Dogs don’t just make us happy—they change how we live. Michael Easter talks with former Navy SEAL and writer Sam Alaimo about why dogs pull us back into the present, create purpose, and help us rebuild after our toughest moments.
Then researcher Dr. Nancy Gee (director of a human–animal interaction center) breaks down what the science actually says about how and why pet ownership contributes to our health and wellbeing.
Two Percent is hosted by Michael Easter. Today’s episode was produced by Joey Fischground, Robbie Hiser, Dana Brawer and Julia Nutter. From Kaleidoscope, our executive producers are Mangesh Hattikudur and Kate Osborn and Julia Nutter. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norvell and Nikki Ettore. Our Head of Video is Maria Paz Mendez Hodes. This episode was edited by Joey Fischground. Our theme music is by the Heater Manager.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:17):
Welcome to two percent. I'm your host, Michael Easter. In
today's episode is all about dogs, which is why I
have my best buddy Duke with me right here. So
Duke is a eight month old German short hair pointer.
He hangs out with me all day. He goes with
me everywhere. I have owned dogs my entire life and
I am an absolute and utter dog person. Love dogs.
(00:40):
So first off, we are going to talk to Sam Alima.
Sam is a Navy seal who is also a big
dog fanatic. And what's interesting about Sam is he writes
a lot at his substack called what Then about the
philosophy of dogs and how dogs can help us become
better humans and give us a philosophy of living day
(01:01):
to day. After that, we're gonna talk to doctor Nancy
g She is a researcher who studies the physical and
mental health benefits of dog ownership. So she's gonna get
into all the details about why owning a dog is
really really good for you. So with all that said,
we're gonna get into the episode. We're gonna let Duke
(01:22):
go off and chase a squirrel or whatever he's gonna do.
After this, we've got a good episode though, So let's
get into it all right. Now, we're gonna bring on
Sam Alimo. Samlimo is a dog lover first and foremost.
He is a former Navy seal and then he got
his masters at Columbia and he now runs the what
then Substack, which is one of my favorite reads. And
(01:42):
on his what then Substack he writes a lot about
the philosophy of having a dog and what we all
can learn about living better from dogs. So let's bring
him on now. Sam, thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
I appreciate it. Thank you. Michael.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Well, we're here to talk dog, so we obviously got
to start with you your priors. You have a dog.
Was his name? Is it a him?
Speaker 3 (02:04):
It's a him, and it's a carson. He's a mutt.
We have no idea what he is. We just know
he's like ridiculously good looking. His shizzle jaw, the shape,
the colors, the eyes, the compact pause, everything about him awesome.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
How big? Uh?
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Sixty two pounds.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
Oh that's a big guy. I've seen photos of him
on your substack. I was thinking you were going to say,
like forty five fifty.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Now he's lean, he's muscle, He gets a lot of rocking,
a lot of walking.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Awesome. When did you get him? So?
Speaker 3 (02:31):
My girlfriend actually had him early and he and I
are first met twenty eighteen, so we've been together for
a while now.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Awesome. That's rad. Did you have dogs growing up?
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah? I grew up.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
We had a sheep dog. We had an Australian shepherd dog.
And then when I was I guess starting from middle school,
we had we had shit suos and like to this day,
there's still my favorite dog breed shit zoos.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, they're actually very sweet. You see. I feel like
people can see him and they kind of like, what
is It's this fu fou thing? But they're actually awesome.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Yeah, especially when they started apping, You're like what are
you doing? But then you realize the size of the
soul of a shitsu. So they're tiny. They don't know
how small they are. Like for how small they are,
they're literally bare knuckle fighters. They will take on any
dog ten times a size and they don't care. They
will throw down. So they're the most spirited dogs. They
have the most personality of any dog I've ever seen.
(03:22):
I love them my best friend. When I was a
kid growing up in Utah. He had a shitsu. His
name was Puddles.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
I'm gonna let you take a single guess why its
name was Puddles. But this dog would They lived on
this relatively busy road. It was like a thirty mile
an hour road, and this dog would chase cars and
just you ap at them and bite their tires. I
think it got hit five or six times, and then
finally on the seventh it all ended. But the dog
(03:50):
was like thirteen on that final one. I mean, this
dog was just bad ass.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
That's relentless. You can't train that. That's by nature. The
shitsu is that way.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, this is my road, bitch, Get off it. Awesome?
All right. So you're a former seal? Correct when did
you join? How old were you? I was.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Nineteen, and I wanted to be a seal since I
was fourteen, So that was like my five year preparation
before I actually got to sign the paper and make
it happen.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Why at fourteen did you want to become a seal?
What was it about that?
Speaker 2 (04:31):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Early in life I had a sort of awakening or
hammer strike, however you want to refer to it, where
I think I realized at a young age how short
life can be. And I felt, even at fourteen, like
I was on a trajectory that I didn't exactly author myself.
And I realized I had a choice right now. If
you can question everything to the point where you have
(04:54):
no idea what the point of life is at fourteen,
it means you have the innate to build it.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
If you could break it down, you can build it up.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
And I said, Okay, what's the most difficult thing I
can do that would get my mind and my body engaged.
So I did at that time, like a primitive Google search,
and I came up with Navy Seals.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
I didn't know anybody in the military and knew nothing
about them.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
I just said, that's it, and from that day forward,
every single day push ups, reading, swimming, running, rocking every day.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Then that was how I built my life.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
That's awesome. The reading part is interesting. What prompted the
reading thing? Because I think most people would see seals
and then they do that initial Google and then they
click images and it's a photo selection or something. So
why the reading.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
I think you'll find I think you know a lot
of the guys.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
There's a particular draw to communities like that where it's
not just hey, I like to lift waists and drink beer.
It is the whole human effect. It's how do you
excel not just physiologically but psychologically. How do you excel emotionally?
How do you excel intellectually? Even the enlisted community and
(06:03):
the seal teams more than half have bachelor's degrees. That's
not normal. So you get a four year degree and
then you enlist in the military become a seal. It's
trying to max out that full spectrum of the human experience.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Do you feel like that that feature of being I'll
use the word intellectual gets selected for in the process
of selection, where it's someone who has read, read a lot,
thought a lot, can maybe dissociate more with the physical
suffering that happens in the selection process and not get
basically tossed out by it or what.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
That's a good question.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
The intellectual was the best word I picked off the cuff.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
I may not be the best word overall.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
There's a difference between the intellectualism of multiple IBE league
degrees and the intellectualism of being acutely aware of your
presence and reality, of the working of your mind, of
your assumptions about your capacity to handle an extremely difficult situation,
(07:03):
about how you read the person you're in a fire
team with, about how you read the enemy, about how
you read intelligence.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
And that is a super.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Mindfully engaged to tune whatever you want to call it,
sort of intellectualism that is one percent selected for deliberately.
It just so happens that the people who have that
capacity are also drawn to the world of books, the
world of ideas, and not so much schooling as they
are education. Schooling has often gone awry, but education almost
never goes wrong, and they generally in that direction.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, that makes sense. And you did tours in Afghanistan.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Right, I did a couple of tours.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Yeah, how long were you over there?
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Was there twenty ten, eleven, twelve, and thirteen?
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Okay, And a lot of these places were you were
kind of in the middle of nowhere. These are like
pre state places.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Straight up pre state. And that's where kind of a
lot of my writing originated. It was a exposure to
to a legitimate pre state. Where I was, they didn't
think of themselves as Afghany. They thought of themselves as.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Part of their village. And the villages there were.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Maybe fifty people, and then you would have this mountainous
tribal land, and the mountains are like beautifully crisscross by
river valleys. So the mountains are like these stark brown,
reddish rock. And then in the middle in these river
valleys is a thin, muddy river and this lost green zone, almond, pomegranate, rice,
(08:28):
ancient crops, beautiful little little mud pathways going in and
out of them, the crisscross. And the people live in
that place with no electricity, there's no plumbing. Most of
them don't have vehicles. None of the roads are paved.
There's no cell phones, there's no cell coverage. It is
literally as pre state as it gets. If Alexander the
(08:49):
Great had set foot in that river valley, he would say, Wow,
nothing changed. It was a mind blowing experience and probably
the most beautiful place I've ever seen in my life,
because you can smell the air, but there was no pollution,
and at night there was no light pollution, so that
the milky way you literally reach out and like grab
the milky way, like every color of red and yellow
and white was. I called it like Middle Earth, like
(09:12):
it reminded me of some fantasy land that existed twenty
thousand years ago, all.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Right, So you get out of the sales and then
you went to business school at Columbia pretty quickly.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Right, Yeah, So to make that happen, since I enlisted
when I was nineteen, I had to do my degree online,
So I did that while I was in. It's you
could do it if you don't sleep for four years
and work on the weekends. So I got my undergrad
degree online while I was in and then with about
a year left, I had to decide am I going
to stay at the military path or am I going
(09:44):
to get out? So I had the opportunity to go
to a different unit, the seal teams, or go to
Columbia to get my master's. And you know, the tours
were my tours were very kinetic. I think I checked
every boxed and wanted the check plus money. I didn't
want to and it was time to move on for
a new adventure.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
And that was it.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Interesting. So you go from the world that is one
kinetic and two like Middle Earth into Manhattan? What was
that transition like, not to mention you're in a classroom.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Yeah, it was almost enough to break me.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
Like I could admit that now and at the time
it was even harder, not just due to the transition
and that shift between two different worlds, but I was
also doing with like health stuff. I didn't realize it
took me a few years to figure that out, but
it was all our immune problems, which I'm still dealing
with today, and it's now kind of shaped my life
into a very narrow channel. And I made the mistake
(10:38):
of attributing much of the psychological and existential torment I
was going through to mental weakness as opposed to a
physiological problem.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
So I made it worse.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
I like literally cascaded it, and just that learning experience
itself was Yeah, it was good.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
It was eye opening.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
I'm sure Hewson was it. The ended up getting a dog.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
It was a while, so Carson was probably the first
one I had since going to the military. But through
the military, my family dog, Gerdy Shitsu.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
She was sort of like my anchor.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
And it's difficult to describe.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
You go, there's a great.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Ethnography on the marine Jaggers, the Norwegian Navy seals. I
got to work with a couple of guys that are
really good dudes, and the author embedded herself with the
marine Niggers and really summed up that world beautifully. She said,
Marine naggers and other soft or combat units, they live
on the margin. And then the margin is everything civilization
(11:44):
doesn't want to talk about or see. That's the violence,
that's the death, the dying, the killing, the suffering, the
training for war. Extremely hyper masculine environment, all all the time,
high risk. And when you experience that environment, I found
like an equal and opposite reaction to explore the other half.
(12:06):
And that was great to me, Like what is the
most absolute pure essence of just goodness and love and loyalty, unquestioned, unconditional.
So the deeper I got in the deployments, the deeper
I got in that change that was.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Occurring within me. She was like the anchor for me.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
That was the thing that cut through both those worlds,
that primeval world I was living in a civilized world.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
It no longer knew I had to deal with.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
And she this thirteen pound shitsu who had eyes looking
in two different directions and extremely crooked teeth. She was
like a goddess to me, like she led me through
this thing. And she passed after my last tour, which
was absolutely gut wrenching, but like to this day, I
still feel it as if she's still here. That's the
power that these dogs can have.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Over us totally. I mean, when I got sober, one
of the first things I did was get a dog,
and this guy who was helping me get sober goes, well,
I don't know if you're in the headspace for that,
but you know, maybe he'll help you. And I'll tell
you what, man like that dog. It gave me a
mission and it gave me something to focus on other
(13:14):
than myself. It was like, I can't drink again because
I got to take care of this dog, and that
like gave me a focus that sort of put me
on the right track. And I mean that dog literally
saved my life.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Did you did you grow up with dogs or was
that your first introduction?
Speaker 1 (13:28):
That was my second dog. I grew up with the dog.
It's funny because you said your dog was an anchor.
I had this dog when I was a kid. He
was a Fox Terrier and my I don't know my dad,
he's ever been around, but my mom would travel about
a third of the year for work, so I had
this like rotating cast of nannies. As a kid. I'd
have a new nanny like every year or two. So
(13:51):
I was always having to figure out how to adapt
to all these different people. But I had this dog,
and that was like the that was the thing that
was always in the house, right, So that dog was
sort of like the anchor for me, like this thing's
always going to be here, and so we got we
got pretty tight too.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
That's awesome. That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
I feel like dogs for people in the military who've
seen combat and come back and have any sort of struggle,
I feel like there's a lot of things that help,
but I feel like dogs are kind of a common thing.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
And what's nice too is when you have a dog
over there, the military working dogs, they're just they're like
super dogs. They're like nieches over man, but in dog form.
But it's still nice, Like they're still therapeutic, even though
they could repeat the shreds in a fraction of a second.
They're just to have that like simple little four legged
being there that no matter what happens, no matter how
(14:39):
bad the firefight, no matter how boring the winner happens
to be, they're.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Just ready to go.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
They're bright eyed, Like I could look at their eyes
and say, all right, what am I being weak about?
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Let's go work out. This dog's ready to go.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
It's like the perpetual motion machine, the perpetual happiness machine.
They're just like the ultimate consistent reminder, Hey, don't be
a loser, Like, hey, be a better human being at
all times.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
It is the best thing in the world.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Why do you think that is that they give us
this reminder to be a better human being.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
I don't think it'd be too far of a stretch
to say that there's been coevolution happening, and at a
deeper level than like science has been able to put
into words yet, Like, if you think about it, we
domesticated dogs before we domesticated wheat and figs and grapes
twenty thousand years ago or more. That's as far as
we know. It could even be longer back agricultures ten
(15:27):
thousand years.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
So what does that mean.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
It's like four hundred, five hundred human generations, five hundred
human generations. We can't even remember four generations ago. So
if we've been living with dogs for five hundred generations,
we got to think about what is the impact there?
Speaker 4 (15:41):
Now?
Speaker 3 (15:41):
When I point my finger, Carson knows what that means.
If I point my elbow, he doesn't know what that means.
So there's something that are going on. But that's like
merely physical. There's the existential component as well. And I
wrote a piece about this, and like the theory was
that you have this world. We live in this list world,
(16:01):
and it's built on maximization. It's built on speed, built
on hustle, it's built on grind. Get some have a goal,
execute go checkbox a checkbox. The dog doesn't give a
shit about any of that. The dog is pure minimalism.
The dog is here. It's slow, it's quality, it's depth,
and that dog I framed it as the dog is
(16:23):
literally a bridge to what it means to be an
ancient human being. Because while we're living in this world
surrounded by all this incredible stuff and not so incredible stuff,
that mutt with fur and blood and love is literally
right there and we look at it and remember twenty
thousand years ago. It cuts through all of it, immediate
reframing of everything. So they bring us back to the
era of minimalism. If we choose to listen to them.
(16:46):
It all comes back down to the choice. And you
look at the dog and it's like hey. At all times,
the dog's looking at me saying Carson looks at me
and says, you have a choice. You either you either
learn my lesson or you don't. It's on you. It
comes back on you at the end of the day.
One of the beautiful offerings of the dog totally.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And dogs aren't going to change their behavior. Whether it's
ten thousand years ago and we're setting up a camp
and starting to grow food, or it's right now and
we're in a big house and we're ordering uber eats,
it's all the same. Whereas as technologies progressed, we've sort
of been There's more, faster, stronger all the time, and
(17:24):
the dog is just psyched to be there no matter
what's going on, no matter who you are, no matter
what you look like.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Yeah, it makes me think about the evolution we're going
through right now, which is incomparable. The evolution we're going
to go through in the next five years is probably
greater than what we went through in the past twenty
thousand years. As like to me, the dog is going
to be even more important in the next five years
than it was for twenty five thousand years. Like even
looking at like the movement of like transhumanism, which is
(17:52):
trying to merge the human with the AI, with the cloud, Like,
why do we even need these bodies anymore? Where we
can upload ourselves and live forever in a silicon world.
I don't really want that. You know, If we can't
have the dog by our side, are we still human? Yeah,
there's an argument to be made we're not anymore. We're
something completely different. So as long as we choose to
have a dog in our life, there's something innately human
(18:14):
about this non human animal. And trying to weigh with
those two different worlds and ways of being going to
be like in our lifetime, we're going to have to
answer that question.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
On what then your substack, you've written a lot about dogs.
What even prompted that in the first place.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
The big thinking I like to do is between the worlds,
the primeval the civilized, trying to bring the best of
the primeval here.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
And part of that was the dog.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
So it almost seems like it doesn't really fit that,
but it almost is at the core of it. And
there's a tendency with myself and I think a lot
of writers as well, to get lost in the world
of abstraction, lost in the world of idea and eventually
forget why you're writing.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
In the first place.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
And if your writing is not grounded in the concrete,
the daily and making you a more aware and grounded
human being.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
What's the point?
Speaker 3 (19:08):
And I easily get lost in an idea, like I'll
devote everything to an idea, and I'll forget that I'm here,
I'll forget to train, I'll forget everything.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
And Carson doesn't let that happen. I got to be here.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
So it's almost a spiritual practice to write about the dog.
Even before I started writing what, then, I would journal
just one thing every day I was grateful for about Carson,
and that immediately cut through drama at work, stress, worry, concern, fear,
doubt literally grounded me in the moment, just as a
spiritual practice to write two hundred words on the dog.
(19:39):
And when I was doing what, then, I'm like, all right,
I can't just write about this, this hardcore stuff, these
hardcore thoughts and trying to figure out how to live
more optimally. And then what better way to ground that
than with a couple dog essays every few months?
Speaker 2 (19:51):
And that that was the cause.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
That's awesome. You had one where you talked about how
and you can correct me if I'm wrong on the
on the numbers. But Napoleon, through his campaigns managed to
kill about six million people total, which is like half
a percent of the world. So this guy is just ruthless,
does not give a damn. And then after a battle
(20:15):
he sees this dog and it changes something about him.
So tell us about that.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Yeah, he murdered so many people. His battle fled to
the murder of so many people. On the death as
so many people, combatants, women, children, non combatant, males, elderly, young,
Like the mind can't even compute six million. You can't
see six million as a football stadium is what eighty thousand.
So six million people died. And he was remarkably cold
(20:45):
about that fact. He's like, I actually didn't feel anything
about that. I could watch ten thousand of my men
die in a matter of a few days.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
It's a course of business. I had a mission to
attend to.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
And then one day during his Italian campaign, he was
just I can almost see him, like sitting there in
his tent looking out at the battlefield, literally thousands of
corpses of his own men, of his enemy, the dead,
and the dying. And then he saw a dog sitting
next to one of the dead men, one of his
dead men, and the dog was howling. And he literally
(21:15):
sat down and wrote down in his journal he had
sent thousands of men to their deaths with no problem whatsoever.
And then all of a sudden he has this emotional rupture,
not because of the dead men, but.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Because of the dog.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Because all these people were back at camp, eating, trying
to go home, thinking about themselves.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Who was out there suffering with the dead.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
It was a dog who loved her master who was
now dead, and it kind of like woke them up
a little bit. Obviously didn't change his behavior, kept doing
what he was doing, but for him to stop what
he was doing and have that emotion that dog tapped
into something human in him, like the dog gave him
a reminder of the human condition and almost inhuman being.
(21:56):
And it's pretty remarkable. And I tried to compare like
the two forms of logic, the logic of the dog
and the logic of the human, and to universalize that
we all have a little Napoleon in us.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
We're all human.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
We all want to keep achieving, we all want the fame,
the status to a certain degree, the wealth to a
certain degree to achieve the mission, whatever the mission is.
But the dog, again doesn't give a damn. To the dog,
that's all a fiction. To the dog. What matters is
being there for the person you love. And that's what
the dog in the field is doing, is she was
there for the one human being that she loved. Nothing
(22:32):
else mattered, not taking over the world, not becoming a monarchy.
It was a human thing. And it was a really
poignant moment totally.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
And I think a way at least I experience this
is I will be, you know, driving around Las Vegas
and I might see a person who's homeless or whatever,
and you know, my initial thing is like do we
want to get too close? But then they'll have a
dog with them, and the dog doesn't care about the
person's condition or situation. The dog is just there. They're
(23:03):
just like clung onto that person. They're ready to go.
And it gives me like this moment to sort of
reframe things and see things in a more human way
that we're all kind of on this big spinning rock
and the cosmic abyss. And you know, at the end
of the day, everyone just like wants to be loved
wants to have something that's devoted to them, and we
(23:24):
often forget that. But it takes like a dog to
bring me back to that, you know.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
Yeah, it's I mean, there's a whole world there that's
worth thinking on and again why that's the case, whether
it's the coevolution, But it almost doesn't even matter, because
if that dog can be enough to humanize all of
us and just be that reminder throughout the day that, Oh,
I wish I could remember. I just read a great
quote about I think it was I was reading the journal,
(23:52):
the journals of Aaron's Junger, I think, and he said
something the effect of, what if before were born, we
had the opportunity we actually chose our role in life.
So the role that Michael Easter is living right now
exactly as it was your whole history, all the good,
all the bad, the role Sam Alaimo shows, we actually
chose that out of a selection before we were born,
(24:14):
and that adds like a level of autonomy and a
reminder of choice to our lives.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
At the moment.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
That strikes me as something like the dog, like it
almost doesn't. It's almost like Niets's eternal recurrence, like the
dog reminds you that this moment, no matter what it is,
you can wish it to be the same forever if
you're reminded to make of this moment everything you want
it to be. So it's like a roving philosophical reminder
of the dog. Maybe that's maybe that's what it is.
When you see the homeless man with the dog.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
How do you feel like dogs? Have you be more present?
You've written about that. I feel like ever, you know,
everyone's like to your point about ambition and schedules are
more scheduled than ever. It's always like, got to be
doing something, got to be working five, ten, twenty steps ahead.
But the dog somehow pull us back into right now.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
I wrote a different piece on Zumi's and watching over
time how the zumis end up declining with age. It's
super depressing, but that's the awareness, that's the moment it
brings you back to. And I'm a super big fan
of Tolkien. I read The Lord of the Rings every
year since I was fourteen. Same year I wanted to
(25:21):
be a seal every single year. And the perspective of
the elves is that you're a Middle Earth elf is
immortal and very early on in the creation of Middle Earth,
they made an alliance with men, and I remember Tolkien
and film early and talking about the first meeting of
(25:41):
elves and men, and they met each other, they loved
each other, they respected each other. And then the men
got older and died, and the elves were just mourning.
They're like, why is he gray haired and wrinkled? And
I look like I'm twenty two, Like what is this curse?
And it reminds me of the dog? Where are they elves?
The dogs are the humans because they live so much
(26:03):
less than us. So in a lifetime you could have five, six, seven, eight, nine,
ten different series of dogs. And every single time they
come and go, every single time they get a lot
of zoomies as a puppy and then know zuomies when
they die. It is literally a reminder of what is
the most important thing in the world. Every single day. Yeah,
(26:24):
and they literally he makes me slow down, makes me
stop what I'm doing, the stress, the phone, the slack,
the internet, the email, the writing, the thinking, and just
stop literally pet them, play with them for two minutes.
And then they teach you the value of five minutes,
because five minutes every day added up to a long
time and ten years of a dog. Yeah, and that's
(26:44):
sort of the macro makes a stentil perspective that I
try to keep every day.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
When I read that piece, it reminded me. So I
have a dog right now who's six months old. His
name is Druke, and he's a German short hair. Yeah,
he's bred to high. He needs a mission, and oftentimes
his mission is, for example, pulling my computer monitor off
of my desk, which just a thirty two inch monitor,
(27:12):
shattering it into various pieces while also putting a gigantic
dent in the wood floor. And at first I'm just like,
oh my god, what have you done? But then it's like,
one day, this dog is not going to be pulling
down computer monitors, and you know what, I'm probably going
to miss that. And so it reminds you to just
be like, just enjoy the dog's personality now, because even though, yeah,
(27:35):
he pulls down some computer monitors, it's like he also
does all these other hilarious puppy things that are just amazing,
and I'm going to miss them one day.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
And the spontanighty is good too, Like if everything's going,
if everything in life went perfectly well, life would be
so boring we probably couldn't even take it. So to
have a puppy busting at computer screen and like making
you stop whatever it is you're doing in your day
to clean it up, there's something magical on that.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Too, totally. So when Carson got sick, you can tell
us what happened. I can't remember the specific details, but
you ed just take him to the er overnight. What
did you learn from that?
Speaker 2 (28:10):
I still don't know what to call out. I forget
what the name was.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
So when he gets anesthesia and gets put under, it
collapsed his whole stomach, lining his whole intestinal track, so
we didn't know that we're bringing him home. And then
within a few hours he starts crying and whimpering. And
he doesn't do that, like he doesn't even when he's
in pain, he doesn't cry that much.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
And it was like literally a heart tugging noise.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
And it was on the weekend after the surgery, so
the that clinic was closed, and then we drove him
to the er. It was literally a raining day. He
was in the back seat. We both felt like we
wanted to throw up. We felt so bad for him.
He can't put words to it. It doesn't make any
sense to him. He's suffering. I would gladly take that
suffering for him, and we get him there and luckily
(28:52):
they found out what it was, gave him the medicine,
got his stomach back on track. Now he just needs
a shot before he gets put under. But like I
genuinely believe that the philosopher Epictetus was actually a dog
in human's clothing, Like if a dog could speak, it
would be Epictetus.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
And he's one of my favorite thinkers.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
And just kind of like brutal, blunt voice, bringing you
immediately back down to the present moment, immediately to what
is within your control and what is not within your control.
Forget about what's not maximize what is That's the dog
And I tried to when I got back from that trip.
I was in the middle of studying Epictetes and a
specific quote he had sounds super morbid, and it kind
(29:35):
of is. But it's like, what harm is there if
you whisper to yourself at the moment you're kissing your
child to say tomorrow you'll die, And that is a
classic epictetis stoic exercise.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
It's not meant to be morbid.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
And I try to explain explore what that meant through Carson.
It doesn't mean don't care about it since you can't
control the life. It doesn't mean pull back and become
emotionally numb. I think it means the opposite. I think
it means use this reminder. This reminder of mortality is
a deliberate practice on the daily basis to reframe your
(30:11):
treatment of and your relationship with the people in your life.
And Carson having that near death experience, which like rip
this in two, is a verification of that quote. And
what it means to say tomorrow you will die is
to stop everything right now, appreciate not just the.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Dog, and that's the dog.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
The dog's gift to us with their mortality is to
remember to treat humans in our lives the same way,
with the same patience, because they too will die and
so will we. And I try to frame that with
that quote. I'm pretty sure that's probably what Epictetus meant.
Will never know, but it's probably as good a definition
as any.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Yeah, it's interesting because when you talk about that plundering
your own death or the death of others, like everything's
going to go a lot of people. To your point,
they do find that morbid. But I read about this
a little in The Comfort Crisis. I traveled to Bhutan
to write about the topic because they have a very
different relationship with death and contemplating it than we do.
(31:08):
But when I was doing research for that section a
chapter of the book, I came across this study. I
think it was conducted at Stanford. Don't quote me, but
they had these groups of people think about their own
death and their response was in the short term, that
(31:29):
was very uncomfortable. I did not like that at all.
But when they tracked them in the long term, they
ended up reporting higher levels of happiness because it had
changed their behavior in such a way that they realized, Oh,
this ride is going to end eventually, and I have
a choice of how I can write it. I can
enjoy this ride, I can like slow down, savor the
(31:50):
things I really love and get meaning from or not
more or less. So I do think there is some
good and I don't I'm not one of those people
that thinks we need a study behind everything to think
an idea is valid, not at all, but I do
think it, you know, sort of adds some scientific backing,
especially for the non believers.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
Yeah, that's the striking thing about what we've been talking about,
the philosophy of the dog, epic piteous the human dog.
But to your point, people have been thinking about this
for a long time. And one of my favorite thinkers
is Urban d Alums. He was an existential psychotherapist. So
he took existentialism, which is like a world of double
talking out there, what are you talking about, but applied
(32:30):
it to psychotherapy, so he grounded it in the concrete
world and he actually practiced. So to your point, he
used his actual case studies, had actual patients to write
this book and explore what existentialism meant. And he riffed
a lot on cancer patients, car accident survivors, you name it,
and articulated their monologue. They're in a monologue before the
(32:52):
incident and then after the incident, and how just that
brush of death changed everything. They quit the job they hated,
They ended the relations and ship that was toxic. They
stopped and literally just looked at a flower, whereas before
is hey, I got to get to my car, I
think at the work. I think it's done. I have
to go to the store, I have to come home. No, stop,
literally make a trip dedicated to just go look at
(33:13):
a flower or a butterfly at the park, and it's remarkable,
remarkable how much of a difference that can make. And
again that cuts through what we think is normal in
this world was constructed, which is a beautiful thing with
a lot of exceptional attributes, But that reminder of mortality
is a way to maximize it so that you can
still enjoy, like all the fruits of your labor and
get after life with as much passion as you want,
(33:35):
which I love doing. I love the speed, but at
the cost of the slowness and of the appreciation of
the gratitude, it almost doesn't worth it at that point.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
So it becomes an art of balancing the two.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
That's the dog, Yeah, exactly. You don't necessarily need the
brush with death, the car accident, the cancer, the tour
in Afghanistan. If you've got a dog, that's a reminder
right there, every single day.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Yeah, it's practice, it's a discipline, all right.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Man. Well, I appreciate you coming on. Give Carson a
pat for all of us.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Walk on.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
I appreciate the time, appreciate the conversation.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Now we are going to speak with doctor Nancy G.
She is the director for the Center for Human Animal
Interaction at Virginia Commonwealth University and she studies how dogs
can improve physical health and mental health. So we're going
to dive into all of the scientific details about why
dog ownership can be really, really good for you. Here's Nancy,
(34:37):
Doctor Nancy G. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5 (34:39):
Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
Here's where I want to start. In your Google Scholar profile,
you have yourself. Your photo is with a dog, which
I absolutely loved because I feel like most academics their
Google Scholar profile would be them in a white lab
coat or in a lab or something. But you're with
your dog. So what kind of dog or dog? Maybe
you have multiple dogs do you have?
Speaker 4 (35:03):
I have two dogs right now and they are both
miniature poodles. I have had Border Collies and a wide
range of other breeds. But the program I run, we
have sixty six therapy dogs in the program and they're
all different dog breeds, from Golden Retrievers down to multipools,
(35:24):
so every breed size you can imagine amazing.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Is there a certain type of breed that tends to
do well as a therapy dog?
Speaker 4 (35:33):
You know, it's a great question, and it all boils
down to the dog's temperament. So within any given breed,
you can have a range of temperaments. But generally speaking,
kind of the stereotypical therapy dog is going to be
that Golden retriever, golden doodle, labrador because generally speaking, these
dogs tend to be affiliative, and what that means is
(35:55):
that they like to visit with strangers. Not all dogs
really want to go up and have a stranger touch them,
and that's what it boils down to. Any dog can
do this. We've had Doberman's and pit bulls and breeds
that are stereotypically considered, you know, a little more fearful,
they're fear producing. But the reality is those dogs, many
(36:18):
of them, really do love to just interact with people
and have people pet them. And that's a unique quality
when you think about it. I mean, not very many
people want to go up to complete strangers and interact
with them, and so it is kind of a unique
quality and it isn't really breed specific.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
I love that. How did you start pairing psychiatry with dogs?
Speaker 5 (36:39):
So it kind of goes back a long time.
Speaker 4 (36:41):
So I'm a researcher by training, and years ago I
was doing dog sports and it's kind of a long story,
but a couple of my friends said, Hey, we're doing
a therapy dog evaluation. Your dogs would be great. Why
don't you bring your dogs and get them evaluated. So
I did and they passed, and now I have these
two registered there dogs.
Speaker 5 (37:00):
What am I going to do?
Speaker 4 (37:01):
So I started visiting with them a wide variety of
different populations, and I was seeing these kind of amazing effects.
I mean, you know, really kind of chilling in that,
you know, people get very emotional when they see some
of these interactions. And so as a scientist, I was thinking, well,
that's anecdotal, you know how much of that is real?
Speaker 5 (37:23):
And so I started doing research.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
I started doing experiments, and I've been finding out over
the course of about twenty five years that dogs really
do make a difference in a variety of ways in
the lives of humans.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
That's so interesting that it started with this observation then
a little bit of skepticism, but I have the background
to maybe figure out if there's some there there. I
feel like that's how most great scientific findings start.
Speaker 4 (37:51):
Well, you know, that's absolutely true. And that's where I
came from, is trying to apply the science to it.
And so I was doing randomized trials very early on,
and I was getting some neat results, which was really
kind of interesting and also affirming in that there is
something to this. It isn't just anecdote. And I think
it is that science, that body of evidence that legitimizes
(38:14):
these kinds of practices. And so we see, for instance,
therapy dogs in hospitals. We just completed three randomized control
trials in a hospital setting. So we were looking at
the sort of the most vulnerable populations, and we were
looking at people who are vulnerable to the dilitarious effects
of loneliness, and those are older adults, those with mental illness,
(38:36):
and hospitalized children.
Speaker 5 (38:38):
We just completed those studies and guess what.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
We found that the dogs actually do improve loneliness among
other measures that we included in those studies.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
Interesting, what did the people who were participants the patients report?
Did you talk to them at all? And what were
some of the things they found? And I guess what
how did you? I guess how did you measure the improvements?
As well?
Speaker 4 (38:59):
So we use standardized measures to begin with, So we
used some reliable and valid measures of loneliness, anxiety, depression,
and also mood. And we also collected some physiological measures
using essentially a riskwatch that collects a variety of different
(39:20):
kind of physiological outcomes. And we also collected saliva from
the children so that we could look at CITO kinds
and other measures of stress. So what did the participants say, Well,
it's really interesting when you think about this kind of research.
We're upfront with them right as part of the informed
consent process. We say this is a randomized trial. We've
got three conditions. One of them includes a dog. The
(39:42):
other two do not include a dog. And so one
of the things one of the challenges that we faced
is that the people always wanted the dog. So the
people who are willing to be in this kind of research,
they really do want to have the dog present. Now,
in fairness, they participated anyway, even if the dog wasn't
in their condition. We had very few dropouts, but people
really wanted that dog to come visit them while they
(40:05):
were in the hospital. These folks were all hospitalized for
five or more days. So this is where loneliness becomes
a real issue in these kind of chronic situations, and
it can be so important to intervene while they're in
the hospital.
Speaker 5 (40:20):
If we can reduce their loneliness, what we.
Speaker 4 (40:22):
May see and we don't know this yet, but what
we may see is better adherence to sort of follow up,
better compliance with their ongoing treatment, and perhaps more positive outcomes.
Right now, we know that we see these effects in
terms of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and mood in particular was
altered by the presence of the dog.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
What do we know generally about the physical health impacts
of dog ownership?
Speaker 4 (40:50):
So dog ownership is a little bit different, right, So
what we did was an interaction study. So again, this
is what I was talking about earlier. These are dogs
that go and interact with complete strangers, right, But dog
ownership itself is a little bit different. There's some neat
research out there that shows that, for instance, dog owners
tend to have lower blood pressure, lower risk of cardiovascular disease,
(41:12):
improved mood. There's one study about individuals who adopted pets
that showed that they reported fewer health complaints after adopting
a pet. And there's some really neat research that happened
years ago by Erica Friedman She looked at individuals who
had a heart attack, and she was doing research on
a wide variety of things, and basically she gave them
(41:34):
a questionnaire, you know, on a whole bunch of things,
and one of those questions was do you own a pet?
And then she followed up with them one year later
and guess what, the pet owners were more likely to
be alive one year later than the non pet owners,
particularly the dog owners.
Speaker 5 (41:52):
And so here's the problem with pet ownership research.
Speaker 4 (41:55):
People want to pick their own pets, and you know,
researchers want to as sign people to conditions, right, so
we get a selection bias in a lot of pet
ownership research. Now, there are some studies out there where
people have been assigned to either own a pet or not,
but they tend to be small samples and they tend
to use quite unique populations. For example, there was a
(42:18):
study done in Korea where they assigned people to care
for crickets, so they became cricket owners, and over an
eight week period of time, they found out that depression
scores were decreased and there were some other need improvements
over just adopting and caring for crickets. Wow, so we
do think that pet ownership can be beneficial.
Speaker 5 (42:40):
But here's the fundamental question.
Speaker 4 (42:42):
Do healthy people choose to own pets or do pets
make people healthy? That's the part that's really hard to
tease out.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
Does the study on the people who had heart attacks?
Does that seem to suggest that there's some there there
more or less because we're starting fundamentally with a population
that's unhealthy, you.
Speaker 5 (43:03):
Know, it's a great question.
Speaker 4 (43:04):
And so a lot more research has been done since then,
and the American Heart Association actually issued a statement evaluating
all of the existing research and basically saying that pen ownership,
particularly dog ownership, is associated with and probably causally associated
with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, adding that word
(43:27):
causal in there. That's a big deal for that kind
of thing to be issued from the American Heart Association.
And so there is some evidence to indicate that that
dog ownership, particularly dog ownership, is beneficial for cardiovascular health.
We don't know what that's due to. Is it because
dog owners are more likely to take their dogs for
walks and we know that walking is good for you?
(43:48):
Is it that we need to care for another living being,
you know, a dog?
Speaker 5 (43:53):
They force it to freedom.
Speaker 4 (43:55):
You know, they say, hey, it's time for food, it's
time for me.
Speaker 5 (43:58):
To go out. They force you to get up. In fact,
I did a study with some great.
Speaker 4 (44:03):
Researchers up in Scotland and we looked at older adults
and older adults who had dogs. They experienced fewer sedentary
events during the day.
Speaker 5 (44:14):
And sitting is kind of the new smoking, right, Sitting
is not good for us. We need to get up
and move around.
Speaker 4 (44:20):
They also walked more, and they walked faster, and so
there is some evidence that having a dog can be
a very healthy choice.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Well, it's interesting because my mom is she's now. I
don't know if she may disown me for giving her age,
but I'll just say she's in her late seventies. That
we won't put a firm number on it. She got
a dog maybe six years ago, five years ago. And
one it made her far more active. You know, her
step counts easily doubled. Two, it gave her a routine.
(44:51):
So she was kind of winding down into retirement. So
as she had this job that was somewhat high pressure,
her entire life that goes away. But now she a dog.
That to your point about routines. Oh, I got to
feed it, I gotta take it for walks. Oh I
got to go get it to go to a bath.
Like that, this routine gets inserted that keeps her active
but also gives her I guess I would use a
sort of sense of purpose. And then to layer on
(45:13):
top of that, she's met so many new people through
that dog. She goes she's got a doodle, She goes
to doodle meetups in Las Vegas. One of her current
best friends is someone she met through the dog.
Speaker 5 (45:25):
Yeah. You know, dogs are kind of the great leveler.
Speaker 4 (45:29):
You know, you're you're willing to risk interacting with somebody
you don't know just because they have a dog.
Speaker 5 (45:35):
And you see people doing this all the time. They'll
pull out their phone.
Speaker 4 (45:37):
And I've got a doodle too, and they start showing
you a photo on their phone of their dog, and
we start having these interactions and you know, So, we've
done some research on older adults and pet ownership, and
one of the things that we see is as people age,
pet ownership.
Speaker 5 (45:52):
Drops off, and so that is a little bit problematic.
Speaker 4 (45:55):
But for those older adults who do retain their pets,
we also see a greater retention of cognition and physical functioning,
and so that's kind of an important finding.
Speaker 5 (46:08):
If you can support.
Speaker 4 (46:09):
Older adults to maintain their pets as they age, it's
actually it seems to be really good for them in
terms of cognition and physical function.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
How important is the I believe in one of your
studies you might have used the word motivation, just in
the sense that sometimes when people retire. I feel like
you read reports where you know they might have worked,
they sort of had purpose and motivation every day, and
then that sometimes can kind of disappear. You know, It's
like the first couple weeks of retirement, you're like, this
is great, I don't have to do anything, But then
after that you go, oh, I don't have to do anything.
(46:42):
How important are talks for that and how does that
play out?
Speaker 4 (46:45):
You know, it can be very important, and so we've
talked about it as being kind of a reson vetre right,
a reason for living. And with for instance, older adults,
when when one of the couple passes away the other one,
if they have a pet, they experience a shortened grieving process,
and so there is something to be said for the
(47:05):
pet helping them to recover from that grieving process.
Speaker 5 (47:09):
We're also very.
Speaker 4 (47:10):
Much aware that older adults or individuals who are considering
suicide will say, I won't do that because I have
to be there to take care of the dog, and
so that can also be very impactful, the fact that
they will not commit suicide because they have to take
care of the dog. If you can get them through
(47:30):
that period, that's amazing and incredibly beneficial.
Speaker 5 (47:35):
Now, we also have.
Speaker 4 (47:36):
To consider that pets are not a panacea, though you know,
there are downsides to pet ownership too. For instance, pets
don't live as long as we do, and so losing
a pet can be very emotionally impactful, or caring for
a sick pet can be very challenging as well, particularly
if you know that things aren't ultimately going to go
well with whatever disease that pet is dealing with. And
(47:59):
for older dogs else we have to also be concerned
about risks of falling. Now here's where it gets a
little bit tricky, because older adults who walk their dogs
and who get out there and do things with their
dogs have a lower risk of falling. However, we do
have to be concerned about older adults in the home,
perhaps perhaps tripping over a pet and falling.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
Yeah, or having a one hundred and twenty pound dog
who likes to pull on the leash when it's someone
who weighs who is I don't know, eighty and weighs
one hundred and thirty pounds or something, and it.
Speaker 4 (48:29):
Can pull their arm out of the socket or feel
that way, that could be very challenging.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
Yeah, what do we know about dog ownership or interventions
on dogs and mental health.
Speaker 4 (48:40):
So actually, we've written an entire book on this is
published by the American Psychiatric Association.
Speaker 5 (48:45):
It's a wonderful book.
Speaker 4 (48:46):
And what we did is we paired researchers in human
animal interaction with psychiatrists, and each of the chapters in
this book are really about various aspects of the ways
in which animals, most stuffen dogs but not always can
be involved in the treatment of mental illness. But the
reality is there's some great evidence out there to indicate
(49:08):
that involving a dog in the treatment of mental illness
can be beneficial. Other species are also involved, so for instance,
there's equine therapy. Other kinds of animals have been used
in classrooms in a variety of settings to help.
Speaker 5 (49:22):
With that issue. Of motivation. I used to work with
preschool kids, and I'll tell you what.
Speaker 4 (49:26):
Preschool kids become highly motivated when there's a dog in
the room.
Speaker 5 (49:30):
And they are very willing.
Speaker 4 (49:32):
To raise their hand and practice turn taking and follow
the rules and listen to instructions when there's a dog present.
And so there is something kind of special and unique
about having a dog in these various situations to kind
of move things along, to sort of provide social lubrication
if you want to get somebody to open up and
(49:53):
talk more. Oftentimes with kids, they're more willing to talk
to a dog than to their therapist. So the therapist
could perhaps, you know, say would you mind telling the
dog what's going on?
Speaker 5 (50:06):
And they will. And this was sort.
Speaker 4 (50:09):
Of discovered years and years ago, how just bringing a
dog into therapeutic situation can help a client to relax
and assuming of course that they like dogs, help them
to relax and open up. And so there is something
very sort of impactful about having that kind of key
if you will, to sort of getting them to open
(50:31):
up and participate. By the way, they also they'll show
up on time. Kids who are in school programs, they'll
go wake their parents up. Hey, we can't be late
to school today because I know there's a dog there.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
You know, what do we think is going on? Why
does this happen with dogs in particular, and does it
play out for cats too? I know the cat people
are going, Oh, Michael, you always just harp on how
much you love dogs. You never talk about cats, So
what's up with cats as well?
Speaker 4 (51:00):
Let me ask Let me answer the first question first,
what's going on?
Speaker 5 (51:04):
Why is this happening?
Speaker 4 (51:05):
Well, there's a number of proposed reasons for why it's happening.
One is simple biophilia, and that means that we are
drawn to nature and natural things, and so that's a possibility.
Another one is that dogs may help us to reduce
our stress. And so if that's true, for example, we've
seen decreases in blood pressure and cortisol and increases in oxytocin,
(51:29):
that kind of bonding feel good hormone. If that's what's happening,
then that freezes us up to use our cognitive resources
for other things. So, for instance, dogs may be beneficial
for things like test anxiety, because if the dog can
help that person to relax, then what can happen is
that frees up all that thinking they don't have to.
Speaker 5 (51:51):
Worry about, oh, I'm going to do terrible on this test.
Speaker 4 (51:54):
Instead they can actually start thinking about the questions on
the test and perform well. So it could be stress reduction,
it could be attachment. Particularly for our own dogs, that
the power of attachment can be very important. We need
attachment figures in our lives, and dogs can meet sort
of the requirements for an attachment figure. So, particularly for
older adults whose social networks are decreasing, it may be
(52:18):
beneficial to have that dog as sort of an intermediate
attachment figure. And then you see that you start meeting
other people through dog ownership, and it can help to
rebuild those social circles a little bit. So lots of
potential reasons for why it's happening.
Speaker 1 (52:34):
I feel like, especially with I guess what you would
call weak ties, people who you just kind of seeing
your neighborhood. You have small conversations with them, but it's
not like you're, you know, seeing them on the weekends
going to dinner. I feel like dogs especially help with that.
So we have I mentioned we have the German short airpointer,
and there's another couple in our neighborhood that also has
a German short hair pointer. So whenever we see them,
(52:55):
we're going to stop and talk to them for five
to ten minutes. You know, this happens maybe once a week,
but it's like these small little moments with other people.
I feel like those get overlooked, but they often really
count for our emotional health, our mental health, and all
these different things like that.
Speaker 4 (53:11):
Absolutely, what you're talking about is social capital. And so
walking in the neighborhood, people don't necessarily know my name,
but they might know my dog's name, and they might
come over to chat with me just to talk about
the dog. And there are other poodle owners in the neighborhood,
and likewise, you know, we stop and chat and let
the dogs interact.
Speaker 5 (53:29):
But it also it can build from there.
Speaker 4 (53:31):
So for instance, your neighbors might say, Hey, we're going
to go out of town, would you mind watching our
dogs while we're out of town, And so you start
to build greater connections with people in your neighborhood. The
other thing that happens in neighborhoods where people walk their
dogs is the dogs provide kind of an informal surveillance
in the neighborhood and the neighborhood is perceived as safer,
(53:54):
and so it draws people out. More people will communicate
with one another. So it really can kind of help
to build those ties that may build into something more,
or it could be at the level of, you know, hey,
here comes Ali's mom, right, and we chat about Ali
for a while, and that's okay. But the point is
it is helping people to connect. And going back really
(54:16):
quick to your question about cats versus dogs, So, first
of all, with cats, there's just less research.
Speaker 5 (54:23):
We have far more research.
Speaker 4 (54:25):
In fact, the lion's share of research in this area
involves dogs, and there's lots of reasons for that, but
not least of which a dog is highly trainable and
is willing to go into hospital environments.
Speaker 5 (54:35):
And you know, zoonotic disease transmission is.
Speaker 4 (54:38):
Very well understood in dogs, so we can safely take
them into hospital situations because we can prevent kind of
the zoonotic disease transmission through some simple behaviors. But with cats,
some of the research does not bear out with cats
as it does with dogs. So, for instance, the pet
ownership research that I was talking about before, we see
(55:00):
some really nice decreases in blood pressure and cortisol and
some of that things that doesn't necessarily bear itself out
with cats. Particularly in that study that I mentioned that
Erica Friedman conducted where she looked to see if people
were alive a year later. That was true for dog owners,
but it wasn't true for cat owners. And so what
(55:22):
I would have to say is we can't draw conclusions.
There's just not enough evidence. We need more research with cats,
and we need bigger studies with cats in order to
be able to draw some real conclusions. Right now, we've
got some very solid evidence with dogs and a little
bit of evidence with cats.
Speaker 1 (55:40):
Okay, that makes sense. I think one thing that's interesting too,
is that all of this communication, the relationship that you
have with the dog is totally nonverbal. Right. You can
tell them stay whatever, but they're not going to talk back.
And it's really interesting, though, how you can still communicate
with your dog and they can communicate with you. My
dog will tell me what he wants, what he wants
(56:02):
to do, And I just think that's fascinating that we're
not speaking to each other, but we kind of know
what's going on with each other.
Speaker 4 (56:09):
You know, if you think about kind of the process
of domestication and selection, of dogs from their ancestors, which
are predominantly gray wolves, and the.
Speaker 5 (56:20):
Wide variety of breeds that we have from that.
Speaker 4 (56:22):
But if you think about that process, what's happened is
that dogs have become highly adept at reading our social cues.
They're also pretty good at telling time, so they have
ideas about when it's time to go to bed or
you know, when it's time to go for a walk.
And if you say those words, I kind of glanced
to the side because my dog's here and I just
said that word that.
Speaker 5 (56:42):
We normally spell.
Speaker 4 (56:43):
By the way, they do pick up on some of
those words, and some dogs do have a pretty good
vocabulary in terms of picking up on words that you say.
But you're absolutely right, the dogs do not speak English.
They don't come back to us and say, mom, I
would like to go for a walk, right, not what
they do. But yet they do communicate pretty clearly what
(57:04):
their needs are. For instance, with my dogs, I put
sleigh bells on the doors, so when they have to
go out, they go ring the bell, and you know,
like a good maid or butler, I.
Speaker 5 (57:14):
Go running over and open the door to take them out.
Speaker 1 (57:16):
Yeah, we do the same, and it's funny what you
say about time. We had a German short hair who
you can tell a fame. We love short hairs who
passed away. But this dog knew what time it was
all the time. It would be right, does the clock
hit five, he'd perk up like it was dinner time.
Same at seven am. It was just hilarious. It would
(57:37):
drive us nuts, but it was just such a lovable
trait he had.
Speaker 4 (57:40):
Well, you know, and their senses are so different from
our own. So you know, for instance, when my partner
comes home, the sound of the car, the sound of
the door, I think the dogs hear that, right, they
hear the sound. They can smell things beyond what we
can smell. Our noses are virtually useless compared to what
(58:01):
they can smell, and so they have their ability to sense,
I think really helps them to appear to have a
far better understanding of the situation, largely because like, oh,
here comes mom, and they know right, they can tell.
Speaker 1 (58:16):
Yeah, I'm sure with my dog it was okay. He
stopped working about an hour ago. He did this. He
did this, Oh, dinner usually happens sometime in this arena.
Whatever happens, and.
Speaker 5 (58:27):
What clothes you put on.
Speaker 4 (58:28):
Yeah, you know, if you put on the work suit right,
then the dog knows, oh, they're gone to work, and
they behave differently than if you put on the clothes
to go outside for a walk or to hang out
on a Saturday.
Speaker 5 (58:40):
They do pick up on these cues.
Speaker 1 (58:43):
Yeah, are there any studies where dogs have been brought
into retirement homes? And absolutely, and one of those found.
Speaker 4 (58:50):
So wide variety of things, but for instance, there's lots
of visitation programs to retirement homes, and so they see
things like reductions in depression for some older adults, particularly
those with memory problems, on the days the therapy dogs
are going to be there. Those older adults are very
good at orienting to time and place. Are the dogs
(59:11):
coming today? When will they be here? That can really
sort of help them to orient. They're also more verbal,
they're more willing to talk and open up. And with
some older adults, we start to see issues with regard
to calorie consumption. So they begin to lose weight and
so we need them to eat more. And so one
of the things that they did is they put an
(59:32):
aquarium in the dining area at a retirement home and
they found that simply having the aquarium in there got
the older adults to consume more calories because they stayed
longer and they watched the fish and they ate more food. Interesting,
and so there's some really neat, neat studies. One study
(59:53):
did some things like having the older adults do some
basic dog care, brush the dog, put a collar on them,
and that's really good for helping them with fine motor skills.
So a wide variety of different kinds of studies have
been done showing some really neat results of those.
Speaker 5 (01:00:10):
Animal visitation programs.
Speaker 4 (01:00:11):
And I should mention that although therapy dogs are the
largest number of therapy animals, there are other kinds of
therapy animals. There're therapy cats and therapy bunnies and therapy
lamas for instance.
Speaker 1 (01:00:24):
That's great. Who should not get a dog.
Speaker 4 (01:00:28):
A person who doesn't have time, yeah, and a person
who does not have the resources to care for the dog.
So if you're working sixty hours a week, don't get
a dog. These dogs are social animals. They want to
be with you. And so if you don't have the
time to welcome a family member into your family, and
it's not a good time to get a dog. And
(01:00:49):
I think people need to do an honest evaluation of that.
You know, am I at a good space to have
a dog? Am I going to be able to be
there to spend time with these social animal? And do
I have the financial resources to take them to the
vet and buy them the food and the toys and
all of those sorts of things need to be considered
when you're thinking about getting a dog.
Speaker 1 (01:01:11):
Yeah, but if you do have the time and the resources,
it seems like a pretty good idea for your health.
And what I thought was interesting when we started is
that the dogs that you work with, they're all different breeds,
So it's not like you have to single out a
specific breed. It's like pick one you want, pick one
that seems friendly, and you're good to go.
Speaker 4 (01:01:29):
Do your research, you know, find out what kind of
a dog is going to fit your lifestyle. For instance,
if you have a very sedentary lifestyle and you're not
going out in the world, or maybe you live in
a small apartment, you probably don't want that border collie r.
A border collie wants to run and wants a job
and really needs to be active and working with their
handler a lot.
Speaker 5 (01:01:51):
So maybe what you want to do is get a
small dog.
Speaker 4 (01:01:54):
There are some great dogs that are sort of considered
lap dogs that would be great for an apartment if
you're if you have allergies, you want to think about
getting you know, what kind of pet can I have
that would.
Speaker 5 (01:02:06):
Suit my allergies?
Speaker 4 (01:02:07):
And there's no such thing as a hypoallergenic animal. But
the reality is that some of those curly coated breeds,
like poodles, they tend to keep the dander close to
the skin rather than releasing it into the environment. So
people react less to non shedding breeds and particularly curly
coated breeds. But again, find out, go visit that kind
(01:02:29):
of dog and make sure that your allergies can tolerate them.
Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
When we so we're on our second German short hair
pointer and we had a trainer come help us, and
you know, we called her before we got them. We're
getting a German short hair pointer. And she goes, do
you know what you're getting into? He said, yes, we
know exactly what we're getting into. We know they're absolutely nuts.
They need a mission, they need to be run, they
need a lot of exercise. But we love them for.
Speaker 4 (01:02:53):
That absolutely, And that's true of every dog. Right finding
out what that dog needs, and then meeting the.
Speaker 5 (01:03:01):
Dog where they are.
Speaker 4 (01:03:02):
You know. For example, I think some people are very
well meaning when they meet a dog for the first
time and they do that pat the dog on the
top of the head. I have yet to meet a
dog that wants to be patted on the top of
the head, right.
Speaker 5 (01:03:14):
They love to be scratched behind the ears.
Speaker 4 (01:03:15):
And the point is find out what the dog likes,
you know, what makes that dog happy and excited, and
do that with your dog a lot. And what's neat
about it is that makes us feel good. We feel
really good inside when we do things that make our
dog feel good, which is kind of neat.
Speaker 1 (01:03:33):
I love that. Our final question, and this one's kind
of a strange one. We're gonna flip the tables a
little bit. Let's say the dog is the psychiatrist. What
do you think dogs would prescribe to humans to be well.
Speaker 5 (01:03:45):
Live in the moment, Live in the moment. This is
such a good lesson from dogs.
Speaker 4 (01:03:51):
They live in the here and now, and so much
of what troubles humans is worrying about things that are
not in the here and the now or aren't as
pressing in the moment. And if we can live in
the moment. If we can take time to smell the flowers,
we don't necessarily have to smell other dogs.
Speaker 5 (01:04:12):
Behind right like a dog would.
Speaker 4 (01:04:14):
But the point is if we enjoy those sensory experiences
and really live in the moment, I think that would
be a dog's advice to us.
Speaker 1 (01:04:24):
I love it well, Nancy, thanks so much for joining us.
I really enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker 5 (01:04:29):
Thank you so much for having me. This has been
a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (01:04:34):
Welcome back. We're going to end the show, but before
we do, I got some final words about dogs and
keeping them healthy this summer. Summer is heating up. Turns
out the dogs are not as able to cool themselves
as us humans are. So humans are actually really unique
as species because we're so good at cooling ourselves. This
is because we are not covered in fur. We also
(01:04:54):
stand upright so the sun doesn't hit us as intensely,
and we also sweat. Now dogs they have known of this.
They're covered in fur, which is insulating, and they also
don't sweat. They have to cool themselves by panting. Not
to mention, they are down horizontally on the ground, so
they get hit with a lot more sunlight. So I
(01:05:16):
want you to think of it like this. Their situation
in the heat would be like if you were to
cover yourself in anti pursprint and put on a winter
coat and then just sort of crawl around the ground.
You get really hot on a hot day. So dogs
can overheat at temperatures that are surprisingly not that hot
for US ninety degrees eighty degrees, those can be really
(01:05:36):
hot and dangerous temperatures for dogs. So what does that
tell us? What should you do this summer? First and foremost,
if you are taking your dog out in the summer
and you feel like it's hot, like you're getting a
bit overheated, that is definitely definitely happening to your dog.
So my main advice for taking dogs out in the
summer is to do so early in the morning or
(01:05:59):
after the sun has gone down. That is going to
be the number one thing you can do to make
sure your dog stays healthy. If you happen to be
out and your dog does start to pant excessively or
stumble a bit, you want to get that dog immediately
in some shade, give them some water, maybe give them
some ice chips, just get them out of direct heat
and not moving as much. You do those things, and
(01:06:21):
you'll be able to keep your best friend healthy all summer.
That is all we got for you today. Thank you
as always for checking out the show. We're in your
feeds twice a week. And if you want to send
us a question for our Ask Michael Anything section, we
would love that Email it to media at twpct dot
com or just drop it in the comments. We would
(01:06:41):
love voice memos as questions and also video questions. We
would love to run those. We'll answer as many of
your questions as we can do. Not forget to subscribe,
and as always, have fun, don't die. And I'm going
to add one more thing. Love dogs
Welcome to two percent. I'm your host, Michael Easter. In
today's episode is all about dogs, which is why I
have my best buddy Duke with me right here. So
Duke is a eight month old German short hair pointer.
He hangs out with me all day. He goes with
me everywhere. I have owned dogs my entire life and
I am an absolute and utter dog person. Love dogs.
(00:40):
So first off, we are going to talk to Sam Alima.
Sam is a Navy seal who is also a big
dog fanatic. And what's interesting about Sam is he writes
a lot at his substack called what Then about the
philosophy of dogs and how dogs can help us become
better humans and give us a philosophy of living day
(01:01):
to day. After that, we're gonna talk to doctor Nancy
g She is a researcher who studies the physical and
mental health benefits of dog ownership. So she's gonna get
into all the details about why owning a dog is
really really good for you. So with all that said,
we're gonna get into the episode. We're gonna let Duke
(01:22):
go off and chase a squirrel or whatever he's gonna do.
After this, we've got a good episode though, So let's
get into it all right. Now, we're gonna bring on
Sam Alimo. Samlimo is a dog lover first and foremost.
He is a former Navy seal and then he got
his masters at Columbia and he now runs the what
then Substack, which is one of my favorite reads. And
(01:42):
on his what then Substack he writes a lot about
the philosophy of having a dog and what we all
can learn about living better from dogs. So let's bring
him on now. Sam, thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
I appreciate it. Thank you. Michael.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Well, we're here to talk dog, so we obviously got
to start with you your priors. You have a dog.
Was his name? Is it a him?
Speaker 3 (02:04):
It's a him, and it's a carson. He's a mutt.
We have no idea what he is. We just know
he's like ridiculously good looking. His shizzle jaw, the shape,
the colors, the eyes, the compact pause, everything about him awesome.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
How big? Uh?
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Sixty two pounds.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
Oh that's a big guy. I've seen photos of him
on your substack. I was thinking you were going to say,
like forty five fifty.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Now he's lean, he's muscle, He gets a lot of rocking,
a lot of walking.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Awesome. When did you get him? So?
Speaker 3 (02:31):
My girlfriend actually had him early and he and I
are first met twenty eighteen, so we've been together for
a while now.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Awesome. That's rad. Did you have dogs growing up?
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah? I grew up.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
We had a sheep dog. We had an Australian shepherd dog.
And then when I was I guess starting from middle school,
we had we had shit suos and like to this day,
there's still my favorite dog breed shit zoos.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, they're actually very sweet. You see. I feel like
people can see him and they kind of like, what
is It's this fu fou thing? But they're actually awesome.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Yeah, especially when they started apping, You're like what are
you doing? But then you realize the size of the
soul of a shitsu. So they're tiny. They don't know
how small they are. Like for how small they are,
they're literally bare knuckle fighters. They will take on any
dog ten times a size and they don't care. They
will throw down. So they're the most spirited dogs. They
have the most personality of any dog I've ever seen.
(03:22):
I love them my best friend. When I was a
kid growing up in Utah. He had a shitsu. His
name was Puddles.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
I'm gonna let you take a single guess why its
name was Puddles. But this dog would They lived on
this relatively busy road. It was like a thirty mile
an hour road, and this dog would chase cars and
just you ap at them and bite their tires. I
think it got hit five or six times, and then
finally on the seventh it all ended. But the dog
(03:50):
was like thirteen on that final one. I mean, this
dog was just bad ass.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
That's relentless. You can't train that. That's by nature. The
shitsu is that way.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, this is my road, bitch, Get off it. Awesome?
All right. So you're a former seal? Correct when did
you join? How old were you? I was.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Nineteen, and I wanted to be a seal since I
was fourteen, So that was like my five year preparation
before I actually got to sign the paper and make
it happen.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Why at fourteen did you want to become a seal?
What was it about that?
Speaker 2 (04:31):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Early in life I had a sort of awakening or
hammer strike, however you want to refer to it, where
I think I realized at a young age how short
life can be. And I felt, even at fourteen, like
I was on a trajectory that I didn't exactly author myself.
And I realized I had a choice right now. If
you can question everything to the point where you have
(04:54):
no idea what the point of life is at fourteen,
it means you have the innate to build it.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
If you could break it down, you can build it up.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
And I said, Okay, what's the most difficult thing I
can do that would get my mind and my body engaged.
So I did at that time, like a primitive Google search,
and I came up with Navy Seals.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
I didn't know anybody in the military and knew nothing
about them.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
I just said, that's it, and from that day forward,
every single day push ups, reading, swimming, running, rocking every day.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Then that was how I built my life.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
That's awesome. The reading part is interesting. What prompted the
reading thing? Because I think most people would see seals
and then they do that initial Google and then they
click images and it's a photo selection or something. So
why the reading.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
I think you'll find I think you know a lot
of the guys.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
There's a particular draw to communities like that where it's
not just hey, I like to lift waists and drink beer.
It is the whole human effect. It's how do you
excel not just physiologically but psychologically. How do you excel emotionally?
How do you excel intellectually? Even the enlisted community and
(06:03):
the seal teams more than half have bachelor's degrees. That's
not normal. So you get a four year degree and
then you enlist in the military become a seal. It's
trying to max out that full spectrum of the human experience.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Do you feel like that that feature of being I'll
use the word intellectual gets selected for in the process
of selection, where it's someone who has read, read a lot,
thought a lot, can maybe dissociate more with the physical
suffering that happens in the selection process and not get
basically tossed out by it or what.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
That's a good question.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
The intellectual was the best word I picked off the cuff.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
I may not be the best word overall.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
There's a difference between the intellectualism of multiple IBE league
degrees and the intellectualism of being acutely aware of your
presence and reality, of the working of your mind, of
your assumptions about your capacity to handle an extremely difficult situation,
(07:03):
about how you read the person you're in a fire
team with, about how you read the enemy, about how
you read intelligence.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
And that is a super.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Mindfully engaged to tune whatever you want to call it,
sort of intellectualism that is one percent selected for deliberately.
It just so happens that the people who have that
capacity are also drawn to the world of books, the
world of ideas, and not so much schooling as they
are education. Schooling has often gone awry, but education almost
never goes wrong, and they generally in that direction.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, that makes sense. And you did tours in Afghanistan.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Right, I did a couple of tours.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Yeah, how long were you over there?
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Was there twenty ten, eleven, twelve, and thirteen?
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Okay, And a lot of these places were you were
kind of in the middle of nowhere. These are like
pre state places.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Straight up pre state. And that's where kind of a
lot of my writing originated. It was a exposure to
to a legitimate pre state. Where I was, they didn't
think of themselves as Afghany. They thought of themselves as.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Part of their village. And the villages there were.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Maybe fifty people, and then you would have this mountainous
tribal land, and the mountains are like beautifully crisscross by
river valleys. So the mountains are like these stark brown,
reddish rock. And then in the middle in these river
valleys is a thin, muddy river and this lost green zone, almond, pomegranate, rice,
(08:28):
ancient crops, beautiful little little mud pathways going in and
out of them, the crisscross. And the people live in
that place with no electricity, there's no plumbing. Most of
them don't have vehicles. None of the roads are paved.
There's no cell phones, there's no cell coverage. It is
literally as pre state as it gets. If Alexander the
(08:49):
Great had set foot in that river valley, he would say, Wow,
nothing changed. It was a mind blowing experience and probably
the most beautiful place I've ever seen in my life,
because you can smell the air, but there was no pollution,
and at night there was no light pollution, so that
the milky way you literally reach out and like grab
the milky way, like every color of red and yellow
and white was. I called it like Middle Earth, like
(09:12):
it reminded me of some fantasy land that existed twenty
thousand years ago, all.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Right, So you get out of the sales and then
you went to business school at Columbia pretty quickly.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Right, Yeah, So to make that happen, since I enlisted
when I was nineteen, I had to do my degree online,
So I did that while I was in. It's you
could do it if you don't sleep for four years
and work on the weekends. So I got my undergrad
degree online while I was in and then with about
a year left, I had to decide am I going
to stay at the military path or am I going
(09:44):
to get out? So I had the opportunity to go
to a different unit, the seal teams, or go to
Columbia to get my master's. And you know, the tours
were my tours were very kinetic. I think I checked
every boxed and wanted the check plus money. I didn't
want to and it was time to move on for
a new adventure.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
And that was it.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Interesting. So you go from the world that is one
kinetic and two like Middle Earth into Manhattan? What was
that transition like, not to mention you're in a classroom.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Yeah, it was almost enough to break me.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
Like I could admit that now and at the time
it was even harder, not just due to the transition
and that shift between two different worlds, but I was
also doing with like health stuff. I didn't realize it
took me a few years to figure that out, but
it was all our immune problems, which I'm still dealing
with today, and it's now kind of shaped my life
into a very narrow channel. And I made the mistake
(10:38):
of attributing much of the psychological and existential torment I
was going through to mental weakness as opposed to a
physiological problem.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
So I made it worse.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
I like literally cascaded it, and just that learning experience
itself was Yeah, it was good.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
It was eye opening.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
I'm sure Hewson was it. The ended up getting a dog.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
It was a while, so Carson was probably the first
one I had since going to the military. But through
the military, my family dog, Gerdy Shitsu.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
She was sort of like my anchor.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
And it's difficult to describe.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
You go, there's a great.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Ethnography on the marine Jaggers, the Norwegian Navy seals. I
got to work with a couple of guys that are
really good dudes, and the author embedded herself with the
marine Niggers and really summed up that world beautifully. She said,
Marine naggers and other soft or combat units, they live
on the margin. And then the margin is everything civilization
(11:44):
doesn't want to talk about or see. That's the violence,
that's the death, the dying, the killing, the suffering, the
training for war. Extremely hyper masculine environment, all all the time,
high risk. And when you experience that environment, I found
like an equal and opposite reaction to explore the other half.
(12:06):
And that was great to me, Like what is the
most absolute pure essence of just goodness and love and loyalty, unquestioned, unconditional.
So the deeper I got in the deployments, the deeper
I got in that change that was.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Occurring within me. She was like the anchor for me.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
That was the thing that cut through both those worlds,
that primeval world I was living in a civilized world.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
It no longer knew I had to deal with.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
And she this thirteen pound shitsu who had eyes looking
in two different directions and extremely crooked teeth. She was
like a goddess to me, like she led me through
this thing. And she passed after my last tour, which
was absolutely gut wrenching, but like to this day, I
still feel it as if she's still here. That's the
power that these dogs can have.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Over us totally. I mean, when I got sober, one
of the first things I did was get a dog,
and this guy who was helping me get sober goes, well,
I don't know if you're in the headspace for that,
but you know, maybe he'll help you. And I'll tell
you what, man like that dog. It gave me a
mission and it gave me something to focus on other
(13:14):
than myself. It was like, I can't drink again because
I got to take care of this dog, and that
like gave me a focus that sort of put me
on the right track. And I mean that dog literally
saved my life.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Did you did you grow up with dogs or was
that your first introduction?
Speaker 1 (13:28):
That was my second dog. I grew up with the dog.
It's funny because you said your dog was an anchor.
I had this dog when I was a kid. He
was a Fox Terrier and my I don't know my dad,
he's ever been around, but my mom would travel about
a third of the year for work, so I had
this like rotating cast of nannies. As a kid. I'd
have a new nanny like every year or two. So
(13:51):
I was always having to figure out how to adapt
to all these different people. But I had this dog,
and that was like the that was the thing that
was always in the house, right, So that dog was
sort of like the anchor for me, like this thing's
always going to be here, and so we got we
got pretty tight too.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
That's awesome. That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
I feel like dogs for people in the military who've
seen combat and come back and have any sort of struggle,
I feel like there's a lot of things that help,
but I feel like dogs are kind of a common thing.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
And what's nice too is when you have a dog
over there, the military working dogs, they're just they're like
super dogs. They're like nieches over man, but in dog form.
But it's still nice, Like they're still therapeutic, even though
they could repeat the shreds in a fraction of a second.
They're just to have that like simple little four legged
being there that no matter what happens, no matter how
(14:39):
bad the firefight, no matter how boring the winner happens
to be, they're.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Just ready to go.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
They're bright eyed, Like I could look at their eyes
and say, all right, what am I being weak about?
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Let's go work out. This dog's ready to go.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
It's like the perpetual motion machine, the perpetual happiness machine.
They're just like the ultimate consistent reminder, Hey, don't be
a loser, Like, hey, be a better human being at
all times.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
It is the best thing in the world.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Why do you think that is that they give us
this reminder to be a better human being.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
I don't think it'd be too far of a stretch
to say that there's been coevolution happening, and at a
deeper level than like science has been able to put
into words yet, Like, if you think about it, we
domesticated dogs before we domesticated wheat and figs and grapes
twenty thousand years ago or more. That's as far as
we know. It could even be longer back agricultures ten
(15:27):
thousand years.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
So what does that mean.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
It's like four hundred, five hundred human generations, five hundred
human generations. We can't even remember four generations ago. So
if we've been living with dogs for five hundred generations,
we got to think about what is the impact there?
Speaker 4 (15:41):
Now?
Speaker 3 (15:41):
When I point my finger, Carson knows what that means.
If I point my elbow, he doesn't know what that means.
So there's something that are going on. But that's like
merely physical. There's the existential component as well. And I
wrote a piece about this, and like the theory was
that you have this world. We live in this list world,
(16:01):
and it's built on maximization. It's built on speed, built
on hustle, it's built on grind. Get some have a goal,
execute go checkbox a checkbox. The dog doesn't give a
shit about any of that. The dog is pure minimalism.
The dog is here. It's slow, it's quality, it's depth,
and that dog I framed it as the dog is
(16:23):
literally a bridge to what it means to be an
ancient human being. Because while we're living in this world
surrounded by all this incredible stuff and not so incredible stuff,
that mutt with fur and blood and love is literally
right there and we look at it and remember twenty
thousand years ago. It cuts through all of it, immediate
reframing of everything. So they bring us back to the
era of minimalism. If we choose to listen to them.
(16:46):
It all comes back down to the choice. And you
look at the dog and it's like hey. At all times,
the dog's looking at me saying Carson looks at me
and says, you have a choice. You either you either
learn my lesson or you don't. It's on you. It
comes back on you at the end of the day.
One of the beautiful offerings of the dog totally.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And dogs aren't going to change their behavior. Whether it's
ten thousand years ago and we're setting up a camp
and starting to grow food, or it's right now and
we're in a big house and we're ordering uber eats,
it's all the same. Whereas as technologies progressed, we've sort
of been There's more, faster, stronger all the time, and
(17:24):
the dog is just psyched to be there no matter
what's going on, no matter who you are, no matter
what you look like.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Yeah, it makes me think about the evolution we're going
through right now, which is incomparable. The evolution we're going
to go through in the next five years is probably
greater than what we went through in the past twenty
thousand years. As like to me, the dog is going
to be even more important in the next five years
than it was for twenty five thousand years. Like even
looking at like the movement of like transhumanism, which is
(17:52):
trying to merge the human with the AI, with the cloud, Like,
why do we even need these bodies anymore? Where we
can upload ourselves and live forever in a silicon world.
I don't really want that. You know, If we can't
have the dog by our side, are we still human? Yeah,
there's an argument to be made we're not anymore. We're
something completely different. So as long as we choose to
have a dog in our life, there's something innately human
(18:14):
about this non human animal. And trying to weigh with
those two different worlds and ways of being going to
be like in our lifetime, we're going to have to
answer that question.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
On what then your substack, you've written a lot about dogs.
What even prompted that in the first place.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
The big thinking I like to do is between the worlds,
the primeval the civilized, trying to bring the best of
the primeval here.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
And part of that was the dog.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
So it almost seems like it doesn't really fit that,
but it almost is at the core of it. And
there's a tendency with myself and I think a lot
of writers as well, to get lost in the world
of abstraction, lost in the world of idea and eventually
forget why you're writing.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
In the first place.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
And if your writing is not grounded in the concrete,
the daily and making you a more aware and grounded
human being.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
What's the point?
Speaker 3 (19:08):
And I easily get lost in an idea, like I'll
devote everything to an idea, and I'll forget that I'm here,
I'll forget to train, I'll forget everything.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
And Carson doesn't let that happen. I got to be here.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
So it's almost a spiritual practice to write about the dog.
Even before I started writing what, then, I would journal
just one thing every day I was grateful for about Carson,
and that immediately cut through drama at work, stress, worry, concern, fear,
doubt literally grounded me in the moment, just as a
spiritual practice to write two hundred words on the dog.
(19:39):
And when I was doing what, then, I'm like, all right,
I can't just write about this, this hardcore stuff, these
hardcore thoughts and trying to figure out how to live
more optimally. And then what better way to ground that
than with a couple dog essays every few months?
Speaker 2 (19:51):
And that that was the cause.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
That's awesome. You had one where you talked about how
and you can correct me if I'm wrong on the
on the numbers. But Napoleon, through his campaigns managed to
kill about six million people total, which is like half
a percent of the world. So this guy is just ruthless,
does not give a damn. And then after a battle
(20:15):
he sees this dog and it changes something about him.
So tell us about that.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Yeah, he murdered so many people. His battle fled to
the murder of so many people. On the death as
so many people, combatants, women, children, non combatant, males, elderly, young,
Like the mind can't even compute six million. You can't
see six million as a football stadium is what eighty thousand.
So six million people died. And he was remarkably cold
(20:45):
about that fact. He's like, I actually didn't feel anything
about that. I could watch ten thousand of my men
die in a matter of a few days.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
It's a course of business. I had a mission to
attend to.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
And then one day during his Italian campaign, he was
just I can almost see him, like sitting there in
his tent looking out at the battlefield, literally thousands of
corpses of his own men, of his enemy, the dead,
and the dying. And then he saw a dog sitting
next to one of the dead men, one of his
dead men, and the dog was howling. And he literally
(21:15):
sat down and wrote down in his journal he had
sent thousands of men to their deaths with no problem whatsoever.
And then all of a sudden he has this emotional rupture,
not because of the dead men, but.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Because of the dog.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Because all these people were back at camp, eating, trying
to go home, thinking about themselves.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Who was out there suffering with the dead.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
It was a dog who loved her master who was
now dead, and it kind of like woke them up
a little bit. Obviously didn't change his behavior, kept doing
what he was doing, but for him to stop what
he was doing and have that emotion that dog tapped
into something human in him, like the dog gave him
a reminder of the human condition and almost inhuman being.
(21:56):
And it's pretty remarkable. And I tried to compare like
the two forms of logic, the logic of the dog
and the logic of the human, and to universalize that
we all have a little Napoleon in us.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
We're all human.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
We all want to keep achieving, we all want the fame,
the status to a certain degree, the wealth to a
certain degree to achieve the mission, whatever the mission is.
But the dog, again doesn't give a damn. To the dog,
that's all a fiction. To the dog. What matters is
being there for the person you love. And that's what
the dog in the field is doing, is she was
there for the one human being that she loved. Nothing
(22:32):
else mattered, not taking over the world, not becoming a monarchy.
It was a human thing. And it was a really
poignant moment totally.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
And I think a way at least I experience this
is I will be, you know, driving around Las Vegas
and I might see a person who's homeless or whatever,
and you know, my initial thing is like do we
want to get too close? But then they'll have a
dog with them, and the dog doesn't care about the
person's condition or situation. The dog is just there. They're
(23:03):
just like clung onto that person. They're ready to go.
And it gives me like this moment to sort of
reframe things and see things in a more human way
that we're all kind of on this big spinning rock
and the cosmic abyss. And you know, at the end
of the day, everyone just like wants to be loved
wants to have something that's devoted to them, and we
(23:24):
often forget that. But it takes like a dog to
bring me back to that, you know.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
Yeah, it's I mean, there's a whole world there that's
worth thinking on and again why that's the case, whether
it's the coevolution, But it almost doesn't even matter, because
if that dog can be enough to humanize all of
us and just be that reminder throughout the day that, Oh,
I wish I could remember. I just read a great
quote about I think it was I was reading the journal,
(23:52):
the journals of Aaron's Junger, I think, and he said
something the effect of, what if before were born, we
had the opportunity we actually chose our role in life.
So the role that Michael Easter is living right now
exactly as it was your whole history, all the good,
all the bad, the role Sam Alaimo shows, we actually
chose that out of a selection before we were born,
(24:14):
and that adds like a level of autonomy and a
reminder of choice to our lives.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
At the moment.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
That strikes me as something like the dog, like it
almost doesn't. It's almost like Niets's eternal recurrence, like the
dog reminds you that this moment, no matter what it is,
you can wish it to be the same forever if
you're reminded to make of this moment everything you want
it to be. So it's like a roving philosophical reminder
of the dog. Maybe that's maybe that's what it is.
When you see the homeless man with the dog.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
How do you feel like dogs? Have you be more present?
You've written about that. I feel like ever, you know,
everyone's like to your point about ambition and schedules are
more scheduled than ever. It's always like, got to be
doing something, got to be working five, ten, twenty steps ahead.
But the dog somehow pull us back into right now.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
I wrote a different piece on Zumi's and watching over
time how the zumis end up declining with age. It's
super depressing, but that's the awareness, that's the moment it
brings you back to. And I'm a super big fan
of Tolkien. I read The Lord of the Rings every
year since I was fourteen. Same year I wanted to
(25:21):
be a seal every single year. And the perspective of
the elves is that you're a Middle Earth elf is
immortal and very early on in the creation of Middle Earth,
they made an alliance with men, and I remember Tolkien
and film early and talking about the first meeting of
(25:41):
elves and men, and they met each other, they loved
each other, they respected each other. And then the men
got older and died, and the elves were just mourning.
They're like, why is he gray haired and wrinkled? And
I look like I'm twenty two, Like what is this curse?
And it reminds me of the dog? Where are they elves?
The dogs are the humans because they live so much
(26:03):
less than us. So in a lifetime you could have five, six, seven, eight, nine,
ten different series of dogs. And every single time they
come and go, every single time they get a lot
of zoomies as a puppy and then know zuomies when
they die. It is literally a reminder of what is
the most important thing in the world. Every single day. Yeah,
(26:24):
and they literally he makes me slow down, makes me
stop what I'm doing, the stress, the phone, the slack,
the internet, the email, the writing, the thinking, and just
stop literally pet them, play with them for two minutes.
And then they teach you the value of five minutes,
because five minutes every day added up to a long
time and ten years of a dog. Yeah, and that's
(26:44):
sort of the macro makes a stentil perspective that I
try to keep every day.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
When I read that piece, it reminded me. So I
have a dog right now who's six months old. His
name is Druke, and he's a German short hair. Yeah,
he's bred to high. He needs a mission, and oftentimes
his mission is, for example, pulling my computer monitor off
of my desk, which just a thirty two inch monitor,
(27:12):
shattering it into various pieces while also putting a gigantic
dent in the wood floor. And at first I'm just like,
oh my god, what have you done? But then it's like,
one day, this dog is not going to be pulling
down computer monitors, and you know what, I'm probably going
to miss that. And so it reminds you to just
be like, just enjoy the dog's personality now, because even though, yeah,
(27:35):
he pulls down some computer monitors, it's like he also
does all these other hilarious puppy things that are just amazing,
and I'm going to miss them one day.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
And the spontanighty is good too, Like if everything's going,
if everything in life went perfectly well, life would be
so boring we probably couldn't even take it. So to
have a puppy busting at computer screen and like making
you stop whatever it is you're doing in your day
to clean it up, there's something magical on that.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Too, totally. So when Carson got sick, you can tell
us what happened. I can't remember the specific details, but
you ed just take him to the er overnight. What
did you learn from that?
Speaker 2 (28:10):
I still don't know what to call out. I forget
what the name was.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
So when he gets anesthesia and gets put under, it
collapsed his whole stomach, lining his whole intestinal track, so
we didn't know that we're bringing him home. And then
within a few hours he starts crying and whimpering. And
he doesn't do that, like he doesn't even when he's
in pain, he doesn't cry that much.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
And it was like literally a heart tugging noise.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
And it was on the weekend after the surgery, so
the that clinic was closed, and then we drove him
to the er. It was literally a raining day. He
was in the back seat. We both felt like we
wanted to throw up. We felt so bad for him.
He can't put words to it. It doesn't make any
sense to him. He's suffering. I would gladly take that
suffering for him, and we get him there and luckily
(28:52):
they found out what it was, gave him the medicine,
got his stomach back on track. Now he just needs
a shot before he gets put under. But like I
genuinely believe that the philosopher Epictetus was actually a dog
in human's clothing, Like if a dog could speak, it
would be Epictetus.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
And he's one of my favorite thinkers.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
And just kind of like brutal, blunt voice, bringing you
immediately back down to the present moment, immediately to what
is within your control and what is not within your control.
Forget about what's not maximize what is That's the dog
And I tried to when I got back from that trip.
I was in the middle of studying Epictetes and a
specific quote he had sounds super morbid, and it kind
(29:35):
of is. But it's like, what harm is there if
you whisper to yourself at the moment you're kissing your
child to say tomorrow you'll die, And that is a
classic epictetis stoic exercise.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
It's not meant to be morbid.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
And I try to explain explore what that meant through Carson.
It doesn't mean don't care about it since you can't
control the life. It doesn't mean pull back and become
emotionally numb. I think it means the opposite. I think
it means use this reminder. This reminder of mortality is
a deliberate practice on the daily basis to reframe your
(30:11):
treatment of and your relationship with the people in your life.
And Carson having that near death experience, which like rip
this in two, is a verification of that quote. And
what it means to say tomorrow you will die is
to stop everything right now, appreciate not just the.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Dog, and that's the dog.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
The dog's gift to us with their mortality is to
remember to treat humans in our lives the same way,
with the same patience, because they too will die and
so will we. And I try to frame that with
that quote. I'm pretty sure that's probably what Epictetus meant.
Will never know, but it's probably as good a definition
as any.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Yeah, it's interesting because when you talk about that plundering
your own death or the death of others, like everything's
going to go a lot of people. To your point,
they do find that morbid. But I read about this
a little in The Comfort Crisis. I traveled to Bhutan
to write about the topic because they have a very
different relationship with death and contemplating it than we do.
(31:08):
But when I was doing research for that section a
chapter of the book, I came across this study. I
think it was conducted at Stanford. Don't quote me, but
they had these groups of people think about their own
death and their response was in the short term, that
(31:29):
was very uncomfortable. I did not like that at all.
But when they tracked them in the long term, they
ended up reporting higher levels of happiness because it had
changed their behavior in such a way that they realized, Oh,
this ride is going to end eventually, and I have
a choice of how I can write it. I can
enjoy this ride, I can like slow down, savor the
(31:50):
things I really love and get meaning from or not
more or less. So I do think there is some
good and I don't I'm not one of those people
that thinks we need a study behind everything to think
an idea is valid, not at all, but I do
think it, you know, sort of adds some scientific backing,
especially for the non believers.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
Yeah, that's the striking thing about what we've been talking about,
the philosophy of the dog, epic piteous the human dog.
But to your point, people have been thinking about this
for a long time. And one of my favorite thinkers
is Urban d Alums. He was an existential psychotherapist. So
he took existentialism, which is like a world of double
talking out there, what are you talking about, but applied
(32:30):
it to psychotherapy, so he grounded it in the concrete
world and he actually practiced. So to your point, he
used his actual case studies, had actual patients to write
this book and explore what existentialism meant. And he riffed
a lot on cancer patients, car accident survivors, you name it,
and articulated their monologue. They're in a monologue before the
(32:52):
incident and then after the incident, and how just that
brush of death changed everything. They quit the job they hated,
They ended the relations and ship that was toxic. They
stopped and literally just looked at a flower, whereas before
is hey, I got to get to my car, I
think at the work. I think it's done. I have
to go to the store, I have to come home. No, stop,
literally make a trip dedicated to just go look at
(33:13):
a flower or a butterfly at the park, and it's remarkable,
remarkable how much of a difference that can make. And
again that cuts through what we think is normal in
this world was constructed, which is a beautiful thing with
a lot of exceptional attributes, But that reminder of mortality
is a way to maximize it so that you can
still enjoy, like all the fruits of your labor and
get after life with as much passion as you want,
(33:35):
which I love doing. I love the speed, but at
the cost of the slowness and of the appreciation of
the gratitude, it almost doesn't worth it at that point.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
So it becomes an art of balancing the two.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
That's the dog, Yeah, exactly. You don't necessarily need the
brush with death, the car accident, the cancer, the tour
in Afghanistan. If you've got a dog, that's a reminder
right there, every single day.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Yeah, it's practice, it's a discipline, all right.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Man. Well, I appreciate you coming on. Give Carson a
pat for all of us.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Walk on.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
I appreciate the time, appreciate the conversation.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Now we are going to speak with doctor Nancy G.
She is the director for the Center for Human Animal
Interaction at Virginia Commonwealth University and she studies how dogs
can improve physical health and mental health. So we're going
to dive into all of the scientific details about why
dog ownership can be really, really good for you. Here's Nancy,
(34:37):
Doctor Nancy G. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5 (34:39):
Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
Here's where I want to start. In your Google Scholar profile,
you have yourself. Your photo is with a dog, which
I absolutely loved because I feel like most academics their
Google Scholar profile would be them in a white lab
coat or in a lab or something. But you're with
your dog. So what kind of dog or dog? Maybe
you have multiple dogs do you have?
Speaker 4 (35:03):
I have two dogs right now and they are both
miniature poodles. I have had Border Collies and a wide
range of other breeds. But the program I run, we
have sixty six therapy dogs in the program and they're
all different dog breeds, from Golden Retrievers down to multipools,
(35:24):
so every breed size you can imagine amazing.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Is there a certain type of breed that tends to
do well as a therapy dog?
Speaker 4 (35:33):
You know, it's a great question, and it all boils
down to the dog's temperament. So within any given breed,
you can have a range of temperaments. But generally speaking,
kind of the stereotypical therapy dog is going to be
that Golden retriever, golden doodle, labrador because generally speaking, these
dogs tend to be affiliative, and what that means is
(35:55):
that they like to visit with strangers. Not all dogs
really want to go up and have a stranger touch them,
and that's what it boils down to. Any dog can
do this. We've had Doberman's and pit bulls and breeds
that are stereotypically considered, you know, a little more fearful,
they're fear producing. But the reality is those dogs, many
(36:18):
of them, really do love to just interact with people
and have people pet them. And that's a unique quality
when you think about it. I mean, not very many
people want to go up to complete strangers and interact
with them, and so it is kind of a unique
quality and it isn't really breed specific.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
I love that. How did you start pairing psychiatry with dogs?
Speaker 5 (36:39):
So it kind of goes back a long time.
Speaker 4 (36:41):
So I'm a researcher by training, and years ago I
was doing dog sports and it's kind of a long story,
but a couple of my friends said, Hey, we're doing
a therapy dog evaluation. Your dogs would be great. Why
don't you bring your dogs and get them evaluated. So
I did and they passed, and now I have these
two registered there dogs.
Speaker 5 (37:00):
What am I going to do?
Speaker 4 (37:01):
So I started visiting with them a wide variety of
different populations, and I was seeing these kind of amazing effects.
I mean, you know, really kind of chilling in that,
you know, people get very emotional when they see some
of these interactions. And so as a scientist, I was thinking, well,
that's anecdotal, you know how much of that is real?
Speaker 5 (37:23):
And so I started doing research.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
I started doing experiments, and I've been finding out over
the course of about twenty five years that dogs really
do make a difference in a variety of ways in
the lives of humans.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
That's so interesting that it started with this observation then
a little bit of skepticism, but I have the background
to maybe figure out if there's some there there. I
feel like that's how most great scientific findings start.
Speaker 4 (37:51):
Well, you know, that's absolutely true. And that's where I
came from, is trying to apply the science to it.
And so I was doing randomized trials very early on,
and I was getting some neat results, which was really
kind of interesting and also affirming in that there is
something to this. It isn't just anecdote. And I think
it is that science, that body of evidence that legitimizes
(38:14):
these kinds of practices. And so we see, for instance,
therapy dogs in hospitals. We just completed three randomized control
trials in a hospital setting. So we were looking at
the sort of the most vulnerable populations, and we were
looking at people who are vulnerable to the dilitarious effects
of loneliness, and those are older adults, those with mental illness,
(38:36):
and hospitalized children.
Speaker 5 (38:38):
We just completed those studies and guess what.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
We found that the dogs actually do improve loneliness among
other measures that we included in those studies.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
Interesting, what did the people who were participants the patients report?
Did you talk to them at all? And what were
some of the things they found? And I guess what
how did you? I guess how did you measure the improvements?
As well?
Speaker 4 (38:59):
So we use standardized measures to begin with, So we
used some reliable and valid measures of loneliness, anxiety, depression,
and also mood. And we also collected some physiological measures
using essentially a riskwatch that collects a variety of different
(39:20):
kind of physiological outcomes. And we also collected saliva from
the children so that we could look at CITO kinds
and other measures of stress. So what did the participants say, Well,
it's really interesting when you think about this kind of research.
We're upfront with them right as part of the informed
consent process. We say this is a randomized trial. We've
got three conditions. One of them includes a dog. The
(39:42):
other two do not include a dog. And so one
of the things one of the challenges that we faced
is that the people always wanted the dog. So the
people who are willing to be in this kind of research,
they really do want to have the dog present. Now,
in fairness, they participated anyway, even if the dog wasn't
in their condition. We had very few dropouts, but people
really wanted that dog to come visit them while they
(40:05):
were in the hospital. These folks were all hospitalized for
five or more days. So this is where loneliness becomes
a real issue in these kind of chronic situations, and
it can be so important to intervene while they're in
the hospital.
Speaker 5 (40:20):
If we can reduce their loneliness, what we.
Speaker 4 (40:22):
May see and we don't know this yet, but what
we may see is better adherence to sort of follow up,
better compliance with their ongoing treatment, and perhaps more positive outcomes.
Right now, we know that we see these effects in
terms of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and mood in particular was
altered by the presence of the dog.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
What do we know generally about the physical health impacts
of dog ownership?
Speaker 4 (40:50):
So dog ownership is a little bit different, right, So
what we did was an interaction study. So again, this
is what I was talking about earlier. These are dogs
that go and interact with complete strangers, right, But dog
ownership itself is a little bit different. There's some neat
research out there that shows that, for instance, dog owners
tend to have lower blood pressure, lower risk of cardiovascular disease,
(41:12):
improved mood. There's one study about individuals who adopted pets
that showed that they reported fewer health complaints after adopting
a pet. And there's some really neat research that happened
years ago by Erica Friedman She looked at individuals who
had a heart attack, and she was doing research on
a wide variety of things, and basically she gave them
(41:34):
a questionnaire, you know, on a whole bunch of things,
and one of those questions was do you own a pet?
And then she followed up with them one year later
and guess what, the pet owners were more likely to
be alive one year later than the non pet owners,
particularly the dog owners.
Speaker 5 (41:52):
And so here's the problem with pet ownership research.
Speaker 4 (41:55):
People want to pick their own pets, and you know,
researchers want to as sign people to conditions, right, so
we get a selection bias in a lot of pet
ownership research. Now, there are some studies out there where
people have been assigned to either own a pet or not,
but they tend to be small samples and they tend
to use quite unique populations. For example, there was a
(42:18):
study done in Korea where they assigned people to care
for crickets, so they became cricket owners, and over an
eight week period of time, they found out that depression
scores were decreased and there were some other need improvements
over just adopting and caring for crickets. Wow, so we
do think that pet ownership can be beneficial.
Speaker 5 (42:40):
But here's the fundamental question.
Speaker 4 (42:42):
Do healthy people choose to own pets or do pets
make people healthy? That's the part that's really hard to
tease out.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
Does the study on the people who had heart attacks?
Does that seem to suggest that there's some there there
more or less because we're starting fundamentally with a population
that's unhealthy, you.
Speaker 5 (43:03):
Know, it's a great question.
Speaker 4 (43:04):
And so a lot more research has been done since then,
and the American Heart Association actually issued a statement evaluating
all of the existing research and basically saying that pen ownership,
particularly dog ownership, is associated with and probably causally associated
with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, adding that word
(43:27):
causal in there. That's a big deal for that kind
of thing to be issued from the American Heart Association.
And so there is some evidence to indicate that that
dog ownership, particularly dog ownership, is beneficial for cardiovascular health.
We don't know what that's due to. Is it because
dog owners are more likely to take their dogs for
walks and we know that walking is good for you?
(43:48):
Is it that we need to care for another living being,
you know, a dog?
Speaker 5 (43:53):
They force it to freedom.
Speaker 4 (43:55):
You know, they say, hey, it's time for food, it's
time for me.
Speaker 5 (43:58):
To go out. They force you to get up. In fact,
I did a study with some great.
Speaker 4 (44:03):
Researchers up in Scotland and we looked at older adults
and older adults who had dogs. They experienced fewer sedentary
events during the day.
Speaker 5 (44:14):
And sitting is kind of the new smoking, right, Sitting
is not good for us. We need to get up
and move around.
Speaker 4 (44:20):
They also walked more, and they walked faster, and so
there is some evidence that having a dog can be
a very healthy choice.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Well, it's interesting because my mom is she's now. I
don't know if she may disown me for giving her age,
but I'll just say she's in her late seventies. That
we won't put a firm number on it. She got
a dog maybe six years ago, five years ago. And
one it made her far more active. You know, her
step counts easily doubled. Two, it gave her a routine.
(44:51):
So she was kind of winding down into retirement. So
as she had this job that was somewhat high pressure,
her entire life that goes away. But now she a dog.
That to your point about routines. Oh, I got to
feed it, I gotta take it for walks. Oh I
got to go get it to go to a bath.
Like that, this routine gets inserted that keeps her active
but also gives her I guess I would use a
sort of sense of purpose. And then to layer on
(45:13):
top of that, she's met so many new people through
that dog. She goes she's got a doodle, She goes
to doodle meetups in Las Vegas. One of her current
best friends is someone she met through the dog.
Speaker 5 (45:25):
Yeah. You know, dogs are kind of the great leveler.
Speaker 4 (45:29):
You know, you're you're willing to risk interacting with somebody
you don't know just because they have a dog.
Speaker 5 (45:35):
And you see people doing this all the time. They'll
pull out their phone.
Speaker 4 (45:37):
And I've got a doodle too, and they start showing
you a photo on their phone of their dog, and
we start having these interactions and you know, So, we've
done some research on older adults and pet ownership, and
one of the things that we see is as people age,
pet ownership.
Speaker 5 (45:52):
Drops off, and so that is a little bit problematic.
Speaker 4 (45:55):
But for those older adults who do retain their pets,
we also see a greater retention of cognition and physical functioning,
and so that's kind of an important finding.
Speaker 5 (46:08):
If you can support.
Speaker 4 (46:09):
Older adults to maintain their pets as they age, it's
actually it seems to be really good for them in
terms of cognition and physical function.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
How important is the I believe in one of your
studies you might have used the word motivation, just in
the sense that sometimes when people retire. I feel like
you read reports where you know they might have worked,
they sort of had purpose and motivation every day, and
then that sometimes can kind of disappear. You know, It's
like the first couple weeks of retirement, you're like, this
is great, I don't have to do anything, But then
after that you go, oh, I don't have to do anything.
(46:42):
How important are talks for that and how does that
play out?
Speaker 4 (46:45):
You know, it can be very important, and so we've
talked about it as being kind of a reson vetre right,
a reason for living. And with for instance, older adults,
when when one of the couple passes away the other one,
if they have a pet, they experience a shortened grieving process,
and so there is something to be said for the
(47:05):
pet helping them to recover from that grieving process.
Speaker 5 (47:09):
We're also very.
Speaker 4 (47:10):
Much aware that older adults or individuals who are considering
suicide will say, I won't do that because I have
to be there to take care of the dog, and
so that can also be very impactful, the fact that
they will not commit suicide because they have to take
care of the dog. If you can get them through
(47:30):
that period, that's amazing and incredibly beneficial.
Speaker 5 (47:35):
Now, we also have.
Speaker 4 (47:36):
To consider that pets are not a panacea, though you know,
there are downsides to pet ownership too. For instance, pets
don't live as long as we do, and so losing
a pet can be very emotionally impactful, or caring for
a sick pet can be very challenging as well, particularly
if you know that things aren't ultimately going to go
well with whatever disease that pet is dealing with. And
(47:59):
for older dogs else we have to also be concerned
about risks of falling. Now here's where it gets a
little bit tricky, because older adults who walk their dogs
and who get out there and do things with their
dogs have a lower risk of falling. However, we do
have to be concerned about older adults in the home,
perhaps perhaps tripping over a pet and falling.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
Yeah, or having a one hundred and twenty pound dog
who likes to pull on the leash when it's someone
who weighs who is I don't know, eighty and weighs
one hundred and thirty pounds or something, and it.
Speaker 4 (48:29):
Can pull their arm out of the socket or feel
that way, that could be very challenging.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
Yeah, what do we know about dog ownership or interventions
on dogs and mental health.
Speaker 4 (48:40):
So actually, we've written an entire book on this is
published by the American Psychiatric Association.
Speaker 5 (48:45):
It's a wonderful book.
Speaker 4 (48:46):
And what we did is we paired researchers in human
animal interaction with psychiatrists, and each of the chapters in
this book are really about various aspects of the ways
in which animals, most stuffen dogs but not always can
be involved in the treatment of mental illness. But the
reality is there's some great evidence out there to indicate
(49:08):
that involving a dog in the treatment of mental illness
can be beneficial. Other species are also involved, so for instance,
there's equine therapy. Other kinds of animals have been used
in classrooms in a variety of settings to help.
Speaker 5 (49:22):
With that issue. Of motivation. I used to work with
preschool kids, and I'll tell you what.
Speaker 4 (49:26):
Preschool kids become highly motivated when there's a dog in
the room.
Speaker 5 (49:30):
And they are very willing.
Speaker 4 (49:32):
To raise their hand and practice turn taking and follow
the rules and listen to instructions when there's a dog present.
And so there is something kind of special and unique
about having a dog in these various situations to kind
of move things along, to sort of provide social lubrication
if you want to get somebody to open up and
(49:53):
talk more. Oftentimes with kids, they're more willing to talk
to a dog than to their therapist. So the therapist
could perhaps, you know, say would you mind telling the
dog what's going on?
Speaker 5 (50:06):
And they will. And this was sort.
Speaker 4 (50:09):
Of discovered years and years ago, how just bringing a
dog into therapeutic situation can help a client to relax
and assuming of course that they like dogs, help them
to relax and open up. And so there is something
very sort of impactful about having that kind of key
if you will, to sort of getting them to open
(50:31):
up and participate. By the way, they also they'll show
up on time. Kids who are in school programs, they'll
go wake their parents up. Hey, we can't be late
to school today because I know there's a dog there.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
You know, what do we think is going on? Why
does this happen with dogs in particular, and does it
play out for cats too? I know the cat people
are going, Oh, Michael, you always just harp on how
much you love dogs. You never talk about cats, So
what's up with cats as well?
Speaker 4 (51:00):
Let me ask Let me answer the first question first,
what's going on?
Speaker 5 (51:04):
Why is this happening?
Speaker 4 (51:05):
Well, there's a number of proposed reasons for why it's happening.
One is simple biophilia, and that means that we are
drawn to nature and natural things, and so that's a possibility.
Another one is that dogs may help us to reduce
our stress. And so if that's true, for example, we've
seen decreases in blood pressure and cortisol and increases in oxytocin,
(51:29):
that kind of bonding feel good hormone. If that's what's happening,
then that freezes us up to use our cognitive resources
for other things. So, for instance, dogs may be beneficial
for things like test anxiety, because if the dog can
help that person to relax, then what can happen is
that frees up all that thinking they don't have to.
Speaker 5 (51:51):
Worry about, oh, I'm going to do terrible on this test.
Speaker 4 (51:54):
Instead they can actually start thinking about the questions on
the test and perform well. So it could be stress reduction,
it could be attachment. Particularly for our own dogs, that
the power of attachment can be very important. We need
attachment figures in our lives, and dogs can meet sort
of the requirements for an attachment figure. So, particularly for
older adults whose social networks are decreasing, it may be
(52:18):
beneficial to have that dog as sort of an intermediate
attachment figure. And then you see that you start meeting
other people through dog ownership, and it can help to
rebuild those social circles a little bit. So lots of
potential reasons for why it's happening.
Speaker 1 (52:34):
I feel like, especially with I guess what you would
call weak ties, people who you just kind of seeing
your neighborhood. You have small conversations with them, but it's
not like you're, you know, seeing them on the weekends
going to dinner. I feel like dogs especially help with that.
So we have I mentioned we have the German short airpointer,
and there's another couple in our neighborhood that also has
a German short hair pointer. So whenever we see them,
(52:55):
we're going to stop and talk to them for five
to ten minutes. You know, this happens maybe once a week,
but it's like these small little moments with other people.
I feel like those get overlooked, but they often really
count for our emotional health, our mental health, and all
these different things like that.
Speaker 4 (53:11):
Absolutely, what you're talking about is social capital. And so
walking in the neighborhood, people don't necessarily know my name,
but they might know my dog's name, and they might
come over to chat with me just to talk about
the dog. And there are other poodle owners in the neighborhood,
and likewise, you know, we stop and chat and let
the dogs interact.
Speaker 5 (53:29):
But it also it can build from there.
Speaker 4 (53:31):
So for instance, your neighbors might say, Hey, we're going
to go out of town, would you mind watching our
dogs while we're out of town, And so you start
to build greater connections with people in your neighborhood. The
other thing that happens in neighborhoods where people walk their
dogs is the dogs provide kind of an informal surveillance
in the neighborhood and the neighborhood is perceived as safer,
(53:54):
and so it draws people out. More people will communicate
with one another. So it really can kind of help
to build those ties that may build into something more,
or it could be at the level of, you know, hey,
here comes Ali's mom, right, and we chat about Ali
for a while, and that's okay. But the point is
it is helping people to connect. And going back really
(54:16):
quick to your question about cats versus dogs, So, first
of all, with cats, there's just less research.
Speaker 5 (54:23):
We have far more research.
Speaker 4 (54:25):
In fact, the lion's share of research in this area
involves dogs, and there's lots of reasons for that, but
not least of which a dog is highly trainable and
is willing to go into hospital environments.
Speaker 5 (54:35):
And you know, zoonotic disease transmission is.
Speaker 4 (54:38):
Very well understood in dogs, so we can safely take
them into hospital situations because we can prevent kind of
the zoonotic disease transmission through some simple behaviors. But with cats,
some of the research does not bear out with cats
as it does with dogs. So, for instance, the pet
ownership research that I was talking about before, we see
(55:00):
some really nice decreases in blood pressure and cortisol and
some of that things that doesn't necessarily bear itself out
with cats. Particularly in that study that I mentioned that
Erica Friedman conducted where she looked to see if people
were alive a year later. That was true for dog owners,
but it wasn't true for cat owners. And so what
(55:22):
I would have to say is we can't draw conclusions.
There's just not enough evidence. We need more research with cats,
and we need bigger studies with cats in order to
be able to draw some real conclusions. Right now, we've
got some very solid evidence with dogs and a little
bit of evidence with cats.
Speaker 1 (55:40):
Okay, that makes sense. I think one thing that's interesting too,
is that all of this communication, the relationship that you
have with the dog is totally nonverbal. Right. You can
tell them stay whatever, but they're not going to talk back.
And it's really interesting, though, how you can still communicate
with your dog and they can communicate with you. My
dog will tell me what he wants, what he wants
(56:02):
to do, And I just think that's fascinating that we're
not speaking to each other, but we kind of know
what's going on with each other.
Speaker 4 (56:09):
You know, if you think about kind of the process
of domestication and selection, of dogs from their ancestors, which
are predominantly gray wolves, and the.
Speaker 5 (56:20):
Wide variety of breeds that we have from that.
Speaker 4 (56:22):
But if you think about that process, what's happened is
that dogs have become highly adept at reading our social cues.
They're also pretty good at telling time, so they have
ideas about when it's time to go to bed or
you know, when it's time to go for a walk.
And if you say those words, I kind of glanced
to the side because my dog's here and I just
said that word that.
Speaker 5 (56:42):
We normally spell.
Speaker 4 (56:43):
By the way, they do pick up on some of
those words, and some dogs do have a pretty good
vocabulary in terms of picking up on words that you say.
But you're absolutely right, the dogs do not speak English.
They don't come back to us and say, mom, I
would like to go for a walk, right, not what
they do. But yet they do communicate pretty clearly what
(57:04):
their needs are. For instance, with my dogs, I put
sleigh bells on the doors, so when they have to
go out, they go ring the bell, and you know,
like a good maid or butler, I.
Speaker 5 (57:14):
Go running over and open the door to take them out.
Speaker 1 (57:16):
Yeah, we do the same, and it's funny what you
say about time. We had a German short hair who
you can tell a fame. We love short hairs who
passed away. But this dog knew what time it was
all the time. It would be right, does the clock
hit five, he'd perk up like it was dinner time.
Same at seven am. It was just hilarious. It would
(57:37):
drive us nuts, but it was just such a lovable
trait he had.
Speaker 4 (57:40):
Well, you know, and their senses are so different from
our own. So you know, for instance, when my partner
comes home, the sound of the car, the sound of
the door, I think the dogs hear that, right, they
hear the sound. They can smell things beyond what we
can smell. Our noses are virtually useless compared to what
(58:01):
they can smell, and so they have their ability to sense,
I think really helps them to appear to have a
far better understanding of the situation, largely because like, oh,
here comes mom, and they know right, they can tell.
Speaker 1 (58:16):
Yeah, I'm sure with my dog it was okay. He
stopped working about an hour ago. He did this. He
did this, Oh, dinner usually happens sometime in this arena.
Whatever happens, and.
Speaker 5 (58:27):
What clothes you put on.
Speaker 4 (58:28):
Yeah, you know, if you put on the work suit right,
then the dog knows, oh, they're gone to work, and
they behave differently than if you put on the clothes
to go outside for a walk or to hang out
on a Saturday.
Speaker 5 (58:40):
They do pick up on these cues.
Speaker 1 (58:43):
Yeah, are there any studies where dogs have been brought
into retirement homes? And absolutely, and one of those found.
Speaker 4 (58:50):
So wide variety of things, but for instance, there's lots
of visitation programs to retirement homes, and so they see
things like reductions in depression for some older adults, particularly
those with memory problems, on the days the therapy dogs
are going to be there. Those older adults are very
good at orienting to time and place. Are the dogs
(59:11):
coming today? When will they be here? That can really
sort of help them to orient. They're also more verbal,
they're more willing to talk and open up. And with
some older adults, we start to see issues with regard
to calorie consumption. So they begin to lose weight and
so we need them to eat more. And so one
of the things that they did is they put an
(59:32):
aquarium in the dining area at a retirement home and
they found that simply having the aquarium in there got
the older adults to consume more calories because they stayed
longer and they watched the fish and they ate more food. Interesting,
and so there's some really neat, neat studies. One study
(59:53):
did some things like having the older adults do some
basic dog care, brush the dog, put a collar on them,
and that's really good for helping them with fine motor skills.
So a wide variety of different kinds of studies have
been done showing some really neat results of those.
Speaker 5 (01:00:10):
Animal visitation programs.
Speaker 4 (01:00:11):
And I should mention that although therapy dogs are the
largest number of therapy animals, there are other kinds of
therapy animals. There're therapy cats and therapy bunnies and therapy
lamas for instance.
Speaker 1 (01:00:24):
That's great. Who should not get a dog.
Speaker 4 (01:00:28):
A person who doesn't have time, yeah, and a person
who does not have the resources to care for the dog.
So if you're working sixty hours a week, don't get
a dog. These dogs are social animals. They want to
be with you. And so if you don't have the
time to welcome a family member into your family, and
it's not a good time to get a dog. And
(01:00:49):
I think people need to do an honest evaluation of that.
You know, am I at a good space to have
a dog? Am I going to be able to be
there to spend time with these social animal? And do
I have the financial resources to take them to the
vet and buy them the food and the toys and
all of those sorts of things need to be considered
when you're thinking about getting a dog.
Speaker 1 (01:01:11):
Yeah, but if you do have the time and the resources,
it seems like a pretty good idea for your health.
And what I thought was interesting when we started is
that the dogs that you work with, they're all different breeds,
So it's not like you have to single out a
specific breed. It's like pick one you want, pick one
that seems friendly, and you're good to go.
Speaker 4 (01:01:29):
Do your research, you know, find out what kind of
a dog is going to fit your lifestyle. For instance,
if you have a very sedentary lifestyle and you're not
going out in the world, or maybe you live in
a small apartment, you probably don't want that border collie r.
A border collie wants to run and wants a job
and really needs to be active and working with their
handler a lot.
Speaker 5 (01:01:51):
So maybe what you want to do is get a
small dog.
Speaker 4 (01:01:54):
There are some great dogs that are sort of considered
lap dogs that would be great for an apartment if
you're if you have allergies, you want to think about
getting you know, what kind of pet can I have
that would.
Speaker 5 (01:02:06):
Suit my allergies?
Speaker 4 (01:02:07):
And there's no such thing as a hypoallergenic animal. But
the reality is that some of those curly coated breeds,
like poodles, they tend to keep the dander close to
the skin rather than releasing it into the environment. So
people react less to non shedding breeds and particularly curly
coated breeds. But again, find out, go visit that kind
(01:02:29):
of dog and make sure that your allergies can tolerate them.
Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
When we so we're on our second German short hair
pointer and we had a trainer come help us, and
you know, we called her before we got them. We're
getting a German short hair pointer. And she goes, do
you know what you're getting into? He said, yes, we
know exactly what we're getting into. We know they're absolutely nuts.
They need a mission, they need to be run, they
need a lot of exercise. But we love them for.
Speaker 4 (01:02:53):
That absolutely, And that's true of every dog. Right finding
out what that dog needs, and then meeting the.
Speaker 5 (01:03:01):
Dog where they are.
Speaker 4 (01:03:02):
You know. For example, I think some people are very
well meaning when they meet a dog for the first
time and they do that pat the dog on the
top of the head. I have yet to meet a
dog that wants to be patted on the top of
the head, right.
Speaker 5 (01:03:14):
They love to be scratched behind the ears.
Speaker 4 (01:03:15):
And the point is find out what the dog likes,
you know, what makes that dog happy and excited, and
do that with your dog a lot. And what's neat
about it is that makes us feel good. We feel
really good inside when we do things that make our
dog feel good, which is kind of neat.
Speaker 1 (01:03:33):
I love that. Our final question, and this one's kind
of a strange one. We're gonna flip the tables a
little bit. Let's say the dog is the psychiatrist. What
do you think dogs would prescribe to humans to be well.
Speaker 5 (01:03:45):
Live in the moment, Live in the moment. This is
such a good lesson from dogs.
Speaker 4 (01:03:51):
They live in the here and now, and so much
of what troubles humans is worrying about things that are
not in the here and the now or aren't as
pressing in the moment. And if we can live in
the moment. If we can take time to smell the flowers,
we don't necessarily have to smell other dogs.
Speaker 5 (01:04:12):
Behind right like a dog would.
Speaker 4 (01:04:14):
But the point is if we enjoy those sensory experiences
and really live in the moment, I think that would
be a dog's advice to us.
Speaker 1 (01:04:24):
I love it well, Nancy, thanks so much for joining us.
I really enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker 5 (01:04:29):
Thank you so much for having me. This has been
a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (01:04:34):
Welcome back. We're going to end the show, but before
we do, I got some final words about dogs and
keeping them healthy this summer. Summer is heating up. Turns
out the dogs are not as able to cool themselves
as us humans are. So humans are actually really unique
as species because we're so good at cooling ourselves. This
is because we are not covered in fur. We also
(01:04:54):
stand upright so the sun doesn't hit us as intensely,
and we also sweat. Now dogs they have known of this.
They're covered in fur, which is insulating, and they also
don't sweat. They have to cool themselves by panting. Not
to mention, they are down horizontally on the ground, so
they get hit with a lot more sunlight. So I
(01:05:16):
want you to think of it like this. Their situation
in the heat would be like if you were to
cover yourself in anti pursprint and put on a winter
coat and then just sort of crawl around the ground.
You get really hot on a hot day. So dogs
can overheat at temperatures that are surprisingly not that hot
for US ninety degrees eighty degrees, those can be really
(01:05:36):
hot and dangerous temperatures for dogs. So what does that
tell us? What should you do this summer? First and foremost,
if you are taking your dog out in the summer
and you feel like it's hot, like you're getting a
bit overheated, that is definitely definitely happening to your dog.
So my main advice for taking dogs out in the
summer is to do so early in the morning or
(01:05:59):
after the sun has gone down. That is going to
be the number one thing you can do to make
sure your dog stays healthy. If you happen to be
out and your dog does start to pant excessively or
stumble a bit, you want to get that dog immediately
in some shade, give them some water, maybe give them
some ice chips, just get them out of direct heat
and not moving as much. You do those things, and
(01:06:21):
you'll be able to keep your best friend healthy all summer.
That is all we got for you today. Thank you
as always for checking out the show. We're in your
feeds twice a week. And if you want to send
us a question for our Ask Michael Anything section, we
would love that Email it to media at twpct dot
com or just drop it in the comments. We would
(01:06:41):
love voice memos as questions and also video questions. We
would love to run those. We'll answer as many of
your questions as we can do. Not forget to subscribe,
and as always, have fun, don't die. And I'm going
to add one more thing. Love dogs
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