The Johnjay Van Es Podcast
From the mastermind behind one of the most popular morning shows in the country, Johnjay Van Es brings his signature blend of curiosity, humor, and fearless honesty to the podcast world. If you’ve ever had a question on your mind but were too afraid to ask, don’t worry—Johnjay’s got you covered.
With hilarious, jaw-dropping conversations, amazing guests, and the inside scoop on everything you actually care about, this show is a wild ride through the stories you’ve never heard and the truths nobody else dares to say. Whether it’s celebrities, trendsetters, or just the most interesting people on the planet, nothing is off-limits, and no question is too bold.
Come for the interviews. Stay for the insanity. This is the podcast you’ll be talking about. Don’t miss it!
The Johnjay Van Es Podcast
Are We All Just Zombies in Disguise?
What if you’re being zombified right now, by your phone, your gut microbes, or even your dog?
Dr. Athena Aktipis, the “Zombie Professor,” breaks down how unseen forces influence our thoughts and behaviors in ways we don’t realize. From smartphone addiction hacks to the surprising science of pets, microbes, and even cancer cells, she shows how playful ideas can unlock serious insights about being human.
👉 Hit play and subscribe for more conversations that make you see the world differently.
Okay, so welcome to our podcast. This is a little bit different today, because this podcast is a spinoff of our radio show okay, so you are the zombie professor. Yeah, some people call me the zombie professor and you are a professor like at asu, arizona state university yeah, I'm actually a real professor that's so crazy sometimes people are like what?
Speaker 2:you're a professor.
Speaker 1:That's amazing like I know, you know, I have this thing where I don't like to like and this is probably bad, but I don't, I don't like to. I always look at, like what I'm doing. I don't like to research people because I like to go like if I was sitting on a flight. I remember back in the day, like on southwest airlines, like back in the day they used to have flights like you're sitting there and I'm sitting here, they face each other and by the time you landed in an hour, you knew the person.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I kind of like I don't know who I'm sitting next to, I don't get a wikipedia of them, so I always kind of. And then, and then I like watched the interview with larry king and I watch all these really good interviewers and they're like no, you research, you never ask a question that you don't know the answer to already, and I just don't totally believe that. So first of all, I'd like to apologize in advance zombie professor, for anything I say, that is please don't apologize, I love to just.
Speaker 2:Can I swear? Yeah, I love to just shoot the shit, and having conversations with strangers is one of my favorite things in the world good so you know, as soon as you start like doing research ahead of time, then you're not having a conversation with a stranger anymore and it's kind of a different thing, it's like right. If it's a conversation with a stranger and other people are listening to it, they're also kind of having a conversation with a stranger versus like an interview.
Speaker 2:That's like prepared for that's more like oh okay, this is like these are specific learning outcomes that I want to have, or something Right it's much more structured and less fun maybe.
Speaker 1:But before we get to like the zombie thing, how are you a professor? Like, what do you do to become a professor? I know how you get to be a doctor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how do you?
Speaker 1:get to be a professor.
Speaker 2:Well, so lots and lots of school and lots of research. So I have a master's degree and a PhD in psychology and I've been doing research on cooperation, doing many different methods. So I do research with human participants, I do computer models, I do field work and I do also like a lot of public outreach and kind of how do we have the methods that we're using of science make sense for the real world? So do all of those things and pretty much have since I was in I mean, really it was in my teens that I was like, oh, I want to study evolution and human behavior, in particular cooperation.
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah. So where does the zombie part come in?
Speaker 2:The zombie part comes in when you have like a creative colleague or two and you guys like sit around late at night drinking whiskey and you're like, oh, you know what's, you know what's wrong with academia, it's too boring. And you're like why don't we have a conference that's about zombies. Like, yeah, let's do that, you know. And you're like a few whiskeys in and then you wake up the next morning and you're like, huh, maybe that wasn't just a crazy drunken idea. Maybe we should actually do that so what so do?
Speaker 1:actually is there a class at ASU Now?
Speaker 2:there is a class called the Science of Zombification, and you're the professor of that class.
Speaker 1:I'm the professor. Yeah, and it started that whiskey night was how long ago.
Speaker 2:That was like eight years ago, something like that. So it started with the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting, which is an academic conference that is about the zombie apocalypse. We're actually having the next one next month in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. It's coming up. But, yeah, it's basically an interdisciplinary conference where everybody comes ready to talk about zombies and the apocalypse. So you're framing your research in terms of these fun, imaginative, creative ideas, whether it's, you know, talking about like food preferences by like constructing a study of zombies and their food preferences, or talking about like how you actually do public policy around disaster recovery by talking about it as a zombie apocalypse.
Speaker 1:So there's a message to everything you're doing.
Speaker 2:There is a message, and part of the message is the medium of we're having a fun conference that's playful, not opportunity, which oftentimes I'm sorry to say, but oftentimes academic things end up being like pissing contest people. You know, it's like the first thing everybody wants to do is establish that they're the expert on this or that and then the next thing that they want to do is figure out if they're better than everyone else. Not everybody does that, but even if you have a few people in the room doing that, it kind of ruins it for everyone. So we would purposefully like well, let's make it so. The expectation is that you are being playful, you're having fun. There's no, you know, egos and uh posing and all of that. We're here to put our heads together to eat each other's brains and talk about how to survive the zombie apocalypse.
Speaker 1:So when you said preference, food, preference of a zombie, don't zombies eat other people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, for example, one of the, I think, greatest talks that we've ever had at the zombie apocalypse medicine meeting was my friend and colleague, peter Todd, who for a long time was the chair of psychology and cognitive science at University of Indiana so super high up guy and he put this whole experiment together and ran it, where he asked people about their preferences for different foods based on how hungry they were. And I'll just give you one example of what he did. He took, on one hand, a carrot stick and, on the other hand, a severed finger Pictures of these, okay. And then he morphed them so that, like in the middle there was something like is this a carrot stick or is this a severed finger? You like can't kind of really tell.
Speaker 2:Um, and then he manipulated people's hunger.
Speaker 2:Right to see, would they say that something that it looks more like a human finger is edible and is a carrot stick? Right, if they're more hungry? Um and uh, he found that effect, and the way that he framed it all was you know, we want to understand zombies' cannibalism and their food preferences, but we can't get approval for human subjects research with zombies because they can't give informed consent, and so we have to do this experiment on undergraduates, right, you know. So he like he took the whole conceit right that like we're doing research in the zombie apocalypse and he designed this study to look at. He like he took the whole conceit right, like we're doing research in the zombie apocalypse and he designed this study to look at like a real phenomenon, and then he presented the whole thing in a totally scientifically valid way, exactly how he did the study, and the only thing that was, you know, fiction in it was the idea that initially he had planned on doing this on zombies because zombies, zombies you know, well, depending on what you think, zombies don't exist.
Speaker 2:We could talk about that later, but so did, did.
Speaker 1:Did people pick the carrot or pick the finger?
Speaker 2:so the hungrier people were, the more they less, they cared the more likely they were to say that, uh, things that were further along towards the severed finger were were edible and were a carrot stick. If they just had a sudden, you know, just like a brief flash of it. So you're like, oh, what did I see?
Speaker 1:But it's like the movie or the book, this true story of Alive.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, the plane crash.
Speaker 1:They ate each other. They ate the dead bodies.
Speaker 2:So all of it connects to the real world in one way or another, and it's just sort of like a playful vehicle for talking about things that might otherwise be a little bit scary or, you know, maybe not something that people want to sit around and talking about. Like, do you want to? Should we have a conference about cannibalism? I don't know how? About a conference about the zombie apocalypse? And then there's some sort of you know pieces of it that. Let us play with some of these ideas to actually explore the science behind what happens when people are hungry.
Speaker 1:So you're saying then, like Bigfoot, are there zombies? That's like I would.
Speaker 2:I would say, are there zombies? Is almost more of a philosophical question, because we can think about what a zombie is in many different ways because, yeah, right now I've seen all the videos.
Speaker 1:I think somewhere in philadelphia, all the people that are on fentanyl and they're just like this, they're called the zombie park. Have you seen that footage?
Speaker 2:I haven't seen that particular, but I do know about this phenomenon. Yeah, and you know, I I saw a, a zombie, when I was riding my bike, um yesterday, walking down the street on her phone, like crossing the street completely unaware of anything and anyone so a zombie is she's, she's in the zone. Yeah, yeah, she's an unsafe zone yeah, yeah, you know, under the influence of something that's not herself so you're having a lot of fun with the definition of zombie yeah what we can do with zombies.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do your. What do your parents think when you tell them you're a zombie? Professor?
Speaker 2:you know, uh, my father passed away two years ago.
Speaker 1:You know what I was gonna ask you that my parents passed yeah and I didn't want to use that as I can't ask her about her parents. So what's the right should I have said are your parents still around? No, and then said right, it's such a weird thing, because, yeah, you know, I mean because I I didn't want to. Oh, just because my parents are past, yeah, doesn't mean her parents are past, but you were a professor two years ago yeah, uh, and my, I think my dad was like kind of like what he actually.
Speaker 2:He was a professor too, but a professor of biochemistry, you know, a little bit more conventional than me um my mom. She was very creative. She was actually the art director for playboy back in the 70s. So so she just was. You know, stop yeah yeah, she's got stories. Yeah, definitely stories, and she was always very, very encouraging of like everything creative, so I'm sure she would have been like, yeah, like do it.
Speaker 1:Athena, she passed away too. Yeah, yeah, wow, how long ago.
Speaker 2:She actually passed away when I was in my teens. So oh, wow, yeah, am.
Speaker 1:I talking about it. That's all right. How did they both pass?
Speaker 2:Well, so my dad, he really was just. You know, he had me when he was in his late 40s already, so he was an older dad and he just like lived his life. He just lived it and his body was like no more. But up until like a year before he died he was living like he was, you know, 50, like he was just so how old was he when he passed?
Speaker 1:he was in his mid-80s, so yeah yeah, yeah, I'm so sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah. You ever see, uh, and you know I had to get to this, but you know the walking dead did you ever watch? Did you watch all of the walking dead?
Speaker 2:I haven't watched at all, but I've watched some of it okay, do you remember?
Speaker 1:do you know who the governor is? Yeah, yeah okay, the governor ended up being this evil guy and then he had been a good guy, but when, when there was a point I never thought I thought I watched this episode he was this really mean dude, but he his daughter became a zombie like his seven-year-old.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he kept her chained up because he loved his daughter. Yeah, and he wanted to like he couldn't kill his daughter. Right, and that's how you have to survive the zombies, according to the Walking Dead? Yeah, so it's like if you could keep your parents alive as a zombie, would you have a zombie professor?
Speaker 2:No, let it go Right, zombie professor. No, let it go right now. Yeah, and I mean, I think that does bring us into this like very philosophical territory about zombies, and I think one of the things that's nice about zombies as like the, the fictional version of them is that they let us grapple with some really fundamental questions like what does it really mean like like to be you, what is yourself, and if you have been compromised by, you know, getting hijacked by something that's not you, whether it's a zombie virus or if you're, you know you can also be hijacked by your body breaking down right and then you're like no longer really you for example.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So you know what does that mean for how we think about what it means to be a self? And you know to me, if we want to kind of like fast forward through my whole journey of all of this and kind of like where I am now in terms of my thinking, I think so much of it is our body and our brains, like all of the pieces of us, that make us up sort of physically and informationally. Do they have aligned interests? Yes, so you know, do we have parts of our brain that are working in different directions? Do we have influences that are coming in, that are affecting our behavior, that are pulling us in different ways, that aren't really consistent with what's right for us?
Speaker 2:So I kind of think of, like, you know, how do you not be a zombie? Well, you kind of cultivate within yourself an alignment of interests, both physically and informationally, and then in your world you sort of cultivate that alignment of interests, both physically and informationally, and then in your world you sort of cultivate that alignment of interest. So it really comes down to cooperation, which maybe isn't a surprise that I would get there, given that I studied cooperation. But yeah, that's sort of my solution to the zombie problem.
Speaker 1:I think you're so fascinating, you're so smart at a whole other level that I can't comprehend. So I apologize. Like to me what you said earlier. I mean, I think, the cell phone or the. What do you call this now? What do you call these smartphones?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is like the biggest zombie maker in the world, right.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I mean, you ever sit there? I don't know. Do you troll on, not troll? Do you get on? Do you scroll? Do you doom scroll?
Speaker 2:Sometimes I do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm so conscious of it that I try not to yeah, but before you know it's such. It's almost like oh, I got a flight in an hour and a half, I'll just go to the airport and hang out on my phone and you know, an hour and a half goes by and you're like what a waste of time. Or sometimes I catch myself on the couch watching TV and then watching my phone.
Speaker 2:I'm like so it's like literally to me the new you being a professor.
Speaker 1:Are you? What do you, do you acknowledge? How do you stop it? What advice do you have? For, since you also are a massive psychology person, professor in real life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean, I have a number of solutions which I employ better or worse in different circumstances. So one is just I have like really strict rules for myself about using my smartphone around bedtime. Um, I'm not gonna say I'm perfect. Sometimes I'll break that and then I'm like why am I doing? You know, I realize like it's messing up my sleep and then I'll stop, but I try to not be on my phone in the hour before I go to sleep. I like put away it's basically in the part of the house that's the furthest from where I sleep plugged in. You know, an hour before I go to bed, when I find that I'm like spending too much time on my phone, I'll turn it to black and white mode.
Speaker 1:That sucks so bad.
Speaker 2:I know then you're like this thing whatever it works, so good it does, but it sucks so bad yeah.
Speaker 1:Especially when you like want to take a picture. There's so many things you realize. Yeah, oh let me take a picture. Oh, that sucks, it's black and white mode. I don't want to take it off. Or like when you said about putting it like I realized this.
Speaker 2:Like here's my phone, like I'll be like I second and I'm like wait a minute, or you know what I mean. It's like it's, it's so addicting it's crazy, yeah, yeah, I would say that the most effective thing, though, that I try to do is make my real life more interesting than what's available on my phone. That's the most effective.
Speaker 1:Okay, so like what? Give me an example of that. What? Do you do. That's more exciting than somebody posting that they're in the Bahamas on vacation.
Speaker 2:Like I'll drive up the mountain and go for a big old hike. Like I don't want to be on my phone when I'm like.
Speaker 1:But it's 120 outside.
Speaker 2:Oh well, I go up to Flagstaff all the time. Oh yeah, I drive. So I will get in the car and drive and go on adventures like pretty much pretty regularly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like you said when you came in here that you were just in Arkansas.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was in Arkansas for a few days, you know opening a business there, and you know that was much more fun and interesting than just being on my phone.
Speaker 1:Is the business that you're opening? Well, wait, but getting to Arkansas, driving to the location. I actually flew to Arkansas for that, because right, but on the plane you're on your phone. Did you not watch a movie on the plane?
Speaker 2:so, you know, on the plane, oftentimes I like I'll have a book, because what? Yeah, I like I'm kind of old school, I like books, so I'll read a book. Um, sometimes so if there's internet, like, one of my hacks for myself is I can actually do a lot of email because I'm just sitting there and there's nothing else that I can do, and I'm usually so bad at email I can do, like you know, 20 minutes of email and then I get distracted with other things. But, yeah, on a plane it's like there's not a lot of other interesting.
Speaker 1:Do you think you have ADHD?
Speaker 2:Oh, I have never you know gotten an official diagnosis, but probably.
Speaker 1:But aren't you also someone that can give yourself an official diagnosis?
Speaker 2:No, I'm not a clinical psychologist. You're just a research psychologist, so yeah, psychologist, you're just a research psychologist, so yeah, so you can like get a um a degree that lets you be a practicing like clinical psychologist. Um, that's actually, that's research. Um, pavlov is like, yeah, psychology research. So mine is more on the research so you're like yeah, wow, yeah.
Speaker 1:So when it comes to zombies and I'm want to get back to Hollywood zombies would you say that there is a movie or a TV show that is extremely realistic, that could happen in the zombie world, or no?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a great question. People always ask me like what's my favorite zombie movie, but the most realistic zombie movie? You know, zombie movies are almost by definition unrealistic because of thermodynamics and the uh energetic constraints on organisms I was gonna say that exact same thing yeah. So there are like pandemic movies that are realistic, like Contagion for example. Oh God, yeah, I'll break, yeah, yeah. And then you know, once you get into the zombie movie territory, you start to have, you know, entities that break the rules of biology.
Speaker 1:Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Well, I would tell you.
Speaker 1:For me, I think, if you ever get a chance to watch episode one of the Walking Dead, it's fantastic.
Speaker 2:I don't think I've seen episode one. Episode one is just fantastic.
Speaker 1:I think it's just so like this is it, so I wanted to do something that I've never done on this podcast, for one. I don't know where you stand on Botox and stuff like that. Is that a zombie thing?
Speaker 2:I don't do it myself. I have a lot of friends that do, but not for me.
Speaker 1:I'm not a person that goes, oh, I need Botox. But I just take advantage of opportunities. My friends reach out to me. So I have a friend of mine Her name is Jamie, she owns a med spa called the Comstock and she's been friends of a friend of mine for years and years, and years and she texted me this morning and she said hey, uh, I have an opening at 11 and I have an opening at two. If you want to come in for Daxi I think it's called Daxify, daxify, okay, I never bring props, but I'm bringing a prop for this. And she goes I go, oh, I can. I'm doing an interview. I got a couple podcasts I'm taping today. I can't and I thought, wait a minute, it's a zombie podcast. If my face is all red and poked, it'll fit perfect in the podcast. So that's actually what happened. I don't know if you can see, but I went in there and she not Botox taxified my whole face, okay.
Speaker 1:And she gave me this and I thought it'd be so cool. This is what she told me to put on right after and I thought I want to put it on and do the interview some of the interview, like this this is this special mask that you wear. You get it, and I thought it looks like Hannibal Lecter.
Speaker 2:Looks so creepy already. It's so creepy.
Speaker 1:So if I just put this on what so I'd be like. So tell me, tell me, zombie professor. How about do dogs? Can dogs be zombies? Can pets be zombies?
Speaker 2:Oh, we have such a zombified relationship with our pets. I don't know about you. Do you have any pets yourself?
Speaker 1:I have six dogs. You have six dogs. My wife and I run the dog rescue.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, yeah, so I have two dogs and I am so zombified by my dogs and they're zombified by me as well.
Speaker 1:They are How's that going there? Good, because I had it on the wrong way.
Speaker 2:Did you finally figure out how to position it properly?
Speaker 1:I did, and now it's burning.
Speaker 2:You look so creepy, do I? You look so creepy?
Speaker 1:So you can say, as you move on with your life, and you'll never forget this interview.
Speaker 2:I will never. This is probably the most memorable podcast I've ever been on already.
Speaker 1:So tell me, tell me what's the zombie related? Because we get so involved with our dogs, right, yeah, To the point of like, yeah.
Speaker 2:So if you, if you think of defining a zombie as an entity that is under the influence of something that is not itself, then we are totally zombified by our dogs. Right, we like take care of them, make sure that they have everything that they need, we want them to be happy and fed, and we just like, our whole emotional life can easily revolve around a dog or two, or six, and there's a biological basis for that. So, as humans, our oxytocin systems you know, sort of our like cuddle, our bonding hormones. They get activated when we interact with our dogs. Our dogs also have oxytocin systems that get juiced up when they interact with us.
Speaker 2:So we are, you know are fully and happily zombified by our dogs.
Speaker 1:So this form of using zombie is positive.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, zombification doesn't have to be bad, right, it's like influence is inevitable. We're going to be influenced by things, whether it's other humans or parasites or technology. It's just normal for us as humans to be influenced and, in fact, as a living thing, you're going to have influences on you no matter what. And the question is just are those things that are influencing you aligned with your own interests and well-being, or are they not?
Speaker 1:What are some other positive zombifications besides pets?
Speaker 2:So I'd say, if you're in, like a healthy relationship, romantic or otherwise.
Speaker 1:To get obsessed with your partner in a good way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know, maybe they are interested in helping you meet your goals or your personal development, your happiness I mean ideally those are things that your partner would care about as well, and so if you're in a healthy relationship, then you have a lot of influence from your partner, and a lot of that is probably good.
Speaker 1:As far as marketing goes, or have you somewhat trademarked the way you're using zombification and zombie because you're doing it totally different? Everyone thinks like what I do. When I sat down here I thought we're talking about tv shows, hollywood, zombies and and that kind of stuff. But you've actually come up with a very clever way to uh talk about a problem, like when you talk about being on your phone, but then you also brought up in a positive way and relate, so it's like it's, isn't that psychologically very interesting?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so. I'm right now writing my third book. The full draft is into the publisher now and it's in the stages of going towards coming out, hopefully next year. It's called Hijacked that's the tentative title at least and it's all about the things that take over our brains essentially zombification in a book. I also have a podcast called Zombified, where I talk about all these different things and like actually, my first episode was called the Puppypocalypse with my colleague, clive Wynn, who studies human-dog interactions, and we've been talking forever about, you know, sort of cooperation human and dog cooperation.
Speaker 1:You think people get a little crazy with their dogs?
Speaker 2:oh yeah and that's good though I think that it can be very good. It isn't always good, but it has the potential to be very good for everybody involved like my sister has two dogs.
Speaker 1:We have six and we love our dogs, but my sister is like, feeds them with a spoon like like a little insane, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, a lot of people, myself included, have speculated that dogs maybe are parasitizing our parental investment systems. So if you're looking at it from a strictly evolutionary perspective, you might say well, people who have dogs may be less likely to have kids. So maybe it's not in our evolutionary interests, maybe they are parasitizing us in that way, but boy do they make us happy well also my sister has two kids yeah like it's, it's pretty crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's, it's incredible, but yeah, so um puppy apocalypse. What does it call it?
Speaker 2:the puppy apocalypse puppy pop.
Speaker 1:That could be a fun uh thing for our dog shelter to do for halloween oh, that'd be somewhat to do because we have so many.
Speaker 1:That's the thing right now is that, first of all, the pet business, the dog business is 150 billion dollar business right now. Wow, I know, I mean we're not, we don't make money, we don't. We're a non-profit, yeah, but it's like there's so much going, like we have right now at our dog shelter we're full, we have all these people that are surrendering their dogs and we don't have room for it oh, I know it's really sad. What kind of dog do you have?
Speaker 1:I've got two mutts so we're like, how long have you had them?
Speaker 2:uh, one for eight years and the other for four years.
Speaker 1:So so what are your first two books?
Speaker 2:uh, so my first book is the nerdiest of all of my books and the most serious. Uh, it's called the cheating cell how evolution helps us understand and treat cancer. Wow, yeah, and in that book I basically apply the science of cooperation to understanding our bodies as cooperative cellular systems and looking at cancer as a breakdown of that cellular cooperation.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So you can kind of imagine like our bodies are a society of 30 billion cells that are cooperating and coordinating every millisecond to make us function. And they do certain things, including suppressing their reproduction, their division. Right, they don't just replicate out of control, they do something called apoptosis, which is controlled cell death. It's essentially cellular suicide. So if they're doing anything that's damaging to the body, they take themselves out of circulation. There's also resource distribution and management. You take food in and the nutrients get to all the cells that need to get them. There's division of labor, cells doing different jobs.
Speaker 2:There's also a whole system for taking care of the environment inside our bodies, getting rid of waste, building the structures in between cells. You know, because our bodies are not just cells, there are also all these things in between the cells that make us have the you know the physical structure that we do and be able to function the way that we do. So you have all of these cooperative things happening all the time, completely below our awareness, just at the cellular level. And what happens with cancer is you get a breakdown of those five foundations of cooperation. So you get cells replicating out of control, not dying when they should, monopolizing resources, not doing the division of labor that they should and trashing the environment of the body, and that's basically what cancer is. And when cells start to do that, they can gain an evolutionary advantage inside the body which allows them to replicate. So it's an evolutionary process that's happening inside the body that's favoring cells that are basically cheating on the social contract of multicellular cooperation. That is otherwise what our bodies are?
Speaker 1:You can't diagnose it ahead of time and stop it?
Speaker 2:So one of the things that we've worked on in my early work on sort of cancer, and we're continuing to do, is how can you actually use evolutionary and ecological frameworks to better predict whether cancer, like early cancer, is going to um turn into something that is malignant? Right and you can actually break down things that uh come from evolutionary biology, like, uh, you know, looking at the mutation rate, that tells you how fast something will evolve the population size right?
Speaker 2:How many cells are there that are sort of rogue evolving cells? So you can take all of these things from evolution. You can also take things from ecology, and that's what I tried to do in basically. You know, the first decade of my work on cancer biology was take all these tools from cooperation science, evolutionary biology and ecology to try to understand cancer better. And that book that I wrote was kind of the culmination of all of that Was there a lot of positive feedback on the book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's been translated into so many languages I can't even keep track now. Wow, yeah.
Speaker 1:Are you familiar with natural killer cells? Yeah, and do you believe that works?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's absolutely. You know our immune systems do a lot to suppress cancer on an ongoing basis. They're sort of doing like surveillance of all of our systems to make sure that there aren't systematic problems that are occurring. And, and you know, also, just the cells inside our body are always monitoring their neighbors, even the non-immune cells. There's just constant sort of communication and feedback happening among cells that help keep everything in check.
Speaker 1:I I know a woman. She's going to be 90 next month Wow yeah, in October and she has stage four bone cancer and she's had it for a long time. My aunt got stage four bone cancer after this woman and my aunt died six months later. This woman, she goes to Mexico and gets stem cells. She gets natural killer cells, I think it's almost every three months. It's very expensive, very expensive, but she gets the natural killer cells and she does hyperbaric treatments in a real hyperbaric chamber and she does red light therapy and she's almost 90. And she just bought a Porsche a month ago. Like you cannot tell. Like this woman is she's living 90, and she just bought a Porsche a month ago. Like you cannot tell, like this woman is she's living it.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I think the natural killer cells, like you know, I mean she's got, you know she had breast cancer. I mean she's fighting it, but these natural killer cells, I think are keeping her alive.
Speaker 2:I actually haven't really looked into the use of you know natural killer cells in that way. I just know about you know the killer cells that are in our bodies already and the role that they play.
Speaker 1:So what I did is I went about a little over a year ago to my doctor and they took 26 vials of my blood, getting back to the zombie thing, took all my blood, took it to a clinic in Irvine and got my natural killer cells out of there. I got 2 billion of them, wow. Then I went to Mexico, where it's legal, and they gave me an IV drip. They got 4 billion and they gave me 2 billion back in the in an IV drip to fight whatever. I don't have anything. I just wanted to be preventative. You know, I have some calcium in my heart. I'm hoping that I could go in there and maybe reverse calcium. I don't know if that worked or not, but it's eating up because the doctor who actually I want to invite you to meet this doctor, the doctor showed me a video. It's a microscope all zoomed up and it's cancer and there's NK cells, the natural killer cells, and you see him like eating the cancer, like a Pac-Man, like it's crazy. In fact, I've had this professor or this scientist on my show before and he's coming next week with a few other doctors. They're holding a seminar. They're going to be on this podcast. I'd love to have you join us if you want to talk about it. They own this company. They also have this company in Mexico called Immunocene, and they told me not to use the word cure. I guess you can't do that, you can't use the word remission anymore or something, but they get rid of it and you guys could probably have a way more intelligent conversation than I can, because I'm just like it eats it like Pac-Man. You know what I mean. But if you're around next week, you want to pop in and they're having a seminar on Tuesday. Maybe they know all about your book. They're amazing. They also. They're also stem cells.
Speaker 1:Do you believe in stem cells? Do you believe that stuff too?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, stem cells are definitely a thing. I've done simulation research on stem cells and cancer and I most of what I know about sort of the use of stem cell therapies is just from you know people I know who are connected to that world.
Speaker 1:I haven't actually done any research on that myself I just came back a week ago from getting stem cells in mexico. I'm addicted. How?
Speaker 1:was that it was great I've done it. I've gotten stem cells now seven times in an iv drip. Last week, though, I went in and to the hospital and they put me under anesthesia and they injected my spine, my discs, my the, the bone, the little facets, the membranes, everything you can think of that goes in the spine. I got 140 million stem cells injected into me, and then I did an IV drip of 200 million just to fight. The reason being is because, as we talked about our parents earlier, my mother died of brain cancer at the age of 66, and my father died of a heart attack at the age of 66. And my father was in the best shape of any man still to this day had ever seen at 66 years old, so he just died like that.
Speaker 1:I have three boys, so I'm doing everything I can where I've become somewhat obsessed with being as healthy as I can, right. So I've lost weight. My weight's fluctuated, so I'm trying to do everything I can to stay healthy, which is why another thing we talked about when we walked in sauna I try to sauna every day. You are a sauna person.
Speaker 2:I love saunas yeah.
Speaker 1:What's your? What do you do? Ten minutes, 15 minutes.
Speaker 2:Well, I, when I'm up in Flagstaff, I do it. I'll do like 10 to 15 minutes with, you know, a break in between to cool down, if I can cold plunge. But I don't have a cold plunge up there but if I can or if I'm like somewhere where there's snow, I'll get in the snow or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I try to. So I did stem cells a week ago and with the stem cells they ask you not to hot tub, cold plunge or sauna for a couple of weeks. There's a little bit of I get mixed reviews. Somebody said, just wait three days. Somebody else said, well, the stem cells of your body 29 days. So, uh, normally one of the things I usually sauna, hot tub, cold plunge every day.
Speaker 2:I cold plunge maybe two or three times a day like I'm obsessed with it yeah, if I had a cold plunge I would totally do it all the time I love it, but I'm like also, what I really love is like going into natural bodies of water that are freezing, Like you know in Iceland like the glacial uh yeah, plus you're grounding.
Speaker 1:When you do that too, you've done the Iceland thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and I swam in the sea in Iceland in November. It was awesome, so yeah, for how long?
Speaker 1:Um, maybe five six minutes, that's a long time long, um, maybe five, that's enough minutes.
Speaker 2:That's a long time. Yeah, how cold was it? Oh, very, very cold, because, you know, I mean it's like the, the, the streams at the. So I did it in the streams in may with the glacial runoff, so that's just like yeah just you know, um not freezing like just not freezing. And then in November the sea was like a little bit warmer than that, but not much. But yeah, it was fun. I was like swimming out there and at one point I'm like, oh, that's a bunch of seals, Maybe I should.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it might be a shark looking for that.
Speaker 2:Maybe I should get back on shore.
Speaker 1:When you do that, are you doing that because you're speaking with your career or are you doing that for vacation?
Speaker 2:So whenever I have the chance to go to Iceland, I do so. I've been invited a few times to the Royal Swedish Academy of Science you know, the entity that gives Nobel Prizes. That gives Nobel prizes. So I do stuff about. You know, in general, how do we survive disasters and how do we have a positive outlook on the world, even though things are pretty fucked up, and so I've been a part of several events there. So that's in Stockholm. So I'm like what if I spend a day or two in Iceland on the way there and the way back? So I'll just like know, squeeze it in, rent a car, drive out to the places where there's natural hot springs by the water and do the you know hot springs and then get in the awesome in the water.
Speaker 1:Is that something when you are you by yourself or do you travel?
Speaker 2:you travel um often I'm by myself, I like. The first time I was in Iceland, I was with a bunch of colleagues and it was awesome and we, like whitewater, rafted this, like insane, like you know, 4.5. And it was. It was crazy and freezing, you know. So you're in these like dry suits and of course mine was compromised.
Speaker 2:So I was like oh what? Because I was also like they're like do you want to like get in? Like there's this area? That's like not totally crazy. You could just like get in and float down. And I'm like fuck yeah, I'm getting into, float down and turned out my suit wasn't quite waterproof, so that's great, but yeah, so you know, you remind me of something sweet.
Speaker 1:I I happen to um meet some people here on this podcast that are gurus that own um. They have a in india. They have this huge I don't know what you call it I wish I knew the right words, I'm gonna but it's this beautiful monastery and people they teach you and you you meditate and all these wonderful things happen, and they also have one in sweden. In fact, abba built it. What weird, yeah, it's weird. And then they built it for some people. Then those people left it and then these people I know bought it and and you know, we're talking about evolution and stem cells and our body and ourselves. Where are you spiritually with this kind of stuff?
Speaker 2:oh, like, like. What do I believe like?
Speaker 1:because, like, there's people I know, like you know, when you battle, when you battle like the, the common sense of things, you think like I know some people that are so smart and I have respect, so much respect for them. And then you know they're preachers in the church and I'm like, wow, it just seems so hard that a God just made all this stuff. And then I read in the Bible it's okay to question that, so I don't want to get in trouble. But then it's like, here you are with all this stuff, and then I read in the Bible it's okay to question that, so I don't want to get in trouble. But then it's like, here you are with all this science. So you must not believe the other side.
Speaker 2:Well, if you want me to just tell you yeah, yeah, okay, so my personal belief is that a lot of the things that we think about as religion and spirituality are, in one way or another, linked to our microbiomes and the microbes that live in our world that we, that we share. So, uh, I don't know, sounds like pretty crazy. Like what? What is she even talking about?
Speaker 2:but, um, we do know that microbes that live in our guts and that occupy, you know, essentially an important role in terms of helping us digest food and function biologically. They also produce hormones and neurotransmitters that interact with our body and our brain, including oxytocinin, which gives us a feeling of calm and connection and bonding with others, and so microbes have the ability to give us what I think many people would describe as spiritual feelings. So what if and now? This is just this is wildly speculative. This is just. You know, you're getting like the taking my professor hat off kind of now and just being like here's just some crazy shit that I think about. Um, so you?
Speaker 1:should call it your fourth book.
Speaker 2:That crazy shit that I think about yeah, actually I I'm starting a um, uh, uh, what do you call it? A sub stack in november that's called not for peer review, which is essentially going to be. Here's some crazy shit that I think about including, like this kind of stuff. But but yeah, so if you know there are microbes that can make you feel universally connected and calm and all of that, and they're microbes that can be transmitted to others, then you have a situation where you can almost have like a contagious spirituality. If you just have a shared microbiome, that is then affecting your physiology, your brain, your gut.
Speaker 1:Like if you're in a room chanting and manifesting with everybody and doing a meditation. There's power in that power.
Speaker 2:There's power in prayer group right and that might partially possibly be mediated by shared microbes that's the.
Speaker 1:That's the crazy hypothesis but what about microbial spirituality? That makes a lot of sense to me I wouldn't argue that at all. But what about when you die your soul? What about the soul? Is there a scientific explanation for soul or no?
Speaker 2:I mean, maybe that's microbes too.
Speaker 1:That makes sense to me too.
Speaker 2:You know I mean not to be flippant about it, but people do talk about like the breath of life and you know like we have microbes that are not just in our guts but on all of our epithelial surfaces. You know, inside our lungs and our mouths and everything probably there are some pieces of things that we think about as spiritual and religious that are in some way or another getting influenced by our microbiomes and potentially also our shared microbiomes.
Speaker 1:Well then it's also the power of thinking too, the power of your mind, right? Because I've seen this thing. Where you ever seen that thing? I can't remember what study it was, but it was like there's water and they labeled the water ugly, mean and or something happy and whatever. And then when they brought up the um, microscopic inside, like the mean ugly water, where there was like dark stuff and then there was happy bubbles in the other water. So it's like if, if you think positive and you think spiritual and you think great things are going to happen and this and this and this and happiness and happiness, then is there some sort of you're making good things happen with your microbiome. It's all positive, it's all happy, whereas if you're woe is me and you're negative, you're like, oh, it's going to be a bad day today, oh, this podcast is going to go terrible. That actually will make that happen yeah.
Speaker 2:so I think that power is actually happening mostly through uh changes in social expectations that happen when you come to a situation with a certain attitude, and this actually comes down to game theory. So you know, have you uh heard about the prisoner's dilemma and tit for tat and all of that? So you and I are in a situation we can choose to cooperate, have mutual benefit, or we could choose to not cooperate. We both don't cooperate and things aren't that good. Or if you cooperate but I don't, then you get suckered, or vice versa.
Speaker 2:So there are a decent number of situations in life where your expectation about what the other person is going to do influences what is the best option for you.
Speaker 2:So if you think you know I'm going to cooperate and we could have a long-term relationship where we're cooperating, then it makes sense for you to cooperate also. But if you know I'm coming in with a negative attitude and you're like, hmm, I wonder, this doesn't seem like a good long-term cooperative situation, then that's going to influence what makes the most sense for you to do and it's also going to influence just what ideas pop into your head in interacting with me. It's going to influence for me what ideas pop into your head and interacting with me, it's going to influence for me what ideas pop into my head. Am I suspicious about things or am I excited about possibilities? So, depending on where we are mentally, it really changes the opportunities in our social environment. So, both because other people change how they behave towards us when we come in with a certain attitude and because our own mental state changes, what ideas get activated and are available to us in our own minds.
Speaker 1:So if you walk into a setting and you're willing to cooperate or willing to be a team player, it can change your perception right. So you use cooperate a lot.
Speaker 2:That's like your word, that's like your sentence, one of my words, yeah, one of my big words, but I feel like cooperate the way you're using it.
Speaker 1:it makes me feel like again, like manifest. I guess there's so many different connections because it's like, hey, we're going to visualize it, visualize it, be positive, be positive. I'm going to go meet these new people I've got to work with. I hope it all works out great. It's going to work out great Versus walking in there, going I've heard so-and-so's or whatever. Now you're not cooperating. Right, right, right.
Speaker 2:Or you're not going in with the expectation of a positive interaction, right, and I think people worry so much about not getting exploited that oftentimes they miss great opportunities for positive interactions. And you can simultaneously sort of come to a situation with positive expectations but not be there for getting exploited. You could be like, oh well, actually this isn't working out, I'm out of here. In fact, that's what I did my PhD work on. I basically proposed this alternative strategy, called the walkaway strategy, for dealing with this sort of prisoner's dilemma situation, where you begin by cooperating and then you just leave if your partner doesn't cooperate. And you can also do this in groups. So you join a group, you start out cooperating and you stay and cooperate as long as the return that you're getting is above a certain threshold, and if it isn't, then you just leave. So you're always cooperating, but you're just not staying in partnerships or groups that aren't cooperating as well, and that's okay.
Speaker 2:Well, so what I did was computer models of this and showed that it leads to higher payoffs for cooperators. In general, it makes cooperators do better than exploiters, when you're willing to leave. When, yeah, when cooperation isn't going your way or when you've had enough well, it's basically when you're not getting what you really deserve as a cooperator but that's not taking your ball and going home it's taking your ball and going and playing with somebody else okay, that's, that's good.
Speaker 1:What's? What book is that?
Speaker 2:right, there is that one that you wrote um, this is my second book, a field guide to the apocalypse, a mostly serious guide to surviving our wild times.
Speaker 2:So, that's awesome yeah, and this is basically, you know, uh, a way that I took, like all this work on cooperation, a bunch of stuff that I done, a bunch of stuff that other people have done, and framed the question of how do we navigate in our crazy times now in terms of the idea that we need to build cooperation, community, have a sense of adventure, to survive all the craziness that we're in right now.
Speaker 1:Is that a book you tell your students to get?
Speaker 2:So they read parts of it. Oh yeah, yeah, it's uh and it's like illustrated. I tried to, I tried to kind of make it um fun. So, like you know, you got like there's like me with my ukulele, with the apocalypse happening you play the ukulele I play a lot of different instruments. We should have brought one in here for you. I didn't. Oh yeah, I well, I could keep the zombies away tiptoe through the tulips.
Speaker 2:It's uh, I'm, I'm really into um, oh, this is for you, by the way I can sign it, thank you thank you but yeah, so I I think like music is just an amazing way of connecting with people across all divides. And just this coming weekend, actually, I'm going up to Flagstaff for the Picking in the Pines Bluegrass Festival and I'm going to be in the campground jamming until all hours of the night.
Speaker 2:You're awesome and I'm running two workshops there too. So one is a workshop about jamming and cooperation and building community. That's based on, you know, kind of some of the ideas of the book but also this notion that music is this way that we coordinate and practice cooperating when we're jamming together. So so that'll be that workshop. And then I'm doing a workshop called your brain on bluegrass with a colleague of mine who also studies music. So we're going to do a little like, you know, two professors up there talking about, like, how music works and what happens when you get, you know, in sync with other people when you're playing music.
Speaker 1:Music is amazing. It's pretty wild also how music all like the younger generation now knows all of it because of in fact, I would generation now knows all of it because of, in fact, I would say, music, you can be zombified. Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Zombified for sure, and you can be collectively zombified.
Speaker 1:Right, You're just like all in it. A concert just in the zone. Yep, yeah, Watching a show.
Speaker 2:We call it in bluegrass jamming the vortex.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, makes sense.
Speaker 2:You're just like oh my gosh, this is like amazing and it's like spiritual and euphoric. And also you're just like picking and you're like I didn't even know I could do this, you know, and it's collected, this collective experience right, but I'm talking about also listening, just absolutely yeah, yeah, but like my son.
Speaker 1:I have a son who's 19 and I'm so impressed with his knowledge of 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000, like he knows yeah he knows every yacht rock song. He knows every drake song. What yeah, it's crazy the, the different generation because of access being zombified on your phone true you know, listen, 19 000 hours of drake in 2023, yeah, but so, in your opinion, how so far was this? Was this podcast was a good podcast, was it?
Speaker 2:oh, I've had so much fun talking to you. Have you really For, really, oh, yeah, for, really For, really For really Use that next time you're in class.
Speaker 1:Good, so it was a good podcast for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was a lot of fun Because I was really nervous because you know you're really smart. I'm just like I'm just a regular person. Oh regular people write a book on cancer cells and cooperation. These cells aren't cooperating. I also like to just go to dive bars and talk to strangers, so you know that's regular yeah, that's regular what's your favorite restaurant? Uh like anywhere in phoenix in phoenix um.
Speaker 1:It's a tie between glibon and chula okay, chula fishula Fish in Glybon is a Thai food restaurant. I have not been there. I've heard so much about it.
Speaker 2:Oh it's amazing.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm going to go there today.
Speaker 1:I think today's not open. One of these days is I went to go one day and it wasn't open, and it was a day that I was like why wouldn't it be open? Wow, okay. So welcome to our podcast. This is a little bit different today, because this podcast is a spinoff of our radio show. Okay,
