The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 908: The Lone Star Tick and Alpha Gal Syndrome

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with journalist and author Burkhard Bilger about: the lone star tick; alpha gal syndrome; Lyme disease; treatments; cockfighting; and more! Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Holy smokes, joined today by Burkhard Builder, the writer. We're going to talk about Alpha-Gal syndrome and the lone star tick, but we're also going to talk about a bunch more of your work. And I got to tell you flat out right here, this is embarrassing. I've been a fan. I've been a fan of you for over a quarter century. Wow. That's great. I, like, dude, I'm not kidding you. In 1999 or whatever that was, 1999, 2009, 2000, I was a graduate

student. And I got the, the, the, the, the, Harper's magazine. And it had your piece on cockfighting. And I, I, I was split between, I was split between loving you because it was so perfect and, in wanting to kill you because I was so jealous. I'm not kidding you. And I've, I've loved your stuff since, man. Oh, thank you.

Like you're, you know, I know, I know you've done. books like you have a book noodling for flatheads and you kind of blew that i mean you like made that whole thing in my mind you took this like esoteric you know backwards practice and sort of made it to where every social media influence around the planet goes out and has their day noodling flatheads you know i mean like you found that a friend of mine in oklahoma made a documentary called oki noodling with the flaming nick lips for the soundtrack and and he uh now there's a whole noodling tournament in or no blower every year that's but you were on to that stuff yeah you were out of that stuff 20 like over 20 years ago yeah yeah there's uh yeah 25 30 years ago yeah and another favorite thing

like one of my favorite passages ever written is you were you were profiling the the sort of like up-and-coming bull riders can you explain this people real quick and i'll tell you my favorite passage but like how do you explain your piece about bull riding well it's basically about how young bull riders get made and they you know they get started five or six on sheep and then they go to little calves and then they go to small bulls and steers and and that has happened that has gotten younger and younger even as the bulls have gotten more more fierce and terrifying and destructive and so it's been a crazy yeah kind of collision of two cultures and you did mostly reporting for that am i remember right

was it mostly in nevada or you it's mostly in oklahoma actually where i grew up in Oklahoma so I knew a lot of and there were there a bunch of bull riding families down there that I knew so I met them but you were I always tell people this story because you're writing a piece about bull riding culture and these young kids bull riding and at the same time that you're working on this in your own neighborhood in Brooklyn right New York there's a park where the parents all take their little kids to play and they came in and installed rocks in the park I mean flat rocks like two inches high yeah Yeah, so you're writing about the parents who are deeply upset about the hazard that these rocks would present to their children should they get hurt on the rocks. Right. And people being like, hey, I can't believe they're real rocks put in the park. And you're like, you're living in this while also living with these bull rider people. Right. And it was just, I mean, it was, I think it was the high point or the nadir of the kind of helicopter parenting thing.

And in Park Slope, where I'm in Brooklyn, was really intense about that. These parents who wanted to oversee every single thing, create a perfectly safe bubble for their children. And then I go to Western Oklahoma, and some five-year-old, eight-year-old boys getting thrown off, bloody face might have a bunch of cuts. And his parents are like, get back up, boy,

get back up on that thing, you know? And it's just like... And I have to say, those kids that I was with, those bull riding kids, were some of the best kids I've ever been around. Was that right? Incredibly polite, focused, like, good-natured. You know, I mean, there was a good chance

they were going to get grievously injured before the age of 20, you know, and they could have had it. It was lots of risk in what they were doing. But in terms of how they approached life, there was so much zest and appetite to it. It was kind of, they were kind of great. Yeah.

And then now, the reason I want to you hear now is you just wrote a big piece, All your stuff is so well reported. You do a great job. I feel like you usually, you seem to really win the trust of people you're talking to. You paint things very fairly. And now you've done a piece on something that I've been paying a ton of attention to,

which is this, you can clarify what seems to be this explosion in alpha-gal syndrome, to where now I've got buddies that have had it. I've got buddies that got it so long ago they got over it. It seems like there's more and more of it. I went through. I recently was reading the writer, Nellie Bowles.

I recently read a piece she had where she called, she said that Lyme disease is a chic disease. Like people are proud to have had it. I don't know about that. I've had a tick porn. I had a tick porn illness from Lyme that I was treated for and got better. And ticks are part of the conversation in this country, especially in the outdoor community.

Like ticks are a bigger part of the conversation now than they've ever Ben and it seems like they're only going to become more and more and more of the conversation. And there's more and more things to worry about. And I didn't even realize it and I'll have you explain it. But I recently picked the loan, I had a lone star tick right here on my clavicle. I called my friend of mine who's a doctor because I thought it was like the kind of thing you take an antibiotic for. This is just, I mean, this is a couple weeks ago. Right.

And she's like, no, man, this is a whole other ball game. This is not nothing to like, that's not this. And they realized like how little I knew about this. Yeah. But which we're going to cover it. But to start, like, why did you get into this idea? Like, what drew you to this idea of alpha-gal syndrome and lone star ticks? Well, it's like a lot of stories.

I kind of zeroed in on it gradually. My first thought was, damn, we've had these waves of infestations over the last 30 years, you know, Lyme disease and super lice and bedbugs. And there was this huge scabies outbreak in Europe that might be coming to this country and screw worms. And, you know, it's just been like one after the other. And I thought there's got to be a pattern here. What's going on?

And so I started calling, first I called pest control people in New Jersey. And then they sent me to a bunch of extension folks in Nebraska and Kentucky. Okay. And they said, well, yeah, you know, a bunch of those things are, we're worried about the screw worm, but they haven't really come across the Texas border yet. but everybody here is freaked out about Alphagal.

And I had heard about Alphagal maybe 12, 15 years ago, but as a kind of a novelty disease, there was a piece on radio lab about a woman who'd gotten it. And it felt very much like what Lyme disease was in the early days, like maybe something that in a small pocket's like the Hamptons or Martha's Vine, which, by the way, are two of the biggest hotspots for it. maybe people get it there, but it's not that wide spread. And then I started to realize, no, it's actually,

those ticks have moved all the way west to the Rockies. They're like, and they're spreading and multiplying, so it's becoming a much huger thing than it was. You just said that the ticks are spreading. Is it that the ticks are spreading or that the pathogen or the diseases are spreading? Well, it's both, really. I mean, in this country, I mean, if you look worldwide,

Alpha-Gal is all over the world now. Okay. More than 30 countries, six continents. Got it. And in all these countries, all these continents, it's carried by different ticks. Like the Bond tick in South Africa, or the Castrabean tick in Europe. In this country, it's carried by Lone Star ticks, almost exclusively. And the Lone Star tick used to be pretty much contained in the southeast.

Like up until 1950, they didn't really go past north of Virginia. Okay. And now you look at the CDC map of Lone Star Ticks, and they're all the way to the Oklahoma Panhandle. They're all the way to Maine. They're all the way to northern Michigan. So they, with climate change, and especially with the kind of wetter conditions that often come with climate change, they've kind of followed those and spread all across the country. And they're so aggressive and so bold and resilient that they've done really well wherever they've gone. Yeah. I want to tell listeners about a thing real quick. Then I want you to explain how this Al-Gal thing. works. But like,

people are very familiar with Lyme. We've been talking about Lyme disease for decades. Lyme disease is you have a tick that carries like a bacterial pathogen. The tick latches on to you, and the longer it's on you, the more it can transmit, and it transmits a bacterial infection into your body. Right. It's passing an infection along into your body. You can have the ticks that carry it.

You have areas where there's a very low prevalence, right? There's a small percentage of the ticks are infected. There's areas where, like, when I got it and doing my research after getting it, I learned that about three quarters of the ticks at that time in Hudson Valley, about three quarters of the ticks carried the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. So, you know, if you got a tick latched on you, had a 75% chance that that thing had the capability of bringing it to you. Right. this alpha gal deal

which will jump to the kind of the punchline here is it causes like a meat and dairy allergy is how people become aware of they had it has a totally different way it functions yeah can you explain to people what's like what is going on when you get bit by these things yeah yeah no it's true i mean lyme disease babesiosis anaplasmosis all the major tick-borne diseases are you know they're bacteria or they're parasites alpha gal is different and it and it's different in two ways like every lone star tick has alpha gal in its saliva right so it's not a question of if you have the bacteria or not they all have it like they're just born with it you're born with they're born with it and when you get bitten if they latch on and they stay latch on that alpha gal it goes into your system now the the catch is that like not that larger percentage of people who get the alpha gal into their system from a bite will be will be we'll be we'll be we'll develop the syndrome, right? You might even have alpha-gal antibodies in your body and still not get the

syndrome. The syndrome means you're getting an allergic reaction to it. But if you get bitten by a lone star ticking, it stays on you, you will get alpha-gal in your system. And what is that, like, explain that bit about that all meat, besides like people meat, monkey meat, all mammal meat, contain something, right? Yeah. All non-primate bodies contain alpha-gal. And the most of it, if you look at the ones that have the highest concentration, it's the organ meat, it's the sinews, it's the fibers, but it's also in the meat. And dairy often has, almost always has alpha-gal in it.

And what is it? It's a carboy. It's a type of sugar. It's a type of sugar, which is another unusual thing. Most allergies are caused by proteins, our two proteins. but this case is the sugar, which is one of the reasons it took so long for it to get identified. But it's in this, you know, and so, you know, we eat alpha-gal all the time. We're eating meat all the time, and mostly we don't react to it.

So the question is, why do we? And that still hasn't been totally figured out. There's clearly something in the tick saliva, some kind of co-factor that's not only, we're not only getting the alpha-gal, but it's triggering the immune reaction to the alpha-gal in the people who get it. And then they get it, like the tick gets it in them. Yeah. To some degree where the body, now the human body now reacts to it. Has immune reaction to that sugar, that foreign sugar that's in your blood.

So then you go eat a burger. Right. You go eat a beef burger and all of a sudden your body lights up. Yeah. I mean, and the crazy thing is that most dollars are quick, right? You get bitten by, you get stung by a B and you react right away, you know. but alpha-gal it can take two to six hours to manifest and it seems to be because the alpha-gal itself is bound up in lipids and fats or it's bound up in these connective tissues and both of them these kind of gluey connective tissues and both of them take a long time to digest and so you know you're eating this stuff and no reaction at all and then suddenly at three in the morning you're starting to get terrible stomach cramps or you might get shortness of breath you're your throats closing up, you're getting rashes or hives.

And people don't make the connection. Yeah. Right? I mean, there was a study in 2017 that looked at 100 doctors' visits of people who had alpha-gale syndrome, and only one in 10 doctors identified it correctly. Oh. You know, and the people in that study, the median length to diagnosis was seven years. So you think about people having these serious,

allergic reactions to the point of some of them are going into anaphylactic shock, you know, and they don't know. And they go to the doctor and the doctor says, well, that might be a gluten allergy or, I don't know, maybe you have some heart palpitations. We didn't need to do some heart things. I talked to one guy who had three heart surgeries because they misdiagnosed alpha-gals. Really? Yeah, this is a guy in Springfield, Missouri. So that's the, that's the scary part of it. If you don't identify it, you start to think, oh, you have irritable bowel syndrome. You of any number of things that it could be that you could think it is causing it huh so when what do what does it mean when people say i got one buddy i don't want to say his name i say his first name his name's

evan he got it and then he got better right and again when i first heard i should clarify this when i first heard about this i thought it was like i had this i had this feeling how many ever years ago i was there i had this feeling that that can't be true right Yeah, it sounds like I thought it was another and I don't in any way I want to say there's not such a thing. Like I don't want to go down to being like there's no such thing as gluten allergies, whatever. When I first heard it, what went off in my head is it's like a thing that people are becoming aware of and they're self-diagnosing at a higher rate than people are actually getting it. Right, right. Because yeah.

But then I've got friends. By the way, allergists and epidemiologists were the same way. For like 10 years, they said, this is not a thing. You're lying. That's the feeling I had. I don't know what you got going on. You ate a bad burger. What do you mean?

You're allergic to burgers. Right, right, right, right, right. But then my buddy who I know and know him well, you know, he went through it. And I can't remember what it was. It was some, I don't know, five, six, seven years. And he said it started to dissipate. What's that all about? Well, I mean, that's the, I guess, the bright.

side of it is that your antibody levels start to drop and sometimes three, four years even, you can go back to eating meat. You know, people have all kinds of different reactions. The trick is though, and here's the problem, is that the more tick bites you get, the higher antibody levels go, right? So if you really want to have it dissipate and go away, you can't be outdoors very often. You have to be incredibly careful. You have to wear, you know, about, about awaiting ticks bites. It's not just watching your diet, but it's watching your activities. Yeah, you can't eat meat or dairy and you can't get bitten again. Huh.

Explain a little bit about, like, what's this ticks kind of groove? Like, what is his life cycle? What is he doing with his time? Well, every spring season, they come out and they want a blood meal, right? They want to be. And before that, they're spending most of the time in semi-hybernation, right? They're in leaflet or somewhere not bothering anybody. But then they come out in the spring, and they're looking to suck

blood and they do this even as larvae. One of the big things that people worry about is what they call tick bombs, which are these clusters of 200 tiny seed-like lone star ticks that people walk into. And you look and you think you have some dirt on your pants and on your leg and you brush it off and you've had 25 bites. And those little larvae sons of bitches. Each of them can bite. Each of them can give you alpha-gal syndrome. You know what I haven't seen that, but you know what I've gotten tangled? up with that comes in those clusters have you had a chick problem with chiggers ever that's what i

grew up with an oklahoma oh that's right you're from the heartland of that shit man yeah yeah no that that's what we hate because they get you like a bunch right and they burrow under your skin i mean it's it's an awful yeah you know what's funny about those chiggers too is uh there's so much there's when i first got my first bad chigger infestation where i was in i think i was in missouri one yeah was in missouri first time i ever got it bad and the number of of remedies that were suggested to me. Bathing in bleach, putting nail polish on them, putting epoxy on them, rubbing motor oil into them.

And there's so much misinformation that I even went. So I got so bad I was having, like, I was going into, like I was having an allergic reaction to him. I was getting feverish. I mean, I was coated. And people are telling me, oh, well, it laid its eggs in you and now they're living in you, right? And I quickly, like, on my phone, I quickly learn that that's, that's not what this is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I go to a med stop. I go to see a doctor. I'm like, here's the deal. I'm so covering these chiggers. Like, I need like a steroid. She goes, is that the thing that lays the eggs in you? I'm like, no, it doesn't lay eggs in you.

Oh, my God. But anyhow, so that, so when that tick comes out and he's got those little guys. Yeah. those will bite you. Those will bite you. But the big one will bite you too. Big ones will bite you. I think basically there's three seasons

in every tick if I have a right to bite you. And it's pretty restricted to the spring and summer. Okay. The thing about the Lone Star tick is they're incredibly aggressive. I mean, the funny thing is talking to entomologists, you know, usually they love their beasties and they like to talk about the things they study. But with Lone Star, every single animalologist I talked to you said, I hate that tick.

Oh, really? I hate that thing. Like one woman said to me, Holly Gaff, she worked at Old Dominion and Virginia, and she was like, they're like the bullies of the insect world. They'll beat you up and take your lunch money. They actually pursue people, you know, unlike most ticks, like the dog tick or the deer tick, they'll hang around on a blade of grass and wait for you to go by and then they'll hitch a ride and bite you. But the Lone Star will actually come down and follow your heat and your carbon dioxide and track you down and crawl on.

On foot. On foot. I mean, this guy I talked to this animalologist or the public health biologist in Martha's Vineyard was saying he talked to lots of people who had said that the Lone Star ticks were coming down from the dune grasses, cross the burning sand and onto the beach blankets and biting people as they were sunbathing. So these things are just so aggressive. protecting people's presence. Oh, yeah, yeah. And they're going after them. And they're really hearty.

So they can handle some heat. You know, a lot of ticks will dry up too quickly to do that. But, no, they're really, they're problematic, little animals. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Hello. My gosh. Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish.

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I'd be wearing them right now. But you can bet your ass I got them in my truck. And they are up at the meat eater store right now at the meat eater store.com. Explain the relationship between, because the tick that carries lime has the same deal where they have a tight little friendship with deer right the deer doesn't look at it that way they have a relationship with deer yeah i mean the the lone star i mean the same biologist

on martha vina told me like a typical deer in a season can carry 500 to a thousand ticks okay now that's probably deer tick and lone star ticks but um yeah i mean they're like the perfect vessel for carrying these there's so much blood in them they can't get them off And so in areas like Georgia and all across the country where they have high deer populations, they're just breeding factories for Lone Star Ticks. Yeah, you even see now, there's always these different, depending on who you ask, there's always these different motivations to reduce deer numbers. Yeah. And especially your law in the urban, suburban interface, particularly in the eastern U.S. There's always these different motivations of lower deer numbers where a traditional one would be agriculture.

Sure. You know, just deer come out and destroy cornfields, eat alfalfa, whatever. Right. And so at agricultural interests, be like, we need to suppress deer numbers. Right. Eating people's atrange. There's a thing that gets talked about probably more. It gets discussed probably in a way that's disproportionate to how impactful it is.

but car insurers will now and then point out that it would be advantageous to us if deer numbers were lowered. Right. That's people debate whether that's true, but I've seen documented evidence where car insurers have advocated to lower deer numbers. I've seen lately with wildlife managers being under some level of political pressure to lower deer numbers because of ticks. Yeah. Like that's entered the conversation.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel like, I mean, I started working for science magazines almost 40 years ago. And even then, at the very beginning, there were this debate about what do we do about deer populations. My first magazine was an environmental magazine. And the question, I think, was Fire Island in New York. Oh, yeah, I've been there.

And they were saying, what are we going to do with the deer? And back then, the big fight was between, really an interesting way, between ecologists who were saying, these deer are disastrous for the ecosystem. They're eating all the native plants. They're like just changing the whole environment and animal rights activists.

And people who just had, who just loved animals, not necessarily peeved up people, but just people who didn't want to see these beautiful animals killed. And it's amazing to me that it's that 40 years later, it's still the same debate because it felt like it was pretty clear 40 years ago

that we have too many deer, that they're bad for the environment, and that there's an easy solution to this, which is, you know, relaxing hunting laws in some cases. There's also some ways of, you know, there's vaccines and other things you can do, but it felt like that's been kind of a natural, ecologically sound response. Yeah, you've had for many decades, for many different reasons, pointing out that some of these areas have too many deer,

and then you just kind of tack on whatever the issue of de jure. Right, right, right, right. Right, right. Although, I do think that ticks might be the thing that finally does it. I mean, talking to these folks, in in in missouri but also in in martha's vineyard there you know they were for a long time against killing these deer and now they're just launching this huge killing campaign campaign on that island and i think it's the people finally said look we we just can't live with this kind of

threat it's direct it's like yeah it's direct human health right because people can look at these people could look at these ideas of sort of like long-term negative impact on native plant species and they they just kind of tune out right but when you're paranoid to have your kid out in your yard, playing on the grass, it just hits people different. Well, the funny thing is, it even hits people different with it's Lyme disease. And they say, well, you may have to take an antibiotic or you might get some fatigue syndrome. And when you say, you're not going to be able to eat meat anymore or drink milk anymore, somehow that freaks people out.

I want to, I want to spend more time on that tick life history. Well, let's do that first. I eventually want to ask you about a little bit about Lyme, because I'm assuming you've read a lot about lime in your work and talk about you about Lyme. But, so this tick, like, he, he hatches out, they got these little bombs, these little clusters, and eventually

they mature, and then they latch on to a deer. Yeah. Why do they ever want to leave the deer? Or don't they? Oh, that's interesting. I mean, not just deer. I mean, essentially, they're pretty indiscriminate, you know, omnivorous. I mean, in terms of they want blood, but

a lot of, you get white-footed mice, you get short-tailed shrews, you get, possums, raccoons. I mean, you know, people in Georgia, the wildlife biologists I talked to who said, look, anything that has, that moves and has blood is fair game. Got it. So that tick, he's not drawn to dearness. No. No, no, no. Okay. So that part of its life stage, if he gets on your dog, a possum, a person, that's all great by him. Absolutely. And that's one of the reasons when they talk about how do you get rid of these things. You can't get rid of them, right?

Um, but what you could do is drop the population dramatically. And that's where deer coming because deer are both so overpopulated and such incredible hosts, right? There's just, they're just so large and can carry so many ticks. Like I said, 500 to a thousand in a season. You know, a mouse you have four or five, maybe four or five ticks on them, but a deer you have a hundred times that number. So got it. You know, I always saw about reading about that, how they kind of hang out and wait for something to pass by. you wonder if

finding that host and latching on to something is successful is essential to reproductive success. Absolutely, and then they'll get their blood meal and then they'll drop off. Yeah, but you imagine like the failure rate. Right.

The failure rate's got to be enormous. I mean, for everyone that happens to have a thing brush against it and it gets on it, he's got to have 99 siblings Right. Who never were like, who never were in the right spot.

I mean, dragging, we were dragging these sheets through these meadows on Martha's Vineyard. And, you know, within an hour and a half, we had 81 ticks on it, you know, and it's a little stretch that we were doing. Explain that to me? It's about, he goes tick-dragging, basically. So he just has a big pole with a piece of white cotton on it,

like a meter by meter square. And he just... But it's not warm. It's not, no, but the, it just the the ticks just latch on you know they're just stretching out for something and it's moving and they just get caught and so suddenly and you pull it up and it just crawling all over the the sheet and you know and he's catching 81 in an hour and in a in a hundred square feet 100 square meters meaning if you went for an hour stroll oh yeah you're you're surrounded by ticks um and and of course there are trillions across

the planet so it's like you know there's plenty of food for them now let me get to the my a Lyme question. I was deep into the whole lime world 13 years ago. Okay. I always talk. It was a very,

it was like a formative experience for him, man. Like my boy got, he got, he had bells, Pauls, he was terrible. I was sick.

Like sick, and got better. And while that was going on and while I was very like into sort of like the culture of Lyme disease, there was this raging debate. And I even got to where I couldn't engage in it, you know,

of like, what would they call it, the sort of perpetual lime or long lime or whatever, yeah. Like untreatable or long haul lime or, I can't remember what it's called now. Right, right. But this idea that there were people out there that had it, knew they had it, but it was untreatable. Right.

And they just lived with it. Yeah. But then people at that time, people in the medical establishment, that I encountered infectious disease people, CDC people, whatever, they were dismissive of this idea.

Yeah. They're dismissive of that there's like an untreatable lime. When I was treated, I did the orals, I did the intravenous. Right. I got sick in June.

I got better in November after doing intravenous. And then do you know, though, because you still live in the area in the hotbed tick area. Yeah. Is there still this idea? that there's a strain of lime or there's people that have lime that cannot be cured,

even with intravenous antibiotics. There's nothing that can be done and they're going to live the whole life with lime. Right. I think it's a little bit like long COVID. I think it's something that's kind of half accepted, but we haven't pinned down exactly if it, how long it lasts, if it can really last forever. I mean, I've always heard that if you really go all out with the full rounds of multiple antibiotics you can even get long-term lime out but you know i was just talking this morning to my my brother-in-law

who's a doctor and he was saying yeah but you can get neurological damage there's things that can happen from not treating lime that will stick with you um i do think it's that's a scary thing about lime is it's it's as opposed to alpha-gal is you know it's curable but then often people don't know to cure it and then by the time they cure it they've already had some deleterious effects so it's it's It's a different kind of problem. Yeah. You know, when you, if you go way back in time, you'd be like, there's certain species like, uh, opossums, raccoons,

which just throughout the last couple centuries, these things have poured north and poured west. Right. And it's some, there's definitely a climate component to it. There's a component to that these things tend to be animals that, that do well around people, right? Right. That human activity opens up range conditions or opens up habitat conditions.

So in the absence of like if Europeans have never come to the new world and altered everything the way we altered them, raccoons and possums might still have gone north and west, but they might not have gone north and west as much as they've gone north and west as much as they've gone north and west. right meaning there's all these factors that lead to it like probably mild like milder winters probably they have more predators yeah yeah exactly like predator reductions yeah yeah probably agriculture probably like all these things going into it suburban homes and in trash practices and leaving dog bowls out on your porch and you get this whole soup of things right and it's just undeniable that these animals have had a great very successful

run and have dramatically expanded the range. When we hear about that these ticks are moving around, why now? I mean, it's, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's the same combination of factors, right? It's not just climate change. Certainly, climate change, I think, is allowed ticks to move north.

And in some cases, West, if it happens to have made some area more humid, where they can handle better. But the bigger thing, I think, is land use. If you look at the east, you know, eastern United States, it's been reforested dramatically in the last 50 years, you know. And not just that. You've had people do that. At the same time, you have suburbanization. You have these sub-developments out in the woods. You have this kind of sense of what used to be, you know, inner city became suburb. And now you have kind of a kind of sprawl that's sending its tendrils out deeper into the forest. You get all these edge habitats that deer love, that, all the animals you're talking about love, and that ticks then can ride on those hosts and proliferate.

So we've kind of created the perfect patchy, woody, brushy tick habitat over the years along a lot of the eastern United States. Oh, you know, when I first heard Lone Star Tick, all the whatever the hell years ago, however long ago I know that we were doing this show. Like this podcast existed at the time I first heard of the Lone Star Tick. Well, in fact, let me ask you, when would I probably first heard the word Lone Star Tick? You had to guess.

I mean, if you're from the South, it's been the dominant tick for a long time. Like 90% of Tick bites are from Lone Star Ticks. They've been used to the Lone Star Tick. For more than a decade. Yeah, for decades. Oh, so people were talking about Lone Star Ticks in the South a long time. Yeah, for them, it was just, but, you know, the interesting thing is, like, there was a study done, what we get our Alpha-Gal statistics is based on the study of blood samples from military.

recruits three thousand of them all over the country they were taken between 2001 2007 and they looked at the alpha-gal antibodies in those blood samples okay and then they kind of showed where they were most prevalence based on where the recruits came from oh that's fascinating man and it's uh and it's amazing if you look at the epicenter which is really like southeastern oklahoma up through northeastern uh northwestern arkansas into south central Missouri, it's like 47% of those recruits had alpha-gall antibodies. What? 47% and that was, you know, that was 15, that was almost 20 years ago.

Oh, so I was late to the party on this one. You're like, I mean, we all were. But in the south, the interesting thing is in the southeast where they were endemic, you know, the Lone Star ticks, much more so than, I mean, Arkansas, southern Arkansas, Oklahoma, they would have had it. But in places like Martha's Vineyard or Hamptons, they had just as high rates. And they didn't have endemic, loan startics. But in the southeast, it was only 10% of the recruits on average had alpha-gal.

So something, it makes you think that people who grew up with this, or it's been for decades or centuries even, there's probably some natural immunity built in, you would think. Yeah. Yeah. What that was leading me to, it doesn't really matter. but when I heard it, I thought it meant that it was a tick that lived in Texas. Oh, right.

Right. I didn't know. That just like that click and then I didn't realize, oh no, because it's got like a lone star. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's got like a star out of it.

Right, right, right, right. I thought it was like some Texas tick. And oh, so it's just funny to think back of like when you first heard it what clicked in my head is like, there's this thing in Texas and I don't really believe it. No, no, that was my first thought too.

And it's just that white dot on the on the back. That's the only thing. So do you know how with Lyme, there's a question of where it ever came from? Like, you know, there's an honest debate about where it came from. There's a wildlife disease you probably have heard of chronic wasting disease. Sure. So chronic wasting disease was identified. I can't remember if it was 68 or 72 or it was identified in Colorado.

What's not known is where did it come from? Was that just when we identified it? did they, you know, no one thinks that they identified the first case. Right. But then it seems to be in many more places than it used to be. But prior to that, they weren't looking for it. So there's this whole thing of like, what is it? Where did it come from?

Was it always here? And we just found out about something that's always been here. Or did it somehow emerge? And we freakishly found it right when it emerged. Like, you know, we don't know. Maybe Sunday we will know as sort of the genetic things and, you know, improve. Maybe we'll get better clarity into it. But with alpha-gal syndrome, since it's a thing that's innately in the tick, why weren't dudes, why when you're reading about the Civil War?

Okay. And they're dealing with malaria. Why weren't people back then saying, oh, did you hear, you know, little Johnny down the road has developed a mysterious meat allergy and can't eat meat anymore? Why wasn't that a conversation? You know, I asked that question of every epidemiologist and allergist I talked to, and they all said, at some level, it's a mystery. I mean, you can explain it away to some degree with the fact that it's late onset, so people just didn't notice it, and they misdiagnosed it. You could say it's just, you know, people didn't take it seriously. Somehow, meat allergy didn't.

But the truth is that it didn't just suddenly appear here. It appeared in South Africa. There's huge cases in Africa. There's a bunch of stuff in Peru. There's people in the black forest in Germany, you're starting to get Alphagana. In all these places, no one noticed it and emerged around the same time.

Really? So, yeah, I mean, it started to get identified between 1997 and 2007. You know, the first woman who really is woman, Cheryl Van Noonan, sorry, Cheryl. Cheryl Van Noonan in Australia. She accepts your apology. Yeah.

She was the first person, who really noticed the pattern in Australia. She had local people on the north coast of Sydney who were getting, and where they have these crazy paralysis ticks. She had her first cases, I think, in the late 80s, and then she published a poster in 2003 and presented it at a conference in 2007. Okay.

And she didn't know why it was causing it, but she knew that the tick bite was causing a meat allergy. And in Australia, there was crazy tick. called the paralysis tick, which can kill small children. I mean, it has this neurotoxin. And that's what spreads. I never heard that one. It's a scary.

And it's the one that spreads alpha-gal. So she first noticed it, but then pretty soon, you had German researchers, you know, people in Southeast, in Korea, I mean, it's really all over the globe. You know, I want to hit you with a thing that, I need to make a note to myself, because I need to ask you about a, I don't want to call it a conspiracy theory, a theory. you know what I'm going with this sure okay we'll get to it let me hit you with something though

a way I think about this kind of thing like why weren't dudes a long time ago developing meat allergies so my little boy my younger boy developed this condition called osteocondritis dicycans um they call OCD what's funny is he's around on when he's going through this he's around on crutches like I remember getting out of playing with him the pilot is greeting people and he's like, why happened to you? My boy says, I have OCD. So I had to follow behind him being like, it's his whole other. Right, right, right.

It was osteo-chondrized dye skins. Okay. It seemed, what it is is little bits of the cartilage, little bits of the cartilage in your joint dying to fall off. Yeah. Okay. He got it weirdly. Weirdly.

Well, not weirdly. It's weird to get it in one leg. It's, it's, it's weirder, but not twice as weird to get it in two legs. It apologies to any people that specialize this and I'm screwing parts of this up. But there is a genetic predisposition aspect to it. And there's also a use aspect to it. So he likes soccer and basketball and all that kind of stuff. So that probably complicates him.

And he has this thing happen. We dismissed him because he'd be like, something's wrong on my knee. My knee hurts all the time. He's always talking about his knees or he's laying on the floor being my leg won't work. I'm like, what do you mean your leg won't work? And he'd be like, oh, there it goes. Okay. Not hurting, but just observing this.

And so like, what are you talking about? Right, all right. You get a max raid doesn't do any good because the x-ray doesn't show, doesn't reveal this. You got to do an MRI to find out that you have it. So a lone bold he has, he gets these couple surgeries. My wife brings him to a specialist. He's all fine now.

But check this out. My mom's dad, okay, grandpa Glenn, just had bad knees. Do you know what I mean? It was a fact of Grandpa Glenn's life. It didn't no one, it was this, you know Grandpa Glenn. He's always had bad knees. And I don't have any reason to think, but I'm like, I wonder if that dude.

Yeah. Just had this thing that our little boy has going on, but it was just that he has bad knees. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. No one's going to do anything about it. They're not going to MRI Grandpa Glenn, you know, 70 years ago. And it was just like it was just the deal. You know, his knees hurt all the time.

Yeah, I mean, that was a question I asked. Is it could it be that we just have always had this and we used to ignore it? And everybody said, no. Oh, really? It's just, there's just, it's too severe and it's too, and it's been this too big a surge, you know? I think the other thing you can say that speaks to what you're talking about, though, is that, you know, there's been an allergy epidemic in this country in the last 50 years. I mean, food allergies have doubled and doubled again, right? And some of it is because allergies gave us the wrong advice.

You know, I just stay away from allergenic foods. Don't feed your kids. Or peanuts and all that kind of stuff. So we're absolutely more prone to allergies than we used to be. So that's probably a big part of this. And there are all kinds of theories. It's the hygiene hypothesis that we're living too cleanly. We're not developing, you know, we're not developing antibodies when we're young enough.

Or our gut biome isn't good enough to send off the off of dirt. yeah yeah all those things um there's this idea not licking enough rocks at the park right right there's this one epithelial um barrier hypothesis which says that that the the chemicals we use and the and they're in the air are making are kind of making us more porous to allergens you know they're like weakening the things that protect us in our skin and in our lungs and so where it's more easy for allergens to get into our bodies so um there's all kinds of hypotheses but we do know i hit you with some more sure I thought people about this and like people in the no in the no-ish who are like

like I don't know what what we'd like I'll just okay a couple years ago we had a couple years ago when he was when he was running for present we had RFK Jr. on he used to talk about allergens and things and he was talking about when these allergens exploded and these different areas

where he's he's like we don't I don't know when people look at the timeline like what are big shifts that happened societally, right? And he wasn't pointing to anyone, but he's like, you go and be like, well, what,

what things really happened in humanity and you'd be the explosion of corn syrup? Cellular and cellular networks. All these other things. Like medical practices, just kind of things you're talking about, like, what could have,

what sort of thing could have happened? Right. It would be in my lifetime, where things just got different. And out of it came a lot of where we see like, why did childhood obesity do whatever? Why is autism done whatever? Why are the allergy rates done whatever?

And is there something we missed? Well, I mean, I talked to this guy, Jeff Wilson at the University of Virginia. He's done a lot of really good Alphidale research. And one thing he talks about is, look, tick bites of all kinds just boost antibody levels across the board. Right? And the interesting thing is that you can have really high antibody levels and not have any allergies. And weird things can trigger it, like stress can trigger it.

Okay. You can get this called chronic echaritis or something. I got the name wrong. But it was where you have these sudden flare-ups of hives or rashes, you know. And you've had this kind of baseline of antibodies in your blood the whole time, and something is triggering it. You know, it could be exercise. It can be alcohol. We know those things can trigger allergic reactions faster.

Exercise. Exercise and alcohol. You know, like in one German study for Alfa-Gal, they know that people had alpha-gal antibodies, and they wanted to feed them meat to see if it would trigger it. But they weren't getting into good enough reaction, so they gave them some beer to drink and put them on treadmills. And then they got a higher reaction. Man, my buddy that I was taught about, big exercise guy, big beer guy.

Yeah, yeah. No, those two things together, you're more likely to get triggered. So, you know, so he was saying, you know, we can't necessarily, like, pin, you know, it's not a pure cause and effect. You know, sometimes we have all the working materials, but it doesn't happen unless some other outside factor comes in. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Hello. My gosh.

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Open the free IHR radio app. Search video podcasts and tap watch. Good Lord, they're finally here at long last after fighting and yelling and fighting some more. Clay Newcomb and First Light have done it. They have built a pair of work bibs together. Not just any work bibs. We're talking the bare grease bibs from Clay. Now, I've watched Clay work long enough to know that he wasn't going to put his name on a pair of hunting pants, pretending to be work bibs.

And boy, he did not. These are Clay's invention for things like breaking mules, rendering grease, kneeling in the dirt. I'm going to use them all the time, trap and working, fixing stuff. It doesn't matter. If you want good, durable, comfortable bibs, these are your bibs made from tough stretch duck cotton. They got briar-proof chaps that run from cuff to thigh. They got pockets damn near everywhere. Again, comfortable and durable.

Put them on. You don't need to worry about having anything go bad. If it wasn't so hot right now outside, I'd be wearing them right now. But you can bet your ass I got them in my truck. And they are up at the meat eater store right now at the meat eater store. I hesitated to go there, but let's go there on this area. So I'm going to treat this. I'm going to treat this with all due respect.

Yeah. I'm not going to lead the witness. I'm not going to do an eye roll. It has been thrown out there. Yeah. Even by people within my social circle, it has been thrown out there. What they look at is they say, how did, why did these big, the emergence of these big VC-backed meet all, alternative companies beyond meat, whatever, all that shit, you know, fake burgers.

Right, right, right, right. The emergence of all these like high power VC backed, um, meatless products coincided with the explosion in Alphigal. Right. And they're like, they're trying to create customers in the dirtiest, yeah, right, right. The dirtiest way possible. Did you run into this?

Did you have people share this idea with you? Oh, absolutely. And in fact, what I was... Like, how was it explained to you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Bill Gates was a bad guy in that story, right? It was like, he's invested, I think, in alternatives to meat. And he...

The Gates Foundation has paid for or funded genetically engineering ticks and genetically engineering vaccines for cattle to fend off ticks. And so there was this idea that will maybe... Something got out of the lab, you know. The problem is, one, you know, the Gates Foundation didn't work with Lone Stars. But two, the timelines don't match up. Okay. Right?

Like, we started to see AlphaGal. I mean, it's been around, but we know it's been around since at least the 90s, you know, that people have been getting it. And no one was making those fake burgers back then. And no one was making those fake burgers. And we started to get the real explosion before the fake burger industry came around. Yeah. What struck me is it struck me as a. imprecise

expensive extremely risky right marketing right strategy yeah yeah like like really risky yeah like you thought like when coke changed their recipe they made new coke yeah right you thought that was caused its consumer backlash imagine when the word gets out you've created disease disease and spread it all around the country. No, no, no. That's going to be hard on your soyburger. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Business. No, I have to say, like, to me, I don't think it holds water either, but I think the Lyme disease conspiracy theory is much more convincing. Hit me with that one. Well, that was, the idea was, I wanted to ask you about this, because Willie Bergdorfer, the guy, the, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, called Borrelia burgdorffi, and that is named after Willie Bergdorfer, discovered in 1981, I think. And he, you know, he, you know, he, he was, he was, he was, he was, worked for the military doing uh you know what what do you call it bioengineering yeah ticks and and like bio weaponry there was an idea that you could air drop infected ticks onto enemy populations and they actually looked at and you know infecting ticks and using them as a weapon you know so that work was

actually done i'm not i'm not questioning that's true but what does that then do for when your forces are occupying that area. Yeah. It is like, some of that stuff is insane. Yeah. But I'm not taking, I mean, it's serious.

Like, it's a real. No, it's true. It's like, how do they not go, but hold on a minute. Because after we win, we're going to kind of need to go there. Right.

Well, and then how are our guys? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it makes. It's like, it's like insanity. No, no, no. It makes no.

I mean, and, you know, and so that narrative made a certain kind of cracked logic, you know, Yeah, but the truth is that, again, that the idea was there that they had genetically engineered the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. But the truth is, you know, Lyme disease predated that discovery and predated his work. And the earliest examples of that bacterium, we find it are in museum collections of mice from 1894 that already had that bacterium.

Oh, you're kidding me. It was more than a century before this thing came around. You know, so it's, again, it doesn't hold water, but it's a. You can see why people would be into it on the internet. It sounds like that kind of logic. Oh, yeah. It's like we used to joke where we'd talk about friends of ours. You know, we'd be sitting around talking about stuff like this.

And we'd have friends where we felt that most of the information that they traffic in would be information you'd get if you typed into Google, the truth. If you prefaced your searches with the truth about. If you always said, the truth about blank. It'd be like that information. Right, right. Well, the problem is it's always most convincing and effective when it's 80% right. Sure. When the science behind it is actually kind of true, they're just missing some crucial piece of it that invalidates the whole thing.

Yeah. Are they able to go in that, I didn't know that about finding those old mice and museum collections and stuff. Is there a marker where you could go in and you could find, I don't know, man, like you go back and find. in in historic lone star tick country that you could take some remains from someone and look for and look for alpha down there yeah i don't know maybe maybe out of the scala without soft tissue yeah you know i mean and go and sort of get some idea but maybe you can't do that yeah i don't know i'd be interesting forensic work i mean the guy that did that work with the with the with the lyme disease is professor telford at tufts And I don't know if they've looked into into ancient alpha-gal yet.

But, you know, when you were working on this, what other, are there other, you know, we talk so much about Lyme, we talk about Al-Fagal? When you looked at this, are there other tick-borne pathogens that we're going to be hearing about, like, in 10 years that they're just talking about now? Like, what's on the horizon? Well, the big thing that a lot of the veterinarians and livestock folks were talking about was screw-worm, certainly. but also the Asian Longhorn tick carries a deadly disease. I forget the name of it, but it's starting to spread. It's in, I think, 24 states now. That's not even a tick from this continent.

No, no, no. I think it was first identified in New Jersey, about 20 years ago or 15 years ago, and it's already spreading all across the country. So that's a thing people are really worried about. You know, the interesting thing is, like, if you look at statistics for the number of people catching these things you know babesiosis can kill you a lurki erliquiocese can kill you what are those two

i'm not familiar i think babesiosis is a i'm like i want to i don't get this wrong i think that's a parasite born one but i'm not sure but it's it causes terrible chills and it can um but those are such small percentages compared to lime and alfagal i mean alif lime is 10 times as as prevalent as they are and alpha gal i mean the most recent tracking data from virginia this year um the number of people who are reporting alpha-gal, the blood tests that are reporting alpha-gal positive, it's 10 times as high as people with Lyme disease. So it's really spreading at a huge rate.

So it's a different scale that we're talking about with those two diseases. Are they closing in on any, are they closing in on any treatment? Like if it's like, if it's something like allergen, you know, I don't know, I don't know the first thing about any of this. I just want to be surprised to hear it as someone's like, oh, you know, we've come up with some, I don't know, treatment

that makes it that your body doesn't trip out about alpha-gall anymore. Well, there's three or four things. One is what you talked about. You just go off meat and dairy and it gradually drops. Another one is there's a drug called Zolar, X-O-L-A-I-R, that was approved for asthma originally. And it's since been approved for food allergies

in a broad way. And it's been pretty effective. I mean, it's expensive, but your insurance can pay for it. But people who have had an anphalactic shock from, who are really in danger of alpha-gal reactions, often get prescribed this. This professor Scott Commons at the University of North Carolina that I spoke to, he's really one of the guys who was

with our earliest discoverers and has really spearheaded. He prescribes out a lot to people. And people have found, you're not really supposed to take it regularly. It's supposed to be, but it seems to be safe, and people have found they can really eat meat on it in some cases. Oh, really? So it's, it's, that's, that's one possibility. Commons is looking at, at a potential drug that might attack, you know, he, he has some,

some good leads for, for drug development. Tell me who that is. Scott Commons is the guy at the University of North Carolina. And then I've, I know there's some work being done in, I think, University of Arizona on, on, on, on vaccines that, like, that could, maybe, maybe the idea is there's some common denominator, of all these tick-borne illnesses, something, some co-factor that's making people react.

And if we can somehow neutralize that, you know, maybe we can prevent some of these diseases. So there's lots of ways things people are looking at. The other thing that's non-pharmaceutical that a lot of people told me as effective is what's called auricular acupuncture, an auricular, A-U-L-A-R-I-C-U-L-A-R. And that means around the ear.

and it's when you know and it sounds woo-woo but it's yeah i've already dismissed it but tell me anyway yeah you know the thing about acupuncture is that it's actually one of those alternative medicines that has they've had double blinds try they've had trials that have shown its effectiveness and when i talked to commons about it he said look i'm an allergist this is not my thing but in some ways it makes a lot of sense to me tell me because there's the vagus nerve nerve goes up there around your ear and it goes down into your gut okay and and the mastels that are reacting to alpha gall they're down in your gut and so if you have something that you can somehow modulate the reaction of those nerves to that to that allergen that could explain a lot

i mean he was telling me look my son is allergic to walnuts if he eats a walnut within seconds he's got a reaction okay said nothing else in the body moves that fast except for nerves it that has to have a neural connection, you know? Yeah, I got you. Yeah, it's not like going through your digestive tract and getting absorbed out of your colon. Signals are shooting instantly. So he said, it's faster than booze. Right, right.

It makes sense to me that that would be something that's modulating your nervous. That's an interesting point, man. That's doing it. And I talked to a few people who'd had, you know, that kind of treatment or giving it to their children and it had good effects, you know, that actually were able to eat meat again. I'll tell you what my like I don't want to get it but I've thought about it and I thought like if I got it I would hunt turkeys and fish like a madman it would be a real like I wouldn't really change my general way of going about life I would just really shift do you know I mean I would use it I would just be like okay all the energy I normally spend and getting deer meat and all that right I'm going to get turkeys and I'm going to fish right right and I kind of I used to live in, for the first couple of years, I lived in this fear of it.

Right. Because I'm like, oh, it'd be like so ironic. Like, I got it, you know. Here's a problem with that. Tell me. It's not just, you're not totally protected, right? Because one, you're still getting tick bites probably, right?

So your sensitivity might still go higher. And if your sensitivity goes higher, even if you're eating fish and birds, right? Suddenly, you might become sensitive to things like the gelatin capsules around ibuprofen, which is made with collagen from beef, or the lanolin in a, in since skin cream, or the, or the lactase in lactate products in toothpaste.

You get... Oh, really? They get that bad? People get it, and then the worst ones are you go in to get surgery, and they give you heparin, which is a blood thinner, and it's made with animal products, or you get insulin, or you get... anti-venant if you get bitten by a snake it's made with i think horses blood you know just it's kind of if you get sensitive enough if you're out there hunting your well turkeys you know like the like

yeah they can turkeys can carry ticks well turkey hunting is the most tick is the most tick bitting thing you could do on the planet right i mean doing everything a tick wants you to do right crawling into the grass and just sitting there for a long right right yeah you're where the ticks want to be yeah yeah that's a good point yeah it's funny you mentioned that it but all other stuff that has animal protein in it we we got a we got a dear friend her daughter was her daughter's vegetarian you know she's over my house eating the marshmallow we're camping and I said I said I understand you're vegetarian but you know that marshmallows got um what were they call it what's the stuff in there

gelatin yeah yeah so that marshmallow's got animal gelatin in it so what what do you make of that she says I guess I'm a vegetarian that eats marshmallows Oh, yeah, that'll work. I mean, they were telling me, I mean, there are people, and again, this gets into the kind of psychosomatic stuff. But there are people who tell me, look, I can't even drink bottled water because it's made with bone char. It's purified with bone char. And you think, well, how is that going to leave any alpha gallon in the water? I mean, it feels like a step too far, but you start to get these psychosomatic reactions.

Yeah, other stuff, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, how do you spend, like, how do you spend your life now? I mean, you do these big, well-reported pieces. Do you have days when, I mean, is that the main, is that the main thing you do? Do you have other kind of annoying stuff you got to do throughout the day? Or you just, you just write. Like, you just work on your writing and you write. No, I just, I'm, I write full time.

But that means, you know, like right now I'm in a, in a phase when I'm gathering my next story idea. So I'm sending emails to researchers around the world, and I'm reading scientific papers. I'm calling friends who have leads for things. And that takes several weeks. And then I'm in the reporting phase. And the writing phase is actually probably, you know, just the last third of it. Yeah. So tell me how much time you spent, like, take the, take the Al-Fegal paper or article.

How much time did you spend on that? Well, I went out to Missouri to start the reporting in late March, like the 20th of March. Okay. and this and I was done with the thing the 20th of June so what is that three months so three months and that was fairly compressed but yeah and that was the one thing you were working on the only thing I was working on yeah you know but I went I went to Missouri went to Arkansas I went to North Carolina went to Virginia went to Martha's Vineyard I um talked to people all over the country so you know it becomes like a big I mean part of the thing I felt about Alpha Guy was it there had been lots of stories about it little piecemeal stories. Sure. But no one had done the kind of the whole thing. And that's what I love to do with the New Yorkers. They give me 9,000 words, and I can talk about the history of it, and I can talk about the epidemiology of it. I can talk about the allergy epidemic, and I can talk about all these dimensions. Yeah. And the great thing about Al-Fagal is it really, it touches on all that

stuff, like the ecology, the history of our country's landscape. You know, all that stuff ties into this story. Yeah. For listeners, Burkhard just said a nine-thous. word article. Yeah. That is, that's a doozy. Yeah. That's like,

that's long form reporting. And most people, if you're, if you're sitting there reading, you know, a newspaper or whatever, and you're reading what you probably think of as a long story, you're probably reading like 1,200 words.

Right, right. You know, you think of like a classic, glossy magazine magazine feature. Those usually run like, like I used to write for outside and like a big, a big one. And a doozy and outside was 4,000.

Right, right. 4,000 words. Yeah. So 9,000 is, well, I'll put it in perspective this way. There's a hell of a lot of books. There's a hell of a lot of books that are 70,000 words. Right. You know, a lot of books come in around 100,000 words.

You can get away with 70,000 words. So when you're doing this piece, you're writing like a seventh or a tenth. Yeah, yeah. Your piece on these ticks is a seventh or a tenth of a book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is a hefty chunk. It's a heavy chunk. It's a heavy chub.

And it, you know, and it's a, I mean, not to dig too much into the craft, but it's kind of, it's a challenge, which I love. You know, like, how do you keep all these threads going? How do you, how do you keep the reader interested? And is there enough dimensions to any given topic to really merit that kind of things? I don't want to, I mean, back in the day, New Yorker had, there was once a famous, I think in the 70s or early 80s, there was a pro, it was just four 10,000 word pieces on, each one was on a different kind of grain. You know, and, you know, this week, wheat, you know. And, you know, and I don't think Americans' readers have that kind of patience anymore.

No, but that's where the good stuff is, man. Yeah, I do love those kind of deep dives. I mean, you know, Joseph Mitchell, my favorite New Yorker writer from the 30s, 40s, 50s, he, you know, he sometimes wouldn't get to the nut graph, to the main point of the article for three or four thousand words. you know he would be like setting the scene introducing you and and it wouldn't be till pretty deep in before you really knew you're what you're going to write read about i knew a guy he passed away he was a writer here in montana brian de salvator he did a little work for the new yorker i remember it was it was phenomenal he did a 10 000 word piece on the history of dynamite called vehement fire man i would totally read that everything you'd ever want to know about dynamite Right, right. And what Nobel invented? Right.

Yeah. Oh, that's the whole story, like picking up pigeon shit and getting guano. It's just a whole history of explosives. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. But I don't know. I don't want to say I miss it because it still exists, but it's not as prevalent American culture as like these like very informative deep dive pieces. Hey, I'm Ruby Carr, the host of the podcast, Encore.

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You don't need to worry about having anything go bad. If it wasn't so hot right now outside, I'd be wearing them right now. But you can bet your ass I got them in my truck. And they are up at the meat eater store right now at the meat eater store.com. I want to ask you about one of the one of the pieces you wrote,

and it was the one I brought up earlier that when I first discovered you, you know, 26 years ago, 27 years ago. And there's your piece on cockfighting. Right. Do you feel that you'd be able to do that? Do you feel that you would be,

that you'd be able to write that piece today? If, you know, why not? Because of what's constrained? Just so, because it would be like, it would just get such a reaction. Yeah. Regardless of what you said about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It would get such a reaction. Yeah, yeah. About, you know, like a, like, don't even talk about that that's so mean. Right, right, right. Do you know what I mean? Like, no matter what your take on it is, it would just be like, not a thing people want to talk about. Yeah.

I think the New Yorker would still publish that piece. I think part of the reason was, you know, as you remember that, part of the point of that piece was, you know, we have, we have this aversion to cockfying, this revulsion. As a culture, we've decided this is not okay. Where did that come from? I mean, I think it came from early. I mean, you know, there was some real terrible things

that had 19th century, like women wearing whole birds on their heads. You know, the whole species of beautiful birds were decimated and the animal rights movement came out of that or the conservation. I mean, there was a lot of really important work that got done to kind of stop the cruelty. But, you know, what we got instead was, you know, industrial meat production. And you look at, part of what I was trying to say was, look, we have these urban values now where we are revolted by cockfighting, you know, and we think of it as cruel. But when you look at the life of a chicken, right, would you rather be a fighting cock that has its own beautiful cage that gets literally massaged every day that gets the best feed that gets exercise equipment in his cage and that lives a year or two years and goes out fighting? Or would you rather be?

a factory chicken they get six weeks and then gets bottled onto a conveyor belt hung from a running chain zapped with a bolt of lightning and had its throat cut by a rotary saw i mean which life is a better life yeah and yet and as urbanites as as as modern americans we've gotten used to being blind to the you know shrink-wrapped chicken looks abstract sitting in our supermarket but oh boy you show someone killing a chicken or you think about someone watching a chicken fighting and that's appalling to us which is more appalling so that was kind of the point in the way was to kind of flip all that inside out a bit and you when you worked on that you went to some cock fights in the south went to a bunch of them yeah yeah i mean and honestly there were cock fights that i almost kind of admired and there were

cockfights that i did find appalling i mean was it common in the ones you went to i can't remember were they putting the blades on them they were putting blades on them yeah I mean, it Myers is the wrong word, but I went to some local small, what they call brush pits, cockpits, but brush pits are small pits in Louisiana. And you know, you go there at midnight or at one in the morning and you're thinking,

because you've been told by all the anti-cockfighting folks, that these places are dens of iniquity, drinking and drugs and gambling, you know, and you go there at one of the morning, you think, shit, you know, I'm out of town or I don't know, what's gonna happen. And you walk in, and you walk in, and it's a it's a little cage with some bleacher seats around it and the first night I went there

are two nursing mothers sitting on the front row with their babies they're their kids running around up and down the aisles you know you had whole families it was like Friday or Saturday night in the country and this is what they did you know and yeah it's bloody and that but the chickens are also at some level those chickens weren't you know you get some bad stuff you know you get chickens that are injected with drugs you get you know poisons put on their on their blades you get some bad stuff but in those in those cases it was he was kind of an old tradition that abraham lincoln was a cockfighting referee george washington went to cockfights i don't know honesty was into it oh yeah they were you know um andrew jackson supposedly had cock fights in the oval office you know in the white

house um i don't know with the oval office that i have my period wrong but he you know so it's it's it's It was an old tradition. And then it's, and then now it's no longer. The cockfits that I, the cockpits that I thought were kind of awful, were the really big ones. Where you go, like, I was one on the border, on the Arkansas border, Oklahoma border. And the weekend I went, there were 900 chickens fighting. And, you know, and those birds, and that was just a pure betting scene, you know, and their birds are getting, they're getting these big blades on them. They're going in, they're tearing each other apart.

people are betting on them and you walked around backstage at those places and they were just trash cans filled with these dead birds and this is clandestine you know in louisiana it wasn't when i went in 2000 it was still legal okay now in 2008 it became illegal in the whole country and in 2018 even the territories even porto rico and guam it's illegal so it's become got it so it was still legal in a couple places when i went one of the most brilliant accidental things that ever had to me traveling. I was in the Southern Philippines. It was actually time it was right after the 9-11 attacks. It was kind of like dicey down in the south

in the Southern Philippines. But I was down there and locked into a cockfight. It spent hours there. I was just blown away by it. What kind of a place was it? It looked like a, like a, if you didn't know where you were

and you'd drive him by, you'd think it was a small, like a county fairground right with overhead open open walls overhead cover bleachers yeah yeah yeah yeah but they had this the thing i remember most man is like and this is a difference between like a place like the philippines in a place like america probably that is big cauldron big boiling caldron and every guy everybody when their cock lost in a fight they'd go over to that cauldron and pluck it um so they dunk it and pluck it dress it and just all day right watching guys walk off down the road carrying and they're gonna eat that chicken yeah like carrying plucked roosters right right right home to eat it was just like it's just

brilliant to see it man like it was just amazing to see it you know well that was the waste in in in in that big pit was like all those birds are so injected with weird stuff sure you can't eat them right yeah and it was a big tradition in louisiana you'd make it sauce de brie picom you know like this spicy sauce and you would and you would eat your rooster that died after was part of the ceremony part of the tradition you know and I think once all these things happen with drugs it that kind of fell away so that's that's that's part of what's what was lost is is is um the world you covered back then okay when you did that when you do your cockfight piece that world's gone that I mean I think there's still

lots of clandest and cockfight cockfac cockerets yeah I think there still are but I think it's definitely gone on i mean even when i was reporting you know in new york it's been illegal for decades yeah but there was a big bust in harlem while i was writing that piece and they there was an old theater that had been turned into a cockpit you know and and i know it in brooklyn there's you know there's centa there's a lot of caribbean cultures and and so there's there's cock fights going on in new mexico yeah yeah yeah yeah lot lots of people like oh we just keep those I used to have this driver I would use a lot he was Dominican and I was going to go to DR with him. He had like weirdly this dude had a family meaning he had a wife and kids in DR.

He had a wife and kids in the U.S. And they knew about each other. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Anyways, he'd bounce back and forth. I had this whole plan where I was going to go with him to DR and he was. and he was going to take me to a cockfight.

I never went. My wife's like, that sounds like just the worst idea you've ever had. I never actually did it, but I haven't seen one since all that time ago. Yeah. You know, it's funny because I haven't been to one either, but it was interesting, like, when that piece came out in Harper's,

I read at least one or two sermons that were written based on the piece, that were talked about the blood of the cock. And, you know, it is like, it's a deep old cultural thread, you know, in American culture. And certainly Southeast Day. Asian and Caribbean culture. Up top, I mentioned, too, your work on, and you know, you had a book where you explored, I'd like you to tell people some more of the chapters, but you had a book, it came out as

noodling, noodling for flatheads. And it was about southern culture. Yeah. Lay out some of the chapters. I remember I had the cockfighting one, flatheads. It had a thing on noodling. There was a piece where I hung out with modern-day moonshiner's and with ATF folks who were hunting them down. I kind of went back and forth between the two groups. I did a piece on, on frog farming,

I did a piece on coon hunting. The whole way I got into the book was I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, kind of missing Oklahoma a bit, and I wanted to get a coon hound. And so I went and I found an ad for a blue-tick cun hound in Western Mass. And I went out there, but I really wanted a red bone, because I think they're beautiful dogs. And so I went there, and I talked to the guy, and I said, well do you know i could get a red bone are there any red bow mergers around here well sure and he went to the back and he came back out with american cooner magazine you know and it was fat big full of ads and it had all these ads for like coon hunters shipping sperm across the country to each other for their champion nighthounds and all this kind of stuff and it was and and all the different big hunts that were going all around the country and

i ended up finding a woman who fought who took her dogs out 350 nights a year. I mean, every night she would go out at midnight and have a coon hunting contest with three other dogs. And you're not killing the raccoons. You're basically just sitting, standing in the woods for three or four hours in the dark, listening to your dog's bark,

and then you're getting points for the first dog that hits a trail, first one that trees. So anyway, so I wrote a whole thing about coon hunting. I wrote a thing about this old, marble tradition in the south you know kind of all these obscure little subcultures that are still around that still have a lot of people doing them how did you hit on um i brought us up early on like how did you hit on what when did you first hear like oh there's a thing noodling for flats is because you grew up in oklahoma like did you grow up knowing about it you know i didn't which

is funny i mean okay it's not funny actually because it's it's it's typical for my family my My parents were both German. They moved over in 1962 from Germany. And we spoke German at home. And my dad was a physicist and my mom was a historian. So we had a very weird little academic bubble of the household. Yeah, you guys weren't like hard hit and rednecks. Yeah, we were not.

And I loved Oklahoma, but it wasn't really until I started going back. Right after college, I started writing for Oklahoma Today magazine. They'd send me on these assignments, and I'd write about Buffalo or Tallgrass Prayer here. I wrote about the Tulsa Race Massacre. back with 1990. But I was, so when I started doing that, you know, I really started to think, wow, there's a whole side of the South

that I just never got to know. In the middle of that, two things happened. One, I was at the Environmental Magazine in Cambridge where I was working, an intern came in from Southern Mississippi, and he told me about noodling. And I thought, what? And then I was talking to my brother-in-law in Oklahoma,

and he said, well, you know, the plumber here, noodles. And this guy, Lee McFarland, was my classmate in high school. I mean, I didn't have been in school for him for like 15 years. Oh, Burker, I'll take you noodling. And then, you know, and he was just a genius at it. I mean, and I went out with him. The first day I went out with him, I caught a 23-pound catfish on my arm, you know. So anyway, that was, and he was perfect for me because when I knew him in high school,

he was kind of a layabout he was a guy who just didn't care made primate c's and d's you know yeah smart funny guy but no one ever calls anybody a layabout anymore yeah right i like that um but then when i met him again in this context uh he was on fire he was on fire and he knew his shit and he was funny and he was capable and he was a great plumber and he was also this guy you know so he anyways it was great yeah when you were when you were working on all that did did you you ever um because a thing you don't do is you don't do there's a predictable way that a guy would go about that a predictable way because you said you had like you had like you know your dad was a physicist right um there's a predictable way where you would go about it like you're you're you're

slumming it with these people right um they're not in on the joke right right right you know yeah yeah look at like everything's kind of ironic yeah you know you're you're you're you're you're showing them off, not you, but a writer might be showing them off to his friends. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Having a laugh at them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right? Yeah, that's not. But you don't do that game.

I mean, it's not even like I'm... It's not a game. I'm trying not to do it. It's not where your mind goes. Yeah, it's not, I mean, I find these people that I've written about fascinating and impressive in a lot of cases, you know, and, and refreshing in a way that, you know, like, I've spent the last almost 50 years, 45 years of my life on the East Coast, you know, and in cities. And almost everybody I interview for most stories is kind of media ready. They've kind of

prepared their spiel, right? And they kind of know how to narrate their life. And they think they're going to be the next person on Survivor or whatever. You know, we kind of all package ourselves for ourselves and and you know when i'm talking the the coon hunters or cockfighters those guys they had never been interviewed by people before you know you know and they were and that was exciting to them to be to have someone be truly interested in what they're doing and truly interested at the level of not just like how many chickens died you know it's like what do you feed them what how do you exercise them what's the history of this thing how did you get into it you know how you know i really want to know the whole dimension of it

And that to them is then, so it becomes a real exchange. It's not just me looking for the lurid bits and trying to play those up. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Does it take you a long time to win people's trust? When all of a sudden here's this dude, he's coming from this big fancy magazine, you know, and, um, right. And now I'm going to show you some things that I can't tell if you're here to laugh at me or expose my secrets. Is it hard to win people over?

You know, I feel like there's usually, there's usually a, the same kind of transition happens where it starts out with they're kind of tickled that a new york guy came down to from new york to talk to me they usually don't know the new yorker you know or they don't care about it maybe they've heard about it they don't care about it but the fact that i'm just i've flown down from new york to come talk to them that's impressive so they're willing to give me the time and they kind of think of it they're kind of it's a joke to them a little bit right and then pretty soon i'm with them for a week sitting in their cab of their truck, typing everything they're saying,

you know, wanting, going through the muck with them. And then at a certain point, they're like, ah, this guy really wants to know everything, you know? And part of the way is, the way I report is, I mean, nowadays, I do more recording, but in the day, I always had little keyboards, and I always typed everything as they said. And at a certain point, they'd be like, damn, everything I say is interesting. He's taking everything down.

So they kind of get excited about it. got it got it you know so yeah it's it's anyway i love the process so what do you're going to work on next well i have a bunch of leads i don't have anything firm yet you got a book are you working on a new book um well i'm trying to put i mean one thought i've i've had is like my last bunch of pieces have been all i realize i've written about a lot of the phobias the top 10 phobias i've written pieces about Tell me what they are. I mean, arachnophobia, claustrophobia. I wrote a big piece on deep cave divers,

wrote a piece about a woman who collects venomous spiders. And, you know, I've written about turbulence. I've written about infestations. I've written about snakes in Florida, snakes. So anyway, I've been thinking about putting together the collection called, like, the sum of all phobias or the big book of discomforts or something like that. Sure, man, yeah.

That'd be a good one. because I kind of feel like it's something we're more and more in touch with, like all these fears that we have. Like people go to therapy or CBT therapy and all these kind of stuff to address them. So it's become more of a, anyway. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah. And what magazine pieces are like tickling your fancy right now?

Like you said you got a lot of ideas. Yeah. I'll tell you if they're good or not. Hit me with one. I'll tell you if it's worth your time. Here's a problem. I don't want to tell you because this is, You have way too many listeners.

Because they'll jump on it. They'll jump on it. So that's, I have to have a certain. Long-form magazine writers. I'm joking. I don't know you're saying. There's certain things that are floating around my head. I don't want to say them.

Yeah, yeah. Like, for instance, I have the world's greatest name for a business, but I can't say it. I don't think I can tell you. Actually, the one, the story you told me before we started taping. That one that sounds like an interesting. I'm ready for that. Yeah. Okay.

Dig into that. Because I pass along to another writer, and I don't think you bought. Yeah, yeah. Well, man, I want to thank you again for coming on the show and talking about about all this man that's total pleasure yeah i think people should really like i think that i'm saying it's very particular to the people that listen to the show um people listen to the show you're gonna you're gonna love when you when you go find you'll have to conquer paywalls and all that but when you go find the um tell me the name of the piece i can't remember the name of your

alpha gal piece um well you can look under the great infestation the great infestation um or the tick that hunts down its hosts Yeah, that's okay, yeah, to take the hunts down its host. Yeah. And it's Burk-H-H-A-R-D, so B-U-R-K-H-A-R-D, B-I-L-G-E-R. Yeah. And the Newling for Flatheads has probably the most. Well, that's what I was going to do, the mega-plug on.

Yeah. Because I, um, is if you're in, I mean, if you're interested in American culture, if you're interested in Southern culture and like, kind of the under, like the underground, sort of the underground world of people who live a, centrics who live these kind of old traditional lifeways and um

noodling for flyheads is a great book man yeah thank you yeah that was fun one yeah thanks so much my kids were small when I when I did that when I reported that so they kind of went around in my in our motor home and I have great memories of being in northern Georgia and a hunting cabin like talking to moonshiners and I'd come back every night and

anyway were you drinking a lot of moonshine back then you know I actually went to a moonshiner's reunion in South Carolina. And I spent two or three days asking people, hey, do you do you make moonshine? I'd look to taste some of you moonshine. And they were like, no, I don't know. They looked at me and I had this kind of East Coast accent.

And, you know, that was a place where they really didn't trust me. I want you to take a sniff of this. All right. Dude, don't get too close. It's not bad. But don't get in there, get in there. get in there, but just get in there and take a whiff of that. Isn't that something?

That's the weirdest. I took a sip of that one time. You couldn't get it out of your mouth. It's beaver casters. So this is the way they used to save them. It's beaver casters preserved in moonshine. That's crazy. Yeah, don't sip that.

I took a sip of that and I was tasting that taste for a day. The ones in South Carolina, they had these. Like a moonshine dude made that for me, you know. I didn't tell them what I did with it. But they took these native hard-led Indian peaches, and they would soak it in moonshine. And it would make this blood-red, incredibly tasty moonshine. Oh, really?

Yeah, I love that stuff. And I actually, I mean, I probably shouldn't say this because it's a felony, but for, I made some moonshine in Brooklyn for one year. Oh, you did. Because in my neighborhood, there are all these apple trees planted in the 19th century, early 20th century, and nobody picked those apples.

they're all rotten. So I went around and I, my friend Kevin and I, Kevin Bergen and I, mapped all the apple trees that we could find in our neighborhood. And then we bought a press and we went around and asked everybody if we could get the apples. Get the apples. And we ended up just pressing carboy after carboy, these giant glass jugs full of... Where were you doing it at? We were doing it in the basement of my house and out on the sidewalk.

And then eventually that, you know, fermented into... into apple cider and hard cider and then and then i i bought a still from portugal and my son and i made a batch of apple apple jack just and it was actually amazingly good i could not believe it huh we just had that we just had a writer on isaac fitzgerald who wrote um he wrote that book about johnny apple yeah yeah right so we got into this whole like apples into this and into that and into that and We had a guy right in explaining, like, you were just talking about, this is, like, this from apples makes this kind of thing. Right. The next step and I forgot all what it is now, but.

Yeah, yeah. No, it was distilled drinks. That was crazy. I did not. I assumed it would be indigestible, but it was actually pretty good. It was just makes it taste like apples. It was good. Yeah.

That's good, hard work and journalism right there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, man, I want to thank you again for coming on the show. It was great. I appreciate it. Thanks, man. I know, like I said, I was kind of not looking forward to getting an alpha gal, but I had a plan,

but now you make me think my plans off. Yeah, the plan's got some problems, I think. He's got some problems. The other big thing is I don't like to admit this about myself, but I'm a big half-and-half guy in my coffee. Oh, yeah. That's done it with. Half-and-half cheese, all the good things. All right, I'm going to avoid it.

All right, thanks again. When the seasons are on, the work doesn't stop. You're still scouting, still adjusting, still putting in early. early mornings and long days. That's no off-season. First Light fieldwear is built for real use in-season and beyond. No shortcuts. Check out First Light's new fieldware collection at firstlight.com.

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