ASM201 Recycling, Shaming, and the Messiness of the Middle

[transcript automatically generated - please help edit to make it better]

warning this episode of ask science mike contains frank discussions of sexuality lgbtq issues pedophilia and violence that might be triggering or upsetting to you feel free to pause this episode and come back at another time recycling shaming and the messiness of the middle all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike even though he may not understand he'll talk anyway he got problems he won't solve them but he'll talk and talk and talk until he flew in the face science faith in life welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where we believe that every sincere question deserves a supportive and non-judgmental response i'm your host mike mccarth also known as science mike and i'm a non-expert college dropout who just loves curiosity and we have a lot of fun exploring questions together every week so what do you say let's get it started [Music] if you're a frequent listener then you know i took some time off from travel for the rest of the year i've been having some health stuff frankly but my health is getting better with the rest so that's a really exciting sign and that means next year i'll be traveling again so i want to go ahead and let you know some of that january 11th i'm going to be at trinity church in buffalo new york for their fresh voices series which looks really exciting and uh if you want to learn more about that you can go to asksciencemike.com and click on events and as we get back in the flow here i actually have a lot of events in the winter and spring we'll get those up on the website but we want to let you know immediately january 11th will be trinity church in buffalo new york [Music] hi science mike i was at the minneapolis gathering and saw your talk on neurobiology and shaming and i have had some honest confusion about the way we've been using the word shaming in the last few years for example what is the difference between shaming and condemning it seems to me that shame is used as a tactic by a culture or society to weed out behaviors that they deem as a threat either to the society or to individuals within the society so is shaming an ineffective tactic in achieving its means or are we merely negotiating which things we think are worth shaming and not shaming so we seem to say shaming body image and sexual ethics are bad but we have no problem shaming or condemning things like violence or racism so is there a difference help me understand this thanks mike this is such a great question it's such an important question i i literally can't imagine a more timely question for the world we live in right now um yeah what is it with shame and shaming people when's it okay when's it not okay like this is really hard for us to navigate as people because we're learning that shame is bad and i think we should be learning that i do actually think shame is bad and i think that shaming people is wrong almost without qualification but in order to understand that and what i mean by that what i just said is not a tweetable insight for example because it would be so easy to misinterpret so let's go a little deeper and let's talk about what shame is when you experience shame you experience negative feelings about who you are about your identity about your sense of self so i thought it interesting in your question that you mentioned body image which is part of our self so if you shame someone for their body you're telling them to to feel bad about who they are you mentioned sexual identity and if we were to talk about someone's sexual orientation or gender identity and shame that well then we would be shaming the person and that would be shaming but there's another similar emotion to shame and that feeling is guilt and shame and guilt are not the same thing we feel guilty about things that we do but not who we are so when we condemn violence as you said in your question or condemn racism we're condemning violence or acts and racism is a belief that harms other people we're condemning we're creating a sense of guilt now here's the thing both shaming and guilt projection or condemnation are used in human society to control behaviors what we're learning is that there's a significant cost to shaming but that there's also a cost to being silent in the face of acts of abuse or exploitation or oppression and that creates well the soil from which your question arises it is a critical distinction the difference between shame and guilt when we condemn someone's identity we shame them when we condemn their actions we we say what we will and won't allow as a society so i want to be really clear naming harmful or hurtful behaviors is necessary it's even an indispensable part of being a good member of society i call out harmful behaviors readily and without hesitation it i i i don't pause at all what that's not true i always pause but after a healthy moment of self-reflection i readily call out harmful behaviors we need to know what we should and should not do we should not be violent against others that seems really clear to me right when i see in the media that there has been a police shooting i call out that harmful behavior because it seems clear to me looking at the circumstances and looking at the data our justice system and our police system is too ready to use unjustified violence especially towards people of color especially towards black people so i call out those harmful behaviors readily and easily when i call out harmful belief systems i'm more careful why because belief systems although they produce harmful behaviors are part of the internal landscape of another person and if i'm not careful with what i call a harmful belief system the person i'm trying to to speak to about the impact of their beliefs will psychologically shut down and withdraw that's that's human nature those psychological mechanisms are the foundation of things like white fragility white fragility of course is when you talk about race and racism with white people they tend to shut down anytime we raise the notion that something someone is doing or believes is bad or wrong that begins to affect their identity as a good person and we all all of us all races all gender identities all people have an intrinsic need to see ourselves as good people that's one of the underpinnings of human psychology so i'm more careful calling out harmful beliefs i still call them out by the way you hear me i'm a white person who calls out white supremacy very often that's because the belief systems that support white supremacy cause great harm in our world i condemn behaviors readily i contend beliefs readily but more carefully i avoid shaming people over their identity as much as possible i have no interest in shaming people it can on a temporary basis modify behaviors but people who are ashamed eventually have enough shaming and then this this outpouring of resentment this this reaction to being shamed i think one of the things we often see is white men moving into the justice movement experiencing from their perspective shame acquiescing for a period of time and then pushing back against it and then becoming like a jordan peterson listener or something my apologies to the jordan peterson listeners i know who are in this audience but that i'm not saying if you're a jordan peterson dynamic that's 100 you but i am saying i have seen that dynamic with some people where you start as say politically and morally conservative you become more progressive you get confronted with ideas of patriarchy and white supremacy you feel shamed you repress it for a while and then it pops up and now you're a you know classical liberal or whatever it is that um that the kids are saying online these days that's a pattern that i don't see as helpful and i i i don't think it's right to shame people's identity it drives me crazy when people talk about our current president in the context of obesity and fat shaming there are plenty of harmful behaviors and beliefs to critique about our current president without getting into his body but you'll also notice that i don't speak about that a lot why because in this triage of things for marginalized people if you're if you're lgbtq or you're latinx and in your fear and your frustration you call our current president a you know fat person or more commonly an orange cheeto which that's a little different the tanner thing that confuses me like is that identity is that behavior um but that's not the time to tell someone wait don't shame people is when a marginalized group is expressing frustration over how they're treated i don't dictate to marginalize people how they pursue their liberation so i gotta include that as well so i try to avoid shaming people over their identity i get frustrated when people do and i have great patience for marginalized people who are seeking their liberation i think all those things are are necessary and can be done simultaneously where this gets complex is when we get to matters of identity that intersect harmful belief systems what do i mean i mean i am white i'm a white person and whiteness which is different than being a white person whiteness is a system of beliefs and systems that advantage white people over other people i critique white supremacy and i critique whiteness and for people who are new to that conversation that gets interpreted as an attack on their identity that's one of the reasons i as a white person i'm so careful and try to be so patient with white fragility and white feelings in response to discussions of white supremacy is because now we're it's getting messy it's getting mixed between condemning a harmful belief system like whiteness versus shaming an identity like i'm a white person there's nothing wrong with being a white person there is something wrong with participating in the system of whiteness that produces white supremacy i'm a man when we talk about the patriarchy which is a harmful belief system for someone who hasn't done their self-work related to justice issues talking about the patriarchy they hear you're saying i'm a bad person because i'm a man no i will never say someone's a bad person because they are a man never but i will say that men are often in fact almost always conditioned to be participants in the harmful belief system we call the patriarchy when we talk about ableism able-bodied people tend to get upset wait you're saying i'm a bad person because i'm not disabled no that's not what i'm saying but your identity here is intersecting with a harmful belief system homophobia transphobia same thing if you're cisgendered and you're straight we talk about these things it might trigger you right so this is where it all gets complicated when a black queer trans person online names the problems of white supremacy patriarchy ableism and transphobia they are not shaming the identity of people who identify as white straight able-bodied cisgendered men but they are calling out harmful belief systems that give those identities extra advantages in society so to me this is the difference between shaming and condemning it is never shaming to speak the truth of your experience it is shaming when we reduce people to their individual intersections of identity and condemn them because of that and this is very rare so what mostly happens is people from more privileged backgrounds we've been inoculated from a lot of social discussion and our psychology has become dependent on avoiding those discussions and then because we get very fragile marginalized people can grow very frustrated with our fragility but friends let me tell you something i'm as wide as it gets i mean listen to my voice look at my face i am a white guy just through and through there's no way around it there's no denying it there's no avoiding it i present as very um able i don't present as disabled although as a person with autism a person with narcolepsy i'm becoming aware of how significant my limitations are in in daily living and the amount of support i require to get through the day that other people may not in the same way but if you just look at me and you just listen to me my whiteness my maleness my straightness and my ableness are immediately apparent but do you know something here i am the widest and the guys of white guys i have such wonderful dear close relationships with people at all different intersections of identity and do you know what i have found because i for myself do the work of making the distinction between people calling out harmful behaviors and belief systems versus shaming my identity well gosh i have found that all kinds of people are patient with me and have time for me and reach out to me and support me here i am a white man and i have so many close friends of color who are the people who somehow seem to know when i'm having a bad day and send me an encouraging text and as we develop a relationship over time when i have questions about how i can best be an anti-racist want to have questions about how i can best be an intersectional feminist when i have questions about how i can combat ableism and homophobia and transphobia there are women of color and men of color and disabled people and queer people who are ready to talk to me and so supportive and so helpful because i don't expect them to do my work for me and i've demonstrated in the way that i live my life that i don't ex i never expect them to do my work for me and sometimes all i need is is just a sounding board by the time i would ask a marginalized friend a question i can tell you i've read three books on the topic each and every time so your question is so timely because here we are it's almost 2020 and we're all learning how to live together we're all learning how to respect each other we're all learning how to love each other well and it's really divisive because when people are panicked we like what we had even it was bad and sometimes i feel hopeless and i feel hopeless because of questions like yours not that i think it's bad you ask your question because i share it what how what is the difference between shaming and condemning how do we drive social change what is the responsibility of someone who is acting out of ignorance how do we approach that how do we deal with the real legitimate psychological responses to being critiqued when we or others we love are taking harmful actions or hold harmful beliefs but i feel i feel more hopeful lately and it's precisely because as i've leaned in to inclusive relationships in my personal life and in my work i start getting glimpses of what it looks like to respect every person's identity to view our uniqueness as is not just okay but wonderful as an indispensable part of being a human person and i get hope that maybe unlike the media narrative which shows us all falling apart well gosh maybe one by one we can start coming together and we can start building a world together that's fair for everyone my friend andre henry says it doesn't have to be this way and in that statement i find such tremendous hope and i find such encouragement and in that hope i will always condemn harmful behaviors and harmful beliefs while respecting everyone's identity if you listen to ask science mike then you already know that kiwi co is one of my all-time favorite sponsors you know that my family gets kiwi crates every month that we build things together and in doing so we learn about science technology engineering art and math you know that kiwi co helps kids learn about these things in ways that are age appropriate and fun and hands-on what you may not know is that kiwi co makes the perfect gift this holiday there's something for every kid on your list so just remember that kiwi co is a great option for gifting these subscriptions help every young explorer artist or engineer in your life learn about the things they love i especially love the fact that kiwi co can help children of all gender identities feel connected to science technology engineering art and math after all art is for boys and science is for girls too this holiday give the gift of hands-on learning for tomorrow's makers every month and as always the first month of kiwi hello for science mike listeners is free so they've got all kinds of crates for your children including the new eureka crate for teenagers and adults i've tried them and i love them absolutely love them so if you're interested in helping your children or children you know get excited about science and learning and art and all those good things i just need you to go right now to kiwico.com science where there's an exclusive office offer for ask science mike listeners again that's kiwico.com [Music] hi mike i'm a member and leader at a united methodist church after the decision earlier this year i was asked to help found a sunday school class that is publicly affirming of lgbtqia plus people i found this encouraging i thought that by helping to foster inclusion that maybe the church was taking a first step that would be followed by second and third steps that didn't happen i've met incredible people some of whom joined our church because of our group and i have a more diverse network of friendships than i've ever had before i love this aspect of my attendance at this church however i am increasingly exhausted by the supposedly moderate stances being publicly declared from both the pulpit and the church itself this pains me because some of the pastors are my personal friends and i know them to be extremely inclusive individuals to be clear hate is not being taught in any way however inclusion is not being clearly declared or taught either i am told that tension is being held for different viewpoints my day job is in green technology so i spend my weeks navigating the moral complexity of capitalism and white supremacist patriarchy baked into the business world i think and talk about climate change in depth as part of my work each day by the time i get to sunday i have a hard time getting out of bed to face this institution i often sneak in just for my sunday school class and leave fast i've told several folks in the group that i might leave soon i've been asked not to abandon them which resonates with me because i am a cis-het white woman and if people who are more marginalized than i am want to stay then how can i let them down i am getting tired i also have small children to raise i don't know what the right thing to do is stand on very clear rigid principle and go out by myself or stay to support people who tell me that they find my presence helpful any advice you might have would be very welcome love em well am i i'm so moved i'm so moved that you care for lgbtqia plus christians it drives me crazy how we tell people they have to choose between their sexual identity and their gender identity and their faith i'm tired of it i'm technically still a member of the united methodist church i attended you know my methodist church for many years that i loved and full disclosure once the the that that fateful vote came out i stopped going to any methodist churches that sunday and i have not been to one since so i understand the desire to take a stand and to move on i've been going to episcopal churches it breaks my heart this moderate position this messy middle that methodists are proud of holding viewpoints and tension doesn't work on matters of life and death for one of those groups so we can hold intention differences on theological or political matters that don't affect life and death of people we can we can and should do that but this is a moral issue as clear to me as slavery or the civil rights movement we can't hold intention the right to own human beings in the church it is simply wrong to own human beings in the same way it is simply wrong to exclude people based on their sexual identity and gender orientation i understand that this is a new theology and i also don't care that it's a new theology well mike if we accept lgbtq people who else do we have to accept everyone there's no limit here as christians where we get to decide who gets included i'm sick of it and then i'm sick of bad faith arguments well what about pedophiles you know what i accept that pedophiles are human beings i accept that some people have trauma i've answered a question from a pedophile on this show who because they were raped as a child were attracted to children but they were aware of that and working on it and not acting on it it's such a bad faith argument to compare orientation to things like pedophilia and murder because pedophilia and murder are horrible acts against another human being and same-sex relationships are a consensual celebration of love it's not the same thing get your heads out of the 1500s i'm tired of it i am tired of it i will not stand for one more teenage gay lesbian trans or intersex teen taking their life because we're holding a viewpoint in tension depart from me i never knew you so some of you got to experience science mike angry for the first time just now i hope that was not overwhelming i am learning um that anger isn't wrong it's not wrong for me to be angry over the treatment of my kin and the kingdom of god so yeah my blood just boiled a little bit all that to say em i understand that you are tired i am tired too so here's what you can do you can just keep loving and affirming these people whether you stay in the church or not and you can follow your conviction if you say in the church stay in the church and say i'll teach this sunday school class but i won't go sit in a church service when we hold the tension on people's right to exist if the pastors are your friends they will understand you following your convictions i think this all comes down to money older people who are more likely to tithe are more likely to stand to get same-sex marriage younger people who are less likely to tithe keep the pews full make the church feel it has a future but there's not as much money in it and so people who are inclusive personally but aren't in the pulpit to me that comes down to money and i'm not a good person to give advice here because i've abandoned financial gain over and over and over and over and over for the last five years of my life because i refuse to compromise the dignity of marginalized people so that i can be wealthy or that i can make payments on something friends i will sooner lose the lease on my house then compromise on the right of marginalized people to live lives that are as fulfilling and as legally protected as my own i can show you the data friends as i've spoken out about white supremacy money has disappeared funding has gone away as i've spoken out about patriarchy money has gone away and as i've spoken out in defense of lgbtqia plus christians funding has gone away well good riddance good riddance whatever you do em this is my advice make sure that no queer person could ever question where you stand that's it make sure they know that your support and your solidarity is absolute and is non-negotiable you may find like me that on that stance because you rest better than you ever have that you feel like you have more integrity as a parent than you've ever had and be careful the unwavering support of straight and cis-head people is so uncommon you may find that people offer you a gratitude and a support that is embarrassing that is inordinate with the sacrifice you're making you will make the tiniest sacrifice in lgbtq people in your life they may give you more gratitude than you deserve and that's something you gotta work out in therapy that's something that i'm working out myself but from one cis-head white person to another m i'm proud of you for caring and i am proud of you for making a space people like you give me hope not only for the future of the church but for the possibility of a god that loves us [Music] hey mike uh just finished reading pale blue dot on your recommendation by carl sagan so thank you so much for that i really enjoyed it uh it was published in 1994 though i'm curious if you have insights thoughts ideas about things that um if the book were being written now what would be different what new information would be in there and what are some things that uh sagan got uh wrong or what are things that he was guessing on that he he was right now that's been proven thanks so much man i know that's kind of a wide net that i'm casting in that but you said that you read that book every year so i figure you'll you'll have some stuff to immediately grab onto okay you're right i do read pale blue dot every year i have a first edition on my shelf that i love um there's few books i've read as often or as frequently as pale blue dot other than maybe the bible itself and i still am just gonna swing and miss on this question to answer your question well i would have had to pull pale blue dot off the shelf right now and read it with your question in mind the trouble is i read dozens of books in a slow year so even reading a book once a year there's still a lot of books interspace in there and there's i read strangely i mean the mechanics of how i read is strange i've become aware in the last few years of how different the mechanical process of me reading is than most people and then what i take away from a book is very different here's what i remember about a book that i read i remember new pieces of information that i haven't heard before and i remember the style of prose what i thought about the writing is what i take away from books fiction and non-fiction so when i read a fiction book i remember almost nothing about it immediately unless there was a new idea like a they had some interesting depiction of a teleporter then i remember that i don't remember characters i don't remember plot i don't remember any of that stuff and in non-fiction books i remember new information so when i reread pale blue dot do you know what i remember how much i like carl sagan's writing [Laughter] because when i read i for instantly disregard something i already know or things that i disagree with so when i read a book that i really disagree with i remember nothing about it other than like i didn't agree with the author people say what do you disagree with so i think now you're saying when you all ask me book questions it's like how does he remember so much i have a very specific form of recollection that makes you think i remember more than i do all that to say this is such a hard question for me to answer so what i've done instead is i've thought like my general impression of payable dot and what we've learned about the world since the late 90s i can tell you that carl sagan's predictions are pretty good um he's a good scientist i think his predictions on the the pace that we'd explore our solar system may be off although he kind of he kind of hedged that bet in his in his in his book actually kind of uncannily frankly um you know it would differ he i think he would talk a lot more about voyager 1 and 2 and how far they've gone they both entered interstellar space now they've left our solar system and that's really exciting i think he'd talk a lot more about exoplanets now that they aren't theoretical but instead that we have catalogued and measured thousands of them in our galaxy i think he'd probably really geek out that we have to a high degree of confidence that we know the shape of the universe that it is flat instead of open or closed i'm not going to go into that because if you're not familiar with that concept that's going to be a 12-minute answer to go into those things i think he would talk a lot about the curiosity mission on mars and we're finding out about oxygen and methane and soil composition and how much water ice how much moisture there is on mars i'm sure he'd be captivated by the cassini probe and its exploration of saturn i can't imagine that he wouldn't talk about new horizons and its fly by encounter with the dwarf planet pluto i also think that if pale blue dot were written today as he talked about geocentrism and caring for the only the only cradle we have right now i think carl sagan would talk a lot more about climate change and the threat that poses on society and that's i don't know that's all i could come up with it's a strange thing for that to be my favorite book and what i take away is like carl sagan writes really poetically i don't think his geocentrism stuff would really change at all i don't think the core message of uh you know the pale blue dot passage the earth is a mode of dust suspended in the sun sunbeam i think all those insights are every bit as prescient and profound today as they were the day they were first written that's why i have such deep deep respect for carl sagan who he was as a scientist as a communicator and as a man he's carl sagan is a hero of mine and i i enjoy that as so many of my heroes fall away as i learn more about their uh how they treated other people especially women that so far carl sagan has been a durable hero of mine um which i'm sure nelson's going to tweet me and sadly tell me true information that will may take that away from me but as i say this carl sagan remains a brilliant person who lived his life with integrity who i deeply admire [Music] and our last question this week came in via email and it is uh well here it is hi mike i've been seeing and hearing stories recently about china not accepting our recycling anymore on top of that they say most of the recycling we do as citizens isn't accepted and is just thrown in a landfill anyway to that end the reports i've encountered have argued that it's better not to recycle at all than it is to recycle the wrong way with climate change already wrecking our world i just can't tell myself to throw my plastic containers into the garbage i'm flummoxed how dire is this recycling issue thanks for being our guide what can we do better preston well preston that's a great question so what if you've already done a good thing you've realized a curiosity and that honoring that curiosity can make the world a better place so the first thing i'd like you to do preston is just like pat yourself on the back say good job preston you care so many people don't we get busy you know life's hard then we find out recycling might not work there's an oversimplification here that i want to address right up top that's dangerous that's not your fault it's what you've been told but you've heard that it's better not to recycle at all than it is to recycle the wrong way here's what that means throwing a greasy pizza box in your recycling bin is problematic that doesn't mean not recycling is better than recycling it means we need to be we have some care and consideration with how we recycle things so that means for things that were used with food like if you're recycling an aluminum can let's go and wash that thoroughly before it goes in the recycling bin and you've just helped make the planet a better place it means throwaway paper items that aren't soiled with food and that can be recycled things that have that have been laminated for example can be difficult so some of this is going to be legwork to recycle well you may need to reach out to the organization governmental or hired organization that recycles your waste locally and figure out what their specific guidelines are for recycling it is true china is not accepting all our plastics anymore which is good because china was accepting all our plastics and a lot of it was just going into their soil and water that's not good for anybody if we're pressured with having to deal with our plastic we might make less of it and i think that's important okay here's the good news sorting tech has gotten really quite good there's we have a thing now called single stream recycling which is we're throwing glass we're throwing metals we're throwing papers we're putting it all in the same bin and guess what it's not labor intensive to sort that stuff out that's great that's wonderful single stream recycling does work it's better to use it than not use it unless you do it badly how do you do it badly you put plastics in there that are hard or impossible to recycle if you look at a object that's been manufactured it's going to have a little stamp on it like an impression that looks like the recycling triangle and in the middle of that triangle is a number so you want to do something great reach out on the web or on the phone to whatever organization or institution handles your recycling and figure out which numbers are go and which numbers are no go because if they get too much no go in a load that just goes to the landfill because it's too expensive to sort right so just make your make your recycle bin really easy don't put stuff in there they can't recycle same thing with paper products have been soiled by food grease that's garbage that's not recyclable it might be compostable if you're into that too much paper too much vapor fiber is going to mess up your compost compost though so you know those kind of paper products are a real problem so what do we do the biggest problem with recycling is a glass that's broken up too finely you want to put hole you don't want to like put shattered glass in your recycle bin and single use plastics so we just make too much stuff that's single use and plastic so if you cut down on single-use plastics eating fresh food helps that a lot and it's also more nutritious and you limit your overall consumption so if you so if you buy something on amazon it gets shipped to you in an individual box with individual packaging yikes if you buy something in a store locally it came on a pallet there's less packaging to discard do you see what i'm saying you want to think how do i limit the amount of packaging that's required for my life to exist you buy less things you buy more things locally you buy more fresh foods and i understand that all that has an economic cost i'm not shaming people of low incomes first you do what you have to do to survive okay but those things considered look for ways to limit the uses especially of single use plastics glass metals especially aluminum are far more easy to recycle than any plastic here's the last thing watch out for ableism and environmental and recycling movements i mike mccarg should use a lot less plastic straws than i do and because my daughter gets all over me i have a metal straw i can use a metal straw people with physical disabilities they need plastic straws they don't want them they need them so plastic straw bands end up hurting disabled people that's not okay so people who don't need plastic straw shouldn't use them but they should always be readily available they shouldn't be you should have to pay to get one this is to me this is a an accessibility issue but for people who don't need a given plastic product for their health or safety we should use them as little as possible and we should support um i don't i don't know this gets complicated like if we think about straw bands i love that we're going to uh do you want to straw with that out here in california i think that's a great notion remind people oh yeah there's a cost here i could even you know see a ban on straws that includes making straws are present for disabled people and available at no cost right even if it even if we produce less straws and now a single straw costs four dollars that's tough restaurant you're gonna eat the four dollars and you're going to put it in the price of all of our food so that disabled people don't have to pay extra just to eat and drink that's not okay i'll have a link from wired magazine that talks about the macro issue of china and recycling and policy changes that could happen and that that's a really worthwhile piece reading i wanted to focus on personal actions and ableism because every time this comes up environmentals come up come up no one no that's not true disabled people but non-disabled people rarely talk about the ableism implications of environmental policy and i think that's important and that's critical so preston thank you for caring and i hope i've given you a few helpful insights that you can put into practice today [Music] you've made it through another episode of ask science mike man i got a little preachy got more excited on that one than i expected i should have known with those great questions here's what you got to know ask science mike has never been more popular than it is right now there's never been more downloads of a given episode than there are today and there's never been fewer people sending their questions in how is that happening i don't know so if you if you if you're curious about something let me celebrate that with you go to asksciencemike.com you can type out a question or you can send me a voicemail you can hear yourself on the show or i'll read your question you hear it every week but just know i do this because i like your curiosity i don't know what to talk about unless you ask me and i want to thank all of my patrons on patreon for picking out the questions every week thank you so much for not only supporting the show but picking what goes on the air and if you want to join my patrons you can go to ask sciencemike.com there's a join me on patreon button you can click that and learn all about what it's like to support this show on patreon you can you can do so for as little as a dollar a month that makes a huge difference in my life it lets me make sure the people who work on the show get paid all those wonderful things so if you're not a patron please consider it i'd like to thank andrew gillucki as always for doing pre-production greg nordine for production and sound design i would like to thank caitlin hermstad for being the executive producer of ask science mike and holding the whole thing together i'd like to thank you yes you for listening for 200 episodes and beyond thanks for listening everyone and i can't wait to talk with you next week [Music]