From the Vault: I Drink Your Blood Type

Gather round ye blood drinkers and children of the night, for in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe will discuss human blood types -- what they are, why they exist and what powers they hold. It’s all required listeners for any serious vampires. (Originally published 10/3/2019)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.
Time to go into the Old Vault. And this episode
was called I Drink Your Blood Type. It was originally
published on October three, nineteen. I hope you're ready. Yeah,
exactly a year ago to the date. So let's drink

(00:27):
blood drinkers, night walkers, children of the night. Why hunt
for scraps in the shadows when you can feast in
style at New York City's hottest, trendiest vampire nightclown doors
open at midnight and we let in only the juiciest
mortal party goers who appease your diabolical, he asked me,

(00:52):
off of seductive lounges, blood bath dance floors, and people
dancing in cages. So many people dancing in cages who
don't even know how to give them out, They just
keep dancing. And unlike typical vampire nightclubs, we separate the
hood by blood type for your convenience. At Brooked, you

(01:13):
will feast in the certainty that all human partiers and
our medievalist to prove throwing room are type A B
and our foam dance party Room runs on Type O
negative exclusively guaranteeing chance floor look for us on Vampire
You Help and don't forget to leave a review. Welcome

(01:36):
to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. A production of I
Heart Radios has to works. Hey you welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick. Hey, it's still October. That means we're partying.
That's right. It's Halloween, and Halloween means blood. It also

(01:57):
means vampires. As I think everyone probably got the idea
from from the title this episode and from the cold
open that we just inflicted upon you. You know, what
I was just wondering is whether in the month of
October people actually like in the industry, you can see
a spike in demand for caro syrup or general you know,
corn syrup products and and red food coloring, is the

(02:18):
demand for fake blood enough to make a dent in
an otherwise massive agricultural or industrial food product, Well, I
mean it depends. I mean a lot of people are
just going to buy a bottle of fake blood. They're
not going to bother to mix their own. I guess
that's you know, I bet mixing your own is cheaper though. Oh,
I'm sure it is. But not everybody has the skill
to create a you know, a good batch of Kensington Gore. Uh.

(02:41):
I remember when I was a kid, I was trying
to make fake blood and I did it by mixing
red food coloring with water, and that was how I
discovered that blood is thick. Yeah, I mean it. It's
far better just to shoot it all in black and
white and use chocolate syrup. But even that gets a little, little,
little pricy, I imagine. And also it's gonna, you know,
just attracted by of ants. But yeah, when you think Halloween,

(03:03):
you think monsters, you think vampires, and of course you
think blood. Now, blood hasn't really changed in the course
of human history, but our understanding of blood has. Blood
Letting used to be a lot more common, right, yeah. Uh,
And sometimes sometimes vampire tails change to reflect some of
the new ideas regarding blood. Oh yeah, Like, I'm sure
you can see vampire lore being affected by, say that

(03:25):
the four humors theory when that was in vogue, Like
the idea you could have a sanguine personality that might
be caused by an excess of blood. In the body.
I'm sure that that makes them specially juicy targets for
vampires or something that you're gonna mean, there's like there
are there are four different vampires for each of the humors, right,
oh right, so you get the black bile vampire and
the worst kind of vampire to be because it's so bitter.

(03:48):
So yeah, the ideas of what blood is make change.
But of course there's first of all, the simple notion
that blood is food. Various human cultures include the consumption
of animal blood in one worm or another in their cuisine.
Blood sausage is one example of that. Blood tofu and
in certain Chinese cuisines is another example. Never heard of

(04:08):
this blood tofu? Yeah, look aout made from blood? Blood? Okay? Uh?
And then there's the idea of blood is this is
a fluid that contains our vital life force. Right, this
is a classic of the vampire trope. Uh. And then
naturally we do need blood to survive. But traditions have
you know, tend to go above and beyond biological fact
and stressing this. Oh yeah, the blood takes on a

(04:31):
kind of magical essence. It's the you know, the ecore
of the human Uh, there is. I think you can
see this often when there is emphasis on monsters and
other creatures having differently colored blood than humans do. Like
their blood isn't red, it's green, and that shows that
there's some different there's some kind of different essence to them.

(04:52):
And then there's also all kinds of beliefs about Um.
You know that your affinity for your family is based
on the metaphor that you air blood, which is funny
because you might not necessarily share physical characteristics of blood.
You might not have the same blood type as either
one of your parents, But there's this idea that you're
bound by blood and that I think that takes on

(05:13):
a more kind of a magical kind of quality in
people's minds. Yeah, this idea that there's this blood line
flowing through the centuries. Um, I do have to say
I love a creative blood color, and in a monster
or so certainly in like a Star Trek alien type
of scenario, if there's only so many colors, like what
you mean, like purple blood or what? Oh yeah, wasn't

(05:34):
it Star Trek The Undiscovered Country where the Klingon's head
head pink blood like looks like pepto bismal. Oh. I
always chalks that up too bad early c G I,
because they're in their blood c G I, and that
movie is like really early c G I floating around
in the zero G environment after the as it is
really impressive. Well, it looks terrible now, but that movie

(05:54):
still holds up. Is one of the better of the
Star Trek movies. Now in modern times will often encounter
vampire stories that invoke blood banks and and uh and
blood drives sometimes uh and sometimes you'll even see recognition
of blood types. And generally this amounts to which blood
of vampire finds most tasty interesting. I don't think I'm

(06:16):
very familiar with it. Well, I am familiar with, of course,
blood banks and blood drives, because I remember when I
was a kid and my family would go to the
beach and we get Sci Fi channel on the TV
and watch that show Forever Night, which is about a
good guy vampire who is also a cop, and he
keeps a refrigerator full of like blood bank type style
blood bags. I guess he drinks those in order to

(06:37):
not have to kill people because he's good. Oh Man,
Forever Night. I never watched Forever Night, but it's one
of those Canadian series where a lot of times I'll
watch another Canadian series and I'll look it up and
it's like, oh, this person is from Forever Night. Forever
Night is the like the beating heart at the center
of Canadian drama from that period of time. Yeah, I
mean I never saw that much of it, but in

(06:57):
the episodes I saw, because he's a good guy, he
doesn't drink from next he drinks from bags. There's um
there's a Tales from the Crypto episode that called the
Reluctant Vampire that started Malcolm mcdowe as as the titular
Reluctant Vampire and also had just an all star cast.
Of course, like all those episodes, just an embarrassment of

(07:20):
riches generally squandered on some sort of in a sappy,
bad taste kind of plot. But this this episode is
pretty good. But in that one, he's depending on a
blood bank as well. But then occasionally like meeting real
live hosts to prey upon, and he ends up asking
them a lot of questions about, you know, if they
had dental surgery recently, that sort of thing, But but

(07:41):
he he never asked them about their actual blood type,
dental surgery, wait, like he fears the amalgam in their
teeth or something like, we might have silver and if
he just needs to have a good pa you know,
biomedical history before he uses them as his prey. Fair enough, now,
of course, the the HBO series True Blood features vampires

(08:02):
that have a clear preference when it comes to blood type,
and they use the synthetic blood product that's labeled and
bottled called True Blood, which is in the show available
in in different types. So you can get your oh
negative true blood bottle you if you prefer a B,
they have a B as well. Oh so all the
I haven't seen True Blood, but all these vampires are

(08:23):
of the forever Night type where they don't drink from people.
They drink from bags they're supposed to because it's basically
like vampires are out amongst us, uh, and we're living
alongside each other. They have kind of their separate government.
We have ours, and there's like a treaty that says
they're only going to drink their synthetic blood products or
you know, consenting adult humans that wish to have their

(08:46):
blood drained that sort of thing. Okay, it's kind of
a mixed bag, but it it also has a wonderful cast,
and Dennis o Hair in particular was a real standout
playing this character the who was the King of Mississippi.
Stephen Root also ow it up at one point and
it was great. Stephen Roots wonderful. Yeah. Um, There's another
movie at this time that I ran across that was

(09:07):
interesting that invokes blood types. N nine's The Return of
Doctor X. Seen this no, I. I was not even
familiar with this at all because it stars Humphrey Bogart
as an evil doctor. Hey, okay, yeah, who's been brought
back to life? Because this is a sequel? Uh in
this in this movie has brought back to life with
synthetic blood and he has to find type of victims

(09:29):
and drain their blood and use it in order to
stay alive because his synthetic blood cannot replenish itself. This
was a few years before The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.
In case anyone's wondering, you know, I like I really
like Humphrey Bogart as a villain type character, or at
least as a very dark and troubled character as opposed
to I don't know. You might say that he has

(09:50):
shades of villainousness in his detective stories and in Casablanca,
but in movies like A Lonely Place, or he plays
this like scary, abusive creep or in Treasure the Serrah Mare.
I guess you could say also, I think Bogart actually
makes a great villain, and I wish you'd seen him
as a villain more often. So I want to see this. Yeah,
And now, of course Dr X is no typical vampire. Generally,

(10:12):
the you know, the models very much parasitic in nature.
Perhaps a vampire can taste the difference amid blood types
in the same manner that a wine connoisseur can taste
things in the wine that others can't, or at least,
you know, claims to have that ability. You've got some
skepticism about the smell, YEA. I want to come back
to it at some point, because I feel like there

(10:33):
was an old episode of the show where we we
looked at one of these studies that was a real um.
I mean, I don't even know that what extended was
a true study, was just kind of a guy who
got you exercise with wine experts, like tricking them into
saying one wine was another, and and and so forth.
But I think there's I'd like to to give the
topic due diligence sometime and really get into like, because

(10:56):
sometimes the you know, the idea of priming and you know,
bringing in some sort of prior knowledge to your experience
of the wine. Uh. You see people talk about that
is if that's a you know, a negative you know,
But I mean that's part of the appreciation of any
kind of food product or certainly a wine is knowing
where it came from and making connections. And if some
of the connections or maybe partially imagined or exaggerated based

(11:17):
on your prior knowledge, I don't think that's necessarily a
bad thing at all. Have you been to any of
these places that do wine style tasting notes but for oysters, Um, yes,
I have. I'm all in on that. When I have
the oyster, I'm like, yes, I take yes, that's right,
salted melon, yeah. I mean the cases like that, they're
providing me with the specific terminology and descriptive language that

(11:40):
I don't have, uh, you know, regarding oysters or or
certainly wine or what have you, and it gives and
then I can I can look for those things in
my my taste sensation that I'm experiencing right now. Once
they give you the words for it, you can kind
of find it in the sensation void with with most
cases of fictional vampires, though, yeah, they're I think we

(12:00):
can we can assume that maybe they could taste some
sort of difference in the blood type. You know, they're
essentially parasitic. They're they're digesting the blood now. And since
they're digesting the blood, you know it's not going to matter,
um you know what kind of what type of blood
it is, because their digestive system is going to break
down all those troublesome proteins. But then again, I don't

(12:21):
think I've ever seen outside of doctor X here, I
don't think I've encountered a vampire or vampire like creation
that can only use one particular blood type. Well, if
you imagine vampire physiology a little bit different, Like you're
saying that they just use a normal style digestive system,
break it down for the nutrition in it. What if

(12:41):
it's that the vampire drinks blood in order to have blood,
So like when the vampire drinks blood, they're essentially getting
a blood transfusion. In that case, maybe the vampire would
need in fact, to have a compatibility test for the
right kind of blood because drinking the wrong kind of
blood could give them an immune response. Yeah, that would
I think it can make sense because it also would

(13:02):
would line up with some of these descriptions from folklore
where they would dig up the body of the vampire
and it would be just just just thick and bloated
with blood, like every you know, all its entire all
of its flesh is just just completely ballooned up with
the stuff. You know, you're saying that's the swelling of
the allergic reaction. Yeah, maybe, so maybe that's the that's

(13:24):
the explanation. Well, maybe we should get into how blood
types actually work, because I realized not too long ago
that this is something I should know, and I actually didn't,
so I had to go and read up about it. Yeah,
it's it's easy to go through life without knowing the
explanation for it and just and hopefully just knowing what
your blood type is, but not necessarily what that means. Right, Well,

(13:44):
should we take a break first and then come back
and talk about the blood type basics. Let's do it, alright,
We're back al right, So, if you know your blood
type or if you've seen blood types listed before, you
generally will have seen a letter followed by a plus
or minus sign, and that letter is probably gonna be

(14:04):
A or B or A B or O, but is
so okay? You know there are at least several different
types of blood, but you might not know what they do.
In fact, there are actually many different blood type families.
I think the known number of human blood group systems
is now somewhere in the forties, So there are tons
of different ways of classifying and grouping blood. But the

(14:25):
most common and the most important blood group types to
discuss are the A, B O blood group system and
what's known as the r H factor. Now you've heard
of these before, but what do they mean? Simply put,
blood type refers to which category of antigens you will
find on the outside of your red blood cells, and

(14:47):
that in turn determines how your body's immune system responds
to different types of blood from other donors because of
the antigens on the outside of their red blood cells,
and also how other people's bodies would respond to your
blood if you if given a transfusion from you. By
the way, Joe, before we go any further, what is
your blood type, I almost answered, but then I stopped.

(15:09):
Should I reveal my blood type on air? I wonder
I'm getting flashes of some future like cyber scenario where
I regret sharing this information publicly. Well, I can't think
of a way people would use it against us. I
can think of a way Facebook will use it against us.
Well probably, Okay, Well, you don't have to reveal if
you don't want to. You want to reveal yours? Well,

(15:30):
I mean, I don't mind saying that I'm I'm typo negatives.
Oh nice, just like the goth industrial band of the
same name. Well, you also have a rare and important
blood group, as we'll discuss as we go on. Yes,
and we'll we'll just consider Joe's blood type to be
what blood type enigma, Well, we'll leave it to the
listeners to imagine what it might be. Blood type question

(15:52):
mark equal sign. Yes, okay. So, red blood cells, we
know they serve the function of traveling through the body
and transporting oxygen mal fules to body tissues, and they
also carry away carbon dioxide. And so the outsides of
the red blood cells in your body will have these
little molecules on the outside on these structures made of molecules.
Uh that on the top layers of these structures consist

(16:16):
of various types of antigens that the and of course,
an antigen is just something that your body's immune system
can recognize as a threat and react to. And so
your red blood cells can have either a antigens, be antigens, both,
or neither. If your red blood cells just have A antigens,

(16:37):
just these A antigen molecules on the outer layer, you
have blood type A. If you have just BE antigens,
you have blood type B. If you have both your
blood type A B, and if you have neither, you
are blood type Oh all right, I think that's pretty straightforward.
So really, yeah, they're they're like two critters at play here.
You can have either one, both, or neither. Now, of course,

(16:58):
blood types are genetically inherited, you get them from your
biological parents, but your a bio blood type is based
on interactions between a number of dominant and recessive genes.
So the correlation between your parents blood types and your
own blood type can be kind of confusing. It can,
for example, happened that your blood type might be different
from both of your parents blood types because of a

(17:20):
dominant recessive interaction. Um. But if you want to work
it out, you can look up inheritance matrices for blood
type online. These are easy to find, right, Or you
can just do like most families do and just put
your blood in a petri dish and just go around
in a circle and put a hot wire in that
way he can find out whose family and who is
definitely not well. It's funny how how close that that

(17:43):
scene in the thing is to some of the early
tests that were done to figure out what was going
on with blood types. Get into that in a minute. Um.
So again, why does it matter which type of blood
you have if you're going to receive a blood transfusion. Well, again,
it's because of your immune system. So within your body,
you've got in your blood plasma, you have white blood cells,
and you've got antibodies that work kind of like defense drones,

(18:06):
latching onto certain types of antigens that they encounter things
in your body that seem like they might be some
bit of dangerous foreign material in the blood. And of
course the main thing you'd be worried about, there are
some kinds of germs. Right now, generally we don't have
antibodies that will attack our own red blood cells. So
if you have blood type A, meaning you've got these

(18:27):
A antigens on the outside of your red blood cells,
your immune system will not attack A antigens because you
know you need to not attack them, they're they're going
to be abundant throughout you. But it probably will attack
BE antigens and vice versa. So generally your immune system
will attack whichever of these little molecules on the outside

(18:49):
of red blood cells you don't naturally have. So it
works out like this. If you have type A blood,
your immune system will attack BE antigens. If you have
type BE blood, your immune system will attack A antigens.
If you have type A B blood, you have both antigens,
so your immune system will attack neither of them. If
you have Type OH blood, you have neither antigens, so

(19:12):
your immune system will attack both following So far, yeah,
I think I think it's pretty straightforward for everybody. So
it's basically you know the starbillied sneeches, except a little
more complicated, like like you know three or four different
tribes of sneches. Well, right, I mean this means that
when you donate or receive a blood transfusion, you don't
always just need to match the same type between donor

(19:34):
and recipient. There are these inherent asymmetries and who can
receive what types of blood. For example, if you have
a B blood, you can receive blood from any other type.
You can receive A blood, you can receive B blood,
you can receive A B blood or OH blood. It
doesn't matter because you don't in your blood plasma have
antibodies to attack any of those other types of red

(19:56):
blood cells. And for this reason, type A B is
the unit versal recipient class. But if you donate a
B blood, that blood can only go to a recipient
who is also a B because that recipient otherwise is
going to have immune system reaction to one of one
or both of those antigens on the outside of those cells. Now,

(20:17):
on the flip side, type OH blood, which has neither
A nor B antigens, is the universal donor class. You
can give type O blood to people with A B, A, B,
or OH and it will usually be fine. Now I
think we should say that these donor you know, these
donor safety statements are for most cases, these are like
on average, they'll be better. There are always kind of
like anomalous reactions people can have to any type of protonation,

(20:40):
and and and and that also gets into the fact
that all things being equal, an exact match is always preferred,
but certainly in an emergency. Uh, that's when you see
cases where where you know the universal donor can come
in exactly. And that's a one reason. A common practice
in modern hospitals and clinics today is to collect blood
from a patient in advance of a preplanned surgery or

(21:03):
procedure in which a transfusion might be necessary. So if
you're going in for surgery these days, they'll usually take
some of your blood, you know, the day before, the
week before the surgery, and that way, if you suddenly
need a transfusion, if there's some emergency during the procedure,
you can receive your own blood, decreasing the chance of
an immune immune reaction or any other compatibility issue. Right.

(21:25):
It's not that your your doctor is of secret vampire,
right and just needs a taste before things get going, right,
But there may be times when somebody needs a blood
transfusion and there's none of their own blood on hand
to give them, so they need blood from a bank,
They need blood from a donor from a reserve of
pre stored blood. That's they're waiting for somebody who needs it. Now,

(21:47):
we should also say, on top of the A B
O system, there's also the r H factor, which is
just yet another type of thing that you would find
on the outside of red blood cells. This time it's
a protein UH that's known as the UH the recess
factor r H factor after the recess monkeys from which
it was originally studied and isolated UH, and it works

(22:08):
sort of the same way. Basically, there are only two
options with the RH factor factor. Either you have these proteins,
meaning you're RH positive, or you don't have them, meaning
you'r RH negative. And the RH factor is noted with
a plus or a minus sign after your A B
O type. So the true universal donor is actually not
just blood type OH, but blood type O negative, and

(22:28):
the universal recipient is not just type A B but
type A B positive. Now that's the simplified version, but
it also gets more complicated because the blood donor and
recipient compatibility is very based on whether you're talking about
like red blood cells versus plasma. Like your red blood
cells contain the antigens for your blood type, but your
plasma will contain the antibodies or potential immune response correlated

(22:51):
to your blood type. So most of what we've been
talking about so far has been for the red blood
cells that would be donated or received. But yeah, so again,
so you mentioned your type of negative. You are the
universal donor, Robert, You're you're you're kind of human gold. Well,
I do have to stress it. I think that is
what we have to be careful about overstating that, not

(23:11):
that I'm gold, because obviously I don't want people to
harvest my blood without my consent. I do try and
give give blood, um, you know, a lot when whenever
there's a blood drive and I'm allowed, you know, to
do so. But but but also nobody out there who
is like a B needs to to feel like, oh, well,
my blood is not as valuable. I'm gonna sit this
one out, like they don't really need my blood because

(23:32):
I'm not negative. Like, no, your blood is still really
important because again, all things being equal, they're going to
try and do as as close of a match as possible. Yeah,
that's totally right. All all blood is valuable, all all
blood is beautiful, then maybe all blood is delicious uh
should we. So let's let's talk a little bit about
that the blood serum clumping test we mentioned earlier. Now,

(23:54):
the Austrian immunologist and pathologist Carl Landsteiner, who I keep
accidentally calling land Striders. Stop me if I do get
get dark crystal brain. But Carl Landsteiner, Uh, he discovered
the primary A bio blood groups around the year's nineteen
hundred or nineteen o one. And at the time, doctors

(24:15):
knew that blood transfusions could be very dangerous, could kill patients,
they caused adverse reactions and the recipient um. And you know,
up until around this time that there was a good
reason why blood transfusion wasn't done much. It was considered
sort of a risky, experimental kind of thing, not not
like a standard medical intervention. Yeah, I realized I probably

(24:37):
bring this show up every time we talked about the
history um of of surgery. But the the excellent cinemax
series from Soderberg the Nick there's one scene in which
they attempt a blood transfusion um to save a patient
and the patients is just killed on the operating table. Yeah,
I mean, yeah, that would have been a reality at

(24:58):
this time, Like if few. So there were surgeons who
tried to experiment with blood transfusions because patients died all
the time for from blood loss, and so you know,
if you could find a way to get blood into
them to save their life, that would be great. And
sometimes it worked, but a lot of times it didn't.
And it if it didn't work, there were chances it

(25:19):
could go catastrophically bad and could kill you. Yeah, but
they they think, they begin to realize, yeah, there's some
there's some code in the blood, there's some there's something here.
There's a reason that it works sometimes but not other times.
We just have to figure out what that is. Yeah. Now,
one of the things that doctors of the time observed
is that you could see this if you just mixed
together blood samples from different patients in uh in in

(25:43):
dishes or in tubes. Sometimes when you mix together blood
samples from different patients, you would get what was known
as a glutination, which is where the red blood cells
I'll start to clump together. That's not good if that
happens inside your body. Right, So it's clearly that's a
major thing must be happening in these cases where you
give humans a blood transfusion and it goes really wrong.

(26:05):
And yet while we knew these negative reactions could happen,
we didn't know exactly why. And land Steiner comes in here.
He figures out that this adverse reaction to donated blood
was because the recipient's immune system in the plasma is
attacking the new blood cells like they were germs. And
land Steiner figured out that these immune reactions were correlated

(26:26):
to four categories of antigen profiles in red blood cells,
which now from from which we've now derived the first
he discovered the A group, the B group in the
O group, and then a little bit later he discovered
the A B group also. But as I mentioned earlier,
there are these other blood factors, and len Steiner discovered
several of those as well, such as like m in

(26:47):
and P factors, And he was also involved in research
decades later that led to the discovery of the RH factor. Again,
that's like the plus and the minus sign after you
see the most common blood types in the A B
group or the A B group. Uh and Lensteiner eventually
won the Nobel Prize for his research, which was essential
to making blood transfusions safe and commonplace. So this was

(27:08):
like very important work in the history of medicine. Yeah,
I mean this is one of those technicus surgical technologies,
medical technologies that it's hard to imagine, like modern medical
science without the ability to give blood transfusions. Right. Um,
But there still is an underlying mystery here, something that
we haven't fully solved yet. Why do we have different

(27:31):
blood types? Like what evolutionary pressures, if any, brought about
these different uh, these different antigen structures on the outside
of red blood cells. And this is still to some
extent and unsolved mystery and human evolution. But I think,
at least as far as I've read, there are some
indications that the evolved differences in blood types may have

(27:52):
something to do with different pressures related to immune response
and protection against disease. Yeah, that's that's that's what I'm
from from from the information I was looking at here. Um,
So let's get into this the idea that in a sense,
there are powers in the blood or or more specifically,
I guess that that different blood types bring with them

(28:12):
different immune strengths and in some cases perhaps immune weaknesses.
And you know, this is a very common thing to
find in human evolution. A lot of times you see
different population groups with slight differences, and you wonder why.
And it's because of some local parasite that people's ancestors
evolved to h to resist. And so let's let's talk

(28:34):
about the parasites here. The real blood drinkers, the real
dangerous vampires. Uh, not count Dracula, but the but the
the mosquitoes that drink human blood, that hunt is for
our blood and spread a host of deadly diseases in
the process, the real vampires. Yes, so you know you
may have heard before, you may have read this before

(28:55):
that mosquitoes prefer typo blood. I don't know if I
had heard that, But once you start looking for it,
you see it all over the place. Uh. And more
than that, you probably read it in any number of
articles in in very trustworthy publications. Uh. And it's it's
been widely reported. You know that people with TYPEO are
bitten twice as often as people with type A, while

(29:17):
Type B falls somewhere in between. Okay, so wait, you
get betten a lot by mosquitoes. I mean I do.
I was been numerous times yesterday actually a whole researching
this because I was working out on the porch and
then it grilled in the afternoon, and I was thinking, like, well,
you know, I surely get attacked by them a lot,
but then that proves it. But yeah, that's hardly proved.

(29:37):
That's just like if any time you're bit my mosquito
fed upon my mosquito, you know that's that's one time
too many, right, So a lot of these articles though
there they end up pointing to a two thousand and
four study from the Journal of Medicine Etymology from two
thousand four from Cheray at All which found that quote,

(29:58):
blood group OH subjects attracted more uh mosquitoes than other
blood groups be A, B, and A, but we're significantly
more attractive than blood group A subjects in sixty four
human landing tests. So um, yeah, this one's this one
is cited a lot. I'll come back to that in
a second, but I want to point out that the

(30:19):
Smithsonian magazine has an article about the about this, and
they point out that, you know, based on genes, about
eight people secrete a chemical signal that broadcasts their blood type,
about fifteen percent do not, and mosquitoes are apparently more
attracted to secret ors. Now, to be clear, though there
are plenty of other factors here at well that play

(30:40):
into whether mosquitoes will swarm to you. They don't care
about gender, hair color, or pigmentation, but they can be
attracted by the big one. One of the big ones
is carbon dioxide. Uh, sweat, high body temperature is a
big one. Uh, certain skin bacteria, ethanol excretion, and sweat
due to beer concid. Yeah, pregnancy apparently as a factor,

(31:03):
but that seems to come down to just carbon dioxide
and warmth, like increased carbon dioxide and warmth, and then
also dark clothing, which that's one that matches up. I
found with my experience killing mosquitoes is that they'll be
attracted to dark things I'm wearing. And then if I'm
killing them, say in a bungalow, they're going to go
to the dark corners of the bungalow to try and

(31:23):
get away from me. Well, I wonder if it's because
out on a warm day, dark clothing gets hotter. Yeah,
that's true. They're attracted to heat. Yeah, again, heats one
of the big ones. Now, the notion that mosquitoes prefer
type of blood did not hold up for long. The
study was criticized for statistical problems. Uh. Joseph Conelin, technical

(31:43):
adviser of the American Mosquito Control Association, has dismissed this
as a as as as not being that that big
of a factor or not being a factor at all.
But but you still see it decided quite a bit.
But as far as I can tell, UH, based on
the re search here, I don't think blood type really
plays into whether or not a mosquito is going to

(32:05):
feast under blood or certainly it's not. It's it's it's
not going to compare to the other factors that are
going to dictate whether or not you're going to be
fed upon. Now, on the other hand, there does seem
to be evidence that people with type OH blood are
protected from the most severe forms of malaria. According to
a two thousand fifteen Swedish study, a protein secreted by

(32:27):
malarial parasites only bonds weekly with type of blood cells,
but bonds strongly to a As a result, type of
blood is more prominent in malaria plague regions. The researchers
from the Caroliniska Institute point out that roughly half of
Nigeria's population has type of blood. And by the way,

(32:48):
this is uh, this is how it breaks down in
the United States. According to the Red Cross, UH OH
positive blood you'll find UH forty seven percent among African Americans,
thirty nine among Asians, thirty seven percent among Caucasians, fifty
among Latino Americans, and then OH negative four percent among
African Americans, one percent among Asians, eight percent among Caucasians,

(33:11):
and four percent among Latino Americans. So having type OH
blood with the positive rh factor is much more common, yes, yeah,
And and certainly you see, like in the the American
the African American population, you do see that significantly higher
um rate of O positive blood. Likewise with Latino American

(33:33):
blood as well. So I think these are some of
the key statistics that people are focusing in on when
they're making a case for UH. You know, the blood
type having this uh this immune factor. You know that
this is the reason you find these different blood types
in different human populations, the result of your more recent
ancestors being exposed to more malaria risk. Yeah. Now, on

(33:56):
the other hand, people with type OH blood tend to
become more severely ill from cholera compared to other blood types,
and according to a two thousand sixteen study from the
Washington University School of Medicine. It may be due to
the way that blood type influences how strongly cholera toxin
activates intestinal cells leading to diarrhea. Oh yeah, I was
also reading about some evidence that there may be different

(34:19):
responses to norovirus having to do with blood types. Well that, yeah,
that would make sense too. Um. I've also seen a
B and A by link to higher risk for coronary
heart disease, but I didn't I didn't look into that, uh,
super closely. I'm not sure how much of that is
is really ironed out, or or to what extent is correlation.
I think type A blood is associated with greater risks

(34:43):
for some types of cancers. Now, of course, as we
stressed already, one of the most important aspects of type
of blood remains that it is a universal donor, meaning
that an in an emergency, it can be used with
the lowest risk of series reactions for all blood types.
And so as you might imagine, it would be ideal
to be able to transform any blood type into a
universal donor, right Uh. And I suppose our vampires would

(35:06):
would very much like that as well, if they indeed
prefer um O oh negative and no positive blood, and
one of the ways that this could be achieved is
by using bacteria enzymes to clip away sugars that give
red blood cells their type, but it's ultimately not a
very effective method. But recently this year, in fact, researchers
at the University of British Columbia found two types of

(35:28):
enzymes in the human gut biome that that can transform
blood types essentially into O UH into O type blood.
One converts the antigen to an amine and the other
removes the antigen completely. But a lot of work remains
to be done in this area before anything like a
human test UH this would be possible, but it does

(35:49):
show how we could very well come to a you know,
a day in the future where when you give blood
that blood is then can then be altered so that
it can be more broadly used. Now we alluded to
this earlier, but there are also tons of just edge
cases where things get more interesting and more complicated than
the blood type groups we've been talking about so far.

(36:11):
Like there is what's known I think is like the
Bombay blood type group where UH this is a relatively
isolated phenomenon, but UM, but people who are not type
A B A b or oh, and can only receive
blood from each other. All right, On that note, we're
going to take a quick break, but when we come back,
we're going to get into some blood myths. Than all right,

(36:37):
we're back. So, you know, we started off this episode
talking about vampires drinking blood, and we touched on the
idea of vampires being sort of like wine connoisseurs. So
what if you had an elder nos Ferato style vampire
holding up a goblet of blood and you know, sniffs it,
SIPs it, and then starts just uh, you know, ranting

(36:58):
about a raving about how oh you can tell that
this one, this one came from a hunter, some came
from a you know, a fierce lover. Uh, and I
can taste it. This has notes of big Mac, notes
of barbecue sauce. But getting into this idea though that
that blood could in any way inform the vampire about

(37:23):
the personality of the individual that it came from. Uh,
you know, that would seem to get into into supernatural
aspects about blood for sure. And yet well we also
see this idea, you know, moving among the living in
our real world. Uh, this idea that personality is somehow
tied to blood type. Yeah, it's a somewhat popular form

(37:44):
of personality assessment in Japan these days that's based on
blood types. So in some Japanese magazines and TV shows
and stuff, you'll find what are essentially blood type horoscopes,
or for how about this bood type relationship compatibility charts,
like if you know you to figure out if you've

(38:05):
met the person who's right for you, look up their
blood type on this chart and see how it correlates
with yours. Uh. And this is all predicated on the
belief that blood types concern more than just the proteins
and antibodies and stuff in your blood, but that they
actually determine important aspects of your personality, much like the
zodiac signs in Western astrology. Um. And though I think

(38:26):
some Western characterizations of this folk belief maybe overstating its
importance in modern Japanese culture, the popularity of books in
Japan giving life advice based on blood type indicates that
this is at least a somewhat or pretty popular belief.
I guess it's always hard, Like I was trying to
find a survey that had good numbers on this, but
I couldn't find anything that was very well sourced in English.

(38:49):
But I guess it's always kind of hard to determine
things like this anyway, because even if you ask people like, well,
do you believe in uh, you know, astrology and the
zodiac signs predicting your personality or do you believe in
blood types predicting personality? I always kind of wonder what
stuff like this like to what extend do people really
believe in it? Like with astrology, I think there are

(39:10):
a lot of people who do it, who participate in it,
who are who sort of believe in it, maybe half ironically,
but but they wouldn't say, take the advice of an
astrologer over the advice of their doctor. Yeah, we got
into this a little bit when we talked about the
Chinese zodiac on a past episode of the show UH
with with some of like the birth rate spikes than

(39:31):
one sees in the auspicious year of the dragon. And
I remember some of the author's writing on this. We're
pointing to not, you know, not a situation where we
had like a bunch of really hardcore um you know,
Chinese zodiac enthusiast in these Chinese communities outside of mainland
China where the the where the research was conducted. But
rather it was the idea that you had the younger

(39:54):
UH individuals with more of a casual acquaintance, more casual
knowledge of the DIAC. They were just kind of, you know,
they're trying to make a big life decision, and there's
a lot of information coming at you, and you're probably
getting second and third opinions and maybe get that fourth
opinion from the zodiac, and all things being equal, maybe
you give into that right that you can kind of

(40:16):
that you can kind of engage with it and kind
of let it partially guides you, even if you're not
a die hard believer, or even maybe if you wouldn't
even admit to believing. I don't know, I do not
think by the way, I mean, we should go ahead
and say this, there is any good evidence that personality
traits are strongly or even moderately correlated with blood types.

(40:36):
There may be a small number of extremely weak correlations,
but even that seems uncertain. I was just looking at
one study by Kingo Nawata called no relationship between blood
type and personality evidence from a large scale evidence from
large scale surveys in Japan and the US. In the
Japanese Journal of Psychology in two thousand and fourteen. The

(40:57):
author here writes that the relationship between personality and the
A B O blood type is popular in Japan, but
there has previously been no empirical substantiation for the belief,
and so this study is a secondary analysis of data
collected for more than ten thousand American and Japanese subjects
in the years two thousand four and two thousand five,

(41:18):
and of sixty eight personality traits or items assessed, there
was no significant difference between blood group types for sixty
five of those sixty eight traits, and I guess small
effects observed for the other three, which could still turn
out to be errors. So basically, at best, the author
rights quote blood type explained less than zero point three

(41:39):
percent of total variants in personality. These results showed the
non relevance of blood type for personality. So the bottom
line is that the relationship between blood type and personality
seems to be somewhere within the range of extremely weak
to non existent. And yet you will find plenty of
popular books on this subject. You'll find websites that offer
you know, guides, I've on stuff even in English. I

(42:01):
guess uh, for helping people get acquainted with Japanese culture
and showing you know, stuff about like blood type compatibility
between different personalities. I guess we'll refer to that more
in a minute. But apparently much of the interest in
blood type personality stuff comes from a series of books
beginning in the nineteen seventies by a Japanese journalist and
named Massa Hico Nomi. And this was not a guy

(42:25):
with any scientific credentials, by the way, but there are
a ton of books by different authors on this subject.
Apparently up until the present day, this remains sort of
a popular genre of life advice, you know, when it
comes to things like life advice and and and ultimately
some of the more supernatural, uh, you know, things we
turned to be at a you know, astrology or something else.

(42:47):
I think, you know, a lot of it is just
coming from this idea that you know, people, I think
you know, you just feel paralyzed by choice. You need
something to guide you be at the stars or the
secrets in your blood or whatever is being you know,
related to you. And and yeah, I mean I understand
that it could feel it can feel liberating to have
have something tell you you know what you should do,
or to just sort of back up some sort of

(43:08):
core belief about yourself. I think there's another thing at
work here that lines up perfectly with that, and I'll
come back to it in just a minute. But I
wanted to look specifically, like, well, what are the blood
types believed to be correlated with? Like if you believe
in this, what what does it tell you about yourself? Uh?
It seems complicated and somewhat variable, Like I was finding

(43:28):
different descriptions of the blood type personalities that didn't seem
to exactly match up with each other. Though I find
this is the same thing when I look at personality
assessments due to the due to the zodiac signs and astrology. Um.
But according to a BBC article I was reading by
Ruth Evans on the subject, UH just gives a list
of examples. Quote. According to popular belief in Japan, type

(43:51):
a's are sensitive, perfectionists and good team players, but over anxious.
Type OH is there curious and generous but stubborn. A
B is our ard but mysterious and unpredictable, and type
b is are cheerful but eccentric, individualistic and selfish. Um
And also to add to that roughly fort of people

(44:13):
in Japan are Type A, about thirty percent er Type OH,
about twenty percent er Type B, and about ten percent
or Type A B. I also found a chart for
blood types with positive traits and negative traits correlated here
from a website called Tofugu, which I think is like
a It's an English language website for people who want to, uh,

(44:34):
maybe travel to Japan and learn about Japanese culture, and
it's sharing a bunch of stuff here like it says
that people with blood type A, uh, they're positive traits
are that they're earnest in their neat but they're negative
traits are that they are stubborn and they're anxious. People
with blood type OH, here you go, Robert. You are
easy going and you've got leadership ability. Well, I think

(44:54):
I have one of those things, not the second one.
But you're also insensitive and un punctual. I think I'm
very sensitive and I'm semi punctual, So yeah, I don't
think that lines up with me at all. But it
also says, uh, Type B here is supposed to be
passionate and creative, but also selfish and uncooperative, and type
A B is talented and composed, but eccentric and two faced.

(45:20):
That sounds really negative now, but but then again we
also have to look at the ratio, at least the
presented ratio that one finds in Japan. So this probably
becomes a situation where if you have blood types occurring
at certain percentages within a given culture, then you can
also match that up with social norms in a given culture.

(45:41):
And since a B is amounting to just ten here,
then yeah, you can go ahead and say that those
are the eccentric and the two faced people for such
a small section of society anyway, they're the artsy weirdos,
and and so you might think, well, okay with that
more or less lines up. So the thing that I
detect in this um pretty much exactly the same way
that I detected in uh in astrology generally, is that

(46:04):
there's a good bit of the forror effect to work here. Now,
we did a whole episode about the four or effect
a few years back, and I remember very thinking very
fondly of that one. I think that was a lot
of fun. But in short, this is a psychological phenomenon
in which people have the tendency to interpret vague general
assessments and predictions as specific and highly accurate statements about themselves. Right,

(46:30):
so you can say something that would apply to almost anybody,
saying like, you know, oh, it turns out people with
your blood type are it can be sometimes insensitive, but
also are passionate about whatever. You know, Like, give a
list of characteristics and everybody will just say, yeah, yeah,
that's me. How do they know so much about me? Uh?

(46:51):
This was demonstrated in this original experiment by this American
psychologist named bertram For when he had his students take
a personality test and then he later handed back the
quote results of their test and asked the students to
rate how specific and accurate the characterizations from the results
were to them individually, and for the most part of
the students were like, wow, yes, this is really describing me.

(47:14):
In fact, for had handed back the exact same personality
assessments to every student in the class, and there was
no correlation between their answers on the test and the
results they got. Obviously this probably led to lots of
nervous laughter, but I think this certainly rings true. I mean,
people are so hungry for personality tests and stuff. We
we have a natural eagerness to interpret vague general statements

(47:38):
as applying specifically to us in particular and being like,
yoh yeah, that is me. They got me. Yeah, I mean,
and probably more so than ever with the sort of
online live so many of us lead, you know, we
want without actual personal interaction with someone, we want we
want something to tell us. That's some sort of feedback mechanism.

(47:59):
And so then when you're old, oh well, your negative
traits are that you're insensitive and your unpunctual, you may
be inclined into instead of saying, oh, well I'm actually sensitive,
you know, um, screw off, you're gonna say, well, wait,
in what ways am I insensitive? Like there's one right there.
I just remembered one sort of thing. And that's exactly
what Bertram for said. So he was assessing these results

(48:20):
he found and he said, you know, what's going on
here he thinks is a combination of what he calls
universal validity and subjective validation, or I think he called
it personal validation, but more recent research calls it subjective validation.
And basically this means that as for rights, the universal
validity trade is that quote, virtually every psychological trait can

(48:41):
be observed in some degree in everyone. So like any
psychological statement you could make, you can find examples in
your own autobiography for which it's true. One of one
of my my favorite examples of this. And I feel like,
I mean, I'm certainly guilty of this as well, the
use of the word sociopath. Uhum. And when we've discussed

(49:04):
sociopaths and psychopaths and what these terms actually mean on
the show before, but in a general sense, there is
a tendency to just throw the word around at other
people but also at your own self where you're like, oh,
my goodness, and I and my a sociopath? Was was
I acting like a sociopath the other day when I
did this or the other? Uh? You know, we we
have this tendency to lean into those terms for you know,

(49:27):
for either regarding ourselves or to mold our perceptions of
other people to fit them. A sociopath is somebody who
behaves like a sociopath most or all of the time,
as opposed to you who behave like a sociopath only
some of the ten percent of the time. Yeah. Um.
But the other thing he says that's paired with this,
So every psychological trait you find to some degree in

(49:50):
almost everybody. But then he says, on top of that,
there's subjective validation, which is that this is what you
were just alluding to. When you search through your own
autobiography and your mental picture or of yourself to judge
whether a personality statement applies to you, you've been a
huge number of memories and instances to draw from and
no real way of judging whether a personality assessment statement

(50:11):
applies better to you than it does to other people.
So imagine if I tell you, because of your blood type,
you have a tendency to be generous but also stubborn.
Because of universal validity, almost anybody can think of examples
of times when they were both generous and stubborn. And
because of subjective validation, you'll have lots of opportunities in

(50:32):
your memories to find examples of yourself displaying both of
these traits, as well as difficulty judging whether you actually
display those traits more or less than other people do.
I mean, because you know more about yourself than you
know about all other people, you'll probably just have the
tendency to find more examples of any trait within yourself
than you would normally see in others. But I think,

(50:54):
especially if the traits are flattering, I think, but it
also drives home just how if if an individual is
it then too narcissism, how easy it is to feed
that narcissism. And likewise, if one is given to self
deprecation or just outright depression, like there's always going to
be plenty of stuff to feed that as well. Yeah, totally.
But one aspect that I think is interesting about the

(51:15):
blood type personality myth in particular as opposed to say
Western astrology or zodiac signs, is that it seems a
little more biologically plausible, Like it's something about real genetic
traits within the body. If blood type is a heritable
biological trait, which it is, why couldn't certain aspects of
personality be biologically inherited in some correlated way? Like the

(51:38):
idea isn't inherently implausible, It just doesn't seem to be true. Yeah,
I mean it's it's it's leaning into the idea of
the mind body connection, which is is a reality. But
but that doesn't mean that every invocation of the mind
body connection is is scientifically authentic. Sure, well, I mean
there are there's evidence of some coral lation between mammalian

(52:01):
gut flora and personality traits. So uh so, like, if
that could be going on, why couldn't blood type be
correlated with personality traits. It's not that it's impossible, it
just does not seem to be the case. Now, another
area that one will sometimes find some life advice tied
up with blood type is in the domain of diet.

(52:22):
Oh boy, yep. It's been argued that different blood types
benefit from different diets, and this idea was popularized in
the book Eat Right for Your Type, written by naturopath
Peter di Atamo. So basically it draws on this idea
that like each blood type is kind of it kind
of ties you to a specific archetype of of ancient

(52:46):
human identity, which which is not true, right right, not
true like our our blood types evolutionarily or traced back
to our like ape like ancestors, that they go back
that far. It's not it's not from like what profession
your great great grandparents have, right, So Like, for instance,
it's it's presented that Type a's are agrarians and they

(53:08):
need an agrarian diet that's essentially devoid of meat, bees,
are no bads who can eat meat but need to
avoid wheat, corn, lentils, etcetera. A. Bees are enigmas and
they just have to avoid kidney, beans, corn, beef, and chicken.
And meanwhile, typos are hunters and basically need a paleo diet,
so limited grains, lagoons and dairy but less of protein.

(53:31):
So that would make me a hunter. But but then again, okay,
so you know, one might say, well, okay, maybe with
without leaning as much on this idea of you know,
these archetypes, but maybe there is still something to it,
because again, our blood is our body, it's part of
our body, it's part of our system. Perhaps there is
some connection between different blood types and different dietary requirements.

(53:54):
Sure could be the case it but it again does
not seem to actually be the case. Right. So there
there are, as far as I can tell, no studies
that that back this up. Uh. There has There's been
at least one study that has set out to debunk it. Uh.
In two thousand fourteen study came out of the University
of Toronto. They found that blood type had nothing to

(54:14):
do with it, but rather, you know, it comes down
to sticking to a reasonable vegetarian and low carb diet. Now,
it's only a study of one thousand, four hundred study participants,
but then again, there's not a lot of research out there.
This is one of the studies that does exist, and
it certainly argues that there's there's nothing to this idea

(54:35):
that diet needs to line up with your blood type. Yeah,
and the basis of it on the idea of like
humans as certain types of like natural professions and your
blood that again, that's the basis is wrong. Yeah. Now,
on on the other hand, it's often pointed out that,
you know, many people probably picked up this book, followed
the dietary advice that was included, and experienced improvements in

(54:58):
their health. Uh. And a part of it comes down
to the fact that if you're if you do not
have any kind of a managed diet at all, if
you're perhaps eating poorly, and then you start, you know,
eating a largely vegetarian diet based on your blood type,
you're still going to you're gonna see a shift in
your overall health because now you were following a diet,

(55:19):
you're probably following a healthier diet. Now you might be
using it, you might be employing this diet for a
reason that is not scientifically validated. But the idea that
you could cut down on carbs and eat more vegetables
and improve your health, well, that's that's nothing. There's no
superstition there. Yeah. I think I was reading one article
that said that some research on this just found that

(55:40):
everybody should follow the blood type a diet or whatever,
like it didn't have anything to do with blood type.
Is just that, like some of these diets are going
to be better than others. Yeah, but but again we
have to come back to the fact that we can
you can definitely see why this idea is appealing. Like,
there is this idea that there is a there's essentially
a code in your blood, there's a secret language in
your blood. And now that we know that language, we can,

(56:03):
you know, we can better prepare for our personality, for
our we can better choose a diet based on this information.
But it's not really the case. I think the idea
of diets tailored to an individual person and not not
just the same diet for everybody, that there is something
to that, but again, not that it has anything to
do with blood type, right, I mean, you're gonna have

(56:23):
a host of issues there too. I mean, people are
gonna have different allergies obviously that are going to come
into play. Um uh, you know, which is again just
comes down to the complexity of our of our immune
systems for the most part. But imagine this were true
and impar it with what you were talking about earlier
about technologies to change blood types. This would be leading
obviously to a future where everybody is trying to get

(56:45):
the Would it be cosmetic surgery, the elective surgery to
transform their blood into the pastry group? Thoh yeah, well
that would be a step beyond even what because I
believe the research I was looking at was talking about
changing blood after it has been removed. But again, as
long as we're you know, cranking the time machine forward,
I imagine, I imagine somebody is probably speculated on a

(57:06):
time when you could you could make those alterations to
a human being as well. So I guess it'd be
easier just to change the blood, right, I mean, I guess,
I don't know how would you want it? If you
were doing you're sending a crew out to another planet
on a lengthy space uh a journey, would you want
everybody to have the same blood type? Would you want
an array of blood types? My guess is that blood

(57:28):
types would be a fairly low priority when selecting the crew.
That's a boring answer, unless you're going to the Planet
of the Vampires. Oh, what a great movie, in which
case it could become a factor. Though I don't remember.
Did that film actually have vampires in it? Or are
they more zombies? There's sort of vampires. Yeah, yeah, it
had these uh, these spirits inhabit. Oh. Man, what a

(57:48):
great movie. That movie's got killer cost of costumes are
the main thing I remember. Now you can watch the
movie on mute and it's almost as good. Is that
Mario Baba? Yeah? I think I Actually we just watched
another Mario Boba movie last night. Yeah, we watched Black Sunday.
You know that one. I know of it. I've seen
It's got that very distinctive cover art, but I've never

(58:09):
seen it. Oh, you should see it sometimes. Nineteen sixty.
It's black and white, super creepy, very unusual to see
a black and white movie from as early as it was.
That's as gruesome and gory as it is, but in
a good way. I would say, pretty big thumbs up
to Black Sunday. It's it's creepy and also funny. It's

(58:31):
got a it's got this great professor character who just
goes about smashing things, Like goes into an old ruin
and there's a wind blowing through some organ pipes and
he just smashes them with his cane and he smashes
a tombstone. Well, speaking of smashing tombstones, I think it's
time to close this episode out. Okay, So I'm really
it's also kind of surprised that we were able to

(58:51):
do a vampire episode. Every time we do a vampire
themed episode, I feel like, like that's it. We've exhausted
the vampire possibility. Is nothing else we can cover that's
even vampire flavored. I really enjoyed our vampire Clinic episodes
last year. Those were good. Yeah. Yeah, I mean every
time we we we dip back in to the vampire content,

(59:12):
it's always it's always rewarding. But this one kind of
took me by surprise. Uh. It was suggested that we
do something on blood types, and then I'm like, oh,
it's got to be vampire them and here we are. Wait,
who suggested it? My wife suggested it? Okay, yeah, she
was I was like, I don't know where we're going
to record next week. We we gotta pick one of
these Halloween topics. And she was like, oh, we should

(59:34):
do blood types, and I like, well, yeah, that's that's
true blood vampires, Halloween. It's perfect fit. And so there
you have it. Obviously, we'd love to hear from everybody
out there, because you all have blood, you all have
experience with your blood, thoughts about your blood. Perhaps you
have exposure to um blood type based diets, blood type

(59:55):
based personality tests. You've all bathed in blood at some
point and and in doing so noted the like the
weird coagulations of the blood right, and you realize, oh,
well they mixed. I requested, specifically requested on all a
B bath and they gave me a little bit of
A and a little bit of B. It's not the
same thing, people, It's not the same thing of a vampire.

(01:00:16):
Can tell uh. Also, maybe you've had a blood transfusion.
You'd like to tell us about that as well. As always,
you can find us in the normal places. And if
you want to support the show, the best thing you
can do is to rate and review stuff to blow
your mind. Wherever you have the power to do so,
and be sure to subscribe to Invention as well. That's
our other podcast. It is a journey through human techno history,

(01:00:39):
one invention at a time, which thanks as always to
our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would
like to get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

(01:01:04):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart
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