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