. Damp squib. Where's my khakis? Where's my khakis? Where's my khaki? Damp squib. Damp squib. Not squid. Squib. Like in Harry Potter. Squib. Squib. Yes. The pot A was a bit of a damp squib because only Richard turned up. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. To pot the bee's knees. That's not a British phrase. That's just old. Chunder. What? Chunder. What? Chunder was Australian. I ate a bad pizza last night after too many drinks and I chundered in the street. What is this song? I ate some bad chips and I chundered in the street. What was the song? Australian. Midnight oil. I'm from the land down under. Where women roll and men chunder. Women roar. No, women roar. No, men roar and women thunder. I think that's what it was. I thought it was chunder. Like one time he said chunder. You probably do say chunder in there at some point. But guys, I don't understand. My cocaine. My cocaine. Ballocking. My cocaine. What's your name? My cocaine. Taking the piss. You take the piss. Crawl it. It's not a British term. Ballocks. Ballocks. I watched a how to act video, technical acting video by Michael Cain once which was the most disturbing sort of thing. Michael Cain. I actually use a lot of these terms. Michael Cain. But he did this sort of thing like when you act when you act that suspicious of somebody as they talk look down into the left then make eye contact again, then look up into the right, and everything he did it was all technical acting. You know, if you're asked to ponder something, the importance of something, if you act to look ponderous or wonderment or thinking, look off past the camera and ask yourself if you left the iron on at home or the oven. But the whole thing was like, don't actually feel like, don't put yourself in the role at all. Just do these eye movement tricks. Do these things. Then you'll be an actor. We are an actor. And you can go in and say, but I'm an actor. I think a lot of, yeah, are in lore. A lot of these British terms are you in California. Maybe I... Yeah.  You know, I have some British friends. I love my British, my British Leila. She's always there. It's brilliant. It's brilliant. It's brilliant. Everything. It's brilliant. The hippies, they're everywhere. Watch out, Dave. I mean, we're all everywhere, man. We are everything and nothing, man. Isn't that what we learned today? We're all just, like, going to live forever or not. What's a boot? A boot. That's a trunk. That's no. A boot. That's what Canadians do. They go out in a boot. Sorry. Sorry, Canadians. Gord, are you still there? Dave wants to know if I showered. Dave, you obviously don't know me at all. Faithful listeners know how I am about my showers. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It's weird that I got that reputation on this show. As being the show showower. Yes. As being the one who gets really intense about cleanliness, bodily cleanliness. Well, we know it's not me. I think by comparison, you're right. It's unfair. My lack of adherence to any sort of hygienic code predisposes anybody around me to seem as though they were a hygiene freak. Like, you mean you bathe every day? Mostly. Mostly. She spends an hour and a half in the shower with betadine. Unclean, unclean. She thought she had a naturally olive complexion. No. Oh, snap. That was a good one. That was an excellent burn. Okay. I missed what happened. There was a meetup in San Francisco. There was something happened at a zoo. I think there were shorts made. Are those out? Are those being edited? Are we talking about this? I just got back yesterday, last night, and they're still in the camera in the bag. I haven't even taken the card out of the camera. I haven't even taken the cards out of the camera to check and make sure we got the video. Okay. Yeah. What is this video? What are we going to do? You'll have to wait. Good, sir. Yeah. There did a couple of interviews, and I got B-roll. It's pretty good. Talking about some stuff that's going on at the zoo. A couple of zoo current event stories. Please, Zoo. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. That'll be cool. What you need to do is come up to Portland, and then we can do a podcast episode and go to the zoo here and record a short. Everybody. Absolutely. Maybe what would be funny would be a twist short, just all of us being like, this is my favorite animal. I could do that all day. You know I could. Favorite is one. Favorite is one. You can't do it. Then you'll just be saying the same thing over and over again all day long. No, because I'd say this animal is my favorite animal because this animal is my favorite animal because it makes a different sound. This is how I choose my favorite animals. Different proofing times. Absolutely. Audio record of the different animal sounds. Yes. That's my sound effects record that I'm making. Mm-hmm. Ooh. Woo. Yes. I absolutely want to come to Oregon. I've never been to Portland. No. I've never been. So if they have a festival or something that we can record a show at, then see it's a business expense to get meat over there. That's the key. Exactly. Yeah, so figuring something like that out. So I know in the late summer they do a mini maker fair. That could be kind of fun maybe, but I don't know if we could make that happen. But they do have also, I'm going to go talk at a meetup next week. It's happening at this place where the guy is starting a podcast studio. So it's Portland's first podcast studio. I haven't taken a look at it yet, so I don't know what that means. And so he's been trying to get a podcast community going up here in Portland, and so he's like, would you guys want to do a live show? And so maybe we could make that work too, depending on the setup. Yeah, but there are possibilities maybe. Oh, also this reminds me. There is a possible affiliate station that we could be on re-broadcast on in the Portland area.  At KBoo? Is it KBoo? Is that 90.3? I don't know if that is not, I don't think it is, no.  KDVS alum have created a 90.3 radio station in Portland. Really? Yeah, this is a rumor, a fresh rumor just heard. I have no idea if there's any validity to it. Freeform, okay, so it's Freeform Portland, KFFP. It's a low power station, which makes no sense, yeah. Local volunteers who want to reclaim some portion of our airwaves. KDVSE? Yeah, very KDVSE. And it's 90.3, it's not an accident. They chose that specifically because of all those logical reasons that you would do that. Interesting, they really did? Yeah, cool. This is how I heard about it, it must be true only because I heard about it and it exists. You heard about it in Davis, which that would make sense. Right, by somebody who used to do shows and was talking about this. So I think it's probably true, therefore. And it's in the Northeast Alberta neighborhood, not very big, and it streams online. That's cool. So I'm thinking that maybe you should contact them and say, hey. Hey. We have this show that's rebroadcast on the other KDVSE. Would you be interested in filling some of your airtime with this show? Kind of a thing. Yeah, interesting.  I know, look it up. You probably know some of these people. I'm looking at it right now, but I didn't say any of their names. Doesn't say who they are. That's interesting. Cool. Coolio, coolio. An ACA member? Is that an American Zoo Association? Association of zoos and aquariums. Oh, okay. Oh, Portland slang. Is that Portland, Oregon or Portland, Maine? Portland. Oh, Stumptown. Portland, Oregon. Yes. Oh, that's a boring slang. Pods. The Max. Freddy's. Got that. Grenola. Go to the coast. You go to the coast. You go to the coast. Justin, go to the coast. You have the farthest to go to get to the coast. I've got a long way. I'm pretty darn close. I'm about three miles. You could totally walk there. I'm like two miles from the coast. You could just walk to the coast. And I have, in fact. Who needs to set a business meeting in their journal? That's days when you're saying I don't even have a show to go to to go to Portland. Yeah, you just had to set a business meeting and then it's a business meeting. What are oysters, Dave? Because I'm pretty sure you don't have local oysters in Denver. Yeah, you don't want to know. Uh-oh. We don't need to know. Are those the Rocky Mountain oysters? Or maybe look it up on Urban Dictionary. All right. It's happening. All right, here we go. I like Rocky Mountain oysters. Denver is the third result. Oh, yum. Why are they called that? Why are they called that? I wonder if Wikipedia will tell me why they're called that. I'll be right back. Where are you going? I might leave. Yeah, in case you haven't noticed, I'm a little exhausted. You're hilariously exhausted. I am too. I still haven't recovered from Memorial Day shopping, people. That's been crazy. Although, through that experience, that's how I got that 90.3 in Portland. Yeah, interesting. I'll look into it. Connected to our 90.3. So, I'm going to go away now. Let's all go away. It's time to go away. We're going to go away. Good night, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Once again, it has been a fantastic evening. You're not going to find out what Blair won't talk about. No, you won't. But it did remind me because you told me once that zoo exhibits are designed to keep the animals in, not to keep people from getting into the exhibits. And we're also going to leave now with a big thank you to you for joining us for the show. And Justin, thank you for being a great co-host and Blair. Thank you for being a great co-host. I hope all of us get a lot of good rest between now and next Wednesday so we can bring back more of this wonderful energy. Yeah, yeah. I think Justin was just sleeping with his eyes open. I kind of was. I kind of happened throughout this day. Thank you.