Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 908: The Lone Star Tick and Alpha Gal Syndrome

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Ep. 908: The Lone Star Tick and Alpha Gal Syndrome · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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  Speaker 1: can't predict anything brought to you by first Light. When
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  Speaker 1: no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer,
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  Speaker 1: no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at
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  Speaker 1: first light dot com. That's f I R S T
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: L I T E dot com. Holy Smokes joined today
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: by bercard Builder, the Writer. We're gonna talk about Alpha
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Gala syndrome and the Lone Star tack. We we're just
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: gonna talk about a bunch more your work. And I
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: gotta tell you flat out right here, this is embarrassing.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: I've been a fan. I've been a fan of you
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: for for over a quarter century.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: Wow, that's great.
• 1:06
  Speaker 3: I like, dude, I'm not kidding you.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: I in nineteen ninety nine or whenever that was nineteen
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: ninet niney two thousand, I was a graduate student and
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: I got the Harper's magazine and it had your piece
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: on cock fighting, and I was split between I was
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: split between loving you because it was so perfect in
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: wanting to kill you because I was so jealous. I'm
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: not kidding you, and I've loved your stuff since.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: Man, oh thank you.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: Like you're you know, I know you've done books, like
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: you have a book Noodling for Flatheads, and you kind
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: of blew that out.
• 1:46
  Speaker 3: I mean, you like made that whole thing.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: In my mind, you took this like esoteric, you know,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: backwoods practice and sort of made it to where every
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: social media influence around the planet goes out and has
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: their day noodling flatheads, you know, I mean like you
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: had found that.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: A familine in Oklahoma made a documentary called Oki Noodling
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: with the Flaming nick Lips for the soundtrack, and and
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: he and now there's a whole noodling tournament.
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  Speaker 3: But you were out of that stuff.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you were out of that of twenty years like
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: over twenty years ago.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there's uh yeah, twenty five, thirty years ago. Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: And another favorite thing, like one of my favorite passages
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: ever written is you were you were profiling the sort
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: of like up and coming bull riders.
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  Speaker 3: Explain this people real quick.
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  Speaker 1: Now'll take my favorite passage, but like, how do you
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: explain your piece about bull riding?
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  Speaker 2: Well, it's basically about how young bull riders get made
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  Speaker 2: and then you know, they get started five or six
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: on sheep, and then they go to little calves, and
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: then they go to small bulls and steers, and and
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  Speaker 2: that has happened, That has gotten younger and younger, even
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: as the bulls have gotten more and more fierce and
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: terrifying and destructive. And so it's been a crazy kind
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: of collision of two cultures.
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  Speaker 3: And you did mostly reporting for that, and I remember, right,
• 3:07
  Speaker 3: was it mostly in Nevada or you.
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  Speaker 2: Mostly in Oklahoma? Actually in Oklahoma, so I knew a
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  Speaker 2: lot of and there are a bunch of bull riding
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: families down there that I lived, so I met them.
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  Speaker 1: But you were always tell people this story because you're
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: writing a piece about bull riding culture and these young
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: kids bull riding, and at the same time that you're
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: working on this, in your own neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York,
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  Speaker 1: there's a park where the parents all take their little
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: kids to play, and they came in and installed rocks.
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: In the park.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: I mean flat rocks like two inches high.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, So you're writing about the parents who are deeply
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: upset about the hazard that these rocks would present to
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: their children should they get hurt on the rocks, and
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: people being like, I can't believe they're real rocks put
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: in the park, and you're like, you're living.
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  Speaker 3: In this while also living with these bull rider people.
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  Speaker 2: Right, No, I mean it was I think it was
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  Speaker 2: the high point or the nature of the kind of
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  Speaker 2: helicopter parenting thing. And in park slope where I'm in
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  Speaker 2: Brooklyn was really intense about that these parents who wanted
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  Speaker 2: to oversee every single thing create a perfectly safe bubble
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  Speaker 2: for their children. And then I go to Western Oklahoma
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  Speaker 2: and and you know, some five year old eight year
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  Speaker 2: old boys getting thrown off bloody face, might have a
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  Speaker 2: bunch of cuts, and his parents are like, get back up, bore,
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: get back up, all that thing, you know, and it's
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  Speaker 2: just like, and I have to say, those kids that
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  Speaker 2: I was with, those bull riding kids were some of
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  Speaker 2: the best kids I've ever been around. Incredibly polite, focused,
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  Speaker 2: like good natured, you know. I mean, you know, there
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  Speaker 2: was a good chance they were going to get grievously
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  Speaker 2: injured before the age of twenty, you know, and they
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  Speaker 2: could have headed It was lots of risk and what
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  Speaker 2: they were doing, but in terms of how they approached life.
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  Speaker 2: There was so much zest and appetite to it. It
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  Speaker 2: was kind of they were kind of great.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, And then now the reason, the reason I wanted
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: to hear now is you just wrote a big piece.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: All your stuff is so well reported. You do a
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: great job. I feel like you. Usually you seem to
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: really win the trust of the people you're talking to.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: You paint things very fairly. And now you've done a
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: piece on something that I've been paying a ton of
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: attention to, which is this what seat you can clarify
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: what seems to be this explosion in alpha gal syndrome
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  Speaker 1: to where now I've got buddies that have had it.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: I've got buddies that got it so long ago they
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  Speaker 1: got over it. It seems like there's more and more
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: of it I went through. I recently was reading the
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  Speaker 1: writer Nelly Bowles. I recently read a piece she had
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: where she called she said that lime disease is a
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  Speaker 1: chic disease, like people are proud to have had it.
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  Speaker 3: I don't know about that I had. I've had a tickborn.
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  Speaker 1: I had a tickboren illness from lime that I was
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  Speaker 1: treated for and got better and ticks are part of
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: the conversation in this country, especially in the outdoor community. Like,
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  Speaker 1: ticks are a bigger part of the conversation now than
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  Speaker 1: they've ever been, and it seems like they're only going
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  Speaker 1: to become more and more and more of the conversation.
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  Speaker 3: And there's more and more things to worry about.
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  Speaker 1: And I didn't realize it, and I'll have you explain it,
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  Speaker 1: but I recently picked a loan.
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  Speaker 3: I had a lone star tick right here on my classical.
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  Speaker 1: I called my a friend of mine who's a doctor,
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  Speaker 1: because I thought it was like the kind of thing
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  Speaker 1: you take an antibiotic for. This is just I mean,
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  Speaker 1: this is a couple of weeks ago. And she's like, no, man,
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  Speaker 1: this is a whole other ball game. This is not
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  Speaker 1: nothing to like, that's not this. And it realized how
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: little I knew about this but which we're going to cover.
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  Speaker 1: But to start, like what was it? Like why did
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  Speaker 1: you get into this idea? Like what what drew you
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  Speaker 1: to this? This idea of alpha gel syndrome and lone
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  Speaker 1: star tics.
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  Speaker 2: Well, it's like a lot of stories. I kind of
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  Speaker 2: zeroed in on it gradually. My first thought was, damn,
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: we've had this these waves of infestations over the last
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  Speaker 2: thirty years, you know, lime disease and superlice and bedbugs,
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  Speaker 2: and then there was this huge scabies outbreak in Europe
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  Speaker 2: that might be coming to this country, and screw worms,
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  Speaker 2: and you know, it's just been like one after the other,
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: and I thought, there's got to be a pattern here,
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: what's going on? And so I started calling. First I
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: called pest control people in New Jersey, and then they
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  Speaker 2: sent me to a bunch of extension folks in Nebraska
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  Speaker 2: and Kentucky and they said, well, yeah, you know, a
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  Speaker 2: bunch of those things. We're worried about the screwworm, but
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  Speaker 2: they haven't come really come across the Texas border yet,
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  Speaker 2: but everybody here is freaked out about alf gal. And
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  Speaker 2: I had heard about Alpha goal maybe twelve fifteen years ago,
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  Speaker 2: but as a kind of a novelty disease. There was
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  Speaker 2: a piece on Radio Lab about a woman who'd gotten it,
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  Speaker 2: and it felt very much like what lime disease was
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  Speaker 2: in the early days, like maybe something that in a
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  Speaker 2: small pockets like the Hampton's or martha'svinias, which by the way,
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  Speaker 2: are two of the biggest hotspots for it. Maybe people
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  Speaker 2: get it there, but it's not that wide spread. And
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  Speaker 2: then I started to realize, no, it's actually those ticks
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  Speaker 2: have moved all the way west to the Rockies. They're
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  Speaker 2: like and they're spreading and multiplying. So it's becoming a
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  Speaker 2: much huger thing than it was.
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  Speaker 1: You just said that the ticks are spreading. Is it
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  Speaker 1: that the ticks are spreading or that the pathogen or
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  Speaker 1: the diseases are spreading, Well.
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  Speaker 2: It's both, really, I mean in this country, I mean,
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  Speaker 2: if you look worldwide, Alpha g al is all over
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  Speaker 2: the world now more than thirty countries, six continents, and
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  Speaker 2: in all these countries, all these continents is carried by
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  Speaker 2: different ticks, like the BoNT tick in South Africa or
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  Speaker 2: the castor bean tick in Europe. In this country, it's
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  Speaker 2: carried by loane star ticks almost exclusively. And the lone
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  Speaker 2: star tick used to be pretty much contained in the southeast,
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  Speaker 2: like up until nineteen fifty, they didn't really go past
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  Speaker 2: north of Virginia, Okay. And now you look at the
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  Speaker 2: CDC map of lone star ticks and they're all the
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  Speaker 2: way to the Oklahoma Panhandle, They're all the way to Maine,
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  Speaker 2: they're all the way to you know, northern Michigan. So
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  Speaker 2: they with climate change and especially with the kind of
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: wetter conditions that often come with climate change, they've kind
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  Speaker 2: of followed those and spread all across the country. And
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  Speaker 2: they're so aggressive and so bold and resilient that they've
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  Speaker 2: done really well wherever they've gone.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to tell listeners about a thing real quick.
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  Speaker 1: Then why you'd explain elf, like how this alf gal
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  Speaker 1: thing works. But like, people are very familiar with lime.
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  Speaker 1: We've been talking about lime disease for decades. Lime disease
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  Speaker 1: is you have a tick that carries like a bacterial pathogen.
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  Speaker 1: The tick latches onto you and the longer it's on you,
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  Speaker 1: the more it can transmit, and it transmits a bacterial
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  Speaker 1: infection into your body. Right, it's passing an infection a
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: long into your body. You can have the ticks that
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  Speaker 1: carry it. You have areas where there's a very low prevalence.
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  Speaker 1: Right there's they're a small percentage of the tics are infected.
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  Speaker 1: There's areas where like when I got it, and doing
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: my research after getting it, I learned that about three
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  Speaker 1: quarters of the ticks at that time in Hudson Valley
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  Speaker 1: about three quarters of the ticks carried the bacteria.
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  Speaker 3: That causes lime disease.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, so you know, if you got a tick latched on,
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: you had a seventy five percent chance that thing was
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: had the capability of bringing it to you.
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  Speaker 3: Right.
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  Speaker 1: This alpha gal deal, which will jump to the kind
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: of the punchline here, is it causes like a meat
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: and dairy allergy. That's how people become aware of they had.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: It has a totally different way it functions. Can you
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: explain to people what's like, what is going on when
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: you get bit by these things?
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, no, it's true. I mean lime disease, bibiziosis, anaplasmosis,
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: the ourlikios is all the major tick born diseases are
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: you know, their bacteria, they're parasites. Alpha gal is different
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: and it and it's different two ways, Like every loane
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  Speaker 2: start tick has alpha gal in its saliva. Right, So
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  Speaker 2: it's not a question of if you have the bacteria
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  Speaker 2: or not it they all have it.
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  Speaker 3: Like they're just born with it.
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  Speaker 2: You're born with they're born with it. And when you
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: get bitten, if they latch on and they stay latch on,
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  Speaker 2: that alpha gel it goes into your system. Now, The
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: catch is that, like not that large a percentage of
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: people who get the alpha gallu in their system from
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: a bite will develop the syndrome. Right, you may even
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: have alpha gal anybody's in your body and still not
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: get the syndrome. The syndrome means you're getting an allergic
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: reaction to it. But if you get bitten by it
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  Speaker 2: by a lone star ticket, it stays on. You will
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: get alpha gal in your system.
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  Speaker 3: And what what is that? Like? Explain that bit about that.
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  Speaker 1: All all meat, like people meat, monkey meat, all mammal meat, Yeah,
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: contain something, right.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, all non primate bodies contain alpha gal and the
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: most of it if you look at the ones that
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: have the highest conscients the organ meat, it's the sinews,
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: it's it's it's the fibers. But it's also in the meat,
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  Speaker 2: and dairy often has it, almost always has alpha gal
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  Speaker 2: in it.
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  Speaker 3: And what is it?
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  Speaker 2: It's a type of sugar. It's a type of sugar,
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: which is another unusual thing. Most most allergies are caused
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: by proteins are two proteins, but this case is the sugar,
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: which is one of the reasons it took so long
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: for it to get identified, but it's it's in this,
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: you know. And so you know, we eat alpha gal
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  Speaker 2: all the time, we're eating meat all the time, and
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: mostly we don't react to it. So the question is
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: why do we And and that still hasn't been totally
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: figured out. There's clearly something in the tick saliva, some
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: kind of cofactor that's not only we're not only getting
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: the alpha gal, but it's triggering the imma immune reaction
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: to the alpha gal and the people who get.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: It and then they get it like the tick gets
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: it in them, yeah, to some degree.
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: Or the body. Yeah, now the human body now reacts
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: to it.
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: As immune reaction to that sugar, that foreign sugar that's
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: in your blood.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: So then you go eat a burger, right, you go
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: eat a beef burger, and also in your body lights up.
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean. And the crazy thing is that most
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: dollargies are quick, right, you get bitten by you get
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: stung by a bee, and you react right away, you know,
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: But alpha gal it can take two to six hours
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: to manifest. And it seems to be because the alpha
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: gal itself is bound up in lipids and fats, or
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: it's bound up in these connective tissues and both of
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: them these kind of gluey connective tissues, and both of
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: them take a long time to digest. And so you know,
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: you're eating this stuff and no reaction at all, and
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: then suddenly at three in the morning, you're starting to
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: get terrible stomach cramps or you might get shorten it's
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: a breath, your throat's up, be getting rashes or hives,
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: and people don't make the connection right. I mean, there
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: was a study in two thousand and seven and seventeen
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: that looked at one hundred doctors' visits of people who
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: had alpha galle syndrome, and only one in ten doctors
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: identified it correctly. Oh you know, and the people who
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: in that study, the median length for to diagnosis was
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: seven years. So you think about people having these serious
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: allergic reactions to the point of some of them are
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: going into anaphylactic shock, you know, they and they don't know,
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: and they go to the doctor and the doctor says, well,
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: that might be a gluten allergy or I don't know,
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: maybe you have some heart palpitations. We then need to
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: do some heart things. I talked to one guy who
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: had three heart surgeries because they misdiagnosed alpha Galleson. Really, yeah,
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: this is a guy in Springfield, Missouri. So that's the
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: that's the scary part of it. If you don't identify,
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: you start to think, oh, you have irteal bow syndrome.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: You have any number of things it could be that
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: you could think is causing it.
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: Huh.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: So when what do you what does it mean when
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: people say I got one buddy, I don't want to
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: say his name, say his first name.
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: His name is Evan. He got it and then he
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: got better, right and again. When I first heard I
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: should clarify this. When I first heard about this, I
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: thought it was like I had this.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: I had this feeling how many every years ago I
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: was there, I had this thing that that can't be true, right, Yeah,
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: it sounds I mean, I thought it was another And
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: I don't in any way want to say there's not
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: such a thing. But I don't want to go down
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: and being like there's no such thing as gluten analogies whatever.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: When I first heard it, what went off in my
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: head is it's like a thing that people are becoming
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: aware of and they're self diagnosing at a at a
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: higher rate than people are actually getting it right right,
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: because but then I've been friends by.
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: The way, allergist sent Epodemil was the same way for
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: for like ten years. They said, this is this is
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: not a thing. Yeah, you're lying.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: That's the feeling I had, Like, I don't know what
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: you got going on. You eat a bad burger? What
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: do you mean you're allergic to burger?
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: Right? Right, right, right right right?
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: But what so?
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: But then my buddy who I know and know him, well,
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: you know, he went through it and I can't remember
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: what it was. It was some I don't know, five six,
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: seven years and he said that it started to dissipate.
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: What's that all about?
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean that's the I guess. The bright side
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: of it is that your anybody levels start to drop,
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: and sometimes three four years even you can go back
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: to getting meat.
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: People have all kinds of different reactions that The trick
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: is though, and here's the problem is that the more
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: tick bites you get, the higher anybody levels go. Right,
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: So if you really want to have it dissipate and
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: go away, you can't be outdoors very often. You have
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: to be incredibly careful. You have to wear you know
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: about about the way you.
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: Watch your diet, but it's watching your activities.
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't eat meat order and you can't get
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: bitten again.
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: Huh. Explain a little bit about like what's this ticks
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: kind of groove? Like what what is his life cycle?
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: What is he doing with his time?
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: Well, every sea, every spring season, they they come out
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: and they want a blood meal, right they want to
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: And before that they're spending most of the time and
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: send me hibernation right there and leaflet or somewhere not
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: bothering anybody. But then they come out in the spring
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: and they're looking to suck blood. And they do this
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: even as as larvae. And one of the big things
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: that people worry about is what they call tick bombs,
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: which are these clusters of two hundred tiny seed like
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: lone star ticks that people walk into and you look
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: and you think you have some dirt on your pants
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: and on your leg and you brush it off and
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: you've you've had twenty five bytes.
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: Well, and those those little larvast suns of bitches to.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: Them can by each of them can give you alpha
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: gaal syndrome.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: Say, you know, you know what I've I haven't seen that,
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: but you know what I've gotten tangled up with that
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: comes in those clusters.
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: Have you had chi problem with chiggers ever?
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: That's what I grew up at an Oklahoma.
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: Oh that's right, you're from the heartland, that ship man.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that's that's what we had.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: Because they get you like a bunch, right, and they
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: borrow under your I mean, it's it's an awful Yeah.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: You know what's funny about those chiggers too, is there's
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: so much When I first got my first bad tigger
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: infestation where I was in I think I was in Missouri.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: I was in Missouri, first time I ever got it bad.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: And the number of remedies that were suggested to me
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: bathing and bleach, putting nail polish on them, putting epoxy
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: on them, rubbing motor oil into them, right, And there's
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: so much misinformation that I even went so I got
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: so bad. I was having like I was going into
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: like I was having an allergic reaction to them.
• 18:48
  Speaker 3: I was getting feverish.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: I mean, I was coated, and people are telling me, oh, well,
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: it laid its eggs in you and now they're living
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: in you. Right, And I quickly, like on my phone,
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: I quickly learned that that's that's not what this is. Yeah,
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: but I go to a medstop, I go to see
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: a doctor. I'm like, here's the deal. I'm still covering
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: these chiggers, like I need like a steroid shees. Is
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: that the thing that lays the eggs in you? I'm like, no,
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: it doesn't lay eggs, Oh my god. But uh anyhow
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: so that so when that tick comes out and he's
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: got those the little guys, yeah, those will bite you.
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: Those will bite you, but the big one will bite
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: you too.
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: Big big ones will bite you. I think basically there's
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: three seasons and every tick, if I have it, right
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: to bite you. And and it's pretty pretty restricted to
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: the spring and summer. The thing about the Lone Star
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: tick is it's they're incredibly aggressive. I mean. The funny
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: thing is talking to anomologists. You know, usually they love
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: their their beasties and they like to talk about the
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: things they study. But with Lone Start, every single anomologist
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: I talked to you said, I hate that tick. I
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: hate that thing. Like one woman said to me, Holly
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: Gaff she worked at Old Dominion and Virginia, and she
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: was like, they're like the bullies. Of the of the
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: insect world. They'll beat you up and take your lunch money.
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: They just they actually pursue people, you know, unlike most ticks,
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: like the dog tick or the deer tick. Uh they'll
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: hang around on a blade of grass and wait for
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: you to go by, and then they'll hitch a ride
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: and bite you. But the lone Star will actually come
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: down and and follow your heat and your and your
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: carbon dioxide and and track you down and crawl on
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: foot on foot. I mean, this guy I talked to
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: this entomologist in uh Or, the public health biologist in
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: Martha's Vineyard was saying he'd talked to lots of people
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: who had said that the lone star ticks were coming
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: down from the dune grasses, cross the burning sand and
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: onto the beachlankets and beat biting people as they were sunbathing.
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: So these things are just so agreed. They're detecting people's presence.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, and they're and they're going after them.
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: And they're really they're really hearty there so they can
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: handle some heat. You know, a lot of ticks will
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: dry up too quickly to do that. But no, they're really,
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: they're they're problematic little animals.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: Explain the relationship between because the tick that carries lime
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: has the same deal where they have a tight little
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: friendship with deer, right, the deer doesn't look at it
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: that way.
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: They have a relationship with deer.
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the lone star I mean the same
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: biologist Don Martha Dinner told me, like a typical deer
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: in a season can carry five hundred to one thousand ticks.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: Now that's probably deer tick and loan star tacks. But yeah,
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: I mean they're like the perfect vessel for carrying these.
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: There's so much blood in them they can't get them off,
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: and so in areas like Georgia and all across the
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: country where they have high deer populations, they're just breeding
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: factories for for lone star ticks.
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you even see. Now, there's.
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: There's always these different depending on who you are ask,
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: there's always these different motivations to reduce deer numbers. In
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: some especially along the urban suburban interface, particularly in the
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: Eastern US, there's always these different motivations of the lower deer numbers.
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: Where a traditional one would be.
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: Agriculture, Okay, sure, you know, just deer come out and
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: destroy cornfields, eat alfalf or whatever, and so at agricultural
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: interests be like, we need to suppress your numbers, people's
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: own strangers. There's the thing that gets talked about, probably
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: more it gets discussed, probably in a way that's disproportioned
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: to how impactful it is. But car insurers will now
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: and then point out that it would be advantageous to
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: us if deer numbers were lowered.
• 22:47
  Speaker 3: That's people debate whether that's true.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: But I've seen like documented evidence where car insurers have
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: advocated to lower deer numbers. I've seen lately with with
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: what managers being under some level of political pressure to
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: lower deer numbers, right because of tics. Yeah, like that's
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: entered the conversation.
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, I mean I feel like I mean, I
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: started working for science magazines almost forty years ago, and
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: even then, at the very beginning, there were this debate
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: about what do we do about deer populations. My first
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: magazine was an environmental magazine, and the question I think
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: was Fire Island in New York, Oh, And they were saying,
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: what are we going to do with the deer? And
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: back then the big fight was between really an interesting
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: way between ecologists who are saying these deer are disastrous
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: for the ecosystem, they're eating all the native plants. They're
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: like just you know, changing the whole environment. And animal
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: rights activists you know, and people who just had who
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: just loved animals, you know, not necessarily ped up people,
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: but just people who didn't want to see these beautiful
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: animals killed.
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: Yeap.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: And it's and it's amazing to me that it's that
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: forty years later, it's still the same debate, because it
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: felt like it was pretty clear forty years ago that
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: we have too many deer, that they're bad for the environment,
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: and that there's an easy solution to this, which is,
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: you know, relaxing hunting laws in some cases. There's also
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: some ways that you know, there's there's vaccines and other
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: things you can do. But it's but it's felt like
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: that's been a kind of a natural, ecologically sound.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: Response you've had for many decades for many different reasons,
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: pointing out that some of these areas have too many deer,
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: and then you just kind of tack on whatever.
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: They're like, yeah, no issue, dessure it right, right right.
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: I do think that ticks might be the thing that
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: finally does it. I mean, I mean talking to these
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: folks in Missouri, but also in Martha's vineyards. They're you know,
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: they were for a long time against killing these deer
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: and now they're just launching this huge killing pain campaign
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: on that island. And I think it's that people finally said, look,
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: we can't live with this kind of threat direct.
• 24:54
  Speaker 3: It's like, yeah, it's direct.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: Human health, right, because because people can look at these
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: people can look at these ide is of sort of
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: like long term negative impact on native plant.
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: Species, and they just kind of tune out.
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: But when you're paranoid to have your kid out in
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: your yard planing in the grass, it just hits people different.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: Well, the funny thing is it even hits people different
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: when it's lime disease and they say, well, you may
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: get you may have to take an antibiotic, or you
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: might get some you know, fatigue syndrome. And and when
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: you say you're not going to be able to eat
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: eat meat anymore or drink milk anymore, somehow that that
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: hits home freaks people out.
• 25:30
  Speaker 3: I want to I do want I want to spend
• 25:31
  Speaker 3: more time on that tick life history. Well let's do
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: that first.
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: I eventually want to ask you about a little bit
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: about lime, because I'm assuming you read a lot about
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: lime in your work and talk about you about lime.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: But so this tick like he he hatches out and
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: they got these little bombs, these little clusters, and eventually
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: they mature and then they they latch onto a deer.
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, why do they ever want to leave the deer?
• 25:55
  Speaker 3: Or don't they?
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: Oh that's interesting. I mean not just deer. I mean essentially,
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: they're they're pretty discriminate, okay, omnivorous. I mean in terms
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: of they want blood. But a lot of you get
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: whitefooted mice, you get short tailed shrews, you get possums, raccoons.
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: I mean, you know people in Georgia wildlife biologists I
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: talked to you, said, look, anything that has that moves
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: and has blood is fair game.
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: Got it?
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: So that tick, he's not drawn to dearness, no, no, no, no.
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: Okay, so that part of its life stage.
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: If he gets on your dog, a possum, a person,
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: that's all great by him.
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, And that's one of the reasons when they talk
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: about it. How do you get rid of these things?
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: You can't get rid of them, right, But what you
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: could do is drop the population dramatically, and that's where
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: deer coming because deer are both so overpopulated in such
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: incredible hosts. Right, There's just they're just so large and
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: could carry so many ticks, Like I said, five hundred
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: to one thousand in a season. You know, a mouse
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: you have four or five, maybe four or five ticks
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: on them, but a deer you have a hundred times
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: that number.
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: Got it?
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: You know, I always thought about reading about that, how
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: they kind of hang out wait for something to pass by.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: You wonder if if if.
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: Finding that host and latching onto something is successful is
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: essential to reproductive success.
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, and then they'll get their blood meal and then
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: they'll drop off it.
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: Would you imagine like the failure rate, right, the failure
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: rate's got to be enormous. I mean for everyone that
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: that happens to have a thing brush against it and
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: it gets on it. Yeah, he's got to have ninety
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: nine siblings.
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: Right. We never were in the right spot.
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: I mean dragging. We were dragging these these sheets through
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: these meadows on Martha's vineyard and you know, within an
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: hour and a half we had eighty one ticks on it,
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: you know, And it's a little stretch that we were doing.
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: It's about he goes tick dragging basically. So he just
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: has a big poll with a piece of white cotton
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: on it, like a meter by meter square, and he
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: just but it's not warm, it's not no, but the
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: it just the the ticks just latch on, you know,
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: they're just stretching out for something and it's moving and
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: they just get caught. And so suddenly and you pull
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: it up and it's just crawling all over the ship,
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: and you know, and he's catching eighty one in an
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: hour in a one hundred square feet under square.
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: Meaning if you went for an hour stroll.
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you're you're surrounded by ticks. And and of
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: course there are trillions across the planet, so it's like,
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: you know, there's plenty of food for them.
• 28:35
  Speaker 3: No, let me get to my line question.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: I was deep into the whole lime world thirteen years ago, Okay,
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: I always talk. It was very It was like a
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: formative experience for me. Man like my boy got he
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: got he had Bell's palls.
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: He was terrible.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: I was sick, like six sick and got better. And
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: while that was going on, and while I was very
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: like into the sort of like the culture of lime
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: lime disease. There was this raging debate, and I even
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: got to where I couldn't engage in it, you know,
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: of like what they call it, the sort of.
• 29:11
  Speaker 3: Perpetual lime or earth or whatever.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like untreatable or long haul lime or I can't
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: remember what it's called now, right, But this idea that
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: there were people out there that.
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: Had it, knew they had it, but it was untreatable, right,
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: and they just lived with it.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: But then people at that time, people in the medical
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: establishment that I encountered, infectious.
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: Disease people see DC people whatever, they.
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: Were dismissive of this idea. They're dismissive of that there's
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: like an untreatable lime. When I was treated, I did
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: the orals, I did the intravenous, right, I got sick
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: in June. I got better November after doing intravenous And
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: then do you know, oh, though, because you still live
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: in the area, in the hotbedtick area, Yeah, is there
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: still this idea that that there that there's a strain
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: of lime or there's people that have lime that cannot
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: be cured even with intravenous antibiotics. There's nothing that can
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: be done. And they're going to live the whole life
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: of lime, right.
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: I think it's a little bit lined like long COVID.
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: I think it's something that's kind of half accepted, but
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: we haven't pinned down exactly if how long it will lasts,
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: if it can really last forever. I mean, I've always
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: heard that if you really go all out with the
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: full rounds of multiple antibiotics, you can even get long
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: term line out. But you know, he's just talking this
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: morning to my my brother in law who's a doctor,
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: and he was saying, yeah, but you can get neurological damage.
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: There's things that can happen from not treating lime that
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: will stick with you. I do think it's that's a
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: scary thing about lime is it's it's as opposed to
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: alpha gal is. You know, it's curable, but then often
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: people don't know to cure it, and then by the
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: time they cure it, they've already had some deleterious effects.
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: So it's it's it's a it's a different kind of problem.
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: You know what, when you if you go way back
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: in time, you'd be like there's certain species like.
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: Apossums, raccoons.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: Was just throughout the last couple centuries, these things have
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: poured north and poured west, right, And it's some there's
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: definitely a climate component to it. There's a component too
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: that these things tend to be animals that that do
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: well around people, right, right, that that human activity opens
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: up range conditions or opens up habitat conditions. So so
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: in the absence of like like if Europeans have never
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: come to the New World and altered everything the way
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: we altered them, raccoons and possums might still have gone
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: north and west, but they might not have gone north
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: and west as much as they've gone north and west.
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: Meaning there's all.
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: These factors that lead to it, like probably mild like
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: milder winters.
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: Probably they have more predators.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, like predator reductions, probably agriculture probably like all
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: these things going into it suburban homes and trash practices
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: and leaving dog bowls out on your porch, and you
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: get this whole soup of things. And it's just undeniable
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: that these animals have had a great, very successful run
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: and have dramatically expanded the range.
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: When when we keep when we hear about that these
• 32:43
  Speaker 3: ticks are moving around, why now.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's yeah, exactly. I mean, it's and it's
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: the same combination of factors, right, It's it's not just
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: climate change. Certainly, climate change I think has allowed ticks
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: to move north and in some cases west, when if
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: it happens to have made some area more human, you know,
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: where they can handle better. But the bigger thing I
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: think is land use. If you look at the east,
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: you know, eastern United States, it's been reforested dramatically in
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: the last fifty years, you know, and not just that,
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: you've you've had people do that. At the same time,
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: you have suburbanization. You have these sub developments out in
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: out in the woods. You have this kind of sense
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: of what used to be, you know, inner city became
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: suburb and now you have kind of a kind of
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: sprawl that's sending its tendrils out deeper into the forest.
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: You get all these edge habitats that deer love, that
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: all the animals you're talking about love, and that ticks
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: then can ride on those hosts and proliferate. So we've
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: kind of created the perfect patchy, woody, brushy tick habitat
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: over the years along a lot of the Eastern United States.
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: Oh you know, when I when I first heard lone
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: star tick all the whatever the hell years ago. However
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: long ago, I know that we were doing this show,
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: like this podcast existed at the time I first heard
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: of the lone star tick. Well, in fact, let me
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: ask you when would've probably first heard the word lone
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: star tick.
• 34:12
  Speaker 3: You had to guess.
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: I mean, if you're in the South, it's been the
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: dominant tick for a long time. Like ninety percent of
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: tick bites are from loan star ticks. They've been used
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: to the lone star take more than a decade.
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for decades, So people were talking about loan star
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: ticks in the South long time.
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, for that most But you know, the interesting thing is,
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: like there was a study done. What we get our
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: alpha gal statistics is based on the study of blood
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: samples from military recruits, three thousand of them all over
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: the country. They were taken between two thousand and one
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: two thousand and seven, and they looked at the alpha
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: gal antibodies in those blood samples, Okay, and then they
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: kind of showed where there were most prevalence based on
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: where the recruits came from. Oh, that's fascinating, man, and
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: it's and it's amazing. If you look at the epicenter,
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: which is really like southeastern ok Home up through northeastern
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: northwestern Arkansas into south central Missouri. It's like forty seven
• 35:06
  Speaker 2: percent of those recruits had alpha GLE. Anybody's what forty
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: seven percent? And that was you know, that was fifteen
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: That was almost twenty years ago.
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: So I was late to the party on this, you're.
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: I mean, we all were. But in the South. The
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: interesting thing is in the south East, where they were endemic.
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: You know, the lone Star takes much more so than
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: I mean Arkansas, southern Arkansas, Oklahoma, they so that they
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: would have had it. But you know in places like
• 35:34
  Speaker 2: Martha's Viny Orhampton's they had just as high rates and
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: they didn't have endemic loan sartics. But in the Southeast
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: it was only ten percent of the recruits on average
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: had alpha gel. So something it makes you think that
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: people who grew up with this, or it's been for
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: decades or centuries, even there's probably some natural immunities no
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: kids built in you would think.
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that what that was leading me to it
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: doesn't really matter. But when I heard it, I thought
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: it meant that it was a tick that lived in Texas.
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: Oh right, right right.
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: I didn't know that, just like that click, and then
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: it realized, Oh no, because this guy like a lone star,
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: yeah right, like a star at it, right right, right right.
• 36:15
  Speaker 3: I thought it was like some Texas tick.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: And so it's just funny to think back of, like
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: when you first heard it. What clicked in my head
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: is like, there's this thing in Texas and I don't
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: really believe no, no, no, that was.
• 36:26
  Speaker 2: My first thought too. And it's and it's just that
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: white dot on the on the back, that's the only thing.
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: So so do you know how with lime, there's a
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: question of where it ever came from, Like you know,
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: there's an honest debate about where it came from. There's
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: a wildlife disease. You probably heard of, chronic wasting disease. Sure,
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: so chronic wasting disease was identified. I can't remember if
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: it was sixty eight or seventy two or it it
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: was identified in Colorado. What's not known is where did
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: it come from? Was that just when we identified it,
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: did they what you know, no one thinks that they
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: identified the first case, but then it seems to be
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: in many more places than it used to be but
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: prior to that, they weren't looking for it.
• 37:09
  Speaker 3: So there's this whole thing of like, what is it?
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: Where did it come from?
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: Was it always here and we just found out about
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: something that's always been here or did it somehow emerge
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: and we freakishly found it right when it emerged, Like.
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: You know, we don't know.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: Maybe someday we will know, as as as sort of
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: the genetic things and you know, improved, maybe we'll get
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: better clarity into it. But with alpha gal syndrome, since
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: it's a thing that's innately in the tick, why weren't dudes,
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: why when you're reading about the Civil War okay, and
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: they're they're dealing with malaria, why weren't people back then saying, oh,
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: did you hear? You know, little Johnny down the road
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: has developed the mysterious meat allergy, And me, why wasn't
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: that a conversation?
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: You know? I asked that question of every epidemiologist analogist
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: that I talked to, and they all said, at some level,
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: it's a mystery. I mean, you can explain it away
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: to some degree with the fact that it's late onset
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: and so people just didn't notice it. They misdiagnosed it.
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: You could say it's just you know, people didn't didn't
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: take it seriously somehow meat allergy didn't. But but the
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: truth is that it didn't just suddenly appear here. It
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: appeared in South Africa. There's huge cases in US half
• 38:29
  Speaker 2: afterc there's a bunch of stuff in Peru, there's people
• 38:31
  Speaker 2: in the in the Black Forest in Germany. You're starting
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: to get alpha get in all these places. No one
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: noticed it and it emerged around the same time. So yeah,
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: I mean it started to get identified between nineteen ninety
• 38:45
  Speaker 2: seven and two thousand and seven. Now, the first woman
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: who really is a woman, Cherylvin Ben Noonan, sorry, Cheryl
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: Cheryl van Noonan in Australia. Yeah, she was the first
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: person who really noticed the pattern in Australia. And she
• 39:02
  Speaker 2: had local people on the North Coast of Sydney who
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: were getting and where they have these crazy palystics. This
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: was she had her first cases I think in the
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: late eighties, and then she published a poster in two
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: thousand and three and presented it at a conference in
• 39:19
  Speaker 2: two thousand and seven.
• 39:20
  Speaker 3: Okay, and she.
• 39:21
  Speaker 2: Didn't know why it was causing it, but she knew
• 39:23
  Speaker 2: that the tick bite was causing a meat allergy. And
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: in Australia there has this crazy tick called the paralysis tick,
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: which can kill small children. I mean it's it has
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: this neurotoxin and that's what the spreads. It's a it's
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: a scary and it and it's the one that spreads
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: alpha gel. So she first noticed it, but then pretty
• 39:44
  Speaker 2: soon you had German researchers, you'd you know, people in
• 39:48
  Speaker 2: Southeast and Korea. I mean, it's really all over the globe.
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: I want to hit you with a thing that I
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: need to make it know what myself I need to
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: ask you about. I don't want to call it conspiracy
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: theory a theory. You know I'm going with this, sure, Okay,
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: we'll get to it. Let me hate you with something though.
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: A way I think about this kind of thing, like
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: why weren't dudes a long time ago developing meat allergies.
• 40:09
  Speaker 3: So my little boy, my.
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: Younger boy, developed this condition called osteo chondritis dice cans
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: they call OCD. Well, it's funny is he's around on
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: when he was going through this. He's around on crutches,
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: Like I remember getting out a plane with him the
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: pilots greeting people, and he's like, why appen to you?
• 40:30
  Speaker 3: My boy says I have OCD.
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: So I had to follow behind him be like it's
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: his whole other it dice skins. It seems what it
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: is is a little bits of the cartilage, little bits
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: of the cartilage, and you're joint die and fall off. Yeah, okay,
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: he got it weirdly, but not weirdly. It's weird to
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: get it in one leg. It's it's it's weirder, but
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: not twice as weird to get it in two legs.
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: It apologies to any people that specialize this and unscrewening
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: parts of us up. But there is a genetic predisposition
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: aspect to it, and there's also.
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: A use aspect to it.
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: So he likes soccer and basketball and all that kind
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: of stuff, so that probably complicates and he has this
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: thing happened.
• 41:18
  Speaker 3: We dismissed him because he'd.
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: Be like, something's wrong on my knee. My knee hurts
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: all the time. He's always talking about his knees, or
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: he's laying on the floor of me. My leg won't work.
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: Why do you mean your leg won't work? And he'd
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: be like oh there it goes okay, not hurting, but
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: just observing this and was like, what are you talking about?
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: You get a max RAYD doesn't do any good because
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: the X ray doesn't show, doesn't reveal this. You got
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: to do an MRI to find out that you have it.
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: So Loan Bold he has. He gets these couple surgeries.
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: My wife brings him to a specialist and he's all
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: fine now, but check this out. My mom's dad. Okay,
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: Grandpa Glenn just had bad knees, do you know what
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: I mean? It was it was a fact of Grandpa
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: Glenn's life, didn't no one. It was just you know,
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: Grandpa Glenn, He's always had bad neees. Yeah, And I
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: don't have any reason to think, but I'm like, I
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: wonder if that dude, yeah, just had this thing that
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: our little boy has going on.
• 42:16
  Speaker 3: But it was just that he has bad neees. Yeah, yeah, right.
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: No one's good to do anything about it. They're not
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: gonna MRI. Grandpa Glenn seventy years ago. Now, it was
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: just like it was just the deal. You know, he's
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: hurt all the time.
• 42:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that was a question I asked, is
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: it could it be that we just have always had this,
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: and we used to ignore it and everybody said, no,
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: oh really, it's just there's just it's too severe and
• 42:38
  Speaker 2: it's too and it's been this too big a surge,
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: you know. I think the other thing you can say
• 42:44
  Speaker 2: that speaks to what you're talking about, though, is that
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: you know, there's been an allergy epidemic in this country
• 42:49
  Speaker 2: in the last fifty years. I mean food allergies have
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: doubled and doubled again, right, And some of it is
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: because ours just give us the wrong advice, you know,
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: stay away from allergenic foods, your kid, our peanuts and
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: all that kind of stuff. So we're absolutely more prone
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: to allergies than we used to be. So that's probably
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: a big part of this. And there are all kinds
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: of theories, is that we're you know, hygiene hygiene hypothesis,
• 43:13
  Speaker 2: that we're living too cleanly, we're not developing, you know,
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: we're not allowed developing anybody's when we're young enough, or
• 43:19
  Speaker 2: our our gut biome isn't good enough kids. Yeah, all
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: those things. There's this right, right, there's this one epithelial
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: barrier hypothesis, which says that that the chemicals we use
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: and the and they're in the air, are making are
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: kind of making us more poorous to allergens. You know,
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: they're like weakening the things that protect us in our
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: skin and our lungs and so where it's more easy
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: for allergens to get into our bodies. So there's all
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: kinds of hypothes but we do know.
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: Sure, I thought people about this, and like people in
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: the know, in the know wish who are like, like,
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: I don't know what we.
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: Had out of Okay, A couple of years ago, we had.
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: A couple of years ago when he was when he
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: was running for president, we had RFK Junior on He's
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: talk about allergens and things, and he was talking about
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: when these allergens exploded in these.
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: Different areas where.
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: He's he's like, we don't, I don't know when people
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: look at the timeline, like what are big shifts that
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: happened societally? Right, And he was a point to anyone,
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: but he's like, you go and be like what what
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: things really happened in humanity and you'd be the explosion
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: of corn syrup, M.
• 44:37
  Speaker 3: Cellular and cellular networks.
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: All these are things like like medical practices just kind
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: of things you're talking about like like what could have
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: what sort of thing could have happened? It would be
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: in my lifetime where things just got different, And out
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: of it came a lot of where we see like
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: why did childhood o BC do whatever? Why has autism
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: done whatever? Why allergy rates done whatever? And is there
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: something we missed?
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: Well?
• 45:04
  Speaker 2: I mean I talked to this guy, Jeff Wilson at
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: the University of Virginia. He's done a lot of really
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: good alpha al research and one thing he talks about is, look,
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: tick bites of all kinds just boost antibody levels across
• 45:19
  Speaker 2: the board, right, And the interesting thing is that you
• 45:23
  Speaker 2: can have really high antibody levels and not have any allergies,
• 45:27
  Speaker 2: and weird things can trigger it, like stress can trigger it.
• 45:30
  Speaker 3: Okay, you can.
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: Get this called called chronic carry ititis or something I
• 45:36
  Speaker 2: got the name wrong, But where you have these sudden
• 45:39
  Speaker 2: flare ups of hives or rashes, you know, and you've
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: had this kind of baseline of antibodies in your blood
• 45:46
  Speaker 2: the whole time and something is triggering it. You know,
• 45:49
  Speaker 2: it could be exercised, it can be alcohol, and we
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: know those things can trigger alergic reactions. Faster exercise exercise
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: and alcohol. You know, like in one German study for
• 45:57
  Speaker 2: alpha gel, they know that people had alpha gala antibodies
• 46:02
  Speaker 2: and they wanted to feed the meat to see if
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: it would trigger it. But they weren't getting into good
• 46:08
  Speaker 2: enough reaction. So they gave them some beer to drink
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: and uh and put them on treadmills, and then they
• 46:13
  Speaker 2: got a higher reaction.
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: And my body that I was top big exercise guy,
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: big beer guy.
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, No, those two things together you're more likely
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: to get triggered. So, you know, so he was saying,
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: you know, we can't necessarily like it's not a pure
• 46:30
  Speaker 2: cause and effect. You know, sometimes we have all the
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: working materials, but it doesn't happen unless some other outside
• 46:36
  Speaker 2: factor comes in.
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: I hesitated to go there, but let's go there on
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: this area. So I'm gonna treat this. I'm gonna treat
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: this with all due respect.
• 46:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah. God, I'm not gonna lead the witness. I'm not
• 46:50
  Speaker 3: gonna do an eye roll. It is.
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: It has been thrown out there. Yeah, even by people
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: within my social circle. It's been thrown out there. Were
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: would they look at as they say, how did why
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: did these big.
• 47:05
  Speaker 3: The emergence of these big VC backed meat.
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: Alternative companies, Beyond Meat whatever, all that ship you know,
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: fake burgers.
• 47:15
  Speaker 3: Right. The emergence of all these like high power VC backed.
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: Meatless products coincided with the explosion in Alpha Gel, right,
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: and they're like they're trying to create customers.
• 47:32
  Speaker 3: In the dirties in the dirtiest way possible. Did you
• 47:36
  Speaker 3: run into this? Did you have people share this idea
• 47:39
  Speaker 3: with you?
• 47:39
  Speaker 2: Oh? Absolutely? And in fact, what I.
• 47:41
  Speaker 3: Was like, how was it explained to you?
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 47:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean I mean Bill Gates was a
• 47:45
  Speaker 2: bad guy in that story, right. It was like he's invested,
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: I think, in in alternatives to meet and he the
• 47:52
  Speaker 2: Gates Foundation has has paid for or funded genetically engineering
• 47:59
  Speaker 2: ticks and genetically engineering vaccines for cattle with you know,
• 48:03
  Speaker 2: to offend off tics. And so there was this idea
• 48:06
  Speaker 2: that well maybe something got out of the lab.
• 48:09
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: The problem is one you know, the Gates Foundation didn't
• 48:15
  Speaker 2: work with lone Stars. It was you know, but to
• 48:17
  Speaker 2: the timelines don't match up, right, Like like we started
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: to see Alpha GAL. I mean it's been around, but
• 48:24
  Speaker 2: we know it's been around since at least the nineties.
• 48:26
  Speaker 2: You know that people have been getting it on fake
• 48:28
  Speaker 2: and no one was making those fake burgs, and we
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: started to get the real explosion before the fake burger
• 48:34
  Speaker 2: industry came around.
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: What struck me is it struck me as an imprecise, expensive,
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: extremely risky right marketing right strategy? Yeah yeah, like like
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: really risky. Like you thought like when Coke changed their
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: recipe they made new coke. Yeah right, you thought that
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: was called its consumer backlash. Imagine when the word gets
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: out you've created disease and spread it all around the country. No, no, no,
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: that is gonna be hard on your soy burgers. Yeah yeah, yeah, business.
• 49:12
  Speaker 2: No, I have to say, like to me, I don't
• 49:14
  Speaker 2: think it holds water either, But I think the lime
• 49:17
  Speaker 2: disease conspiracy theory is much more convincing.
• 49:20
  Speaker 3: Hit me with that one.
• 49:21
  Speaker 2: Well that was the idea.
• 49:22
  Speaker 3: I wanted to ask you about this because Willi.
• 49:24
  Speaker 2: Bergdorf for the guy that the bacterium that causes lime
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: disease called Barellia burgdorfi, and that is named after Willi
• 49:31
  Speaker 2: Bergdorf for discovered in nineteen eighty one, I think and
• 49:35
  Speaker 2: he you know, he worked for the military doing uh
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: you know, what do you call it? Bioengineering tics? And bioweaponary.
• 49:48
  Speaker 2: It was an idea that you could air drop infected
• 49:50
  Speaker 2: ticks onto enemy populations and they actually looked at and
• 49:54
  Speaker 2: you know, infecting ticks and using him as a weapon.
• 49:57
  Speaker 2: You know, so that work was actually done.
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not questioning that's true. But what does
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: that then do for when your forces are occupying that area? Yeah,
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: it's like it's some of that stuff is insane.
• 50:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but I'm not taking that.
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: I mean it's serious, like it's a real true It's like,
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: how do they not go? But hold on a minute,
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: because after we win, we're going to kind of need
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: to go there.
• 50:19
  Speaker 2: Right well, and then yeah, yeah, no.
• 50:22
  Speaker 3: It makes it's like it's like insanity.
• 50:26
  Speaker 2: No, no, no, it makes no, I mean an you know.
• 50:27
  Speaker 2: And it's so that narrative made a certain kind of
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: cracked logic, you know. But the truth is that again
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: that the idea was there, that the genetic engineered the
• 50:39
  Speaker 2: bacterium that that causes lime. But the truth is, you know,
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: lime does. He's predated that discovery and predated his work,
• 50:47
  Speaker 2: and the earliest examples of that bacterium we find are
• 50:51
  Speaker 2: in museum collections of mice from eighteen ninety four that
• 50:54
  Speaker 2: already had that bacterium.
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: So it's your kid, I don't know.
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: It was more than a century before this thing came around,
• 50:59
  Speaker 2: you know. So it's again it doesn't hold water, but
• 51:02
  Speaker 2: it's it's a you can see why people would be
• 51:05
  Speaker 2: into it on the internet. It sounds like a kind
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: of logic, you know.
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, It's like we used to joke where we talked
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: about friends of ours. You know, you'd be sitting around
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: top of a stuff like this, and we'd have friends
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: where we felt that most the information did they traffic
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: in would be information you'd get if you typed into
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: Google the truth if you prefaced your searches with the
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: truth about.
• 51:30
  Speaker 3: If you said the truth about blank, I'd be like
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: that information right right.
• 51:35
  Speaker 2: Well, the problem is it's always most convincing and effective
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: when it's eighty percent right, when the science behind it
• 51:41
  Speaker 2: is actually kind of true. They're just missing some crucial
• 51:44
  Speaker 2: piece of it that that invalidates the whole thing.
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, are they able to go in that I didn't
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: know that about, like finding those old like mice and
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: museum collections and stuff. Is there a marker where you
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: could go in and you could find I don't know,
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: and like, like you go back and find in in
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: in historic lone star tick country that you could take
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: some remains.
• 52:10
  Speaker 3: From someone.
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: And look for and look for.
• 52:14
  Speaker 3: The Yeah, I don't know.
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: Maybe maybe out of this without soft tissue, Yeah you know,
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: I mean and go and sort of get some idea.
• 52:21
  Speaker 3: But maybe you can't do that.
• 52:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. That'd be interesting forensic work. I mean,
• 52:24
  Speaker 2: the guy that did that work with the with the
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: with the lime disease is Professor Telford at Tufts And
• 52:30
  Speaker 2: I don't but I don't know if they've looked into
• 52:31
  Speaker 2: into ancient alpha get yet.
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: But yeah, what when you were working on this, what
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: other are there other you know, we talked so much
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: about line we talk about alpha gel when you looked
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: at this, are there other tickborn pathogens that that we're
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: going to be hearing about like in ten years that
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: they're just talking about now, Like what's on the horizon.
• 52:52
  Speaker 2: Well, the the big thing that a lot of the
• 52:55
  Speaker 2: veterinarians and and and lifestock folks were talking about was
• 52:59
  Speaker 2: screw arms, certainly, but also the Asian longhorn tick carries
• 53:03
  Speaker 2: a deadly disease I forget the name of it. But
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: it's but it's starting to spread and it's in I
• 53:08
  Speaker 2: think twenty four states.
• 53:09
  Speaker 3: Now, well, that's not even a tick from this continent.
• 53:12
  Speaker 2: No, no, no, it's I think it was first identified
• 53:15
  Speaker 2: in New Jersey about twenty years ago or fifteen years oh,
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: and it's already spreading all across the country. So that's
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: that's the thing people are really worried about.
• 53:25
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 53:25
  Speaker 2: The interesting thing is like, if you look at the
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: statistics for the number of people catching these things, you
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: know bybeziosis can kill you, kosa can kill you. Where
• 53:34
  Speaker 2: are those two familiar I think babiziosis is. I'm like,
• 53:38
  Speaker 2: I want to I don't get this wrong. I think
• 53:40
  Speaker 2: that's a parasite born one, but I'm not sure. But
• 53:42
  Speaker 2: it's it causes terrible chills, and it can. But those
• 53:47
  Speaker 2: are such small percentages compared to lime and alpha gal.
• 53:50
  Speaker 2: I mean, lime is ten times as prevalent as they
• 53:53
  Speaker 2: are and alpha gal I mean, the most recent tracking
• 53:56
  Speaker 2: data from Virginia this year, the number of people who
• 54:01
  Speaker 2: are reporting alpha gal, the blood tests that are reporting
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: alphagal positive, it's ten times as high as of people
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: with BLME disease. So it's normally spreading at a huge rate.
• 54:11
  Speaker 2: So it's a different scale that we're talking about with
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: those two diseases.
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: Are they are they closing in on any are they
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: closing in on any treatment?
• 54:20
  Speaker 3: Like if it's like if it's some like allergen, you know.
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know for thing about any
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: of this, and I just want to be surprised to
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: hear it that someone's like, oh, you know, we've come
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: up with some I don't know treatment. Yeah, it makes
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: it that your body doesn't trip out about alpha gall anymore.
• 54:36
  Speaker 2: Well, there there's three or four things. One is what
• 54:38
  Speaker 2: you talked about. We just go off meat and dairy
• 54:42
  Speaker 2: and it gradually drops. Another one is there's a there's
• 54:46
  Speaker 2: a drug called zolar XO l a i R that
• 54:50
  Speaker 2: was improved for asthma originally and it's since been approved
• 54:53
  Speaker 2: for food allergies in a broadway and it's been pretty effective. Mean,
• 54:58
  Speaker 2: it's expensive, but you're insuring can pay for it. But
• 55:01
  Speaker 2: people who have had an anphylectic shock from who are
• 55:04
  Speaker 2: really in danger of alpha gl reactions often get prescribed
• 55:08
  Speaker 2: this this this professor Scott Commons at the University of
• 55:12
  Speaker 2: North Carolina that I spoke to he's really one of
• 55:14
  Speaker 2: the guys who was one of the earliest discoverers and
• 55:16
  Speaker 2: is really spearheaded. He's he prescribes out a lot to
• 55:20
  Speaker 2: people and it and people have found you're not really
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: supposed to take it regularly. It's supposed to be but
• 55:26
  Speaker 2: but it seems to be safe and people have found
• 55:28
  Speaker 2: they can really eat meat on it in some cases.
• 55:31
  Speaker 2: So it's it's that's that's one possibility Commons is looking
• 55:36
  Speaker 2: at at a potential drug that might attack you know,
• 55:40
  Speaker 2: he has some some good leads for for drug development.
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: Scott Commons is the guy at the University of North Carolina.
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: And then I've I know there's some work being done
• 55:49
  Speaker 2: in I think University Arizona on on on vaccines that
• 55:53
  Speaker 2: that that could maybe maybe the idea is there's some
• 55:56
  Speaker 2: common denominator of all these tick born illnesses, something cofactor
• 56:01
  Speaker 2: that's making people react and if we can somehow neutralize that,
• 56:06
  Speaker 2: you know, maybe we can prevent we can prevent some
• 56:09
  Speaker 2: of these diseases. So there's lots of ways things people
• 56:12
  Speaker 2: are looking at. The other thing that's non pharmaceutical that
• 56:17
  Speaker 2: a lot of people told me is effective is what's
• 56:20
  Speaker 2: called auricular acupuncture. Auricular a U R I c U
• 56:25
  Speaker 2: l A R and that means around the ear, and
• 56:28
  Speaker 2: it's when you know, and it sounds woo woo.
• 56:31
  Speaker 3: But I've already dismissed it. But tell me, you know,
• 56:34
  Speaker 3: the thing.
• 56:34
  Speaker 2: About acupuncture is that it's actually one of those alternative
• 56:38
  Speaker 2: medicines that has They've had double blind trial and they've
• 56:41
  Speaker 2: had trials that have shown its effectiveness. And when I
• 56:44
  Speaker 2: talked to Commons about it, he said, look, I'm analogist.
• 56:47
  Speaker 2: This is not my thing, but in some ways it
• 56:49
  Speaker 2: makes a lot of sense to me. Because there's the
• 56:52
  Speaker 2: vegas nerves. Nerve goes up there around your ear, and
• 56:55
  Speaker 2: it goes down into your gut, and the mass tells
• 56:59
  Speaker 2: that are action to alpha gal they're down in your gut.
• 57:02
  Speaker 2: And so if you have something that you can somehow
• 57:05
  Speaker 2: modulate the reaction of those nerves to that, to that allergen,
• 57:10
  Speaker 2: that could explain a lot. I mean, he was telling me, Look,
• 57:13
  Speaker 2: my son is allergic to walnuts. If he eats a walnut,
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: within seconds, he's got a reaction. He said, Nothing else
• 57:21
  Speaker 2: in the body moves that fast except for nerves. That
• 57:24
  Speaker 2: has to have a neural connection.
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: You know, Yes, it's not like going through your digestive tracked.
• 57:32
  Speaker 2: Signals are shooting instantly. So he said, right right, it
• 57:37
  Speaker 2: makes sense to me that that there would be something
• 57:40
  Speaker 2: that's modulating your nerve nervous, that's an that's doing it.
• 57:43
  Speaker 2: And I talked to a few people who'd had you know,
• 57:45
  Speaker 2: that kind of treatment, given it to their children, and
• 57:47
  Speaker 2: it had good effects, you know that actually were able
• 57:50
  Speaker 2: to eat meat again.
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: So I'll tell you what my like, I don't want
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: to get it, but I thought about it, and I
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: thought like, if I got it, I would hunt turkeys
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: and fish like a madman. It would be a real
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: like I wouldn't really change my general way of going
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: about life.
• 58:10
  Speaker 3: I would just really shift. I mean, I would use it.
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: I would just be like, Okay, all the energy I
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: normally spend and getting deer meat and all that, right,
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: I was gonna get turkeys.
• 58:20
  Speaker 3: I don't know.
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: Fish right right, And I kind of I used to
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: live in for the first couple of years, I lived
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: in this fear of it, right, So I'm like, oh,
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: it'd be like so ironic, like I got it.
• 58:29
  Speaker 2: You know, here's the problem with that. It's not just
• 58:36
  Speaker 2: you're not totally protected, right, because one, you're still getting
• 58:39
  Speaker 2: tick bites probably right, so your your sensitivity might still
• 58:43
  Speaker 2: go higher. And and if your sensitivity goes higher, even
• 58:47
  Speaker 2: if you're eating fish and birds, right, suddenly you might
• 58:51
  Speaker 2: become sensitive to things like the geltin capsules around iboprofen,
• 58:56
  Speaker 2: which is made with collagen from beef, or you know,
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: the lanolin in a in since skin cream, or or
• 59:01
  Speaker 2: the or the the lactasees and lac tape products and
• 59:06
  Speaker 2: toothpaste you get oh really they get that. Bad people
• 59:10
  Speaker 2: get it. And then and then the worst ones are
• 59:12
  Speaker 2: you going to get surgery and they give you heparin,
• 59:15
  Speaker 2: which is a blood thinner, and it's made with with
• 59:19
  Speaker 2: with animal products, or you get insulin, or you get
• 59:22
  Speaker 2: anti vent and if you get bitten by a snake,
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: it's made with I think horses blood.
• 59:26
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 59:27
  Speaker 2: Just it's kind of if you get sensitive enough, if
• 59:31
  Speaker 2: you're out there hunting your.
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: Well, like the yeah, they carry ticks. Turkey hunting is
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: the most tick is the most tick bitten thing you
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: could do on the planet. Right, I mean doing everything
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: a tick wants you to do, right, crawling into the
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: grass and just sitting there for.
• 59:46
  Speaker 2: A lot, right, Yeah, you're where the ticks want to be.
• 59:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good point.
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: You know, it's funny you mentioned that about all other
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: stuff that has animal protein in it.
• 59:55
  Speaker 3: We got a we got a dear friend, her daughter.
• 59:59
  Speaker 3: Her daughter's vegetarian. You know, she's over my house eating
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 3: the marshmallow you're camping. And I said, I said, I
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: understand your vegetarian, but you know that marshmallows got what
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 3: do they call it, what stuff in there? Yeah?
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so that marshmallow's got animal gelating in it. So
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: what what's what do you make of that? I guess
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: I'm a vegetarian that eats marshmallows.
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 2: Oh word, I mean they were telling me. I mean
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 2: there are people and again this gets into the kind
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 2: of psychosomatic stuff, but there are people who told me, look,
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 2: I can't even drink bottled water because it's made with
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 2: bone charts, purified with bone chart How is that going
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 2: to leave anti alpha get in the water? I mean
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 2: it feels like a step too far. But you start
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 2: to get these psychosmatic reactions and.
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 3: The other stuff. Yeah there's stuff legitimate, yeah yeah yeah.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: So uh, like, how how do you spend like how
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: do you spend your life now, I mean you do
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: these big, well reported pieces. Do you have days when
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: I mean is that the main is that the main
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: thing you do? Do you have other kind of annoying
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: stuff you got to do throughout the day or you
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: just you just write, like you just work on your
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: writing and you write.
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 2: No, I just I'm I write full time. But that means,
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 2: you know, like right now, I'm in a in a
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 2: in a phase when I'm gathering my next story idea.
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 2: So I'm sending emails to researchers around the world, and
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 2: I'm and I'm reading scientific papers and I'm you know,
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 2: calling friends who have leads for things, and you know,
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 2: and that takes several weeks and then I'm in the
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 2: reporting phase and the writing phase is actually probably you know,
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 2: just the last third of it.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, tell me how much time you spent like take
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: the take the the al Fa gel.
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 3: Paper or article. How much time did you spend on that? Well?
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 2: I went out to Missouri to start the reporting in
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 2: late March, like the twentieth of March and this, and
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 2: I was done with the thing the twentieth of June.
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: So what is that three months? So three months and
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 2: that was fairly.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 3: Compressed, and that was the one thing you were working.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 2: On, the only thing I was working on. Yeah, you know,
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 2: but I went I went to Missouri, went to Arkansas,
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 2: I went to North Carolina, went to Virginia, went to
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 2: Martha's vineyard. I talk to people all over the country,
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 2: so you know, it becomes like a big I mean,
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: part of the thing I felt about Alpha gle was it.
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 2: There have been lots of stories about it, little piecemeal stories, sure,
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: but no one had done the kind of the whole thing.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 2: And that's what I love to do with the New Yorkers.
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 2: They give me nine thousand words, and I can talk
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 2: about the history of it, and I can talk about
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 2: the epidemiology of it. I can talk about the allergae epidemic,
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 2: and I can talk about all these dimensions. And the
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 2: great thing about Alpha gal is it really it touches
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 2: on all that stuff, like the ecology, the history of
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 2: our country's landscape. You know, all that stuff ties into
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 2: this story.
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for listeners, Burkhard just said, a nine thousand word article,
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah that is that's a doozy.
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a that's long form reporting.
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: And most people, if you're if you're sitting there reading,
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: you know, newspaper whatever, and you're reading what you probably
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: think of as a long story.
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 3: You're probably reading like twelve hundred words, right right, you know.
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: You think of like a classic glossy magazine magazine feature.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: Those usually run like like I used to write for
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: Outside and like a big, a big one, a doozy
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: and Outside was four thousand right right, four thousand words. Yeah,
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: so nine thousand is well, I'll put it in perspective
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: this way.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 3: There's a hell of a lot of books. There's a
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 3: hell of a lot of books.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: That are seventy thousand words, right, you know, a lot
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: of books come in around one hundred thousand words. You
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: can get away with seventy thousand words. So when you're
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: doing this piece, you're writing like a seventh.
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 3: Or a tenth. Yeah, yeah, you're your piece on these
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 3: tics is a seventh or.
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: A tenth of a book. Yeah, yeah, which is it's
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: a hefty chunk, it's.
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 2: A heavy chub and it you know, and it's a
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 2: I mean, not to dig too much into into the craft,
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 2: but it's kind of it's it's a challenge, which I love,
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 2: you know, like how do you keep all these threads.
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 2: How do you how do you keep the reader interested?
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 2: And is there are there enough dimensions to any given
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 2: topic to really merit that kind of thing, because I
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 2: don't want to. I mean, back in the day New
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 2: Yorker had, there was once a famous I think in
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 2: the seventies or early eighties, there was a pro It
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: was just four ten thousand word pieces on each one
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 2: was on a different kind of grain, you know, and
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 2: you know this week wheat, you know, and and you know,
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 2: And I don't think Americans readers have that kind of
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 2: patience anymore.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 3: No, But that's where the good stuff is. Man.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I do love those kind of deep dives. I mean,
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 2: you know, Joseph Mitchell, my favorite New Yorker writer from
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 2: the thirties, forties, fifties, He you know, he sometimes wouldn't
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 2: get to the to the nutcraft, to the main point
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 2: of the article for three or four thousand words. You know,
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 2: he would be like setting the scene, introducing you, and
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 2: it wouldn't be untill pretty deep in before you really
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 2: knew you're what you were going to write read about.
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: I knew a guy he passed away. He was a
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: right here in Montana. Brian de Salvatore. He did a
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: little work for The New Yorker. I remember it was
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: it was phenomenal. He did a ten thousand word piece
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: on the history of dynamite called Vehement fire Man.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 3: Read that everyone to know about dynama, right.
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 2: Right, and was no Bell invented it?
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was the whole.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: Story, like picking up pig and shit and getting guana.
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: It's just the whole history of explosives.
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, But I don't know, I not.
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: I don't want to say I miss it because it
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: still exists, but it's not as prevalent in American culture
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: as like these like very informative deep dive pieces. I
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: want to I want to ask you about one of
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: the one of the pieces you wrote, and it was
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: the one I brought up earlier when I first discovered you,
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: you know.
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 3: Twenty six years ago, twenty seven years ago, and there's
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 3: your piece on cock fighting, right, Do you feel that
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 3: you'd be able to do that?
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: Do you feel that you would be that you'd be
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: able to write that piece today?
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 3: Mind me? Why not?
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 2: Because of what's constraints?
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: Just so because it would be like it would just
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: get such a reaction. Yeah, regardless of what you said
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it would get such a reaction. Yeah,
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: yeah about.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 3: You know, like a like I don't even talk about that.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 3: That's so mean, right right, right, do you know?
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: I mean, like, no matter what your take on it is,
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: it just be like not a thing people wanted to
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: talk about.
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I think the New Yorker would still publish that piece.
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 2: I think part of the reason was, you know, as
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 2: you remember that, part of the point that was piece
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 2: was you know, we have we have this aversion to cockfying,
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 2: this revulsion. We as a culture, we've decided this is
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 2: not okay.
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 3: You know where did that come from?
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think it came from early I mean,
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 2: you know, there was there was some real terrible things
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 2: about nineteenth century, like women wearing whole birds on their heads,
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 2: you know, the whole species of beautiful birds were decimated.
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 2: And then the animal rights movement came out of that
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 2: or conservation. I mean, there was a lot of really
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 2: important work that got done to kind of stop the cruelty.
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 2: But you know what we got instead was you know,
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 2: industrial meat production, you know, and and you look at
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 2: part of what I was trying to say was look,
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 2: We have these urban values now where we are revolted
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 2: by cock fighting, you know, and we think of it
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 2: as cruel. But when you look at the life of
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 2: a chicken, right, would you rather be a fighting cock
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 2: that has its own beautiful cage, it gets literally massaged
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 2: every day, that gets the best feed, that gets exercise
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 2: equipment in his cage, and that lives a year or
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 2: two years and goes out fighting. Or would you rather
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 2: be a factory chicken? They get six weeks and then
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 2: gets buldled onto a conveyor belt, hung from a running chain,
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 2: zapped with a bolt of lightning, and had its throat
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: cut by a rodary. So I mean, which life is
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 2: a better life? Yeah? And yet and as urbanites, as
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 2: modern Americans, we've gotten used to being blind to the
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 2: you know, shrink wrapped chicken looks abstract sitting in our supermarket.
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 2: But oh boy, you show someone killing a chicken, or
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 2: you think about someone watching a kit and chicken fighting,
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 2: and that's appalling to us, you know, which is more appalling?
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 2: So that was kind of the point in the way,
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 2: it was to kind of flip all that inside out
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 2: a bit.
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 3: And you when you worked on that, you went to
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 3: some cockfights in the South.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 2: Went to a bunch of them. Yeah, yeah, I mean,
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 2: And honestly, there were cockfights that I almost kind of admired,
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 2: and there are cockfights that I did find appalling.
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: Was it common? And the ones you went to, I
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: can't remember. Were they putting the blades on them?
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 2: They were putting blades on them? Yeah, I mean, admires
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 2: the wrong word. But I went to some local small
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 2: what they call brush pits, cockpits, but brushpits. There's small
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 2: pits in Louisiana. And you know, you go there at
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 2: midnight or at one in the morning, and you're thinking,
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 2: because you've been told by all the anti cockfighting folks
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 2: that these places are dense of iniquity, drinking and drugs
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 2: and gambling, you know, and then you and you go
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 2: there one in the morning, you think, shit, you know,
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 2: I'm an out out of town or I don't know
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 2: what's going to happen. And you walk in and it's
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 2: a it's a little cage with some bleacher seats around it.
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 2: And there the first night I went there, two nursing
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 2: mothers sitting on the front row with their babies. They're
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 2: their kids running around up and down, the aisles. You know,
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 2: you had whole families. It was like Friday or Saturday
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 2: night in the country and this is what they did,
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 2: you know, and yeah, it's bloody and that. But the
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 2: chickens are also at some level those chickens weren't. You know,
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 2: you get some bad stuff, you know, you get chickens
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 2: that are injected with drugs, you get you know, poisons
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 2: put on their on their blades, you get some bad stuff.
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 2: But in those in those cases, it was it was
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 2: kind of an old tradition. Abraham Lincoln was a cockfighting referee.
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 2: George Washington went to cockfights. Oh yeah, there were, you know,
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 2: and the accent supposedly had cockfights in the Oval Office,
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 2: you know, in the White House. I don't know if
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 2: the Oval Office and I have my period wrong, but
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 2: you know.
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: So.
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 2: It's it's it was an old tradition, and then it's
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 2: and then now it's no long The cockpits that I
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 2: the cockpits that I thought were kind of awful were
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 2: the really big ones where you go, like I was
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 2: one on the border on the Arkansas border Oklahoma border,
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 2: and the weekend I went, there were nine hundred chickens fighting.
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 2: And you know, and those birds, and that was just
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 2: a pure betting scene, you know. And their birds are getting,
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 2: they're getting these big blades on them, they're going in,
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 2: they're tearing each other apart. People are betting on them
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 2: and they're a getting. And you walked around backstage at
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 2: those places and they were just trash cans filled with these.
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 3: Dead bus This is clandestine, you know. In Louisiana.
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 2: It wasn't when I went in two thousand. It was
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 2: still legal. Now in two thousand and eight it became
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 2: illegal in the whole country, and in twenty eighteen even
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 2: the territory, even Puerto Rico and Guam it's illegal. So
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 2: it's become So it was still legal in a couple
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 2: of places when I went.
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: One of the most brilliant accidental things that ever had
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: to be traveling. I was in the Southern Philippines. It
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: was actually time, It was actually times after the nine
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: to eleven attacks. It was kind of like dicey down
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: in the south, in the Southern Philippines. But I was
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: down there and lucked into a cock fight and spent
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: hours there just I was just blown away by what
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: kind of a place was it.
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 3: It looked like a like a if.
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: You if you didn't know where you were and you're
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: driving by, you'd think it was a small like a
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: county fairground, right with overhead open open walls, overhead covered bleachers.
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: But they had this thing I remember most many and
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: this is the difference between like a place like the
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: Philippines and a place like America. Probably they had this
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: big cauldron, big boiling cauldron, and every guy, everybody won
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: their cock lost in a fight, they'd go over to
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: that cauldron and pluck it.
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 3: Mm so they don't it, pluck it.
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: Dress it and just all day right watching guys walk
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: off down the road carrying pluck and they're eat that,
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: like carrying plucked roosters, right but right right home to eat.
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: It was like it was just brilliant to see it, man, Like,
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: it was just amazing to see it.
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 2: Well that was the waste in in that big pit.
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 2: Was like all those birds are so injected with weird stuff,
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 2: you can't eat them, right, And it was a big
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 2: tradition in Louisiana. You'd make it so stable picante, you know,
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 2: like this spicy sauce and you would and you would
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 2: eat your rooster that died after it was part of
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 2: the ceremony, part of the tradition, you know. And I
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 2: think once all these things happened with drugs, that kind
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 2: of fell away. So that's that's part of what's what
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 2: was lost is.
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 3: The world you've covered back then.
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: Okay, when you did that, when you do your cockfight piece,
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: that world's gone.
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 2: That I mean, I think there's still lots of clandestine
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 2: cock Yeah, I think there still are, but I think
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 2: it's definitely gone. And I mean even when I was reporting,
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 2: you know, in New York it's been illegal for decades,
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 2: but there there was a big bust in Harlem while
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 2: I was riding that piece, and there was an old
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 2: theater that had been turned into a cockpit, you know.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 2: And I know that in Brooklyn there's you know, there's Centeria.
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of Caribbean cultures and so there's there's
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 2: cock fights going on.
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 3: And you see fighting cocks in New Mexico.
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, lots of they.
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 3: Oh we just keep.
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: I used to have this. I used to have this driver.
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: I would use a lot. He was Dominican and he
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: I was going to go to d R with him.
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: He had like weirdly this dude had a family, meaning
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: he had a wife and kids in d R. He
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: had a wife and kids in the US, and they
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: knew about each other.
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 2: Wow, okay, Yeah, anyways.
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 3: He'd bounced back and forth.
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: I had this whole plan where I was going to
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: go with him to d R and he was gonna
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: take me to a cock fight.
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 3: I never went.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: My wife's like that sounds like just the worst ie
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: you've ever had, But I never I never actually did it.
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 3: But I haven't seen one since all that time ago.
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it's funny because I haven't. I haven't
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 2: been to one either. But it was interesting, like when
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 2: that piece came out in Harper's I read at least
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 2: one or two sermons that were written based on the piece.
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 2: They were talked about the blood of the of the cock,
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 2: and you know, it is like it's a deep old
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 2: cultural thread, you know, in American culture and certainly Southeast
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 2: Asian and Carameeane culture.
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 3: Up top.
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: I mentioned to your work on and you know you
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: had you had a book where you explored I'd like
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: you to tell people some more of the chapters, but
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: you had a book. Now it came out as noodling
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: noodling for flatheads, and it was about Southern culture.
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: Layout some of the chapters I remember had the cockfighting
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: one flatheads.
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 2: And doodling. There was a piece where I hung out
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 2: with modern day moonshiners and with ATF folks who were
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 2: hunting them down. I kind of went back and forth
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 2: between the two groups. I did a piece on on
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 2: frog farming. I did a piece on coon hunting. The
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 2: whole way I got into the book was I was
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 2: living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, kind of missing Oklahoma a bit,
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 2: and and I wanted to get a coonhound, and so
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 2: I went and I found an ad for a blue
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 2: tick coonhound in western mass and I went out there.
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 2: But I really wanted a redbone because I think they're
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 2: beautiful dogs. And so I went there and I talked
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 2: to the guy and I said, well, do you know
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 2: where I could get a red bone? Are there any
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 2: red bone readers around here?
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 3: Well?
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 2: Sure, And he went to the back and he came
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 2: back out with American Cooner magazine, you know, And it
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 2: was fat, big, old full of ads, and it had
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 2: all these ads for like coon hunters shipping sperm across
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 2: the country to each other for their champion nighthounds and
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 2: all this kind of stuff, and it was and all
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 2: the different big hunters were all around the country, and
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 2: I ended up finding a woman who fought, who took
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 2: her dogs at three hundred and fifty nights a year,
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 2: I mean every night she would go out at midnight
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 2: and have a coon hunting contest with three other dogs.
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 2: And you're not killing the raccoons. You're basically just sitting
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 2: standing in the woods for three or four hours in
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 2: the dark, listening to your dog's bark. And then you're
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 2: getting points for the first dog that trees hits the trail,
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 2: first one that trees it. So anyway, so I wrote
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 2: a whole thing about coon hunting. I wrote to think
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 2: about this old marble tradition in the South, you know,
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 2: kind of all these obscure little subcultures that are still
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 2: around that still have a lot of people doing them.
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: How did you hit on? I brought this up early on,
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: Like how did you hit on? When did you first hear? Like, oh,
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: it is the thing noodling for flats is because you
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: grew up in Oklahoma.
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 3: Did you grow up knowing about it? You know?
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 2: I didn't, which is funny. I mean Okay, it's not
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 2: funny actually, because it's it's typical for my fan. I mean,
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 2: my parents are both German. They moved over in nineteen
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 2: sixty two from Germany, and we spoke German at home.
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 2: And my dad was a physicist and my mom was
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 2: a historian. So we had a very weird, little academic bubble.
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 3: Of the house. Hard hitting rednecks. Yeah, we were not.
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 2: And I loved Oklahoma, but it wasn't really until I
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 2: started going back. Right after college. I started writing for
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 2: Oklahoma Today Magazine, and they'd sent me all these assignments
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 2: and I'd write about Buffalo or tall grass prairie.
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 3: Here.
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 2: I wrote about the Tulsa Race massacre back with nineteen ninety.
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 2: But I was so when I started doing that, you know,
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 2: I really started to think, Wow, there's a whole side
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 2: of the South that I just never got to know.
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 2: In the middle of that, two things happened. One, I
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 2: was at the Environmental magazine in Cambridge where I was working.
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 2: An intern came in from southern Mississippi and he told
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 2: me about noodling, and I thought what. And then I
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 2: was talking to my brother in law in Oklahoma and
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 2: he said, well, you know the plumber here noodles. Was
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 2: this guy Leeke McFarlane was my classmate oh high school.
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 2: I mean, I didn't been in school for him for
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 2: like fifteen years, you know, Burker, I'll take you noodland
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 2: and then, you know, and he was just a genius
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 2: at it. I mean, and I went out with him.
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 2: The first day I went out with him, I caught
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 2: a twenty three pound cat pound catfish on my arm,
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 2: you know. So so anyway, that was and he was
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 2: perfect for me because when I knew him in high school,
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 2: he was kind of a lay about. He was a
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 2: guy who just didn't care made probably made Season D's,
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 2: you know, smart funny guy.
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 3: But don't ever call anybody a layabout anymore. Yeah right,
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 3: I like that.
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 2: But then when I met him again in this context,
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 2: he was on fire. He was on fire, and he
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 2: knew his shit, and he was funny and he was capable,
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 2: and he was a great plumber and he was also
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 2: this guy you know, so he anyways, it was great.
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: When you were when you were working on and all that,
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: did you ever own because the thing you don't do
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: is you don't do there's a predictable way that a
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: guy would go about that a predictable way because you
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: said you had like you had, like you know, your
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: dad was a physicist. Right, there's a predictable way where
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: you would go about it. Like you're, you're you're slumming
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: it with these people, right, they're not in on the joke,
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: right right, right?
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 3: You know you look at like everything is kind of ironic. Yeah,
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 3: you know, you're you're you're showing them off. Not you,
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 3: but a writer might be showing them.
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: Off to his friends. Yeah, yeah, yeah, having a laugh
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: at them. Yeah yeah, yeah, right, yeah, but you.
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 3: Don't do that game.
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's not even like I'm.
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 3: It's not a game. But is that where your mind goes?
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not. I mean, I mean I find these
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 2: people that I've written about fascinating and impressive in a
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 2: lot of cases, you know, and and refreshing in a
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 2: way that you know, like I've spent the last almost
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 2: fifty years, forty five years of my life on the
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 2: East Coast, you know, and in cities, and and almost
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 2: everybody I interviewed for most stories is kind of media ready.
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 2: They've kind of prepared their spiel, right, and they kind
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 2: of know how to narrate their life, and they they
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 2: think they're going to be the next person on Survivor
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 2: or whatever.
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 2: They we kind of all package ourselves for ourselves. And
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 2: and you know, when I'm talking to the coon hunters
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 2: or cock fighters, those guys they had never been interviewed
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 2: by people before, you know, and they were and that
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 2: was exciting to them to be to have someone be
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 2: truly interested in what they're doing, and truly interested at
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 2: the level of not just like how many chickens died?
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 2: You know, it's like what do you feed them? How
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 2: do you exercise them? What's the history of this thing?
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 2: How did you get into it? You know how? You know,
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 2: I really want to know the whole dimension of it,
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 2: and that to them is then and so it becomes
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 2: a real exchange. It's not just me looking for the
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 2: lurid bits and trying to play those up.
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: Does it take you long time to win people's trust
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: when all of a sudden, here's his due.
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 3: He's coming from this big fancy.
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: Magazine, you know, and right, and now I'm going to
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: show you some things that I can't tell. If you're
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: here to laugh, at me or expose my secrets. Is
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: it hard to win people over?
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 3: You know?
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 2: I find like there's usually there's usually the same kind
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 2: of transition happens where it starts out with they're kind
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 2: of tickled that a New York guy came down from
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 2: New York to talk to me. They usually don't know
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 2: the New Yorker, you know, or they don't care about it.
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 2: Maybe they've heard of it, they don't care about but
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 2: the fact that I'm just I've flown down from New
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 2: York to come talk to them, that's impressive. So they're
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 2: willing to give me the time, and they kind of
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 2: think of it. They're kind of it's a joke to
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 2: them a little bit, right, And then pretty soon I'm
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 2: with them for a week, sitting in their cab of
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 2: their truck type and everything they're saying, you know, wanting
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 2: to going through the muck with them, and then at
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 2: a certain point they're like, oh, this guy really wants
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 2: to know everything, you know. And part of the way
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 2: is the way I report is. I mean, nowadays I
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 2: do more recording, but in the day I always had
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 2: little keyboards and I always typed everything as they said.
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 2: And a certain point they'd be like, Damn, everything I
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 2: say is interesting. He's taken everything down, so they kind
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 2: of get excited about it, you know. So yeah, it's
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 2: it's anyway. I love the process.
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: So what do you What are you gonna work on next?
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 2: Well, I have a bunch of leads. I don't have
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 2: anything from me yet.
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 3: You have a book? Are you working on a new book?
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 2: Well, I'm trying to put I mean, one thought I've
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 2: I've had is like the last bunch of pieces have
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 2: been all Uh. I realized I've written about a lot
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 2: of the phobias, the top ten phobias. I've written pieces
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 2: about I mean a rachnophobia, claustrophobia, I wrote a big
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 2: piece on deep cave divers, or a piece about a
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 2: woman who collects venomous spiders. And you know, I've written
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 2: about turbulence. I've written about infestations. I've written about snakes
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 2: in Florida snakes. So anyway, I've been thinking about putting
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 2: the other collection called like the you know, the Sum
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 2: of All Phobias or the Big Book of Discomforts or
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 2: something like that, man like one, because I kind of
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 2: feel like, uh, it's something we're more and more in
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 2: touch with like all these these fears that we have,
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 2: people go to therapy or CB teeth or therapy and
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 2: all these kind of stuff to address them. So it's
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 2: become more of a anyway. Yeah, I can see that.
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And what magazine pieces are like tickle in your
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: fancy right now, Like you said, you got a lot
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: of ideas, they're good or I'll tell I'll say, if
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: it's worth your time, here's a problem. But I don't
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: want to tell you because this is you got.
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 2: You have way too many listeners and because they'll jump
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 2: on they'll jump on it.
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: So that's I have to have a form magazine writers.
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: I'm joking. I know what you're saying. There's certain things
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: that are floating around my head. I don't want to
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: say them. Yeah, but for instance, I have the world's
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: greatest name for a business, but I can't say it.
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 3: I think can tell.
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 2: You actually the one the story you told me before
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 2: we started taping that one.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: Ready for that, Okay, dig into that because I passed
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: along to another writer and I don't think you bought.
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 3: Well.
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: Man, I want I want to thank you again for
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: coming on the show and talking about all this. Man,
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: that's total pleasure. Yeah, I think people should really like
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: I think that I'm saying this very particular to the
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: people that listen to the show.
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 3: People listen to.
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: Show, You're you're gonna love when you when you go find,
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: you'll you'll have to conquer pay walls and all that.
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: But when you go find the tell me the name
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: of the piece. I can't remember the name of your
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: alpha gal piece.
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 2: Well, you can look at under the Great Infestation.
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: The Great Infestation, or the tick that hunts down its host. Yep,
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: that's okay to take the honts down its host.
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: And it's burkhard builder So b U r K A
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: A R D yeah, b I L G E R Yeah.
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 2: And then Newly for Flatheads has probably the most.
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 3: Well that's what I was gonna That's what I was
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 3: gonna do. The megaplug on is.
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: If you're in I mean, if you're interested in American culture,
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: if you're interested in Southern culture, and like kind of
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: the under like the underground, sort of the underground world
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: of people who live eccentrics, who live these kind of
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: old traditional life ways. And Newly for Flatheads is a
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: great book, man, Yeah, thank you.
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that was a fun one. My kids were small
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 2: when I when I did that, when I reported that,
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 2: so they kind of went around in my in our
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 2: motor homely and I have great memories of being in
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 2: northern Georgia and a hunting cabin, like talking to moonshiners
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 2: and I come back every night and anyway, we.
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 3: Were you drinking a lot of moonshine back then. You know.
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 2: I actually went to a moonshiner's reunion in South Carolina
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 2: and I spent two or three day asking people, Hey,
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 2: are you do you moon? You make moonshine? I'd love
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 2: to taste some moonshine. And they're like, no, I don't know.
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 2: You know, they looked at me and I had this
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 2: kind of East Coast accent, and you know they were
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 2: that was a place where they really didn't trust me.
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: You got, I want you to take a sniff of this,
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: all right, Well, dude, don't get too close. It's not bad,
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: but don't don't get in there. Get in there, but
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: just get in there and take away for that. Isn't
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: that something that's the weirdest. I took a sip of
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: that one time. You couldn't get it out of your mouth.
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: It's beaver casters. So this is the way they used
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: to save them. It's beaver casters preserved in moonshine.
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 2: That's crazy.
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, don't sip that. I took a sip of that,
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: and I was tasting that taste.
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 2: For the ones in South Carolina they make a moonshine.
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 3: Dude made that for me. You know, I didn't tell
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 3: what I did with it.
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 2: We made it. But they took these native hardled Indian
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 2: peace and they would soak it in the moonshine and it
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 2: would make this blood red, incredibly tasty moonshine.
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 2: I love that stuff. And I actually, I mean I
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 2: probably wouldn't say this because it's a felony, but for
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 2: I made some moonshine in Brooklyn for one year. We
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 2: did because in our neighborhood there are all these apple
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 2: trees planted in the nineteenth century early twentieth century, and
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 2: nobody picked those apples. They're all rotten. So I went
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 2: around and I my friend Kevin and I Kevin Bergen
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 2: and I mapped all the apple trees that we could
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 2: find in our neighborhood, and then we bought a press
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 2: and we went around and asked.
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 3: Everybody if we could get the apple.
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 2: Get the apples, and we ended up just pressing carboy
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 2: after carboy, the giant glass jugs full of.
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 3: Where were you doing it at Apples?
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 2: We were doing it and h in the basement of
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 2: my house and out on the sidewalk. And then eventually that,
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 2: you know, fermented into into apple cider and hardsider and
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 2: then and then I bought a still from Portugal and
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 2: my son and I made a batch of apple apple
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 2: jack still and it was actually amazingly good. I could
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 2: not believe it.
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 3: Huh. We just had that.
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: We just had to write around Isaac Fitzgerald who wrote
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: he wrote that book about Johnny Apples. Yeah, yeah, right,
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: so we got into this whole like apples, into this
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 1: and into that and into this and into that. Yeah.
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 3: We had a guy right in explaining.
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: Like you're just talking about this is like this from
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 1: Apples makes this kind of thing and the next step
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: and I forgot all what it is now, but yeah, yeah,
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: now it was distilled drinks.
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 2: That was crazy. I did not assumed it would be indigestible,
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 2: but it was actually pretty good.
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 3: It tastes like apples. Was good.
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's good hard work and journalism right there exactly. Well, man,
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: I want to thank you again for coming on the show.
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 3: It was great. I appreciate it.
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 2: Thanks now.
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 3: Like I said, I was kind of not looking forward
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 3: to getting now for Gal, but I had a plan.
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 3: But now you make me think my plans.
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 2: Off plans, got some problems.
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 3: I think got some problems. The other big thing is
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 3: I like to admit this about myself, but I'm a
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 3: big half and half guy in my coffee.
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah that's done with half and half cheese, all the
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 2: all the good things.
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 3: All right, I'm gonna avoid it. Thanks again,