Stuff You Should Know - Does the body replace itself?

Episode Date: March 31, 2015

Does the human body really replace itself every few years? The answer is yes, but different parts of the body do so at different rates. Learn all about which parts of your body are the speediest, and which take the longest to regenerate. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a skyline drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HouseStuffWorks.com Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and guest producer Noel. Noel is in the house. Yes he is, and in the new studio, and this place is comfy, cozy. I like it, I wish there was a chair version of a water bed. I know, this is a nappish little place. Yeah, especially today, I think I'm dragging, oh apologies. Yeah same here, so if we're talking kind of slow or low, or we just stop talking for

a little while, we're just tired. Yeah, we bumped into you at the Hawks game last night. I know, hey how's it going? How's it going? You know? Yeah. Just the bump in. Yep.

We were both at the Hawks game, in the Hawks one. Didn't even know we were going. No. Look over in the line, there's Josh and Yumi. Yeah. That's great. There's Chuck and Eddie. Yep.

Bump into each other. Bast Eddie. And an arena of 18,000 bumping into someone. Is that it? That's all it holds? I think it's something like that. Yeah. It's a lot of people.

It's a good arena. Yeah. But you had box seats because you were special. They were free. Mine were free too, and the nosebleeds. Yeah. I liked just about every seat in that place. Yeah, it's not too bad.

I was laughing about the nosebleeds going in, but then I got up there, I was like, this is great. Yeah. You can see everything. Did your nose actually bleed? Just twice. Once out of a sheer excitement, and then once from the altitude. And that was more of a spray, right?

Yeah. Just covering everyone. I was like, go Hawks. Boy, what a weird intro. It's a little weird, but I mean, it kind of jibes a little bit because we're talking. Yeah. You're mentioning blood? Sure.

I was shedding cells and blood. You were. Like blood is made up of cells, and we shed tons of cells. But before we get to that, right, there's the fact of the podcast, you shed cells. I want to mention this one thing I read. Yeah. It's called, I think the title of the article is the self is moral. Yeah.

And we get our identity of self from, like where it's rooted, it was written by a person named Nina Strohmeyer, I believe, is on Aeon magazine. Just type in the self as moral, Aeon. It'll come up. That'll get you there. And toward the beginning, the author says there's this very famous philosophical exercise, which you know, philosophers love to do like mental exercises. Yeah.

That's all they have. So imagine you have like, imagine you have like a ship, right? Okay. Like a boat. Yeah. A nice Yankee clipper. Okay. Okay.

And this Yankee clipper is slowly over time, kind of salvage for parts. Okay. But rather than just being stripped, like every time a part is taken out, it's replaced. And then over the course of like 50, 100 years, as each plank, as each bolt, as each like mast head, even the thing that carved lady in front, eventually just gets replaced with something else. Yeah. A new carved lady that speaks of the time.

Right. Is it still though, after every single part has been replaced, the same ship that it was before? Yeah. That's what you mean. I don't think that can be possible. Why not? Especially if it has the same name.

And it's the same ship in the same place as before. It was just slowly over time. Moved out. True. Where does the self lie? Yeah. That's a good point, man. Like redoing a house, same thing.

Yeah. I mean like... Place all the floors and the walls and the windows. Like when does it cease to become that same house that was built in 1930? Exactly. Isn't that cool? Yeah, it is really cool. And the reason that it applies to this episode is because over the course of your lifetime,

a significant portion, pretty much all of the cells in your body are going to be replaced. So that the person, even after you reach your adult self, physically, by the time you die, assuming you're going to die much later, you are essentially a different person, at least on the cellular level. Yeah. 37 trillion cells. Ish. Ish.

That's how many we have? Yeah. That's what they estimate. And I did a little looking into lifespans. That sounds like an estimate. 37 trillion? Yeah. What do you want?

They're like give or take. Yeah. I did a little research into lifespans just because this all sort of comes back to like your death, basically, because that's all death is, is your cells, you know, dying little by little. Well, yeah, I mean, if you think about it, Chuck, one of the things that... Like why do we die if we'll get to all that? Oh, okay.

But it's intriguing, you know? It is. It started, you know, questions started popping up. So apparently we gain about three months every, three months of life, humanity, every year that we progress. Like the average lifespan expands by three months? Yeah. Like if you were born in 2012, the average lifespan is now, and this is the United States,

this is 78.8. If you were born in 1901, it was about 47 and 50 years for men and women, respectively. But if you look at the ratio, it's still about three months, despite all our technologies, three months a year. Every year. Every year. Just slowly creeping along. Yeah.

Because I think the article, it was like when we're going to live to be 100 by average. And they say by the year 2100, if things hold, then the average human or American will be about 100 years old. I thought that, so I guess, if things are steadily progressing, I'd heard that like our generation would be either the last or the first, the last to not hit triple digits or the first two. On average. Yeah.

And these are all guesses, you know. So who knows. Plus, if you believe in like things speeding, science speeding up. Yeah. What is that? Moore's Law? Yeah. Applied to computers though.

Right. Right. But I mean, you can extend it to other stuff. Yeah. Then you might think, you know, it's, it's, but, you know, they say it's not increasing like that. No. At least not so far.

Moore's Law is exponential growth, just adding three months every year is non-exponentials geometric. I think we're still at non-exponential growth. Definitely. Yeah. We're just adding three months. Yeah. It's not bad though.

That's pretty good average. Every four years, that's an extra year. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting to think about, you know, people that were born, you know, a lot of our colleagues, like eight years behind us, are going to live an average of two years longer. Yeah. That seems unfair.

Sad. Yeah. I know. What did they do to deserve that? We're, we're thinking about our own deaths today. Yeah. And check that there's this rumor theory legend, maybe, that your body regenerates itself. 95% of your body regenerates itself every year.

Yeah. That's not true. No, it's not true. But it was a very long-standing rumor and it was actually based on science. Yeah. You know, not just the idea that, oh yeah, our cells regenerate. So back of the envelope estimate is that, you know, we regenerate 95% or 98% of our cells every year.

It was early experimentation by injecting radioactive isotopes into human beings and then following their course and then making estimates based on that led to this idea. It's called pulse labeling. Is it? Yeah, it's like tagging an animal in the wild, basically. Right. But you're just tagging a cell. Yeah.

For specific types of cells. Yeah. And you're just tagging them more. No. They do it for animals, I think. It's a very dumb thing to do. Sure. Injecting radiation.

Exactly. Yeah. Unless, of course, you know, it's radiation treatment. That's true. Which is still a really weird thing if you think about it. Yeah. I have a feeling it's going to be like one of those things we look back on as like a primitive treatment.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I hope so. But there was this long-standing science for decades or this idea, scientific idea that we regenerated ourselves by 95, 98%. Finally, and I think 2005, there was a researcher named Dr. Jonas Friesen. He's Swedish.

He's awesome. He said, this whole urban legend is really bringing me down. I want to figure out a way to really track how often the human body regenerates itself. Yeah. The biggest question has been the brain, specifically the cerebral cortex and the heart and the heart muscles. I mean, they want to know all this stuff, but those were the two biggest mysteries, I think.

Right. There's still the mysteries, but if you went back to prior to 2005 and Dr. Friesen's research, it was all a mystery. Yeah. He figured out, he basically put a very accurate time stamp on how often human tissue and human cells regenerate themselves. Yeah. Right?

So the way he did this is very clever. For a long time, botanists knew that the trees around the world contained a spike of carbon-14 radiation. Yes. Thanks to humans and nuclear bombs. Exactly. From 1954 to 1963, tree growth around the world show a big spike in carbon-14. Carbon-14 is naturally occurring, too.

So just cosmic rays from the sun bombard Earth's atmosphere and create radioactive isotopes by knocking electrons from particles in Earth's atmosphere. Those radioactive particles become carbon-14, which is radioactive, and in the atmosphere, carbon-14 binds to oxygen and creates carbon dioxide, which comes to Earth. Every living thing breathes this stuff in, whether it's a plant, whether it's a human. We just have C-14 in our bodies. We also eat plants, exactly contain the C-14, besides breathing it in. We also eat the animals that eat the plants in just C-14.

We got carbon-14 in our bodies. That's right. But because of the spike in carbon-14 that was introduced to the atmosphere from nuclear testing, there is a spike in humans as well. You can roughly age a human compared to another human if they were born in, say, 1959, and one who was born in 1970 after there was that spike of carbon-14 had gone away. That's pretty cool. What Dr. Friesen did is even cooler.

He basically went back to those tree trunks, those tree rings that show a spike in carbon-14 and created a calendar of carbon-14 decay and basically said, okay, on this date, this is how much carbon-14 was on Earth. If I take this cell and compare it knowing that carbon-14 decays at a constant rate, I can tell you exactly how old the cell is. Exactly. He used it to date cells and tissues and all sorts of cool stuff. He went looking for a marker and he found one due to our atomic testing program, which

is pretty weird. Just released all that junk in the atmosphere and now, all these years later, it has a nice use. You know? It does. So we now know when we're going to die. Right. Sort of.

The reason he was able to use this as a marker, Chuckers, is that when you take a breath of life, your first breath of life, and you get some of that C14 into your DNA, and a steady amount stays in there. You don't keep ingesting C14 as far as I understand, as far as your DNA goes. Once it's in your DNA, as your cells divide, that original amount becomes divided evenly. Right. So the less C14 that's in tissue, the older that cell line is, or the younger the actual cells are.

Right. Is that right? I think so, which would mean the new cell, the marker, would be a fresh batch of the C14? No, it would have less C14. Oh, really? Yeah. That's the cell divided, yes. Exactly.

Yeah. You have 10 grams of C14, which you don't, can't imagine, but that would be like, let's say your one cell that's never divided has 10. When it divides into two, each of those two cells is going to have five grams, and then two and a half, and then 1.75 and so on and so on. So since you know that C14 is generated at a constant rate, you know that it decays at a half-life of 5,730 years, you can look at the amount of C14, and then also the decay of it as well, you can date things that are no longer living to, to see when they ingested

that C14 was. Yeah, he's a little like a bingo card, he just, from the calendar that he made with the trees, and he holds it up in the light, and that's how he determines it. That's not true. But what he did determine though was, which is really cool, and this is sort of what we've been building toward, is that most of your cells are about 7 to 10 years old. Yes. In the body.

And there are variances, and of course we're going to talk about all that, and right after this break, we're going to give you a little primer on cells, so you know what all this means. Let's get started. Attention Bachelor Nation, he's back, the man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new Tell All podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times, it'll be funny, we'll push the envelope, but I promise

you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all, and now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders, and repairing this, moving forward, and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this, and I have a lot of thoughts.

I think about this every day, truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikala, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology.

Lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends, and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, cancelled marriages, K-pop? But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good.

There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology? It changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Josh, we were promised a cell primer, and we like to deliver on those promises, weird stuff you should know.

So I guess we started off by saying there are 37 trillion cells about in the human body. Yeah, give or take. And water makes up about two-thirds the weight of those cells. Oh, yeah? That's right. They're tiny. You need a microscope to see them. And it's the tiniest thing that can still reproduce.

And even though we have many different kinds of cells, I think 200 types, and within those cells there are differences, but there are a lot of similarities with all cells in their structure. Namely, they have a cell membrane. They have a nucleus. They have a nucleus. Some have more than one. And these membranes are what allows nutrients to pass in and out, waste to pass out, water

through osmosis travels in, reverse osmosis travels out. And what else? We got your mitochondrion as well. That's where this is the important, really important thing, which is basically what keeps your cells alive. That's the power center, right? Yeah, and your cells need food to live just like your body does, but you can't pass that hamburger straight into your cell.

It needs to be broken down so your cell can use it. Exactly. And adenosine triphosphate, ATP, is like the universal cell fuel, right? So there's a lot of stuff that the body does make. I think you need like 23 amino acids, and like nine of them, your body doesn't really manufacture. So those are the nine non-essential amino acids, right? And you use amino acids to build proteins and use proteins for everything from making

muscles to making red blood cells to your mounting and immune response. Proteins are very, very vital. In some of them, you have to build by eating stuff from your environment, right? Yeah. So you go out and you find yourself a nice pig, and you cut off its back leg. You say, sorry, pig, here's a pig leg for you, but I need this leg, and I'm going to eat this leg, and what I'm really eating is the muscle, and what I'm really, really eating is the glutamine.

Yeah. And then my body's going to take this glutamine. It can make it itself, but it doesn't hurt to have an extra little bit of glutamine. Yeah, it doesn't hurt to have that pig leg in your back. Exactly. You're jumping on the pig leg, eating the pig's muscles. Sorry, it doesn't hurt. The pig's muscles.

Vegetarian listeners, by the way. Right. Just use your imagination for a second. Sure. And yes, I'm sorry, too. So you're eating the pig leg, and you're gaining this glutamine as a result, and your body's metabolizing the glutamine and then reusing it, right? Yeah.

And it can be glutamine. It can be anything. If we're ingesting a protein, if we're ingesting amino acids, or if we're eating any kind of food, sugars, whatever, our bodies break it down into its constituent parts. And then a lot of those constituent parts become part of our bodies. So if you think about it, in this sense, when we eat, when we breathe, we're taking in stuff we need from the environment. And that stuff that we take in from the environment becomes a part of us, literally, physically,

on the molecular level, it becomes a part of us. Or better or worse, depending on what it is, of course. Yeah, that's a great... I think that's ultimately one of the side lessons of this whole thing is we should take care of our environment because that environment becomes us, and we either suffer or thrive as a result of it. You ever heard the expression, you are what you eat? Exactly. You literally are what you eat.

Quite literally. And then also, Chuck, it goes the other way as well. When we excrete waste, when we exhale CO2, that's taken up by other things in the environment, is deposited into the environment, and it becomes part of the environment itself. So not only do we regenerate our cells, regenerate tissue, on average seven to ten years, become almost wholly a new version of ourselves, we also, the boundary between us and the surrounding environment is really non-existent because there's a constant exchange of molecules. Yeah, we lose, on average, they say average adult male loses 96 million cells per minute,

but we also replace those at the rate of 96 million per minute. Yeah, roughly. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the good news. We've got all these cells that we're losing, we've got all these new cells that are replacing them. And I think, like you said earlier before the break, that these, the different types

of cells, and then hence different tissues, regenerate at a different rate, right? Yeah, and they all have specialized jobs, and the cells are often built in such a way to aid that job, physically different to make that job easier, which is really cool, too. Right. It shows how versatile they are. Yes. You know? Like stem cells are very versatile.

Super. So let's say your skin, your skin regenerates every two to four weeks, I think. Yeah, exactly. You get a new healthy coating of skin every two to four weeks because your epithelial cells are particularly good at regenerating themselves. That's right. And that is, well, I guess that would fall on the low side, obviously, if we're talking seven to ten years.

On the super low side, you have the cells that line like your intestine and your gut, and those things don't last long at all because it's such a harsh environment, you know? You wouldn't expect them to last like weeks and months and years. Yeah. How long is it? Five days. Yeah, that's nothing. But the structure of your guts, the, that are beneath that membrane lining that turns

over every five days, they last about 15 years. Yeah. So it's such a, like a beautiful, elegant system that we have to keep us alive. Red blood cells last about 120 days, but then you have things like cells in your bone which actually regenerate as well. So your bones are over time, over a much longer period of time, actually becoming, I mean, I hate to call them new bones, but they kind of are, you know? Well, yeah.

So if you compare, if you took your femur and somehow compared it to your femur when you were 15 years old, like they are two totally different bones. Even though they're your bones, they were in the same place growing in the same person with the same DNA, they're still different bones because they're made of different cells. Ten years or so for the bones? Yeah, something like that. For the human skeleton, 300 to 500 days for the liver, very important organ. It is.

And one of the other cool things about the liver is it's just gangbusters that regenerating itself. Yeah. You can apparently cut out 95% of a person's liver and it will grow back and you won't have full function, but it will function. You'll survive with just 5% of your liver. That's pretty amazing, actually. Yeah, because it will just grow right back, kind of like a hornet's nest.

Only the inner lens cells of your eye form in your embryo and basically don't change. Yeah. Now, is that why you have suffer from degeneration and vision? That's what I would guess. Is that the reason? Yeah, so with the corneal lens, Chuck, when you're born, when you're conceived, right, you are a cell that divides finally. Once that first division takes place, those corneal cells, they're set in stone.

Like your corneal cells are as old as you are, the same age as you. Other cells that make up different parts of the eyes, they're far newer, but your corneal cells, your cerebral cortex cells, they think? Yeah, that's the one I mentioned, the brain and the heart muscles. Those are the two big ones because obviously the reason we have diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia are because the cerebral cortex has long thought to not regenerate cells at all. Yeah.

Now, I think they believe that they do in a very small number. Or different regions, like the olfactory bulbs supposedly does. Yeah, in the hippocampus. So we can learn new things or sense of smell can be refined over time. Yeah, and I think isn't that also the reason the smell is very much tied to your memory? Probably. Like a smell can conjure up a memory more clearly. Yeah, but the cerebral cortex itself, they don't think, who was her name?

Elizabeth Gould of Princeton did a lot of work on this because it was just basically set in stone for years. Like no, that didn't happen. And she did a lot of work over the years trying to prove that it did using tracer studies. And I think that where they are now is they think it does some. Yeah, here there. Here there. But obviously we still have to mention Alzheimer's.

So it's not, it doesn't regenerate like the rest of the body, not even close. Yeah, Alzheimer's also may be produced, I guess, by plaques, I remember plaque buildup. Oh yeah. In between your neurons that keep them from firing as well. Yeah. It seems like we're so close to figuring out the secret, you know, to, I don't know about not dying ever. I'm not talking immortality, but I'm living much longer lives.

Well, let's talk about that because all of this stuff kind of leads to that question. If we regenerate so often, why do we die? And we'll address that right after this. The tension bachelor nation, he's back, the man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new tell all podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny.

We'll push the envelope, but I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward and letting everybody hear for me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this and I have a lot of thoughts.

I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikulur and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology.

And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. We put it up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good.

There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so Chuck, there's this idea that if we are regenerating ourselves every seven to 10 years, we're like the vast majority of our body cells regenerate. Why do we age and why do we die?

It doesn't really make sense in that respect. Yeah, what they think is it has to do with your DNA actually in the cell. Our cells as we age, even the new ones that get replaced, which really stinks, become what they call senescent, which means that they can't divide any longer. We've talked about the Hayflick limit before or replicative senescence is basically how many times your cells can divide over its lifetime. And I think like a fibroblast, which is cells of the connective tissue and mammals, it's about 50 cell divisions.

And then it hits that point of senescence and it starts sending out repair signals to your body that aren't necessary and that causes inflammation. And we've talked about inflammation kind of being the source of most of the original problems that will eventually lead to your death. Something becomes inflamed and leads to all kinds of problems, so there's no repair needed. So it's a false signal. So they're trying to come up with drugs now. There's one called Repamycine that tries to stop the cells from sending out those false

signals, which is amazing. Yeah, that would be wonderful. There's another explanation for it as well is that when our cells divide, especially over time as we age, they're basically making photocopies of themselves and you ultimately years down the road end up making photocopies of photocopies and those don't tend to pan out very well. So as far as analogies go, that one kind of makes sense that yes, we have brand new cells, but the DNA copies, the DNA blueprints that they're based on have seen better days many

years back. Yeah, that makes sense. That's a good way to say it. We also talked a little bit about whether or not the heart muscle itself replenishes itself in the cells and for a long time they had no idea, but now thanks to our buddy Dr. Pearson, I don't think we said who he works with, did we? No. He works with the K, Karolinska team, just like incredible scientists that are making

like amazing advancements and trying to figure this stuff out, but they did in fact find that the heart does replace itself, the muscle cells. About 1% of the heart muscles were replaced every year at age 25 and that falls over your lifetime to less than half a percent per year by the age 75. I spoke too soon. That does make sense. Yeah. So what they basically said is about half of your heart's muscle cells will be exchanged

during a normal lifetime. Okay. Which is okay. It is, but as it's slowing down over time, I mean the heart's kind of essential. Yeah, but they're hoping again to develop drugs that can accelerate that process too. Yeah. I don't know how far along they are on that, but that'd be amazing. Um, so there's this whole thing that kind of came up to me, man, like that I don't,

all of this raises question to me, right? Yeah. If you look at like you or me or any living thing as an investment, like a molecular investment in the ability to reproduce, right? Okay. Once you finish your reproductive age, then it does make sense that you would just kind of, there would be built in this mechanism of aging and then death and then decay, which is what we do.

Yeah. We return back to the earth to put it in kind of biblical terms. There's like that whole ashes to ashes, dust to dust thing. It is very, very true. And if you look at us and you look at all living things as something that exchanges molecules with the external environment, takes them in, puts them out, right? And you look at us as all connected in that sense. Yeah.

Like we're just like a plant. Exactly. Or we're just like a rock. Yeah. Like we're all that stuff. And those things are us because we're able to exchange basic ingredients. Then it makes total sense that a person would come together, be conceived, start dividing his cells, make more of itself and then start to age and then die and decay and then it

would give something else a chance to come up from that again, right? But then it makes you wonder, what's the point of that? What do you mean? Like think about it, if we're just the same as plants. Like why are we all here? Yeah. Like if the whole point is to just basically recycle materials because we are just recycling stuff from the environment and we're recycled as we die and decay, what is the point?

Is our point just to be part of the carbon cycle so we're moving carbon in and out of ourselves and in and out of the environment and moving it around? Or I don't understand what the point is of life, I guess is what I'm saying. You're a nihilist. No, I'm not saying I don't believe that there isn't a point. I'm just curious what it is because if we are the same as any other living thing, and the definition of living is an exchange with an active exchange with the surrounding environment, breathing, eating, whatever.

Eating, pooping. Yes. And then if you kind of take that a little further and say, well, clearly we're meant to reproduce or something like that and then after that we age and die, what's the point? Why not just have one species of living thing? And just let that do all of your carbon recycling or whatever. Yes. I think, are you about to quit the show?

Yes, see what you mean. If we look at ourselves as a purely mechanical, serving a purely mechanical function on the planet. Like we are to the carbon cycle, what say evaporation is to the rain cycle. Like we're a means of moving something along. Well, I think that's when you man this. I'm Munga Shatigler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe.

You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Here's the Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. And to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.