ASM127 Chlorophyll, Convergence, and a Crisis with Debt

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chlorophyll convergence and a crisis with debt all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemic [Applause] [Music] science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith in life and man there are some doozies this week uh so hopefully i do a decent job answering these we get the biochemistry i'm not great at biochemistry but man so much fun recently i saw a lot of you at the literatures gathering in la i hope to see more of you as i hit the road again so uh let's get it started so like a year and a week ago maybe a year week and a half ago my book finding god in the waves came out major major uh thing in my life as you know if you follow the show or listen to the one year anniversary special but uh i do want to let you know that the paperback version of finding god in the waves comes out october the 3rd and it's got a couple of neat features that the hardback book doesn't have one is a group discussion guide right in the book that my publisher hired some genius to read my book and write an incredibly thoughtful discussion guide with great questions so if you want to go through the book with others this would be a great format to do that in especially when it's coupled with the second feature an incredibly low price the retail price of the paperback is 14. and i've seen it online for as low as 10 bucks so this is definitely the cheapest way to get your hands on the book and knowing a lot of you in this audience cash is short so this might actually be your first opportunity to have a copy of my book finding god in the waves now if you haven't bought the book yet because you've heard that my story's in it and you feel like you already know my story through you know you made it weird with pete holmes or the liturgist podcast or one of the seven million interviews i've given online wherein i go into my story i don't want that to hold you back from getting a copy of the book the first half of the book is in fact my story but told at a level of detail that's never been done in an interview or on stage i'm really able to go in depth into what my problems with scripture were why i had philosophical logical objections to the idea of god in general and and in specific detail so uh if you're a skeptical person you might find a degree of solidarity in my book that you've never seen before but the other thing that makes the book different from any other telling of my story is the second half which is where i go through and describe how i see god in science and how i approach god through mysticism to help people build a new framework to relate to god of their own my book is not about convincing you to think like i do or believe like i do but instead to help you examine what you believe and if you're in some state of you know angst about what you feel about god or what you think about god uh show you ways that you can begin to explore spiritual ideas spiritual practice and the idea of god again so that's what finding god in the waves how i lost my faith and found it again through science is all about available in paperback october 3rd for as little as ten dollars you can learn more by going to findinggodintheways.com i've been fascinated already to watch hardback sales drop off a cliff the last couple of weeks and paperback pre-orders more than pick up the slack so for those of you who've been getting a copy of the book without even knowing or hearing about on the podcast it's really cool you're paying that much attention and now the rest of you uh listening in podcast land i hope you'll consider getting a copy of the book uh before we get into the show i do want to tell you i have like a zillion events coming up like a zillion which is not a real number which is why i can use it um october the 6th i'll be at the liturgist gathering in boston that is nearing sellout so if you're anywhere near boston and thinking about going get your ticket right now don't wait the liturgistgathering.com and you can get a ticket or just google the liturgist gathering our our seo is pretty good so you should be able to find us the liturgist gathering in los angeles was amazing we had a packed house we did a live podcast that you'll be able to hear on the liturgist podcast feed really soon and we're going to have christina cleveland with us in boston i could not be more excited about that and then of course october 27th i'll be in seattle for the liturgist gathering where hillary mcbride will join us so we'll have a live podcast we'll do a table liturgy we've designed together and we'll talk about crazy stuff we'll do breakout sessions and you'll get to know people like you who um you know aren't really into pretending anymore [Laughter] so we'd love to see you at the liturgist gathering october 6th in boston october 27th in seattle and of course in the middle of that i'll be doing a uk tour october 11th i'll be in london and october 13th i'll be in birmingham and october 17th i'll be in edinboro for an ask science mic live recording tickets are on sale right now you can go to asksciencemike.com and click on events to get tickets there october 21st i'll be doing the rubicon conference in dublin ireland tickets for some of those sessions are sold out but the overall conference tickets are still available you can find out more at we are rubicon.com and then i've got a lot more events coming up you know for the rest of the year and into next year which you can see on the events page on asksciencemike.com please come see me uh i love seeing you all and spending time with you and getting to know you and hearing your stories you know people come up to me in line they say i hear your voice all the time and it's so weird to hear your voice now but it's not weird for me to hear your voice it's wonderful so let's turn our parasocial relationship into an actual social relationship and i'll see you hopefully while i'm on the road [Music] hi mike this is deacon godzilla from lawrence kansas i was listening to an npr interview this evening with author jonathan lazos about his new book improbable destinies fate chance and the future of evolution and he spoke about convergent evolution and how some of the recent findings in engineered evolution are blowing some of darwin's theories out of the water in terms of the length of time that's required for evolutionary change to take place and i was just wondering if you'd read the book if you have any thoughts on convergent evolution that you can share with us and any other resources you could point us towards thanks so much well just to be completely honest right up front i have not read improbable destinies yet um i have a copy it's on my bookshelf of the books i haven't read yet so i'll probably get there the next uh i don't know maybe next year i'm reading a lot as i research my next book and that's consuming most of my reading time but i will get there eventually the good news is i'm familiar with some of the concepts from improbable destiny especially convergent evolution so let's kind of dig into that to compare convergent evolution to darwinian evolution i was going to say it was like comparing apples to oranges but it's not it's more like comparing an apple peel to an apple so convergent evolution isn't like a comprehensive theory of evolution instead it's just an observed phenomenon that informs the theory of evolution okay so it's something we see happening that leads us to evaluate how we view evolution because it's it's a particular facet of evolution via natural selection so let's let's unpack that a little bit most of the time when you see similar traits in two different species of animal or animals it's because they share a common ancestor so think about the similarities in the bones of like a human's arms and a dog's legs if you look at a skeletal diagram you'll see we have very similar numbers of bones and very similar relationship to each other just in different proportions at different angles and depending on you know what species you're looking at the similarity can be uncanny for example a skeletal diagram of a whale's fin looks remarkably like a human hand a whale's forearm is just very very very short and its fingers are very long and webbed together but the the bone structure underneath certainly speaks to our common ancestry and uh when you think about humans arms and dogs legs well of course they're similar we're both mammal tetrapods meaning mammals with four limbs and our ancestor our common ancestor with dogs was also a mammal tetrapod so in this case evolution was divergent it produced different traits from the same ancestor uh convergent evolution is the opposite where a similar trait or traits have developed without common ancestry so think about dolphins and sharks dolphins are mammals that are aquatic sharks are predatory fish they're in completely different wings of the animal kingdom and yet their form is remarkably similar their common ancestor didn't look like a dolphin or a shark and and dolphins went through this weird period of evolution where they were land animals before they went back into the water and yet they have a very similar form uh let's see other examples of convergent evolution think about bats and birds the common ancestor of bats and birds didn't have wings and yet both bats and birds have wings and fly through the air in a similar way so evolution is converged on a common solution without a common ancestor holding the trait in question that's convergent evolution uh eyes are another example of convergent evolution there's several eye lineages and eye strategies in the animal kingdom and that's quite remarkable and in fact some people use that as evidence of you know intelligent design or god's involvement in evolution that god uses these dissimilar evolutionary paths to reach a similar solution you know most scientists wouldn't buy that but i i just want to mention some some theologians find that very encouraging but what convergent evolution does tell us as we study it more deeply is that when selection pressures are intense when environmental factors are tough evolution can actually happen at a speed darwin never imagined you know darwin imagine these random mutations over time being selected for or against by the environment that slowly and subtly created new species created new traits and animals and what we're seeing in engineered evolution and engineered convergent evolution is um evolution can happen incredibly fast you know we've been working with some bacterial strains for like 30 years in laboratory conditions where permanent radical alterations have happened in these bacteria in a human lifetime another example i read from improbable destinies is the changes that can happen in plants when you prevent rabbits from feeding on them like you can see in a very very short amount of time radical alterations not only in the appearance of the plants but in their genome and their genetic structure so it turns out that evolution v natural selection can impart rapid changes in organisms which may be responsible for how life recovers from extinction events asteroid collisions ice ages these events we've had in earth history where most species have been wiped out it creates a period of intense selection pressure and rapid changes in the genome and rapid introduction of new species sometimes along previous solutions to ecological problems like wings so the ideas and improbable destinies like convergent evolution aren't about refuting the theory of evolution or even refuting darwin himself instead they're about updating our understanding of how evolution works and that's science darwin's texts aren't meant to be infallible revelations to humanity but instead a series of hypotheses supported by a body of observed evidence that is subject to revision as we learn more about the world over time the fact that scientists today still accept the basic framework of darwinian evolution speaks to the brilliance of the model but it would be unrealistic to think that evolution and our understanding of it wouldn't grow and change as we learn more about it it is in the very character of the theory of evolution for the theory itself to evolve over time [Music] our next question came in via email and it sounds simple but it's incredibly hard it might be one of the hardest questions ever submitted to the program that is pure science the question is this how does chlorophyll convert photons into stable energy that can support life for the whole planet it seems chlorophyll is best at transforming and storing energy could some form of nanotechnology be able to capture those in the same way this is an absolutely perfect question it's phenomenal and it's difficult for several reasons the first one is of all the sciences chemistry challenges me the most it's not even close i barely passed chemistry in high school by the skin of my teeth and it was not from a lack of effort for some reason chemistry does not work with my learning style and that comes to both understanding it as well as explaining it to others and photosynthesis is a largely chemical process there's some certainly some physics there in the beginning as uh photons excite electrons but beyond that you're squarely in the realm of chemistry and chemistry is freaking complicated i understand physics is also complicated physics is complicated in a way that i can understand the math of physics if i work hard enough uh comes to me um chemistry nope just doesn't work and then and then you layer biochemistry on top of that it's even harder because it's so many interdependent chemical reactions so it's not just add this this do a little math make a prediction it's these cascading chains of chemical reactions and oh man those are smart people biochemists um so that's the first problem answering the question the second problem is we've been studying photosynthesis for over a hundred years in great detail as a species and there are parts of the process that are utter mysteries to us today so if you go like on youtube and watch videos about photosynthesis and chlorophyll and not the ones for kids but like the ones for you know undergrads and post grad students you'll see like really remarkable uh explanations that are thorough uh crash course biology number eight on photosynthesis is one that's fantastic also uh there's got a ted ed video nature smallest factory the calvin cycle that was a little more accessible but still quite detailed and they break out you know photosynthesis and that's stage two process the stage one process how that works into the calvin cycle you know where chlorophyll sits in the structure of plant cells where these different processes happen in relation to each other biologically and it is very deep uh but if you take any one step they give you in a text or a video and you try to dig deeper into it you'll find that especially in the early parts of photosynthesis you begin to brush up against our best understandings of physics in general like wave particle duality so we don't know exactly how photosynthesis works we've got a great understanding biochemically but the underlying physics are fuzzy so i tried to write right sometimes i'm very proud of myself i did a relativity explanation earlier in the program that i thought was among the clearest i've ever heard and i pat myself in the back and i said good job so i thought you know what if i can make relativity easy to understand with a baseball then surely i can make photosynthesis accessible and i wrote a script and i recorded it and it was 25 minutes and confusing as hell um so i'm going to recommend instead that if you're that interested check out one of the two videos i linked in the show notes on ask sciencemic.com because when it comes to photosynthesis a visual aid is incredibly helpful so i'll skip to just like a high level overview here and say that photosynthesis uses light in the form of photons primarily at red and blue wavelengths carbon dioxide and water to make oxygen and hydrocarbons like glucose or starches technically it can also make the structures inside of plants as well which is neither glucose nor starch but is a hydrocarbon and that little process complicated and mysterious as it is is responsible for the vast bulk of biological energy on this planet almost every food chain on earth is completely reliant on photosynthesis the only exceptions are some closed loop food chains that rely on volcanic vents in the deep ocean other than that all life on this planet is completely dependent on photosynthesis now oddly enough for something so important in our food chains photosynthesis just isn't very energy efficient excuse me just isn't very efficient at all i suppose i guess no that's right i'm going to backtrack on my back tracking it is not energy efficient because only about three percent of the sunlight absorbed in photosynthesis is converted into organic compounds can you believe that three percent if we compare that to artificial photosynthesis which is where a photovoltaic cell like a solar panel drives electrodes v and creates uh hydrogen from water using electrolysis [Music] that can create 10 percent of absorbed light into hydrogen in a year's time compared to three percent for photosynthesis so it's maddeningly inefficient especially in the calvin cycle the the nitty-gritty of how the first byproducts in ps2 and ps1 produce uh basic chemicals from excited photons excited electrons from photon absorption very very little of that process comes out of the cycle most of it gets looped back looped back into the cycle and that's why so little is left to allow the plant to do plant things that aren't photosynthesis like grow or get eaten by us um now that's that's not to say we may not eventually be able to replicate the molecular action of photosynthesis and nanotechnology we certainly can't yet it is far far far too complicated for what our capabilities are today in nanotechnology um but i wonder if we would like if we would want to if it would be more efficient to emulate photosynthesis than to just have natural photosynthesis do what it does photosynthesis does some things that none of our artificial systems do like take carbon dioxide from the air or create really easy to store and transport energy hydrocarbons like sugar are incredibly energy dense and stable for transport hydrogen is less energy dense than a hydrocarbon and really a pain in the ass to transport hydrogen loves to explode which is a is a negative feature in a in fuel stability um so even if we could get all the benefits of photosynthesis via nanotechnology could we ever do it as economically as using an existing technology called agriculture to cultivate and grow plants the problem is not that we know don't know how to scale up photosynthesis the problem is we just decide as to lower economic priority but i think if we care about our earth and its long-term sustainability if we want to clean our air if we want to cool our cities we should have a societal scale investment in photosynthesis in the form of planting trees and leafy plants as many as we can everywhere that we can and our civil engineering should be done in a way that is plant friendly here's what i mean i grew up in tallahassee florida this is an incredibly treed city it has very clean air and water as a result of all those trees but anytime there's a storm that knocks some tree branches down the grid fails right because they've done a good job preserving protecting and planting trees they haven't done a great job at investing in utilities especially electrical and communication utilities that aren't affected by tree falling trees falling so that means investing and it's expensive i get it but making a decision as societies to invest in below ground utilities and lots of above ground trees it makes for healthy cities it combats the effects of climate change not only by directly absorbing carbon from the air but also by shading all of these surfaces in urban environments that absorb light during the day and release it at night raising the temperatures in cities my new city of los angeles for example would be well served by planting and cultivating lots of shade trees in urban areas it would clean the air and cool down the urban corridor and we don't need nanotechnology to do that [Music] hey science mike i have a political science question for you i follow a twitter account that on occasion tweets out the current national debt and it's been a while since i've paid attention to this account it was before the election of donald trump and i just remember it was kind of staying consistent around the 17 trillion dollar mark that that we were in debt and then just recently as in yesterday i happened to glance back at the the twitter account and it says that we are now at 20 trillion dollars in debt and this is just a really confusing concept for me because i look around at america and while yes we do have poor and homeless and that is a real issue i would just think that a country being that far in debt you would see so much more poverty you would see so many more issues um so i'm wondering why first off we aren't being taxed out of our rear ends i'm not saying that that's what i want i'm just curious why we're not in order to fix this problem with the debt why also because of that aren't we facing more issues on an economic level as far as the average life of an american what is it that's causing us to be so sustained despite being so far in debt and if you wouldn't mind elaborating even why are we this far in debt how have we dug this hole so deeply and why does it continue to grow i realize that's the uh well i guess trillion dollar question right now but if you could shed some light on that i would be very grateful thanks it is impossible to answer this question in a way everyone will be happy with there is tremendous disagreement among economists on why the debt is so bad the best way to address the debt how we got to where we are i'm gonna do my my best to give a centrist consensus on the debt story for a guy who loves physics and is a college dropout oh man biochemistry and economics political science in the same week i can just hear people riveted by this week's program all over the world uh but it's super relevant so let's do this let's talk about the debt uh america's debt is over 20 trillion dollars now um so that's true uh so why don't we feel the effects of such a massive massive debt well here's the short answer because most american debt is owed to the united states federal government or its citizens or state and local governments so we owe the debt to ourselves and we have enough tax revenue to cover payments to the debt so 20 trillion dollars is a lot but the united states has a lot of money it has a big vibrant economy so uh if you would imagine a very rich person now i typically don't like to use an individual as an analog for a national economy because that gives you some very terrible assumptions about economies a person participates in an economy a nation has an economy so the analog i guess would only work if the person was the only human being on earth but let's imagine for a second just to understand debt payments a very wealthy person who had a lot of student loan debt if you have a quarter million dollars in student loan debt but you make a hundred twenty thousand dollars a year you can afford to make your student loan payments you may not you may not pay down the principal much or at all but over an indefinite period of time you can continue to pay on that debt without defaulting on it and that's where we are as a nation we can afford to service our debt but we can't really afford to pay it down and in fact we keep borrowing so some of our lenders are getting nervous china especially so let's dig into a longer answer because this is important the first thing i want to note is that almost 30 percent of the total national debt is held by the united states government itself so the us government issues treasury bonds and then buys them from itself different arms of the government buy treasury bonds what in the world how does that make sense well that mainly happens in accounts and funds that are associated with retirement so u.s bonds are considered a safe investment so if you're running a trust for you know the department of defense to handle retirement for defense employees us bonds aren't a terrible place to put your money because you won't lose any but then oddly enough the government owes itself money with interest when that happens so 30 of the debt is held that way that's the public debt now we have private debt well foreign governments hold a lot of our debt that's our public debt excuse me our private debt and that they buy to regulate their currency and to finance you continued u.s spending if you're china you buy u.s treasury bonds so that the united states has a stable economy a lot of wealth to buy chinese goods that's how economies work money moves in circles and then non-government retirement funds own a tremendous amount of the national debt as well so most of the u.s debt in fact more than half of it is owed to americans or the american government more than half of the total debt so you might have heard people in the news saying oh there's so much foreign debt you know other people on this country to be accurate this is very simple math more than half of the total u.s debt is owed to the united states government or its citizens that does not mean we are in the clear in regards to the amount of debt that we carry we will almost certainly face a severe debt crisis as the baby boomers retire right now the baby boomers which are a massive american generation are working and contributing tax revenue not only to the general fund that operates the us government but also to the social security fund soon boomers will start retiring some already have but will hit a critical mass when lots of boomers retire and then all the boomers retire and they'll start drawing from the social security fund and they won't be contributing to it or to the general u.s government fund and that is a big deal because 2.8 trillion dollars of the national debt is owed to the social security fund now this might sound political what i'm about to say but it is not this is a very simple reading of the situation the social security program is not an entitlement it's not an entitlement why because it's a self-sustaining retirement pool that united states citizens pay for via social security taxes you've put in money into a retirement program that's supposed to be invested so it grows so that after a period of time of contribution you start withdrawing money from the fund and the way social security is structured it should be permanently self-sustaining with no additional tax revenue so what's the problem well the u.s government borrows in the form of its congress from the social security fund to pay for general operations instead of investing the money so imagine if you were with a bank that said they would manage your retirement and you were paying them every month to put money in a mutual fund and they took that money and used it to run the bank with the assumption that they might be able to pay you back later out of their profits well uh those bankers would go to jail because that's illegal but when the united states congress raids a retirement fund called social security they just call the program an entitlement and then tell you that later they might have to cut benefits so this is the problem um in principle i don't actually have problems with deficit spending uh some economists have plausible models where at least in the short term or especially in the short term deficit spending stimulates an economy enough to eventually offset the loss through interest but done at the scale that the us government has done in rating not just a social security fund but many government retirement programs over time while constantly threatening austerity it destabilizes the economy and that's why we're in a debt crisis more than half of the u.s debt is owed to retirement funds and a huge swath of americans are about to retire and now that we didn't invest the money we have to figure out how to pay those obligations do we raise taxes do we fail to meet our obligations that's the choice that we're facing here it's a huge huge problem but it hasn't affected us yet because most baby boomers are working and haven't retired yet that's why you haven't felt anything day by day now in terms of how the debt has grown uh our debt grew a lot in world war ii and then we had a great economy we paid it down very low and then for the first time the debt really skyrocketed under president reagan i bet you didn't expect that uh ronald reagan was the first modern president to really raise the national debt in fact more than doubled it and reagan and later bush h.w bush and then bill clinton created a new model where democrats who used to be what they called tax and spend democrats compared to the fiscal prudence of conservatives or republicans who had cut taxes and cut spending both parties now started cutting taxes while increasing spending which is ridiculous i have no problem if you want to raise taxes and boost spending lots of countries do that it it appears to work very well for their societies as long as sufficient services quality services come out of that uh there's a logical elegance at least to the conservative idea of cutting taxes and cutting spending um but you can't cut taxes and raise spending and that's what we've been doing uh and then that led to a financial crisis well that and and and poor behaviors by lenders and our economy lots of financial improvements and real estate we all know that well and so george w bush presided over the largest increase in the national debt in american history and then obama resided over even more because the crisis continued without the stimulus that george w and obama pumped into the economy we probably would have fallen into a depression we may have defaulted on our debt and a science mike would probably not exist because you know i'd be begging for money on the street along with all of you uh but the fact is in the short term it always makes sense to spend more and you can make great arguments for cutting taxes in the short term that makes sense over and over and over until the very moment that it doesn't and your economy shudders like we saw in greece now don't hear me um prescribing any particular solution here i'm not i do have my opinions that wasn't what the question was about though the question is how do we have so much debt and not feel it well it's because we can afford our debt payments that's why if we continue to grow our debt so quickly as we have in the last couple of presidents if we have a lot of people retire if we have uh economic retraction we could be in a real debt crisis and since more than half of the debt is owed to americans it will be americans who are hurt the most [Music] our last question came in via email and it reads hey mike i was curious to know your thoughts on violence in video games i grew up playing mini video games where violence essentially was the plot of the game for example mortal kombat grand theft auto call of duty or halo at this time whenever i heard someone say that these games desensitize people to real world violence or even directly cause it i outright rejected the claim however after completing some psychological schooling i've come across some data suggesting that such games do in fact have a desensitation factor so far i haven't stolen any lamborghinis or went on a citywide crime spree but my question is what effect if any do these types of games have on our brains thanks for all you do it's a great question it's one i love because i am a lifelong gamer i've always played video games as long as they've been a thing in the world because i'm old enough uh you know i guess i missed pong but uh the the real golden age starting with the atari of in-home gaming uh cleanly cleanly correlated with my childhood um there is some scattered data that shows links between video gaming and desensitization of violence but research has not shown any linkage correlation causation between playing violent video games and violent behavior some studies do show a correlation between frequent high duration violent gaming sessions and high risk factor youth especially males they show a correlation but they haven't linked a causal relationship there so it could be that if you're the kind of high risk male prone to violence that drives you to play video games you see what it means that the causality is the other way or it could be a simple correlation with no causal relationship or further studies could reveal a causal relationship but they have not yet in terms of what gaming does to the brain well one believe it or not gaming including violent video games shows some consistent cognitive benefits about information processing and spatial awareness so in certain types of cognitive tests gamers perform very well so of course we should just game all the time right no lots of gaming has been shown to drive anxiety people who game very frequently and for long durations of time have higher anxiety levels can and can even be moved towards generalized anxiety disorders which are very difficult to deal with in your life the other thing we know is that too much sedentary activity and gaming is a sedentary activity unless you're doing something like you know vr where you're moving around a lot that has an impact on the brain and your health that is negative it drives obesity reduces brain mass can affect decision making capacity so the cognitive boosts you get from gaming are not near enough to overcome the losses from too little physical activity so what does this mean to me it means if you're going to be a gamer you need to be self-aware you need to be aware if this is desensitizing you you need to be cognizant you need to be aware if you feel violent impulses or aggression and that's not very likely so more likely you need to be aware if playing games too much is affecting your physical life or preventing you from socializing with others and you need to enjoy gaming and moderation that will let you get a recreational benefit and a cognitive benefit from gaming without negatively impacting your physical or mental health it's all about moderation um and i've got to be honest i don't play nearly as many violent video games as i used to i'm much more troubled by them than i once was the same is true for me in violent media um but i think that has been driven by spiritual development um it's it's just i just value human life too much to glorify it in our media as a problem-solving mechanism or a sign of heroism or a sign of strength i find it interesting how often as we promote female characters in storytelling now we do that by making them extremely violent so our solution to patriarchal media is to make women as violent as men then that troubles me and that troubles me in gaming as well so [Music] just enjoy gaming as a part of your overall media diet and make sure your overall media diet is a small part of your leisure time a walk outside a time spent over a table with good friends these are very beneficial both for your brain and your emotional health so enjoy gaming but not too much [Music] well this has certainly been a really long episode of ask science mike but i thought some excellent challenging questions this week i'd love to hear your thoughts you can leave a comment for me on asksciencemike.com on this episode which is called chlorophyll convergence and crisis with debt you can also tweet me at ask science mike or visit me at facebook.com mike.mccarg i'd love to talk to you on social media or on the comment section of the website i'd like to thank andrew gallucki for pre-production on the show i'd like to thank greg nordin for production and sound design i'd like to thank my patrons on patreon for keeping me alive and for picking the questions on the show every week if you'd like to help keep this program going i could really use your one to five dollar donation learn um just look for the patreon icon uh thanks jeb bodafort of course for the ask my theme song and thank you all for listening i can't wait to talk to you next week