Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Amazing Ways Genes Affect Your Behavior & How Calming Your Brain Makes You Stronger
Episode Date: June 27, 2020Do you keep stuff? You know, things from your past that you have a hard time giving up even though you don’t use them anymore? This episode begins with some interesting advice on what to keep and wh...at to toss or give away – and why it’s a good idea to get rid of things you will never ever need again. http://www.aarp.org/health/fitness/info-09-2010/Kick_Clutter_And_Lose_Weight.html You probably know that your genes influence things your eye color or hair color. But did you know that your genes also influence your behavior? Jay Phelan, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA and author of the book, Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food, Taming Our Primal Instincts (http://amzn.to/2CJZgXF), explains how your genes make you want to do things that are often not good for you (like overeat or drink too much). Did you know you have more than five senses? For example, when you move your foot from the gas pedal to the brake pedal when you drive, you are using another sense that allows you to find those pedals without looking or using any other of your five senses. I’ll explain what it is and what it is called. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/propioception-body-parts-sense-research/420765/ There is real power in calming down. That’s according to Gyatri Devi, M.D., author of the book, A Calm Brain: How to Relax Into a Stress-Free, High-Powered Life (http://amzn.to/2on2EoX) Because our brains are always active – checking texts and emails and rushing around, we don’t have the down time” we need that allows the brain to perform at its best. Dr Devi has some ways to do that and she reveals the amazing benefits of a calm brain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Today on Something You Should Know,
if you tend to keep stuff from your past and have trouble letting it go,
I've got some great advice for you.
Ben, did you know your genes influence your behavior, and not always in a good way?
All these self-control problems, eating too much, having trouble managing money, it can
be attributed back to the fact that we carry these genes that are nudging us into a direction
that we don't want to go.
Also, you have more than five senses.
I'll tell you about one of them
you use all the time. And if you could just calm down a little bit every day,
great things can happen. When I talk about calm, I'm not really talking about
someone who is sedated or mellow. I'm talking about a state where we are at
our optimal, positive, mental functioning.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Something you should know.
Fascinating intel.
The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. And we start the podcast today with a question.
Are you someone who likes to keep stuff?
Do you have a lot of things from your past that you just can't seem to quite throw away?
When you ask people
why they save stuff in the attic
or the garage or
in the back of the closet,
the answer is usually something like,
because you never know,
I might need it someday.
However, according to professional organizer Mike Nelson, you probably won't.
In all his years of organizing, he estimates that people never again use 95% of the things that they save.
So if you're planning to save stuff just in case, you're probably better off throwing it out or giving it away.
There's another good reason to declutter and get rid of stuff in your home.
People who organize and clear out the junk in their house
almost always lose weight.
To put it another way,
having clutter seems to hinder weight loss.
So go ahead, get rid of the junk, you'll probably never use it,
and you'll probably get skinnier.
And that is something you should know.
You probably know a little bit about your genes,
that they determine things like the color of your eyes
and how tall you are and other physical characteristics.
But they do more than that.
They also influence your behavior, maybe more than you realize.
And often they influence you to do things you probably shouldn't do.
When you understand how your genes work, you can trick them to some extent to make them
help you behave better.
Jay Phelan is an evolutionary biologist from UCLA,
and he's author of a book called Mean Genes,
From Sex to Money to Food, Taming Our Primal Instincts.
Hi, Jay. Welcome.
Hi. Well, thanks for having me, Mike.
So I think I understand generally that, you know, genes can determine things like your
eye color or, you know, whether I'm predisposed to get an illness. But how do genes affect or
alter behavior? Well, that's a hugely debated question. It depends on what you look at. I
would say the safe answer is it's somewhere between zero and 100% of what we do.
You went out on a limb there.
I'm going out on a limb there. And even then, people are going to be unhappy.
No, seriously, though, for certain traits, when you are built, it might be something like eye
color. You've got an instruction that says, here's how you lay down the pigment that's going to allow your body to take in light from the world around you and see stuff. Well, the instructions
you have, pretty much what that says, that's what your eye is going to look like. If you've got the
genes for brown eyes, that's what they're going to look like. So it's 100%. But then you go all the way to the other extreme, and you can have genes that just nudge you one way or nudge you another way.
You can have genes that relate to your appetite, for instance, and they can tell you if you have access to high-calorie food, you should consume it.
So nowadays, that gets us into trouble because
we have access to tons of food. We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. But we've got this
big brain, and the big brain says we can evaluate things and alter. So I might be hungry all the
time. In fact, I left a dozen donuts at home before I came in today. I really wanted to eat
them all, but I thought, I don't think I should do that.
And so I just left.
And rather than bringing them, I left them there.
So I have genes that are saying, hey, you got to eat more, you got to eat more.
But I can also override those.
Why aren't there genes that guide us towards broccoli and going to bed on time and not drinking too much?
And why do the genes always seem to nudge us towards the things that are absolutely no good for us?
That's because the genes that we carry are the ones that over millions of years are the
ones that led to the greatest reproductive success of the people that carried them.
So we evolved in a world where
we were hunter-gatherers. This is 99% of our evolutionary history. So we were in small groups
with unpredictable food in relatively short supply. And so the genes that were the ones that
nudged their carriers to the best outcomes were the ones that said, you got to consume as much food as you can.
You got to seek out high caloric value food. There was no money in that world. So there were no genes
that said, ah, here, you should save this surplus for the future. Instead, any surplus you had,
that was in food and it's going to rot if you don't consume it. So our instincts for money are appropriate for the hunter-gatherer world, but not today's world. And so that's at the heart of
why we have so many self-control problems. It's that we carry these genes that are adapted to a
different world. So talk about how genes affect how men and women are attracted to each other.
Is it the fact that some people prefer blondes or some people like skinny mates and some people like heavier mates?
Is that genes at work or is that just something in your brain that, you know, you just like?
Well, yeah, that's a good question.
Is it just something in your brain that you just like?
Before I address that, I'll first go back to another thing where I imagine in our brain it's just, oh, I prefer this food or I prefer that food. And you we find that the higher the percentage of fat in some food as opposed to carbohydrates or protein, the greater the preference for it.
And it turns out you get twice as much energy, more than twice as much energy, nine calories per gram as opposed to four when you consume fat.
So we don't consciously know, oh, that's what I'm trying to do. But we have this preference
in our brain and it reflects this evolutionary adaptation. So now when it comes to what do we
like in a mate? What are we looking for in a mate? One example that's been pretty well studied is
waist to hip ratios. And in women, there is a correlation between the waist to hip ratio and
fertility, such that a waist to hip, so the actual measured inches of waist, measured inches of hips,
if it's somewhere around 0.7, that's associated with higher fertility than if it's higher than 0.7 or lower than 0.7. And over the decades, as we see shifts in whether or not males prefer higher body weight or lower body weight females, we see very little shift in waist to hip ratio.
So it seems like two things can be going on, that there's a cultural influence of what do you like, what do you not like.
But there's also this driving fertility there as well. And when females look at males,
same thing, that there are these preferences for youth, for physical condition or vigor,
but then status is really important as well, because if you are producing offspring,
you need access to resources. And so as males control more resources, maybe they don't look
as fit as they used to. And while females could have a preference for fitness and health and
youthful looking skin, there's also this preference for the control
of resources. And I had a friend and I thought it was funny. He was telling me he got older.
He was maybe 40 or so. And he said, it's getting harder and harder for me to exercise these days.
I've always exercised, he said. But in the last few years, I've gotten really rich, he said.
And I've never had more women want to date me now.
He said, I'm fatter than ever, and yet somehow I'm not getting penalized for that
because I've had this other change in my life.
So you have these complicated sets of factors going on.
I'm speaking with Jay Phelan.
He is an evolutionary biologist at UCLA,
and he's author of the book Mean Genes.
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That's pretty cool. Thank you. So Jay, just think about what you were saying.
How is it that men can have a preference for women with a certain waist-to-hip ratio,
and yet we don't consciously know it?
I mean, how can we be attracted to something that we don't know we're attracted to,
and yet we are attracted to?
Yeah, the waist-to-hip ratio and how it turns out to be related to fertility,
the actual number of children produced is stunning to me,
because I'm like you.
I don't have some conscious thing that I key into. And
people don't state that that's why they prefer one to another. They'll say, I just like this
one better. And there it is, that this thing is unconsciously influencing us. And probably the
best thing that I can think of in terms of how can something so unconscious still have an influence.
If I throw you a ball, in order for you to catch the ball, you have to make predictions about this arc.
And to predict exactly where something's going to be on an arc requires actual calculus.
And you can know at any point in time, here's where it's going to be, here's where it's going to be, and then you catch it. Now, you're not doing those calculations. And yet,
I throw you the ball, you catch it. So you have done, in some sense, the calculations. You've
made the prediction unconsciously without having to do it consciously. And so it's like that.
We don't always know why it is. From an evolutionary perspective,
it doesn't matter if
we have conscious awareness of why we do something. Is there any formula, any magic bullet that,
knowing that our genes are nudging us in ways that may not be so great for us, how do you
nudge back? Oh, that's such a good question. Here's one example. Natural selection has caused us to be
super efficient when it comes to expending energy. Nowadays, we say we're lazy. We don't want to
expend any energy that we don't have to. But I can understand that. Ah, I see. Here's why evolution
would cause me to be super lazy slash efficient. But once I understand that, now I can make my own decision. So for
instance, at UCLA, one of the options I have, I have to get a parking permit. And I can get a
blue permit. And that allows me pretty much to park anywhere I want. I can park, you know,
I could crawl to my office from my parking space. And it allows me to park anywhere. So if I wanted,
I could park clear across campus and every day get the 25 minutes of walking that the American Heart Association says I should.
But every day I have some reason why, ah, today I'm in a rush.
Oh, I'm late for this.
I better just park right next to my office.
On the other hand, I can get a yellow permit.
And the yellow permit requires me to park in a lot that's really far away or else I get an expensive ticket.
Now, I know that I'm going to be super lazy all the time, that that is evolutionarily adaptive. So if I have
one moment of big willpower at the beginning of the year and I say, I'm not going to get the
blue permit, I'm going to get the yellow permit. Once I have that, it's not even an option to park close. So it doesn't take any willpower at all. And willpower is weak. It's going to fail.
So if I outsmart these drives I have by using one moment of willpower, where then for the next year,
I have to park far away, it takes no willpower, but I get my 25 minutes of walking in every day.
So you see what I'm saying? That your
genes still might be fighting you, but what you can do is be smart and you can say, how can I get
the most bang for my buck with my willpower? Because when you know you have to park that far
away, even if you're in a rush, you'll adapt, you'll get there early enough and everything
will be fine. You just do. Yeah, it's not an option.
If the elevator is out in your office, you just take the stairs up. On any other day,
you could still take the stairs up, but you don't because, you know, whatever the willpower takes.
Or I think this about money. You know, I get money and, you know, my paycheck is deposited.
And I think, well, I want to save money. And so, okay,
every minute of every day, I get to say, yeah, I got to try to save less money, or I got to try to spend less money. I got to spend less money. But somehow, by the end of the month,
I've spent whatever money was put into my account, because I know it's there, I can spend it,
and the willpower is very hard to exert. On the other hand, if I come up with ways
that the money is taken out of my account before I ever see it. And one of the first things I did
was this program where money got sent to some bank. And it's like in Colorado, thousands of
miles away from me. I didn't have a card to access it. I could, with a few phone calls,
I could get the money. Obviously, it's still my money, but it makes it really hard. So I signed up for this. And little by little, I started saying,
send more of my monthly paycheck there. Now, each month, whatever gets put into my account here,
the one I have an ATM for, every cent of that I spend. I'm really good at consuming all of my
surplus. But this other thing that's far away and it's not accessible
and I can't see, that accumulates. That's how I was able to buy a house. That I know I'm going
to be weak, so I plan for it and I put it somewhere else. And then it doesn't take any
willpower. So for me, the big message from understanding that we have been produced by evolution is to understand I'm probably not going to win in the battle against my genes if I go head to head, minute by minute of trying to have willpower.
But I can outsmart them with a few well-timed exertions of willpower.
I can actually restructure my world so I don't have to rely on it and I can get a
better outcome. Well, that's good advice because I think we've all been in that position where,
and intuitively we know that if you, you know, if you send, have your employer send money to
an account before you see it, you're more likely to save it as opposed to get it all and hope you
send it to that account because you've seen it. So we all know that.
We all get that.
We just have to do it.
Yes, there's not a lot of deep intellectual power required once you understand that message.
When people retire, the vast majority of their wealth is in their house,
not because of some smart, oh, yeah, every month we're going to
save this much money. But instead, it's because, hey, we need somewhere to live. We keep paying
the mortgage month after month. And it's, again, it's like an enforced savings plan.
It seems that based on what you're saying, that some of the bad male behavior that we've been hearing about lately, that that too is nudged by genes,
and that maybe not putting yourself in those positions makes it easier not to be so nudged.
Remember, the Vice President Mike Pence was saying, hey, I'm not in a room with another
woman and no one else. And people laughed at him and mocked him.
But I remember thinking about that, thinking that's a mean genes move.
He's saying, hey, we're evolved beings and our genes are nudging us towards reproductive
success here or there.
And if you're never in the situation where you are with another woman, then you can't
even behave badly.
So no willpower is required. where you are with another woman, then you can't even behave badly.
So no willpower is required.
So that's a variation on that strategy.
Don't put yourself into the situation, and then you never have to rely on your willpower to get the behaviors that you want.
So it's not as silly as it sounds.
Well, this is really important because, you know,
I think people believe they make conscious choices and that they have free will, and we do.
But we also have this other thing that's nudging us in one direction or another, and sometimes, as you say, not in the best direction.
And understanding that and understanding the strategies to use to prevent that nudging from becoming a reality is really good to know.
Jay Phelan has been my guest.
He is an evolutionary biologist at UCLA
and author of the book,
Mean Genes, From Sex to Money to Food,
Taming Our Primal Instincts.
Thanks, Jay. I appreciate it.
Your questions are fun and intriguing.
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You know, life is just not as calm as it used to be.
You know what I mean? You just don't have a lot of time to calm your mind and sit and be quiet
because you're always checking your phone or your email
and you've got a million things to do
and you've got to rush over here and go over there.
And all that lack of calm is taking a toll on you.
And it took a toll on a woman named Gaitri Devi. She is a medical doctor
and she is author of a book called A Calm Brain, How to Relax into a Stress-Free, High-Powered Life.
Hi, doctor. Welcome. And it sounds as if you took on this project and wrote this book
really for yourself, that this was to help solve a problem that you were experiencing.
I've always been a frenetic person, and my goal has been to be calm.
And my background in neuroscience really helped me understand that the approach that we have
these days, which is to take pills or to overschedule, is not the answer.
And so I've found another method to get to calm.
And do you suspect that people are not calm
because it's kind of inherent that they're just, like you said, frenetic,
and that's their personality?
Or are they frenetic because they just schedule too many things to do?
I think that people have inherent temperaments.
Some people are just,
quote, hyper, if you will, and some people are more mellow. But I think environment definitely
has something to do with it. And I feel that modern climes with all the demands that are
required and all the choices that we have to make just makes it that much harder to get to a place
where we're not prone to a tremendous amount of anxiety.
Is that the problem? In other words, it's not necessarily the doing too many things or rushing around here and there.
It's the byproduct of the anxiety that's the problem, or is rushing around in and of itself a problem?
I think that rushing around, there is a time and a place to rush around.
We are wired to be able to do that.
However, I think it's the incessant rushing around.
It's the incessant overscheduling.
Then it becomes an issue because our body then becomes habituated,
and we're no longer able to turn off the switch so that we can relax.
And the effects on our health have been devastating.
I think there's an epidemic increase in the amount of hypertension, heart disease, depression, and anxiety, even in small children, even in 12-year-olds.
So I think there is something about our society now where we're just required to do so much more. And what I'm trying to say is you can be successful,
you can be efficient,
and you can still be in a place of much less stress
by just incorporating small things into your daily life
that will enhance your inbuilt relaxation system.
And those would be things like what?
Things, very simple things, like turning off your cell phone for an hour, spending a weekend without any schedule and without a clock,
hugging someone, smiling at someone, being forgiving. All of those things actually enhance
the activity of the parasympathetic system,
which is the system that combats the effects of the flight and fright stress system,
which is the adrenaline-driven system that we all know so much about.
So basically, by forcing yourself to calm down for a while, it helps to calm down the whole thing.
Exactly. And, you know, what you want
to do is to schedule little mini vacations into your daily life. And people often say to me, well,
you know, when I go on vacation, then I can calm down. Well, what people are finding more and more
is that when they do go on vacation, they're unable to relax. And then they worry about what they have to do
when they get back. So we have to make calm a habit. And making it a habit is just as important
to our health as eating right is, as exercises. And it has just as many rewards in terms of our
overall well-being. To which some people would say, well, you know,
I go on vacation and I worry because I really have things to worry about, so I've got to be
checking email and all that, and to which you would reply what? I would say that absolutely,
all of us have a lot to worry about and all of us have more to worry about as time goes on, and particularly with this economy.
But we have to realize that unless we keep our bodies and our mind in a state of optimal health,
we're not going to be able to respond to these exigencies of life.
So unless we learn to turn off that cell phone for a few hours,
we are not going to be able to keep our mind in a state of good functioning.
When I talk about calm, I'm not really talking about someone who is sedated or mellow.
I'm talking about a state where we are at our optimal cognitive mental functioning,
a place where we can be the best we can be, and a place from which we can win
far better than in a place where we'd be anxious. I can imagine people saying,
if I turned my phone off for an hour, I would spend the entire hour thinking my child's school
is calling because something went wrong and I wasn't there to answer the phone. That is absolutely right. I think that, you know, you're correct in that, that we have this fear now
and we are tethered to this electronic leash from which, you know,
it's harder and harder to separate ourselves.
And what I say to people like that is just take baby steps.
You know, spend 10 minutes away from the phone.
Spend 15 minutes away from the phone.
And you'll find it's going to be easier to do that.
And the fact is we have amazing systems in place to take care of things.
And it's really also an issue of control, the ability to say, well,
someone else is going to be able to take care of this as well as I can if they
cannot reach me.
And it's also the sense of being dispensable.
All of us are dispensable.
All of us will die.
That's 100% guaranteed.
However, how do we live our life in the interim?
Do we have, if we are going to be checking our phone all the time, are we going to be
able to enjoy the time we have with our loved ones?
Are we going to be able to take care of ourselves?
You know, I remember, it wasn't all that long ago,
that when you left the house, you couldn't bring your phone.
It was stuck to the wall.
And there were no cell phones.
When you were in the car, you were alone in the car.
And people somehow managed to survive.
Kids didn't die at school, and life went on.
But today, if you leave without your phone, you think, you know, the world's coming to an end.
Right, and that's what our new brain, our cortical brain, tells us.
It creates a situation where there is a sense of urgency where there should not be a sense of urgency.
So we suddenly have now alarmed ourselves and taught ourselves that if we leave our
phone behind, that is a crisis situation.
So we live in a state of constant alert, and that's no good for us.
And I think it's important to realize before phones, people survived.
But explain though, if I turn my phone off for 15 minutes today
or if I'm able to quiet down for 15 minutes
and go for a walk without my phone or something,
that helps for the 15 minutes,
but how does that help for the rest of the day?
Because the repercussions last throughout the day.
You know, when you go away for that 15 minutes,
even as you maybe are a little bit anxious
about leaving the phone behind,
but I'm hoping that over time
you're able to actually disconnect
for a few minutes at a time,
what that does is it slows your heart down.
It slows your breathing down.
It resets a little bit your core brain.
It amps up the activity in the relaxation system in your body.
And that allows the sympathetic nervous system, which is kind of in runaway mode right now for most of us, to take a back seat.
And that's very important because it's a process of checks and balances in our body and
we just are ignoring a lot of the balance. Besides just taking a 15-minute break from your phone,
what else can you do? What are some of the other techniques that work? I try to leave, like I say,
human contact. Choose human contact over something electronic all the time. If you have a choice between going out with a friend versus staying at home
and Skyping with a relative in Siberia, choose going out with a friend.
It's more real.
It connects more with your core brain.
Your brain responds better to it.
It's better for your health.
Exercise.
Forgive. Forgive. Forgiveness is a quality that's biblically touted, but it's also excellent for a core brain, and it's also very important for calm,
because when you don't, what happens is you kind of set yourself up in the state of anger, and anger revs up the sympathetic system.
Anger revs up adrenaline, and that makes it harder for you to calm down.
You said in the beginning that everything you write about and talk about applies to you,
that you're one of the people who needs to do this.
So what was your epiphany? What was the moment that you said, wait a minute?
Well, I just realized that
it was not an efficient way for functioning. I thought, you know, there are so many things I'd
like to do and I want to do them well. And how do I do them well? I do them well by having a brain
that's at an optimal state. And I can't be at that optimal state if I'm constantly anxious,
if I'm constantly stressed.
And one of the other very important things in terms of keeping us calm
is daily sleeping.
Sleep has to be a habit, just like eating right, just like exercising.
And we've got to sleep a good amount every day to reset our brain.
That's another thing that's important for calm.
So I think that it's, for me, it was a smart thing to do. It didn't have to do, you know,
my life wasn't falling apart. You know, things were very good. But I thought to myself, over time,
this is not the way to run my body. It's going to run it down. I need to find a way to be efficient, to be
able to succeed in the things that I wish to do well in, but at the same time, not to be at this
level of stress. And very simple things can help you do that. But is this something that works for
you? Or is there some research that says that this will work for everybody this is this has nothing this is not peculiar to me this is you have the mechanisms
for being calm in your body everything i've said reduces the level of adrenaline and increases the
level of vagal tone um in all of our bodies that's why meditation is such a wonderful thing, because it actually raises the
level of calm in so many of us. However, most of us are unable to practice meditation, either
because of time constraints, or because we just have brains that run away from us. So this is not
something that's just specific to one person. It's actually common to the entire human race.
And it makes all the sense in the world. I mean, who hasn't been in that relaxed state,
whether it's in the shower or walking in the country or whatever, where ideas come to you,
you think clearer, you're able to see things better. So we all know this intuitively.
It's just a matter of doing it consciously when we're in the moment.
My guest has been Gayatri Dovey.
She is a medical doctor and author of the book, A Calm Brain,
How to Relax into a Stress-Free, High-Powered Life.
There's a link to her book in the show notes.
Close your eyes and then try touching your nose with your finger.
Did you do it?
Well, of course you did it.
But how?
You didn't use any of your five senses to do that.
So what makes it so easy to do?
It's an ability called proprioception.
Proprioception.
It's defined as the sense of your body part's position.
It's the reason you can switch from the gas pedal to the brake without looking at your feet
or bringing popcorn to your mouth without taking your eyes off the movie screen.
Often considered a sixth sense, proprioception is much less understood than the other senses,
but science is beginning to understand it better.
Researchers from Scripps, Columbia University, and San Jose State University
have identified a key molecule that governs proprioception,
and it's found in the membranes of nerve cells in our muscles and tendons called proprioceptors.
They are one class of a very large array of molecules
that help us detect things like temperature and blood pressure.
There's a lot more to learn about proprioception,
but clearly it indicates that there are more than the five senses that we all know.
And that is something you should know.
Take a minute and let the world know what you think about this podcast
by leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.
I'm Micah Ruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper.
In this new thriller, religion and crime collide
when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community.
Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager,
but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced.
She suspects connections to a powerful religious group.
Enter federal agent V.B. Loro,
who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity.
The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer,
unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions,
and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone
is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan.
Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Jennifer,
a founder of the Go Kid Go Network.
At Go Kid Go,
putting kids first is at the heart of every show
that we produce.
That's why we're so excited
to introduce a brand new show
to our network
called The Search
for the Silver Lining,
a fantasy adventure series
about a spirited young girl named Isla
who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot.
Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple,
or wherever you get your podcasts.