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