In Moderation
Providing health, nutrition and fitness advice in moderate amounts to help you live your best life.
Rob: Co-host of the podcast "In Moderation" and fitness enthusiast. Rob has a background in exercise science and is passionate about helping others achieve their health and fitness goals. He brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the show, providing valuable insights on topics such as calories, metabolism, and weight loss.
Liam: Co-host of the podcast "In Moderation" and new father. Liam has a background in nutrition and is dedicated to promoting a balanced and sustainable approach to health and wellness. With his witty and sarcastic style, Liam adds a unique flavor to the show, making it both informative and entertaining.
In Moderation
Forrest Valkai: Making Science Fun and Functional
Ever wondered why a cucumber is technically a fruit or how you can debunk those wild health claims floating around social media? Join us for a captivating chat with biologist and science communicator Forrest Valkai, who takes us on a journey from his childhood fascination with old science textbooks to his current mission of making science exciting and accessible. Forrest's infectious enthusiasm shines as he shares his path and the uphill battle of engaging students in the often uninspiring public school system. With a strong presence on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, Forrest aims to make science not just educational but entertaining, especially for atheist and skeptic communities.
Get ready to have your culinary world turned upside down as we break down the bizarre and interesting facets of fruit classification. From understanding why a strawberry isn't really a berry to exploring the culinary versus botanical definitions, this episode clarifies the often confusing world of what we eat. We also delve into some cultural dietary misconceptions and evolutionary aspects like lactose intolerance, offering a nuanced perspective that blends science with everyday life.
Finally, brace yourself for a reality check on medical myths and pseudoscience. Forrest debunks the outrageous claims made by health gurus and influencers, stressing the importance of critical thinking and scientific literacy. We discuss the evolution and significance of GMOs, the unsettling science behind everyday foods like bread and wasp honey, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding the consumption of exotic meats. This episode is a rich tapestry of humor, skepticism, and compelling science, making it a must-listen for anyone curious about the world around them.
You can find Forrest
https://www.instagram.com/renegadescienceteacher/?hl=en
https://www.tiktok.com/@renegadescienceteacher?lang=en
https://www.youtube.com/@RenegadeScienceTeacher
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoGrBZC-lKFAce1h4R8nTiMdcpGeveDQH
You can find us on social media here:
Rob Tiktok
Rob Instagram
Liam Tiktok
Liam Instagram
well, we are on episode something or I don't know what liam's count is that 72, 72, 72 go ahead okay hey, 72, it's actually uh 48, I think I'm starting to lose count.
Speaker 3:I feel like it's more than that. We've only done 48. We've done 48. 48 feels so much more. It feels like we've done so many more than that.
Speaker 1:But welcome back to in moderation, where we have for our guest today Forrest Valky. Did I say that right?
Speaker 3:Valky.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what I would say.
Speaker 3:Yeah hi.
Speaker 2:Yeah, valky, yeah, thank you so much for having me. How are you doing? I'm doing really well. Never had a bad day in my life.
Speaker 1:Really, that seems like a lie, that seems like a straight face. Yeah, I don't know right off the bat.
Speaker 2:I'm debunking this everyone's first people you're the first people to call me out on it. Yeah, just I just I just, I'm generally just jovial dude, I'm just happy to be here. I'm just I'm, I'm thrilled. Even even in my worst, most terrible days, at least my life is good enough to recognize that that day fucking sucks and that that's. You know what I mean. Like what a great, what a great day.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but you still have the days like I had yesterday, where my I had to bring my dog to the vet and he couldn't eat anything. So I put the food up on the counter and then, right before he left, he knocked it off and then ate a bunch of food. And I brought him there and they said no, you can't have them now, we have to send them back. And here's the medication. But you have to wait a little while to get the medication. I'm like it's eight o'clock in the morning, I haven't slept yet. But that's cool, that's fine and that's how my day started, anyway, that's, that's one of the reasons why I have neither.
Speaker 2:One of the reasons why I have neither pets nor children right there.
Speaker 3:I have four pets and one child. I when I also have fish. I guess that's more pets, doesn't matter anyway. So yeah, tell us a little bit about yourself then. Like, what do people know you for? Like, why are you here?
Speaker 2:I'm here because Rob asked me to be here and he can take the blame for it.
Speaker 3:I take the blame for most guests my name is Forrest.
Speaker 2:I'm a biologist and a science communicator. I teach people to love science and themselves and each other and the universe around them and, uh, uh, my, my whole job is to just make science fun and exciting and accessible and also use really cool science lessons to teach really important life lessons and, and like, use science as a tool for social progress and societal progress. Um, uh, you can find me on them internets, on YouTube, here at Forrest Falkei, or you can find me on TikTok at Renegade Science Teacher, or just look up my name. You can also find me as a regular host on skeptic and atheist call-in shows such as Skep Talk, the Sunday Show, the Atheist Experience Talk, heathen, the Hang Up and many more like those such as like and yeah, if you like science, skepticism and general weirdness, you will like our heathens.
Speaker 3:And our heathens and our heathens. That's a good one.
Speaker 2:I've got a lot of people who are like either in the process of deconstruction or they're of the mind that, like their, their religious beliefs don't get in the way of their education too badly and that that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Um and so, like you know, I just dance.
Speaker 2:There's, there's. There's some people out there that are fine and that's our. I take a pretty extreme stance on these things, but I'm not going to be a dick to anybody who just is not.
Speaker 1:You're just trying to learn stuff you know you say being a dick for people who are being dicks. Yeah, yeah, exactly yeah uh.
Speaker 3:Well then, what got you uh interested in it, though, like what's what got you all in the the sciency path?
Speaker 2:oh, I've been a scientist since I was a little kid. I just didn't know it at the time. I was always asking, asking questions, I was always poking stuff. I was always trying to learn about the world around me. I used to love watching, like Jeff Corwin and Steve Irwin and all these people, and I would go out in my neighborhood and catch whatever frogs and lizards and small mammals I could and teach about them to an invisible camera in front of me. I used to read all these old like I had like all these old science textbooks from like the fifties laying around. That's all I had and I would just read them and have fun with them.
Speaker 3:Um, and uh, you should start off with that in conversations I read textbooks. As far as it's a fun hobby, yeah, dude.
Speaker 2:Well, cause you learn neat stuff and it's like it's like a cheat code. Some dude spent like their whole life learning a thing and then they just wrote it down for you and you can check it out and it's like so great. And so yeah, I would just. I would just mess around all those things and go explore the world around me and I just loved it. And I didn't know that was what science was, because public school kind of beat all the fun out of it for me.
Speaker 3:And then I finally, as an adult, circled around with, like you know, schools. It just feels like it's just like, it's just crushing. You know, like, like this. There's so many opportunities to make this fun and it seems like you jumped over every single one of them. You purposefully avoided any possibility at fun that's just my feeling towards it.
Speaker 2:That's because we run schools like a business in this country, and so it's really hard to allow passion to lead the way right yeah, that's kind of, that's a big bummer but anyway starting off on a big bummer on that high
Speaker 3:note. You know what got me interested. I'll tell you real quick. Just, you know what got me interested in science when I was younger mythbusters, that was my show. Like I've seen every episode multiple times. Like just kind of the scientific, we have a theory, let's test it, let's have some fun. And it made it fun, right, like I think that's just like actually this can be fun. What if we took a car and it gave it square tires and drove it fast enough? Would it be? Would it would it jiggle or would it be a smooth ride? Like theory? I'm like that's fat. I want to know that's yeah.
Speaker 1:Before we had mythbusters we had bill nye and bill oh, I definitely watched bill nye as a kid.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah yeah, I loved all these things. I I don't. I don't disparage, I. I hate when people pretend like science is only for old white men with big white beards and long white coats and like it has to be this. I I had an advisor at one point and I had a person that I worked under in grad school that was like you're just like science is serious and they hated me. They hated me and my job because I was out here trying to convince people that science was fun and it's not. Science is hard and science is serious and you need to take it seriously. And I'm like dude, I'm getting great results and I'm smiling. You can do both. You can walk and chew gun at the same time.
Speaker 1:So like I don't know, that's it. It is frustrating when people don't take things like mythbusters seriously. Fred penner, all right, all my canadians are know exactly what I'm talking about and only the canadians really only the canadians I've heard all
Speaker 3:the canadians listening someone's so excited that one person's so excited um, that's great.
Speaker 3:Those are the only two other canadians listening someone's so excited that one person's so excited um that's great those are the only two other canadians in the world. There's not that many, but I would, you know, I would say, like you know, we have a lot of these examples of people making science a little bit more fun and that just makes it easier to access you know, like your hank greens of the world and you know they have their own shows and everything like that.
Speaker 3:I think that's what gets people more interested. And then, yeah, you're a person that's like it has to be boring and serious. It's just like, yeah, that's a bummer, that's it.
Speaker 2:It's like you know you wouldn't do that with literally anything else. Like if you went into a gym you wouldn't just sit somebody down with a crazy weight and be like lift this 500 times, tell me when you're done. You know you do something to get them engaged and make sure they're motivated and they're enjoying it and they're having a good time, and it's the same thing If you sit down. Well, I can oh my glob dude, I can make science boring. I can sit here and just teach you vocab all day long and all these little protein pathways. We can go super molecular with it and you will us your rainy voice lecture you've been working on the fun voice for too long.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the opposite way so remember that, that when you want to remodel hetero, a euchromatin, into hetero, slow down a little.
Speaker 3:I think you need a little more spaces, a little more spaces between the words, a little bit more it's really important that you use a stone modifying complex. I've had professors like that and it's oh, that's the best lots of people just had a college flashback.
Speaker 1:I had a professor once.
Speaker 2:This is real story. I had a professor once. He was another one of those. That was. Science is very serious and you need to take it seriously. Um, literally didn't lecture the class about the thing that the class was about for a whole day, so three hours of this class lectured us instead. It was the very beginning of the semester and he looks around the room and he says, uh, that he notices that all of us have spiral notebooks and mechanical pencils and stuff, fountain pen and graduate yourself to an adult writing utensil and to an adult notepad, so you can behave like adults in my lab and like the whole time and I'm like this was three hours that you were supposed to teach us about photosynthesis. What the fuck are we doing? What's?
Speaker 3:going on. How can we get that guy at every party? Go figure.
Speaker 2:The first exam. He had to have another talk to the class because two people in the entire class passed the first exam. And it's like dude, there can't be 30 common denominators here. I don't know what to tell you.
Speaker 3:And we don't know what a common denominator is, because you won't teach us.
Speaker 1:Oh shit, common denominator is because you won't teach us. Oh shit, well, anyway, uh, okay but no, what are we going to talk about? What we're doing on this show?
Speaker 3:yeah, I need to get into something and there's something I need to talk about right off the bat because it just annoys the shit out of me more than it close to, if not anything I have to say, and that is I need you to talk, I need you to tell people that there is a difference between a culinary definition of a vegetable and a biotanical definition of a vegetable, because, god damn, it drives me up a fucking wall anytime.
Speaker 3:I do like hidden veggies and then you know there's a fucking zucchini or some shit in there and people go, um, actually that's a zucchini is a fruit because it has a sense, and I'm just like I never wanted to reach through a fucking phone so bad in my life and bonk someone on the head and just be like pete, please be less stupid, okay, so can you tell people that there's uh, you know, vegetables don't even really exist, or, you know, go on your phone whatever you want, go ahead no, these, these people are all right and you're terrible end of podcast.
Speaker 2:Fucking that's so yeah, so yeah, there there is a botanical definition and there is a culinary definition for fruit and vegetable. The botanical definition for fruit is it's the swollen ovary, basically, of a plant, and so anything that produces flowers will also inevitably produce fruit. They might not be fruit that you want to eat, but this is a thing that contains one or more seeds. If it has one internal seed, it's called a droop. If it's got multiple internal seeds, it's called a berry. Um and and yes, pumpkins and jalapenos and zucchinis, uh and and uh, oranges and apples, um, are all the same kind of. They're all berries, they're different types of berries.
Speaker 1:Whenever somebody does the, it's a fruit thing, I like to retort with. No, it's actually a berry. If you're going to go that way, yeah.
Speaker 2:Which, which it's like saying humans are animals. Yeah, you're right. What kind and like? Do you want to get into it a little bit more, and so like that? Yeah, so if you're talking about oranges, they're there. It's called a Hesperidium. It's a thick leathery rind full of, like, aromatic oils. If you're talking about like, cucumbers and zucchinis and stuff, those are called pepos. If you're talking about apples and pears, they're called palms and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 3:And then there's dry fruits like nuts and dry yes, I was going to say cashews, I know are considered like a droop or whatever, like it's not actually a nut, so I get, that's another one people the cashew fruit is a droop and then the nut coming out of it is a different business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so like, if you talk about uh, uh, nuts and seeds and things, there's uh, uh, either dehiscent or indehiscent fruits, depending on whether or not they open by themselves. That's a whole sub classification of them. Um, and there's just like 80 different things here, dude, and like that's all to say that a vegetable, that's not a science word, um, but in, in, culinarily speaking, a vegetable is either the root, stems or leaves of a plant and a fruit is any other damn thing, as far as I remember um, yeah, basically anything else yeah yeah, and so that's, but but then, unless it's a tomato, in which case fuck you is what, and so like, yeah, so uh, because tomatoes are, they are berries and they're in the nightshade family and they're weird, um, and just it's, it's a whole business.
Speaker 2:That's why, why the culinary arts are culinary arts and not culinary sciences.
Speaker 3:It's just like chefs, common sense if it's not in a fruit salad, then it's not a fucking fruit. Okay, you're not putting cucumbers and pumpkins in a fruit salad and also whenever I do, I did a fun. I just did a fun little video on like my top five favorite nuts and, oh my god, I just wanted to break my phone. It was just so many. Um, peanuts are a legume, like they are me like they are legumes, but can you?
Speaker 3:imagine like oh, put your beans. Like, put your beans and your fucking peanuts in there. Like what the fuck are you talking? It's a, it's it's culinarily. We put it with the nuts because it acts if it tastes like a nut and eats like a nut, which, yes, I know how I'm saying that it's a fucking nut.
Speaker 2:OK, I'm proud of myself for not making any nut jokes this far.
Speaker 3:We're listening.
Speaker 2:We are adults.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're doing great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's, and that's a whole other thing. Is like, yeah, that you can break it down for and like, if you really want to blow people's fucking minds, bring up like strawberries and pineapples. A strawberry is called an aggregate fruit. It's not. Actually a strawberry is not a fruit.
Speaker 2:The strawberry, the red stuff you're eating, that's all just parts of the plant. That's all swollen and full of juice. The fruits are what you call seeds All the little green dots around a strawberry. Every single one of those is a fruit. And the actual red flesh of the strawberry is just the other parts of the ovary. That's kind of left over. Um, and then pineapples um, a pineapple is called a multiple fruit. So when you look at a pineapple, it's got all those little hexagonal sections. Every single one of those is a fruit, because the way pineapple grows is like each one of those is a flower. They all become fertilized, they all swell up at the fruiting bodies and they all grow together into one wad that looks like a pineapple, and so every one of those little hexagons is a different flower that then became part of the pineapple.
Speaker 2:So if I eat a, pineapple, no pineapples, 500 fruits and like, so is a strawberry.
Speaker 1:So if I eat a pineapple, it counts as getting my six servings of food.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's all of them, all at once.
Speaker 3:Oh man, funny, yeah, funny story. I got called racist for telling black people it's OK to eat pineapple. That was fun. That was Dr Sebi thing. That was fun, dr Sebi thing. Yeah, it's the Dr Sebi thing. So Dr Sebi is a guy who teaches people that they can cure AIDS and stuff through their diet and all those sorts of things. Very interesting fellow Got in a lot of trouble. Not surprisingly, people say he was assassinated, even though he was just older and just died because he was teaching people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like got pneumonia while he was in jail.
Speaker 3:Yeah was, it was a whole. Yeah, I got in trouble, it was a whole thing. But I said, yeah, like no, black people eat pineapple. And they're like, no, only white people can eat pineapple. He's just talking to black people who can. I'm like we're not different creatures, like we're still humans. And yeah, I was. I was called a colonizer and everything. It was real interesting.
Speaker 2:That was an interesting you know it's, it's weird because they're like there are sometimes. I'm trying, I'm trying to give these people the most benefit of the doubt that I possibly can in my head and I'm like, I'm thinking like the. There are some things like lactose. Tolerance is a lot more common in white populations.
Speaker 3:That makes sense because of our evolutionary history but I would never say people a little bit on the, the lactose, you know, do you like the story behind?
Speaker 2:yeah, it's kind of so long story short is you've got, uh, so lactose is the sugar in milk, um, you need a special enzyme called lactase to break it down. So, as you're when you're a baby, you produce a lot of lactase because you're drinking breast milk, um, and so you, you have this protein or this enzyme being generated in your body. After about age two ish, the gene to produce lactase switches off and you don't need it anymore because you're supposed to be weaning and working on something else. But in, especially like European populations and some African populations as well that were pastoralists, that that uh, um, were, you know, using cows and sheeps and goats and things and getting milk and cheese and whatnot, needed to continue breaking down uh, this, uh, the sugar, uh, we had a mutation where that gene doesn't switch off anymore, and so we, it causes a condition called lactase persistence or lactose tolerance, and lactase non-persistence or lactose intolerance is actually the natural, like ground state of humans until the past, you know, maybe like 10 000 or so years ago, um, and so like, uh, there, there's a lot of ethnicities out there that struggle with lactose tolerance, but I would never presume to say you can't eat it.
Speaker 2:I know a lot of white people who are lactose intolerant. That are just fine, you know, punishing their bodies. And because cheese is good.
Speaker 2:Or you know. Also, it's not. It's not like a guarantee Like skin color is not like going to tell you everything you need to know about your genetics in that way. I don't know, man, I there's a whenever. If somebody has a complaint like that, I try very hard to listen to it, but there's a lot of times that people on the internet just want very badly to be mad yeah, I think it was.
Speaker 1:You think it was Christopher Hitchens?
Speaker 2:yeah, there's Christopher Hitchens who talked about like you, if someone is going to balance a stepladder on top of the back of their toilet so that they can see out the window, to peer into your living room and be offended by what they see in there, there's just nothing you can do about it. And like, if someone's going to go out of their way to find a problem, if you're saying, yes, people can eat pineapple and that's an issue I don't oh man, that's rough that's, yeah, it's.
Speaker 3:I mean, social media is a real place and, like you got to be prepared for anything, it's, it's not to call out dr sebi followers, but to call out dr sebi followers they really play that race card just because oh yeah, immediately
Speaker 3:he was black and he kind of appealed to the black population but what was interesting is, dr sebi had a lot of problems with the asian population too. He was like that's what you have to wonder, wonder, wonder, why Asian people can't stand up straight because they're eating rice and stuff. And I was like that's like a wild take.
Speaker 1:Black people can only have wild rice and black white. I think it was black rice, black rice yes, black rice. Black people can only have black rice.
Speaker 3:They're like flamingos.
Speaker 1:They have to absorb the other.
Speaker 2:What? A stupid thing to say what a stupid thing to say, but I literally I never thought I'd have to google something like this. But I just googled can black people eat pineapple? Just to see if there's some stupid thing out there that somebody misread to listen to. And I, literally, all I'm coming up with is this shit about people saying, yeah, this is a stupid racist stereotype that's been perpetuated for a long time, and like I've never heard of this before, and I can immediately tell you this is insane.
Speaker 3:Black people can eat red pineapples. There's a red pineapple which is like usually used for ornamental reasons.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:No, they say that's fine for some reason. But also he said like, yeah, you could cure all these different cancers and aids and everything, and so it's like one of those which is about as dangerous as you can get in the like the diet realm is telling people you can cure your you know horrible disease through naturally yeah yeah, naturally, and it's just, I've seen so much shit like that.
Speaker 2:I hate it. There's there was a dude on Tik TOK a little while ago. Um was telling people that, like, if you take antibiotics, the word antibiotic means anti-life and therefore antibiotics kill literally all the cells in your body and that's why you're more sick when you take antibiotics. When you start taking them, you feel sick and that's it's. That's why, um, and therefore no one should ever take antibiotics and it's like, do you literally? Like? You just poorly translated a word and that's your argument and I don't understand there was another one.
Speaker 2:I remember doing a video about this lady who was doing the same thing. She was saying like, oh, I can sell you my traditional herbal treatments that'll cure your fucking herpes and shit. And it's like dude, like what. It wouldn't be so annoying if it wasn't so real for so many people. And you look at it and you pick any one of those videos, you will find so many people in the comment section. They're like hey, I have these health issues. I'm not getting the answers that I want from my doctor, so tell me what fruit I need to avoid to cure my fibromyalgia, to cure my cancer, to cure my emphysema, to cure my whatever else. And uh, people are distrustful of the medical industrial establishment and they're scared yeah, there's industrial establishment and they're scared yeah, there's yeah, sure, and they're scared and there's.
Speaker 2:It's not like we have a great history in this country, especially regarding race and medicine, so I understand that right, but then there's these fucking vultures that prey on that shit and it drives me up a wall, dude.
Speaker 1:My favorite thing to hate along those lines is medical medium telling people that every time you get blood drawn in order to check it, check your levels and everything get your blood work done, you are weakening yourself because you are actively taking your antibodies out of your system and he's essentially actively encouraging people not to give blood ever. Basically.
Speaker 2:That's interesting. Where did they come from in the first place if you couldn't make more of them by losing some when?
Speaker 3:did you first get them? What, oh dude, we don't think that deep Surface level, it's just gosh, it's just.
Speaker 1:A to B, don't check.
Speaker 2:C or through. Z Go, go it's so good, go to freerangebuff range buffalo dickcom. Get my free range buffalo dick extract. It's the only way to increase your testosterone and cure your cancer.
Speaker 3:Well, we just got another new one to add to the list, liam. Yeah, is it. You need it. It's pasture raised right like free range pasture raised, you know, like grass.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's of course what you. You want it to be regulated, but not in a way that makes it unnatural it doesn't, I can tell you regulated it doesn't have any chemicals in it, and that's what's important. There's no chemicals in the buffalo dick. I just okay I just had.
Speaker 3:I just posted a video about like you know, like a ninja creamy and there's like creamer and somebody just said, uh well, that chemical filled creamer ruined it. And I had to like pin that comment just like yes, I only get my creamer, that's chemical free yes, that's the only time I get here.
Speaker 2:I have a bottle of it right here this is a thing all right and I poured in oh, that's too much, damn it gosh.
Speaker 3:Uh, the chemicals the chemicals in the food is is always one of my favorites. I first it like annoyed me, but now I just have to laugh at it um, chemicals and metals are always like.
Speaker 2:Those are the ones metals always gets me as well. I have to.
Speaker 1:We've shown I've shown it before, but he'll appreciate that. Here's the banana.
Speaker 3:Here's a banana calm the fuck down and it's just all the it's the chemical makeup. Yeah, like so good ridiculous that's.
Speaker 2:I saw this one and like it's, it's, it's frustrating because there's a lot of it that is genuine, just just ignorance and fear is a lot. And and like, yeah, I saw this video of this lady that was like she, so you can do this actually a science experiment that I've done in public schools before. It's really easy you go out and get some cereal um, I recommend a life brand cereal because it's got, uh, really high iron content, as anything that says fortified or enriched or whatever. You're gonna have it and put it in a ziploc bag, crush it up real fine, put water in there, close it up real tight and give it a good shake, make sure it's really saturated and then leave it and put a magnet to it and all these iron shavings will come up to the top of the bag and you can see all the iron that's in your cereal.
Speaker 2:And I've seen videos online of moms that are doing this and like, oh my God, they're putting all this metal in my baby. They're killing my baby, putting all this metal in my baby, they're killing my baby. And I'm like, dude, I am so happy that you're such a good mom that you're scared of this, that this is something you're worried about because you don't understand, and it shows what a great caring person you are and I'm so sorry you're frightened but let me tell you like here's. Here's why, why it's important. And here's why iron is important. And also the bioavailability of iron in that form isn't great anyway, so most of it's just going to be pooped out, but the little bit you do absorb, your baby's not going to have anemia. Good for you. That's great. It's a good thing.
Speaker 1:It's one thing for moms to be doing that, but doctor, doctor, call Saladino, yeah, yes, that's what I mean. You have people who are genuinely afraid.
Speaker 2:And then you have people who are genuinely afraid, and then you have fucking vultures who to do the same thing in order to sell some bullshit pill.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's what it's. Yeah, just you know, sell your, whatever it is your pulse. He actually does have testicle supplements, just ground up testicles in pill form they better be goddamn free.
Speaker 2:Range what I'm saying is just like I want to be very clear that you know we, as we're sitting here laughing at this, it is funny. But I want to be very clear that you know we, as we're sitting here laughing at this, it is funny, but I want to, for anybody listening, I want to be clear about who exactly it is that I'm pissed off at I'm not pissed off at individual people who just don't understand nutrition, that you don't have to Fuck man.
Speaker 2:It's a weird, complicated thing. I'm pissed off at the charlatans who get people hurt because they're spewing their bullshit.
Speaker 3:You know what I mean. Yeah, it's, it's absolutely. But then this because there's this distrust though of the, the system, you know. So you have to kind of trust. So you but you believe a con man, first because they're, they're you know they've caught con man confidence. You know they come out, they start yelling and it's like wow, yeah, and I think for like you know, for you probably, I feel like you've seen this, like scientists and a lot of them just aren't great at like public speaking or just talking to the average person, right, like they talk, maybe they're over their head or they're just not good at public speaking.
Speaker 3:So, they drone Whatever and and also like it's the Dunning Kruger effect, right. Like the less you know, the more you think you know. So it's just like someone who actually knows their shit is going to be, like you know they're not going to be so absolutist, right, they're going to talk about like well, science studies suggest this and maybe that, and that doesn't sound good to your average person. They want, like the confidence man, that's like this, always that you know, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:That that is one thing that, like I, when I teach about like how to spot bullshit, when I teach critical thinking, when I teach about what pseudoscience is that's one of the things that I mentioned is, like, what kind of language are they using to endorse this product? Are they saying that it's guaranteed to do a thing? Are they saying that it's been proven to do a thing? Are they saying that it's a secret hack?
Speaker 3:that is a wonder drug is all these things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good one the or are they saying that modern research suggests, yeah, there's evidence to believe there's a, there's something going on. We think they're like, and like it sounds backwards to say like the if someone's willing to be a little less confident about their claims, that makes them more trustworthy. But like in honesty, like if if you're sitting here with 100 percent guaranteed this is the, that tells me you might not have thought about it hard enough. I need you to be able to find a flaw in what you're saying, because that's one thing I think that is really difficult for people who don't have a STEM background to maybe not difficult for them to understand, but difficult for them to incorporate into their daily life. You should be able to come up with five failure points for every fucking thing and like if you have somebody who's coming out here like nope, this is it, you do this thing and this will happen. Like if they don't have at least one, unless except you know, until whatever.
Speaker 2:Like that I can tell you drinking water is is healthy for you. Drinking clean, pure water is good, unless if you're like really, really strenuous athletics and you're sweating a whole hell of a lot and then you guzzle a bunch of water. Your. Your body is actually trying to conserve water, and that's when we see the highest incident of people with water toxicity, because they that it's in crazy athletes who are trying to stay hydrated and drinking a good amount of water while under that stressful situation. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be hydrating. It means you need to do it effectively and make sure you have proper electrolytes. And it doesn't.
Speaker 1:And so there's but as soon as you put the electrolytes in, it's no longer water. It's not right.
Speaker 2:Yes, no then it's, it's brondo, that's the, that's what plants crave.
Speaker 2:Yes, I can talk for fucking 20 minutes about all the caveats of drinking fucking water. It's not just do it because it's good, and so if somebody is coming out here like you need to fucking drink my brand of a kidney semen because it's going to make you strong and they don't have 30 minutes worth of, don't do this Because it's going to make you strong and they don't have 30 minutes worth of don't do this. And unless you do that and take it only in these circumstances, not if you have these conditions and like just they're probably fucking full of shit, dude.
Speaker 3:And but that just doesn't work well on a stage. You need like. So, gary, like I talk about him all the time just fantastic on a stage, because it's all absolutist, it's all this equals that, and it's just like you've been taught wrong no-transcript.
Speaker 2:There's enough bullshit out there that actually you should. You have been taught wrong about such and such that it gives them, like it kind of gives them a license to then, you know, come up with something stupid like, for example, if you believe that carrots are great for your eyes, that's because of some world war ii propaganda that we just spread and people still believe, and it was because we didn't want to give away our military secrets and so we said yeah, all of our pilots eat a lot of carrots and it makes their eyes super strong but there is like kind of uh, some, there's some truth, but there's a grain of truth behind everything, right.
Speaker 3:So there's like a little bit behind that.
Speaker 2:So yeah, like you can use that, yeah right or, or you know the, the but, but at the end of the day it's like it's grossly exaggerated at best, and like I can tell I've stuck a carrot in my eye before it hurt. I didn't see any better. And so like for people to come out here and say that, like this, like it if people still believe this it's because of some shit that you were actually taught incorrectly. And like, yeah, like you said, maybe there's a little truth, but I guarantee there's some way better stuff that you can do from your eyes, besides having, you know, a carrot salad or whatever the fuck people do with carrots. I don't know.
Speaker 3:Um well, I did want to get onto something else, because this is something I get asked a lot about and from I'd like to get from like just more of a science perspective, because I've been getting tagged in a lot Bio engineered food and GMOs.
Speaker 2:This is something I get asked Can you give a little bit on why it's the worst thing ever and why you should never eat it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So so if you have ever eaten literally any plant or animal matter from a grocery store, you have consumed engineered foods, because that's what fucking artificial selection is. If, if you like, go out into the world and find a natural, all natural, non-human, manipulated apple, it's going to be the size of the tip of your thumb and it's going to taste like a butt, because that you're just not used to it. Um, and like that's.
Speaker 2:That's what we've been doing for the past like several thousand years is finding the fruit that is the biggest and the sweetest and the tastiest and the most nutritious, and we've been breeding those ones. And then, out of that crop, we find the biggest, tastiest, most nutritious ones, and we breed those ones, and we, out of that crop, we do it again and again, and again, until you have what we have today of apples of all colors and shapes and varieties and flavors and all these different things that make us happy, those. That, that is genetic engineering. We just do it in a lab now, instead of doing it over the course of 100 years in a field. We now do it over the course of like a year or maybe a decade in a laboratory and like countless studies over the past I want to say especially 20 years have shown consistently that these things are no more harmful or whatever, better or whatever than you know any other.
Speaker 2:Quote, quote organic, natural food. And if you really don't like that kind of genetic manipulation, you, I think it's it's grossly anti humanist, it's grossly anti-humanist. And you need to look up a guy by the name of oh, I want to make sure I'm saying this right, I think it's Neil Gorsuch and I want to say I don't want to say it, cut this out If I said it wrong. Yep, neil Gorsuch is a fucking Supreme Court justice. Hold on a second. I knew that was the wrong one.
Speaker 3:I knew that as well, because there's some shit there but like come back around to whatever. Whatever else. Norman Morlog how did I get Neil Gorsuch Cut?
Speaker 2:all of that out, God. That's terrible.
Speaker 1:None of this is getting cut.
Speaker 2:They're going to see the entire thing fine look at neil gorsuch, and then after that look up norman borlaug. Yeah, fuck me, dude, that's yeah, I'm over here on my high horse.
Speaker 2:You need to look up this man that I can't fucking remember. Yeah, norman borlaug is who I'm talking about. Norman borlaug, um uh, was an agricultural scientist and he won the Nobel Prize. Grow all over the world in in in places that were having serious problems with caloric density within their populations, and this motherfucker like he he has saved so many people from starvation because of genetic manipulations to plants, and so like, if, if you don't like this stuff, I'm very, very happy to hear that you live in a place with some serious food security.
Speaker 2:But, like for the rest of the world, like this, this is a lifesaving technology that we're talking about here. So like, just, I don't know, man, it bothers me when it's it's. It's like I don't know it's it's. It's like I don't know. It's like having a serious complaint that you, your water tastes too cold while you're chewing mint gum Like that's a fun thing to talk about, that's a funny thing to think. But if you're like actually standing on a platform complaining about that and you don't give a fuck about the 70 something percent of the rest of the world that doesn't have access to clean drinking water in the first place, fuck, like all of the way off and that.
Speaker 3:So just I don't know, man, that's what strikes me as a lot of the time yeah, because I mean we've been able to genetically modify, you know, things out of our food that are not so good for us and that has saved many people from starvation.
Speaker 3:Like how many people would have starved if we didn't modify our food, I mean it's just it's just kind of come back to like an anti-science thing, like it always seems like, you know, the people are anti-gmo, are also, like you know, anti-vax and all these sort of things. Like it's just kind of this natural good, artificial bad was really where it comes from and like it's uh, amplified by people like courtney swans.
Speaker 1:Out there in grocery stores. They're walking around with their $3,000 handbags saying you should, you need to buy this $10 version of this $1 food. The $1 food is bad you know this mayo.
Speaker 3:that's 12 bucks for a tiny jar. I'll stick with my fucking off brand Hellman's. Thank you very much. I'll all the soybean oil, please and thank you.
Speaker 2:If you're not a scientist and you want to know if something is good for you, just check out whether or not uh gwyneth paltrow has endorsed it and then, if she has, just ignore you know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Like that's, if you, if you think you're on to something in terms of like health and and medicine and all this stuff, is it sold on the same website as psychic vampire repellent spray? Maybe you don't need it. Maybe you don't need to buy. Maybe it's actually not the leading medical breakthrough you thought it was oh, but it's expensive, so that must mean it's good, and you?
Speaker 1:and you need it.
Speaker 3:Uh, it's, it's, yeah, the gm, the, the bioengineer food and the gmo food. Just it just annoys the shit out of me, not as much as like be calling fruits, vegetables or whatever, but like pretty close fuck those guys the most. Oh, it's so frustrating.
Speaker 2:It's so frustrating yeah it's, it's just misinformation and and the fact that, like, sensationalism sells and and if people yeah, you, you mentioned a minute ago just the naturalistic fallacy, it's so unbelievably common and I feel like I I don't know, maybe maybe I'm seeing it from a different frame of reference, but I feel like it's on the rise, where people are like anything artificial is bad. Yeah, anything that doesn't come out of nature is bad, and I'm like I hope you never take tylenol or get on an airplane or anything else that you think is that isn't natural, like fuck, I love all those, uh, the big name, nature pushers, liver King, all those people that you know what I saw recently, liver King.
Speaker 3:He went in a hyperbaric chamber and I I fucking ate that shit up. That was the greatest thing ever. He was like you know, I'm healing my he. He tore something, whatever and he went into and he's like I'm not going to heal it through medicine. And this motherfucker, this fucking ninja turtle, went into a hyperbaric chamber to heal it and I'm like that's the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life. You know all our ancestors that when they got hurt, they climbed into their requisite hyperbaric chambers to heal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they ate 30 pounds of raw liver. Got in the hyperbaric chamber, shot up a bunch of anabolic steroids and became strong.
Speaker 3:That's how that's how we are ancestors today and that's how you should do it what do I know?
Speaker 2:I am but a weak man with only two biceps when he has 17 god, eat your liver, king bar, and go into your hyperbaric chamber.
Speaker 1:We're all living wrong apparently.
Speaker 3:It's so funny, natural versus artificial. Just go to the forest and eat a bunch of mushrooms. If you like the natural shit, I'm sure it'll go well for you.
Speaker 2:The amount of people who still, like you know, they, they, you know recommend that I look up some naturopath and like, oh yeah, or something, you know, man, you know they've cracked the code. If you can pay 500 and earn the title of doctor, you haven't earned the title of doctor, sir, you know that's not how that works and just just cause you went to the Kent Hoven school of medicine, I don't know like what. It's not not my job to try to correct you, but you are hurting people and we.
Speaker 1:We unfortunately have um, I don't remember the name of it, but it's a, a college, and I use that loosely because it's not accredited, right. Uh, in Ontario, here in Canada, it's's. It's one, it's one of the most famous um naturopathic wellness colleges in north america and and they, the people who go there, they get a title. And they get the title because the college went and trademarked a name. That's it. Oh, it's just a trademark name. It sounds fancy, it sounds like they're a doctor or something, but all they did was went and trademarked a name and only graduates from this college can use it.
Speaker 2:That's smart, I like that there you go, there you go. Yeah, that's how you do marketing and medicine together. Take notes, kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah and it's actually funny because, um four, I believe four of the provinces actually regulate those tiles titles, while the others don't so.
Speaker 2:In those four provinces, which includes alberta here, they are not allowed to use those titles and they actually have to switch to a different title yeah, my gosh but they earned it by paying their 500 bucks that you don't just study reiki for 13 years, so you can't use whatever fucking title they oh, my god yeah, I love it.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, gmo is fine. If you're wondering, if you want to know what things you should look up, look up Tio Sente, which is like the ancestor of like corn, and that shit was like sad as fuck, like there's it looks like a sheaf of wheat, almost like it's just a little weird.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, so you know I enjoy my GMOs. Thank you very much. I will take their cheaper. And also, I just have to say like before we move on to something else is like we've genetically modified plants to be more resistant to pests, so we use less pesticides. Now on gmo crops but, it's always the people that are complaining about gmos also complain about pesticides. I'm like, you're fucking like. Do you not see the irony here?
Speaker 2:like oh and like, don't be wrong there's. There's plenty of shit to complain about with gmos the fact that like isn't monsanto has trademarked all of the genetics of their things, so if the seeds blow into someone else's field, they can sue that farmer into non-existence or just make them grow only Monsanto products from now on. You know what I mean. Like that kind of shit, talk about it for sure, but don't try to gatekeep nutrition and take good, healthy food, not the science Right.
Speaker 3:That's what.
Speaker 2:I'm saying humans. Healthy food, not the science, right? That's what I'm saying. Don't try to take good, healthy, life-saving food out of people's mouths because you have this weird naturalistic stigma. Uh uh, somebody a friend of mine, um, she goes by morticia on uh tiktok.
Speaker 3:She's a we've had her. We've had her she's awesome, she's great and she did a.
Speaker 2:She did a whole video about um, like chicken from a can. And she's like people are freaked out and disgusted by this and they act like it's disease. And she's like see this little glob of like yellow goo in there. You think it's fermented. You think it's full of bacteria. Look, you can melt it in a pan. If it had fried, it would have been bacterial growth. It melted, which means it's just collagen and you're just adding this problem onto it when you don't need to.
Speaker 2:This is perfectly safe, healthy food that's available for people who need it. If you live in, if you're in a poor situation, if you need to keep your food for a long time you don't have a refrigerator, like you need access to meat. This is perfectly safe, healthy food that you are shaming people for eating when it's totally fucking fine because you're ignorant. And it's the same thing with with, with gmos and with everything else. I see it's just like yeah, but it's icky and it didn't come out of like the. I didn't buy it from sprouts and I didn't pay three times as much as I should have for it and I didn't. You know, I was like whatever, like flip dude, the, the. The train of bullshit is blowing in somebody's background the train of bullshit.
Speaker 1:The train of bullshit that was almost a title of our podcast. The train of bullshit, we decided to go with it in moderation.
Speaker 3:The train of bullshit. Oh yeah, so yeah, don't, just, don't worry so much. People ask us all the time, like time, like, oh, what should we worry about?
Speaker 1:like, a fucking.
Speaker 3:You know spoiled food over consumption of things not being able to afford food, like all of those things are bad, don't worry about your canned chicken, like it's fine yeah, there's plenty of shit to be upset about, dude uh, yeah, it's pretty rough. Oh, can I ask you?
Speaker 2:factors exist, come on, because there's plenty of things to be upset about I. Uh, yeah, it's pretty rough. Oh, can I ask? Factors exist, come on, because there's plenty of things to be upset about I love to.
Speaker 3:Oh. So there's like a couple other things I don't know if we can get into, like how much time we have or whatever, but like I liked your thing about saying like seeds are like wheat. Is what are you saying? Seeds are like an uh, not an a flower.
Speaker 2:It's like a seed omelet yeah, yeah, yeah, flower is basically a powdered omelet.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah I like that. Yeah, yeah, tell people about that oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I've got this video on my on my youtube channel. It's just called bread, uh, and it's about bread. If you like bread, check it out. Um, it's, it's, and basically what I do is like I just explain what bread is and how it's made in like purely scientific term, like really understanding, and it's one of those cool things like when you really think about it, it's fucking gross and horrible and like that makes it great and that's that. Honestly, that's something that I love about biology is that you can look at anything too close and be disgusted by it. And if you haven't, you haven't thought, if you're not grossed out by literally everything in biology, you haven't thought about enough, and so, like that's, that's just the best part.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, seeds um, they've got uh, an external uh layer, this, you know, the outer husk, um, and then they've got this germ that's like wrapped around them and then you've got this endosperm that it's basically like the yolk or of an egg.
Speaker 2:It's just nutrients for the plant embryo to utilize as it's growing, because the seed is basically a plant egg.
Speaker 2:It's got an embryo in there and it's got all this endosperm in there to nourish the embryo as it's getting started, sperm in there to nourish the embryo as it's getting started. And so what you do when you make flour unless it's like whole flour or whatever, like the half and half germ flour, whatever if it's just regular old white flour they just break off the husk and the germ from the seed and then they grind it up. They grind up all the endosperm and you're left with this powder and it's a powdered omelet. Except what endosperm is mainly made of is carbohydrates, and carbohydrates are just chains of sugar. So flour is really just powdered sugar is what it actually is, if you think about it. And then you take that and you mix it with water and some fungus and the fungus eats the sugar and shits out carbon dioxide and alcohol and the alcohol evaporates out as it's boiling, as it's cooking, as it's swelling full of fungus, farts and it's and that's fucking bread and that's what you're putting in your body on purpose.
Speaker 2:You're eating that italian restaurant and they serve it in cylindrical and you get all excited because it's real crunchy on the outside and you and the crunch is just caramel, because what you've got, you've still got a lot of carbohydrates that this is made out of, and when you get those hot, there's a lot of sugars and proteins. You go through my artery actions where those break apart and reassociate in totally unpredictable ways, and that is what caramel is and that's why the outside of bread is brown, because that's literally caramelization that you're seeing. And so you have fucking caramelized, used to be alcoholic, fungus fart, inflated plant sperm powder and that's you put, that you wrap, that's what you make a sandwich out of and you feel good about yourself shame on you that's what you make a sandwich out of and you feel good about yourself.
Speaker 3:Shame on you. That's what it is. I will enjoy every bite of it. Yes.
Speaker 1:Damn fungus.
Speaker 2:The more you think about anything in biology, the more horrific it becomes, and that's one of the best parts about biology. I love it so much. I want to do a video on my channel. I'm writing it right now. It's kind of just an idea that I want to flesh out, hopefully like next month, maybe.
Speaker 3:I want to talk about, like why you don't eat wasp honey.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you guys, but don't you and you watching this, don't tell anybody about this because I want to release a whole video about it. The, the you know you think about like regular, like bumblebee honey, like a so-and-so bee honey, it's, it's they, they go and they eat nectar and then they you think about regular bumblebee honey, right Delicious. Bee honey Sweet. They go and they eat nectar and then they vomit up honey Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's puke, it's bee puke, wasp honey. Okay, so consider, wasps don't have a functional stomach. Adult wasps, they have the wasp waste. It gets real narrow in the middle. It's what we call the wasp waste. So they're, they're, you know that gets real narrow in the middle. It's what we call it a wasp waste. They don't have a functional working like they can't process their own nutrients in there.
Speaker 2:They don't have enough room and so they need an external stomach in order to process nutrients for them.
Speaker 2:So they have babies. They have this hive, this, this, this nest, and they have all these little compartments in there and they put a bunch of babies in there and the little larvae have these horrible little fangs that they scrape along the inside of the inner wall of their little compartments and that creates a vibration that the velocities can hear that says I'm hungry. And so they go over to this scraping fanged larva and they vomit up whatever they've eaten into that baby. They go out into the world, they eat their omnivores, they eat plants, they eat meat, they do whatever they find and they come back and they puke it up into the baby. The baby the larva digests it and whatever is extra nutrients that it can't utilize, that it just has extra. It pukes that up into this wad of sticky, nutrient-rich goo that the adult wasps come and drink and that's how they get their nourishment it's double vomit because they need an external stomach, and so they use their children for it.
Speaker 2:Imagine, if you will, a world in which you, with your child, liam uh, you go out and you eat a big mac and then you come home and you stopped and you, like a bird mother, regurgitate the Big Mac into your child and then, after a few hours, just ring the Big Mac back out of your child and consume that after it's already been partially digested. That's how the wasps do and like I think it's very efficient.
Speaker 3:It's phenomenally efficient.
Speaker 2:It's horrifically efficient. It is some eight like Geiger, esque, shit. That is an absolute fucking nightmare and like the more you think about it, the worse it gets and I want to talk about that on the internet and I have to figure out a way to get like stock footage for that.
Speaker 3:I could not help you with that, but I do have this idea. But so can we eat it, though. Can we eat the goo?
Speaker 2:or do you want to how do you harvest it? Okay, listen hear me out here hear me out here.
Speaker 3:So b so, so, so so, honey is b vomit, right. So that's one puked. That's, that's one puke that's one single but I feel like double is usually better, like, like you know, one twice baked potato, twice baked potato. Great example, yeah, so then, double cooked pork honey, double baked honey, double, double vomited whatever it is double puked honey. Double puked, isn't that twice as good Is, couldn't?
Speaker 2:I don't, I don't want to think about if it is. I'm not saying we want to think about it, but I can say but what I can also tell you is that the composition would be entirely different. It wouldn't be sweet, I can tell you that much it was. Certainly it certainly wouldn't be, because it's it's, it's whatever the fuck the wasp was eating it's not just nectar.
Speaker 3:Could we feed the wasp hypothetically just sugar, like, just like very sweet things, and then have the baby eat the sweet things and then puke up the sweet things again. So it's doubly puked up sweetness.
Speaker 2:I hate how much sense that made. That makes sense, that's right.
Speaker 3:Like okay, so if we could farm, we have to farm wasps.
Speaker 2:You need farmed wasps and you need to see, because they don't they don't store the double puke for the future like bees do, which means you need to collect it as it happens. So you need a series of tiny pipettes, and and very patient and and like somebody who's on top of these fucking larvae and just like watching them.
Speaker 3:So we have to connect a little pipette from each larvae, like in the little you know whatever it is and then kind of like we just add suction, like so okay, so we have one vacuum. That's like pulling constantly, and then that brand branches off into a bunch of little bipeds that all have a constant vacuuming.
Speaker 2:So you can't take. You can't take too much, because they need it to live. Yeah, fuck, so you can only have the vacuum on half the time every other.
Speaker 3:You need a vacuum dedicated to each cell babies puke up, like directly back into the, like the, the adult wasp or does it?
Speaker 2:no, it just kind of bubbles up and it stays there until they come.
Speaker 3:You have a window. You have a window to collect it okay, so we just okay, so we need to get we. So, yes, like, normally, wild caught good, wild caught bad. In this situation we need farms, so we need to farm these wasps Get only. I mean, can they eat sugar? I'm assuming they can just like, eat like if they can eat anything, they can just eat sugar, certainly.
Speaker 2:Could you get different?
Speaker 3:types of sugar, like coconut sugar, and then it would have a coconut-y like flavor, like extra minerals.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know if that would translate, because, like it's like sugar is sugar is sugar. But at the end of the day that that I don't know if it's like. Those coconuts are going to use a different isomer so they're going to be all about like that fructose life. But I think it's the extra other, it's the tannins and the other shit in the coconut that gives it the flavor.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, so I was thinking well not the flavor, because it's like coconut, but like they have minerals in all fairness.
Speaker 3:Like if we're talking about bee honey, like, like you know, but orange blossom honey does taste a little differently than like wild, right, exactly.
Speaker 2:So there's got to be something different sugar things so that you'd have to it would be a lot of trial and error and then, like a blueberry, wasp honey versus because you wouldn't want to add the flavor in afterwards. That's just cheating.
Speaker 3:You'd want the natural get the fuck out of here with that that's just like you know, he's trying to do the fake stuff that people like you know artificial dyes, yeah, they just put honey in and they say it's five and it's a wasp. No, we work for this wasp.
Speaker 2:fucking honey here, not like honey, honey flavored syrup from McDonald's type of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, OK you guys figure this out. I'll get on the phone with Kim thug. We'll figure out a name and marketing for this would be good.
Speaker 3:So yeah, then we just suck it up and then we just like yeah, and then, so you know you have like different types of wasp honey you knock down the wasp nest over your door.
Speaker 2:Outside you're knocking down a gold mine. Y'all like this is. This is your chance now to reinvent the wheel. You could. You could be the next big thing oh, what a horrible world we live in, but that's the thing.
Speaker 3:But you are, as you said. Everything's already disgusting, so you have to lean into the disgust in order to be successful with this. Yeah, that's the best.
Speaker 1:That's the best part about you were about to be on a podcast with a guy that spent like 10 minutes one podcast wondering what a nose would taste like what a nose would taste like oh yeah, I did wonder that nose lungs. What else did you? Well, yeah well he was just like what does this human body part?
Speaker 3:taste right, because the nose is like you know, it's not like you know, there's no like real bones or whatever, like it's the cartilage, like your ears and your nose like that's a different is that like kind of like pig feet you, you think Like is it like I would think low and slow for something like that You'd have to break down. It's a little like you know collagenist or whatever.
Speaker 1:it is like you have to Collagenistic.
Speaker 3:That's a word. You have to. You have to do a low, so you can't like sear this. You know what I'm saying. Like it just wouldn't, it would seize up.
Speaker 2:I think you'd need to. Just if you just have cartilage and collagen from a thing, it's not going to taste good, it's just going to taste taste like slime.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, you obviously have to season it like you can't just like, do nothing, but well, that's going to taste like seasonings.
Speaker 2:You were on. You were on the right track when you said pigs feed, because humans do taste like pork and so like whatever you think is going to come out of that is what it tastes like.
Speaker 3:Is that true? So humans kind of taste like? Is that the closest thing like if for whatever, animal you're eating to a human. My understanding is that on the black market.
Speaker 1:Market. Human meat is known as long pig because we are very poor creatures and and I can tell you, understanding right, I, I mean I, can tell you um.
Speaker 2:So I've, I've, I've dissected a lot of humans. I've never tasted one, but like I've, I've, I've cut a lot of opportunity when? Well, I mean, it was full of formaldehyde. So maybe not, but when a body isn't well preserved, and I can see some of the literally raw meat in there like that is what it looks like the most in my opinion, and so like like that's, that's, that's definitely what it resembles in color and texture, and so, like I would imagine something similar to that, but I don't know.
Speaker 3:I mean, we all have these thoughts.
Speaker 2:I'm just open enough to be like hey I want to know what like I would want to try I would want to try a monkey, because I don't think that there's any place that's going to serve me an ape like. I don't think there's any place that would cook up like a a gorilla or a um, a chimpanzee, but surely there's some places that you can get like some sort of monkey that's like I'm trying to think of how how close to human could you taste?
Speaker 2:because that at that time would just be like bushmeat. So you'd have to figure out an ethical way to source it. Um, but like we're all about ethics here, that's what is it? And that is like poached, poached meat, but meat from poachers of just random wild animals that people want to try.
Speaker 3:That's bushmeat, right am I thinking if I was going to eat a human, I would eat a poacher itself, because like those ones that like hunt lions and shit like, that?
Speaker 2:Because fuck those guys, right? Yeah, fuck those guys.
Speaker 3:When I was in the Amazon.
Speaker 1:We had poachers go by where we were camped and like it was just like everybody, get down, stay quiet, because if they see you they will shoot you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, fuck those like they. They cut horns off like rhinoceroses and shit and like take that, like fuck them. Like I got no, I got no sympathy. So if I was to eat a human, I think that they would be up there.
Speaker 2:OK, so I thought Bushmeat specifically spoke to like things that were like poached and problematic. Excuse me, I'm real burpish right now. According to the Wikipedia this fountain of truth that is wikipedia bushmeat is meat from wildlife species that are hunted for human consumption and it actually isn't just for from from poaching. It represents a primary source of animal protein and cash earning commodity for poor and rural communities and human tropical foreign regions of the world. I think that might be a bit reductionist, but apparently it's. It's all over the place and it's just so. I apologize for speaking disparagingly of it, um, but I would still say that I don't know of any way to ethically source monkey, um, but like oh, that's great oh, before we grass-fed, grass-fed, free range monkey farms out there gosh arms monkey farm.
Speaker 2:I played that game, monkey farm um, it is illegal to import this into the united states. Monkey meat found at the country's border will be seized and destroyed by customs agents, so this doesn't have anything to do with nutrition.
Speaker 3:Before we go, because we were talking about monkeys, I wanted, I want you to tell people, because this is something I see a lot, um, not unlike the nutrition side. This is just totally different. But why haven't, I don't know, monkeys evolved into humans? This is something I see, you know, like where, where?
Speaker 2:are you located? Columbus ohio? That's gonna be a long walk for me to come kick your ass. That's, that's.
Speaker 3:That's gonna be tough, that going to be a long walk for me to come kick your ass.
Speaker 1:That's going to be tough. That is going to be a long walk.
Speaker 3:This is something I see a lot, and it always makes me laugh, and I just need you to kind of explain to people why other animals haven't evolved into humans.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what this is? This is a problem of what's called orthogenic thinking. So orthogenesis is the idea that evolution has like a direction as an end goal, plan, yeah, yeah, and that humans are that goal, yes, um, and so it's why I hate it's called the zallinger diagram. Whenever you see, like the picture of like the monkey that like levels up slowly into a human, like pokemon, that kind of thing, that's originally. That's from a, a drawing called the march of progress by a guy named rudolph zallinger it was for like life magazine back in the day and like that symbol of evolution has sown so much fucking doubt and and confusion, because that's what people think it is. It's just, eventually things will be as cool as humans or they'll be like humans, and that's not how selection pressure works. So remember, evolution is driven by selection pressure, which is to say, if you do this, you die, if you don't do that, you die.
Speaker 2:So selection pressure is the cause of differential survival and reproduction within a population in whatever their specific environment is, and because it's environmentally specific and because it's species specific, and because it's environmentally specific and because it's species specific and really population specific that it changes from one thing to the next. What people don't understand is that there's no one right way to evolve. When you gain fitness in one environment, you are necessarily losing fitness and environment in another environment. The better you get at being a gorilla, the worse you are at being a great white shark. The same selection pressure that would be positive for one species would be negative for another species. Say, for example, avocados Giant ground sloths used to eat avocados, still eat avocados, and avocado is going to kill a dog or a parrot that eats it. It's very toxic to them. So having this as a selection pressure to say, I have access to this resource, which is avocados, and I can eat these and gain nutrients and I can now survive and reproduce better this is positive selection pressure for me, negative selection pressure for a dog, um, or a parrot or whatever else that can't eat this stuff, same with chocolate.
Speaker 2:With human evolution, especially over the last 2.6 or so million years, especially then, we've been leaning really hard into toolmaking. The first tools that we see in the fossil record that are for sure tools are about 2.6 million years old and those are what we call the old one tools. There are some other ones that are a lot earlier than that. We call Lamequi the Lamequian tool complex. I'm not a fan for that. There's just not a lot of strong evidence to suggest that these were actually tools in my opinion yet, but they exist. But who cares to suggest that these were actually tools, in my opinion, yet? But they exist, but who cares?
Speaker 2:The point is for sure starting 2.6 million years ago, we have the species Homo habilis who is now making stone tools. They break a rock with another rock and now they have a sharper rock and they can use that sharp rock to crack open bones and scoop out bone marrow and they can more easily deflesh and process carrion that they're able to find out in the wild and they're able to eat this meat. They now have access to better resources and that fuels brain development. This is now selection pressure. The people who can make the best tools have the most food and the most nourishing food of any other ape on the savannah. You get about a million years further than that.
Speaker 2:A million years or so after that, you have homo erectus pops up about 1.8 million years ago.
Speaker 2:And homo erectus remarkable discovery they figured out. You can sharpen, get this both sides of the rock, uh, and there's where you get the ashulian tools, where you have these hand axes, these big chopping things, and we see a lot more meat processing, a lot more bone marrow action going on. All this really cool stuff. And then you skip forward another you know million or so years and you have all these amazing like diversity of industrial complexes, of different types of tools as different populations split. The Neanderthals had really cool tools that were unique, that were different than the ones that, like we made, and all these, and as you look especially over you know Homo sapiens history we have all sorts of different, increasingly complex and interesting stone tools. We made better tools, which gave us access to better resources, which gave us bigger brains, which allowed us to develop bigger tools, which gave us access to better resources, which gave us bigger brains, which gave us better tools, and loop and loop, and loop, on and on and on.
Speaker 1:These days we have a lot of really big tools.
Speaker 2:That's yeah, and and and. That's. The thing is that, like we and there's even some evidence that tool making had a genetic component to it, which isn't unheard of considering how behavioral evolution works um and so like, this right here is a direct and like like descendant of the very first old one chopping rocks 2.6 million years ago.
Speaker 3:This is a tool, which is a phone, for anyone listening. Yes, yeah, sorry I should.
Speaker 2:I forgot we were doing audio too. But like, yeah, that might the cell phone that you're, the earbuds in your ears at this moment, the car you're driving in listening to this, whatever it may be. You look at the, the most advanced and incredible technology around you vaccines, and and we have a fucking helicopter on mars that for a long time, that just died recently, like that, the voyager, one spacecraft that's flying out of our solar system right now. There's a direct line between that and a fucking ape on the savannah that picked up a rock and smacked open a bone and so like. When you ask, why didn't other animals, you know, go this direction? Well, they didn't have to. That wasn't a part of their story. No one's more evolved than anybody else the, the.
Speaker 2:If something is alive today, it is as evolved as every other thing, because that's how evolution works. As long as there's reproduction, there's evolution. There's copying errors, there's changes in the allele frequencies and the inherited characteristics of a population. When we look at humans getting bigger, brains gave us access to better resources. Tools gave us access to better resources. What we do today gives us access to better resources. This is how we are evolving and how we have been evolving for a very long time.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, in the amazon rainforest there's a boa constrictor that really doesn't want a fucking smartphone but would do much better. Just squeezing a rat and consuming that rat and having stone tools does not give it any more access to any more part of that rat and that's not necessary and so like that's, that's just. And you look, you think it might be some big leap to use a rock for these things. It absolutely is not. You look at you know a non-human primates. Today there are monkeys that use rocks to crack open nuts. That's exactly the same thing we use uh see chimpanzees who use sticks to fish for termites. That's exactly the same thing. We see monkeys that use big balls of moss to soak up water like a sponge. They can carry water with them and drink it more easily. That's exactly the same thing.
Speaker 3:So let me ask you something. Yeah, go ahead. So let me just ask you something there. Would you then consider these people that are like all about our ancestors and acting like our ancestors? Would they be anti-human ancestors and acting like our ancestors?
Speaker 1:would they be anti-human.
Speaker 2:Would they be against human? No, not at all. Not at all, because doing dumb shit is the most human thing there is.
Speaker 3:That was the perfect answer. That's a very good answer, because it always seems to be going back and I'm like well, the whole thing is this helped us get future, get into the, get into where we currently are, where things are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how many millennia ago did we start splitting open rocks and injecting things? Yeah, exactly yeah.
Speaker 2:That's. That's when it really all went downhill. Yeah no, it is hard and like that's, it drives me up a wall really, when people we talked a lot about medical misinformation in the show and things like that.
Speaker 1:And like when people say oh well, well people, you know what?
Speaker 3:what did they do before vaccines, and what did they do?
Speaker 2:before antibiotics. And what did they fucking died, they died, they died.
Speaker 3:Beth, I don't know what you want from me right now like seven billion or whatever it is like.
Speaker 2:That's a lot more I just just use use the incredible technology that you are currently disavowing to look up what survivorship bias is and learn a thing like that's. But what? What do these planes do before we put armor on them? Look, they all came back with only some damage to the wings. They're totally fine yes that's how it works yeah, I, that's.
Speaker 3:That's why it's incredibly frustrating that all this like oh, just go, like our, what we, what humans, can pass you along your genes. Right, that's the, that's the goals. Like pass along your genes and keep going. Keep going, you're, you're, you're race. Like I've had a child, I'm done. Now it's over. Like it does. So when we go back to look like how do we live into our 80s, let's look at our ancestors, for that that doesn't tell us any. Like that's that's you know. We need to look at current, where we currently are and how you can live to your 80s and be healthy.
Speaker 2:Uh, you know and, and you know, we learn that from the best evidence in biomedical science, not from well, my grandpappy lived to the age of of 500, we eat nothing but Listerine and Rolos and therefore I know this is what we have to do.
Speaker 3:That's not how it works. I just needed to get you frustrated with me on that subject, because normally I rant at the end of the podcast about how frustrating something is, so I need somebody else to also get frustrated at the same thing.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm here for.
Speaker 3:That's what I'm here for. That's what I'm here for, oh man, so yeah, that's why. That's why other things haven't evolved into humans, just so you know yes, it's, it's your fault, it's because they all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's because we all got vaccines and and and ate processed GMO foods.
Speaker 1:And that started using sunscreen.
Speaker 3:Yes, and that's precluded. Did our ancestors have sunscreen? No, no. They didn't die of skin cancer, did they? I mean, yeah, they died.
Speaker 2:Not a single one of them. No, no, they didn't. You're right, they didn't live long enough to get skin cancer.
Speaker 3:They died of a two-night infection long before they died of skin cancer. Don't see your dentist.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love the sunscreen one, just because they show pictures of 100 years ago. It's like what did these people do? They didn't wear sunscreen. They're all wearing hats and long sleeves.
Speaker 3:Well, I guess there's that too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh shit, it turns out the sun's been a problem and it's been here the whole time.
Speaker 3:Hmm, like the sun is just like a a bomb, just like a hydrogen bomb, basically like, apparently that's good, though, basically that's just pretty much what it is. Yeah, it's a fucking bomb in the sky, but yeah we're like soaking like you know that area between your butthole and your genitals. Make sure you get that to your son as much as possible.
Speaker 2:Get that, that taint exposure y'all perineum sun exposure. It cures all diseases. Oh, woe be to those with tiny taints that they cannot absorb the blessed radiation video.
Speaker 3:He was like he went to a baby food section and he's just like you ever wonder why testicle shrinking. Testicles are shrinking, taints are tinking, shrinking, damn it because taints are shrinking because of the plastic. That's the baby. Food is in it's so good.
Speaker 2:I want to see the study on shrinking taints. I was. I want that source cited who's out? Here with the tape measure is exactly what I was gonna. And also, where did they draw the conclusion that microplastics are directly related to the size of my or anyone else's taint? It's so good, but it's so good for a fuse, though Does it also impact flavor?
Speaker 3:I want to know oh gosh, so where can people find you to learn more about shrinking taints that you're going to look up Right here?
Speaker 2:I'm not going anywhere. We're going to solve this mystery together here. I'm not going anywhere. We're gonna solve this mystery together. The? Uh. You can find me on them internets, y'all, uh, go, go, uh. Go to my website, valkylabscom. Um. Subscribe to me on the yubi tubies, um, if you like, uh, helping people and also tabletop gaming.
Speaker 2:I'm doing a really cool charity thing right now called Roll for Initiative. A bunch of my friends and I got together and we played about 36 hours of a game called Tales of the Valiant, which is similar to D&D, if you know what that's all about. And it's all to raise money for Doctors Without Borders, because they're the ones on the ground right now saving lives in Palestine and Ukraine and Sudanemen and congo and other crisis zones all around the world. So we are supporting the real heroes in the world by playing some fantasy heroes in a fun little game. So if you like tabletop gaming stuff, uh, go watch that. I play the ever cursed dr victor vindica, um, and uh. We've got an amazing cast, an amazing show, we're telling an amazing story and episode 11 comes out this week, which will be but I'd like you to come out the day before this podcast comes out, I believe. So tune into that and and enjoy it it's, it's a really cool series and we're raising money for a really great cause.
Speaker 3:And now you know next time you can invite, wouldn't be a character He'd be playing Liam.
Speaker 2:The man who is as concerned about the tastes of noses as he is about the length of taints.
Speaker 1:The wasp vomit.
Speaker 3:The hero we all need, I think wasp vomit is first on my interest, but the other ones are close behind it. Love that you could be. A wasp vomit is first on my interest, but the other ones are close behind it. Love that.
Speaker 1:You can be a wasp mancer.
Speaker 2:Wasp mancer. I cast wasps.
Speaker 3:It tastes like whatever they ate. Yeah, god.
Speaker 1:So gross. No, what a show.
Speaker 3:Yeah, got an hour, a little over an hour there.
Speaker 2:Yep, Though did we end it already. Was that it? We didn't?
Speaker 1:even say goodbye. Oh, you can say goodbye.
Speaker 2:Oh no, Thanks so much for tuning in. This was you. You listen to it.
Speaker 1:You listen to it on purpose.
Speaker 3:You have no one to blame but yourself. You listen to it on purpose.
Speaker 2:K-bye, k-bye. Come back next week, or don't. I'm not a cop.
