Ologies with Alie Ward - Audiobook Mixtape 3: Gift Ideas from the Ologists’ Brains

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

You like Ologists. Ologists write books. You like books, so let’s dive into a new, curated sampler platter from your favorite guests’ books.. Fill your ears with dark carnivals, boney catacombs, Rocky Mountain bears and wolves, flies you should love, maggots that make you beautiful, fungus that might be evil, why you should not care what other people eat, queer dolphins, invisible moose, monkey facts, fitness/mental health tips, and how to save money at the salon. Let this melange of literary snippets serve as a refresher of favorite episodes, a teaser for ones you haven’t heard, or just a gentle nudge toward a bookshop. (Or the link below to buy online.)Links to these books (& the Ologists’ episodes)2019’s Audiobook Mixtape 1 Episode2021’s Audiobook Mixtape 2 EpisodeA donation went to 826LA.orgSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio ProductionsManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

I can open a cold, soodie pop. You ready for this? This is a fun one. This is a weird one. It's an audiobook mixtape for you. Let's get into it. Oh, hey, it's a librarian who smells like vanilla extract and never judges you for your queries.

Alliward, and come take a seat, fire aside for this. This is our third ever audiobook mixtape. We're in. We read you excerpts from books written by belovedologists that you already know. So the holidays are upon us. Gift lists are full of bullshit. So maybe get a loved one, the magic of knowledge. Perhaps about how to build a bad house

or indigenous thoughts on animal crossings. If you have ADHD, the flies that make your birthday cake even better, strapping machines to your brain, the dark secrets that America has built on, and how to cultivate hope for the future. But before we crack this vine of these impressive works of nonfiction, just a quick caution for Apple podcast users. So I just find out that the new iOS 17 update unsubscribes people if they haven't listened to an episode in more than two weeks. So please make sure that you hit the follow button next to Oligies.

Or else you're gonna miss on some real quality stuff that we got coming around. So tell your friends. Also, if you'd like to become a patron, sign up for as little as a buck a month at patreon.com slash Oligies. You can submit questions for Oligists. We also have discussion threads every week that I chime in on. You can also support the show with Alligy's merch at AlligySmarch.com, or by leaving us a review, such as this new wet-winged one from Liz Fan 67 who wrote, Delight Alligy. I present as a grumpy, unwashed, 56-year-old cis, straight white male.

But this show brings out my inner rainbow butterfly, and I flit about giggling the whole time I listen. So informative, so funny, absolutely adorable. LizFan67, you've never looked better. Thank you very much for that and everyone who left reviews. And again, if you listen on Apple, make sure that you stay subscribed. Check that button. It really matters a lot and a lot of podcasters quite frankly are pissed about this update. Because people are missing episodes, so spread the word.

Okay, I love making these appetizer platter of books for you. So on to this wonderful moulage of book excerpts to wet your appetite, fill your shopping list, and expand your brain a little bit as I read some to you with my mouth. It's like I'm writing a book. open your ears for audiobook mixtape number three. Okay, this first one is from an episode that was clearly fascinating in its transparency and intrigue. So, what if you could cruise through life and subway turn styles without anyone detecting you? How far are we from that?

And can it happen soon so that I can be a stowaway on a first-class flight to an island? Get a gander at the writing of our invisible photography guest, Dr. Gregg Gabore, who wrote the 2023 book Invisibility, The History and Science of How Not to be Seen. So he chose this snippet for me to read. Okay. The announcement in the year 2000 of a perfect lens made of artificial materials not found in nature, now called, Minimaterials, could be said to mark an entirely new era in optical physics. For the entire history of natural inquiry, scientists and natural philosophers had been asking, what is light? And what can light do?

With the introduction of Menematerials, researchers were now asking, how can we make light do whatever we wanted to do? Many of the rules that optical scientists have labored under for years now turned out to be more like guidelines. This naturally led many researchers to wonder what else can we do with such materials. One answer, as we now see, was design a cloak of invisibility.

So that was from Dr. Greg Gabors invisibility, the history and science of how not to be seen. And unlike its topic, you can see and buy this book. I'll do that. Now, if only a moose could lope into a bass pro shop and buy an invisibility cloak. Although honestly, when it comes to cars and collisions, someone life does not need invisibility tech, because we're watching TikTok as we drive. So we had a recent episode on Roadkill with author Ben Golfarb, who wrote Eager, which is your favorite book about the beaver,

and his new one is called Crossings. How Road Ecology is shaping the future of our planet. And we got to talk to him a few weeks ago, but we missed so much of what's in his book. So I'm going to read you a little bit about bears, bonyards, how roads, bisected wetlands, how dedicated passages are helping, and how this man started researching and describing and smelling roadkill as a job. He writes, my own introduction to road ecology came in 2013. The year that I embarked on a trip across the continent

to write about an extraordinary scheme called the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. The goal of Yellowstone to Yukon or Y to Y is boggling. It advocates envision a network of connected habitats that would permit animals to wander unhindered along the spine of the Rockies, a region that spans five American states and four Canadian provinces and territories. Such a corridor would preserve migration routes for elk and caribou, permit far-ranging creatures such as wolves to mingle and mate,

and help sensitive animals like walrines flee northward as climate change nips at their heels. The initiative's emblem is the grizzly, whose expansive requirements make it a useful proxy for other forms of life. An ecosystem that can support bears is probably healthy enough for everyone else. To the uninitiated, it sounded far fetched. Soon after Yellowstone to Yukon's inception, the West Wing peridied as the Wolves Only Roadway, the vanity project of humorless tree huggers who get laughed out of the White House.

But the show's writers, like most of Y-to-Y's critics, misunderstood the concept. Y-to-Y wasn't a discrete pathway. It was a continental jigsaw riddled with missing pieces, most of them at the fragile margins where wild lands and settlements collided. The mission of Y-2Y and its many partners was to plug those holes, to help bears and other animals safely navigate the Rockies without running a foul of humans. In British Columbia, I toured protected grain fields that grizzlies use to commute between mountain ranges at night.

In Montana, I sniffed awful in an electric fenced paddock where ranchers were composting their dead cows, rather than permitting them to fester in bare and enticing bone yards. Few travelers, human or earth sign, can resist fast food. Yet, why do wise deepest cuts remained mostly unhealed? The region was driven by enough numbered roads to Phyllis Adoku puzzle. I90 in Highway 3 in Highway 20, routes 95 and 40 and 12 and 212 spider webbed, otherwise wild winds.

I drove highways that ended lives. I lost track of how many elk littered the shoulder on crow's nest pass, and others that cleaved grizzly populations into lonely clusters. Roads, I began to realize, were not merely a symptom of civilization, but a distinct disease. Among the roads within the Y to Y quarters Ambit was US 93, which traverses Montana on its 1300 mile jaunt from Arizona to the Canadian border. Like so many highways, US 93 had been built heedlessly in the 1950s, plowing through wetlands,

elk meadows, and a vast reservation belonging to the confederated elk meadows, and a vast reservation belonging to the confederated elk meadows, and the vast reservation belonging to the confederated Salish and Kutne tribes. When in the 1990s, state and federal agencies sought to expand US-93 from two lanes to four, tribal officials demanded the chance to provide input on the reconstruction.

A wider, faster road might be safer for drivers, but it would also slaughter more deer, elk, bears, and other animals foundational to the tribe's culture. The road is a visitor, the tribes insisted, that should respond to and be respectful of the land in the spirit of place. The Salish and Kutne flexed their legal and moral muscles, and when US-93 was finally reconstructed, engineers included around 40 wildlife crossings, a network of underpasses, tunnels, and culverts that allowed animals to slink beneath the highway unimpeded. Roadside fencing kept creatures off the highway

and guided them toward the passages. The project's flagship structure was an elegant bridge designed principally for that avatar of wildness, the Grizzly Bear. In aerial photos, the overpass looked at once futuristic and anachronistic, a green parabola that vaulted over the highway with middle earthish grace. If roads were a disease, wildlife crossings seemed like a treatment. So are darling, dashing, and vulnerable critters need you to maybe slow down, especially during this time of year, when collisions with wildlife are most common. So be especially vigilant at night because you don't want animals to have a funeral because of you or your relatives to have your funeral Not to get too dark, but yes, you can see the road ecology episode for more

So let's move along to two kid-friendly books for the wee ones on your list So the first comes to you from Georgia written by wildlife biologist Mr. L. Troutman who you may have heard in 2020's Black AF in STEM episode about Black Birders Week. And Al has written numerous field guides for kids and adults of places like Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Colorado, New York, and now Georgia. So Al, Alex is just a wonderful guy. He's hilarious and kind and a dedicated nature nerd with a really warm heart and his latest release is just a few months old, Critters of Georgia, pocket guide to animals in your state, which features photos and really fascinating info of local fauna. So here's a bit

from that, which I think you will like. He writes, my passion for nature started when I was young. I was always amazed by the sunlit fiery glow of the red-tailed hawks as a sword overhead when I He writes, snakes and coyotes, I found a passion for nature and the environment. Stumbling across conservationists like Steve Irwin and Jeff Corwin and Jacana introduced me to the field of wildlife biology as a career and gave birth to a dream that I was to accomplish and live out, serving as a fish and wildlife biologist for government agencies, as well as in the private sector. My childhood dream was driven by a desire to learn more about the different types of ecosystems and the animals that call our wild places home.

Books and field guides like this wet my thirst for knowledge. Even before I could fully understand the words on the pages, I was drawn to books and flashcards that had animals on them. I could soon identify every animal I was shown and tell a fact about it. I hope that this edition of Critters of Dorejoy can be the fuel that sustains your passion

for not only learning about wildlife, but also for caring for the environment and making sure that all are welcome in the outdoors. For others, may this book be the spark that ignites a flame for wildlife preservation and environmental stewardship. I hope that this book inspires children from lower socioeconomic and minority backgrounds to pursue their dreams to the fullest and be unapologetically themselves. By profession, I'm a fish and wildlife biologist, and I'm a nature enthusiast through and through. My love for nature includes making sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to enjoy

the outdoors in their own way. So as you use this book, I encourage you to be intentional in inviting others to appreciate nature with you. Enjoy your discoveries and stay curious. Alex Trollin. He writes of Georgia, Georgia is famous for its warm climate, rich history, and its many peach orchards. For more than 12,000 years, Georgia has been home to many groups of indigenous people, from the Paleo-Indian period, 12,000 to 8,000 years ago, two familiar groups such as the Cherokee, the Creek, Chixa, Chakta, the Appalachian, many others. The first Europeans to visit Georgia were Spanish-Conquistadors, including Hernando de Soto,

who visited in 1540. The British claimed Georgia as a colony in 1732, making it one of the original 13 colonies. It was named for the king at the time, King George II. After the Revolutionary War, Georgia became an American state, and the US government forcibly removed many of the indigenous people on the Trail of Tears, a forced march to reservations in Oklahoma without adequate food or clothing leading to the death of thousands of people. Georgia was later the site of many important events in US history, from famous civil war battles to the civil rights movement. And today, the state is well known for high-tech industries as a popular filming location and of course, for its agriculture. Georgia has several

different biomes, or large areas with different plant and animal communities. In the northwest is the Appalachian Plateau, which has a 2,390-foot tall lookout mountain. The blue ridge mountains are found in the northeast, with the highest point being 4784 feet. The area also includes forests of poplar, oak, and hickory trees, many of which are covered in the creepy, cool Spanish moss. The southern part of the state is home to the Atlantic coastal plain, with rivers, swamps, and the Atlantic Ocean. Georgia is home to part of the Okofanoki swamp, one of the largest swamps in North America.

These many types of environments shelter a huge variety of animals and plants. The state is home to more than 80 different kinds of mammals, more than 400 bird species, and more than 170 species of reptiles and amphibians. This is your guide to the animals, birds, and reptiles and amphibians that call Georgia home. So that was from Critters of Georgia, written by Alex Trautman,

who has an incredible name for someone who looks at fish and mammals and reptiles doing his dream job. So from the wetlands and beaches and forests of Georgia, we head to the jungles, which are the focus of fieldwork for Dr. Tara Stowinsky, who you may remember from the Gorillalogy episode. So she wrote a book called,

The Fantastic World of Monkeys and Apes and More, an educational children's primate book featuring Gorillas, Lemurs, Orangutans, Bebun's, Champions, and more, a wonderful primates book for jungle loving kids. And Dr. Stowinsky is the president and the CEO of the Diane Fossi Gorilla Fund, which is a Gorilla conservatory in Africa. And she's authored over 90 scientific publications and books.

She got her PhD from the Georgia Institute for Technology. So here, some monkey and ape facts that you can tell your coworker over the holiday party punchball when you've exhausted the topic of whether it will snow tomorrow or not. Here we go, some fun facts. So mandrels are the largest monkeys. And one of the most colorful primates. So males have vibrant colors of red, blue, and purple on their face with golden yellow

beards and the more colorful they are, the more attractive they appear. And males have also red and blue butts to attract mates and be more visible in the forests. Male mandrels will lose color as they lose status in social groups, which has got a hurt. They're like as big as a baseball bat, but chunkier. And they live in the middle of the continent of Africa. But headed to Japan are Japanese macaques, and they are also known as snow monkeys, and they're famous for using hot springs to bathe and warm up when the weather gets cold. And young Japanese macaques, they roll up snowballs just for fun, and then they shed their thick

winter coat in the summer when the temperature is rise. Overall though, their fur is much thicker to keep a warm in snowy environments. They're like as big as a car tire. Moving on to bonobos and chimpanzees, there are closest living relatives, but unlike chimpanzees, the bonobo society is matriarchal, where females are dominant over males.

Even though males are like a hundred pounds and four feet and females are like 65 pounds, but bonobos are capable of laughing as a display of emotion and playful behavior, and they have dark skin on their face and hands and feet. They're a little smaller than chimpanzees, but they have longer legs, and they're more comfortable walking upright

than chimpanzees are. They live in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and her book doesn't say this, but I hear that they're very horny. So there's a book that gives you a peek and know what it's like to howl from a tree and display your butt to your family and maybe eat bugs off the scalp of your best friend and play around with snowballs. Because it's a monkey, you get to sometimes just hang out in a spa and have snowball fights.

How can you be a human ape and play forever? I don't know. Ask Jeanicula Traumatology Guest and orthopedic surgeon Dr. Kevin Stone, who fixed Jared's shredded ACL a few years ago. So he's like a well-regarded wizard of sports injuries and creaking ease, and his book is called Play Forever, How to Recover From Injury and Thrive. And he gives us kind of a gentle kick in the pants to stay active for fun and for our mental health. And also to reduce the costs of fixing a shredded ACL.

I'm just gonna lay down and read my book. I wish we had this book sooner, to be honest. Let's hear some. He writes, the obvious lesson, we defeat ourselves far more often than our opponents defeat us. Unforced errors in tennis are not just the problems of novices, they pervade sports. Despite the best coaching, phenomenal physical training, fitness, vast sums of money, and

even decades of experience, we often remain our own worst enemies. The patterns that serve or obstruct even great athletes are often learned on children's playgrounds, on youth teams, and through parenting. The phenomenal success of players, such as Roger Federer, Tiger Woods, and Serena Williams, are brought to a stop by psychological weaknesses, distractions that cause them to lose their swing, their temper, or their confidence, despite seeming at the top of their game. Federer Woods and Williams were coached to stunning physical success, but left mentally exposed. Consistently, the one weakness that is most difficult to fix in athletes lies in the mind itself.

Mental conditioning, the approach to an injury and its recovery, the overcoming of psychological blocks that prevent a physical superstar from being a winner, these are so ingrained that they remain the most difficult weaknesses to fix. Yet, it's not impossible to change. We can work on these issues, and many doctors and mental empowerment coaches are successful at it. The first step, a simple but crucial one, is to understand that the body and mind are irrevocably linked.

This doesn't only apply to competitive athletes, but to everyone, whether they're dealing with a changing body, playing amateur sports, or simply living. A brain is attached to each body I repair. This is obvious, but in treating the whole patient, I'm cognizant of the importance of mental processes as they relate to treatment. The mental health of an injured patient brings another dimension both to their healing and

their ability to excel. In short, our daily mental health defines what our body is able to achieve. Naomi Osaka poignantly brought this to light in her refusal to undergo the ritual press conference drilling in the 2021 French Open. Over decades of practicing medicine, I have identified particular mental qualities that enable people to shine, not just athletically, but in all they do. This is a good place to start this book, in the unseen and often underappreciated aspect of fitness and health that can ensure you play forever and play well. These eight mental fitness objectives are competitiveness, grit, attention, fantasy, patience, acceptance, grace, and kindness and competency.

While these qualities are what take supreme athletes to the top, they're applicable to all aspects of your life. Pay attention to your own mental game. On the courts, or the play field, or the race course, and in day-to-day interactions at work and home. Strengthening each of these qualities is the cornerstone of fitness. So don't ignore your noggins, people. Now on the topic of playing, but maybe in a less active way,

like when you're done rowing for the day. Dr. Jane McGonagall is a ledologist. And in her episode, we chatted all about video games and what they do for our brains and friendships. So if you're looking for a dose of hope from someone who has a PhD in it, she recently came out with a book called, Imaginable, How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything,

even things that seem impossible today. And in it, she writes, Before we start your imagination training, I want to ask you three questions that will give you a baseline sense of your future mindset. Question one, when you think about the next 10 years, do you think things will mostly stay the same and go on as normal? Or do you expect that most of us will dramatically rethink and reinvent how we do things?

Rate your outlook on a scale of 1 to 10. One is almost everything stays the same. 10 is almost everything will be dramatically different. Question number two, when you think about how the world and your life will change over the next 10 years, are you mostly worried or mostly optimistic? Rate your outlook on a scale of 1 to 10. One is extremely worried and 10 is extremely optimistic. Question number three.

How much control or influence do you feel you personally have in determining how the world and your life changes over the next 10 years? Rate your outlook on a scale of 1 to 10. One is almost no control or influence. 10 is almost complete control or influence. So these three questions give you a good idea of the kind of imagination training we're going to do in this book.

In fact, each of the three parts of the book is specifically designed to increase your score on one of these questions by at least one point. First, we're going to focus on the opportunity for rethinking and reinventing. Why rethinking and reinventing? Well, it's easy to prepare for futures that are similar today.

It's the dramatically different stuff that catches us off guard. So it's important to spend time getting ready for the futures that will feel stranger and less familiar. Focusing on rethinking and reinventing also puts us in a better position to help decide how the future will be different. Having lived through the COVID-19 pandemic, each of us will know for the rest of our lives that almost anything can change virtually overnight, for worse or for better. We know that it's absolutely possible to make radical changes on how we live,

work, learn, and care for each other, and to make those changes fast. This gives us a collective power of imagination, unprecedented in human history. We need to use this moment strategically and creatively. Second, I want to help you create a more balanced mindset between hopes and worries for the future. At the Institute for the Future, we call this using your positive imagination and your shadow imagination. Positive imagination asks the question, what's something good that could happen? It builds confidence that the future will better.

Shadow imagination asks the question, what's something bad that could happen? And it builds readiness to face future challenges. So whatever your instinctive feelings are about the future right now, you'll benefit from cultivating at least a little bit of the flip side feeling. So I'll teach you imagination techniques that help you see both sides of the future, the risks that it makes sense to worry about, and the opportunities that are caused for optimism. The risks that it makes sense to worry about and the opportunities that are caused for optimism. Just know that wherever you are right now in your outlook on the future is fine. Whether you're super worried, super optimistic, or somewhere in between, be ready to

stretch your imagination in the opposite direction. So you can hold both hopes and worries in mind at the same time. As you develop your positive and shadow imagination, you might be surprised to find seeing risks more clearly and defining your worries more concretely can actually help you feel more hopeful. As you get better at anticipating global challenges, you'll feel more optimistic overall. There's a good reason for this paradox.

You're increasing your awareness, not just of what might go wrong, but also of the bold plans and innovative solutions that are already being envisioned and implemented. And deep down, you know that you're putting yourself in a stronger position to help yourself and others by seriously imagining a future crisis instead of denying that it could ever happen.

Finally, we'll focus on building your confidence and how much influence you have to help determine how the future turns out. So this book is more than just anticipating the future. It's about acting to create the future you want. Happier, healthier, safer, more just, more sustainable, more beautiful, more equitable. So that is a book on how to hope for the future by Dr. Jane McGonagall.

And what else is in store for us in the future? Maybe some wearable tech that reads our dang minds. So Dr. Nita Farhani of the neuro technology, which was the AI and brain tech episode wrote this book called The Battle for Your Brain, defending the right to think freely in the age of neuro technology. And she tells us about wearing a brain scanner device, which is casually connected to a phone. Oh, hi, the future. I didn't realize that you were standing right there. So she writes, I'm trying to get the birds to sing. If I can calm my mind just enough, they will sing. Though I've tried to convince my children otherwise, I don't have magical powers. I'm wearing a simple headband embedded with electrodes that detect my brain wave activity

and send it via Bluetooth to an application on my iPhone. Brain waves, the oscillating electrical voltages in your brain, are small in size just a few millions of a volt, but they reveal a lot about the inner workings of your mind. When I relax into a meditative state, my alpha brain wave activity rises, and the app rewards me with the sound of singing birds. This neurofeedback technique has proven powerful

in preventing the migraine attacks that have dog meat since childhood. Having used the device a number of times, I know how to increase my alpha waves, the pattern of electrical activity produced by the brain when you're feeling calm and peaceful and reduce my beta wave activity, the higher speed brain waves that occur when you're wide awake and thinking. I focus on a happy memory. My eldest daughter, Aristella, is just three years old, and we are hiking as a family to a waterfall in the mountains of North Carolina.

The season is late fall. Afternoon sun, glistens through the trees, still dotted with red and orange as we crunch through the fallen leaves beneath our feet. I can almost feel the sun on my face and hear the water gurgling over water-worn rocks. In my mind, I hear our still as peels of laughter as she races a leaf downstream against one tossed in by my husband's feet. JAPJAP! The app confirms that my brain is responding. Whether we're meditating, doing a math calculation, we're calling a phone number, or browsing through our mental... the source, or just the right word, neurons are firing in our brains,

creating minuscule electrical discharges. When a mental state like relaxation or stress is dominant. Hundreds and thousands of neurons are firing in characteristic patterns that can be measured with an electrocephalogram or EEG. Scientists used to have to place electrodes directly on the periosteum, the inner layer of the scalp to pick up brain waves, and the procedure required surgery under anesthesia

and carried risks, including fever, infection, and leaking brain fluid. Today, the electrodes can be placed externally on the forehead or the surface of the scalp. EEG devices detect and record brain waves in terms of cycles per second known as hertz. Alpha waves, for example, clock in at the 8 to 13 hertz range. Had I wanted to, I also could have placed electrodes over the muscles on my body to measure the signals I sent to them while I was meditating.

Our brains are constantly transmitting signals to our peripheral nervous system, the parts of the nervous system beyond the brain and the spinal cord. Electro-miography, or EMG, can be used to detect the electrical activity in response to a nerve stimulation of the muscle in millivolts, ranging from 0 to 10 millivolts. Together, EEG and EMG give us a window on what our brain is up to at any given moment, including the instructions it's sending to the rest of the body. Our use of EEG and EMG draws on discoveries made by two Italian scientists in the late 1700s,

regarding the electric battery and bioelectric activity in the body. More recent technological leaps in neuroscience and artificial intelligence have converged to give us consumer neurotech devices. A catch-all term for gadgets that connect human brains to computers and the ever more sophisticated algorithms that allow those computers to analyze the data they receive.

At first, neuroscientists brightly dismissed all these consumer devices as inaccurate and unvalidated, little better than choice. But as both the hardware and software improved, consumer neurotech became more accurate and harder to dismiss. The average tech-savvy person can now see their emotions and arousal and alertness and track how efficiently they are meditating. Personal neurotech devices are just one part of the growing category of wearable tech, which allows the average technophile to quantify their bodily functions.

The category is so popular that as of 2020, nearly one out of every five Americans was using one. There are more than 300,000 different mobile health apps available worldwide, a number that's doubled in just five years, with an estimated market value surpassing $100 billion. Globally, the market for neuro technology is growing at a compounded annual rate of 12%, and is expected to reach $21 billion by 2026. Consumers can see graphic displays of their

brain activity in real time, delta, which is dreamless sleep, theta, deep relaxation, day dreaming, in really focused, alpha, very relaxed, taking a break, meditating, beta, aroused, engaged, stressed, and gamma, concentrating waves, as well as patterns of blood flow in their brains and even bioelectric changes in their muscles. Self-tracking is far more than a fad. It's a new way of living and thinking about ourselves. So that was from Dr. Nita for honey's, the battle for your brain, defending the right to think freely in the age of neurotechnology. And on the topic of your brain and mine, let's learn a little more about ADHD, shall we? Y'all loved the attention deficit neuropsychology episode

with global ADHD expert, Dr. Russell Barkley, who's written so many books on the topic. Most notable, perhaps, is the updated edition of Taking Charge of Adult ADHD, proven strategies to succeed at work, at home, and in relationships. But how do you know if it's ADHD? That is the biggest question I feel like I hear from listeners.

So, Dr. Barkley gives us some examples of the patients he might see. There's a funny thing about ADHD. Perhaps because it's impact on achievement is so well known, many people blame the disorder when they don't meet their own standards for accomplishment. Do any of these people sound like you? Joe decided to become a doctor when he was in high school. So he chose a college with a great biology department and a high rate of admission to medical schools. He got into that university only on the waiting list, but at least he got in. Once he was there though, every science course was a struggle for him.

By junior year, his GPA was hovering under 3.0 and he had already taken organic chemistry three times without passing. Joe started to wonder what in the world was wrong with him. He worked so hard, he wanted this so badly, and he was just as intelligent as an ex-guy, wasn't he? By the time Joe had graduated from college and taken the MCAT with disappointing results, he was convinced there was something really wrong with him. An awful lot of his fellow students seemed to have glided along the path that Joe had carved out for himself, yet he was stalled.

It was looking like he might never get into medical school. So Joe decided to have himself evaluated for ADHD. More he read about it, the more he thought this explained his whole problem. The evaluator disagreed, so to the one from whom Joe sought a second opinion. And then third. Carrie fell into a similar trap. Identified as gifted when she was young,

she had been brought up to believe that she should be gifted in doing just about everything in life. When Carrie started hopping from one type of job to another after college, she and her family decided she might have ADHD, which was the only explanation they could come up with for why she kept failing at jobs that should, according to her IQ, be a snap for her. As it turned out, ADHD wasn't the problem, but anxiety was. Carrie didn't like to admit that she found herself almost paralyzed by fear when she started

a new job, and that this made it really hard for her to concentrate on her work. Fortunately, the evaluator from whom she sought a diagnosis of ADHD discovered the real problem and was able to refer her to a therapist who specialized in anxiety disorders. This therapist offered not only treatment and coping strategies, but helped carry except her diagnosis without shame. Cal didn't have any particular reason, such as an IQ score or comparison to a peer group for believing that he had ADHD other than that he was currently in a dead-end job, changed jobs often and impulsively, and had very few

friends and no girlfriend. He believed his life should be different, and had apparently cast around over the years for an explanation for why it wasn't. My colleagues and I have seen numerous people like Cal who simply feel that if they're not getting what they want out of life, there must be some psychological deficit at work. None of us can explain this phenomenon. It's almost the opposite of the TV singing contest shows where the contestant clearly can't stay on key and yet believes rigidly that she's destined for a vocal stardom.

In this case the person believes he cannot perform well in life when in fact he does perform as well as most people even if it's not up to his own internal standard. To adopt a standard for defining the term impairment, other than comparison with the true norm, is like something out of Alice in Wonderland, where nothing is as it seems, and words can have whatever meaning one wishes to give them. Saying that a person functioning as well as, or even better than the average, or typical population, yet can still be impaired, makes a mockery of the term disorder and does a disservice to those struggling with really not being able to function as well as the norm.

If the professional says you do not have ADHD, any of the following could be responsible for ADHD-like symptoms, like being over the age of five or perimenopausal, when increased forgetfulness, distractibility, and disorganization are normal. Recent medical problems such as thyroid dysfunctions, sleep disorder, or apnea, or strep throat, though this particular connection is rare. Excessive recreational drug use, like marijuana, alcohol cocaine, methamphetamine, and so on, which can result in attention, memory, and organizational problems. Unusual stress, though the ADHD-like symptoms would then be temporary, were injury to the

regions of the brain responsible for sustained attention, behavioral inhibition, working memory, and emotional self-control. Any of these possible causes should have been uncovered by the evaluation, and the practitioner should refer you to the appropriate professionals to follow up on them. So those are explanations for why people may not have ADHD, but get yourself to the three-part episode we did on ADHD, which is linked on our website. It'll be at alliword.com slashologies, slash bookworm three, but you do not have to remember that. It's linked in the show notes, so see those episodes about what it's like to have ADHD, where it comes from therapies, all kinds of studies on that with Dr. Russell Barkley. But his book is taking charge of adult ADHD. So if that's adding up, see a

doc speaking of addition. Hey, is math real? It's not a not smart question. So says Dr. Eugenia Cheng of the abstract math and mythology episode. So she wrote this book, Is Math Real? How simple questions lead us to mathematics deepest truths. And let's just shoot out of the gate with an excerpt from her introduction in which I learned that we have the same hairstylist. She writes, when I was in school, one of my favorite classes was the one

in which we made stuffed animals. I made a fluffy poodle and a sleeping puppy with soft, velvety ears. I love the whole process. from cutting out the pieces, seeing how they miraculously fit together to make it a animal and sewing them together to the magical moment of turning the whole thing inside out and the joy of stuffing it so that it seemed to come alive. Why make a stuffed animal when you can just buy one?

Why make anything yourself when you can just get it ready made instead? Sometimes it's because the ones we make ourselves are better. I find homemade cakes much more delicious than store-bought ones, but sometimes things we make ourselves aren't objectively better. I enjoy playing the piano, although I can hear much better performances if I put on a recording or go to a concert. I even enjoy occasionally making my own clothes, although they're far from perfect. Sometimes it's because it's cheaper. It's much cheaper for me to cut my own hair. So I do, even though a professional haircut would look better. But often, it's just satisfying to make something yourself. This is true for me for food,

music, clothes, but different people find different things satisfying. Another variation on this theme is the idea of climbing a rock face just with your bare hands. Well, thanks. Climbing Mount Everest without oxygen, also not for me, or rolling across the Atlantic. I'll pass on that too. Or perhaps it's like going on a camping expedition where you carry everything on your back, including your food and your tent so that you can spend a little while being self-sufficient out in the wild.

For me, math is also about making something myself. It's about making truth myself. It's about being self-sufficient out in the wild world of ideas. This, to me, is an immensely exciting, daunting, awe-inspiring, and ultimately joyful experience. And this is what I want to describe. I want to describe what math feels like in a way that is quite different from how it's often thought of. I will describe the expansive side of math, the creative, the imaginative, the exploratory,

the part where we dream, follow our nose, listen to our gut instinct, and feel the joy of understanding, like sweeping away fog and seeing sunshine. This is not a math textbook, nor is it a math history book. It's a math emotions book. Math inspires rather different emotions in different people, and unfortunately for some people it mostly represents fear and the memory of being made feel stupid. I would like to show math in a different emotional light. Some people love math and some people hate it. And unfortunately, the way some of the math lovers talk

about it makes the other people hate it even more. The thing is that there are two very different reasons people love math. Some people like it because they think it has clear, right and wrong answers. They find it easy to get the answers and this makes them feel smart. Some people dislike it for more or less the same reason, but the other way around.

It has clear, right and wrong answers, but they find it hard to get the answers, and this makes them feel stupid. Or, most likely, they're made to feel stupid by people who get the answers more easily, and they don't even like the idea of clear answers. They see the subtle nuances of life, and they don't think that something so black and white can capture what they find most interesting about life. However, this image of a rigid world with clear answers is a very limited view of what math is like. Habs strapped math really doesn't have

such clear, right, and wrong answers, especially not at a research level, but only a small proportion of people ever make it to that stage to see what it's really like. And the extraordinary thing is that those mathematicians often love math for the same reasons that math phobic people dislike it. They are interested in subtlety and nuance to express and explore what is most interesting about life.

Deep down, math isn't about clear answers, but about increasingly nuanced worlds in which we can explore different things being true. So there is this curious effect. Research, mathematicians, and math phobic people have some similar attitudes toward math. It's just that for the former group, those attitudes are nurtured and celebrated,

but for the latter, they are met with disdain or even ridicule. And the latter people may never find out how close their thoughts and feelings are to those of a research mathematician. So you are smarter than you think, and your brain works more like smart people when you ask not smart questions. Verified by a mathematician. And yeah, sometimes DIY offers gratification that buying things with one single click just can't. Unless it's a book by one of my favorite guests of all time, Chi-Reptorologist Dr. Merlin Tuttle is a legend in the world of bad experts. See the two-part Chi-Reptorology episode to fall in love with his bad-filled brain and his giant heart.

So in his 2022 book, The Bat House Guide, Merlin Tuttle affirms DIY aspirations, so long as it helps our furry flying little friends, and he writes, bats are essential, but populations are an alarming decline nearly everywhere, often due to loss of natural roots. Countless colonies have lost their homes, as forests have been cleared, caves have been converted for human use, and fearful humans have killed or evicted those attempting to take refuge in buildings. However, by simply providing accommodations, you may help dozens, hundreds or even thousands of destitute bats. As many Americans are discovering, bats provide safe pest control, unique entertainment,

and outstanding educational opportunities. Attracting bats may be easier than you think. Thousands of little brown myodis and big brown bats are relying on bat houses as they slowly recover from more than a decade of massive losses from white-nosed syndrome. Private citizens are helping some of the hardest-hit species recover. Dramatic recovery has often been achieved through provision of artificial roosts or restoration and protection of damaged roosts. Rapid growth of colonies and bad houses strongly suggests that roost shortage is a key impediment to their recovery. The Florida Bonneted Bat, believed to be extinct for more than a decade

was rediscovered in 1978, living in a backyard bathhouse. This species is now recovering in small, easy-to-build bathhouses. The more you can learn about bats, the more you can help. Sharing your personal experience with friends and neighbors, helping people overcome needless fear of bats is key to their survival. Now, getting started. The near-you-live to a river, a lake, or wetland, especially where natural vegetation remains, the greater the odds of attracting bats. Such areas are prime breeding grounds for reliable and diverse insect prey that can sustain colonies at time when yard or crop pests are not available. But, bat houses are least likely to attract occupants in areas of intense urbanization

or industrialized agriculture. Depending on the bat species where you live, there may be a variety of options for bad house success. Bat's attempting to live in buildings or other human-made structures are a good indicator of suitable feeding habitat nearby. Well-built and located bad houses are more than 80% successful, rising to 90% where colonies have been excluded from buildings. So what kind of bad house? Single chamber bad houses have long been viewed as minimally attractive to bats,

in part because vendors have frequently sold ones that were destined to fail due to poor construction or inadequate instructions. When painted different colors are located in different amounts of sun, two or more single chamber houses may meet as well as test bat needs better than one multi-chambered house, and thus prove more attractive, providing varied options roughly doubles the odds of success. Multiple houses allow bats to move in response to changes in weather or to escape parasites or predators.

Now, DIY. If you choose to build your own, providing a bat house for bats may require no more tools than a saw, screwdriver, and paintbrush. Depending on your level of interest and available mounting locations, you might consider two or three easy to build single chamber houses. The detailed bat house instructions we provide are simply intended as starting guides. Most houses can be substantially enlarged or improved once you understand bat needs. We also introduce a wide range of options from around the world and strongly encourage testing of new materials, designs, and ideas. So build a little bat house for your soul and get Dr. Merlin Tuttle's book. And again, that's Dr.

Merlin Tuttle of Austin, Texas. Mr. Batman himself from the Chiropterology episode. So if you want a book on how to make bats your friends and your neighbors, the bad house guide, it's a great gift, especially if you're embarking on a building project for the loved one, who doesn't love the smell of coffee and sawdust as you make some mumps. Okay, let's take a quick pause to donate to a charity. And an apt one this week is 826LA, which is a nonprofit supporting students age 6 to

18 with free programs to develop their creative and expository writing skills and helping teachers inspire their students to write. And if you'd like to get involved, they can always use volunteers to serve as tutors, mentors, role models for students, to lead writing workshops and support publishing projects, to illustrate student written books and guide students through the storytelling process. So if you wanna be a volunteer, you can learn more,

or donate at 826LA.org. They have programs all over the US as well. And that donation was made possible by sponsors at the show. Here are some other books that you might like. But you don't have to take my word for it. Well, I guess you do, because I'm the one reading them. But you all love the Onerology episode on Dreaming. And so here are some select bits hand-chosen by author and onerologist Dr. G. William Domhoff, because yes, you can be a research scientist when I guess the ultimate dream job because it's about dreams.

And then you can write a pile of books about it, such as his latest, their neurocognitive theory of dreaming, the where, how, when, what, and why of dreams. And here's what he chose for me to read to you. Their neurocognitive theory of dreaming is first and foremost based on a synthesis of neuroimaging and lesion studies of both the waking and sleeping brain. It also draws on studies of the development of dreaming from preschool to adolescents and on quantitative content

analysis of dream reports collected in both laboratory and non-laboratory settings. The neurocognitive theory of dreaming explains the major findings on dream content, as well as the unexpected findings on what does not appear very often in dreaming. In addition, the long-standing findings on dream content can be combined with more recent neuro-imaging and developmental findings to suggest that dreaming has no adaptive evolutionary function. Instead, it seems more likely that dreaming is a byproduct of the rapid selection for waking

imagination, sociality, and an enhanced self-system over the past 50 to 300,000 years, which have enormous adaptive advantages. Dreaming is a unique form of spontaneous, internally generated thought that shares features in common with mind-wandering and even more with day dreaming. But dreaming is far more intense than day dreaming because dreamers experience themselves as being in real life hypothetical scenarios that almost always include

other human beings and or animals. In addition, the other human beings and animals are usually interacting with the dreamer in the context of vivid sensory environments. Dreams are first and foremost characterized by pan-human dimensions on the one side and by large individual differences on the other. The few gender cross-national and cross-cultural differences, although real and often replicated in the sense of gender, pale in importance. Then to the Character Networks in Dream series, which were discovered by mathematical psychologists with expertise in waking memory,

provide indications that dreaming in general may be rooted in the same principles governing waking memory to a greater extent than is usually realized. So dreams, certainly food for thought, but books are not going to fill your belly. Nobody knows that better than Dr. Syke Williams-Forson from our Black American Magueralogy episode about food, race, and culture. And she wrote a 2022 book, Eating While Black, Food Shaming and Race in America. And she wanted me to read this passage to engage your mind and your literary appetite. The notion of wholesomeness,

along with the requirement of the healthiness of the food, are the twin weapons for issuing shame and culinary policing. Because we all operate out of our own experiences, we can often miss the nuances of how shopping in places like the dollar store and other budget outlets. Enables those who do the shopping to accomplish more than just purchasing food.

For example, once I was in the company of a food advocate who strongly believed in agricultural education and outreach. As we were talking, she began extolling the virtues of her work and why her message was a necessary one for helping communities of people relieve hunger. At one point during our conversation, I told her that farmer's markets were not necessarily a feasible shopping option for many people. She sharply responded, everyone deserves fresh food. Absolutely, I said, but that is not my point. How we obtain foods is of interest and importance to me. It is critical for me that we not insist that

there is only one correct way of obtaining food. We continued to banter while driving to our destination. Along the way we happened to pass a busy shopping center that had a variety of stores including a Walmart, a rainbow, an urban-centered clothing store for women and girls, and a dollar tree. I could not help but think of the many errands that I had to run when I returned home and the number of tasks I could accomplish in but think of the many errands that I had to run when I returned home. And the number of tasks I could accomplish in one hour or so just by going to the three stores we just passed, or even one of them. Alternatively, the thought of needing to figure out the time and location of the next farmers market, and how it would fit within the scope of the many other things I had to do, was daunting to say the least.

I explained to my companion how I, as a middle-class black woman, would find relief in the option of large stores with varied merchandise. After I said this, we rode in silence for the rest of the trip. Each of us lost in our own thoughts, perhaps thinking about the privileges of our own lives. I was not angry with my driving companion so much as I was frustrated and tired by the need to share continuously this kind of information in order to help people check their privileges. I am perpetually amazed by the freedoms enjoyed by so many who choose to tell

black people how we should practice our food cultures. It is clear they most often have little or no clue about our cultural history, heritage, sustainability, or even how we manage life on a day-to-day basis. These advocates are determined in their zeal to impress upon me the need to acquire fresh food. And they feel justified by their outrage to impress upon me that I, as a human being, have a right to have this freshness in my life. Yes, of course I do.

But what my companion and others seem to miss is that it is also my right to acquire food and other goods in ways that work best for me. Even if that means going outside the confines of what others consider acceptable. But some people get this. In the article The Buck Shops Here, Ronnet King explains that not only are dollar stores now being frequented by those with incomes greater than 70,000, but also that they appeal to customers who might not wanna traipse across a huge store and it's accompanying parking lot just to pick up a few items. And this is especially the case when you're busy

with families or live alone. It's absolutely true that everyone deserves to have fresh food. And it is absolutely true that people need to be able to eat what they want and get their food from where they need while they're in the meantime of their lives. That is, well, they're waiting for things to change or improve. So when you sit down to holiday meals, eating while black is a great one to have under the tree and gift to someone

or yourself. And before you hurl your fresh leftovers in the trash, consider the work of the wonderful Dr. Robin Nagel of the Discard Anthropology episode all about garbage. She's an NYU professor in a one-time New York City sanitation worker and author of the book, Picking Up on the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the sanitation workers of New York City. Now on the topic of grubbing and also grubbing-ness, she selected this passage for you. A Buddhist prayer of thanks said at the start of a meal, acknowledges that the food about to be consumed is the work of many hands and the sharing of many forms of life. So is the accumulation of a garbage dump? The garbage here and in every other dump,

the world over reflects lives lived well, or in desperation, or too fast, or in pain, or in joy. Even without the status of worth, or a claim of possession, each bag stuffed with trash, each wad of spent tissue, every shred of shrink wrap, every moldy vegetable, and maggot-covered turkey leg, hints of countless stories. Archaeologists of contemporary household waste have demonstrated this. Indeed, insights that the field has given us about our own past often rest on analysis of nothing more than the garbage of civilizations long dead. We understand such artifacts to be treasures. Less tangible and more metaphysical is the sense that all these unloved things hold traces

of their former owners, Marcel Moss and early 20th century sociologist, propose that even when an object has been abandoned by the giver, it still possesses something of him. The original notion referred to gift exchanges in small scale or tribal societies, but the point can stand for anything that has passed through a life and been cast off. Imagine if we were capable of form of empathy that lets us know one another by savoring the aura we leave on the things we've touched. We could go to a dump to get drunk on one another's souls, but we haven't yet evolved such sensitivities. We generate our drugs, we create their hazards, and then we invent the dump as one of the places to which

we banish them so that we can pretend they won't harm us. But who plays the role of Karen? Ferrying our deceased belongings out of our daily lives and across that river sticks into the imagined safe zone of the dump. Or to put it more bluntly, who keeps us safe from ourselves? Not me. So yes, do pick up, picking up on the streets behind the trucks with the sanitation workers of New York City by Dr. N Eagle to get a whole new appreciation for where your garbage goes from a sack on the street to the grape beyond. But what's under the streets and also in the grape beyond?

Oh, a bunch of human bones, if you're in Paris. I get a chance to chat with Dr. Aaron Marie Legacy in the Metropolitan Tumology episode and record my own creeping around the Paris catacombs. And as a rare expert in this field, Dr. Legacy wrote the book, Making Space for the Dead, Catacombs, Cemetery's, and the reimagining of Paris, 1780 to 1830. And here's an excerpt from her. In December, 1785, the dead moved from Paris's heart into what Victor Hugo would later call its intestines. Shadowy figures entered the city's oldest and largest cemetery, the cemetery of the Holy Innocence and began to dig inhabitants of neighboring buildings watched. Some from their windows, some from the street, as these men, working by torchlight,

began the legubrius and unprecedented process of emptying this historic burial space of its sacred contents. These city workers spent the next year digging human remains out of the cemetery's deep mass graves, and collecting the millions of bones that had accumulated in the Charnel houses around its perimeter. They then systematically transported carts full of bones and human remains to an underground quarry on the city's southern periphery, a newly designated municipal osuery that would soon be better known as the Paris Catechomes. This radical relocation was a culmination of a long campaign to end urban burial in the

French capital. More specifically, it was a consequence of a 1780 royal ordinance that declared the cemetery of the innocence to be an intolerable and illegal threat to the city, owing to the stinking vapors that constantly seeped from its muddy enclosure and endangered the health and well-being of anyone living in the neighborhood. The famous 18th century chronicler of Peresian urban life, Louis Sebastian Marciet, characterized the cemetery as an imminent danger whose cadaverous measmas threatened to poison the atmosphere of Paris. He further alleged that wine, milk, and bullion served in

the vicinity of the cemetery soured within hours, and warned that the cadaverous humidity that clung to the nearby walls had lethal effects. Yes, he explained, to absent mindedly place one's hand against a wall impregnated with this moisture was to expose oneself to the effects of venom. In this ancient space, the dead were, quite literally, deadly. So venture underground with her book, which will be linked on the website. You can also listen to the Metropolitan Tumology episode to hear more about that. Now, do you want to read less about death and more about dolphin sex?

I thought so. Or rather, Dr. Justin Gregg of the Dolphinology episode on dolphins did. He wrote, Our Dolphins Really Smart in 2013, but his latest title is If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, which just came out in paperback and makes an excellent

and entertaining airport read or a gift. Now, he told me, here are some dramatic paragraphs that might be fun to include in a mixtape. From If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal. The conclusion here is that humans, through our complex capacity for moral thinking, have taken something that does not constitute a normative problem for any other species and turned

it into an issue for which we can justify marginalization, criminalization, execution, and even genocide. This is, I argue, a case of animals having a far superior that is less violent and destructive, normative system for dealing with difference than almost all human cultures. Homosexuality is quite clearly not just normal in the animal world, but entirely non-destructive, maybe even beneficial for maintaining animal societies. Why then are humans uniquely homophobic? It's a mystery that can only be solved if you understand how we can reason ourselves

into a corner via our capacity for moral thinking. A handful of cultures and religions have convinced themselves that homosexuality is a moral problem, and millions of our fellow humans must suffer because of it. Not only does anti-gay sentiment have no real counterpart in the behavior of any other species, but it actively creates barriers to our species' success. It not only soes societal discord, but leads to the suffering of a large swath of the human population. What biological benefit has been given to our species through our bizarre moral posturing around the non-problem, problem of homosexuality.

Precisely not. It is a sad testament to the cruelty of human moral reasoning. Intelligence is not a biological fact. This idea of human intellectual or behavioral exceptionalism has no basis in science. We feel in our guts that intelligence is both real and good. But when we look at the ways in which non-human animals manage to eke out a living on this planet, the jaw-dropping solutions they've come up with for solving ecological problems,

it becomes clear that neither of these gut-beliefs holds up to scrutiny. Intelligence is the grand maguffin, a concept we've been chasing in the study of human, animal, and robot minds that has distracted us from the reality of the natural world. A reality in which natural selection has never once acted on a biological trait that we can distill into a singular concept known as intelligence. A reality in which our intellectual and technology feats, born of a mishmash of cognitive traits shared by many other species, are not quite as important or exceptional as we like to believe.

A reality in which the earth is bursting with animal species that have hit on solutions for how to have a good life and ways that put the human species to shame. Human intelligence is not the miracle of evolution we like to think it is. We love our little accomplishments, our moon landings, and megacities like a parent loves their newborn baby. But nobody loves a baby as much as the parents. The planet does not love us as much as we love our intellect. Because we are indeed exceptional, if not necessarily good, we have generated more death

and destruction for life on this planet than any other animal, past and present. Our many intellectual accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction, which is exactly how evolution gets rid of adaptations that suck. It is the greatest of paradoxes that we should have an exceptional mind, which seems hell-bent on destroying itself. Unless we can pull out a Star Trek solution in the nick of time, human intelligence is going to wink out of existence.

So instead of looking at the cows and chickens and narwhals in your life with pity, because they lack human cognitive capacities, first think about the value of those capacities. First, think about the value of those capacities. Do you experience more pleasure than your pets because of them? Is the world a better place thanks to our species intelligence? If we are honest about the answers to those questions, then there's good reason to tone down our smugness. Because depending on where we go from here, human intelligence may just be the stupidest thing that has ever happened. Ha ha, we got you with Dolphin sex. Now we have to think about our own brains destroying things.

So obviously some humans just don't get commuting with the natural world. And some do. We did a witchology episode in October with a real life witch and author, Theo Gerde Palmer, and some of you freaked out because it contained their experiences and opinions. And some of you freaked out because you discovered being a witch is for you. Now if the latter is the case, you may want to pick up their 2023 book, The Witch Belongs to the World, A Spell of Becoming, and Fio selected this passage for you. Witches belong to the world. Etymologically, the roots of the word world position this concept in terms of the age

of man, an epic, the quantity of the known world, this place, this time, not some other place, not some other time, definitely not the other world, which is belong to the world, and we are emissaries to and of the other world. To the other world, we travel and with the mysteries of the other world we return. Born to both, which is our blessing and a bane to the human societies who have feared and revered us, we are part of the fate and destiny of humankind. We have always been here. Stories and legends about us are as old as written records and oral traditions. We are older than revivalist traditions bearing our names. We are older than initiatory lineages and orders of witchery. We are older than revivalist traditions bearing our names. We are older than initiatory lineages and orders of witchery. We are older than the persecutions, the pyramids, the cave painting, the stone axes.

But who and what were we before empire? What have we become? Who are we becoming? So that was the witch belongs to the world. Which book to get? There's so many and we're not done yet folks. Books. More books. So as long as we're lurking in the mist and the darkness, let's hear a little bit from a technologist and monster lore expert Dr. W. Scott Poole from the slam dunk

fan favorite recent episode on monsters. So Dr. Poole has monster books, of course, such as Monsters in America, but his latest book is titled Dark Carnivals, Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire, and he chose this creepy and thought-provoking passage for us. Empires stand alone. They're so often in immense loneliness at the heart of contemporary horror films. The stories leaching out of our inner poisons, replaying for us the terrors of living in a fortified nation state. Even before the pandemic of 2020, themes of blindness, deafness, and above all isolation, saturated contemporary

horror films like Bird Box, Aquia Place, the silence hush, here alone, it comes at night, the wind, and don't breathe. Empires apocalypse has come to mean suffering alone, a particularly haunting echo of the failed promises and the horrors of the global village. The writer Ling Zengd, in his novel Love Like Hate, admits that Vietnam, especially his beloved Saigon, is a disaster, but he adds that at least one doesn't die alone in the desolation, the solitary nightmare of America. Americans are so cool they manage to be quiet about their desperation.

Isolation may seem a strange condition at Empire's twilight. Perhaps it's the pondering of the aftermath of the world we made that horror plays with now. The clowns are terrifying, the sound of the Clia P tingles the spine with its weirdness, the music of the carousel jangles, its whirl its retune broken and serrated. But once something wicked coming this way has passed, what is it we behind? Is our insatiate need to victimize or at least glamorize those who victimize in our name. Part of the reason for our polarizations and isolations, American myths adore the loner and the rogue, the quiet man of action.

Teddy Roosevelt tore a canal into Panama, and Ted Bundy tore apart sorority girls. John Wayne buried his kills by Old Red river and John Wayne Gacy laid his to rest in a crawl space. At 82-13 West Somardale Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. Speaking softly and carrying a big stick has been the American way, as has using that stick to bludgeon others into paralysis and death. It's lonely at the top of the bone pile. Have Americans chosen the chainsaw or the shark? The last hundred years suggest they've wanted both. The certainty that the monster's weighting in the deep can be slain by American tough

gaiere means we are never afraid to wait back into the water. We still feel the saw but refuse to let its blind roar unsettle our sleep. We can even reimagine it, a weapon we make our own. Ash of the evil dead films, putting a chainsaw on his bloody stump of an arm, and marching against an army of darkness with penache, even a John Wayne swagger. War stories are difficult.

War stories are so often horror stories that try to ignore their own tropes. Too often, when the lights go up, you think war is hell, but also damn exciting and has to be done. But look at it. It's also the sort of empire that demands full cooperation. Your taxes, your apathy, your willingness to hate what you see in the floating gun site that ranges across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific world.

Horror movies, fiction, and games draw on these poisoned waters, and reimagine these piles of corpses. In a country that taught itself to become history's most powerful war machine, while keeping less than 1% of its population under arms, horror offers one of the few places where the true war story can unfold. The truth of war is not about what happens on the front lines. It's a story about what Americans consume, what we're willing to allow our government to do so we can keep binging, and whether we are willing to all play at answering the call of duty, becoming a nation of first-person shooters, most of whom

we'll never have to pick up an actual rifle, unless it's to kill other Americans out of rage and frustration. Instead, the working class avatars we'd call the cops on if they walked through our neighborhood do the killing for us. We'll just wrap ourselves in the softer side of empire, tales of soldiers in our wars, defending our freedoms, and not the truth that they are ponds in a larger game of taking what belongs to others. The war story of America has become the very apotheosis of Aslan Clark's dictum about horror. The worst thing is true.

So yes, that is from Dr. W. Scott Pools book Dark Carnivals about Empire and America and much darkness. That's well written and well-thought out. Now in those city streets of America are not just mysteries and power struggles, but people and Aaron Foley and expert in Detroit history and culture from the Detroit ology episode. Well, he wrote a beautiful novel called, Boys Come First, but he also authored a really straightforward and hilarious guide to the motor city, titled, How to Live in Detroit without being a jackass, which also has really beautiful reflections on how we treat each other,

and he gave this passage to read to you. Listen to people, real people. Life in Detroit cannot be gleaned from an article, no matter how shareable on social media, real people. Life in Detroit cannot be gleaned from an article no matter how shareable on social media it seems. You have to absorb everything here in real time. Not be easy, but do not put the blame on Detroit. Life is an obstacle course no matter where you are.

But people are paramount. Treat people with respect and dignity, not just in Detroit, but especially in Detroit. It's pretty basic, but you'd be surprised how many people don't abide by this. And why is that? Because people get so wrapped up in things like Kony Dogs that they forget about humanity, which is beautiful writing about Detroit and American culture at large. And again, life is an obstacle course no matter where you are. Also, did someone say obstacle course?

Let's talk about chickens now. So Tova Danovich is not only a chickenologist, and yes, that's a real word. Look it up. I swear to frogs. But also, she's an author, and I'd like you to hear part of her 2023 book, Under the Hen Fluence, Inside the World of Backyard Chickens,

and the people who love them. In it, she describes and experienced she had firsthand. The workshop seems ordinary. There are rows of tables and chairs, a large screen for PowerPoint presentations, and an area for coffee and snacks. If it weren't for the dusty smell when you walk in the door and the sounds coming from downstairs, this could be a 101 workshop and any conference room in the US. The spell is broken quickly when I hear a cappacar from downstairs. Someone has laid an egg.

This is chicken camp, a multi-day class that is ostensibly all about clicker training chickens. Most people in the workshop work with animals, some are professionals, or others just wanna learn how to train their puppy when they get back home. One woman does wildlife rehabilitation. And other is a primate researcher, a few of them work with feral cats.

But for the next few days, or longer for those who stay for both the beginning and advanced chicken training classes, we will learn how to click or train chickens to do all kinds of things a chicken doesn't normally do. Some will teeter across balanced beams, others will walk confidently around a parking cone. They will complete obstacle courses and matching games. These hungry chickens will do amazing things in exchange for food. But for now, they know very little. Nothing has ever been expected of them besides laying the occasional egg. Today, that's all about to change. So yes, you've been wanting chickens, get yourself under the influence inside the world of backyard chickens and the people who love them, or

get it as a gift for your partner and beg them for chickens. Let's continue on the topic of eggs, but also zombies come with me into the world of neuro parasitology, aka nature zombies, with author Matt Simon who wrote, Plite of the Living Dead, what real-life zombies reveal about our world and ourselves. Zombies, really? Really? He writes, The zombie may as well be real, because it actually is. Only in a far more incredible and diabolical and horrifying way than a screenwriter could ever dream up. Because all across the animal kingdom, parasites are climbing into other creatures and mind

controlling them. Be they worms, or wasps, or microbes, certain organisms have figured out how to brainwash their victims in ways so clever and precise, they may calling wood's creations look down right and responsible. In September 2013, I was pacing in my kitchen, talking on the phone with presumably a madman. In South America, he told me, a fungus invades ants bodies and takes over their minds,

manipulating them with unreal precision and consistency. The parasite steers the ants out of the colony and up a tree always at noon, always ordering them to bite onto a leaf always about a foot off the ground. This just so happens to be where the temperature and humidity are ideal for the fungus's growth and the body snatcher has positioned its host right above the colony's trail. So as it erupts out of the back of the zombie ants head and sprays its spores, it infects more victims.

A parasite without a brain of its own has brainwashed one of the most loyal creatures on Earth to betray its family in spectacular fashion. So for more on that, see the neuro-parasitology episode with Matt Simon, his book is Plight of the Living Dead. Oh, it's so good. And I realize you may feel a beef with bugs right now, but let's change that mind yours. With the book Eyes on Flies by Dr. Brie, the fly guy,

written by Dipter Holland, she guessed, Dr. Brian Lassard. He wants you to love flies like he does, and he makes it easy with passages such as, no flies, no chocolate. Without flies, there would be no chocolate, true story. This is because midge flies are the most important pollinators of the cocoa plant that gives us chocolate. These teeny-diny flies are the size of a pinhead and are the only pollinator small enough

to crawl inside the cocoa flowers. Turns out these flies have a sweet tooth. As they buzz from flower to flower, drinking sweet nectar, they get doused and pollen to help pollinate the flowers that eventually ripen into delicious cocoa pods. Next time you to piece chocolate, make sure to thank the chocolate fly. We'll do. He also writes, New Species Realness. Category is, New Species Extravaganza. One charismatic and unique soldier fly looks like a shiny rainbow jewel

sashing around the forest floor. So I named it Opaluma RuPaul after the Glamazon RuPaul. The first specimens of Apaluma flies were collected in 1912 and waited more than a hundred years before someone came along with a nerve and the talent to name them. That's why I wanted to give them big bold names so they can get the much needed attention they deserved from researchers and community scientists. Even RuPaul saw the Ru's emblents and posted a picture of the fly on social media.

The rest was herstory. He also writes, Want to know the secret of looking pretty fly? Believe it or not, some cosmetic companies have a secret ingredient in their age to flying face creams that keep you looking younger. Oil from a maggot. Pardon? And not just Oil from a maggot. Pardon?

And not just any kind of maggot, but the youthful black soldier fly. Turns out the oil found in black soldier fly larvae is rich in fats, oils, and vitamin E that are supposed to nourish the skin and help it look healthier and younger. After all, beauty is in the fly of the beholder. He writes. So get his book, Eyes on Flies by Dr. Brie, a Fly Guy. And y'all, that's it. Ask smart books, not smart questions, or get some

his gifts to delight and entertain your loved ones. Head to the link in the show description, alliwere.com, Sush, Allegies, Sush, Bookworm 3, for links to the original episodes that we talked about and the ologist books as well as a link to literacy charity which we donated 826LA. If you're listening on Apple make sure you have the follow button to subscribe so you always have episodes as soon as they go up we have some great ones coming on every week you don't want to miss you can follow us at oligies on Instagram where we post your art tagged oligies art on Fridays and your merch picks on Monday that are tagged.

Oligis merch. I'm on there and Twitter at Alleyward. We also have so many kid-friendly small Gs episodes. You can download at alleyward.com slash small Gs for free, which is linked in the show notes. Aaron Talbert, Admin's our Facebook group. Noel Delworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale is managing director Kelly R. Dwyer,

does our website. Emily White of the wordery makes our professional transcripts. Smalleges have been edited by the Secret of Registamus and Jersleeper of Blind Gem Media, as well as our lead editor Mercedes-MateLint of Maitland Audio who wrote the book on piecing together podcasts. Well, she might one day. The theme music was written by Nick Thorben of the band Islands and if you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you a secret a secret and this week let's do book related, okay? So in college and in my early 20s I did some TV shows and it helped pay for college and I also was catering on the side And I had like four jobs But I really liked doing the TV stuff until one day

I was mugged by these two guys with giant kitchen knives in real life. And then my appetite for simulating violence on crime shows just kind of disappeared with my wall at that day. But on my first audition ever, like years before, I was so nervous. It was for a moody college student. And I had practiced the audition. And in the waiting room, there were 15 other girls who looked just like me. And so to distract myself, I took out a book from my bag and it was Sylvia Plath's The

Bell Jar. And I was like, how perfect am I for this? I'm already reading a really depressing book. And then I looked up and there was literally a girl across the room also reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. And it wasn't even assigned for a class. We just, I guess both happened to be reading it. And I was like, was even the point of being here. So easily, there's nothing interesting about me. And I guess I was so defeated

that I seemed like an actual depressed college kid, which I was. So I got the part. And when I found out via a pager that I was shooting like the next day, I called my parents from a pay phone and said, we just go and I was screaming so much that my dad thought that I was gravely injured or being held hostage, but I was just happy. But then years later, when I actually did get mugged, I could not make a noise at all. Like, open my mouth, nothing would come out. It's kind of like when you're in a nightmare or a cartoon and you're like, ah, like nothing.

But don't be sad about all that because if that hadn't happened, I wouldn't have been like, ugh, yuck. And then become like a writer and done science TV and made all the gays. So it all worked out. And I also learned that when you're like authentic in your life and your work,

you become irreplaceable. But when you try to be just like everybody else, then things don't work out so great. You also become a little bit less depressed when you're just you. Okay, next week another newology. So make sure you're subscribed to the users, pass it on, and thank you for listening to the very end of this audiobook mixtape number three I would be like it my throat is sore okay bye hackadermy college homology cryptozoology litology nanosanology meteorology

oloectology nephology seriology homosanology I like the books.