Space Biology and Recreating Human Hearts | Dr. Suh, Microbiologist

Dr. Dakotah Tyler sits down with Dr. Suh for a wide-ranging conversation on biomedical engineering, organs on chips, how biology behaves in space, stem cells, evolution, and human identity.

They talk about microgravity and aging, space travel, induced pluripotent stem cells, tissue engineering, animal research ethics, body odor genetics, microplastics, beauty standards, the manosphere, and what it means to deconstruct your sense of self.

Lead with curiosity.

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Yo, welcome back to Dr. Star Kid. I'm your host, Dr. Dakota Tyler, and with me I have a very special guest. This is my first guest interview. I have with me Dr. S PhD in biomedical engineering, uh, creating synthetic hearts and parts on chips and all these cool things. Welcome and thanks for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Absolutely. It's a pleasure. We always like, we always get it go on and on when we chop it up. So I'm excited.

SPEAKER_04 0:28

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so there was something on my mind that I wanted to talk to you right away. I recently became aware that on Artemis II, which flew to the the which flew past the moon several months ago, they had the organs on a chip. They had these things called avatars. I forget the exact um acronym, but it's it's this idea, and you told me about this that you know you can well me I'll maybe you can explain it a little bit better because I'm I'm just gonna butcher it.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Biomedical research, tissue engineering, and space stuff has been happening a long time. And actually, when I was in high school, I got put in this program where they put underrepresented students into like labs of a hospital. And there's a woman, Dr. Apronka, who I was in her lab, she went on to work with NASA, and she was actually an object researcher. And her sort of whole thing was at the time, this was like in 2008 or something, but her whole thing at the time was studying the way catecholamine stress hormone release uh happening during labor, associated with labor, affected early attachment and survival. They were looking at a mouse model.

SPEAKER_04 1:45

Okay, hold up. So let me let me pause you there because that's already super interesting to me. So when a mother is giving born uh birth, there's stress hormones because it's a stressful thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Yeah, and so the baby is also experiencing those. So the baby is getting a flood of these as well, and so they believed that the expression of something that's kind of a marker of that, what you we call is perinatal because it's like sort of during the birth, they believed that the expression of this protein CFOS in the locus corleus, I believe, was the area of the brain we're looking at. They believed the presence or absence of that labor, sort of labor-associated stress hormones, sort of profoundly impacted survival of these mouse pups and things like their ability to latch on and breastfeed and stuff like that. Um, and so I don't remember exactly why, but Okay, wait a second, wait a second.

SPEAKER_04 2:45

So they the amount of stress hormone that the baby and mother experience in combination may either lead to us the a survival of the pup or it not surviving.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

And I wouldn't even say I think survival is a strong word, but I think like outcome, maybe yeah, indicators of like wellness and survival. So, like, and so I don't want to state anything too heavily because these papers were published after I left, and I don't want to incorrectly represent like her lab and what they did. But I will say that the hypothesis they're working on at the time is that because of that, cesarean sections may negatively affect early survival of mammals, their ability to breastfeed and stuff like that. And now this is getting really tangential because I don't remember why, but they did some of this stuff in space.

SPEAKER_04 3:44

Um yeah, well, that that's which is that happens a lot though, right? There's a lot of biology research and medical research that's done in space.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Interesting thing I've seen lately, actually, about space research is I don't know that this was in space, but they showed that simulated microgravity, um, they could use it to simulate aging in organoid models. So that was interesting. Maybe should I if I like look something up, is it gonna be weird for the stream? No, no, no, you you totally can um find this because I don't want to tell you wrong, but I'm pretty sure that was an organoid thing.

SPEAKER_04 4:27

Um yeah, interesting, and yeah, it's it's I guess something that's that's seems strange to me is that obviously we evolved on Earth for one one G, right? But and that is true for every single living thing that has ever existed on Earth. So why wouldn't going into microgravity or any lower gravity environment just be instantly bad?

SPEAKER_00 5:05

I don't know, and you see I don't know. I I I think that's a really interesting evolutionary question that I can't even begin to answer. The paper was named Simulated Microgravity Accelerates Aging of Human Skeletal Muscle Myoblasts at the single cell level. Actually, look this up. Um, so I guess that's the thing people are doing now.

SPEAKER_04 5:33

Yeah, it's always, you know, I I know something else that has come a long way through the our space programs is keeping astronauts healthy while they're in space. I think at first they like didn't work out or anything, and they would come back and they would have heart problems and their muscles were like they couldn't walk. Um, sometimes they would mess with their vision as well. And so now they have a training regimen where they have to like work out for two or three hours a day or something like that, and they're able to mitigate a lot of that stuff. Did you end up finding it?

SPEAKER_00 6:07

Yeah, I can I don't know that this will help anyone listening or watching, but I can drop it in the chat to you. Um, it looks like it this is similar to what you were saying. I mean, the first sense of abstract is that Earth's gravity is essential for maintaining skeletal muscle mass. Instead, they atrophy. Um, they come back and without the regimen that they've learned through trial and error and continue like space missions where knowledge that they gain buildings. Now they know that they have to do uh what I assume is some sort of specialized exercise regimen. But you're right, like um they they they lose muscle mass. Um so it looks like they've done a culture of an of a so they have skeletal muscle model in a dish, like a plastic wear in the lab, and they put it in in microgravity, and they saw senescence, which is just refers to cells slowly losing their ability to function the way they should over time. But he now is immunosines. I think we chatted about that a little bit like immunosines.

SPEAKER_04 7:13

I don't we may have, but I the it I forgot what it means.

SPEAKER_00 7:18

That's uh sort of a similar thing, but it for the immune system. So when you think about how older people vaccines are less effective, they get sick more often, they die from sicknesses more often, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_04 7:29

That sort of thing is so okay. So what they're seeing in muscles is basically the exact same thing in muscles and immune, the immune system is in microgravity, these things sit work, they work biologically, um, in a way that seems like they're much older than they are. And so that's interpreted as accelerating aging.

SPEAKER_00 7:54

They're not even saying that it's like they have muscle, skeletal muscle cells, and they're becoming old. It looks like they're saying that in their model the the cells that are supposed to become cells that are fully differentiated and have really turned into contractile skeletal muscle. It looks like that doesn't even fully happen. Um, and it looks like they're saying that that negative effect remained even after microgravity was removed and they were returned to a normal gravitational field.

SPEAKER_04 8:34

There was like long-standing, there was a re uh like a resonant effect. Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

And this is relative it's not that new. I mean, it's 2021, but you know, for biomedical research, things progress fast, so they've probably done even crazier stuff definitely by now.

SPEAKER_04 8:55

You know, I feel like that's an interesting thing that gets left out of the discussion around us being interplanetary or you know, Elon Musk wanting to go to Mars or something. It's like we have not successfully been able to keep a human in space for like a decade or something. You know what I mean? Like just the what you would have to do for a lifetime. Uh there hasn't been a baby that was born in space, a human baby.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

And I'm guessing that was the rationale for why um that that PI I was talking about, Dr. Ronka had so much funding from NASA as an open yeah, because those are I mean, these are important things that 2008. They were already, I mean, of course they are. I wrote a uh an essay in middle school about like should we colonize Mars? We've always, you know, humankind for a long time and US interests, which I won't get on my soapbox. I mean, that's that's been something they've been saying forever.

SPEAKER_04 9:55

Yeah. Um, I remember not too long ago, maybe a couple years, there was a study where they simulated the amount of galactic radiation. So just um when you get outside of the Earth's magnetic field, there's a lot of uh high-energy particles that are just zipping all over the place from whatever stuff that's happening out in the universe, and they exposed um, you know, it was a simulation, they didn't actually put the rat out there, but they exposed rat kidneys to this galactic radiation, and within like a couple months, they just stopped working altogether. And so it's like on your trip, you know, if you know, say that we the we were just gung-ho and and Trump and the administration just let Elon Musk do whatever he wanted, and they like sent a bunch of people out there, their kidneys would have shut down before they were like 30% the way to Mars.

SPEAKER_00 10:53

I don't know. I know you're more of like a planets type astrophysicist than like a space shuttle astrophysicist, right?

SPEAKER_04 11:00

Like an aerospace engineer. I'm definitely not an aerospace engineer.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

You you would still have more of an idea than me, because I have no idea. So, like, how protected, like when you're in a spaceship, you're practically completely insulated from your environment in a way. However, there's some things you can't mitigate, for example, the absence of gravity. I mean, they can simulate gravity in an enclosed space, but like there's certain elements, right, of space that you can't just hold at bay by encapsulating yourself in metal, right?

SPEAKER_04 11:34

I mean, yes and no. Um, you could think of providing enough shielding for the craft uh to protect you from some of these high-energy particles that I'm talking about. Well, actually, it would be low, it's it's low pressure, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:49

It's not high.

SPEAKER_04 11:50

It would be almost Well, you know, the outside is is really low pressure, which means that the inside is extremely high pressure. You know, you can think about have beefing up the whatever sort of shielding that you would need. Another thing is there are substances like water that's actually great. So, you know, you could think about if you like line, if you imagine that there was like imagine you had an insulated ship, um, and then in that insulation space, instead of there being nothing, it was like water that was all the way around the ship. And that would kind of like that would help absorb a bunch of the those high-energy particles, but then you're talking about you know, lifting off this thing with a bunch of additional weight, a bunch of water, or a bunch of extra shielding, which then becomes a tougher challenge for the engineer, the aerospace engineers, they're trying to lift the rockets off. I um was thinking about this the other day. You know, a lot of the planets that we have found, most of them that we found actually are uh most of the rocky planets are larger than Earth, so they're more massive. They may be somewhere between two to five or six times as massive as Earth for the Rocky planets, which means that there's gonna be a lot more gravity. I think for I'd have to fact-check myself on this, hopefully I get it right. I think for an Earth, a rocky planet that's like 10 Earth masses, you would get uh surface gravity that's like twice as much, which doesn't sound that crazy, but when you look at how the rocket equation gets something off the ground, it doesn't scale linearly, it's exponential because every additional gallon of gas or fuel that you put on, your thing gets heavier, so you need more fuel, which makes it heavier, which means we need more and so you could imagine that if if like the most common planets are still rocky planets, but that are a bit more massive than the Earth, there may be a limit to what civilizations could even evolve spacefaring ability if it they just have to deal with it. It's for them, it may be like technically impossible to uh figure out how to launch themselves into space.

SPEAKER_00 14:17

Interesting scientific question because that is a scientific question that fascinates all scientists. Like, what is possible? Yeah, like what are the limits of engineering? What are the physical like boundary conditions that actually prohibit us? Like even thinking about the the length of human life and our ability potentially to suspend it in stasis in some way, which we're people say we're close to that, we're very, very far away from that. You have to think about remember when they were saying that they crier preserved Walt Disney and he was like coming back? That's yeah, bro.

SPEAKER_04 14:55

He's not, he's he's running away in there.

SPEAKER_00 14:59

Which would be really funny. I'm not advocating violence, but if we told Elon, like, yo, you're going to space, just get in this cryotank, and then just kind of like left in there.

SPEAKER_04 15:08

You know, this is a bit of a left term from what we're talking about, but I think that there's an element of that um preservation in the tech billionaire upload my mind to the server sentiment that seems to be it's kind of hard because these guys are so weird, it's kind of hard to know exactly what they're thinking about, but it seems like maybe it's that it's like in that realm.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

You see this burgeoning interest of like like the really rich tech bros, pseudo-tech bros, because I wouldn't even call them tech, they don't know really what they're doing, they're just rich, but um in longevity, and so and now you're seeing there are legitimately shocking advances in longevity. They're they're they're starting to realize that the same way that I think I explained to you, you can reprogram any cell in the body other than a sperm and an egg to become a stem cell. They're finding that you can take similar transcription factors and genetically manipulate cells to reverse aging.

SPEAKER_04 16:17

Okay, wait, let's roll back for a bit. Um, the people who are listening to this may have never heard this before. Could you could you like go back and into this this idea? Hold on, let me see if I can pluripotent stem cell.

SPEAKER_00 16:31

So the pluripotent c refers to its ability to become any cell um in the body.

SPEAKER_04 16:37

So these are like the when you're an embryo, right? The shortly after conception, most of your cells are starting out as these stem cells that can become anything, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:49

This is nomenclature-wise confusing, but those are actually not what I'm talking about induced pluripotent stem cells, those are embryonic stem cells, however, they have the characteristic of pluripotency because they can become any cell. But the reason these are called induced pluripotent stem cells is because we revert them to that state of pluripotency, and this was a huge deal for biomedical engineering because now we don't need an embryo, and that was controversial. Um, and even controversy aside, limited source, regardless of if you feel morally this way or that way about it, which I'm not even gonna get into. So, this discovery that you can take any cell other than a sperm or an egg, so a blood cell, a cheek swab, even cells from urine, and you could reprogram it by just turning on and off these what are called transcription factors. So perhaps I should say that each cell has within it the entire genetic instruction book to become any cell. However, there are these things called transcription factors that tell that cell what part of that book to read. So it's like there's a chapter that's kidney cells, and then subsections about all the different types of cells in the kidneys, a chapter about heart cells. And so the transcription factors are what tells that cell to go into the book which section to read and what recipe to follow to become.

SPEAKER_04 18:23

So the book is your DNA, and these transcriptions, so transcript transcription factors are like your assigned reading for the day. Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

So what this guy, uh Shinya Yamanaka, and there was another guy, Sir Gordon, I think. They they discovered it sort of parallel, um, and they received the Nobel Prize together, even though they were working on it independently, but they kind of like were racing in a way. Um, so what Yamanaka discovered, um, and the other guy too, I'm just gonna say Yamanaka for the sake of brevity, but what he discovered is that you can actually um go into cells that have already become what they've become blood cells, kidney cells, skin cells, and you can trigger specific bookmarks that are now called Yamanaka factors and turn them back into stem cells. So that's why it's called induced pollution stem cells because you induce them to go back to become cells. That's crazy. People did not believe them, they didn't believe them. It took I get that, I get that.

SPEAKER_04 19:35

It sounds big.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

It was like fucking crazy, yeah. It was like I'm struggling to think of a parallel to like your field, but it would just be like, no, all the planets are not planets, actually, they're any planet can become any other planet. It's like it's just like people didn't believe it, yeah. And so that's a good example. That's a good example of people going into their labs and reproducing what he had done for people to realize, oh, like this is a real thing, and so that was just like a a renaissance for tissue engineers, which is people who try to engineer tissue to repair or replace disease damaged tissue, or for people who need transplants. And in my case, I was doing like cardiac stuff for my PhD. So when you do this, when you have it right here, this is if you if you're looking for a book, this is like a story.

SPEAKER_04 20:35

Uh-huh. What's it called?

SPEAKER_00 20:37

The winding road to discovering IPS cells.

SPEAKER_04 20:40

Induced pleary. Very cool. So I have a question and the so if you take a you know how how how how old is the oldest heart cell in your heart? Is it like years, is it months? Like how we what's the time scale that they get replaced?

SPEAKER_00 21:02

Well, so that's part of why heart disease is so um deadly, and why cardiac tissue engineering is such a huge deal. Your skin will regenerate if it's wounded. Your heart cells have what is referred to as a limited regenerative capacity. Now, like everything else in science, it depends. There's there's now people realizing that there may be that there are cardiac stem cells. Okay, sure. However, generally, like as an example, if you have a myocardial infarction or heart attack, it's not just the fact that you're you're losing billions or maybe even trillions of cardiomyocytes, the beating cell in the heart. It's the fact that they're not going to grow back and they're going to be replaced by scar tissue. So, yeah, that's that's the heart just doesn't pre-let's.

SPEAKER_04 22:00

Forget ignore the heart cells, um, some other cell that lives to be uh long, uh that lives to an older age. Does it matter if you're taking like fresh new cells versus older cells when you induce the pluripotency? Does it matter? Like is like one of those easier or harder? And then taking a step further, when you change those cells into something else, does their origin affect their um their like, I don't know, the their quality or their effectiveness whenever they do change?

SPEAKER_00 22:38

I think that would be uh an interesting experiment. I'm sure someone out there is doing it because I don't know, it's outside, it's really outside of the scope of my practice or whatever. However, I will say that there's some things that happen in sales like telomere shortening as they divide that I do not believe, though I could be wrong, I don't think that it would reverse telomere shortening just if you induce pluripotency. So though I don't know how or why. I would be shocked if the age of the original sale did not matter at all. That would be surprising to me. I'll put it that way. I don't want to overstate my knowledge. Sure, yeah, because I don't have any. Um, to your other question, I that's another thing that I always felt like I was kind of fighting an uphill battle, trying to differentiate fibroblast-derived IPSCs into cardiomyocytes. And I think some people have started to look like, and and that's a fascinating question. Like, do these cells have some sort of memory? Is there some sort of like, even though we told them to go read this other part of the book, I'm like anthropomorphizing the cells, but just bear with me. Do they deep down like remember what they were? Like, I don't know. I think that's a really fascinating question, too.

SPEAKER_04 23:57

Yeah, yeah, it's so interesting. Um, the implications, because I guess the the hope would be that one day you could you could get a new heart that was your you didn't have to wait for a trans uh a transplant where that where you need somebody that has that's genetically compatible with you, that you could just like grow your own, which would be pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

Well, there's a lot of challenges for that with heart, but scale up is a big one, tumor in genocity, right? Because if you have these sales and they're not all differentiated and they're just gonna keep dividing because that's what IPSC cells do, then that's a tumor, so that's bad. However, I will say, even though heart is among the last ones we'll probably figure out um because it's so complicated, they have done cornea in Japan. Like there are people with I have corneas in their eyes, and it reversed blindness in a lot of those patients.

SPEAKER_04 24:56

Wow. So interesting. So that's so it's are it's already like being successfully implemented or implemented for certain body parts. What are the okay, what are do you have a sense for what I get, I'm getting, you know, I I understand from you that heart is like the difficult one. Um, I'm also assuming that brain is also probably like the heart the hardest.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

Kidneys are also very, very, very complex. Ask any medical student what was probably the hardest for them and renal is kidneys, are like so complex. I don't even like so so that's up there.

SPEAKER_04 25:34

What other easy ones or you know, relatively simple ones are there?

SPEAKER_00 25:40

The other simplest ones are skin and bladder.

SPEAKER_04 25:46

Okay. So those are probably the the what uh what about something like limbs or like digits?

SPEAKER_00 25:54

Yeah, I think those are simpler compared to. Let me see if anyone's done IPSC derived skin because I don't know that, but I feel like they probably have. There are clinical trials, um but direct transplantation of IPSC derived skin tissue is preclinical, meaning they're not putting it in in humans yet. However, they're starting to do clinical trials with the topical derived IPSC derived dressing for diabetic foot ulcers. So like they're not injecting the, but they're they're putting sort of like a band.

SPEAKER_02 26:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

And I should mention that um, I want to preface this by saying I'm really about non-human primate studies. I don't particularly like them.

SPEAKER_04 26:41

But I will like them, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

I will say they did create an IPSC derived heart patch, and they did it in in monkeys, and they found that it reversed a lot of the effects of heart disease, which is huge.

SPEAKER_04 26:58

Like they were able to regenerate why do monkeys get heart disease?

SPEAKER_00 27:02

They gave it to them. That's why I don't like that. Yeah, okay. Yeah, but I will say it's incredible that they were able to regenerate muscle of the heart after a heart attack. I mean, that's just sci-fi. Yeah, that was IPS. Very, very n like the I won't get into it, but I don't like the they call them NHP non-human primate studies. I I find that morally murky.

SPEAKER_04 27:29

Well, okay, that's I think that's an interesting question. You find that to be more morally murky than um like other animals. How come?

SPEAKER_00 27:45

Well, I think like I I can see the argument against what I'm about to say that all animals have intrinsic value life, whether they're cognitive or regardless of their cognitive abilities and their ability to understand that they're being like used for research or that they're gonna be euthanized. But I think there is a higher moral duty when an animal is like more conscious. Like, I just I just that's my personal belief.

SPEAKER_04 28:17

Yeah, okay. So what other what other animals would you would you slot in there besides the ones that are closely related to us? Would you include like I don't think anybody does medical testing on elephants or whales or anything, but like those are the other like smarter Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:36

It's hard for me to say, like I just for one, because I just don't consider myself the arbiter of it. Like I have opinions kind like I have strong opinions for what I have strong opinions about, yeah, but like I just don't think I'm an expert on like that. I don't know, I go in circles in my head, like you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 29:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 29:05

Um right because it's like you can't get in animal bioethics, like you know, and I'm just like I don't I yeah, well, because it's and then like you know, if you if we like race to the finish line, you know, the prior steps to being able to successfully administer this to humans is a sequence of trials where you know you're kind of going from the first things that everybody tests on, which are rats and mice, and you're like, you've got to bridge the gap somehow.

SPEAKER_00 29:44

And I don't even fully like the way some human clinical trials, I don't think even some of the way that you some human clinical trials are fully ethical.

SPEAKER_02 29:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

So like, you know, who am I to say?

SPEAKER_04 29:58

What what um, you know, I don't know, I don't have like much uh knowledge to draw on for the human trial um methodologies. What like what things seem unethical or like which you think what which things are you so what aspects are you saying are unethical?

SPEAKER_00 30:14

So I want to preface this by saying that um there are like so many, they're usually called IRBs institutional review boards, so it's not like people are just running amok and like doing whatever they want, like you will get audited, you will go to prison, like you can't just blah blah blah blah blah. However, I do think there's some like interesting gray area when we talk about what is coercion and the way we explain trials. So it and it is it fair to go to someone and try to get their informed consent in a very risky, risky trial if you're heavily implying this is their only shot at living or their child's only shot at living? Is that ethical? Is it ethical, even to take it way, way, way back and lower the stakes a lot? Is it ethical to offer grad students a $20 Chick-fil-A gift card to come do an eye test? Is that ethical? I don't know. So, like you see what I mean?

SPEAKER_04 31:19

Like, yeah, there's also I always that I mean that's like that's a really good point. I think that there's also an interesting potential for um selection, a selection bias when because a lot of grad students do that, like whether they're psych, social, whether you know, whatever it is, it's like they there's a there's hella young people around on university. So how can we get them to do it? Oh, you know, we give them like a free meal, and but that also selects for the students who are willing to subject themselves or their time for a relatively small amount of money top of the fact that you're sort of selecting for young people in college.

SPEAKER_00 32:04

Now you're also selecting for people in a particular socioeconomic class where they need a $20. Yeah, potentially, yeah. So, but I will say that's that those are things that are like discussed at length extensively when these studies are designed, so it's not like people aren't aware that they're doing a convenience sample, they are aware of that, right? Right. Well, that's good. That's good to know. I did a clinical research certificate at the med school here. Yeah, that's a discussion. What is coercion? Where is the line?

SPEAKER_04 32:40

So here's a here's a question. You know, the the hope then is that like organs could be reconstructed at some point in time. Maybe we can like one by one knock out every organ in the human body. What about something that's more like dynamic and widespread, like the immune system, like immune cells? Is that something that and like how would that work? Is it do you want to reproduce immune cells or do you want to like reproduce the cells that are in the lymph nodes throughout the body?

SPEAKER_00 33:20

I would say this is probably so annoying that I'm always saying, I don't know. I don't I don't really know. You're a good scientist. Yeah, because I just don't want to I don't know. I that's I and I don't even want to describe CAR T cells because I don't think I would do it correctly. And I actually have a friend of mine who you should have on the podcast. Um he does CAR T cells, but that's kind of what CAR T cells are. You're engineering T cells, you're editing their genetic makeup to make them do or be something else, I think. Maybe cut that part out. Yeah, yeah. Let's Google it actually. What are you got the couple of the professional researchers right here? So there are patients' own white blood cells, T cells, that genetically get altered with chimeric antigen receptors. Those are like little going.

SPEAKER_03 34:11

What is that?

SPEAKER_00 34:12

They're proteins that um like change, and and I think it's CRISPR is the name of when they cut part of it out, the DNA, and then they add something different or they just remove it. But I think car is like a little more advanced where instead of like cutting, they actually modify. Um, they're actually genetically modified. There, there's actually a new gene inserted. So that in terms of actual like immune cells, like BNT cells, I have no idea.

SPEAKER_04 34:42

Have is it a settled thing? This is another, this is completely changing the topic. Is it settled in biology and and I guess evo bio that the reason we lost, the reason humans lost m most of our body hair, at least in the thickness that most other mammal that a lot of other mammals have, is purely due to sweating, the ability to sweat more effectively and cool off.

SPEAKER_00 35:14

So I that makes perfect sense to me, but people in science argue about everything, you know that.

SPEAKER_04 35:20

So yeah, yeah. And then there's also almost always no, yeah, yeah, and then there's also almost always, especially when you're thinking about evolution, there's almost always never one reason for things. It's like this confluence of a bunch of different environmental factors and genetic drift and all these other things that are going on. But um, the I guess like the very reductive pop sci story that is in my head right now is like, you know, our our early, early ancestors several million years ago that had already split off from chimps were in a part of Africa, Eastern Africa, that was becoming less of a like lush rainforest. And so as it dried out, there was like the the forests weren't as thick, there weren't as many trees. And if you look at the places where chimpanzees and gorillas um currently live, it's just in other parts of Africa that do have that jungle environment. So they you know kind of like evolved down that path, but then we lost you know the that environment, and it, you know, things became drier, and you had to like kind of start walking around, um, and then like being able to cool off by jogging a long time and like sweating or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 36:49

But to your point about like there's always multiple reasons for everything, even just thinking about it in this five seconds, like that that you're explaining it, I could come up with the counter reason. What if it's that there were less bugs that carried diseases there, and the chimps and monkeys needed the hair to sort of ward off to prov as a barrier between diseases, and then when humans move where there are less insects, there were less trees. They don't need so there's there's reasons. I mean, who knows?

SPEAKER_04 37:18

That would, but that would also fit in with this drying out uh story where because I yeah, I'm not an etymal entomologist, whoever studies bugs. I don't study bugs, but I think that like there's much more bugs in places where it's much more humid and and like wet all the time. So that also maybe that's a reason why there wasn't like this expensive price to pay because there like weren't weren't as many bugs, or I don't know. I'm literally we're uh that's just a thought.

SPEAKER_00 37:55

I don't grow armpit hair. People think I'm lying.

SPEAKER_04 37:57

Uh I just don't get it lasered off, you just don't grow it.

SPEAKER_00 38:01

And I also don't have any armpit odor. Like I it's weird. I think it's an ABC 11 gene thing, or like that gene that makes Asians turn red when they drink, and that also makes our earwax dry instead of wet. I'm pretty sure I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_04 38:18

I didn't know any of those things.

SPEAKER_00 38:20

Oh, yeah, okay. No armpit. So many East Asians don't have body odor. Between 80 to 95 percent of East Asians have no body odor smell. It comes down to a gene mutation. I think it's called ABC something. Yeah, ABCC2, and then also this also makes you know how most people I'm sending, you know how most people's earwax is like where are you sending these things to? You oh, there's a chance is that a real thing? Okay, also reason our a lot of East Asians earwax is dry and flaky, it's not like liquid earwax like other people's, and it's also why we turn really red when we drink. And it's all from one mutation. I don't know that much about it, other than like what I discuss colloquially with you know other East Asians about like the quirk of life it's for us, but yeah, yeah, I guess it's all from that one genetic mutation, which raises a lot of evolutionary questions.

SPEAKER_04 39:22

Yeah, the the set the same gene, the same gene affects your the wetness of your earwax and your body odor, and there's no armpit hair. But what is the evolutionary benefit of armpit hair?

SPEAKER_00 39:38

Okay, let's google that.

SPEAKER_04 39:40

Yeah, let's let's get let's get on it.

SPEAKER_00 39:42

Okay, most famously, the a a single letter change in this gene dictates whether your underarms produce body odor and determines the physical consistency of your earwax. So I maybe the Asian glow is a different gene, and actually, it's not in completely unique to East Asians, although 80 to 95 percent of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese descent carry it. It does show up in European, African, and South Asian people. It can.

SPEAKER_04 40:14

That's so interesting.

SPEAKER_00 40:17

It also changes the composition of breast milk and can confer chemotherapy resistance.

SPEAKER_04 40:25

This is all from one gene?

SPEAKER_00 40:27

One gene, uh yeah, maybe C C11.

SPEAKER_04 40:34

Damn. So you don't even have to wear do you even have to wear deodorant? You don't have armpit hair and you don't produce body odor. I mean, that must be nice. Would you rather be stinking? Like, would you rather stink?

SPEAKER_00 40:45

I have nothing to compare it to, so it's just like yeah, I mean, and I'm also like, how big of a deal is it if you stink? You just go shower, just take a shower. Um some deodorant.

SPEAKER_04 40:58

See, the thing is, is that um there like there's always up in the air is this, you know, the body the products that we put on our body, what are the long-term effects, and there's not always great research because there's always new things coming out.

SPEAKER_00 41:20

Also, fear mongering, but then there's also real, so it's like first of all, we all have microplastics in our blood, so yeah, we're kind of screwed anyway.

SPEAKER_04 41:30

However, yeah, the the micro the microplastics thing is interesting because the gloves. What's that? The gloves?

SPEAKER_00 41:40

Hesitate to say this. I'm only saying this on this platform because I know you have scientifically minded people who will not take this and run.

SPEAKER_04 41:49

Oh, you're about to do some misinformation? All right, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 41:52

They found out that a lot of the numbers from the from the microplastics study were actually artificially inflated because they were using gloves that had plastic in the gloves. So the reason I say that I don't want people to take this and run and say microplastics aren't bad. There are no micro plastics, microplastics are bad. We're fucked. However, some of the numbers were inflated because I didn't hear that.

SPEAKER_04 42:19

I didn't hear that. So what I what I I did uh see this study that said that there was a method that they were using involves I think vaporizing the polymers or something like that. And that was yeah, see, now I'm I'm about to do my own misinformation. Let me try to look it up real quick.

SPEAKER_00 42:39

That that sounds right. I I only made that face because I I don't know what what you're talking about, not because I think that it's wrong.

SPEAKER_04 42:45

We're talking about two different things, but they both have the same lean. Um, mine uh what I was thinking of, there's a lot of doubt in the high impact papers surv uh uh surrounding microplastics, which they always, you know, for a long time, a lot of the studies have just shown that our bodies are busy. It's almost like we're like just filled up from bottom to the top. We're like mostly we're like mostly plastic, but um the the specific way that they have been trying to detect them. This is from one group, right? So this is it's like you say, scientists are always going back and forth. Um, but the way that they're that they're testing it is perhaps over itself inflating the number. And you're saying, I mean, what you're talking about is like just a straight up first year freshman in lab contamination issue where it's like, oh, I touched it. Oh, and they actually have images. It's straight up latex gloves. They were tet so they were testing the samples, and then as they touch it, the glove pieces of the like pieces of the glove are falling into the sample, and they're like, holy shit. These people have plastic gloves coursing through their veins. It's interesting because you would think, you know, plastics. So we know that like BPA, there we know that certain chemicals are really bad for you. But we have been doing plastics in the country since I want to say around 50s, 60s, 70s. So it's been it's been like two full generations. You would think that if there was a very strong, very significant impact from having all these microplastics, you would think that it would be obvious. Like, right?

SPEAKER_00 44:39

You would Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's interesting. I wonder when or what that would look like. I mean, if there's no microplastics in us, because it was just gloves on the scientists.

SPEAKER_04 44:51

The whole time it was just gloves.

SPEAKER_00 44:52

We get to die of climate change or the next pandemic instead. But to your point, like that's kind of a good point. I don't want to sound like a a microplastic denier, but that's just you know, but sometimes we don't know, you know, like people thought to say that's great for you.

SPEAKER_04 45:10

Did they really? I know that the pub the public may have thought that if they paid like doctors to say, hey, you know, get yourself a good smoke, get a good, get a good smoke, it's good for your baby.

SPEAKER_00 45:23

If you're inhaling like tar.

SPEAKER_04 45:26

It feels good.

SPEAKER_00 45:26

It makes you feel good. I wish I had a cigarette right now.

SPEAKER_04 45:30

It makes you feel good, then it must be good for you. That is, I think that is the first thought that if you don't know anything about anything, and you're just like a conscious being that your species has recently gained the ability to like ask questions like that, I could see how oh, it feels good, so this must be healing or this must be good. Um, but then you start doing science and you're like, no, actually, it has nothing to do with it.

SPEAKER_00 45:57

That's interesting though, because it is an interesting question too. Like, and I'm sure people study this. Like, what is the evolutionary? Like, how do we conceive of like pleasure evolutionarily when sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad? That's like a neuroscience thing, too, I guess.

SPEAKER_04 46:19

Well, yeah, and it and it's I think it's a great example of how in modern times we are taking a brain that evolved for vastly different experiences that are mostly tamed way down, like sugar tastes good, but in the wild, you know, if you eat a wild banana, the shit's like mostly seeds. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 46:44

Sometimes I feel like that the the stakes being so much lower have almost like really like caged our immune or not immune systems, caged our nervous systems to be hyper reactive to like you know, like we're you we're not really like fending off lions anymore or like dying of fucking dysentery dysentery at 18. Yeah, but like so now what we're anxious because we're addicted to TikTok. It's just you're right, it it goes back to this idea that we have these archaic brains that maybe have not evolutionary developed that much. I'm not a neuroscientist, I don't know, but they they do seem wired for almost a different era, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 47:39

If our and go back millions of years, if our ancestors were eating, you know, so much junk food that they were giving themselves health problems, that would not have been like the ones who didn't do that would have just passed on those those genes, right? And so it's like, yeah, food tastes that like I love food so much. Every day I look forward to like what I'm gonna eat at some point in the day, and it because it's so good. But you know, if I wanted to get, I live in LA, and it's like if I wanted to go to a Brazilian steakhouse tonight, and then in the morning I wanted to get breakfast, you know, at some French pastry shop, and then for lunch I wanted to get Thai food. Like I can literally just do that. I don't have to struggle, I don't have to go hunt down a duck or um you know knock a strangle a cow or however, you know, poke it with a spear.

SPEAKER_00 48:33

What are we evolutionarily selecting for? Are we are we evolving at all? Because same thing with like glasses and context, like we would both we'd be goners. Well, I don't know how bad your vision is. I can just see that you wear glasses, but like I would have been a goner, I can't see shit.

SPEAKER_04 48:50

So, like that does how well do you need to be able to see if you're uh like a hunter-gatherer? You don't need to be able to like read signs, right?

SPEAKER_00 49:01

Standing more than seven, eight feet away from me. I don't know who it is. Okay, yeah, it's bad.

SPEAKER_04 49:10

Yeah, that that seems like that seems like it would be bad for sure. How bad is yours? Uh I mean, mine is my left eye is like half as good as it should be, but my right eye is fine. Um, and these are also blue, I have a blue light prescription. I have like this thing where uh the blue light.

SPEAKER_00 49:29

I'm grouping people with me when you would live.

SPEAKER_04 49:32

So we have different struggles. We have different struggles, but I you know what you said, I think it that that's a thought that I've had a lot as well. It's like if we and this is why I think it is not um useful to compare suffering between people, because you know, to build off of what you said a few minutes ago, if we just have these nervous systems that have kind of they've been like modulated for an environment where like half of the animals we encounter may eat us, and then like half of them we may eat, and there may be some that we live, you know, in symbiotically with. And that like that in an environment like that, or like half of the like the random people that you may meet that you don't know throughout your life may pose an imminent threat. Um, maybe they're trying to take your resources, or you know, maybe you have a good community with them, but like maybe you don't, you know, we know that um hunter and gatherers, they were like, you know, they were like territorial, and um, you know, we can see a lot of that behavior in pretty much all you know all animals. If you need if we evolved to absolutely not be apex predators, and there's animals that we you need to have like this healthy fear of, and you need to have like a healthy fear of of people that you don't know, and then you just plop us here. It's not like you can change the genetic code that has us wired to be neurotic in that sense, and then we just we like adapt the neuroticism to the environment around us, which is like a lot of social media, it's it's TikTok.

SPEAKER_00 51:22

I mean of this really funny tweet. It's one of my favorite tweets of all time. It's like people act like overly freaked out and crazy sometimes because you're not supposed to see this many bad bitches, like you like on social media, you might go your whole life without seeing one IG baddie level bad bitch, and when you do, that's like an evolutionary, like and now you just you just see them every day.

SPEAKER_04 51:47

Yeah, you know, that's it. I wonder if anybody has done psychological or sociological research around that idea. I would be interesting to see what the paper would be called, but like dead ass.

SPEAKER_00 51:59

Oh, it was right that's that's a sociological shift in perception of like attractiveness, right?

SPEAKER_04 52:06

And like, you know, I'm thinking of what was it with the um the what was that war? The war with the Spartans and the um the horse, the Trojan horse, the Trojan War, the Trojan War. There's and obviously it's a you know, it's a story, it's a made up, it's a made-up story, but uh it's the woman who long had a who was so beautiful, the face that launched a thousand ships, Helen of Troy. That it's just a story, but you see it, you see it there. It's like you don't, you know, this is like a a one in a million, like the one in a million attractiveness person, but online, yeah. It's like you see you see people who the most attractive people who've ever lived, you know, like physical, uh, surface level attraction, and you just see you just like see them nonstop.

SPEAKER_00 52:56

Yeah, so I think that's an interesting conversation, and I have this um with like women and queer people and people, not that beauty standards don't affect cishet men, but less. I mean, like you guys, like cishet men are allowed to be crusty, they're allowed to be ugly, and I think something that's increasing, but I'm saying that men are allowed to be ugly. Like women, I've noticed more and more as I've gotten older. Of course, when I was young and people were getting bullied, and the go-to insult has always been ugly. But I think more than ever, there is an association of appearance with worth that has gotten heightened to a level, especially for women, that is unprecedented. Um, and I noticed this when I started decoupling or attempting to decouple my self-worth with my attractiveness. I only when I started to do that um did I notice how that is people's go-to insult. Um, and and and usually when you come back with something like, I don't care if you find me attractive, they don't know where to go from there.

SPEAKER_03 54:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:10

Uh it's it's really interesting. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 54:13

Do you I know so you know what you're what what you're saying is I agree, it's like something that's objectively true that you know everybody is kind of gets compared, both all people, no matter their gender, sexuality, whatever, get compared to the most attractive, whatever those qualities are. And so exactly. And so, like traditional beauty standards, it's it is it's very obvious, you know. And I've I've you're you're not the first thing that happened to men.

SPEAKER_00 54:44

I think with men, the big thing is a hype thing. Like, I got straight home girls, and they're like, I it's they do the hype thing, they're like that that's definitely a part.

SPEAKER_04 54:52

I think the height thing is a big one, but I think with men, there's also a very heavy like your financial your socioeconomic status. Um, whether that's like your fame or how much money you make, like height is obviously one, you know, height is one that uh that nobody that like you can't control, right? And I it does seem like with men, you know, and this is just me thinking, there are some physical attractive attraction ones, but there are so many others that don't have anything to do with how you look that men have this wider range of of being and still being seen as attractive, which I think in this conversation we're kind of using as a proxy for like the your so your general social worth that's like tied to a thing, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:50

Yeah, and I think you're right. That's that's to my point, right? Like, I'm not saying it's good that we reduce anything.

SPEAKER_04 55:57

Oh no, I think it's horrible.

SPEAKER_00 55:58

For I think a woman, there's this, and this is really like I don't think this is real life. I think people I would like to believe are like a little less brain rotted than this in real life, but especially online, there's this thing that like once I say you're chopped, you're like worthless. Your opinion doesn't matter, like you will express an opinion. Like, my favorite color is green, and someone will deadass be like, Well, you're ugly, so it doesn't matter. Like, and I think that is done to women way more than men, probably because maybe a man could come back with at least I'm rich or something. But a woman, you know, I'm sure you've seen the gender wars, we don't have to get into it. They're like, Men don't want a woman who's educated, men don't want a woman who's rich.

SPEAKER_04 56:44

Like Yeah, a lot of men openly say that. I also think that that is indicative of the like I've never met a smart person who didn't also want to be around and date a smart, a smart person. No, it's like, no, I don't care like if you're dumb or you know what you're doing in life or you have direction or passions, or I just want you to be this thing. But and there are a lot of people who are like that, and I think that a lot of people don't necessarily examine what they want in a person or like what they feel attraction to or what they try to do to make themselves seem more attractive. And if you never think about that, which it's not like we're taught that in school, how to be that reflective and understand, oh, you know, we live in a society where you're gonna be influenced and encouraged to, if you're a woman, do everything to maximize how you look and like put down other women, maybe. And as a man, it's like you're gonna do everything to maximize like all the resources you can get and take them from everybody else and like fuck everybody else. And we're gonna we don't we don't like go through that education, which I think that we should, because otherwise you just end up absorbing what you absorb and being the way that society makes you exactly because because we don't learn that formally, we're left to be socialized through it.

SPEAKER_00 58:04

And one thing I say or I discussed uh the other day with my friend is the alt-right red pill pipeline, and how you know, I mean, I don't have like that many straight men friends, but the ones I do have have told me that you're missing out, straight friends, but almost every straight man has told me that there was some point in their childhood, early adolescents or adolescents, where they sort of got partially sucked into the manosphere red pill thing, and it took one of their friends, one of their sisters, mother, cousin, to be like, yo, that's some loser shit, yeah, to pull them out of it. And that like that that spiral is so strong through in endpoints that are like usually weightlifting or like video games or something, that like that socialization of men has almost become the default, and it's scary. Like, I saw a TikTok of this girl who was like, I lost my brother to like my my sweet little brother that I've always seen as this little kid playing with toys to like the the man cell, incel red pill, school shooter ass Reddit, and like yeah, it's crazy.

SPEAKER_04 59:21

You know what, so I would go a step further and say that until relatively recently, that idea of red pill, rabbit hole, slippery slope, manosphere was literally just the default for men, period, right? And it's like in and now today there's a lot of people who are like a lot of men, a lot of straight men who are like reaching back for that. They're like pulling back for that. But that's always what it was, right? It was always, oh, you're a man, you need to do all these things, and uh, you know, a woman should never, you know, you do you should never let like a woman is basically below you, right? That's the way that that's historically, especially in this country, that is the social socialization pattern.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:10

I know that men are lonely too. My girlfriend's brother asked his friend to go to the movies with them, and he said, No, I'm bro, that's gay. Like, damn, y'all can't go to the movies. Damn, going to the movies is gay.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:22

I'll be going to the movies all the time. Movies are great. I but what you what you said that you know, the straight men that you've talked to have to that have like illuminated elucidated this experience. I the reason why I say I think that's just the way it used to be, because I'm I'm 35, so I grew up, I was born in 90, grew up in the 90s, early 2000s, and I played sports, I played football, so I was always in a locker room, and it's like that the worst version of what red pill shit that you that you picture now is literally just like how guys were that played, and that's just what it was. And for me, it was only like after I was kind of getting out of football, you know, I got hurt and then I started um studying all this stuff. I met a lot of different people. I started meeting people that were that like to like read interesting things and that knew they came from all these different parts of the world. You know, science is this um thing that brings people, especially in the US, from places literally throughout the world. And I started meeting people that had all you know all these different religions and people that and and so I went through this process myself of like examining all of those beliefs, all the ways that I was socialized and like actually starting to think, well, you know, why like why do I think that? Like what's what's so like what's wrong about being gay in a like what's what is it that's wrong about that? Because people will tell you that it's wrong. I remember being told that by my dad when I was a kid. I remember the lecture he gave me. We were on like a road trip, and uh me and him were awake and everybody else was asleep in the car, and he like gave me this speech about how it's gay, it's it's unacceptable and wrong to be gay. And as a kid, you know, I'm like, oh yeah, like you you're an adult, like I believe you 100%. And then it's like only in examining these things and thinking about all of them, and then thinking about like how that actually relates to what's the worst thing in that environment for men to call each other. And it's some version of a woman, it's pussy, it's a bitch, it's always it's something that's closer to a woman, which is farther than a man, and so then you realize that the the the foundation of all of it, it is this like the gender, this gender difference between where like women are you're less of a you're worse, you're less of a human if you're closer to a woman, which is like what a horrible, horrible mindset to be socialized into.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:04

In that moment where I would even go so far as to say, I think you developing as a scientist probably helped you look at that logically, but there is a moment where it occurs to you, not just men, but anyone who has a belief that may be wrong, there's a moment where that occurs to you, and and there's a choice where it's like, do I dive into this and really explore whether my prior beliefs were wrong, or do I hunker down and and double down? And so I think a lot of men do that in the manosphere thing, and then it's this cycle of like they they develop increasingly alt-right views, which increasingly makes them like sort of like not in the 90s because like I was born in '93 and I was around a lot of that too. Like, but like nowadays it it is kind of like you're an incel that's weird, but then that isolates them further into that incel community, and I feel like they just go down this spiral of denial, whereas actually there is an opportunity to do what you did, which is look at the way you've been socialized and realize it doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:15

Yeah. The hard one of the hardest things I think for us to do, for all of us to do, including scientists right, this is one of the things that you get trained out of you as you're training to be a scientist, is getting rid of like your confirmation bias, examining your assumptions, um, being able to step back and just see the thing objectively. And it's a little bit easier in science, you know. If I, you know, if I if I go study a star system and there's a rocky planet and a gaseous planet, that doesn't really, I'm not really emotionally attached to that. It doesn't, I don't feel some type of way that it's a uh a gas giant and a rocky planet instead of like two rocky planets or or seven rocky planets.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:02

I would say that maybe it's different in my field, but I think we're still biased towards positive results. Everyone wants to publish in Sale Nature and Science that they found the the biomarker for immunotinescence. No one wants to sit to publish that I thought this biomarker was good and it's not.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:20

I definitely agree that there's a bias towards because there's also other things that come into that, right? It's like there's recognition, there's the status. Very important. Like your livelihood as a researcher in academia is directly tied to your ability to have high impact papers. Um so definitely, definitely agree with that. But I do think that there's there's there's something to be said that or like a lesson to learn from that and the beliefs that we have that are tied to our identity. You know, like the number of planets out there is actually not a part of my identity as a person. But the way that you see yourself and your value in your gender or your age group or whatever, in your your social circle, that actually is very closely tied to your identity and oftentimes your ego. And so those are the things that are really, really hard for us to examine, to try and poke holes in, to try and falsify, which is what we're always in science, you're always trying to falsify. And if you can't falsify it, then we say that it's true for now, at least.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:30

Because there's more emotional weight. And no one, someone might wake up and say, I want to do this experiment to find out if this is true or not. But people don't typically wake up and say, Wow, let's deconstruct my idea of self. Like because that's painful, I would go so far as to say.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:48

Yeah, yeah. Anybody out there listening though, deconstruct your idea of self. It's a great, it's a great place to, it's a great thing to deconstruct. And because it's painful, but because you can build it back however you want. And and you know, just the nature of being a child, unless you had the perfect friends and parents and all this stuff, it's unlikely that your idea of self is something that you constructed from values that you vetted and goals and and objectives that are important to you. But you can do that. Like, that's one of the cool things about being a conscious human being, is that we that is something that we can do.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:30

And I would go so far as to say, you're saying, like, what if you had a perfect childhood, perfect parents? And I think about that sometimes. Like, what would a person look like with no trauma? However, I think that I would go further and say, there is no way, even if it was perfect and they had all the right beliefs, right? So they're not racist or transphobic or anything, even then, you still haven't created a sense of self, you have still inherited their values. Those values are better, right? Because they're not racist, sexist, transphobic, misogynist, and blah blah blah. Obviously, those are better values to have, but they're still not even yours.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:05

Because you never deconstructed them.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:06

Yeah, uh, that's a that's a good point. There's no there's no getting around it. Yeah, you can't, yeah, there's no shortcut, you can't gloss over it no matter what. It's something that that you should do. And then like continuing that practice throughout throughout your life, very important. Damn, we uh been going for a while. I feel like we covered the gamut, like we covered a wide range of of topics. Well, sir, I appreciate you coming on. Um, like I said, this is the first interview that I'll have done for Dr. Star Kid, and it was a pleasure, honored that you could join me.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:48

On Dr. Star Kid, I can't wait to see if anyone tops this. Probably not gonna no, I'm just fucking with you. No, it really wasn't honored.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:56

You're setting a hard, you said a high bar.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:58

No, but it really was like a pleasure. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:01

So, do you have anything that you want to plug? I don't know if you do or not.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:06

I know you kind of lay you kind of lay I'm on the the lookout for uh tenure track faculty positions and or potentially pulse docs in the cardiac IPSC space. I mean, I still have an Instagram, I'm not doing the whole content creation thing. I may return to it.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:26

Yeah, I don't really have anything to uh no no you know I'm counting on. Can I count on you that when I hit 70, 80, 90, you're going to have a heart for me or a method that I can go to using my own plural potent cells to recreate my own heart?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:49

Yes, I will make you one. Okay, thank you.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:53

Appreciate that. All right, Dr. Sa, it's been real. Uh, as always, out there, lead with curiosity.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:02

Nice.