Alie Ward
Appearances
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Oh, hey, it's the new leaf on your what you thought was a dying houseplant. Allie Ward, this is Ologies. We're going to get real about sociology. It's everywhere humans are, including in your television. And by that, I mean probably your laptop in bed or your phone on the toilet. Now, reality TV sociology, it's a real thing.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
You know, you mentioned the real world and I watched the real world when it came out when I was in high school and it was revolutionary to be like, wait, we're just in these people's house. They're just being themselves in their houses. This one got in a fight. What is going on? Are they going to kiss? These are real people. And Survivor, I feel like was a really big,
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
moment for competitive TV, for competition-based television? Did they wire younger brains to be like, I really am more drawn towards seeing actual emotions, you know?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Okay, let's go back in time now. Although Gen Alpha may not know, the road to reality has been paved with classics like the panoptic iconic Big Brother and the delicate balance of being wealthy and attractive but upset at the same time. When it comes to Real Housewives, tell me why that has a spot in your heart. And is it only certain areas?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Are there certain cities that are more attractive to you? Or what do you love about it?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
What is real in reality TV? Who signs up to be on reality TV? What effect could it have on young brains? Primetime catfights, class warfare, passive aggression.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
You know, the term brain rot is, I feel like, something that we use where we just need to turn our brains off from thinking about something that is too terrible. I'm wondering how much human brains are actually capable of taking in the horrors of the world on a global scale from an anthropological standpoint.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And if there is some need, as we learn more and more about what's happening globally with suffering, global warming, if we... are more drawn towards something that's low stakes. Do you feel like reality TV is doing something to our brains where it's a respite?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And for decades, scholars wondered about the causes and effects of reality shows. There was this one 2001 paper. It's now vintage, I suppose. Psychological escapism, predicting the amount of television viewing by need for cognition in the journal Communication.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And it found that if a person's need to think is lower, they feel less pleasant when they have nothing to do because there's nothing left to do but think. And the easiest way for individuals to escape this pressure to think is by watching TV.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
what reality can teach us about ourselves, eating hamburgers with a camera in your face, good examples, bad examples, race, wealth, and so much more with sociologist, author, professor, and straight-up professional reality TV sociologist, Dr. Danielle Lineman. So many people were like, get her on now. And I was like, I didn't know this was an ology. My name is Danielle Lindeman. She, her, hers.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
So if we're wondering why we sit and scroll for hours looking at videos of people we will never meet who are blending their contour or sharpening a camping hatchet or demoing their guest bathroom, that might be why. In tough times. No think he feels good. But can reality TV as a construct deliver that anymore?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
There was this one New York Times critic who called reality shows, quote, a theater of cruelty, citing that the casualties of these onscreen conflicts are too real with reality TV personalities dying by suicide and suffering other stark readjustments to their new life under scrutiny. So now that we know the behind the scenes, reality TV might be too dark to lean on for escapism.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Or maybe as a culture, we're just getting more mean. What are some things that you feel like your students or you have learned about human interactions and human dynamics? Has it changed any of the ways that you interact with people in your life or the way that your students interact? Do you end up learning how to be a person or how not to be a person from hours of watching?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
You know, I've always wondered, too, I grew up watching Discovery Channel. I loved, like, nature documentaries and animal documentaries. And then as time went on, it became, like, Pawn Stars or, like, Ice Road Truckers. It became a lot of Blue Collar Hero. And... Is there something economic there where it's cheaper to make the shows or the demographic tends to want to see themselves reflected?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Do we know why some media has kind of turned over to reality TV type of shows that are more people-based than maybe nature-based?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Alec Baldwin and Hilaria's new show with their seven kids, that's on TLC. Now, one 2021 paper in the journal Media and Communication is titled, quote, Here come my 600 pound quintuplets, a discussion of reality television as a freak discourse.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
which explains that from gorgons and mermaids to bearded ladies and elephant men, people have for centuries been fascinated by those who deviate from physical and mental social norms. However, as science and medicine progressed and the protection of human rights became more important, freak shows and traveling side shows dwindled.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
The article looks at how reality television programming as a genre uses a narrative formula that can be likened to 19th century freak shows to enhance its storylines and produce a human spectacle. Wow. But why?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
So yeah, like a drive-thru on a road trip, it's cheap and it's easy. And unlike trained actors with SAG and AFTRA union protections, the documentary nature of reality means longer shoot days, no overtime penalties or missed or late meal penalties, no mandatory eight-hour turnaround between shoots to sleep. And we covered the importance of unionizing the labor force.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
with a ton of great history in the entertainment industry in a field trip episode from the wga strike during which we talk about how the literal richest company on earth exploits union loopholes to pay its crew low budget film rates and we'll link that episode in the show notes but even 10 20 years ago this was well established in the industry as detailed in this paper titled reality tv's low wage and no wage workforce
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
which covers how reality TV's classification as non-scripted programming lets the studios exploit this non-unionized workforce and how duping someone into being a contestant on a show means you don't have to pay for the participation. It's a gamble for contestants, but the house always wins. Speaking of wealth and houses, how do you feel as someone who loves The Real Housewives?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
How do you feel about the title?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
When it comes to what you study for reality TV, do you dip into things like YouTube and TikTok? Or where is the line for you educationally where you're focusing on this medium, but not this one?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Can I launch into some questions from listeners? For sure. Okay. I'm just going to get into it because they have so many good ones. But before we do, let's highlight and donate to a charity.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Great. Reality TV. Did you start off watching it or did you start out so interested in sociology that you realized this was like the perfect cauldron of places to find interesting things about humanity?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And this week, it's going to the Pedro Zamora Scholarship via AIDSMemorial.com, which is dedicated to continuing the legacy of the late AIDS educator and health and social justice activist Pedro Zamora by awarding $5,000 scholarships to those making a difference in the fight against HIV-AIDS and or advancing public and reproductive health, racial, environmental, and immigration justice, and more.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
So for more on those scholarships or to donate, you can see the link in the show notes, which will take you to the AIDSmemorial.org's page about it. Thank you to sponsors of the show for making these donations possible. Okay, on to your questions sent in by the patrons via patreon.com slash ologies.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
First one comes from Oliver Callis, Sarah Manns, and Darren Bush, who noted that in working with primates in grad school, Darren said, when there's a physical conflict, every monkey watches with interest. Maybe we're wired to be voyeurs, Darren said, as well as...
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And as proof, we're going to meet a professor of sociology at Lehigh University, who is part of the core faculty of women, gender and sexuality studies, who's also an author of the books, Dominatrix, Gender, Eroticism and Control in the Dungeon. and her highly lauded 2022 release, True Story, What Reality TV Says About Us.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Patron The Lady is a Geek asked, rather than these shows reflecting the reality of courtship, how much do they shift expectations to something unrealistic? Reality TV seems to romance what porn is to sex, The Lady is a Geek said. It reminds me of that definition of pornography or obscenity where I can't define it, but I know when I see it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Right. Also, I understand that in House Hunters and House Hunters International and all of the franchise that they absolutely already bought the house before they shot it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Yeah, no, sorry, everyone. On those house hunting shows, they usually already bought the house. And according to many publications, like House Beautiful's article, here's the shocking truth about HGTV's house hunters. Usually, you're watching someone who already purchased a place tour their own empty home.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And then the producers find a few other places to tour, like according to reports from people who have been on the show, they might be filmed in walking through an Airbnb or even a friend's house, places that are sometimes not even on the market, as if they were considering living and dying in it. Now, filming can take place over a few days and you might get paid like 500 bucks to do it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
But for like Lynn and Gary looking for a Myrtle Beach summer house, I guess the clout in the cash like isn't bad for people who are not classically trained thespians. But then is that acting if someone's like, I don't know, Roger, I really don't want to live this close to the freeway. Is that acting? Are they playing themselves?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Well, this was on the minds of a lot of listeners. Jamie Hanna asked, reality TVs often make me think of the Stanford prison experiment, which is really interesting because so many of these questions are about ethics. Does a person's behavior change while in an extreme situation? Ali Lopez, first time question asker, asked the same thing.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Curious how the presence of the camera in and of itself influences, amplifies, changes how people on reality TV act versus how they would have handled similar situations while not on display. So, Does the presence of the camera change the reality of it? And how would we know?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
When it comes to cash prizes, how does that influence the way... that a show is shot or the outcome. Like Jamie Hanna wanted to know, can you discuss coercion and cash prizes? I'm thinking of someone like Alone who has a half a million dollar cash prize.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
The year was 1992 and the network was MTV. A camera crew composed the first shots of a media revolution.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
When Constantini says, I've noticed that reality TV shows have a really different vibe when there is or is not a cash prize, like the Great British Bake Off versus those crazy stressful Food Network shows. And I remember seeing some meme about how like... The Great British Bake Off is like, well, it's quite good for a fondant, but you could use some work.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And then American cooking shows are like, I need to win this or my child doesn't get cancer care, you know? Yeah. What is the difference there when cash is involved? Patrons Lisa Kahn, Scott Sheldon, Lily B, Brittany Corrigan, Jesse all asked in Lisa's dismayed words, why are American reality shows so awful and cruel?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Great British Bake Off has proven that watching lovely people be kind and wonderful to each other is popular, Jesse says. So is it the lack of safety nets and the fear of getting like a stress-induced disease that will bankrupt you? Is that what drives American reality TV to be a gladiatorial sport? Like what's happening?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Yeah, I think the dynamics do change. Even if there's not a cash prize, you might end up as a co-host on The View. You might have your own hosting gig on E! News. And so there is always that promise, perhaps, of using that to make a career and make some wealth, especially if you're not from a wealthy background.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And a lot of people wanted to know why. As much as we like to watch reality TV, It's a real small percentage of people that would be like, sign me up for it, right? Because it could be so brutal psychologically to see yourself portrayed or just you might get your heart broken or you might have to eat a deer penis, depending on what the show is. You have a real bad gag reflex. Is that true?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Yeah, when I have too much toothpaste in my mouth, I gag. How are you going to get through a buffalo penis? I can do this because this is $50,000.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Side note, if you're like, the host who's barking at a woman to deep throat a bull penis sounds familiar. Yes. He's now America's chief cultural arbiter, Joseph Rogan. And his previous job did involve gulping picnics. But on the less juicy side of the mic... Who does that is a great question.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Asked by Angelica Stanley, Ally B, Hope J, Renee Wagner, Alia Myers, Rachel Nelson, who was almost cast on Dance Moms, but her mother was too emotionally stable, Cooper Michael, and... Cuck Simber, first time question asker, asked, I get why we love to watch it, but why do people want to be on it? That was Lee, first time question asker.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And Annabelle wants to know if there are studies of people who decide to be on a reality show, like what types of people get cast in it and what are they looking for?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Yeah. Okay, but who does gravitate? Of course there are studies, such as this 2016 paper from the journal Current Psychology titled The Dark Triad Traits and Fame Interest. Do dark personalities desire stardom?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Which explained that although the fascination with fame is not a new phenomenon, the emergence of YouTube and reality television has led to the perception that fame is something that seemingly anyone can achieve.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
They write, researchers have examined the characteristics that are associated with the desire for fame and have found that narcissism is one of the most consistent predictors of fame interest. But while psychopathy and narcissism were associated with fame interest, the third dark trait, Machiavellianism, was negatively associated with desiring fame.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
It continues that the perceived ease of achieving fame may be motivating large numbers of individuals, especially younger individuals, to strive for celebrity status.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And it also cites a 2012 study that found 40% of children between the ages of 10 and 12 reported that becoming famous is their biggest goal in life, with kindness toward others and achievement taking second and third place, respectively. But honestly, in this economy, ugh. I don't know.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Another 2016 paper, Narcissism on the Jersey Shore, Exposure to Narcissistic Reality TV Characters Can Increase Narcissism Levels in Viewers. That one's pretty self-explanatory. And then a 2022 paper in Psychology of Popular Media titled Linking Adolescence Exposure to and Identification with Reality TV to Materialism, Narcissism, and Entitlement reported that
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Though previous research found a link between adolescents' reality TV viewing and their level of materialism, narcissism, and entitlement, those earlier studies did not stand the test of time because current adolescents had lower traits of narcissism and materialism because, quote, reality TV mainly portrays negative consequences of entitled and narcissistic behavior, causing viewers to refrain from copying this behavior.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
So that's good news. You may not have to lose sleep over your child growing up to hit someone with a purse or slamming an empty margarita glass onto a mansion patio. What would you do if your child was on a reality show? I don't know. Ask my mom. I just realized in talking to you that I've been on a reality TV show. What was it?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Well, I mean, it's not really, but I mean, I had a Food Network show where I went around and ate stuff. Yeah. Why do you say that's not really? I never even thought of it that way. I mean, there is a discomfort for sure of having to perform emotions or having to have an emotion that's interesting enough to be camera worthy.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
So it's interesting for me to delve into it because I wouldn't have considered it reality TV, but it was very much eating hamburgers and stuff on camera for entertainment. So... Yeah, exactly. I'm going to have to go down a whole spiral of being like, what did that serve in my life? I'm really surprised that you've mentioned sleep deprivation. I had never considered that.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
But Anna Wolf, DVNC, and Kyla C want to know a little bit about that. Like the conditions where there are maybe not a lot of sleep breaks or not a lot of rest and stuff like that. Is that just partly filming schedule or is that something that it really does sort of take down your filters and guards?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Are there a lot of sociologists and sociology professors that work with reality TV? Or did you find that this was like a hard sell for the education board?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
But who among us hasn't been A little bitchy when we're hungry or after a red eye broke down crying in an Uber. You know what I mean? Like if you had a camera on me when I've missed a flight in an airport and have cried in the bathroom. If you don't want to lose all your marbles on camera or in a stall that smells like diapers, you may find the acronym HALT helpful.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
It stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired. So again, halt. Hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. And if you're any or all of those things, I don't know, you're dancing too close to the edge, my friend. And I know I've fallen off it. Conditions affect our resilience so much. But Greg Wallach wanted to know how you feel that reality TV has influenced shifts in cultural attitudes like Project Runway or
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
RuPaul's Drag Race, queer culture, attitudes toward race, things like gender. Do you think that it's moved things forward to feeling like I have a friend who is queer or trans from watching TV, even if people might not be exposed to them in their actual lives?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
So that's some good news. But Marianne asked, do you feel that given today's climate toward women that we should really be watching stuff like The Bachelor where it's so degrading to women? And talking about gender, Ruby Gordon and Olivia Rempel wanted to know, why do many men seem to like it less than many women? Olivia asked, why is reality TV typically seen as a feminine activity?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
I know this isn't always the case and a lot of masculine people enjoy it, but a lot of what I've experienced, they say, is an aversion to these shows from the male presenting people around me. Is that partly because... you know, tentpole shows like Kardashians, Real Housewives are focused on more without taking into account how many shows are reality?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Yeah, it is interesting, though, like Ice Road Truckers, Pawn Stars, things like that. Right. That blue-collar hero stuff that they might not think of as reality TV just because people aren't wearing makeup in it, you know? Right. Yeah, good point. People are asking a little bit about the history and the evolution. Esther Haddock wants to know, how has the genre evolved? And Julia L.,
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And Anajali Himali also wanted to know that. Anajali asked, do you see a change in attitudes or awareness of stereotypes in newer TV shows? Since you've been watching, you know, for 25 years, how have you seen that evolution of different genres?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Just a side note, if you didn't watch The Swan or you blacked it out due to secondhand trauma, I got you. It premiered around the turn of the century in 2004. And every episode followed two women who identified as ugly ducklings. And they get sequestered in a nice McMansion.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And over three months are treated to therapy sessions, personal trainers, dental care, and things like extreme plastic surgery to correct their natural plainness. Wow. You say it can't get much more degrading than that. But hold on. They also have to compete in a beauty contest among all the other contestants.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And only one is crowned the swan because it's just it's not enough to be at war with your own body. You also have to go into battle against other people with the same vulnerabilities. It only survived two seasons, but it lives on in our hearts like a tapeworm.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Well, there's such a variation in smut level. I feel like you could find highbrow and you can find lowbrow. Is there reality TV that is more respected? And is there some that's like, this is just straight exploitation or scripted? Are there tiers where it gets closer to documentary and then others that get closer to Jerry Springer? Because he's
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do? Yes, after the BLM movement and Me Too, there was a brief era of so-called cancel culture, say the people who were held accountable for their misdeeds. But it's 2025, baby, and we have seen things that have been canceled bounce right back up like a horror movie villain 10 seconds before the final credits. So yeah, Cops is back.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
It was canceled for four months and resumed shooting in October of 2020. Aired on Fox, it remains one of the longest-running shows in America. The more things change, the more they stay the same. You know, you mentioned transformations. Hannah Marie, Ali B., and Haley Kirby asked about that. Hannah asked, why was Bridal Plasty the best reality TV show ever made, and why was there only one season?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Ali B. asked about The Swan and The Biggest Loser. Were they popular because Americans love to critique reality? Or do we hate ourselves so much that we want to see people suffer to change themselves? Have you seen anything in the body positivity movement change in reaction to shows like that? Or have you seen how those types of shows have declined?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
I mean, there are elements of bridalplasty on TikTok and on Instagram. You know, if you look up a moisturizing cream, the next thing you know, they're like, would you like to get a full facelift at 35? And you're like, what? What? No. So, you know, those things I think are, they find their niche differently. But, you know, you mentioned race too.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Mark J. Lerman wanted to know, how are reality TV dating shows racialized? How does race operate in terms of the presentation? Asked by their daughter, Jackie.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Just heads up, I cannot recommend the reality podcast Two Black Girls, One Rose more highly. Justine and Natasha have the hottest takes on things like Love is Blind and The Bachelor. They're looking at modern love and relationships through popular TV.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
So they are, in effect, reality TV sociologists, but also hilarious. Two black girls, one rose. Love those ladies. We have a really interesting episode about vocal fry, accents, code switching, and African-American vernacular English in the phonology episode with a brilliant Dr. Nicole Holliday, which we'll link in the show notes.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Also, Rachel Lindsay, who's an attorney, was the Bachelorette in 2017 and the first black lead in this long-running Bachelor franchise and in a really rare move. did end up married with her pick on the series for five years, which is pretty good.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
They separated in late 2023, but she launched a career as a TV personality and a correspondent from it, which honestly, on that show, that's kind of the bigger goal for a lot of contestants. Are there any shows that you feel like have really moved the needle more? Are there any shows that you're excited about
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
giving voice to people who maybe haven't had them in the past, anything like that, that you feel is, you know, very hopeful that that might have super positive impacts?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
We had someone ask about that. Matt Thompson wanted to know how have shows negatively affected different minority groups like Bisexuals with Tila Tequila's dating show and LDS with Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. But you mentioned that there are some other options that are actually kind of illuminating positives of different queer groups. When it comes to religious voyeurism,
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
I don't feel as bad with religious voyeurism because I'm like, you're proselytizing all the time anyway. So let's look at how fucked up this is. Yeah. Which, I mean, I came from a Catholic background. Me too.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
It's like, come on in. Literally confessionals. Yeah. Right?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Lisa Khan wanted to know, why are American reality shows so awful and cruel? Great British baking show has proven that watching lovely people be kind and wonderful to each other is popular. B. Ingberti asked, I'm a fan of reality shows. However, if we watch shows that are from other countries, such as Japan, I get to learn about cultural norms as an outsider.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Are they very different across different countries? Like, for example, I turned on the TV at a hotel I was in in London right as room service came up and they brought in a sandwich or whatever right as everyone's dongs were just in full 4K color. There's like a reality TV show. What show is this? It's like they show you fully naked naked. On a reality show in England. And I was like, what?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And I was mortified. And then I told someone that I met about that later and they were like, oh, no, those are just like our normal reality shows. But it was like full frontal nudity. And I was like, oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
I mean, by the way, Naked Attraction was the name of it. Naked Attraction? Are they being judged based on the... Oh, yes. A clothed person is faced with six naked people who are initially hidden in booths. Their bodies and faces are gradually revealed through successive rounds from the feet up. And at each round, the chooser eliminates one naked person until only two are left.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
When the chooser also takes off their clothes to make the final choice. Just because. Why wouldn't you? And then they pick a person and then they go for a fully clothed date. Oh, I like that they specified that the date was fully clothed. Okay. Fully clothed. And each episode can take up to 12 hours to film. Okay.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Well, it's on Max in case you want to see naked people seeing naked people.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And last question about politics. Ali B. and Sidoni S. wanted to know, Ali asks, can you correlate the rise of reality TV with world and political events of the early 2000s? 9-11, Bush administration, war on terror, war in Afghanistan. And really, did this start because we cannot face actual reality? which we touched on earlier.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
But Sidoni S. wanted to know, how did The Apprentice shape America's perspective of Donald Trump? Did reality TV make him our president because of that familiarity? Or what about political and historical influence?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And she studied creative writing at Princeton and then got a PhD in sociology from Columbia and has spent her career analyzing and writing about non-normative or deviant behaviors and how they shed light on how we relate to each other. Now, months back, a tweet of hers went viral, and it was a snapshot of the list of presentations some of her students were giving.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
What are some reality TV shows that you wish existed? Is it really hard not to be driving around and being like, you know what they're doing? You know?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And who we are, again, can change from our teenage era to our horny golden years. And it can also change Schrodinger style on whether or not we're being observed.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
It's so funny to think of how maligned reality TV is because of that when people don't realize that they're doing their own forms of code switching 10 times a day, whether they're talking to their dog or their partner or their boss or their in-laws or whatever. So who are we? I feel like is the bigger question that's really, really interesting.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
When does it become a documentary? When does it cross that line? Does it depend on how much producers sort of prod people or nudge them into different directions? Is it talking head confessional booths? Like when is it a documentary and when is it reality TV?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
I could have spent hours chatting with Danielle like she was a new pal. But that is not why I'm doing this. Megan Ratcliffe, Ali B., Maya, and Kim Granier had questions about that. In Kim's words, can we talk about the phrase, I didn't come here to make friends? Also, Kim writes, if I were on a reality show, I would totally want to make friends with everyone. I'm not here to make friends.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
About that phrase. I'm not here to make friends. Do you feel like when people are... on a reality show or they're making a reality show. We are there for the parasocial relationships. And is there friendship? Are we becoming friends with the people that we're seeing?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Miranda? What's the hardest thing about what you do and study? What's the biggest challenge?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
What about the best part of your job? Is there anything that just really lights you up that you get butterflies about? Is there anything where you're like, oh, I love doing this?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Just seeing the list of papers that your students were working on made me see reality TV in so many more dimensions that it is a very fertile ground for exploration of obviously sociology that we just don't think of. We take it for granted because it is entertainment. But studying film in school is there to teach you about social relationships and the art of it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
So it's no different than being a scholar in film. I think it's so fascinating.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Yeah, this makes me want to look at everything that I watch with using more of my brain.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Thank you so much for doing this.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
So ask real people real not smart questions because they would not dedicate their life to it if they didn't care about the subject. So thank you so, so, so much to Dr. Danielle Lineman for that tweet that led to this conversation and for all the context on things happening right under our noses on our phones usually.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Now, we have links to Danielle's work in the show notes, also a link to the Pedro Zamora scholarship, and so many links to clips and research is linked in the show notes. We are at Ologies on Blue Sky. Please give us a follow there. And on Instagram, I'm at Allie Ward on both. And we have shorter kid-friendly episodes called Smologies.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Those are available in their own feed every week wherever you get podcasts. S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. Ologies Merch is available at ologiesmerch.com. You can join our Patreon for as little as a dollar a month at patreon.com slash ologies. A whole bouquet of roses goes out to the people who make this show every week. Aaron Talbert admins the Ologies podcast Facebook group.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. Noelle Dilworth is scheduling producer. Susan Hales, our managing director. Jake Chafee edits and lead editor is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. And also thank you, Jarrett Sleeper of Mindjam Media for some finishing touches on this one. I guess you get the final rose because legally we are married.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Nick Thorburn made the theme music and now is the time when I whisper, confess something and I will tell you that my reality TV vices usually involve building a weird cabin or watching someone surviving in the woods without a cabin or restoring old cars. This week, the reality program I'm most glued to is this couple. The lady is Jackie.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And her partner, I don't even think they're married, goes by Shadow. Okay. And they had a kid in 2022, but have been going through some infertility stuff. And a few of their kids were killed and eaten on camera by ravens. But just today, two new offspring hatched. They are birds. They're bald eagles.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Jackie and Shadow are bald eagles who live 14 stories at the top of a Jeffrey Pine tree overlooking Big Bear Lake in Southern California, which isn't too far from where I live in LA. And for months and years, people have been hoping this pair of eagles will be on the other side of their heartbreak. And now...
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Although just in the last year, the socialite star of The Simple Life alongside Nicole Richie. And now media mogul and DJ Paris Hilton has given more of the backstory of the persona the world has known and mocked for decades.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Today, with 60,000 people watching the YouTube live stream of their nest, their fuzzy little eaglets made their debut. They have two. There's one egg that hasn't hatched yet. So all day and all night, you can watch them sit on the babies. You can see them weathering gusts as their home kind of bends in the wind.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
They're rearranging sticks, sometimes while bickering, or they're tearing up a duck into shreds to drip into their baby's mouths. They're on the YouTube Friends of Big Bear Lake livestream. Jackie and Shadow, they're eagles. They are here to make friends. You are the friend. And bonus, also, the livestream kind of doubles as an ASMR channel.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
If you like the sounds of sticks and bird song and gentle winds and tiny squawking, I do want to model my life after them and just sit and look at a view for most of the day. I do not want to sit on birds, though. Okay, bye-bye.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And while Paris Hilton has been bravely outspoken at revealing the trauma she endured over her life, in one recent interview with her, she explained that a reason she took on that persona as this vapid, materialistic rich girl was because that was what the media at the time glorified. However, she was the media at the time, but did she have enough power to be authentic? How much is coercion?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
So the first of many murky factors is, is someone being themselves? Secondly, what's the point of this show, specifically a reality show?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Yeah, like the Great British Bake Off. I feel like when I watch it, I'm learning how to make a pastry. Reality is I'm never going to make those pastries. Yeah.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Yeah, I mean, I think when people tune into any media, they're looking to get something to put in their pocket to live their life a little bit differently, whether it's aspirational wealth or whether it's. Maybe feeling better about their relationship dynamics because it's not as messy as what they see on TV or something. Like, why? Huge question. Why do we love reality TV? Let's be honest.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And among them were the sociology of body image and self-worth in The Biggest Loser, the sociology of work and inequality in Below Deck, the sociology of lesbian relationships in The Ultimatum, Queer Love, the sociology of perfectionism in Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. So we will dive into a lot of that and more in a sec.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Because while you might not watch Vanderpump Rules or Toddlers and Tiaras or Married at First Sight. you may still be a reality watchers like Mythbusters, West Coast Choppers, Brain Games, maybe even the 2020 Netflix series, 100 Humans or Jersey Shore or Beast Games or the one with Alec Baldwin, seven of his children and one semi-Spanish wife. What is reality?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
Are the Worst people on a reality show actually that bad? They always come out later and say that producers tweaked things, they edited it, they asked them questions, they prodded them. But if you're the worst on a show, are you actually the worst or is that all post-production? I think somewhere in the middle, right?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
And in her book, True Story, What Reality TV Says About Us, she explores race, sexuality, and gender with chapters like, Don't Be All Like Uncool About the Self, Here for the Right Reasons, which explores couple dynamics in reality TV, Not Here to Make Friends is about group sociology, and there's a chapter titled,
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
But first, thank you to patrons at patreon.com slash ologies for supporting the show for a dollar a month or more. and submitting questions before we record. Thanks to everyone out there in Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. Thank you to everyone who leaves reviews, which help the show so much. I read them all and I read you one.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
I question your taste level about class and even bad boys, bad boys on the sociology of deviance on our screens. And her students get to write papers like The Sociology of Age Stereotyping and The Golden Bachelor, The Sociology of Women's Work in Wife Swap, The Sociology of Social Media in The Circle. So for every reality show, there are like 10 papers you could write.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
It just gives me butterflies that this is a possibility. This is an ology. This stuff deserves to be looked at in an obsessive academic fashion. When you're designing your syllabus for the next semester or when papers are coming in from your students, can you describe some of the topics that get covered and how you decide on those?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
When your students are coming up with these papers and they're researching it, do you find that they are typically drawn toward things that have a lot of relevance for their own life? And does that mirror why we tune into some shows and not others?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
So thank you to Sarsi Gray who wrote, in the world of severance, Allie Ward is the Audi Helly R deserves. Swarzy Gray, thank you for that. I hope I wouldn't do that to myself. You know what? Either way, cut banks. Don't sever your crush. Also, thank you Teaspoon32 for saying all the right things. Okay, so reality TV sociology, off we go. Stay tuned for queer culture, making it to the mainstream.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
The presentation was Sociology of Alcohol in Floribama Shore, which examines the MTV show, which bills itself as nine roommates hit the Gulf Coast to party, hook up, fight, and stir up plenty of other Southern fried shenanigans.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann
I watched some clips. I felt like I could smell the clips.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Oh, hey, it's the fish soup that you spilled all over the kitchen, which actually did happen to me, Hallie Ward. And this is Ologies. It's a podcast where we explore an ology a week. So you are tuning into a chat about hippos. It will leave you changed. It changed me.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
That's true? No. That is 100% true. No. What? That's right. Common hippos, the big ones you're used to, they're most closely related to whales. Whales.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
I have so many questions. Mouths. Mouths. I'm thinking like baleen, huge, insane mouths on whales and hippos. Why are mouths so big?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
And after elephants and rhinos, hippos are the largest land mammal, even though the common hippo's scientific name is hippopotamus amphibius. Terrestrial animal? We'll get into it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
That's so much tooth for someone that eats grass. So much tooth.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
These tusks, these mouth harpoons, grow their entire lives. And the bottom incisors, they jut straight out for better stabbing. And though females do have smaller teeth than the males, male tusks can be over 20 inches long or 60 centimeters. Why so big? Because they use them to gore the mouths of their rivals in this spitty, bloody jab battle. It looks like chewing on glass.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
So point your weird little ears our way to learn about knife teeth, blood sweat, swamp hippos, pet hippos, subspecies, their daily diet, the current state of hippo conservation, the absolute chaotic affection we have for Mudang. How many people hippos kill a year for real? If you need to apologize to a hippo. Who are hippos' best friends? Their role as ecosystem engineers.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Now that I know that they are sister taxa to whales. Yeah. Swimming. How are they swimming? They got no flippers. What's going on?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
And so how are they underwater for five or six minutes and what occasion do they have to use that feature? Yeah.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
So essentially your nostrils face your feet, right? Don't put your fingers in there, but you know they're facing your feet. They're pointing down. Hippo nostrils are like on the top of their head and they're facing the sky. Like, you know, Shrek's ears? that's like their nostrils. But they also have ears that look like Shrek's ears.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
So they kind of have like a Shrek's ears for ears and then a small Shrek's ears that are actually their nostrils. It's just unsettling. I like it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
I was going to say, it's like a chocolate river. That's right. Hippos killing people. let's talk about it because they cause more human fatalities than sharks, which we, as if we don't have it coming, like we have a coming so hard, but how are they lethal?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
If you have ever been brainwashed about a hippo, what's up with their nostrils? How to keep a hippo in your pocket? And tips on flattering your friends into planning a group vacation. With conservation biologist, professor, and actual real-life hippopotamologist, Dr. Rebecca Lewison.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
So what's the source of all this drama? Surprise, it's us. Do those happen with overturned boats or bites or how does it?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Yeah. It's like donuts in the break room. What are they supposed to do?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
How are hippo numbers? We know that the pygmy hippo is not doing so great, but how are hippo numbers in general?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
We've got a true hippopotamologist, a professor of biology at San Diego State University, whose research at Vassar and UC Davis focused on vulnerable wildlife populations and conservation and, of course... Hippos. So they know way more about hippos than most people ever will on the planet. And they're in a very elite club of hippopotamologists.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
So aside from zoos, are there hippos outside of Africa? Oh, we will discuss.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Yeah. I would have thought there were millions out there. Yeah. And when it comes to distribution, 38 countries is so many countries. But if you had a map of the world, where do we think they are that they're not? And what would surprise us about where they are? Like when it comes to their range, what do most people think versus what's the reality?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
And Rebecca says that while there are only two species, there is debate about whether up to four subspecies exist since West and East African hippos are so isolated from each other geographically.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
When you say disagreement, what is that like in the hippo community? Are there conferences? Do people not speak to certain colleagues anymore? What are hippo people like?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Why do they have such tiny ears?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
I guess there's a reason we don't go swimming in gowns. Exactly. You don't want too much drag. You mentioned the nostrils being like blowholes. The Jungle Cruise at Disney. You've been on it?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
You're not far from Anaheim. What I recall from that ride is that there's a lot of puns. I believe there's some racism in it, but also there's a depiction of hippos as like nature's ultimate predator. Do you recall anything about that? I do.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Thank you so much for doing this. As someone who studies hippos, this is a busy time of life for you, and we will get to why. How long have hippos been part of your bread and butter?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
It goes like, we did a mosquito episode recently, and it's like, mosquitoes, other humans... Yeah. Snakes, like dogs with rabies, like whatever. Humans and mosquitoes are the ones you got to watch out for. Absolutely. Can I ask you patron questions? Yeah. Okay. Your questions about hippos in a moment, but first we're going to fling some cash at a worthy cause.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
And this week it's going to Weichau Community Hippo Sanctuary, which is a community-led tourism attraction project. It's located at Weichau in the Upper West region of Ghana. And they say that hippos help regulate both aquatic and terrestrial habitats and are great ecosystem engineers. So it's a great cause to find out more. You can go to wilderinstitute.org. The link is in the show notes.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
So thank you for the heads up on that, Rebecca. And thanks for the money, sponsors. Okay, your questions. You can submit yours via patreon.com slash ologies. It costs one hot dollar a month, although the upper tiers let you leave us audio questions. So let's dig into the bag and let's get those answered and find out how to make hippos happier. Deborah Brunner said...
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
So yeah, here's an idea. You don't want to see the sharp end of a tusk. Stay out of the river. If a hippo picked a lock and arrived in the middle of the night in your living room, dripping with river poo, would you not grab the baseball bat between your bed and the nightstand and ask it in no uncertain terms to scram? I know you would.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Speaking of certainty, do hippos know when they've found the one? Steph Simmons, Ann Arbor, Michigan, asks,
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
A little bit. Yeah. They're showing off a little too.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Amanda and Eli Loves Vultures both want to know, Eli says, I love hearing scientists describe animal sounds, wheezes and honks and croaks. Oh my, what do we know about the sounds they make and what don't we know? That is a great question.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
I so appreciate that you're able to mimic them like that. Do people ever try to get them to come to them? No one that I know.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
We need more hippopotamologists. We absolutely do. Several listeners asked this question that was absolutely not on my radar whatsoever. Amanda Nugent asks, is there a plan for the cocaine hippos in Colombia from Escobar's estate? Kayla White, all caps, all caps, no punctuation, said, please, please, please talk about Pablo Escobar's hippos. please, it's my favorite story to tell new people.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
It will be your new favorite story, especially for inquiring patrons, Alan Gross, Stephen Lee, Teresa Gleason, Kristen Love, Matt Goff, Jen Squirrel-Alvarez, A Softly Boiled Egg, Christina Hammerberg, Lucy Vinn, Sigwani Dana, Gregorius of Tomsk, and Pavka34, who needed to hear about these cocaine hippos.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
I guess this sort of dovetails into the question of meat. Rebecca Morrison, Tinaz, Michael Sherman, Daniel Schmaniel, Jess Sunter, several people asked, do people eat hippos?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
And a few listeners, reigning Emily and Andy Pepper, hoped that I would bring up what patron Mackenzie King wrote instead of a question, offered, this feels like a great place to drop the fun fact I have about hippos. Mackenzie writes, in 1910, Robert Broussard, a Louisiana senator, proposed that hippos be imported from Africa to Louisiana to be the new version of beef in America.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Not her. She dedicated her research to a notoriously challenging terrestrial species. What the hell happened?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
This was due to corporate beef monopolies, beef shortages, and super high prices on beef nationwide. I was like, whoa, Raining Emily, Andy Pepper, and Mackenzie, I didn't even know about this. So yeah, the American hippo bill was introduced by Robert Broussard, or as fellow Louisianans called him in the early 1900s, Cousin Bob. And though he had the blessing of Teddy Roosevelt...
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
New York Times food writers who attested that hippo brisket was fatty and tasted like lake cow bacon. And Broussard even had the support of some ecologists looking to solve the invasive water hyacinth problem that was plaguing New Orleans.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Alas. As you know, no swamp hippos lurk in our dark American waters. Our sprawling Bass Pro shops don't sell hippo calling devices to locals. We don't get to see invasive hippos learning to use crosswalks or trying to mate with hot dog carts. But yeah, in other countries, if they got a hippo, they may eat a hippo.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Allison Ledman wanted to know, are there any other animals besides humans that prey on hippos? Or do predators just know to steer clear?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Crocodiles can't even get them. A crocodile will shred your ass up and down and drown you as casually as eating a Snickers, but they can't fight off a hippo. Who would dare? Not many creatures. If they don't have a ton of enemies, do they have a lot of friends?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Like Marissa Kay, first-time question asker, long-time listener, very excited about hippos, would like to know a little bit more about their social structure. Risa Pereni wants to know if they ever cuddle. Do they pair or live separately?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
And patrons Mona Finlayson, Prani Kiritsingh, Storm Kitty Hammond, Colin Robotten, Oliver Callis also asked this, and in Bronwyn Iverson's Hugo's words, do they have best friends?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
You know, speaking of males, people asked about Rob Lara, the poo helicopter, why? Lena Carpenter wanted to know, how do hippos just poop in the water? Like, the water they're in, and then proceed to swim in it like no big deal. Boy, hippo poop spraying, disgust. Do they have middens? Do they just go wherever? There must be so much of it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
So it might be easier to see the behavior of spiders if they're living in the lab and stuff. Exactly.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Thank you, patron and first-time question asker Allison Ludwig for asking, do tilapia really swim behind them and eat their poo? Allison Ludwig, they do. So yes, Emily Gee, Ashley Tween, and Rowan Tree, there are symbiotic relationships aplenty in a hippo's life. And so to Gits and Shiggles and Emma Henson, who asked, I have to befriend one before I die. How do I go about this?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
The answer is to become a tilapia. You're never going to be bored. You're never going to be hungry. Every day is a feast.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Oh, my God. Yeah. Which I've seen it in people's like horrified zoo videos. But I hope that that's like a blessing.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Stacey Bendixson wants to know, do they sleep underwater?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Okay. There's no way that they could lung capacity wise, but in general, they're not like snoozing in a pile on the banks though.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Do you think that scientists are starting to rely more on like drone footage? Is that helpful in terms of getting kind of closer to them and getting like a better eye on them?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
You know, pop culturally, there's no lack of hippos.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
In terms of the word, the beach master, are you, you're familiar with that term? Is it, there's a really long time ago, a documentary about hippos, and they talked about how there's a beach master of hippos.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
And I wasn't sure if this is like a very common term for hippos, and this is just a side note, but that term has stuck around me and my good girl friend groups for decades now, where the beach master is the one in our friend group who now has to decide like where we're going to go to dinner, or someone needs to beachmaster this because I can't deal.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
But I wasn't sure if beachmaster is like, no, that's what we call the dominant male. But no, beachmaster is not a familiar term.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
I played it all the time. They don't even eat marbles in real life, right? They definitely don't.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
It reminds me of like on the bachelorette when one gets a one-on-one date and the rest have to hang out at the mansion.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Do a lot of hippo males divergence? Excellent question.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
When it comes to trying to get DNA samples, their skin seems so thick. You can't just run a Q-tip over their skin and get samples, right? You've touched hippos?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Apparently, a hippo hide can be two and a half inches thick or six centimeters, which is comparable to a very robust slab of kitchen countertop or a butcher block made out of wet leather. And speaking of leather, yes, you could buy, say, a wallet made from hippo skin. And it looks kind of like... thick, crackly suede.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
You could buy it, that is, if you had $99 plus tax and shipping and you wanted it. Now they are, I found some, they're handmade in Indiana by Amish craftsmen and their website has images demonstrating like it's billfold and slots for up to eight credit cards. And I was scrolling to the bottom of the description and I spotted this small disclaimer that said, money and cards are not included.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
And I'm like, They must have gotten one email from a customer who was just enraged that theirs arrived empty. But from seeing red to being tickled pink, what a segue. Let's discuss a question from... So... Speaking of their skin though, sweating blood, what's the deal? Do they sweat red? Is it sunscreen? What's going on?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Right? A few Mudang questions because, of course. She's the cutest, cutest.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Bell Aspiring Garbage Archaeologist asked, is it common or somewhat out of the ordinary for a baby hippo to be as ornery as Mudang? No shade, I wish I could be as ornery as Mudang in public, they ask. Is Mudang ornery for a young pygmy hippo?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
What about... some controversy regarding Mudang. Jennifer Gorgon said, I heard there was some controversy about the treatment of Mudang. Do you have an opinion on the issue? Anna Vilnide wanted to know, would love some professional information. Are caretakers riling up some captive animals for the reactions that visitors want to see, they asked.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
And whether online content being the goal is harming the creatures that we seem to love so much. And Natalie Jones asked, is Mudang doing okay? It seems like having thousands of humans yelling and looking at you a day would mess up a baby's development. Is this a stage mother type of situation that needs intervention?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
No neck. Hippos are neckless. And so are they foraging the grasses on the banks of rivers or are they coming up on land?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Yeah. Is there any flim flam that you just have to bust that you're like, this is not how it is, other than painting them as absolutely cold-blooded killers who want nothing more than a human's demise?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
And I asked her all of my very not smart questions as well as yours. If you want to submit a question ahead of time before we record... You can become a patron at patreon.com slash ologies. It costs about 25 cents an episode to join. It helps fund the show.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
What's the worst thing about being a hippopotamologist?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
What's your favorite thing about hippos?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
If there were ever one sleeping next to you, would you want to give it a gentle kiss on the nosy?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
I wonder if they know how much we love them. That is a good question.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Yeah. This whole episode has convinced me that we're in a toxic relationship with hippos. We're the toxic partner because we fawn over them. We love bomb them. And then we take what they need most. We take their habitat and we spread lies about them and then we slander them. So if anything, if you love hippos, just know you're the toxic one in the relationship. Clean up your act a little bit.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
So they have stomped down a little highway that leads to a food court of short grass. It's like a free buffet, but it only serves short grass. If hippos are like the size of a car, a small car, and they're eating just a very particular kind of grass down a long trail, how are they getting enough calories to have so much cake, to have such dump trucks?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
So hippo people, happy to answer questions. And we're so very lucky that Dr. Lewis was amenable to answering ours. Thank you again, Rebecca. And you can find links to her research and lab as well as to the Weichau Community Hippo Sanctuary at the link in the show notes. And we also have a link to our new show, Smologies, which are shorter, kid-friendly, classroom-safe versions of Ologies Classics.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
They used to be in this feed, but I bounced them to their own feed. So you can look for that show wherever you get podcasts. It's got new green artwork. We are at Ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram. I'm on there as well as Allie Ward. What's just one L in Allie? Thank you to patrons at patreon.com slash ologies for making this show possible. Ologies merch is available at the link in the show notes.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Thank you to Aaron Talbert for admitting the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Love to Mama Kath. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardoire does the website. Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale is the beach master of a managing director. Jake Chafee edits like a
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
hip pro and the mighty Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio lead edits these into submission every week. Nick Thorburn moaned and honked out the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret about my life if you want it. And okay, so this week it's that I wear one of those rings, an aura ring, which I've used for years.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
But an aura ring helps track sleep and your steps and stress. And no big shocker, I've started meditating again literally just in the last week. Um, my soul feels like a hairball in a drain over current events. And I can tell on my aura ring that when I do meditate, my heart rate and stress levels go way down. So that is great incentive to like keep at it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
And I was going to tell you guys that is a secret. And I looked at my app today to see like, yeah, it did go down this morning when I meditated, but I also saw this really sharp spike, um, in anxiety today. And I looked and it was like two hours ago and, And I realized it was precisely the time when I spilled a quart of fish soup on my pants and the kitchen floor and inside the fridge.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
It was like everywhere. And fish soup of all the things. Iced tea, whatever, fine. Fish soup, like, honestly. Anyway, anxiety spike, deep breaths. We're doing our best. We're all doing our best. I hope you enjoy a nice bath today like a hippo would, or you could treat yourself to a big mud salad. Whatever keeps your skin thick and your spirits buoyant. Go do it. Okay. Bye-bye.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
When would you sleep? Would you sleep during the day?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
You can also buy ologies merch at ologiesmerch.com or you can support for no dollars by leaving us a review, which helps convince me that I'm not broadcasting to an assortment of dolls in a basement. And I read all your reviews, such as this one from Chris F., who writes, Hippos, hippos. You might know, you probably know that hippopotamus in Latin, it means river horse.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
What happens if you're asleep on top of a Land Rover watching hippos and an elephant wakes you up? That's a good question.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Did you think you were dreaming for one second?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Just a normal day on the job for a hippo ecologist. So you're absolutely in a safari park of life or you're surrounded by something that sounds like a fever dream. What are you doing when you're watching them at night? Are you taking notes like this one went and did a poop on this one or this one seems to be crying? I know.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
And so when we see hippos in zoos, they are opening their gaping maws and a whole pumpkin goes in. But do they have that kind of experience ever in the wild?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
How long do they live? You said they live a long time?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Okay. They're horses of the river, right? Like water horses? Yes. How are they extracting calories from a bunch of grass? Do they have stomachs like hippos? I mean, stomachs like horses?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
So if you're a hippo doing your thing, it's say a Thursday and you're eating an average of 75 pounds of mowed grass, which is about two huge garbage bags full of lawn clippings per day. So much salad. Your favorite dressing, I guess, is mud. There's no croutons. Maybe you got some accidental worms in there, but you're eating dirt grass. It's the breakfast of champions. It's the lunch of champions.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
It's the dinner of champions. How many pounds are we talking of hippo?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
In the wild. And then pygmy hippos, by contrast. Pygmy hippos, by contrast, are about 400 to... So there are only two species of hippopotamuses or hippopotami. Either word is legit and fine. I thought there were maybe 10 species of hippopotamus, but there are two. The common big-ass hippo that you're used to is a hippopotamus amphibius, and then there's the pygmy hippo, Coeropsis liberiensis.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
You don't need to know those names, but there's just two species. And pygmy hippos are one-sixth the size of a regular hippo or a common hippo.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
That's kind of like a pig, right? A big pig.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Wait, how come I didn't know about pygmy hippos until now?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Whereas the big hippos that you're used to are just like here. They're like, I'm in the river. What's up?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
If you didn't know that, I'm going to give you a second. It's hippo means horse, potamus means of the river, hippopotamus, river horse, these beasts. They are artidactyls, meaning that they have an even number of toes, like a bison or a deer and a giraffe. Those are all in artidactyls.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
These little big babies, they live in Northwest Africa in forests. They keep to themselves. They come out at night like Mothman, and they're little. They're like farmhog size. As for how long humans have been, like, gazing at them from behind a fence, according to this 1972 paper, The Care and Breeding of the Pygmy Hippopotamus in Captivity says,
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
The first time they were introduced into captivity was in 1873 in a Dublin zoo. And I was looking to try to find out more about that. But instead, I stumbled upon an article about a Scottish zoo who just a few months ago welcomed the birth of a baby girl pygmy hippo. And then they made the decision to name her Haggis. In all fairness, she does resemble kind of a gray lump made of skin.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
But they didn't have to go there. But yeah, the people, they want the baby pygmy hippos. With little sign that Mudung fever is waning, it seems this bouncy pig is more than earning her keep. Forced out of their land and hunted to near extinction in the wild, but in captivity, absolute slay.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Hippopotomology (HIPPOS) with Rebecca Lewison
Oh, that's got to be infuriating for you.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Oh, hey, it's the guy at the library with that stack of survival books. Allie Ward, let's talk about your thyroid. Do you still have one? If not, let's talk about how it did you dirty. Metabolism, libido, sweating, freezing. You're in the right place for all of it. So I went to New York because I'm sophisticated.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Positive Steps PDX, it's a joy to introduce the audience to all manner of ologists across all kinds of fields, including your thyroid. Now, thyroidology comes from the Greek thyrodidae. It means shield-shaped, and that refers to the Adam's apple of the throat, which is thyroid cartilage, and then the endocrine gland underneath it that provides hormones that keep your engine running.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
If you discovered a thyroid disease and they called it Patel's, and then everyone complained about having Patel's, would you be like, I'll never be forgotten in my field? Or would you be like, bummer that my name is Patel's synonymous?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Call a little column A, column B. Exactly. Well, okay. I have heard stories of people being diagnosed with thyroid disease just by someone seeing them like across the room or on TV. I don't know if you remember there was a story where someone... Oh, yeah. Do you remember that story?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Someone was on TV and someone was like... I probably want to get your thyroid checked. And they had a thyroid issue.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And then she got treated, right?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So for Nicole McGinnis, being on Beachfront Bargain Hunt saved her life, while having a doctor watch Beachfront Bargain Hunt saved her life. What an anomaly, right? How often would someone be watching an HGTV show and notice thyroid cancer? It's like one in a million, one in a billion. Wait, what? No, hold on.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Okay, I was fact-checking Nicole's story, and I found out maybe this was apocryphal, maybe this was wrong, because it was actually HGTV personality Tarek El Moussa who had thyroid cancer, and it was a nurse who spotted his enlarged gland.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Wait, what? What? Okay. I went on a deep dive about the health of a guy on HGTV. Turns out both of those stories are right. Nicole and Tarek, different shows, different thyroids, both on HGTV. So in addition to that lady looking for the cheap seaside cottage, Tarek El Moussa, co-host of HGTV's Flip or Flop, found out that he had thyroid cancer from that viewer's heads up.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And this is after he'd been seeing a doctor for a while, trying to figure out why his throat hurt and was tight. And his doctor just kept brushing it aside as like allergies. Turns out it wasn't hay fever. It was stage two cancer having spread to his nearby lymph nodes. He had to get the thyroid removed and undergo radioactive iodine therapy, which we'll discuss in a bit.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And then unrelated, side note, Tarek's old doctor also was like, don't worry about that lump in your scrote. It's probably nothing. But it turned out it was testicular cancer unrelated to the thyroid cancer at the same time, at which point I'd want to sue my doctor or my endocrine system or both of them.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Now, for the testicular stuff, it's not something that a doctor on the subway or something would notice in passing, hopefully, depending on what kind of vibe you're running. But as for a goiter or an enlarged thyroid, do you ever notice that on people?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So let's get to it. Let's figure out just what the hell is happening with that lump in your throat.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Does it cover the Adam's apple?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And if maybe it's making you depressed or cold or tired or sweaty or shaky or hot, when to ask your doctor to check it, how to decipher labs, as well as info on radioactive cats, stress and thyroids, surviving a nuclear bomb, how diet can affect your thyroid, flim flam, and how being on TV might save your life.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So according to the 2020 paper, Iodine Deficiency and Goiter in the Williams Textbook of Endocrinology, 75% of people with goiter live in less developed countries where iodine deficiency is prevalent. And this prevalence of goiter is most common in mountainous areas, including the Himalayas and the Andes, where there is significant iodine deficiency.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
That's like a higher percentage of kids mewing in class.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Yeah. Well, first off, is it goiter or goiters?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Okay, got it. I guess you can't have more than one.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Yes. Have those changed in rates historically? Have we seen epidemics of goiter? What causes those?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So the goiter belt, on trend for the Midwest in the 1920s, but has since, thankfully, gone out of fashion. Now, when you see iodized salt, you can say, hey, thanks, goiter buster. That's why you're iodized. But don't overdo the salt, and don't panic if you use uniodized kosher or sea salt. Chances are you have enough in the small amounts you're getting.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Please also remember, however, that we can neither diagnose nor treat you because this is a free audio show. we don't have access to your neck or your blood. Don't be weird about this. Do be excited. So let's hear from surgeon, professor, endocrinology specialist, and thyroidologist, Dr. Kapil Patel.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Is the thyroid trying to compensate by enlarging in tissue size? What's going on?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Hypertrophy, hyper means it's growing bigger.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And if you add iodine to someone's diet, does it just shrink down or does it need a surgical intervention?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
I've always thought that it would just shrink. This is why you're a surgeon and I'm not. But are certain populations, let's say you're a seafaring person or you're a fishmonger on a coast, do you ever see increases in iodine and therefore hyperthyroidism?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
But again, if you're low on that thyroid hormone in your body, that T4 and thus T3, what about hormone replacement? I've heard Synthroid. I've also heard that sometimes they take desiccated pig thyroid. And there are two camps. And some people are very much like, don't give me the fake stuff. And other people are like, that pig stuff, you never know what you're getting.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And also your favorite diabetic, diabetologist, Dr. Mike Natter was getting married to his bride, Alice. And whilst there, NYU Langone Hospital hooked it up with a thyroid expert and a surgeon who who was more than game to answer all my questions about this little hormonal organ that rules our lives.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So remember, T4 is what the thyroid pumps out naturally, and then it's up to your body to convert it to T3. As for what your body is making and what medications might work best on you, if you're hypothyroid, there's that levothyroxine or the natural desiccated thyroid made from pigs. It's just what it sounds like. It's from ground-up pig parts.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Now, I have had some thyroid problems in the past that have now resolved, but I did take desiccated pig thyroid for a while. And it has kind of a subtle flavor, kind of like a boiled pork chop water. Why put it in your mouth, you're asking the universe? Well, a 2024 Frontiers in Endocrinology paper titled, inquisitively, Natural Desiccated Thyroid for the Treatment of Hypothyroidism,
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
noted that people with hypothyroidism who don't respond to levothyroxine, T4, are prescribed a natural desiccated thyroid preparation, which contains that mixture of T4 and T3. But it could vary between batches. You're not quite sure what you're getting.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And so that natural desiccated thyroid may be better for some patients with hypothyroidism, but it's not the first go-to for doctors in the U.S., especially because it's technically not greenlit by the FDA. And it may not be right for some people who have heart disease or thyroid cancers or diabetes.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And if crunched up pork thyroid is not for you, the paper does offer the suggestion of bovine thyroid for individuals who, for religious or cultural reasons, don't eat pork. Still not vegan.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Okay. What about infections? Like, does Epstein-Barr have an effect on thyroid? Does COVID have an effect on thyroid? Or is that just part of the, like, an autoimmune response? Yeah.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
EBV or the Epstein-Barr virus is mono, aka the kissing disease, which in my case, you can get in your 20s without even kissing anyone, but by sipping a friend of a friend's plum wine at a party and then regretting it for the rest of your life, which is how long EBV stays in your body.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And I'll have you just kind of hold it like an ice cream cone. Like if you were a standup or doing karaoke.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So can an autoimmune response happen kind of with any exposure to a virus that just says, hey, immune system, like, let's kick into gear?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Yeah. A hundred percent. Apologies in advance. Okay. First off. Do I have an awful thyroid? I feel like that must be the question everyone asks you. Does my thyroid messed up must be something that you get constantly?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
I used to drink my tea out of a plastic cup from the 99 cent store. Hot tea. Sometimes I think, wow, that was a terrible decision I didn't realize I was making every day. Sure, that cup didn't break, but my body did.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Oh, yeah, it's fine. Absolutely fine.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
What about nodules? When I think of thyroid nodules, I think of little lumps and beads, and I'm like, do you pop them? What are they exactly? Exactly.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And what do you do? Do you stick a needle in there and check it out?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
What's under the microscope when you squirt out whatever was in the needle?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So if it's benign, they'll keep checking maybe a couple times a year. But what if it's not great news?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Do you numb it up before you put the needle in there?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Is it somewhere in between a blood needle and like an acupuncture situation?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Oh, so don't freak out if you get a nodule.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Yeah. And you said, what percentage would you say are benign versus?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
That's what I thought you said, and then I thought there's no way I could have heard that right. Okay.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
But you want to get them checked out in case they are, because that is not a good situation if they are.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
When it comes to getting them out, do you just remove the nodule or do you have to take a chunk of thyroid?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
I figured these are things either you think about when you're in the room or you're taking the subway home and you go-
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So you can't pluck a thyroid nodule out like a pearl in an oyster. Doesn't work that way. That's news to me.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
oh, I know people probably want to keep the nodule. Are you ever like, sorry, buddy, I got to send this down to the lab?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
I mean, I recently had a hysterectomy and I was like, how much of this can I keep in a jar? And they're like, absolutely none of it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
I was like, it was mine 10 minutes ago.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
That's nice. What percentage of people are like, take a snap, doc.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Yeah, I would want to see. It's mine after all.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
I think that's helpful. It's like when a mechanic is like, look at how bad your brake pads are. Exactly. Well, that's a good thing you should have done it. What about, let me see, thyroid cancer. What causes the nodules? What causes a malignancy? Does thyroid cancer typically start as a nodule?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Okay. Got it. So it's not, there's not a different kind of like spider webby cancer that starts.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Like the woman shopping for the beach house on HGTV.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Okay, so most people with thyroid cancer have a very treatable papillary type. Now, anaplastic, that's dicier, it's pretty dangerous. What happens if a person gets that diagnosis?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Wow. You know, with the earthquake in Japan in, I want to say 2010. Yeah. March 2011. My bad. There was a 9.0 undersea earthquake that led to a seaside nuclear reactor disaster. It was rated 7 out of 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The worst since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, which also ranked a 7.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Living on the West Coast, of course, there was more concern about radiation coming up in the Pacific. Are thyroid doctors, are oncologists in general keeping an eye on that?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Is that why iodine pills are used in bunkers and stuff? Yeah. That's fascinating. Can iodine pills also be used to disinfect water? Yeah, you can. Okay, okay. That's so interesting. Why does iodine protect against thyroid cancer?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
For no reason at all, I decided to bone up on what to do if World War III breaks out. And I found myself on the CDC site radiation emergencies, which let me know that a person must take potassium iodide before or shortly after being exposed to radioactive iodine. But before you risk feeling safe, the article mentions that this potassium iodide protects only against radioactive iodine.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
It doesn't protect against any other type of radioactive material. And then it breaks it to us gently that, quote, potassium iodide will not help in a nuclear bomb emergency. But I mean, hey, it's worth having these emergency tablets in your bug out bag, which we should all have. I mean, salt would be tastier, but you'd probably need a lot of salt. You'd probably need a lot of salt.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Can I ask you listener questions?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
But before we get to them, we'll donate to a cause chosen by Dr. Patel, who selected the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons. And the AAES promotes research and education in the field of endocrine surgery to advance the science and the art of endocrine surgery. So a donation was made to them in Dr. Patel's honor. to further research in this area, in your neck area.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So thank you to sponsors of the show for enabling us to toss some money to charities. Okay, your questions. If you're a patron at patreon.com slash ologies for just $1 a month, you can submit these before we record. And we even have a tier to submit audio questions so you could hear your voice on the show, which is pretty sick in a good way. This is not your species.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
However, several people, Timmy H., Deborah Gray, Scalebar, Daniel Sucher, Devin, Jessica Chance, I mean, a lot of people, Earl of Grammelkin, Vanessa Adams, Brycons, wanted to know, in Devin's words, my vet once told me that cats in the seacoast, this person is from Maine, are more likely to develop hyperthyroidism, overactive thyroid, that is. Were you aware of this?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Do interspecies thyroidologists ever chat? And if cats on the seacoast are more likely to get it, is that an iodine thing you think?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Mm-hmm. Earl of Gramelkin said I had a cat with hypothyroidism who got the I-131 treatment, and we had to keep her poop sequestered for a month.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Well, okay, this was my next question.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Just get that box. Go right to Petco. So I checked out the Cornell School of Veterinary Medicine's article, Feline Hyperthyroidism. And 98% of the time, it's benign. It's just from an enlargement in a kitty's thyroid as it ages. And treatment can involve restricting iodine in the diet, which also includes any outdoor hunting, which is good because that's bad for birds. and lizards and such anyway.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And other treatments might include surgical removal of the thyroid and yes, radioactive treatment, which cures 95% of feline hyperthyroidism with one shot. But yeah, avoid that poop for as long as the vet tells you. Now, what about geography and your pet's thyroids? So the Banfield Science and Quality News published an article titled, Feline Hyperthyroidism Common in Northwest
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
and East Coast, and it detailed that, yeah, the Pacific Northwest and the eastern seaboard of the U.S. have more kitty hyperthyroidism, but they don't know why. Could be that the cats there live longer than in southern states, maybe because of the weather they might be kept indoors more. It could be dietary sources of too much iodine.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Could be endocrine disruptors in canned foods or scented kitty litter or flame retardants. And only 177 out of 10,000 cats will have the problem though. And it's a relatively easy fix. So don't start sobbing, but you can hug your cat right now if it lets you. So hyperthyroidism, let's leave your kitty alone. Let's talk about the rest of your bod.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Ari Losensky, Sarah Manns, Dave Cannon, Hannah Bale, Stephanie Lingard, Rachel May, Sam Aker, all asked in Rebecca Fitchett's words, please talk about Graves' disease with an exclamation point. Let's talk graves.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
What's going on with it? What do you do? Where does radioactivity come into it?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
What about your metabolism? How much of an effect does it have in terms of like how many calories your body burns at a basic metabolic rate? How much of your body composition is determined by it?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Remember, that TSH is the inverse of how much thyroid function you actually have. If you're one step ahead, a low, low TSH means what?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So people, if you got a uterus and you are planning to use it to cook a baby, you got to figure out something that's not those medications that will block the thyroid from making too much T4. So what do you do? You're asking me, a podcast host? I don't know.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Dr. Patel gives some advice if your doctor opts for surgery.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Yeah. I myself, if I had the chance to go night-night and wake up with no thyroid versus... sequestering myself with radioactivity, I would probably go night-night and get a popsicle later. Why would someone choose the radioactivity?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Okay. What if you take the radioactive iodine? Do you have to stay in any kind of lead bunker?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So to treat Graves' disease, it's not much radioactive iodine. But with thyroid cancer, you're bringing out the big guns.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
What about bedding and stuff like that?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Okay. Oh, good to know. The idea that you're potentially turning into Spider-Man is exciting now. You know what kind of superpowers you can get.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
If you are inspired to be the radioactive center of the Marvel Universe, what do your labs have to look like?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So many of you, Daniel Johnston, Karen Calabrantly, Matea Orr, Little C. Sidey, Sarah Jo, Cassie Lebon, Caitlin Fitzgerald, Annie Dulles, Elliot, Brooklyn Barron, and Vanessa Adams all asked, what's up with labs that are in the normal range, but you still feel awful, whether it's hypo or hyper? So did. Elliot Feeling, first time question asker, hyperthyroidism and Graves disease have her here.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Wondering what exactly are those normal ranges and what's the difference between T4, T3, or rather in the free versions of them?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Why is, Patrick Duffy wanted to know, why is the normal range... So large.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
How often are people depressed, but they think it's their thyroid or vice versa?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
He's an actor from the 1980s soap opera Dallas, which was its Yellowstone of the era. But anyway. Why is that normal range so large?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Do people then say, okay, my TSH is normal. Let's check the T3 and T4.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
You should. It's like, get off my back, get off my thyroid. I would love to know, what about the metabolism? Is it the temperature gauge that is speeding it up? Or is your body converting more energy to heat? Is that what's really contributing to the fluctuations?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Okay, so we have a whole episode on metabolism, the evolutionary anthropology episode with Dr. Herman Ponser. But some of y'all wanted to know if what you're eating, like cutting out inflammatory foods, can help your thyroid get its shit together. And I'm looking at you, first-time question askers, Michaela Ballard and Marianne Mazinski.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Kelly Paul, Felicia Chandler, a bunch of people wanted to know, can diet help manage Thyroid issues? Amy wants to know, Amy Johnson, any support for the autoimmune protocol diet helping reduce inflammation levels with hypothyroidism? Any suggestions on foods you should avoid or you should eat?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Would like alcohol and sugar also be included in that?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
That was my next question. Also on the minds of Maya Lecker, who's a Graves disease haver, Danielle Bauris, Angie Doulas, and Annie Sayers, who asked, can stress make an underactive thyroid worse? Jen O wanted to know, so many symptoms associated with hypo or hyperthyroidism seem like they could also be caused by stress.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
or other common mental or physical issues, when should a person start to suspect thyroid issues specifically and prompt a discussion with their physician, especially without being looked at as a hypochondriac who spends too much time online listening to podcasts, they ask. Amazing question.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Hypo means under, whereas hyper means above.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
But yeah, how much is stress and common like mental or physical issues, how much does that have like an effect down the line?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Kelly Shaver had a funny question. They said, I'm fat, and every doctor I have keeps insisting on doing thyroid blood tests, even though they're always fine. Why are they so obsessed with my thyroid?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So this guest is a division chief of the NYU Langone Endocrine Surgery Department and a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery. And we met up on a brisk afternoon in this tidy, elegant hospital conference room. And I asked so many questions and he didn't even bill us for them. He knows his stuff and he knows your stuff.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Right. So it's keep looking if you suspect that there's something else going on. There are other tests to move on to, right? Absolutely. Okay. I thought this was a great question, Tiger Yudi and Greg Wallach. Greg asked, can you have Queen Anne eyebrows and your thyroid be fine? And Tiger Yudi wants to know, do thin eyebrows really lean toward poor thyroid function?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
The last half of the eyebrow sort of pieces out early from what I understand. And I have a friend whose mom was like, never pluck your eyebrows. Never. Mine never grew back in the last portion. And then it turned out she just had thyroid disease.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
I understand that there is a lot of blame for 90s eyebrows when really get your thyroid checked. Yeah, exactly. I'll have to do a little bit of an aside on that.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Okay, this symptom is called eyebrow hypotrichosis, and a 2023 paper titled Eyebrow Loss and the Queen Anne Sign in Hypothyroidism said that loss of the outer third of the eyebrows is called the Queen Anne sign, and it's an uncommon manifestation of hypothyroidism. However... The exact mechanism of eyebrow loss only at the outer third portion, it's unknown. They don't know why it happens.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And clinicians should consider hypothyroidism as a diagnosis for patients presenting with that loss of the outer third of the eyebrows, despite the fact that it doesn't happen very frequently. And I was like, who's Queen Anne? So this is named after Anne of Denmark, who was a 16th century hottie, who was a patron of the arts.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
and noted to be a woman of boundless intrigue, although others called her frivolous and self-indulgent. And those people are haters. But according to her official portraits, her eyebrow tails were like, see ya. And the reason for that is lost in the sands of time. Maybe she was hypothyroid, maybe not.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So it's possible if you didn't over pluck the outer tails of your eyebrows, but they are MIA and you're also feeling cold, constipated and dry all over, you might wanna get that thyroid checked. Now, if you over plucked and you know it, let me direct you to the 2023 Live Science article. Why don't over plucked eyebrows fully grow back?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Which essentially says that you abused the follicles so much they don't wanna come back to your eyebrow party. Like, you know how sometimes old guys who wear tube socks for decades have bald shins? It's like that. But now you have like permanent Kate Moss eyebrows. Now, there are worse things. But yeah, we have a whole episode on the drama of hair called Trichology. Now, brows be damned.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And the difference between having, let's say, low thyroid hormone and having Hashimoto's. Hashimoto's, from what I understand, is your immune system being like, let's get this thyroid out of here. Get out of here. We don't like you. You're an invader. And you're like, this is my own thyroid.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Let's talk about other hormones in the tomato soup of your body. Carol Young asked, is there a difference in thyroid functions between males assigned at birth and females assigned at birth? Midnight Cat and Brie Kahn's also asked about female hormone systems and thyroids.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And what about Jay Ramsbald wanted to know, are there any thyroid implications for people assigned female at birth who are taking testosterone for gender affirming care? Does hormone replacement therapy have any role in thyroid issues?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And even before pregnancy, hypothyroidism or low levels of T3 can disrupt ovulation and egg release and hinder the ability to conceive. Or if underlying causes like a pituitary issue or autoimmune disease is causing the hypothyroidism, it might also be thrown a wrench in getting a baby in there.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Respectfully speaking to those who asked, Renee Wenger, Maddie Dennison, Sarah, Cassie Kenton, Danielle Sucher, and Amber McIntyre. why during pregnancy, your thyroid can also cause a bit of a hollow balloon.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
As someone who is on all kinds of hormones, who hasn't checked her thyroid in a while, can it go with the wind? Like, are you typically on a trajectory where if you have a thyroid issue, it's never going to resolve on its own?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So if your body calms down somehow and stops over-provoking your poor, exhausted, overworked thyroid, things can chill and return to normal pretty suddenly, which is a big yay. And for those on the other end of the seesaw whose TSH is too high and the thyroid function is hypo or low... In general, though, if you have somebody who's headed towards...
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Hashimoto's is a type of autoimmune disorder where your body's immune system turns on itself and you're like, can you not? But Hashimoto's is not the cause of all underactive thyroids, aka hypothyroidism. You can have low thyroid hormone without it being caused by autoimmune Hashimoto's. Just like all cacti are succulents, but not all succulents are cacti.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
What about ways to prevent thyroid nodules? And I'm asking literally for a friend who has them. Erin, I got your back. She's like, I got another one I got to go check out. Anything that she can do in her power...
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
When you palpate a thyroid, can you really feel if there's a nodule in there?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So BFF and recent birthday girl, Erin, and patrons Emma Wren, Lydia Trom, and Addie Capello, who says, mine is just chilling, but I know they can become a problem for others. Keep an eye on them. Do people ever come in with just lymph nodes that are...
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And they're like, I have cancer. And you're like, that's a lymph node. You're good.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
You mentioned earlier thyroid cancer that could have spread. Are those like endometriosis? Is it like bits of thyroid tissue that are around that respond to radioactive iodine or-
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
As opposed to like radiation gamma knife or something that can just zap one area, this can actually systemically go and find it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Nice. It's like they're kryptonite.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
What about libido and thyroids?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Do people with Graves' disease get hornier?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
I didn't mean to. I was curious.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Right, exactly. Yeah. What kind of heart rate do you have if you've got Graves' disease?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So all Hashimoto's, hypothyroidism, not all hypothyroidism is Hashimoto's. Do those present differently?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Right. Well, okay. One more question. Mercedes Tarasovic, Hannah at Serrano Hudson. What's the connection between hypothyroidism and chronic uticaria, which are hives, right? What's up with hives and thyroids?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Good to know. Hardest part about your job?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
What sucks the most? It can be anything. It can be petty. It can be huge.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
You're like, I have nothing outside.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Rather be palpating thyroids than filing paperwork.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
One insurance scholar, Jay Feynman, wrote in a recent op-ed piece that in the murkiness of health care insurance, when consumers need coverage, they discover that there are significant protection gaps. And for an expose on how, Feynman writes, the denial of valid insurance claims is not occasional or accidental or the fault of a few bad employees. It's the result of an increasing insecurity.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
and systematic focus on maximizing profits by major companies. You can see his 2010 book, Delay, Deny, Defend. Why insurance companies don't pay claims and what you can do about it. Best thing about your job. What do you love? I know you love your job, which is why I'm talking to you and not some other thyroid jabroni.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Do you ever see someone come back after medication and they look and feel so much better?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
What about any myths that you would want to bust about thyroids? Any soapboxes you want to get on?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
When should someone get a second opinion?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Okay, so this is confusing, but how doctors measure your thyroid function is by checking your TSH. That's thyroid stimulating hormone. So this hormone is like a measure of how much your body is pressing the gas pedal to try to get enough thyroid action.
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Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Yeah. So smart. Thank you so much for making me better friends with my own thyroid.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
I appreciate everything it's doing for me at the moment.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
I'm going to keep it. Thank you, doctor. on serious questions because sometimes those are the ones that most need the answers. And to find out more about Dr. Kapil Patel, see the links in the show notes as well as one to the charity of his choice, the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons or AAES. Thank you so much NYU for loaning him to us for that hour. What a time we had. I loved it.
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Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Say hi to us on social media. I'm at Ologies on Blue Sky, still at Ologies on Instagram and at Allie Ward on there too. We have shorter kid-friendly episodes called Smologies in their own feed now. Just search S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S wherever you get podcasts. Look for the new green artwork and hit subscribe. You can join Patreon at patreon.com slash ologies.
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You can find hats, totes, tees, and more at ologiesmerch.com too. Thank you so much to recent birthday girl and human gem, Erin Talbert, who admins the Ologies podcast Facebook group. I love you, Erin. I hate your thyroid. I'm sorry about it. Tell it to be nice. Aveline Malink makes our professional transcripts. Callie Ardoire does the website.
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Noelle Dilworth steers our calendar as scheduling producer. Susan Hale is the pituitary gland of a managing director. Jake Chafee is our T4 of an assistant editor. And the T3 that gets the episode out of the garage is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn has the aux and made the theme music. If you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret.
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And this week, it's that social media doom scrolling has become a problem because I'm not learning vital info about current events. I'm just like piecing together fragments of what's happening in the world based on other people's reactions to them and then the reactions to the reactions in the comments. And I spent...
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
all day Saturday on my phone, on the couch, mindlessly locked in like a tractor beam of other people's front-facing camera, hot takes, not learning much.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And so yesterday and today, I told myself, I said, if I looked at social media, I would have to donate $1,000 to a political action committee that goes against everything I stand for and harms women, trans people, immigrants, people of color, and our environment. If I scrolled social media, I would have to do that. Not wanting to give them $1,000 was a surefire way to keep me off of it.
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Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And I had a great day off social media, consuming more comprehensive news from reliable sources. So if you feel out of sorts and constantly scared, make a bet with yourself that you cannot afford to lose. Make the stakes so high that there's no way you will do the thing that you don't want to do. Cut bangs, text your crush, we're all going to die. So chin up, keep going. Bye-bye.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So a low TSH means hyperthyroidism or an overactive gland because your body barely has to tap the gas pedal of TSH, but your thyroid is already off to the races. Now, a high TSH means your body is flooring it on the gas pedal so hard and not getting a lot of action to convert to energy. So a high TSH means low activity, hypothyroidism, and a low TSH means high activity or hyperthyroidism.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Just think everything's the opposite, kind of. So walk me through a backstage of the thyroid and the thyroid hormone. It squirts out what T4 to thyroxine. Tell me what is it making and what is that effect?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So the pituitary is at the wheel and at the gas pedal, and it makes that thyroid-stimulating hormone, or TSH. That tells the thyroid to release more gas, T4, and your organs say, thanks, man, I'm gonna break this down a little into T3 so we can use it for energy. So imagine your pituitary saying, We're not going anywhere. Where's the gas?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So we'll talk about your stuff momentarily. But first, let's thank all the patrons at patreon.com slash ologies who make the show possible and send in their questions. You can be one of them if you like for just a dollar a month. Also, thanks to everyone in ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. And if you need a kid-friendly version of the show, Just a reminder that we launched Smologies recently.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Pumping out more TSH to be like, come on, come on, come on. Or if you have too much T4 converted to T3, your pituitary is like, whoa, easy, lead foot, and it releases less TSH.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Where's the T4 hanging out when it's on call to be T3?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Do you know why they're called T3 and T4? Yep.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So what happens when you've got T3 in the body? Does it affect your adrenal systems? Does it affect cortisol?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
If you have a low heart rate, speaking from experience, at some point my doctors were like, wow, you're athletically healthy. And then I was like, or does my thyroid suck? Because I'm not running as much as I used to. It turned out my thyroid sucked a little bit. But when someone comes to your office and they say, I think my thyroid is, let's say sluggish, what are the first things you do?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
If they have symptoms of... hypothyroidism, but their labs are within range. Where do you go from there?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
So for TSH, that thyroid stimulating hormone, in range is typically set like 0.5 to 5.0. You could be anywhere in between there, but it varies by lab. And if a patient is feeling symptoms like for hypothyroid, dry skin, feeling cold a lot, low energy, your guts are slow, you got brittle hair, Maybe you feel like the embodiment of a cold, limp stalk of celery. That's sad.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
And you're in the upper end of the TSH range. Even though you're in range technically, some doctors might flag it and medicate with extra thyroid hormone or T4. Doctors can also see, no matter what your TSH is, how much T4 you're actually making. and test to see how well your organs are converting that to T3, which you can use.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
It's a spinoff podcast in its own feed. Link in the show notes. So thank you also to everyone who leaves reviews for the show. It matters so much to us and it helps boost the show in the charts and I read all of them. And this week, Positive Steps PDX wrote that they look forward to listening every week and that it's been rad to gain knowledge from fellow queer and trans folks.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Now, there are medications like Synthroid, which the generic name is levothyroxine, and that is just T4, and it's kind of up to your body to make the T3 you need from it. Now, with Hashimoto's, the autoimmune issue where your immune system turns on your own thyroid, that is rude, and it's measured by high TSH as well as labs that measure antibodies to your own organ.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Mm-hmm. Do people ever try to score thyroid hormone as like an ozempic?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Yeah. So word of the wise, don't do it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
Yeah. Just like get extra coffee. Does everyone's thyroid kind of poop out as we age?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND) with Kepal Patel
When it comes to women assigned female birth, what is the connection between autoimmune Hashimoto's and ovaries? What's going on?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Oh, hey, it's yesterday's medication in your jeans pocket. Oops, Ali Ward. Let's stab ourselves with information from a porcupine's business end. We have a good one. What a chat. I remember getting off this interview and being like, this is why I make the show. You're in for a treat.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
20 to 30 pounds is like the size of a corgi, but a corgi that's been bred with a sea urchin.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
How many times do you think you've been barbed?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
I did watch one YouTube video of Aldous Rose, another porcupine legend. And his capture method is to cover them with an old red igloo beer cooler, which slides shut. And then from there he can sedate them and then take them out and take measurements for like 20 or so minutes and then release them on their merry way. Now, what if you get porcupined and you are a porcupine?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
They have little paws that are good at grasping and they just got to do their best to reach the ones embedded by their enemies. It's a risky life, but they are armed. What kind of students do you have that are drawn to this field?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
But the ology for this, let's just say erythrozinology, which comes from the Greek for... There's two major groups of porcupines. We're going to include both in this episode, but mostly we're focusing on the genus Erythrozon. Is that cool? Okay, great.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Do you know that I just realized right now that a porcupine actually inspired this entire podcast to exist? And I have not thought about it until right now. Is that true? Yes. There was a guest named Phil Torres, who's amazing. And now he's on Expedition Unknown on Discovery. But he studied butterflies in the jungle. But he was a friend before I started this podcast.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
And he once told the story about how he was studying butterflies in the jungles of Peru. And he's also... hunky to the point where it's comical. And he's married to an absolutely beautiful Norwegian model. And they're also incredibly nice, which is infuriating. It's maddening because they're good people. But to make his way through Cornell, he modeled for Abercrombie. It's
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
You're just like, fuck you, Phil. And we love him. Anyway, he was talking about once he was in the jungles of Peru and he had to chase a porcupine out of his hut with his acoustic guitar. Yeah. You were like gently nudged out. But I was like, if these are the type of stories that field biologists have, I need to hear more of them.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Because the idea of like a shirtless Abercrombie model having to scoot a porcupine out of a hut with a acoustic guitar was like, those are the stories that need to be heard.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
So get suited up for a thrilling array of weird stories involving barbs, grunts, squeaks, cartoonish noses, romantic gestures that will leave you wanting to bleach your brain, counting quills, male models, flim-flam about quill removal, how to spot a porcupine in the wild, and so much more with professor, ecologist, and erythrozinologist, Dr. Tim Bean. Do you get called Jim Beam a lot?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Eleven months out of the year, preggers are nursing. They get one month off. Give these ladies a break, Mother Nature. Why do you hate them? Now, an elderly porcupine would be like 10 years old, but usually they only live to around five in the wild. Now, the upside of that short life is you start early. You're horny. You're ready to reproduce at 18 months old.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
But those uber maternal lady porcupines, though?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Wait, if copulation takes one to five minutes, and they're doing it for eight hours, is there a refractory period?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Usually the same dominant male and then all the other ones who made the commute are just like, well, I guess, bye.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
What about their locomotion? Because if they have a 12-hour window to make it a couple miles to maybe get a chance with a lady, are they just booking ass?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Okay, so we've got an associate professor from San Luis Obispo's California Polytechnic State University, Cal Poly, who teaches courses like this. Introduction to Wildlife Conservation and Administration. They studied ecology, evolution, and environmental biology at Columbia University. They headed to UC Berkeley for a master's and PhD in environmental science policy and management.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
So she like sends out a text. She sends out a group text or tweet, and then she waits for them to Uber their little asses over.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Yeah. Well, is it, how do they, with all of the quills, are they just missionary style? How are they doing that?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
So remember, the bottom of her tail is like a soft, quill-less landing strip that she lays down on her own back for his little tender, quill-less belly. And he doesn't get quilled.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Yeah, that's awkward. But for the most part, the muscles that would sort of like boyoing them are not going to be activated.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Okay. That makes sense evolutionarily, right? Because that would really be a conflict of interest.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
It's like Edward Scissorhands, but Edward syringe fingers. And each one comes loaded with just a little doxycycline. No copay. Oh, what a bummer for them. How long are they alive?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Now, usually we save our patron audio questions for the second half, but who cares? Nothing matters. We're going to break the rules. Let's lose our minds. My mind's already lost. Let's get unhinged. Let's get rebellious with a Patreon question early.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Yeah, Erin, it does. I hate that for you. Now, how do you not go to a zoo to see one? How hard is it to see a porcupine? Are they just up in the trees and good luck?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Does your dog know how to go sniff them out? Why are dogs getting porcupined so much?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
While editing this episode, I spotted a note in the transcript left by lead editor Mercedes Maitland. She just wanted to tell me that her quote, now departed family dog, a standard poodle named Bentley, got quilled by the same dead porcupine three times. She continues, we lived in the country and he would go off and find it in the woods.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
My parents eventually had to comb the woods, she says, for the carcass so they could dump it somewhere far, far away. Bentley was otherwise a very smart dog, but I guess that porcupine smell was just too hard to resist. He also got skunked a few times in his six years, she said, so I guess he was not smart when it came to his nose. Mercedes wanted to tell me that. I wanted to tell you that.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Mercedes, that's insane, and I love it. Also, if you're just now realizing that you have a special interest in the musk of large rodents, you can enjoy our recent castorology episode on beavers, in which we discuss at length how their internal scent sacs made it into your ice cream way back then. Anyway, let's return to that thorn pig stink.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
When you say nothing I've ever smelled before, I understand that then that means that none of us can possibly understand. But would you say it's closer to the skunk, closer to the fragrance of a rose, fruity, musky? Yeah.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Do people ever call you Dr. Porcupine?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
As a field ecologist who is looking for porcupines, if you start to smell that on the wind, are you excited?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
I looked around to find some other olfactory analogs to porcupine essence, and I saw it suggests a strong cheese mixed with weed and barnyard animals. But the most compelling comparison I read was from a wildlife rehabber on Reddit who described it as just like human body odor and ripe. So a squeaky, grunting gym bag that can pierce your face. It's thrilling. What is that like when it's spotted?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
You're like, that's a really good Marvel character. Just like shooting quills out of your wrists at people.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
When someone's like, there it is, there it is. Is that like a kind of routine or does that make your whole day?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
You're like, our posse just grew by one. Well, you mentioned summer nights. Do they tend to hibernate in the winter? Are they nocturnal? Why is that a good time?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
What do you think of Teddy the porcupine?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
I was so worried you were going to say, Teddy is, and then a long pause, complicated. Finding out Teddy was racist or was illegally poached or something. Just a quick side note, Teddy Bear the porcupine is a rescue critter taken in by Idaho's Earth Fire Institute, and they say he's a robust, sometimes moody animal who accepts fresh willow branches and spruce logs, but he likes other treats.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Okay, actually, porcupines. I feel like underneath their quills, they gotta be the cuddliest little babies.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
And his caretakers note that Teddy was once called Piney until, via an animal communicator, he voiced that he wanted to be called something softer and cuddlier, as he, quote, didn't feel his essence was prickly at all. And the sanctuary notes that as most people don't know that porcupines are sweet and gentle, changing Piney's name to Teddy Bear will be a good opportunity for education.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
And now Teddy is famous on the internet. When Teddy eats a pumpkin, say, and our brains get flooded with serotonin, do most porcupines make that noise if they're munching on something? Or is Teddy just particularly like a bon vivant?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Porcupette. This one word is the thin string holding up my sanity in 2025.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Can I ask you approximately a thousand questions from listeners?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Oh my God. Okay. Stephanie Rosso wants to know, are there any predators that are undeterred by their quills? Like what are porcupine predators? Curtis Takahashi says, it seems like they'd be a very painful prize. Mouse Paxton, Anastasia Doherty, Jalene Tangan, John Wallace, and Olivia Lester all asked. Olivia asked, what animals don't care about eating the spines?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
And we'll get to the answer of that question in just one moment. But first, let's eject some money into a tender cause. And this week, it's the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society. And the NAFWS is a national tribal organization seeking to expand the exchange of information and management techniques related to self-determined tribal fish and wildlife management.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Also, Tim told me that one soapbox he'd like to get on is that Congress passed the 1973 Endangered Species Act, to appropriate some money to research on species of special concern. However, Tim told me, federally recognized tribes are not eligible to apply for these funding sources.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
They have a separate and much smaller pot of money that's dedicated to tribal management of wildlife, and it amounts to about one-sixth of the money per acre, which sucks. And Tim wanted you to know about that and also that the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society is a worthy cause.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
So thank you to Tim for the heads up and to the NAFWS for their work and to everyone who cares about land stewardship and ecology. And that donation was made possible by our sponsors. Okay, back to that question. Who dares to eat a porcupine for lunch? Your dog obviously sucks at it, but some critter must be able to conquer them, right?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
If you wanted to be in some sort of close relationship with them, I feel like they would have avoidant attachment issues.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
So kind of like how your mom or your guardian might teach you to peel a banana or cut a pineapple or watch your drink at a bar.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
So fishers eat the face. Martins eat babies through snow tunnels. Mountain lions go for the guts first. And Tim says that coyotes and bobcats are also able to get a bite of them here and there. And owls, how are owls even attempting this? They're like small chickens. Well, through surprise attacks to the face.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Sometimes it works out well for them, but wildlife rehabbers tell tales of demoralized owls whose failure has to be plucked out of their flesh one by one. Now, as for the South American porcupines, this 2020 article in the journal Foodwebs titled, Predation of a Brazilian Porcupine by an Ocelot and a Mineral Lick in the Peruvian Amazon,
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
explains that when a patch of salt becomes kind of like a local pub for porcupines, they are vulnerable to the bravest of predators, including the ocelot. Now, the African porcupines, they got to watch out for hyenas and lions and leopards. But how scary are porcupines, like using numbers? Is it mostly an entry through the face?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Yikes. Yeah. Olivier Callas, Alexander von Fritzie Bitz, and his mom, Issa Brillard, and Eating Dog Hair for a Living, want to ask, Alexander asks, how many quills do they have? Is there an average number? Is it like 4,000 or does it totally vary by species?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
I was going to ask, how do you get that?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Oh, man. I think that if you were really feeling like not super social, it would be nice to just be like, I'm just going to dip in the back and just count some quills for a while.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Nobody talk to me. Everywhere you Google, every old yellowed mammology book you scour, you will find that 30,000 quills quote. And I kept digging further and further for the true source. And it led me to a 1972 paper that then quoted E.R. Hall's Mammals of Nevada.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
which is a famed and well-respected 1946 book, which had no cited source, but every other paper I found cited the 1946 book or each other. I was on this research loop. It felt like driving in a roundabout. But finally, I located a more recent 2017 paper in the Journal of Dairy and Veterinary Sciences.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
by a researcher out of the University of Calgary, and it was titled, Getting to the Point, How Many Quills Does a North American Porcupine Have? And the methodology section read, The dorsal surface, or back, was denuded and the quills sorted. Quills were then counted by the number of sharp, pointed ends. The results?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Is there an easy way to handle a porcupine? If you're a porcupine researcher, what kind of gloves are you working with?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
The author counted 44,006 quills, which, they note, is 46.7% greater than the original claim of 30,000 quills made by E.R. Hall in 1946. Now, this information means nothing to you, probably, but I needed to find out to get a little bit of closure in my life. Also, counting up to 44,000 sounds tedious, but it has been done for science. People wanted to know, when do they get the quills?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Ruby Gordon, Issa Brillard, Olivia Lester, Gretchen Schroeder, Katie Biardi, Cheryl Buechner, Brittany Corrigan, Nicole Kleinman, Sammy, Annalise de Young, Alexa Roth, and... Jonathan asks, is it painful for a mama porcupine to give birth? Julia Bingham wanted to know, are they born spiky? When do their pricks become properly prickly?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Chrysalis said, I pet a baby porcupine once right on his soft little snoot.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
He didn't have sharp quills yet. So yeah, when do they start to grow those?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
And you said they're made of keratin. Is that kind of like having a soggy fingernail that dries out?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Yeah, interesting. This next one was asked by Charlotte Parkinson, Olivia Callis, Lisa Gorman, Jennifer Lemon, Anthony Richards, Caitlin Morrison, Carol, Catherine Vela, Emily Totaro, and... Aurora Cullen and Zed Shurigane wanted to know, in Zed's words, do they regrow the spines that they lose during altercations or is it just a one and done deal?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Do they shed them and regrow them like we do hair?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Does that mean that you might find porcupine quills just in the leaf litter in the forest?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Mouse Paxton, Chris Curious, Danai Sprouse, and Lisa Verge wanted to know, what is the best way to remove quills from a pet if they go after a porcupine, Mouse asks. Dana Sprouse said they suck to yank out of a dog's nose. So Danai, I'm sorry about your dog. How do vets get them out?
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Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Okay, so I dipped deeper into this topic and I found an article written by Dr. Seth Bynum, a veterinarian and also presumably a hunter as it was published in the magazine, Gun Dog. But he says that as long as the pup is safely restrained, you can use pliers or like a Leatherman to grip them one by one at the base of the quill.
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Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
And he writes, employ a firm and purposeful grip and pull with the same enthusiasm. But it might hurt a little. And so go slow and don't get greedy is his advice. Or you risk breaking the quills off if you try to remove them like several at a time. And when you're removing them,
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
He says put them all in one place or like in a dish of water so they don't roll around or get lost underfoot and then stab you doubly. Now, if the victim has a bunch around the eyes or in the mouth, Seth says a vet visit is in order because there are nooks and crannies that quills can burrow into like in the gums or the eye and left undiscovered that can lead to a lot of pain.
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Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
obviously, and infection. And the vet also can sedate your poor dog, which if it were me, I'd be like, hell yeah, give me that sweet, sweet nectar and render me numb. I'm out. Now, this article also did me the favor of busting Flim Flam in that cutting quills does not make them easier to remove. It just wastes time while the tissue gets more inflamed and the quills kind of deepen their grip.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
And also, while if you love it, lube it, is good. generally good life advice. It does not apply to this situation. As Seth writes that it just results in little more than a slippery dog and tools that can't get their grip. And yeah, when in doubt, see a vet. Veterinarians, we love you. Your work is hard. You're worth every penny.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
By under the tail, is that their junk necessarily or is that in a different spot?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
If my hairy daughter, Gremmy, ever got needle blasted, I would be Ubering a medevac. Emily Krieger, Benjamin, Shante, first-time question asker, Charlie Eisman, Lindsay Malone, and Issa wanted to know about their personality. Emily asked, do they have a vibe? Nervous, irritable, curious, chill. Shante said, I feel like porcupines always look so chill and calm.
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Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Do the quills mean that most predators leave them alone? Charlie Eisman says, are they as oblivious as they seem? Judgmental, but a good question. What are they like?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Tim drew a beautiful comparison that will live with me forever.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Porcupines. Hell-raiser sloths forever. Now, are they well-liked in nature? Are they lonely for other forest companions? Asked Cinnamon, Wynn Costantini, Issa Brillard, Alexander Kidd, Average Pie, Colin Robata, Mark D, Annalise DeYoung, Pabka34, and Emily. Oh, a bunch of people did ask about social structure. Ewan Munro wanted to know, are they friends with any other woodland creatures?
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Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Must I remind us of the 2024 Paris pole vaulter whose victory was thwarted by his own generous nethers, a self-betrayal of Olympic proportions. But Tim says that a porcupine's tail, which is about the size of a mitten, is covered in quills on the top. But on the flip side, it's just a haven of only guard hairs and, in the colder months, some soft, fuzzy fur.
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Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
And Yasmin Alu said, I saw a porcupine in an aquarium that was almost always curled up in a corner on its stick. Are they social creatures or was it depressed? They want to know. Should I contact the aquarium? But like, are they solitary creatures?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Imagine it's the middle of the night in your bedroom and a steady stream of screaming, sticky children are just parading through being like, I don't know, her energy seems kind of off. You're like, be gone. Off with you. But porcupines, do they party?
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How are they getting these dens? Because some, the Eurasian African, an expert once told me that they burrow. The expert is you, and it was a few minutes ago. But when the arboreal ones, are they able to dig a den or do they find like an old badger haunt or they find like a rock cave?
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You know, a few people asked about nutrients. Verena Runstadler and Felipe Jimenez wanted to know why they like salt. Felipe said, I heard that porcupines have a surprising craving for salt and will even gnaw on sweaty tools or clothes to get it. Does that have a physiological reason or is it just taste?
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I watched a video of porcupine legend Aldous Rose in a little shed in the woods that he uses to attract porcupines.
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Oh, that's got to be such a find for a porcupine.
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Katie B., Matt Thompson, and Mallory Avery wanted to know about cars. Mallory says, Maybe they chew your brake lines. Is this flim flam? Have you heard of that much?
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Are quills types of hairs or are they modified scales? I mean, I'm going to get right into it because I'm like, what the fuck is going on?
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If only we had like a whole episode about roadkill. Look at that. Boy, howdy. We do. It's linked in the show notes. Roadkill ecology. It's a banger. Also, patrons Benjamin, Susan Osborne, Meg Zeroni, and Shuli Rank, first-time question asker, asked about their numbers. Let's talk numbers. Well, you mentioned that cars can be an ultimate predator for them, essentially, on accident.
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But how are populations doing? You mentioned that indigenous populations are asking where they went. But overall, what do you find in there?
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So there are a few theories about porcupine booms and busts. And Tim says that one researcher, Richard Schweitzer's work, shows that one single mountain lion can really reduce porcupine numbers pretty quickly. And another factor is the timber industry.
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In the Pacific Northwest, in Northern California, there used to be these old-growth Douglas fir redwood stands, but porcupines do not love to eat them. Now, once the lumber industry mowed down all those older trees, What grew in their place were different plant sources that they loved, like a stoner loves fourth meal. So their populations exploded.
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And in the 1970s, researchers predicted the natural decline from that baby porcupine boom, partly because timber companies could say, look, they're doing fine. But that was temporary. Now, speaking of a porcupine menu. So, okay, they stripped the bark off the trees. Are they eating it?
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Tim emailed me after this interview to say he wanted to shout out a couple of researchers, Cara Appel and Parisa Belomarek, who found that porcupines have more foresight than me, and they seem to scout out winter habitat during the summer.
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So ahead of times, in the dunes where they worked, in the middle of summer, they would go out to their winter homes in the foredunes to look for the best shelters, and then they'd just go back to those places that were most protected from the wind and the rain the following winter. So they remembered where to go.
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Also, in terms of like moving to a new town for porcupines, Tim mentioned that Oldest Rose hypothesized that they eat each other's poop and they rely on others' gut bacteria to digest the local plants. So Rose postulates that when a porcupine moves to a new area and gets the runs from eating new kind of leaves, the best way to get the local bacteria is by eating another porcupine's poop.
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tummy's all better. But yes, porcupine decline is of course impacted by human interest.
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And so were timber industries in conjunction with the government putting like a hit, like a price on their heads, kind of like it involves?
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They're like, listen, you be born with quills. You break your bones falling out of a tree.
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Yeah, rodents can get high from eating the ganja. Maybe not as high as your roommate who simmered it in ghee, but you know, like not not high. Are there populations doing okay? Or should we put save the porcupines like on our to do lists?
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Bonus, they specialize in rodents. What does that have to do with porcupines? Everything. Porcupines are rodents. What? Yep. Big, beautiful, barbed, rat-like creatures, and we love them. Thank you also to Sarah Listener Berman, to listener Sarah Berman, who suggested this ologist singing their praises of their porcupine enthusiasm.
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I love that if you won Powerball, you'd be like, I'd be out there looking for porcupines.
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Well, actually, I've been thinking about your life, if you don't mind. And you have to have a vase full of quills somewhere. You must have a collection of quills in a jar, in a pen holder. Where are they? How many do you have?
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You know, a few people, Daisy Moser, who's up in Alaska, said, I know people up here in Alaska who throw blankets on them to collect the quills for making traditional jewelry. Daisy says it seems better than the alternative way of getting them, which is, I imagine, getting clubbed in the face with a tail. But is that traditionally how indigenous folks are getting them?
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And also a few people, Elle Wink, wanted to know, as a crafter, porcupine pills are useful as tools and part of craft material. What's the best legal way to get them? And Olivia Lester wanted to know how do humans use them like for weaponry or tools or writing? What are the ways that porcupine quills are obtained by humans? And what uses have you seen kind of like throughout history?
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So at the very tip of an erythroxontidae, or North American porcupine's quills, are hundreds upon hundreds of tiny barbs. And for more on those, if you must, you can see the 2012 paper, Microstructured Barbs on the North American Porcupine Quill Enable Easy Tissue Penetration and Difficult Removal. There you go.
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And it doesn't hurt them. the porcupine to eject them.
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So as a tool for decor for a bunch of uses, I mean, to have that kind of characterized thing, it's got to be valuable. What about flim flam? What's the most annoying misconception about porcupines?
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So that settles that. David Villafranco, Alia Myers, Pabka34, Aaron White, Kurt Swanson, Blair C., Kayla Meyer, Charlotte Short, Tinaz, and first-time question askers Darian and Emily's mom, and Donray Oliveira, who bravely admitted to spending most of their life, ahem, for decades, they say, believing that porcupines shot their quills, Sonic the Hedgehog style.
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Hearsay, heresy, horse pucky flim flam. Now we know.
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I guess speaking of hardening, keratinize the stuff, Danai Sprouse, Zuleika Pevic, wanted to know, in Danai's words, do they have red teeth? Do they have that orange teeth? Like we just did a beaver episode. Is their enamel that kind of like super hard on one side and then soft on the other?
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Ah, last listener question. Potato Puffer wanted to know, are their bellies soft? Uh, sure. I mean, I guess compared to the dorsal side.
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Okay, good. Had to know. Last questions I always ask, and I know we've been talking about quills. We've been talking about leather gloves. Is getting quilled the worst part of the job or is it like meetings? Like are meetings worse than getting quilled?
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Now, the genus Hystrix, or African porcupines, sometimes called Old World porcupines, no barbs, in case you have a choice of which type of porcupine can shank you. Oof. Okay, you've mentioned other porcupines and you mentioned North American porcupines. I know you study North American ones, but are there... Eurasian porcupines? Are there South American porcupines? Are there African porcupines?
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You need some sort of directory of Powerball winners.
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Yeah, you need a benefactor in the Renaissance. You need a pet patron of some kind. I hope someone listens to this and is like, as a billionaire, I've been looking for a pet cause, and it turns out... Let's save the porcupines. Yeah, Teddy's doing a lot of work, too, for the brand image. Teddy's getting paid handsomely in pumpkins and stuff like that, which is good.
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Like as an influencer, he's got like the Lamborghini. What about the best?
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Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
As the porcupine guy, Tim is just a beacon of knowledge, even for not smart questions.
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Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Do they have good eyes, by the way?
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So seeing the landscape through even better than the porcupines.
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I hope to one day see one in the wild. Who knows? At least I know what to look for. But thank you so much for letting me get to know porcupines. And my wish for you is that someone incredibly wealthy listens to this.
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doesn't have an interest in porcupines.
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Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
So ask ecological people illogical questions because they are much less prickly than you'd fear. Thank you so, so much to Dr. Bean for such a lively discussion of these creatures who are so huggable, at least in our hearts.
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Now, you can find out more about Tim's work and the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society at the links in our show notes and on our website, which is also linked in the show notes. Thank you to everyone supporting and submitting questions at patreon.com slash ologies, which you can join for one hot dollar. Ologies merch is at ologiesmerch.com.
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Also, side note, we have a kid-friendly and classroom-safe spinoff show called Smologies, which you can find anywhere you get podcasts. You can look for the new green artwork by Portland-based muralist Bonnie Dutch. You can spread the word on Smologies. We are at Ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky. I'm at Allie Ward. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for adminning the Ologies podcast Facebook group.
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Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does website. Noelle Dilworth is our lovely scheduling producer whose ceiling collapsed during our recent LA rains. Not a big deal. Ellie's doing great. We're doing great here. Susan Hale is our managing director who keeps the sky from falling. Jake Chafee is our capable and very boopable assistant editor.
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And Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio is our lead editor and a Canadian who is thankfully still friends with us Americans. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this week, it's that last week, I read a review that began, thanks, handsome.
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And I just thought this was a reference to me being like your internet father and also just generally, I guess, dapper and appealing. And it made me feel really good. But it turns out that Thanks Handsome was actually in reference to the podcast Handsome, which had just shouted out ologies. So thank you to the handsomes over at Handsome. I'm embarrassed.
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Also, please keep speaking out about our Park Service employees, our federal workers, our scientists, researchers, public servants, all the people who work so passionately and diligently to make the United States I live in and everyone on the globe's present and future's better. Read the news, call Congress people, keep shouting, keep learning, keep telling ologists how much we love them.
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Okay, that word over and out. Till next week. Bye-bye.
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So we got about 30 species of porcupine and the African and North American ones are distantly related. And then we got the South American ones with a big bulbous pink nose and a tail like a monkey. African porcupines can weigh up to 66 pounds or 30 kilos. And they're mostly veggie eaters who dig for roots and bulbs and they eat people's tuber crops or they forage for fruits or bark.
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Sometimes an African porcupine will eat a dead body if it finds one, like roadkill. And sometimes they hoard a bunch of bones to chew on in their den if they need minerals. What's more goth? Thousands of spikes striking fear into the hearts of your foes. and gnawing on bones in your underground cave. Not even bats can compete with that. I did not know they went so hard.
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I didn't know there were so many branches of porcupine. Speaking of branches. Do you think that the adaptations needed to be a ground dweller versus a tree dweller? are different in terms of if you're in the ground, more things are going to come and try and eat you. But if you're in the trees, you're going to encounter fewer jackals and stuff.
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So we're going to get to it in a sec, but first, thank you so much to everyone who sent in questions, audio ones as well. You can submit them at patreon.com slash ologies. Thanks to everyone wearing ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. And thanks to everyone who leaves reviews for the show, which helps us so much.
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Oh, my poor baby. Do they have like hollow bird bones or they're just not that good at balance?
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Imagine wearing a headpiece that is like a fan made of barbed spears. And it is your burden in life to bear. Just trying to slink between branches to try to eat a salad made out of trees. You're like weaving through an agility course dressed like Rihanna at the Met Gala. But if diamonds were needles...
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I'm never complaining again, ever. When the quills come out in a predator, I've always wondered, do they just kind of pop out easily like a Lego snapping off? Or is it painful like getting your mustache waxed?
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Like this one from NJ Roadrunner, who wrote, if science could embody itself as a warm hug, this show would be it. Also want to shout out Snakes Rule, who left the review. I'm 11 years old and I love this podcast. No, I'm not kidding. No, I do not listen to Smologies. No, I do not listen to the bleeped ones. Yes, I actually understand it. You keep doing you, Allie. Snakes rule.
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And the porcupines, at least. The dog would like to have a word. Oh, God. How did you get into porcupines? Of all things, I know that you work on a few different animals, kangaroo rats. Yep. But how did your path lead you down this spiny road?
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Do you think that there was something in you that made you say it because everyone knows that porcupines are cool?
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And also the thrill of the unapproachability of them.
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Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
So porcupines are your favorite ecologists' favorite ecology. And I have seen many photos and videos of porcupines willingly because they live in my heart. And some of them have faces like a Japanese cartoon with a tiny nose that's sometimes brown and fuzzy. They got little teensy fidgeting hands. Other porcupines have a nose that looks like an oversized pink marshmallow.
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What's going on with their nose? Why so big and cute?
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I'm a fan of you and of snakes. Okay, for those who are looking, though, for Kids Safe episodes, just a reminder that we have Smologies. It's available wherever you subscribe to podcasts. It's a spinoff show. You can look for the green cover art. Okay, porcupines. So porcupines, news to me, get their name from the Latin for thorn pig.
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Is it soft? It looks like a big pencil eraser. Yeah. I want to touch it.
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Erethizonology (PORCUPINES) with Tim Bean
Really? Yeah. I want to touch it. I want to touch the marshmallow nosy. What in your job necessitates getting to, common word, boop, but get to touch the nose of a porcupine? Are they anesthetized and you have to make sure their nose is a certain temperature or is it purely just a perk of the job?
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How big are we talking when it comes to porcupines in general?
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Castorology (BEAVERS) with Rob Rich
And what about you? Where did you grow up and when did you start wanting to be involved with tracking beavers and learning more about them? I've only seen maybe one or two in my life in Montana splashing from afar, but I know I'm fascinated with them. But when did it start for you?
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Okay, so Castorology, it's a study indeed. It comes from the root for Castor, which may come from the Greek for he who excels. And there's this big debate about whether this divine Greek mythological twin named Castor, who was worshiped as a healer, got his name from smelly beaver juice used as a medicine for millennia, or if it was the other way around. But we're here, it's now.
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You're talking about them as something that changes the ecosystem and can have a lot of impact on things like literally downstream. And humans, unfortunately, have kind of stepped into that role, not in good ways a lot. But I'm so curious about the beaver instinct. And they can have such huge impacts on environments.
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And I don't know how they know how to do that because I couldn't go just build a boat. by myself. I couldn't just go build a house by myself. How do beavers know how to chop down wood, how to stack it? What exactly are they doing with all of this instinct and how is it shaping the environment in their immediate way? What does it do for beavers to make dams and lodges?
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Wait, they don't need to build dams? Like all of them? I guess if you score an apartment next to a park, you don't need to erect a swing set in the front yard.
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So beavers making dams not only spread the stream water wider out, but deeper into the soils as well and into the groundwater. And for more, you can see Dr. Wohl's 2017 paper in the Journal of Water Resources Research titled, Beaver-Mediated Lateral Hydrologic Connectivity. Fluvial carbon and nutrient flux and aquatic ecosystems metabolism, which maybe you've already read.
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But if not, TLDR is that our beaver friends make complex watery environments and that those areas are a good sink for water when the streams run low and for carbon capture and nutrients for the rest of the ecosystems. Even hydrologists are like dam beavers. That's cool.
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Let's get to what patron Stratford Abbott calls swimming furry chainsaws.
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So they're kind of shoring up that river. It spreads out. It gets deeper. And then naturally, willows and other things use that water source to grow into it. They create this new little ecosystem where more things start to thrive there.
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And let's talk about baby beavers, tooth tools, lodges, dams, the sound of water, the slap of a tail, who eats beaver and why, the best beaver real estate, the plight of the beaver, hats, whiskey, beavers and folklore, in joke books, in your neighborhood and in your dreams forever with naturalist, wildlife ecologist, tracker, and castorologist, Rob Rich.
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Well, if they get up and go, if they're like, not as much here, and they get up and go, do they have to build an entirely new dam? Or do they ever find abandoned dams from other beavers? And they're like, this is pretty good.
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You know, it always boggles me to hear how fast a spider, like an orb weaver, can spin a web. Kind of the timeline of how different organisms create things, I think it can be really surprising. But when it comes to making a dam, and I know there are really huge ranges probably in sizes, but are they working on it for like a year? Is it a multi-year project?
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Or do they say, all right, let's chew some trees down. Let's get this thing done. And it's like pretty fast.
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Not only that, but they tend to work the night shift, and they dig out trails and even canals to float sticks and tree trunks toward the dams. They're making log rides.
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How are they making those dams? Are they threading different size diameter trunks and sticks? Is it almost like they're weaving it or are they piling it and then kind of plugging in gaps?
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And with a pair of beavers, are they both working on it typically? Or do they ever get the yearlings in on it? Like, hey, you're going to have to do this eventually. Go grab me some mud.
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You know, you mentioned, obviously we're talking baby beavers. Sometimes a wildlife rehabber will have videos of baby beavers and they're very fuzzy and very cute. And I've seen videos of them taking all the towels or toys or items around them and trying to plug up a doorway with them?
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And I imagine that's got to be instinctual, but do they start looking for stuff to push around even when they're little, little?
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This reminds me of when my nephew Mason wanted to play this video game. And it was just a video game about working at a diner, making sandwiches and burgers. And we're like, you know, Mason, one day you can do this for as long as you want. And they give you money for it. You're never going to believe it. It's called a job.
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But yeah, that video I saw, which was uploaded to YouTube in 2022, is titled, Rescue Beaver Makes Christmas Dam In-House. And it features a rescue beaver scooting down a nice hardwood-floored hallway and stacking items, including a flip-flop, a SpongeBob SquarePants plush toy, a small Christmas tree, a rag rug, a teddy bear, and a full roll of red, shiny wrapping paper.
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And castorology, this seems like it's something that's been in the books before. Do beaver people call themselves castorologists?
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And at times this beaver pauses thoughtfully, just blinking, touching his tiny hands together, as you might when you have walked into the kitchen, but you've forgotten why. Now, the uploader, Holly Muraco, writes in the video's description that this beaver is being raised by wildlife rehabbers after being orphaned as a newborn. Her parents were killed and their dam and lodge destroyed.
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Beavers are classified as nuisance animals in many U.S. states, Holly writes, and can be killed anytime. Beavers need to spend two years with their human rehabbers and have lots of opportunities to practice instinctive behaviors. This beaver enjoys playing this game inside the house, but lives with the other orphaned beavers outside most of the time.
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Now, Holly, who works with the Woodside Wildlife Rescue in Mississippi, writes, this misunderstood and unique species needs lots of love. And I want to reach into this video and I want to pet this big rodent. I want to tell it it's doing a good job of stacking all of those objects together. I want to softly pat its big weird tail because I love it.
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A question I feel like I have never gotten to ask someone who gets to study and learn about beavers, but what's with their tail? How big is it? Is that all skin or is it hairy? It looks like a big cactus leaf, kind of. What does that feel or look like?
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I never thought of it this once in my life before, but are there bones in the tail? There've got to be. Is it like a dog tail, but just real flat and big?
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I never realized that. I would have thought it was kind of like a mat of leather. We have so many questions from listeners that are very excited to have a beaver expert on. Can I ask you some listener questions?
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Okay. They knew you were coming on. We've organized them as best we can. into some categories. I thought this was a great question. Shannon O'Grady, Olivia Lester, Onyx Monolith, Rachel Prestanko, Ash Mickelright, Gemma, Shirley Lozanobo, Addie Capello, and Alexandra Rambeau. They want to know about their teeth. How are they so strong? Alexandra asks, has the strength of their teeth been measured?
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I love that they have the term beaver believer because I think not all species get a catchy name like that.
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What are they comparable to? Onyx wanted to know, is it comparable to like tigers and alligators? What kind of jaw and teeth strength are they working with? And we will get to the root of that tooth question in a minute, including why they are the color of a tangerine. But first, we donate to a cause of theologist choosing.
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And this week, the wonderful Rob Rich selected Tracker Certification North America, which aims to create a future where ecological literacy is common, valued, and accessible to all. And they do this by providing education, resources, support, and professional certification for all who aim to improve their skills as wildlife trackers. either recreationally or professionally.
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And they explain that wildlife tracking is a field science, which helps identify and interpret the signs of animal activity and wildlife observations amid a changing world. It also gives people a feeling of a meaningful connection with the landscapes. So that was Tracker Certification North America, with whom Rob works. So thank you to our show sponsors for enabling that donation.
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Okay, and folks submitting questions are patrons of Ologies at patreon.com slash ologies. You can join for a dollar. And we're all eager to get back to the beaver questions. What's with those teeth?
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And where are you right now? Can you set the scene? You're in Montana?
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And for patron Alexander Rambo, hi, hey, who asked, has the strength of their teeth been measured and what are they comparable to? It's about 180 pounds per square inch, which is greater than the 150 or so of a human's, but it's a lot less than the 1,000 pounds per square inch that a Bengal tiger or a grizzly would use to snap your bones. Maybe it's because trees can't run away from beavers.
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Oh, hey, it's the lady at the donut store who knows that you like bear claws. Allie Ward, this is ologies. This is beavers. Finally, the beavers are here and ushering them in is an absolutely delightful beaver man who is a field naturalist and a conservationist who does a ton of biological surveys and teaches wildlife tracking and beaver ecology. and he writes about the beaver as well.
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They can kind of just succumb to their fate being savored bite by bite as slow as they want to. I don't know. I'm neither a tree nor a beaver.
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So our exposed teeth, your exposed teeth, if you're listening to this, have hard enamel on all sides, but touch the back of your teeth with your tongue. So in a beaver, that side is softer. So their teeth are self-sharpening because the harder marmalade-colored enameled front surface of the bottom teeth wears down the soft backside of the uppers.
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So you've got yourself a whole set of mouth shivs taking down trees, ready to go. Now, according to the 2018 paper, a mathematical model of beaver incisor tooth morphology, beavers' front teeth, they just keep getting worn down and growing its whole life.
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They grow a total length of about six feet in its life, which I guess when you consider that they are an entire tool chest for building stuff, and they are also your silverware, it's kind of a worthwhile metabolic investment for the beaver. Some folks asked about diet, and I had never thought about this before because, honestly, I just figured they ate fish and frogs and stuff.
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But Eli, the fish guy, Moe, Prince Nocturnal, Amanda, Key Lime Pie, Shannon O'Grady, Jim, Ziz, Sam and Katie, and Jackie G wanted to know, in Sam and Katie's words, what do they eat? Do they eat any of the bark from the trees they use for their dams? Shannon O'Grady said, do they eat wood? Do they eat fish? And Jackie G says, do beavers really poop sawdust?
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No idea what a beaver eats, to be honest.
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Oh, so the beavers followed the glaciers down in their evolution to where there was water, the beavers went.
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So yes, they eat trees, people. They eat trees. And for more on the different layers inside the tree, which is the most delicious, you can see our wonderful dendrology episode with J. Casey Clapp of the Completely Arbitrary podcast. We also have a scatology episode, and that is about animal poop. Speaking of, what is a beaver log like? What's coming out of their wood chipper?
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All we are is dust in the wind. All we are is beaver scat in a pond. Jacob Ellsbury says, I've never seen a beaver before, but I see their chew marks everywhere. Where do they go? Maya wants to know, are they nocturnal or did I make that up? Sidonia wants to know, how can I increase my likelihood of seeing them?
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Oh, okay. So, but get up early. When it comes to them getting up versus sleeping, a lot of folks wanted to ask about their lodges. And I did not know there was a difference really between a lodge and a dam. I don't know why I never thought about that.
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Megan Walker, Adam Foote, Katie Bauer, Stephanie Rosso, Amanda Lander, Haley Kirby, Jeanetta Soar, Valerie Bertha, first-time quest asker Jean Genoir, all wanted to know what the vibe is in a beaver lodge. What's it like in there? Rebecca King wanted to know, is their lodge really impenetrable by bears? But Ghoul Next Door asked, I was always enchanted by their homes as a kid.
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And I imagine they had beautifully furnished, cozy living rooms down there. But what are those dens like? And is it one big room? Is it a different little kind of nests off of one big space? Other folks wanted to know if they all kind of cohabitate with more than just their family or with other animals. Kind of what's happening in their lodges?
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Okay, so Rob, already established, he's amazing. He sent me a link to Casey McFarland's video of an abandoned beaver dam. His whole YouTube channel is great, but this video is titled Inside a Beaver Lodge and Cross-Section of a Dam, where he's able to peek inside an opening that was previously underwater.
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And you mentioned North America. Where else in the world do beavers live? Are they just a North American species? I feel like I should know this, but I feel like maybe zoos all over the world have beavers, but do they naturally occur in other places?
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Casey scoots through some shallow water and into a clearing in this giant 10-foot mound of sticks. And inside, we see what looks like a collapsed barn. There is timber of every diameter and hard-packed mud and almost a ramp that leads to a platform toward the back.
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I gotta say, it's pretty freaking cool to see inside a beaver lodge.
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Do beavers winter in their lodges or somewhere else? Do they hibernate? Joe Dauphiné and Megan Walker wanted to know about ice holes. Joe said that they had a natural history professor who said that beavers smash the ice with their head to create a path for them to swim, and then they come up and breathe during the winter months. Other people say that doesn't happen.
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But yeah, in some winter behavior, how much sleeping versus how much activity?
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So when it's so cold that a beaver's habitat is too iced over to even slam their head into, they stay just in their dry above land lodge, but they take that ramp down into the water and the entrance is usually underwater. They swim underneath the ice sheets on the surface of the pond or the lake to get to their aquatic pantry of sticks to eat.
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And then they swim back under the ice to the opening to their lodge. All of that when things look still on the surface. Winter for them means going so hard but looking so low-key.
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You know, you mentioned the fur, and I know that their fur has played a huge part, too, in their decline. And Catherine Vela and Gemma wanted to know, what does their fur feel like? Is it wiry or is it coarse? Megan Walker wants to know, how does it not get soaked through?
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And first-time question asker Rebecca Morrison asked, what is it about beavers and their fur that made them so popular for trapping and trade? Sam and Katie asked simply... And I imagine with a tremble in their voice, is it soft? And that thickness obviously must keep them nice and dry or at least warm during the winter. Can you tell us a little bit about the fur?
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On your scalp, if you grow hair there, you've got about 150 hairs per square centimeter. Beavers have 150 times that, up to 23,000 hairs per square centimeter. And they never wash it, and it's shiny. And for product, they use an organic finishing oil sourced from their own ass sacks. Obsessed.
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Well, you mentioned that fatty tail and Naya Squirrel or Nia Squirrel, first time question asker, wanted to know if you've heard what the tail tasted like and if it's true that at one time this is a highly sought after delicacy and some other folks wanted to know beaver meat. This was an audio question from one Dr. Tegan Wall.
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Do people eat them? I know they're hunted and trapped for fur, but is their meat source something that's actually still sought after?
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So in a Harvard University article titled, Damned If They Do, one beaver conservationist and environmental engineer, Jordan Kennedy, explained that the beaver is considered one of the fundamental animals of creation in blackfeet culture.
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So when trappers started to expand west into what's now Montana, the blackfeet nations who revere the beaver were not typically willing to help them with their trapping within that territory. And as a result, the animals weren't wiped out the way they were in much of North America.
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And resources at this website, blackfeetclimatechange.com, describe ecological projects in homage of the beaver, saying that beaver mimicry is this restoration technique that has been gaining popularity due to its cheap and easy and effective application.
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The fossil record dates back 33 million years with 33 beaver genera. That's not even species. So many beaver options.
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So there's this pilot project that they're working on exploring the use of beaver mimicry as a restoration and educational activity in the Blackfeet Nation. However, in some places where locals are still at war with the beavers, industriousness and their architecture, trapping is legal. And folks enjoy not just the thick pelts, but the meat too.
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And I found a 2022 article titled, How to Eat a Beaver. And it describes it similar to elk or bison with a deep woodsy character. And it reads that the meat is clean and sweet smelling, garnet colored and lean with a thick cap of pristine fat under the skin. As for the other eating beaver, that's a whole different episode.
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And we have ones on sexology and gynecology, as well as phallology for anyone feeling left out. Why are there so many beaver innuendos? I'm glad you asked, Mouse Paxton, Pavka34, Lauren Otto, Katie Muray, G. Sharon, Annie G., Hannah Riedel, Rebecca King, Waldron, and Spencer Aldridge. So, we're all wondering, and I looked into this, right?
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So, in the 1920s, a fad went around London, and a 1922 Associated Press article bore the headline, English Lord Tells of Game of Beaver, and it contained some thrillingly Bridgerton sentences. I'll read them.
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Lord and Lady Mountbatten, she is one of England's prettiest and richest women, and he is King George's cousin, decided today they would attend the World Series and compare it with London's new outdoor sport, beaver. Beaver, said Lord Mountbatten, is a street game anyone can play. You walk along with a friend. If you spot a chap with a beard, you call out, "'Beaver!' That counts 15 points."
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If it is a white beard, this is a polar beaver and counts 30. You score as in tennis, the winner makes the loser buy the drinks, and it is driving beards right out of London, Lord Mountbatten says.
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Now, there was another 1922 article in the Columbia, Missouri Evening Missourian News, and it wrote that the unwhiskered have entered joyfully into the game and try to spot a beaver before their fellows. Okay, great game, got it. But then five years later...
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A 1927 book of poetry titled Immortalia, an anthology of American ballads, sailor songs, cowboy songs, college songs, parodies, limericks, and other humorous verses in doggerel contained a limerick. It read, there once was a lady named Eva who filled up a bath to receive a. She took off her clothes from her head to her toes when a voice at the keyhole yelled, beaver.
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So this book is still in print and one modern reviewer praised, this is a most fabulous collection of the smut our forefathers actually giggled about in taverns. So there you have it, from beaver to beaver to beaver. Bring that up at dinner or a New Year's party, or if there's a lull in the conversation, or maybe bring it up at Easter.
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Since yes, Jen Ringney and Rowan Doyle, the Catholic Church does consider beavers to be fish because they are aquatic. And for more on all of that, to see our wonderful capybara episode because if you're Catholic, those big rodents are also fish. Nothing makes sense. Sometimes I get very mad about it. Onward.
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Aveline is a first-time question asker and says they're from Canada and they've met a trapper who has an annual quota of beavers he must trap and says that without human control, they would essentially wreck our world, the human and water infrastructure.
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Other patrons, Rebecca Morrison, Will, Caitlin O'Malley, Mish the Fish, Jay Shea, and Tyler Williams asked about historical trappings and the fur trade causing this steep decline in beaver populations and the sustainability of current beaver trapping. Are we trying to preserve or cull numbers? What's happening?
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That is up to 400 million beaver on the continent, down to 100,000. So over a few centuries of colonization, the percentage of beaver population remaining was one quarter of 1%. 99.75% of the beavers had been killed right off.
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Do they have more than one litter each year? It seems like just a having two a year, they wouldn't be multiplying that fast, right? Or are they pretty prolific?
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You mentioned summer, too, and I had a really sweet question asked by a first-time question asker, Sarah Moore, who says that they have been listening to the show for years and have been saving their first question for the beavers episode. And they said, a few years ago, I was camping in Colorado, and I observed through binoculars a group of beavers swimming around and playing with a duck.
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And they say, I don't know how else to describe it, but they were all swimming around and doing little splashes and twirls and playing. Maybe I'm projecting, Sarah writes, but it looked like they were having so much fun. My question is, am I crazy? Do beavers play? And is it possible they'd ever play with another species?
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Christy Sullivan was another listener who says, just a side note, that there's a beaver that lives in the creek that runs through the neighborhood. And they say, we love him. It's a highlight of our walks to see him swimming around with the ducks and geese. I guess maybe they do love ducks and geese.
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Huge beavers, bear-sized beavers, and some that dug spiral tunnels. They are gone, but they are never going to be forgotten. Please tell all of your friends.
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Go figure. I guess they do play around. Knowing that they do play, that you have seen that. Someone else, a first-time question asker, Fiona Blum, who's been waiting for this topic also, wondered if you had heard of the beaver deceiver devices and are the beavers outsmarting us? It seems like they might be. Can they be strategic like that? And have you heard of these beaver deceiver devices?
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Okay, so I assumed that a beaver deceiver was some kind of ultrasonic technology that made beavers think that a culvert was haunted. But it turns out that Skip Lyle, a one-time construction worker who later got his master's in wildlife management, inspired by beavers, he invented a kind of fencing system around these big drain pipes for streams.
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that prevents the beavers from jamming up the culverts themselves. But it still lets the water flow under the road because beavers, they love a big pipe with water. They love it.
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A lot of people had queries about parachutes. And some people might know this, some people might not. But Jenny Rounds and Andrea Levinson, Nikki Aki, Jen Squirrel Alvarez, Therese, Erin White, all wanted to know. In Andrea's words, I'm begging you to ask about the parachute reintroduction efforts from the 40s and parachuting beavers.
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Was that ever a rabbit hole that you went down in terms of what's going on here?
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I cannot imagine a beaver so big. That's unfathomable to me. Not unsurprising, but what about modern day beavers? Let's say the North American ones, or I'm not sure they differ much with Eurasian, but how big are they? If I were to, let's say, just be blessed with the ability to hold a beaver, is it like a sack of potatoes? Are they smaller than we think?
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So like an expensive cafe that suddenly pops up in your neighborhood full of gas station coffee, a beaver can change the ecosystem of an area.
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And many people, Autumn Nikosin, Keegan Newman, Rowan Tree, Aver, Zink, Melissa Dewoskin, Olivia Rempel, Smiley Kylie, Maria Schoener, Juliet, Stratford Abbott, Emily Totaro, Amanda, Abby Lawson, Megan Radcliffe, Issa Party, and Ghoul Next Door wondered about the beaver's role in engineering ecosystems as a keystone species. which is an ecological term for being the main character.
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Child fam and Shannon Strom, in Child's words, they say, are beavers the answer? My husband is a fish biologist and feels that in terms of habitat restoration and protecting rivers and the species that live in them, beavers are the answer. Is this true? And are beavers also just generally the answer because they're great?
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And Shannon Strom wanted to know, should we think of them as nature's miracles against global warming? Is making sure that beavers are protected also protective for us?
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I can't even get my head around because I see them from so far away if I ever get to see them.
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So 2014, Brangelina gets wed. Gwyneth Paltrow famously consciously uncouples. The first season of True Detective premieres. It was a very big year for tight jeans, Iggy Azalea, and Ebola. But it was also very memorable for the beaver.
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He's a coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation's Montana Beaver Working Group, and he knows so much about beavers. So he spoke to me one morning from his chilly house in the Swan Valley outside of Missoula, Montana. He was wearing a coat and a hat, and a warm smile. And we just we had the loveliest time chatting beavers as I knew that we would. So we're going to get to it in a moment.
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And how do beavers need more castorologists out there? Zoe Dunham, first-time quest jasker, Lisa Nyhuls, Andy Pepper, and Celia Stanislaw wanted to know, in Zoe's words, how does one get into researching beavers? If someone's interested in beaver ecology, what things they could study or what you do when you're working with tracking organizations?
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Is there a part of working with beaver tracking that is either annoying or just the most difficult part?
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Castorology (BEAVERS) with Rob Rich
Yeah. So invasive species, a bunch of weird weeds getting all tangled up in the ecology. And for more on how to eat some of those, the weeds, not the beavers, you can see our foraging ecology episode with Alexis Nelson, aka Black Forager. Or to learn how to basket weave some of those weeds, you can see our recent canistermology episode with James Bamba.
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Now, before I ask about the highlights of Rob's life, one thing is nagging at me and I can't stop thinking about it. Also, when do people say beavers versus beaver?
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Okay. I want to make sure I wasn't doing it wrong. But what about your favorite thing about beavers or beaver?
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um thank you so much for just telling us everything you know about beaver and beavers and i already loved them and not just because they're cute i think they're just cool in general so thank you so much for everything you do and for talking to me yes thank you um So ask beaver geniuses deep and shallow questions and may fortune find you in the midst of these critters. They're majestic.
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Thank you again so much to Rob Rich for talking to me. So worth the wait. And to find out more about the tracker certification, North America, you can see the link in the show notes as well as a link to our website at alleyward.com slash ologies slash castorology, which has so many more links to research and other resources that we mentioned in the show.
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We are at ologies on Instagram and out blue sky. I'm at alleyward on both. We also have shorter kid-friendly versions of Ologies Classic episodes in case you need G-rated ones. They're available anywhere where you get podcasts. You can just subscribe to Smologies and look for the new green logo. We also linked in the show notes. Ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch.com.
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And to join the Patreon, head to patreon.com slash ologies. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for adminning Theology's podcast Facebook group. Thank you, Aveline Malick, for making our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer makes the website. Scheduling producer Noelle Dilworth worked for two and a half years to get this one on the books. Susan Hale managing directs the whole show.
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Jake Chafee edits beautifully and joining him just as busy and chill as a beaver is lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. And if you stick around till after the credits, thank you for listening. Here's a secret that the other people don't know.
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So in 2017, I was toying with this format for Ologies and I was trying to figure out just what the show would be. And I had a few trusted friends listen to some early drafts of episodes. And one, Dr. Tegan Wall, who was a neuroscientist and a screenwriter,
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She took a listen and one suggestion that she still maintains is that the show should have a cold open, that little stinger at the top with an excerpt as like a soundbite sample. And I've never done it until this episode. And so I'm doing it in honor of her. So you can let me know on Patreon if you like it. Teagues, you can just text me about it.
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But meanwhile, I had the best cookies of my life at our friend Aubrey and with a, I think a family recipe, and I'm gonna give it to you now. Don't write it down if you're driving. Wait until after. You can come back later, rewind, find this, then jot it down. Okay, so these are thumbprint cookies with like jam in the center, but the cookie is so soft. There's cream cheese in the dough.
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I ate like 10 of them. Okay. These are cream cheese cookies. Ready? Two cups unsalted butter, eight ounces cream cheese, two cups of sugar, two egg yolks, one teaspoon of vanilla, two teaspoons of salt, five cups of flour. Do the wet stuff. You add the dry stuff. Chill overnight. And then you roll into balls and you indent and you put some jam in the middle. Bake at 400, 8 to 10 minutes.
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You know what weighs a pound? Like a big apple or an orange. A baby beaver the size of a piece of fruit. In fact, one rehabber site I went to described them thusly. A healthy kit looks like a large fuzzy softball with a rubber-like tail. They're so tiny. How many are in a litter?
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Honestly, the best cookies I've ever had. Please enjoy. Be safe. Happy holidays. Be kind to beavers. Bye-bye.
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And they're monogamous? How long do they tend to stick together for?
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Beavers. They love love. We love them for it. Although some North American beavers do cheat, I found out. But the Eurasian ones are pretty much totally loyal. But beavers co-parent, which is more than we can say for a lot of bitter couples that I see posting on TikTok.
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I'm so glad that you brought up that gland because I'm boggled by it. And I didn't know that castoreum was a product necessarily. Is it really used for things like artificial vanilla and strawberry and raspberry? Is there any known history on how humans realized that these scent mounds and that these secretions from beavers would be delicious additives to things?
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But first, thank you to all the patrons at patreon.com slash ologies who submitted questions for this. You too can join for as little as a dollar a month to support the show. Thanks for everyone in ologies merch at ologiesmerch.com. And to everyone who reviews the show, which helps us so much, it costs you $0.
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Okay, so I looked into this and castoreum is again, not in the anal glands, but in these different pouches near there. And yes, both male and female beavers make it. Everyone makes it. Not you, but beavers do. And this unctuous, creamy orange substance has vanilla notes and suggests the smell of an old leather chair and a den full of antique books.
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And I've read that's owing to all the trees that kind of make their way through beaver guts. And you can gently milk castoreum from a beaver, but that is seen as very rude to many beavers. So sadly, most of it comes from trappers who harvest the sack. And they sometimes let that sack dry out and mellow for a few years before grinding it up.
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Now, other than actively seeking it out, you're not likely to find castoreum like hiding in your foods. It's just much cheaper to use actual vanilla or artificial vanilla flavor, a lot easier to harvest. So it's rare to find anything with castoreum on a shelf.
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Although that liquor that Rob mentioned, it sounds extremely German in concept, and its name has umlauts, and it translates to beaver howl, but it's actually Swedish. And my dear friend Simone Jetsch happens to be both Swedish and in Sweden. And so I texted her and her mom at an ungodly time for me, but it was a normal person time for Sweden.
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And I asked if this was like a common beverage and she was like, no, no, I've never heard of that. But there's this place called Tamworth Distillery in the US and they do offer an eau de musk beaver gland perfumed whiskey in case you need to get your hands and your tongues on that. Why would you though?
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Well, it's supposed to be tasty, but also for thousands of years it was used to treat gout and fevers and headaches and other ailments. But the 1969 publication Pliny's Pheromonic Abortifacients in the journal Science says that castoreum used as an incense could provide the termination of a pregnancy. according to the Roman naturalist Pliny, who lived in the first century AD.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Castorology (BEAVERS) with Rob Rich
What else was used back then as family planning? Well, your other options were looking at a viper, holding a raven's egg, stepping over a beaver, Or letting pass into your crotch the fumes from an ass's house. And the paper notes parenthetically donkey stable.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Castorology (BEAVERS) with Rob Rich
But thanks to several thousand years of progress medically, one need not dance over a beaver or invite donkey fumes up your tunic because there are pharmaceuticals now. But while here in the US, many states have rolled back access to that health care to pre-castoreum in a lantern times. But anyway, rodent secretions, many uses throughout the years.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Castorology (BEAVERS) with Rob Rich
I read them all, such as this week's from Maximilie, who wrote, I have been a dedicated listener since the inception of this podcast in 2017. Max, seven and a half years. You're a real one. I like you. Thank you for that. Thank you to everyone who leaves reviews. And thank you also to sponsors of the show who make it possible to donate to a cause selected by the guest each week. So one sec.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Castorology (BEAVERS) with Rob Rich
But no, your birthday cake flavored lip gloss does not have beaver butt in it. You're good.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Castorology (BEAVERS) with Rob Rich
And you can smell it when you're out looking for beavers or if you're out in the fields. Is it something like the breeze shifts and then suddenly you can smell a mound?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Castorology (BEAVERS) with Rob Rich
Do you have any idea how far away you are from a beaver right now? Like where you live in the Swan Valley, do you know when I cross this bridge into town, there's a dam or a lodge there? Are you pretty aware of where they are in your local environment?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Oh, hello. 2024 Allie here. This is an encore while I am napping in a human-sized dog bed in front of a fireplace for the holidays. What a way to start 2025, folks. I wanted you to have this episode at the beginning of January. This is a reminder of scientifically what actually makes us happy and keeps us happy. We all need this one. Please enjoy. I love it. I'm happy to have you listen.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Do you feel like your friends come to you for more pep talks or fewer because they just look at your published work instead?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Shit, am I not supposed to talk about podcast episodes with my friends? Because I've told a lot of people about wildfires and how lizards have two dogs. Let's change the subject. Well, let's get into some of those factors, because I know that you you rattled them off. And it's a lot of things that we we feel like we know, but we don't necessarily know why or the mechanisms of how that works.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
You know, exercise, practicing gratitude. Can you run me down those things? And in a nutshell, tell me why they why do they work?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So for more on a daily practice of looking for things that aren't the fucking worst, I linked the Awesomeology episode in the show notes. Also, learning this next term killed me. I'm dead. I'm a fungus now.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
They keep me from crying on days that are challenging. Also, heads up, if you prefer podcasts without swearing, we have a slew of them. They're called Smologies and you can subscribe to Smologies now. Wherever you get podcasts, they're in their own separate feed in case you need to listen while you carpool to school. Okay. Thank you to all the patrons who left questions for this ologist.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So connecting with people, talking face to face is better for us than just text. The phone works too. FaceTime is even better than the phone. Also helping others when you can, looking for lovely, shiny things amid the compost pile that can feel like life. Also sleep and exercise. It can be immediate or like exercise.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
It can be a few weeks before these habits really take root and you start to feel better. So don't give up. Give it a few weeks, especially since it's free. Are you feeling lazy and annoyed? Don't worry. A lot of us feel that way when we start doing something that will keep us alive and happy. So I asked Dr. Santos for us, why am I like this?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Why do you think from some sort of evolutionary standpoint, when we're bummed out, it's harder to do the things that would make us less bummed out?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
You too can join that club. Costs 25 cents an episode at patreon.com. Okay, so let's get into it. Eudemonology. Will I say it right even one time this episode? Stick around to find out. So this is the science of happiness. And it's been on the ology books a long time. It comes from eudaimon, which is Greek for a benevolent demon or a good spirit.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
How do we hijack that? Like, how do we trick ourselves into doing the thing that we don't to do, but we like doing and is good for us.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So when you pick the salad and stop pretending that Diet Coke is water and you go for the slowest, sweatiest shuffle around the block, but you do it, take a minute and absolutely relish how wonderful and brave and heroic your efforts were and how you feel. We deserve this.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
What about like our self-image? How much does that play into our happiness and how much does monitoring our likes and our social media and, you know, looking at pictures of our face through a distorted camera lens, how much is that affecting our happiness and how we see our lives?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And it was a term used by 19th century humanistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. And he called eudaimonology the art of ordering our lives so as to obtain the greatest possible amount of pleasure and success. But we're talking about the science of this art.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So Nancy Kerrigan displayed a famously sour face receiving the silver in 1994. And then in 1995, a study was published in the Journal of Personal and Social Psychology titled, quote, When Less is More, Counterfactual Thinking and Satisfaction Among Olympic Medalists. Counterfactual thinking... That is the sinking, gnawing feeling of what could have been. Oh, wow. I fudged it up.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So one researcher, Dr. Andrea Lewengrath, a University of Iowa marketing assistant professor, did follow-up studies on medalists to confirm that first study and recently said in an interview that you don't have to be the second best out of 8 billion.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
There are always going to be people who we can compare ourselves to that are better, faster, smarter, or whatever, and that can make us feel relatively bad. So what is the lesson here? Think twice before you get a no regrets tattoo and maybe consider a counter your counterfactuals tattoo instead. And once the sting wears off, celebrate your silvers. You did it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So how to shed the very comfortable, crusty shell of dissatisfaction and anxiety with some good steps that have been proven by research people to make your brain less of a miserable bummer. So press pause on your sad inner goblins and open your ears to hear about wanting versus craving, being happy in your life.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And what about chemicals? Where are just the chemical hands that we were dealt? When do those have the reins on the amount of happiness we feel?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah. Do you ever have students who either come to you or who you hear about who aren't quite sure if it's time for medical intervention or is it time for just trying to hack their habits? How do we as individuals make that call?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
being happy with your life, how happiness is even measured, lottery winner statistics, the wealth of free time, the power of a walk, wheelbarrows of distractions, when does positivity become toxic, how to get around the ickiness of the word gratitude, and some practical tips to enjoy life on planet Earth before you're a pile of forgotten bones.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Okay, that's great to know for people. You may know when you hit this level because your friends will say, I think you should see a doctor, dude, which is what happened to me when I was going through the hardest parts of my life and also had a couple medical conditions that turned my brain into bees. The doctor was like, well, shucks, you need more than a car wash.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Let's check under the hood there, buddy. But yes, what is the technique for sloughing off persistent, crusty, muddy feelings? When it comes to things like gratitude and meditation, how much is effective? Like how much can we get away with if we're feeling real down in the dumps, but we're low on motivation? How much gratitude is enough? How much meditation is enough? How much exercise is enough?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
For more on this, feel free to peruse papers such as Brief Mindfulness Meditation Improves Attention in Novices and Let It Be, Mindful Acceptance Downregulates Pain and Negative Emotion, both published by Dr. Hedy Kober. So scientists in lab coats have dedicated their research and their grant money budgets to proving that yes, meditation does help. It's free.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
It takes less time than making a sandwich. We can do this. Let's do this.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
I think that's so true. Whenever I get out of the habit of running, which is now, I'll go do a lap at the reservoir, but I'll have to just tell myself the first couple times I do it, the first month even, as long as I just get around the reservoir, even crawling is fine.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Expecting yourself to get back into running at a certain pace or doing things whole hog can be so intimidating, you just want to give up right away.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
with cognitive scientist, psychology professor, happiness lab host, Yale researcher, and eudaemonologist, Dr. Lori Santos. Hello, Dr. Santos. How are you? I'm great. Thanks. I'm sure as a happiness doctor, as a professor of happiness, you probably are inclined to say, I feel great more often than the rest of us.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah. Like I never want to obey a dick who's yelling at me. So why do I do that to myself?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
yeah i would i would want to slap my own self for saying that to me you know like i'm yeah i'm the the hardest on myself more than i would ever tolerate in somebody else which is so funny that we do that but um you know you mentioned the term positive psychology before and i'm so curious about that because i feel like i can't tell if it's flim flam or not that positive psychology is totally like a legit practice or is it
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
something along the lines of like toxic positivity at all costs. What is positive psychology? What do scientists think of it?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Are there any myths about happiness that you find yourself constantly having to bust?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Is there a test where people can go figure out how happy am I?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Oh, hey, it's that guy who saw you see him bump his head and then you smiled at each other like, that's okay. Allie Ward, back with an episode of Ologies. It's going to fix your whole life. Just kidding. Actually, maybe not. It very well might fix your life. I love the Life Fixer episodes. And this ologist is someone I've had in my sights for a few years.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So, yes, I checked this out. And if you Google Authentic Happiness, you can help fellow eudaimonologists by taking scored questionnaires. They have Authentic Happiness Inventory, the General Happiness Scale, Positive and Negative Effect Questionnaire. the four dice emotions questionnaire, I myself opted for the classic, the authentic happiness inventory.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And on a scale of one to five, Jarrett, what do you think I got? Three. You know me too well. Did I? Yeah, 3.08. So maybe I'll meditate a bunch and then I'll take it in a few months. Also, I have no idea what all those different tests do, but I'm sure that the scientists know and that's all that matters.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Can I ask you some listener questions? Sure. But before that, let's aim a money cannon at a worthy cause. This week, Dr. Santos chose DonorsChoose.org, which lets teachers list their classroom needs. And then regular jabronis like you and me can make their dreams come true.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So DonorsChoose has fulfilled 1.7 million classroom projects from butterfly cocoons to robotics kits to pencils and paper and books with diverse characters. Okay, so modern day Ali here saying that when this first aired, we funded a few classrooms and this time around we picked a few new ones to fund.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Mrs. Alvarado's classroom at Mainz Elementary School in Calexico, California needed funding to purchase some reading comprehension passages to motivate students to read and write. She also needed new chairs for the classroom for which apparently the United States does not have enough money. So teachers have to buy these things. So happy to fund that for Mrs. Alvarado.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Another classroom project funded was Mrs. Myers at Thurgood Marshall Elementary School in Morrow, Georgia, who says that research has shown that hunger has a variety of detrimental effects on kids and that some of her students come from less fortunate homes and require additional resources and support.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
We also tossed in a donation to Mrs. Perez Copperfield Elementary School in Converse, Texas for snacks for her students that may have financial barriers that limit their access to food. And the snacks will provide them with brain power to focus while also removing the social stigma of going without a snack during the day.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So thanks for Dr. Santos for the heads up on DonorsChoose.org and to sponsors who made this round of donations possible. Okay, happy to ask your questions for Dr. Santos. OK, Ariel Reagan wants to know, do animals experience happiness? Are they happier than people?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So one thing some scientists try to observe is play behavior like hopping around and running, chewing on stuff. My tiny poodle angel, she rubs her butt against stuff like a tire or my shoe. That's her version of typing hashtag blessed. Courtney Graziano wants to know, can anxious people be happy?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
That's great. I'm already learning so much. Can I have you say really quick your first and last name and your pronouns?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Oh, that's really well said. Aiden Patko and Meg G want to know, is it flim flam that smiling actually makes you happier? Or is that a true fact? Meg says, and laughing. And a lot of other folks looking at you, patrons, say, see Demos 101, Alexis Wallach, and Ashley Herbal. Want to know, can you fake it till you make it?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Is there anything you can do for a friend who is feeling really unhappy to help them out as well?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So if you ever think, why would I check up on someone? I don't know how to fix things. Don't worry. Just be alive and in their orbit and listen or tell them about how lizards have two dicks. That's what I do. Patrick Giaveroni says, first time question asker wants to know happiness and the microbiome connection. What can we do to improve our microbiome? Is there a connection? What's the deal?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
you have been on my radar for years actually and so i'm really stoked to talk to you because this is an ology that i've wanted to do for i think since before i even started the podcast do you are you familiar with this that word What a monology? What a monology? No, maybe that word.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Nice. You can just get in on poop on the ground floor.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
I'm in. I think that you literally can buy poop like on the black market for your own at home, like fecal transplants. P.S. Of course I looked this up. And getting an enema with someone else's poop, it's called fecal microbiota transplantation.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And in the microbiology gut biome episode from November 2018, we go into detail about how our microbiomes are suffering from processed foods and artificial ingredients and overuse of antibiotics for things like viral infections that don't need antibiotics.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So given that up to 90% of our serotonin is synthesized in our simmering poo-filled guts, DIY FMTs, do-it-yourself fecal microbiota transplantations, as they're called, they're getting more and more common as doctors are still reluctant to shove poo up our butts, even when we ask nicely.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So according to an American Journal of Gastroenterology article called Understanding the Scope of Do-It-Yourself Fecal Microbiota Transplant, 82% of folks who tried it felt better afterwards. And 92% of those knew their stool donor who, I don't know, I guess you find by asking your friends who seems chill and has good poops.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So you can ask a doctor to screen a donor sample and see if they'll do it. Otherwise, there's plenty of instructions on the internet. Apparently you buy a blender at Goodwill or something and then you maybe burn it later. None of this is my beeswax. Ask your doctors. Don't sue me or make me a smoothie later. I'm good.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Rahala wants to know, first time question asker, is there any truth to the notion that people who are generally happy tend to live longer? And I want to say my dad has cancer and his oncologists were saying just positivity is really helpful for patients in general. Okay, 2024 Allie here. And my dad did pass away in the summer of 2022. And I talk about hospice tips and
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
getting through grief in an episode from July 2022. We'll link that in the show notes for anyone who's going through something similar. But I will say that my dad outlived his prognosis by eight years, and he stayed absolutely boldly optimistic throughout all of his treatment. And we all tried to buoy his spirits in that direction. Do we find that statistically sound?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Patron Annika Callen asked, why are feelings of happiness stronger when you're younger? And RL Shaul Peleg, Paige and RJ George wanted to know if happier people tend to be of a certain gender or age. RJ wants to make sure they don't become a grumpy crank who hates everyone. Yeah, I wonder, do we find that people get happier as they age or crankier as they age?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So I guess this is a study of that feeling or that state. And you're the perfect person to talk to because obviously you have your podcast and you teach courses at Yale about this. So can you tell me a little bit about your background? How did you start studying cognition and feelings? Where did it start?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
You know, I wasn't sure about that and kids, and I hadn't thought to ask that, but I have friends who have kids. I have friends who don't have kids. I myself have a daughter. She's a dog, and she's probably the only kid I'm going to have, and she's an animal, but... I don't know. Like in general, is that the case?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
It's just the stress of having kids, but then the satisfaction that you did it later. So it's kind of like a like it balances.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah, I'm so in awe of people who do have kids just because it seems so challenging. And I know myself, I'm like so scatterbrained that I feel like I just don't necessarily feel like that would be my strong suit. But there are some people who love kiteboarding and others who are like, no, thank you. Like, I would rather be on the beach reading a book.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So it really depends on what you like, you know.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
First time question asker Alana Rickman asks, has the rapid development in technology in the last few years had an overall increase or decrease in people's happiness? And patrons Diana, Ash Gelhaus, Jenna Mandola, Lucas O'Neill, Nicole Kleinman all echoed that. And yeah, I wonder too, in terms of being in the moment, is being on our phone, does that take us out of the moment?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Is that take us into a kind of another like universe or galaxy of what's happening in this digital realm versus what's happening around us?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah, that's such a good way to look at it is to understand just what our brain is sort of grappling with. why it's difficult. It's not like a personal failing that we sometimes look to that. But yeah, I definitely find that when I'm looking for something to sort of boost my dopamine or happiness, I'll go to my phone and then after an hour, I'll go like, I was like, that really did the trick.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
If I had practiced some things I knew might be longer lasting, but at least I can't blame myself for why I was looking. Anthony had a great question asked, what if certain aspects of your happiness or the pursuit of your happiness cause others you care about to be unhappy, thereby making you unhappy?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
What about those circumstances where you're worried that your happiness might make other people dislike you?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And if you're worried someone in your life will be upset at your happiness, just know it's your life and it's OK to feel good. If anyone has a problem with it, that is their own baggage to address. I highly suggest some of Melanie Beatty's writings about codependency. I'm just going to leave that suggestion right there for you. Ben DeWurst says, I'm just finishing up my MBA.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And in one of my classes, they talked about how optimism is actually an attribute of emotional intelligence and can be learned. As an optimist myself, I'd always considered it more of a part of my personality, like extrovert or introverted and unteachable. So how would someone go about learning and training to be an optimist? And what's the relationship there?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Also, is there a relationship between happiness and emotional or just like IQ introversion? intelligence. I feel like there's some badge of like, if you're unhappy, it must mean that you know more and therefore you're smarter.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
OK, so if the term gratitude journaling conjures up visions of sickly, sweetened chamomile tea. Just opt for the term delights, which is just like a straightforward good cup of coffee. Actually, for years, my husband, Jarrett, has cited a short tally of favorite things. His are lavender soap, coffee, and sandwiches.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And he says just thinking of those three things and letting his mind wander to more helped him during a really deep depression. So... gratitude journaling delights, whatever you want to call it. Jarrett calls his his do not kill yourself list, which is kind of like the Miami Cola bang energy drink of a gratitude practice branding. Would you agree? That's my favorite bang flavor. Is it really?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Miami Cola? That's on the list.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So, yes, Ross Gay, The Book of Delights. And again, check out Neil Pazrucha's work and his ophthalmology episode. Another fun project, start a private Twitter just for yourself and chronicle delights of your own or a private Instagram account or something. Also, I should note that in recording this episode, the internet dropped out a few times. So I had to email Dr. Santos a new link during it.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And she has an auto reply message explaining that she may not write back. And it explains that she gets more than 100 emails a day. And it reads in part, quote, Keeping up with that many questions slash requests meant that I was hurting my own time affluence and having less time for the important projects I really should be prioritizing.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And so I am currently trying my own personal well-being experiment. I'm going to try to practice what I preach and reduce the amount of time I usually spend on email. Thanks for your understanding as I try not to overcommit and protect myself from burning out. Oh, I love her. Totally solid major props for walking her talk. She is the best. And in respecting her time, we wrapped it up.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Last listener question. I saved it because it was juicy. Oh, it's so juicy. Bailey Ricketts wants to know, how do we find a balance between being happy and living in the moment while acknowledging all the hurt and suffering going on in the world? Essentially guilt over being happy when you know that there's a lot of bad shit out there.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
That just, I'm sure, gave so many people permission to pursue happiness who feel maybe guilty about it. And by so many people, I mean me specifically, but... No, that's really helpful. Last two questions I ask before we go. Worst thing about your job? Worst thing about being a eudaemotologist and the best thing?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
I just got your auto reply that was like, Yo, I get like 100 emails a day. Thank you so much. But I got to stick to my principles.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
I've never heard those words before, but I love them. Best thing about your job. Best thing about your career.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
I'm I am so happy to talk to you. I have been a fangirl forever. So ask smart people happy questions or bummer questions. They are wonderful and they're great at sharing their knowledge. Obviously, get more of Dr. Lori Santos with her podcast, Happiness Lab. Her socials are linked in the show notes. She is great. If you can take her course, take it. It's also available on Coursera for free.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So look for that. I will link all of those on my website too, which is at allyward.com slash ologies. We are at allyward with one L on Twitter and Instagram. We're also at ologies on Instagram and Twitter. Find us there. Be our friends. Thank you to Aaron Talbert, who moderates and admins the ologies podcast Facebook group and is excellent at that.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Also, now we have Smologies episodes up in their own feed. Just look for Smologies wherever you get podcasts and subscribe. and spread the word, you'll find this new green logo. And Smologies are all swear-free. They're safe for all ages. It's S-M- O-L-O-G-I-E-S for your small ones. Thank you, Emily White of The Wordery. She is a professional transcriptionist who makes transcriptions available.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
She's great. Hire her. She's wonderful. Kayla Patton bleeps our episodes. Those are available on our website for free. The link is in the show note. We also have Smologies, which are episodes we put out once every two weeks. They are cut down versions of classic ones that have already ran. They are cleaned up and kid friendly. They're ready for the classroom.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So look for Smologies too if you have Smologites. Thank you to Noelle Dilworth and Susan Hale for helping me take care of all the ologies business behind the scenes. Thank you to Stephen Ray Morris and Zeke Rodriguez Thomas, who are also working on Smologies and Wonderful. Thank you to editor Jared Sleeper. And also thank you to Grammy.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
We are actually recording this in the car as I'm on my way up to see my pop for his birthday. and I recorded this at five in the morning this morning before I hit the road and then I realized that my mic gain was all the way down so I had to re-record it on the side of the road, which is what we're doing.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
We mentioned her work in the Awesomeology episode with Neil Pazricha. And instead of just citing her, we're essentially interrogating her now to shake her for brain science.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
that's one secret of the episode the other secret is you know how sometimes it'll be like if you need to clean a screen just use a microfiber cloth and you're like yeah well what do I use to clean it with though like Windex what are we talking here water what do I use with the microfiber cloth so I just tried just the microfiber cloth like you're supposed to use and it cleaned the shit out of my laptop
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Like, my monitor's never been so clean. All he did was use one of those microfiber, too soft on your hands cloths, and apparently they're good at what they're supposed to be used for. So, go figure. Okay, bye-bye. This is the sound of my dog drinking water in the car. Okay, 2024 me, thank you for listening. Back next week with a very fresh new episode about something in your bed.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Trust me, it's good. Okay, bye-bye for real.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Yeah. Much different, I think, than just Instagram quotes on a page. Here you've got someone who studies the brain, who studies psychology. You're probably people go into it with a little bit of faith that you'll have some evidence based information, right?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Okay, so the term positive psychology was popularized by Dr. Martin Seligman, who felt that the contemporary psychology was just too deeply focused on what's fucked up about us, not how can we live better. So it focuses on things like self-discovery and a sense of purpose and expressing yourself through creativity and authentically. So we're going to get to more of that in a bit.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
so she got her bachelor's in psychology and her master's and phd in cognition and brain behavior from harvard university and is now a cognitive scientist and a psychology professor at yale where she has taught the course psychology and the good life Oh, she's been a TED speaker. She was named one of Time Magazine's leading campus celebrities. And she hosts a podcast called The Happiness Lab.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
But first, from small hairy primates to larger, slightly less hairy primates like us. And, you know, where did you make that jump from non-human primates and dogs into humans? Did you find that a lot of the research just correlates based on what our brain structures are, how our neurons work?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Okay, so I looked into some data on if Powerball winners are happier and it's a mixed bag of money. So one thing for sure, people do take more vacations when they win the lottery. And by contrast, 60% of Americans take zero vacations a year. And apparently one thing that pleases us so much about vacations is just having something, anything to look forward to.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So just start peppering your calendar with any excursion you can. Even if it's just like a nice bowl of soup next Wednesday or a hike next weekend. Pack a picnic. Leisure time on any scale is apparently worth a million bucks and tax-free. So, hey. Is happiness more about being happy with ourselves and accepting ourselves or external circumstances?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Or is it mission-based, like you're on the right path to doing something that you believe in?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So is it mind over matter? This is where you ask smart persons doofy questions.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
What is happiness? How do you even define it?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So it's been a wonky few years. We all know. And as one person who wrote a review this week of Ologies said, it always brings a smile to my face when I hear people talk about their passions. I'm grateful every day for Ologies and giving me my life back. AJ Buxton, who left that review, I'm very glad you're here. Thank you for leaving that fresh one.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
So I'm going to pause us for a second just to ponder. How do you feel in your life? How are your days to days? Maybe some nice tea in the morning, some supportive co-workers, maybe some evening knitting or a walk with a friend. Or do you hate your coffee maker and you don't know why you started re-watching The Big Bang Theory from episode one? You're tired. Go to bed.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
Now, what about with your life? Do you feel a sense of purpose? Are you proud of your life? Do you feel authentic? Just think about it for a second. It's totally okay if you're like, Some of it's good. Some of it sucks eggs. Or I'm very fortunate. Why am I such a grumpy walrus? And there are lots of different hacks that we can do to improve both of those constructs.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
In terms of emotions themselves, is happiness an umbrella for things like joy and relief and satisfaction and contentment? Or are those all individual separate emotions?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And what about you in particular? I know that you said you can read the studies and understand and know, but sometimes it's hard to do. You know, how has your life changed since you switched a little bit of your career focus on this?
Ologies with Alie Ward
Eudemonology (HAPPINESS) Encore with Laurie Santos
And a 2024 reviewer, V Farm, who wrote that, without fail, my favorite episodes are those on topics I had no interest in. Y'all, vampires, trees, gar, brilliantly unenthusiastic sounding crab experts. There's nothing quite so wonderful. Thank you, V Farm, for getting it. And thanks to everyone who leaves me reviews. They keep the show up in the charts.