Thanksgiving Special: Talkin' Turkey

Daniel and Kelly give our US-based listeners some things to gobble about over Thanksgiving dinner other than politics.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Happy Thanksgiving friends, or happy Thanksgiving to our US based
friends at least, and happy November twenty eighth to the
rest of you.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
On today's episode, we're going to give you.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Some things to gobble about at the Thanksgiving dinner table
other than politics.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
You're welcome.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
First up, we have an expert on to talk about
whether or not the trip to fan in Turkey actually
makes you.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Then we're moving on to talking about a vegetable that
comes in a variety of forms, all of which are
improved by lots and lots of cheese. And finally we're
talking about why it takes so stink and long to
cook a turkey and some probably bad ideas for how
you could speed this process up. Welcome to Daniel and
Kelly's Extraordinary universe.

Speaker 4 (01:05):
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and Thanksgiving is
my favorite holiday.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Ooh. I'm Kelly Weener Smith. I'm a parasitologist and I
really like Thanksgiving. I don't know if it's my favorite holiday,
but I do love the food.

Speaker 4 (01:19):
It's food, it's family, and crucially for me, it's not commercialized.
It's not all about shopping and expensive presence. It's really
just about spending time with your family eating good food,
and like, hey, what's better than that?

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Right, that's pure, that is that's beautiful. I love that.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
So has the commercialization of Halloween ruined Halloween for you?

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Because that's a top contender for rey.

Speaker 4 (01:41):
Yeah, it's crazy. We all just go out and buy
a bunch of candy and give it to each other.
It's hilarious. Although I do like the community aspect that
everybody comes out. My neighborhood goes crazy for Halloween. We
get hundreds and hundreds of trigger treaters. We give away
like a full garbage can full of candy. It's incredible.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Wow, that is incredible.

Speaker 4 (02:00):
This Halloween, we ran out of candy. We started giving
away stuff from our pantry and people were excited. They
were like, ooh, canned corn, sweet potatoes, Are you serious? Yeah? Absolutely.
We gave away dried beans, we gave away summer sausage.
People were very excited to get anything but candy. Actually,
maybe next year we're just going to give away sweet potatoes.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
That's amazing. I love that.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
I remember there were, like, you know, some neighbors who
would do the king size candy bars. And some would
give you a dollar, and then we had a neighbor
who gave a penny and we were all like, what, No,
it's not okay, you fail.

Speaker 4 (02:34):
My Thanksgiving questions for you are what are your most
and least favorite items on the Thanksgiving table?

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Oh man?

Speaker 1 (02:41):
So you know, I often have Thanksgiving up my parents' house,
and like, literally everything my father makes is amazing. Everything
is like my favorite thing. And every year he tries
a new pie or cake, which is incredible. He makes
these fantastic like almond cookies for me every year and
then sends me home with so many that I I
put on like fifty pounds. So I have no least favorite.

(03:05):
Anything with mushrooms I don't really like. And sometimes when
I don't have Thanksgiving with my dad, mushrooms sneak into
the meal and that's disappointing.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
But all right, so what about you?

Speaker 4 (03:13):
My favorite thing on the table is probably turkey wings.
Not a big fan of turkey, but the wings. Love
the wings, so crunchy, so good. Though I gross out
my daughter by like audibly crunching them at the table,
and she's a vegetarian, so that's not so funny for her.
And my least favorite are people who put marshmallows on
sweet potatoes. I just don't get it. Like, to me,

(03:34):
that combination makes no sense. It's like snickers bars on
a hamburger or something like, what is going on here?

Speaker 1 (03:40):
Not sure I have a problem with snickers bar on
hamburger either, but that would be a little weird. I
can't say I'm bothered by the marshmallows on the sweet potatoes,
but it's not one of the first things I go to.
But I think I'm with your daughter. I'd probably sit
on the other side of the table. I'm not a
big fan of the sounds of crunching on bones.

Speaker 4 (03:57):
Personally audible carnivores.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
I mean, I feel like if I were a better person,
I would be more at peace with what it takes
to put the food on my table. But I like
to bury my head a little bit when I can.

Speaker 4 (04:10):
But you live on a farm, right, You're very connected
to where your food comes from.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Yeah, but they're all friends on my farm. They don't
end up on the table. Their eggs do.

Speaker 4 (04:19):
But not them.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (04:22):
Just their children, well.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
They're not children, yeah, just their proto children. I mean,
even our nasty roosters didn't end up on the table,
even though that was at tempting.

Speaker 4 (04:32):
Sometimes. All right, well, we're not just here to debate
when life begins for chickens. We're here to talk about
the science of Thanksgiving, what it means, how it works.
As you all sit there and enjoy your Thanksgiving meal,
we want to inject a little bit of science into
your sleepy afternoon.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
We do.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
And one of the scientific factoids that I feel like
I hear every year is that trip to a fan
in the Turkey makes you sleepy. And I believe the
history of the word factoid is that it used to
be a little piece of information that's wrong.

Speaker 4 (05:04):
It's an anti fact I see exactly.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Yeah, these days it means a tiny fact, but I
think it used to mean this is not correct. And
that is the story with tript to fan making you sleepy.
And we got lucky because your wife knew an expert
that we could talk to about this topic.

Speaker 4 (05:19):
Katrina knows a lot of fun, smart people, so I
often ask her for help in finding an expert. So
we were very lucky to get to talk to doctor
Mark Mapstone here at UC Irvine. But whether or not
trypto fan actually makes you sleepy or if it's all
just a huge nation wide placebo effect.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
And he was a fun guy to talk to, so
none of us are going to have trouble staying awake,
even if we ate a lot of turkey.

Speaker 4 (05:42):
Here's our chat with Mark.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
Okay, So the first topic we're tackling for the Thanksgiving
episode is whether or not the trip to Fan in
Turkey actually makes you sleepy. And we have an expert
on the show today to help us with that. We
invited doctor Mark Mapstone's chief of the Neuropsychology Division in
the Department of Neurology at UC Irvine.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
Welcome to the show, Mark, Thank you for having me.
It's great to be here.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
We're excited to have you to debunk this. So when
I was an undergrad, I remember sitting in an anatomy
and physiology class and having my professor say, Okay, Thanksgiving
is coming, You're gonna eat turkey, You're gonna be tired,
and that's because of the trip to Fan.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
Is that true? Is that how it works?

Speaker 4 (06:25):
Well?

Speaker 3 (06:25):
Probably not.

Speaker 5 (06:27):
This is a myth that's been going around for decades,
if not centuries, This idea that this essential amino acid
called trip to fan that's present in Turkey, which it
is causing you to become sleepy, and there's a.

Speaker 3 (06:39):
Background for that. There's a nugget of truth.

Speaker 5 (06:41):
Specifically, tryp to fan is an amino acid that we need.
It's an essential amino acid that we need for protein
construction in our bodies, and we don't get it. We
can't make it ourselves. We can't make all that we
need by ourselves, so we have to get it from
our diets. And there are nine essential amino acids that
we get from our diet, and.

Speaker 3 (07:02):
The trip to fan is one of them.

Speaker 5 (07:04):
However, it turns out that Turkey isn't the only place
you can find trip to fan, and as a matter
of fact, Turkey isn't the highest density of trip to
fan as far as other foods as well, So it's
found in dairy eggs, other poultry, meat, even beef. There's
nothing special about the amount of trip to fan in Turkey. However,
trip to fan is very important in the synthesis of

(07:27):
a number of other chemicals that affect the brain and
behavior which might lead you to feel sleepy, and those
chemicals are serotonin and melatonin. So there's a nugget of truth.
But probably you have to eat like ten pounds of
turkey to get enough trip to fan to really make
that direct effect to make you sleepy.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
I'm up for that challenge getting but I've done it before.

Speaker 4 (07:52):
Anything for the science.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
Exactly, I have a lot of friends and kids who
take melotone into sleep. How good is the science showing
that orally consuming melatonin actually results in better sleep or
more sleep?

Speaker 3 (08:04):
Probably not so strong.

Speaker 5 (08:06):
A lot of it is metabolized in the gut before
it even gets out to get to the brain. So
it turns out that most of the serotonin that's produced
in our bodies is produced in the gut. The epithelial
lining of the gut produces the serotonin, probably ninety percent.
Although serotonin is widely used throughout the body, we think
of it mostly in the brain. And serotonin is the

(08:28):
feel good drug. It's the chemical that, similar to dopamine,
kind of can make you feel It's a mood altering
or mood regulating neurochemical that our bodies produce in states
that we require for making our mood good. So serotonin
is produced in the gut and it's also produced in
the brain. So most of the brain relevant serotonin is

(08:50):
produced in the raphae nucleus. So this is a chemical
that's produced within the brain, but it's also very important
and produced largely in the gut.

Speaker 3 (08:58):
Ninety percent of it comes from the gut.

Speaker 4 (09:00):
Can I step in with totally naive skepticism about how
much we understand any of this stuff? I mean, can
we identify an individual chemical and said, this one makes
you feel good, this one makes you feel X like.
Isn't it a whole symphony of complex chemistry that few
people understand maybe a little bit.

Speaker 5 (09:16):
Yeah, No, you're You're absolutely right. When people start saying
this particular neurochemical does this, you have to realize that
all of this is happening in this complex miilu. You know,
the brain is more than just a big bag of chemicals.
There are specificity for certain networks and certain areas of
the brain for each of these chemicals. They don't just
all float around. But you're absolutely right. You can't really

(09:38):
just take one neurochemical in isolation and say this gives
you this. It's really a combination of many things.

Speaker 4 (09:46):
And do we understand the sort of microphysical process like
this chemical least to this, which does this? Or is
it all just sort of like correlational studies, where like, hey,
we gave rats a bunch of serotonin and they looked happy.

Speaker 5 (09:57):
Yeah, well, you know, that's kind of how science go.
We can only start with reductionists sort of questions, and
we can test those, and then we have to extrapolate
to bigger issues and bigger concepts and make bigger inferences.
So we do have to start with very tightly controlled
sorts of things like that, Like you move one neurochemical
a little bit, you feed them some trip to fan
and they get sleepy. Although Givens isn't really strong for that,

(10:19):
there's lots of foods that do that. There's probably bigger
contributions to feeling sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner than trip to fan,
and we can review those if you'd like, But let's
review those.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
So I think a lot of people out there are
probably thinking, but after I eat turkey dinner.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
I do feel sleepy. So what is happening there?

Speaker 3 (10:38):
So you're also doing a lot of other things.

Speaker 5 (10:40):
So Thanksgiving dinner traditionally, at least at my house, I mean,
we've got mashed potatoes, you've got stuffing, you've got pumpkin pie.
I mean all of the carbs that you're eating is
going to make you feel sleepy to begin with this
post prandial effect. And we know this every day after
you eat lunch, righted an hour to an hour a

(11:01):
half after you eat lunch, you tend to get sleepy.
It's that why you need that cup of coffee in
the early afternoon. The same thing happens at Thanksgiving, but
we tend to do it like crazy ten times even
more than the eating. So we do tend to overindulge
in Thanksgiving dinner and it's usually on carbs that are
going to make you very sleepy. These are things that
divert your blood flow from brain from muscles to the

(11:24):
guts so that you can deal with all of the
stuff that you just smacked in your gob So it's
all part of like overeating. It's what you're overeating. It's
carbs and sugars and things like this. Maybe very minor
effects of the trip to fan in the turkeys is
probably what's going on. And you're probably having a glass
of wine with that or more who knows or even
you know, while you're watching the football game before Thanksgiving dinner.

(11:46):
So there's the potential effects of alcohol, which of course
is a depressant in the CNS, it tends to make
you sleepy, It tends to make you groggy and dope e.
So alcohol carbs overeating. So I think if you put
all those in a line, trip to fan is like
all way down at the.

Speaker 4 (12:00):
Bottom relatives football, political conversations, politics.

Speaker 3 (12:05):
I mean that could make you want to go take a.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Nap, right amen?

Speaker 1 (12:08):
Absolutely So when we were talking about trip to fan,
you mentioned that it comes from turkey and chicken and eggs,
and it all sounded like it came from meat products.
Do vegans never get sleepy? Does it also come from plants?

Speaker 5 (12:23):
So we have what we call protein dens, are perfect
foods that have all nine essential amino acids, and those
tend to be meats. So I think the protein dense foods, vegetables, beans,
that sort of thing does not contain all nine Many
of them do contain trip to fans. So do vegans
get post Thanksgiving sleepiness?

Speaker 3 (12:43):
That sounds like a study right there. You should be
doing that work.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
We need money first.

Speaker 4 (12:48):
Cacina tells me about the three sisters, Like if you
have squash and beans and maybe a corn together, then
you get all the amino acids.

Speaker 5 (12:56):
Yeah, there are combinations obviously of the vegetables that you
can pull together to make sure you get all nine.
And then obviously there's supplements which are not as good,
but I mean you'd rather get them directly through the
diet rather than take supplements. But people supplement with these
as well.

Speaker 4 (13:09):
Right, But we don't want people to get the impression
that you can't get a complete diet as.

Speaker 5 (13:12):
A vegan, right, right, right? Oh, yeah, I didn't mean
to say that at all. You can definitely take vegetarianism
and veganism very seriously and get everything you need.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
So you had said that this idea that trip to
fan is what makes us sleepy after Thanksgiving meal has
been around for maybe centuries.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
Do you happen to know.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
What's the earliest evidence we have of this sort of
meme taking flight?

Speaker 4 (13:35):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (13:35):
Good question. I wish I had a source for you.

Speaker 5 (13:37):
It may be when I was in elementary school or
high school biology or something, and I first heard this.

Speaker 4 (13:42):
Myth was that centuries ago, centuries ago.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
Getting up there, we can talk decades.

Speaker 5 (13:50):
I may be attributing this to my high school biology
teacher who gave that evidence but did not quote a source,
so don't quote.

Speaker 4 (13:56):
Me on that.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Okay, got it.

Speaker 4 (13:58):
How much do we understand about what makes you feel sleepy?
I mean, I know neurobiology is really complicated, but this
is a very subjective thing, like to feel sleepy. Do
we understand the mechanism for that at all? I mean,
do you feel sleepy because you need sleep? Is it
really just diverting the blood from the brain to the gut.

Speaker 5 (14:15):
We know that there are certain processes that are involved
in regulation of sleep and wake. We refer to these
as circadian rhythms, and these are ways that organisms kind
of move through the sleep and wake estates and then
they're in between states as well. Sleep plays a really
important role. We need to sleep. I mean, it's very
clear that if you deprive animals or humans of sleep,

(14:36):
things go wrong really quickly. You can go for a
couple of days, perhaps at the most, without sleep, but
you start getting beyond that and you start having derangement
of thinking and eventually it can be fatal. This is
something that's really critical and for the brain processes sleep.
It turns out there's been a new system described as
called the glymphatic system, and this is a network that

(14:59):
allows for the metabolic and cellular detritis that's produced during
waking hours to be removed from the brain. You kind
of want the garbage trucks to come around and clean
up after you've had a hard day working as a
brain cell. So we do this as sleep, and it's
really critical to get good sleep because it allows for
these clearance mechanisms to proceed and your brain is able

(15:21):
to clean up after itself and it kind of shuts
down a little bit and allows for these things to happen.
So sleep is really important, and we've got to do
this in a cyclical way. We go through sleep and
wake cycles. And one of the main neurochemicals or neuro
hormones frankly as melatonin, which is produced by the pineal
gland in the brain, and this is a hormone that
regulates the movement between wake and sleep. So this is

(15:46):
a very complex system and most organisms, you know, from
multicellular organisms to humans, have to go through these cycles
to produce meaningful activity, to feed, to reproduce, to do
the things that an organism needs.

Speaker 3 (16:01):
And then you need the downtime.

Speaker 4 (16:02):
Why do you need to be asleep for the garbage
trucks to come in and clean up the mess. What
is it that they're doing that you can't be awake for.

Speaker 5 (16:09):
Oh, that's a good question. I'm not sure that I
know the answer to that. I can say that the
brain goes into a state, an electrical state where there's
oscillations that promote the movement, and that's not compatible with
being awake. So it kind of means that when your
brain is in this state, it's drowsy, and that allows
for these metabolic byproducts to be taken away as garbage.

Speaker 4 (16:31):
On the topic of understanding sleep, what do you think
are things we will understand about sleep in the next
ten or fifty or one hundred years that we don't
understand today.

Speaker 5 (16:39):
One thing that I'd love to have us get to
the point of is really understanding how these clearance mechanisms work,
because there are a number of diseases and disorders of
particularly older adulthood, that are probably strongly related to failure
of clearance of this cellular stuff. And I'm speaking specifically
of Alzheimer's disease, where the build up of proteins in

(17:02):
the brain that are normal, they should be there, but
they're allowed to build up to a much higher level
in people who eventually develop Alzheimer's disease, and the current
thinking is that this may be a failure of clearance
in the sense that if you're not getting good sleep,
then your brain is not taking out the garbage, and
it's allowed to build up in a bad way. So

(17:23):
a normal, healthy brain and aging brain would allow for
that to get out, the garbage to be taken out,
but in an Alzheimer's brain, it's not being allowed to
We don't clearly understand the mechanisms behind that, but certainly
sleep is playing a role. There's a strong correlation between
impaired sleep and risk for Alzheimer's disease as we get older,

(17:44):
and unfortunately that's probably starting in midlife, probably in our
fifties and sixties, when we start having problems with sleep,
that's when this is probably happening. So I'd love for
us as a scientific field to be able to understand
more about that so that we can promote good sleep
and promote clearance of these abnormal proteins.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
Sometimes when I'm having trouble sleeping at night, I panic
because I feel like I should be sleeping more, and
that keeps me up more and I feel like you've
just exacerbated that problem for me.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
Now I'm going to be like, oh, here comes Alzheimer's.

Speaker 4 (18:15):
Well, you know a lot of people listen to the
podcast to fall asleep. So would you say, Mark, as
a medical doctor, that you're prescribing listening to the podcast,
this podcast is actually good for your body?

Speaker 3 (18:26):
It could be. However, I am not a physician.

Speaker 5 (18:29):
I'm a PhD Clinical psychologist, so I can't write scripts anyways,
I give recommendations and yeah, this.

Speaker 3 (18:35):
Sounds like a great thing to fall asleep too.

Speaker 1 (18:37):
Well, I'm going to go ahead and prescribe our podcast
to our listeners. I medically shouldn't do that either, but
I'm doing it all right.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
Thanks so much Mark for being on the show.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
Yeah, you're welcome, Thanks for having.

Speaker 1 (18:48):
Me, and we're back and we're ready to tackle topic
number two. All right, So let's move on to another

(19:10):
staple of the Thanksgiving dinner table, which are veggies. And
for Daniel's sake, we're not going to put any marshmallows
on them.

Speaker 4 (19:18):
Thank you. I know veggies don't need marshmallows. They're delicious
by themselves.

Speaker 2 (19:22):
I think they could use cheese most of the time.
But we can agree to disagree there.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
So a few years ago I was surprised to learn
that a bunch of the veggies that I smother with
cheese are all from exactly the same species of plant.
What Yeah, So, just like dogs, whose scientific name is
Canus lupus familiaris, we've used artificial selection to sort of
change the way that they look so that they can
have different traits that we appreciate for different reasons.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
So we have everything from tiny.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
Little chihuahuas that you could fit in your bag and
they're super cute all the way up to great Danes,
which my husband is afraid of.

Speaker 4 (19:56):
But you don't have dogs in your Thanksgiving table. That's
not where this is going.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
Where this is going. No, no, no no.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
But another species that we have artificially selected to produce
very varied forms that humans like for different reasons is
a plant called Brassica olerasia. And this is the plant
that produces kale, coole, robbie cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts.

Speaker 4 (20:23):
Brussels sprouts too. This is like a monopoly on the
Thanksgiving table.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
I know they're all the same species, and that kind
of blew my mind.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
They look really different.

Speaker 4 (20:33):
So you're saying Brussels sprouts are to cauliflower like chihuahuas
are to cocker spaniels exactly.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
And I think that if podcasting doesn't work out for us,
you have a future writing SAT questions, which I hated
taking when I was younger.

Speaker 4 (20:49):
Then I'm not taking that as a compliment, Kelly, that
was a backhanded insu.

Speaker 2 (20:55):
Okay, it wasn't meant to be.

Speaker 1 (20:56):
I would have enjoyed taking the SAT much more if
you had written questions, Oh.

Speaker 4 (21:01):
Nice, save, nice, save, all right, I am smooth. Well,
I'm a fan of all those vegetables you suggested, but
they all seem so different. I mean there's a green
sort of leafiness, like a crunchiness to them all. But
you know, like cabbage you can eat totally raw, and
kale you definitely shouldn't. How can all these really be
the same kind of vegetable?

Speaker 1 (21:21):
Okay, So there was this wild plant that we think
came from the Mediterranean, and it was domesticated, and this
happened a really long time ago, right, So a lot
of this information has been lost to history, but here's
what we think happened. So initially, people found versions of
this plant that looked different, and some of them had
bigger leaves, and so we like preferentially planted the ones

(21:42):
that had bigger leaves, and over time, by picking the
ones that have the biggest leaves and then helping those
have plant babies over and over again, we ended up
getting big leafed plants like kale.

Speaker 2 (21:53):
So that's where kale came from. That's when you get
a lot of leaves.

Speaker 4 (21:56):
So this is just artificial selection. It's like greeting your
donks to have certain traits by setting up the matches, yes,
or the way that we like took korn from having
these tiny little kernels to this enormous, monstrous deliciousness. It's
the same sort of effect, but it takes a long time, right,
This is not something you can do in a lab
in ten years. It's like hundreds of years or thousands
of years of work.

Speaker 1 (22:16):
So a lot of the answers to this stuff have
been lost to history. So, like we know there were
Greeks around three hundred years BCE who would write about
kley kinds of plants, and so we think that, you know,
thousands of years ago this was like starting to happen.
But you know, over time, like when someone uses whatever
the Greek word was for, like cabbage or kale, It's

(22:38):
possible they were referring to a different plant, but we
think they were referring to this one. And so we
don't know exactly when all of these different forms popped out,
but we think that we started with big leafy things
like kale, and that was maybe a few thousand years ago.

Speaker 4 (22:52):
Incredible that we don't know the history of our own foods.
It's fascinating, I know. You know, whenever there's a gap
in our knowledge, you always find some core order the
Internet where there's conspiracy theories about it, you know, like
how did the Egyptians build the Pyramids? So I wonder
if there's some corner of the Internet where people like
have some conspiracy about how, like Cole Robbie is actually
an alien plant that came on an asteroid or something.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
I mean, that would be really fun.

Speaker 4 (23:16):
Let's start it. Let's start it.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
Yeah, So Robbie was brought to us by the Enceladusians,
and we should thank them every Thanksgiving for this contribution.

Speaker 4 (23:27):
No, no, no, We're not going to join the ranks of
other quote unquote natural science podcasts that just deal in
speculation and nonsense. We are hard hitting science here, so no,
this is fascinating, actual science. So you're telling us that
all of these things have what the same common ancestor,
or there's still technically the same species, Like I know
that great Dane and the chihuahua can mix. I know,
for example, because my dog is a mixture of German

(23:49):
shepherd in chihuahua, which is a fascinating combination. Could you
today take like Brussels sprouse and mate them with cole robbie?

Speaker 2 (23:57):
Yes, what I think?

Speaker 4 (23:59):
I was sure you were going to say, you can.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
Get like broccolini, which is a mix between.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
Broccoli and Chinese broccoli, and it's just like it's a
leafier sort of thing. And so yes, you can cross
these different brasca Oleracea species. They still are fertile together,
so they are still the same species. And there's some
closely related species that also make some other foody things
that we eat. So this is like a genus of
plants that were you know, really happy about. I guess,

(24:26):
depending on how much you like your vegetables. A difficult
question that scientists were trying to answer is like where
did this originally come from? And it was more difficult
to solve than you might expect. So, like, if you
go to lots of different places like the UK, you
find what looks like the original version of this plant,
so like, you know, it doesn't look like a cabbage,

(24:47):
It like looks like the original wild version that we
then did all this selection on.

Speaker 2 (24:52):
And what they think happened was.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
That actually it started from the Mediterranean and then we
domesticated it, and then we had it in gardens like
throughout the world, and then it escaped from our gardens.
And so there's a bunch of lineages that they say
went feral, which was like a thing I only thought
happened to animals, but apparently plants can also go feral.

(25:14):
And when you're not regularly doing this selection and trying
to pick the ones that make the best cabbages every
single time, I guess over time it goes back to
looking like the wild version did.

Speaker 4 (25:24):
Because now natural selection is applying its own influence. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:27):
Fascinating, Yeah exactly, and so it goes back to looking
like the wild version. And so through like a number
of different genetic things, and also by trying to look
at like historical records for when we were first talking
about things that were called cabbages. The current theory is
that it's probably from the Mediterranean initially and then it
went feral everywhere else.

Speaker 4 (25:45):
Do we have examples of that in animals where we
domesticated them and then they went feral again and sort
of returned to their natural shape. I always wonder that
about like coyotes. You know, our coyotes like domesticated dogs
that escaped and became wild again.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
A good question.

Speaker 1 (26:00):
I don't think coyotes are domesticated dogs that went wild again.
Pigeons were really popular animals for artificial selection for a
really long time. They were like all these fancy pigeons,
And anyone who's interested in that should read Rosemary Moscow's
book about pigeons because she's amazing book. Maybe we should
have her on the show to talk about pigeons at

(26:20):
some point, definitely should. It wouldn't surprise me if a
lot of pigeons that were domesticated went feral subsequently.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
Oh what about bores?

Speaker 1 (26:30):
Aren't there like pigs that were domesticated and then got
released and now they're like in Texas.

Speaker 4 (26:36):
This like thirty to fifty wild hogs rampaging around Texas somewhere.

Speaker 1 (26:39):
I think that actually bores that were domesticated and then
got out are a problem in some areas.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
I could be wrong about that.

Speaker 4 (26:45):
You know, and I think it's dingoes. I think it
was not coyotes, but I think dingos in Australia might
have once been domesticated. Really, we'll dig into that and
look into it. But back to the topic of the
Thanksgiving table. Were these things selected to be eaten with
cheese or were people in doing these things even pre cheese.
I mean, cheese is pretty ancient as well, right, Matt.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
You are asking all the questions I didn't prepare for.
So you said that your family is all about fermenting
and stuff, So maybe you know when was the first
instance of cheese coming on a scene for humanity?

Speaker 4 (27:16):
I think they have records of cheese from like Mesopotamia.
You know, people have been eating cheese basically since cattle
have been domesticated, because you know, you take that milk
and you've got to make it last a little longer.
So yeah, cheese has been with us for a long
long time. I think maybe ten thousand years. But tell
us a little bit more about how you take this
plant and make the different varieties, like how do you

(27:38):
take this crazy chewy kale like small leaf thing and
make cabbage?

Speaker 1 (27:43):
So I was interested in this question, and to be honest,
plant parts, I kind of fell asleep during a lot
of the plant physiology stuff. And I've got some plant
friends who are just like, we're taking your ecologist card away,
and that's totally reasonable.

Speaker 4 (27:57):
I just remember stamen and that's the only thing I
learned in ninth grade biology, and that was the last
biology class I took.

Speaker 1 (28:02):
Yeah, there's also pistols and that's exciting. But I found
this website called Botanist in the Kitchen and it's botanists
who are also interested about like telling you about how
to cook all these cool plants. And so they were
saying that the way you get from kale to cabbage,
so kale is like leafy, and so if you take
the leaves that are like growing along the stem and
you lessen the distance between them, so now you've got

(28:25):
lots of leaves that are very close to each other,
and you start getting like the stem a little bit thicker,
and what's called like the marra stem at the top
also gets a little bit thicker.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
Then now you've got something that looks like cabbage.

Speaker 1 (28:36):
So now you've got those leaves, you got more of them,
the closer together in a bigger stem, and now you've
got cabbage.

Speaker 4 (28:42):
That's fascinating because the way you describe it, you sort
of have to have cabbage in your mind to understand
where you're going. It's like this is somebody's target, but
with somebody, just like I wonder what happens if you
do this to this plant, Like this is just random
exploration of like changing this plant and other stuff and
seeing if it gets crunchy and delicious. That's incredible.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
I don't think we know.

Speaker 1 (29:01):
I can imagine someone being like, oh man, this one
has a lot more stems with leaves on it that
I can eat.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
That's great.

Speaker 1 (29:07):
And they just happened to be like shorter distances between
the stems. I don't know that the goal was we
want cabbage. I think the goal was just like more
leaves closer together. That's great, and then it kind of
became cabbage.

Speaker 4 (29:18):
Or maybe some of these things were accidental, right, You
had a weird mutation and weird mixture of two things
accidentally and created something like ooh, this is good. Looks
called cabbage, yeah, could be, Yeah, fascinating.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
So broccoli and cauliflower are about sort of modifying what's
happening with the inflorescences, which are flowers that grow together.
And so if you've ever left broccoli or cauliflower in
your refrigerator for too long, you might see these like
yellow flowers opening up. So what you try to do is,
like you get a lot of these flowering parts, you
get them to grow really close together, and then you

(29:50):
cut it before it starts to actually flower. And that's
broccoli and cauliflower as far as I know, this one,
I think started in Italy around the sixteenth century. It's
like a little bit newer, and it required some complicated
genetic mutations. Maybe we have a little bit of a
better handle on what happened here with broccoli. But I
think broccoli is probably my favorite of all of these.

(30:15):
I just feel like that's an important thing to mention.

Speaker 4 (30:17):
What about you, how much cheese does it take before
you enjoy broccoli? Will you eat broccoli pure without cheese?

Speaker 1 (30:24):
I will eat broccoli with some soy sauce and without cheese,
And the same for Brussels sprouts with some spices. But
you know, everything is better with cheese. Let's be honest.
What about you, what's your favorite of these?

Speaker 4 (30:38):
I will eat broccoli raw. You know, chopped broccoli is
delicious and a salad. It's crunchy, it's got a little
bit of a bite to it, as long as the
chunks aren't too big. It's really fantastic. Raw kale. I'm
still learning to love, you know. My wife's a big
fan of kale. I know kale is supposed to be
really good for you, but there's just no way in
which kale becomes delicious. Actually, no, I take that back.
Somebody once made kale chips. Put them in the oven,

(31:00):
roast them at high temperature. They get really crunchy, but
not very oily. Kale chips are good. But I'm a
fan of all these things. Brussels sprouts, I think are
probably my favorite, which is funny because I remember my
dad cooking Brussels sprouts when I was a kid, and
my memory is that it was the most disgusting aroma
I could imagine, Like when he cooked Brussels sprouts, I
had to leave the house. It was revolting. And now

(31:23):
I totally love them. And so it's bizarre how you
developed these tastes, like why did it take decades to
learn to love Brussels sprouse?

Speaker 1 (31:30):
Actually I was talking to Zach about this this morning,
and I didn't go and verify this by finding a
scientific paper, but he was saying that part of why
people our age like Brussels sprouts now but we hated
it when we're kids, is that actually there has been
some artificial selection for flavor, and it has gotten less
bitter and stuff over time, and so part of it
maybe is that where adults are, we're cooking it better
blah blah blah, but it might actually just taste better,

(31:52):
which I feel like also happened to apples in our lifetime.

Speaker 4 (31:56):
But that's terrible because I've been congratulating myself for learning
to love my dad's Brussels sprouts for a long time,
and now you're saying I haven't even accomplished that. I'm
just eating like baby version of Brussels sprouts, like candy version.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
I'm sorry I took that away from you, but you know,
I feel like, in general, you know, maybe you should
give your dad some more credit, like call him and
be like, I'm sorry, your Brussels sprouts were probably as
good as they could have been.

Speaker 4 (32:17):
No, actually, he's British and he cooked them the British
way of like boiling them to death, and so that
probably also contributed to their disgustingness.

Speaker 1 (32:24):
No, no, yeah, you should have emancipated yourself at age seventeen.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
That's unacceptable.

Speaker 4 (32:30):
But I agree almost all of these are better with cheese.
Cauliflower incredible with cheese, absolutely broccoli. It's all the dishes.
And I hope everybody out there had a really good
helping of healthy vegetables to go along with all their pie.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
I think that's important.

Speaker 1 (32:46):
And now I think we should return to Turkey, but
now take a physics turn on things, and so we're
going to take a break, and then I'm kicking the
control of the conversation over to you.

Speaker 4 (32:58):
All right, all right, we are back, and I hope
you've had a good full meal. You're done crunching on

(33:20):
your turkey wings and slathering your broccoli with geese, because
we're going to take this conversation away from the biology
of Thanksgiving and talk about the physics of turkey.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
Hope you haven't had too much trip to fan.

Speaker 4 (33:35):
A big part of the Thanksgiving experience is cooking a turkey,
and most people don't cook turkeys throughout the year, and
so when Thanksgiving comes along, you look up that turkey
recipe and you invariably do it around two in the afternoon.
You're like, Okay, what do I need to do to
this turkey? And then you look at the recipe and
it says cook for six hours and you're like, oh, no,
I've started too late, or my turkey is still frozen.

Speaker 1 (33:57):
I think I've had three or four instances in my
life where the plan was to eat it for and
then we ate it like nine because it was like
the turkey the center was still frozen exactly.

Speaker 4 (34:07):
And you can blame that on people's planning skills, but
really the problem is physics. Physics is the reason that
turkeys take so long to cook.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
What are the electrons doing wrong?

Speaker 4 (34:18):
Blame the electrons, they're so negative they are, so to
think about cooking a turkey from a physics point of view,
of course, first thing we do is we assume the
turkey is just a sphere. Right to naturally simplify the problem,
assume a spherical turkey.

Speaker 1 (34:33):
This is the go to joke with ecologists was that
physicals will like assume a spherical cat anyway, So all right,
we're spherical turkey.

Speaker 4 (34:40):
But here it's actually useful because you can't think about
all the wiggles and weird shapes of a turkey because
the crucial thing to think about when you're thinking about
the physics of cooking a turkey is how to get
the core of the turkey above a certain temperature, because
that's what cook means. Like, you don't want to eat
the turkey when the core temperature is below about one
hundred and sixty five fahrenheit because and this is a

(35:01):
little bit of biology, what happens when you cook is
you're raising the temperature, you're denaturing the proteins. You're also
killing all the microbes, etc. But really what's happening is
the transformation of those proteins. That's why it goes from
like gouy and translucent to like white and opaque, because
you've transformed these molecules, have broken them down. Did I
get the biology right there, Kelly?

Speaker 1 (35:20):
Yeah, that sounds good and delicious and delicious.

Speaker 4 (35:23):
So you have this object. The whole thing is cold.
It starts at like fifty degrees fahrenheit or whatever. The
temperature is of your fridge, and you have to raise
the whole thing up to one hundred and sixty five
degrees fahrenheit. But the problem is you can't inject heat
into the center of it. I mean, you could microwave
your turkey, but I don't recommend it. If you're roasting
in an oven, you apply heat only to the outside. Right,

(35:44):
Your oven is like a big bath of hot air.
You put the turkey in the oven, The oven heats
the outside of the turkey. It doesn't directly heat the
inside of the turkey. So from a physics point of view,
the reason that it takes so long to cook your
turkey is that it takes a while for the heat
to propagate from the outside of the turkey to the
center of the turkey.

Speaker 1 (36:04):
So this is where we reveal to our listeners that
I don't go in the kitchen excepting eat the food
that Zack has been cooking. And you can't speed that
process up by turning the heat up too much, because
then you're going to burn the outside.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
Is that right?

Speaker 4 (36:15):
Yeah, that's right. What you want is an evenly cooked turkey.
You want the center to be one sixty five, You
want the outside to be one sixty five. Now, the
oven temperature is like three P fifty or so, and
so when the core is one sixty five, the surface
is going to be hotter. And so if you make
the temperature of the oven hotter nine hundred degrees or whatever,
then you're going to cook the outside faster. The inside

(36:35):
will get to one sixty five and it will get
there faster. But when it does, the outside is going
to be even hotter. It's going to be totally burned.
And so the best way to cook a turkey slowly.
This is why, like a souved, you put the thing
in a water bath like whatever the target temperature is,
and you just wait forever until the whole thing comes
up to that temperature. And so what's happening here is

(36:58):
diffusion of heat. The energy is spreading out from the
oven to the turkey, or from the water bath in
the case of a souved into the object. And that's physics.
It's really basic, simple core physics that we see actually
in lots of places in the universe.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
So does a tur ducan take longer to cook because
it's more packed in the center and there's more you
need to heat through.

Speaker 4 (37:21):
Yes, you're violating my spherical turkey assumption here, Kelly. But yes,
it's helpful when you cook a turkey not to stuff
it either with stuffing or other birds, or even cauliflower
or cheese, because you're creating more mass that needs to
cook and you're making it more of a sphere. If
the air can get into the inside, into the chest cavity,
that they can directly heat the inside of the turkey

(37:42):
and it goes faster.

Speaker 1 (37:43):
Okay, So if you've got that like chest cavity, that's
how the air gets in, you can start heating from
the inside. Could you make the chest cavity even bigger
or like cut the turkey in half?

Speaker 2 (37:55):
Why do I have to wait so long?

Speaker 4 (37:58):
Exactly? So if we understand the details the physics here,
that will help us think about how to organize our
turkey to make it cook faster. And so the way
I think about the physics is you have this layer
of hot air that's touching the surface of the turkey,
and microscopically, what's happening is that the air particles are
hitting the turkey. Right, the air particles are moving fast.

(38:18):
That's what it means for air to be hot, right,
those particles have a lot of energy. They bounce off
the turkey, and they deposit some of that energy. They
hit the turkey at high speed, they come off with
less speed, and that speed has now gone to like
the vibration energy of the molecules of turkey. So you
have this layer of hot air that's heating the outside
layer of the turkey. So then how does the inside

(38:38):
of the turkey get hot? Well, that now hot layer
the outside of the turkey is heating up the next layer,
and that warms up and that layer heats up the
next layer. So the air actually only cooks the most
outside layer of the turkey. The rest of the turkey
is cooked by the rest of the turkey. So you
have like layer N is cooked by layer N minus one.
Like imagine your turkey is a series of layers. Each

(39:01):
layer is heated up by the layer outside of it
that's a little bit.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
Hotter than it unless you have nothing in the center
of the turkey, and then you're getting a little heating
from the inside going out.

Speaker 4 (39:13):
That's right. And in the case of a spherical turkey,
it's simplest because all these layers are just spheres, and
you're only cooked by the one outside of it. But
even in a non spherical turkey, still you have a
layer of the turkey and the outside that's touching the air,
and then an inner layer, and another layer and another layers,
just that each of these layers is no longer a sphere,
and that takes time, Like you can't instantly take energy
from the air and put it into your turkey or

(39:35):
from the turkey into the next layer of turkey. There's
a mathematical equation that describes this. It's called the heat equation,
and it's fascinating because you see this equation everywhere in physics.
This is one of the things I love about physics
is that there are only a few equations and they
describe so many different things. We talk in this podcast
a lot about waves, how waves describe the motion of

(39:56):
the ocean and ripples in the electromagnetic field and ont
and field theory, like wave equation is everywhere. That's because
it's very mathematically simple. It's a second time derivative related
to a second spatial derivative, and that's it. Any condition
you have where those two things are coupled, the time
derivative and the spatial derivative, meaning how fast things are
changing over time and how fast things are changing over space,

(40:19):
then you're going to get a wave equation, and you're
going to wave like behavior. The heat equation is very
similar to the wave equation. It's just a different derivative.
It's one time derivative instead of two, and so you
see this everywhere. The heat equation describes how heat flows
through a turkey. It also describes how water will soak
through cloth, or any time you have diffusion or osmosis.

(40:40):
It describes like how salt will spread through something, or
how your cream will spread through your coffee. The heat
equation describes anytime something is spreading through something else. The
physics of turkeys is actually like the physics of the universe.
It's really kind of incredible, and.

Speaker 1 (40:56):
I think that you should definitely push the conversation at
the family dinner table away from politics and towards more
philosophical topics like this.

Speaker 4 (41:05):
And so the reason a turkey takes so much longer
to cook than a chicken, sort of surprisingly longer, is
also because of the dimensionality of space itself, right, Like,
we live in three dimensional space, and that means that
as your turkey or your bird gets larger, the volume
of the bird goes up by the radius cubed Right,
the area for the volume of a sphere hasn't R

(41:27):
cubed in it, but the surface area, the way you
get heat into it, only goes up by R squared.
So as your turkey gets bigger and bigger and bigger,
the ratio of surface area to volume gets smaller, and
so it's harder to heat that turkey. This is why,
for example, elephants get so hot because they're huge, have
a lot of volume in a relatively little surface area.

(41:49):
And I don't know if it's a myth or a factoid,
and that's why elephants have such big ears to increase
their surface area. I have to dig into that. But
it's definitely true that as something gets larger, it's volume
increases faster than its surface area, and so it's harder
to cool or harder to heat. That's core physics.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
So if you have a bigger family, you've got to
get up earlier in the day to start.

Speaker 4 (42:10):
Your turkey exactly, And that's why a turkey takes much
longer to cook than like the equivalent mass of chickens.
If you took like five chickens and you cook them,
you could cook them a lot faster because there's a
lot more surface area for the same amount of meat.
And that's why people invented techniques like spatchcocking your turkey.
This is where you basically break your turkey in half
and flatten it. You remove the backbone and you break

(42:32):
the chest cavity because this just allows the air more access.
It increases the surface area of your turkey, which cooks
it faster.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
So why doesn't everybody do that? Is it because it
doesn't look as nice in the pictures.

Speaker 4 (42:44):
It doesn't look as nice. Yeah, okay when it comes out,
it doesn't have that like holiday turkey kind of sheen
to it. I think it's much tastier. It cooks faster,
and it keeps the breast to thine, the ring all
at good temperature. So I'm a big fan of spatchcocking.
We do it every year.

Speaker 1 (42:58):
I think every family needs eye they're a sower or
a surgeon, so that after you spatchcock it, you can
like stitch it back together for the photos and then
it's faster and it looks nice.

Speaker 4 (43:08):
Well, plastic turkey surgery, huh, you think we would do
that in Orange County. We're big fans of a parents
down here.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
Yeah, well maybe that's where it'll start.

Speaker 1 (43:15):
So sometimes people put turkeys in oil, and that is
a big cause of fires around Thanksgiving, I believe, so
do that carefully, very dangerous, and that makes it faster.

Speaker 2 (43:28):
Right, Why is that faster?

Speaker 4 (43:29):
That's right? If you deep fry your turkey, it takes
like five minutes per pound as opposed to like fifteen
minutes per pound. And the reason is just that oil
transmits heat better than air, and so heat flows faster
into the turkey and the oil gets in all the
crevices and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (43:47):
Ooh, and so as an efficient person, I should start
deep frying everything.

Speaker 4 (43:52):
Yeah, I suppose. So if you really want to gain
some weight on Thanksgiving and you want to do it fast,
that's a way to do it.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
Yes, all right, maybe we'll spashcock instead.

Speaker 4 (44:01):
But to double down on the physics of Thanksgiving, I
was thinking about whether there is a nuclear connection here.
Nuclear power is physics, and you know, we use a
lot of energy on Thanksgiving. We're cooking our turkey, it's
in the oven for hours. I was thinking about, like,
where does that energy come from? And what is the
physics that provides the energy we use to cook our turkey?

Speaker 2 (44:21):
All right?

Speaker 1 (44:21):
So usually when you get excited about an idea, it
means my kids are probably in some sort of trouble.

Speaker 2 (44:26):
How are you going to be cooking the turkey this time?

Speaker 4 (44:29):
So I wanted to start from a fairly safe direction,
which is nuclear reactors. And I was thinking how many
turkeys could you cook with a nuclear reactor? So I
did a little calculation here, and your oven it's on
for like three and a half hours, but your oven
pretty much uses around two hundred and forty watts. That's
like how much energy it takes to heat of that
air to keep it hot. And that doesn't actually depend

(44:52):
on like what you put in it. You just turn
your oven on, it's going to use around two hundred
and forty watts. I mean, you put like an ice
sculpture in there, it's going to take a little bit
more energy, but in general, you just have it on.
That's how much energy it costs. So then you can
think about how many ovens a nuclear reactor could run simultaneously. Okay,
and a modern nuclear reactor runs at about a gigawatt,

(45:14):
so a billion watts. A wat is jeweles per second.
So this is a rate of energy, which means that
you can calculate fairly easily that a single nuclear power
plant can run around four hundred and twenty thousand ovens simultaneously. Wow.
So if you took a nuclear power plant and you
wired it directly to people's ovens, that's all you did
with it for three and a half hours on Thanksgiving afternoon,

(45:37):
you could cook almost a half million turkeys with a
single power plant, which is kind of incredible.

Speaker 2 (45:42):
Sorry, turkey population, that's true.

Speaker 4 (45:47):
Really turning off our turkey listeners. Huh yeah, but you
know we're sacrificing some turkeys. But you know, one turkey
feeds like twelve people or so overall, this is like
five million people can have turkey cooked by a single
nuclear power plant. It's incredible how productive these plants are.

Speaker 1 (46:03):
All Right, I am pro nuclear power, and so I'm
feeling good about this. Are you going to amp things
up to something I'm less excited about?

Speaker 4 (46:11):
Well, then I was thinking nuclear power plants. Okay, that's
kind of vanilla. What if we try to cook our
turkeys with nuclear bombs instead?

Speaker 2 (46:19):
There you go, uh huh, and This.

Speaker 4 (46:21):
Is actually a homework problem I assigned in one of
my thermal physics class to think about like the energy
required to cook a turkey and the energy released by
a nuclear mom So I did another calculation which was
to think not just how much energy does it require
to run an oven, but what about the actual energy
it takes to raise the temperature of the turkey. So
you can think about the turkey as a combination of

(46:42):
water and protein. And I found some measurements online that
said that the specific heat of a turkey, that's how
much energy it takes to raise a gram of turkey
by one degree, is about two point eight jewels per
gram centigrade. And so from that you can calculate like
how much energy it takes to take a whole turkey
and raise it about one hundred degrees And that's like

(47:04):
one point six gigajewels. So if you could take that
energy and just sort of like inject it into your
turkey somehow, you would raise it up about one hundred degrees,
which is what you need to do to cook it.

Speaker 2 (47:15):
How big is this turkey?

Speaker 4 (47:16):
This is a fifteen pounder, So yeah, you're making a
meal for the neighborhood.

Speaker 1 (47:20):
Okay, all right, well it depends on your family. I
think my daughter and I could put down a fifteen pounder.
My husband's a vegetarian. My son doesn't eat meat.

Speaker 4 (47:27):
Wait, so Zack's a vegetarian, but he makes the turkey
on Thanksgiving.

Speaker 1 (47:30):
Oh heck no, no, no, no no. He cooked meat once
and turned green. This is when I was pregnant and.

Speaker 2 (47:36):
I was like, oh, can you please make me a euro?

Speaker 1 (47:38):
And I've never asked him since in are like almost
twenty years together now. But no, my sister in law
is amazing and makes the turkey, or my dad.

Speaker 4 (47:45):
So one point six giga jewels, it's not like a
number we think about a lot, so I tried to
translate it into something more practical. If you had like
one hundred and fifty D cell batteries and you ran
them for an hour, that's about one point six giga jewels,
So you could like cook a turkey with about one
hundred and fifty d segn matteries, which I don't know.
Maybe that'd be useful information for somebody in the end

(48:07):
times when they're trying to have a Thanksgiving of yesteryear.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
If you raid the Amazon warehouse and find a big
store of D batteries like we're on for Thanksgiving.

Speaker 4 (48:18):
Yeah, you made your turkey like a resistor in some
crazy circuit or whatever. But the other alternative if you're
in the end times and there are nuclear bombs going off,
is you could try to use the energy released by
those nuclear bomb drops to cook your turkey. And so
a nuclear blast has a few million gigajewels of energy released. Wow,
So that means that there's enough energy in one nuclear

(48:39):
bomb dropping to cook about a million turkeys.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
That would feed millions of people, right, so that you
could be like president of like a community with all
of these turkeys that you're passing out.

Speaker 2 (48:50):
You can be the queen of the end times or
the king of the end times.

Speaker 4 (48:54):
That's right now. One thing we have in factored in
here is like how you get the energy from the
nuclear blast into your turkey. We talked year about like
slowly cooking your turkey. You know, put your turkey on
a stick and hold it up to the nuclear bomb drop,
and it's gonna get fried, like it's going to get blasted.
Probably you're gonna end up with like a cold core
and a totally crisp outside, so there's a challenge there

(49:14):
and finding the right distance, and you know, to really
be efficient and to cook like all those millions of turkeys,
you really need to like build a spherical shell of
turkeys that's around the bomb blast so they all capture
that energy. Imagine like a dice and sphere around the sun,
but now you have like a turkey sphere around the
nuclear bombing.

Speaker 1 (49:32):
I'm starting to feel like maybe even during the apocalypse,
there's better things you could do with your time. Also,
i feel like you're a strategy of holding it on
a stick and it fries the front but doesn't cook.
That's probably not good for the people either. I think
maybe you shouldn't be king in the end times.

Speaker 4 (49:48):
I've never claimed to have any useful skills for the
end times. You know, particle physicists. They're the kind of
thing you see in society when times are good, you know,
not in the lean times. So we don't spend energy
on particle physics in a lean time. So I'm hoping
the civilization crashes after I pass off from this mortal coil.

Speaker 1 (50:06):
And I'm hoping none of your kids decide to take
on the family profession. And because if they're microbiologists, they
might be okay.

Speaker 4 (50:12):
But well, you know, when my dad retired from the lab,
he took up blacksmithing, came Annville and a forge and
in the garage and he like made his own tools
and weapons, and so he would definitely be a useful
guy to know in the end times. But not me.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
Well, I mean, maybe when you retire he can teach
you some of that stuff.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
That would be good.

Speaker 4 (50:32):
He probably forced me to choke down. He's discussing Brussels
sprouts first.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
Oh yep, no, no, good, forget it. It's not worth it.
It's not worth it.

Speaker 4 (50:39):
Just call it quick, no amount of cheese.

Speaker 2 (50:43):
All right.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
Well, we have conveyed lots of not useful information today
that will hopefully be fun to talk about.

Speaker 4 (50:50):
But there's science everywhere, and science in everyday life. There's
even science in Thanksgiving. So thanks very much everybody for
sharing your Thanksgiving with.

Speaker 1 (50:57):
Us, and we appreciate you, and weppreciate the questions and
the input that we get from all of you, So
please feel free to reach out to us at questions
at Daniel and Kelly dot org.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
We are very thankful for all of you.

Speaker 4 (51:09):
I have agree. Thanksgiving everyone.

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