Pod Crashing episode 370 with Jorge Cham from the podcast Science Stuff. "ScienceStuff" a new original podcast hosted by best-selling and award-winning cartoonist and author Jorge Cham. New episodes release every Wednesday starting March 12th.. Ever wonder if your pet is lying to you, what's inside a black hole or if you'd survive being cryogenically frozen? Each week, "ScienceStuff" will tackle the kind of questions everyday people have always wanted to know the answer to including: Do you really have to wait 30 minutes before you can go swimming?Are near-death experiences real?What exactly are Quantum Computers? With infectious curiosity, Cham, a former roboticist and Caltech researcher and instructor, will take listeners on a fun and illuminating dive into a new question each week, talk to experts and explain the history and latest scientific results on each topic. Jorge Cham obtained his Ph.D. in robotics from Stanford University and was an instructor and research associate at Caltech before leaving academia to create "Piled Higher and Deeper" (known as "PHD Comics"), a favorite comic strip of scientists and academics with millions of readers online and in print. According to the prestigious journal Science, Cham's "following in the scientific world are enough to make even the most distinguished professor green with envy." He is also the main creator and creative director of the Emmy-nominated animated series "Elinor Wonders Why" which airs on PBS Kids and around the world, and an author of several popular science books including the award-winning "We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe" and the celebrated children's series "Oliver's Great Big Universe." "ScienceStuff" is produced and distributed by iHeartPodcasts, joining its flagship family of "Stuff" curiosity shows, which includes the popular "Stuff You Should Know," "TechStuff," "Stuff You Missed in History Class" and "Stuff To Blow Your Mind," among others, expanding the brand into the world of science. All "Stuff" shows are available on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard. Trailer available here: Https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-sciencestuff-269210018/
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, welcome back to the conversation. Let's do some pod crashing.
Episode number three seventy is with Jorge Sham from the
podcast Science Stuff Or Hey, I feel like I should
be calling you doctor sense or even master, because you
have this amazing way of taking incredible knowledge and sharing
it with us who are white belts and yellow belts.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Yeah. Well that's my whole jam. I is to talk
to scientists and kind of translate what they're thinking and
saying and doing so that every person can understand it,
even kids.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
One of the things that you put focus on, and
so many people have talked about it inside their man
caves or even just at work, and that is freezing
human beings.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Now.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Now, the only reason why I think I trust in
all this is because the rumor is Ted Williams his
head it has been frozen in time. So is that true?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Well, that is a fascinating topic. You know. Basically, it's
a technology that might let you jump to the future.
You know, like if you have some sort of illness
that they can find a cure for right now, maybe
you can get frozen and wake up later when they
have found the cure, or if you wanted to go
to a distance star. You know, stars are super far
away from Earth. It's going to take years and years
(01:14):
and years to get there. Maybe we can just kind
of freeze people and then wake them up when they
get there. And so it's been a fascinating present for
years that people have been asking. There's all kinds of
legends like the one about Ted Williams's head, and there's
actually companies out there that will freeze you right now,
Like if you wanted to do it right now, you
(01:34):
could go out there and pay a couple of hundred
thousand dollars or less than one hundred thousand dollars if
you just want to freeze your brain, that will do
it for you. And so this one episode we dive
into it. We talked to biologists who studies how wood
frogs survive being turned to ice. Super fascinating. We talked
(01:55):
to one of the CEOs of one of these companies
that freeze people steps as through the technology. And then
at the end we talk to a neuroscientist who sort
of gives us an answer of whether the brain can
survive being frozen.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Well, I like the way that you break it down
in the way that I mean you start off at
sech like, like you said, the wood frog, you start
at such an easy level. Can a frog? Can a salamander?
Can something like this really survive this? And then you
grow with us forward in the way of Okay, now
let's put the human being in the story. And I mean,
I just like the way you build your stories.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Oh thank you. Yeah, we try to make every episode
basically a journey. So when you listen to the show,
you're basically coming on a journey with me to figure
out the answer to the question of the week. So
do you know, do you really have to wait thirty
minutes after eating before you can go swimming? Or what
is a quantum computer? You know, you're kind of coming
along with me to talk to experts, to you know,
(02:52):
get a sense of what who's doing what out there
about it and so hopefully it gives you that experience
of of following your curiosity and having these kind of
interesting questions develop and grow and take you to places
that you didn't expect.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Well, you know, it sounds like you're curious about all this.
I mean, you sound very genuine when you're asking your questions.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Oh, thank you. I you know, I just you've always
been a very curious person, especially after the more you
learn and the deeper you get into this particular field.
So I have a PhD in robotics, and because I
just always like robots, But once you kind of dive
deep into something like that, you realize how much we
(03:37):
don't know, you know, not just about robots, but how
much we don't know about anything at technologies, the universe,
our bodies, our brains. And to me, that's just fascinating
to think about these questions, but also to kind of
think about how people are answering them, how they're answering
these questions, and so to me, it's just just all
(03:58):
fascinating and I feel super luck that I get to
kind of share that curiosity and those questions with everyone.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
One of my favorite features on the podcast Science Stuff
Is is the way that you there's a click sound
coming out of it and then going back into the conversation.
That click is so important to me as a listener
because to me, it gives me texture and it really
sounds like that that you're taking. You're walking away from
the interview, looking straight into my soul, explaining things to me,
(04:25):
and then click, we're back into the interview.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, well, first of all, I really liked what I
saw when I look into your soul. I wrote, You're
a good egg. But no, that's that's a really interesting
because it is kind of unusual for a science show
to have that click, and it's a click you here
whenever we go from like an expert interview to me
kind of talking and breaking down a subject, and it's
important to have that kind of audio cue to take
(04:50):
you back and forth. And it's not really something you
see in a lot of shows, but it actually kind
of happened organically. So when I was developing this show,
when I was doing like a test pilot, uh, that's
what I would do, you know. I would record these
interviews with experts and then I would bring it to
somebody and presented to them and I would be like, here,
this is what this person said about going to Mars,
(05:12):
and then I would click the button to play the
clip for them, and that would end up that ended
up in the final recording, and I thought, oh, that's
really good. That like works really well to kind of
get your head to shift gears. And so it stays. Yeah,
it does.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
It reattracts the attention of the listener, which is so
valuable to radio as well as podcasting.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Now, one of the things I love it that you
admit that you yourself you are shocked by some of the
information that you receive, and I love it that you've
got the transparency to say that that that it's like,
oh my god, I did not know that.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah. Yeah, it happens every week. You know. That's one
of my favorite things about working on this show is
every week, not only do you do it get to
take people on a deep dive on a fascinating question,
but it's like I'm learning at the same time, you know,
I'm figuring out, oh wait a minute, that's not really
what's happening. This is what's happening, and that's amazing. That's fascinating,
and for me, that's part of the joy sharing those
(06:08):
unexpected surprises you get whenever you deep dive into something.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Yeah were you were you really shocked when you learned
that a coke can can explode inside a freezer? But
but water does different things, and the human body does
even more different things.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah. Absolutely. So this is for that episode that I
think you mentioned maybe about can you survive being cryogenically frozen?
And so I always thought that, you know, if you
freeze your steak or if you freeze your chicken breast
and your freezer, what really just kind of gives it
freezer burn? Is this idea that ice when it freezes,
(06:43):
it expands and then maybe ruptures, kind of like it
happens if you stick a coke can or a soda
can in the freezer. But the first thing right off
the top of the episode that we learn from a
scientist who studies is it's like, no, that's not really
what's going on. What's really what really kind of destroys
things or what would basically kill you if you get frozen,
is the cication or your body drying out. Yeah, so
(07:06):
it's really this totally different phenomenon that ice forms between
the cells, and so that kind of expels all of
the salts and sugars from the water between your cells,
which makes your cells be surrounded by all the salt
and sugar, which basically sucks the water out of him.
And so really that's really you should be your main
concern if you're worried about getting frozen.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Are your guests on zoom or are you packing up
the equipment and visiting them?
Speaker 2 (07:33):
The mission is get the interviews any way you can. Yeah. Yeah.
So sometimes for example, for the quantum computer episode where
we ask what is a quantum computer, I actually went
to cal Tech and I recorded scientists called Oscar Painter
who's also the head of quantum computers for Amazon, and
(07:54):
he kind of took us in a tour of his
quantum computers. And you, as a listener, get to join
in and listen to these things, feel what it's like
to be in the room with them. But sometimes it's
just a phone call and talking to people over not Zoom,
but something called Riverside, which is one of the things
people used to interview online. Sometimes the expert is sometimes
(08:14):
the expert is an Oslo for example, And so I'm
not gonna fly there.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Yeah, just have my Heart Radio sends you over there.
They'll take care of you.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Yeah. Yeah, they're a big company. Sure, I'll just think
they're private jet.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Hey there's more Hoe chom coming up next. Thanks for
coming back to my conversation with ort Chom'. There's a
big commercial campaign right now on the radio here in
the South that's based on the word probably it's an
overused word and it's usually a misunderstood word well and
one of the things that they do in there, Oh,
I ate something about twenty minutes ago. I'm probably gonna
be okay, my god. And then I get into your
(08:47):
podcast and you talk about swimming thirty minutes after eating.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
That is so improbable, But that happened. Is it really is?
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Is it just urban legend or it should we actually
we wait that thirty minutes?
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Yeah, that's a fascinating question. Do we have to wait
thirty minutes after eating before swimming? And I loved this
episode that we had because it was very personal to me.
You know, I grew up in Panama swimming a lot.
I went to pools, the beach and my aunt, my
mom's sister, was a doctor, you know, she's actually a pediatrician,
and she would always say, you have to wait thirty
minutes after eating before you can go swimming. And so
(09:25):
we take a deep dive into this question, kind of
going all the way back to history. So the earliest
that anyone can find this advice being posh out there
isn't the Boy Scout Manual from nineteen oh eight. Wow,
And that's the earliest anyone can find a mention of
this And it's just this random advice in between you know,
how to start a campfire, how to survive a stink bite,
(09:47):
and by the way, you shouldn't go swimming at least
a half hour after eating. And so nobody sort of
knows where this came from, but it definitely kind of
seeped into the popular culture. Parents give that advice to
their kids the time. And so in the episode, we
talked to a doctor who was a competitive swimmer, and
we talked to this physiologist some when we studies kind
of exercise and digestion and what happens to your body
(10:11):
when you eat, So we take a deep dive into digestion,
we take a big bite out of the.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Yeah, because I mean, all the way through that episode,
I kept thinking about my own neighborhood where we all
get together for our pool parties and we're eating while
we're swimming, and I kept thinking, I think I better
take up a CPR class, get all you know fresh
en up on that, because we're screwing around with fate here.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Basically was my aunt lyne to me
my whole entire childhood. That was what I really wanted
to know. But it turns out that it's not something
you have to do. You don't have to eat thirty
minutes after eating before going swimming, but you probably should.
So you kind of dig into the details of how
(10:52):
your body digesting. It's not going to cause cramps. In fact,
sort of not eating is kind of what causes cramps.
And it's not going to suck all the blood out
of your muscles because your body is built to basically
give your muscles whatever they need spoil. And also your
heart is pumping faster, so you don't have to worry
about that. It's really more about your body doesn't like
(11:15):
having all this food in the stomach, and so swimming
actually kind of delays that digestion, and especially because you're
swimming horizontally, it kind of revents you from getting that
food down. And so it's really more like you probably
should wait, otherwise you're not going to feel good.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
From one podcaster to another podcaster, what do you do
when you hit those walls? You come up with something
that sounds like a great idea but nothing is coming together.
How do you stay true to the course.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Oh, well, you just got to dig deeper. You know.
Sometimes sometimes I'll interview an expert and I think, oh
my goodness, that was the best interview ever that totally
answers all the questions, and then you sit down and
edit and you're like, oh m, actually it's not going
to do. So you just got to dig deeper until
you find those those amazing moments of revelation, you know,
(12:08):
asking these questions.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Well, do you think there's a science to what we do?
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Oh? There's definitely a craft in an art and there
are rules you can follow. I don't know if I
would call it a science, like if unless podcasters start,
you know, writing academic papers, making reviewed and running experiments
on listeners, I'm not sure we call it a science.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
I'll give you my daily writing, I'll let you let
you determine if I'm a scientist or not.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
You you go in an area that I'm not afraid of,
but I was afraid for you, and that is near
death experiences because you know that can that can be
a dark area for people who really don't understand that transition.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Yeah. Absolutely, And that's funny. You were afraid for me.
I was a little afraid going into I was thinking,
you know it's dark is you know it's because the
people who go through these experiences. So, first of all,
near death experiences, when people come close to dying, about
ten to twenty percent, they say have these experiences where
they feel they're coming out of their bodies, or they
(13:14):
feel like they meet someone from their past, or they
see their life flash before their eyes, and so it's
a real personal experience for a lot of people. You
think about it, that's a lot of people having these experiences,
and so I didn't want to, you know, be dismissive
about it. In the end, what I did was I
try to stick to the signs of it. You know,
(13:34):
what can we say about these experiences? Well, it turns
out that there's a psychiatrist who's been studying these for
fifty years. I reached out to him and I got
him to tell me about it, and he's been cataloging
these experiences for years and years and years. So there's
things we can say about you know, what percentage of
people have this kind of experience or that percentage people
(13:56):
have that kind of experience. And then I talked to
a new scientists who is an expert on the brain,
and he it basically talks to us about all the
different ways that you can get your brain to give
you the same experiences as people who have near death experiences,
and they're usually triggered by, you know, sort of intense
(14:18):
moments where your brain is maybe dying or you have
a sudden close brush with death. And so it turns
out that a lot of these experiences that people have
can be sort of replicated in the brain with like
technology that can disrupt your brain waves or drugs like
the ones you see in magic mushrooms or in ayahuasca,
(14:39):
and so it's like explainable, but it's still not a
definitive answer, and in the end you sort of have
to come down to the answer that these things are
real to the people that have them. You know, the
people who have them, they are meaningful experiences. That's what
they experience, that's what they saw, that's what they heard,
(15:00):
and in many cases it changes their lives, so it's
super real to them.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Well, it was that episode that really got me to
do some serious deep digging and I'd love to do research.
And what I dug up was that this thing that's
called memories. And one researcher said, memories are you grieving
your life you're dying, and those memories are what's keeping
you alive in this moment, And I went, holy crap,
that I never even thought of it that way.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Oh my god. Yeah, that's pretty deep. You know. The
neuroscientist I talked to, basically, his point of view was
that it's sort of like this gift that evolution and
your brain is maybe giving you in your last moments.
It's stead of giving you this way to have everything
(15:46):
perspective right before you go out the door.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Yeah, which I could relate with because when I had
my heart attack in two thousand and nine, when that
doctor told me I was having a heart attack, I
went into instant meditation. In other words, I didn't want
to be worried about anything but the moment that I
was in. And everybody keeps saying that that meditation is
what kept me alive.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yeah, yeah, so maybe that could be maybe an argument
for you know, evolution kind of favoring these experiences because
then your brain is more active, it's more it's starbard,
it's it's thinking more clearly, and that might maybe help
you survive the experience.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Where can people go to find out more about you?
But because there's more to you than just doing this podcast,
I mean you're a cartoonist, you're an author, you are
involved with everything, dude.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Yeah, thank you. I do have several books out as
books for adults, books for kids. Then there are all
sort of signs related and I also have a television
show on PBS Kids called Eleanor Wonder's LUs. Yeah. So
just google Horhead Cham or google PhD Comics and you'll
see there's a Wikipedia page about me, which you can
(16:51):
only trust about eighty percent, as you shoot with Wikipedia.
But there is a website call Horheadcham dot com and
that and I do make sure it is accurate. Wow.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Well, please come back to this show anytime in the future.
The door is always going to be open for you.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Yeah. Thanks for the invite and thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Okay, yeah, you too,
Hey, welcome back to the conversation. Let's do some pod crashing.
Episode number three seventy is with Jorge Sham from the
podcast Science Stuff Or Hey, I feel like I should
be calling you doctor sense or even master, because you
have this amazing way of taking incredible knowledge and sharing
it with us who are white belts and yellow belts.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Yeah. Well that's my whole jam. I is to talk
to scientists and kind of translate what they're thinking and
saying and doing so that every person can understand it,
even kids.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
One of the things that you put focus on, and
so many people have talked about it inside their man
caves or even just at work, and that is freezing
human beings.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Now.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Now, the only reason why I think I trust in
all this is because the rumor is Ted Williams his
head it has been frozen in time. So is that true?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Well, that is a fascinating topic. You know. Basically, it's
a technology that might let you jump to the future.
You know, like if you have some sort of illness
that they can find a cure for right now, maybe
you can get frozen and wake up later when they
have found the cure, or if you wanted to go
to a distance star. You know, stars are super far
away from Earth. It's going to take years and years
(01:14):
and years to get there. Maybe we can just kind
of freeze people and then wake them up when they
get there. And so it's been a fascinating present for
years that people have been asking. There's all kinds of
legends like the one about Ted Williams's head, and there's
actually companies out there that will freeze you right now,
Like if you wanted to do it right now, you
(01:34):
could go out there and pay a couple of hundred
thousand dollars or less than one hundred thousand dollars if
you just want to freeze your brain, that will do
it for you. And so this one episode we dive
into it. We talked to biologists who studies how wood
frogs survive being turned to ice. Super fascinating. We talked
(01:55):
to one of the CEOs of one of these companies
that freeze people steps as through the technology. And then
at the end we talk to a neuroscientist who sort
of gives us an answer of whether the brain can
survive being frozen.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Well, I like the way that you break it down
in the way that I mean you start off at
sech like, like you said, the wood frog, you start
at such an easy level. Can a frog? Can a salamander?
Can something like this really survive this? And then you
grow with us forward in the way of Okay, now
let's put the human being in the story. And I mean,
I just like the way you build your stories.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Oh thank you. Yeah, we try to make every episode
basically a journey. So when you listen to the show,
you're basically coming on a journey with me to figure
out the answer to the question of the week. So
do you know, do you really have to wait thirty
minutes after eating before you can go swimming? Or what
is a quantum computer? You know, you're kind of coming
along with me to talk to experts, to you know,
(02:52):
get a sense of what who's doing what out there
about it and so hopefully it gives you that experience
of of following your curiosity and having these kind of
interesting questions develop and grow and take you to places
that you didn't expect.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Well, you know, it sounds like you're curious about all this.
I mean, you sound very genuine when you're asking your questions.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Oh, thank you. I you know, I just you've always
been a very curious person, especially after the more you
learn and the deeper you get into this particular field.
So I have a PhD in robotics, and because I
just always like robots, But once you kind of dive
deep into something like that, you realize how much we
(03:37):
don't know, you know, not just about robots, but how
much we don't know about anything at technologies, the universe,
our bodies, our brains. And to me, that's just fascinating
to think about these questions, but also to kind of
think about how people are answering them, how they're answering
these questions, and so to me, it's just just all
(03:58):
fascinating and I feel super luck that I get to
kind of share that curiosity and those questions with everyone.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
One of my favorite features on the podcast Science Stuff
Is is the way that you there's a click sound
coming out of it and then going back into the conversation.
That click is so important to me as a listener
because to me, it gives me texture and it really
sounds like that that you're taking. You're walking away from
the interview, looking straight into my soul, explaining things to me,
(04:25):
and then click, we're back into the interview.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, well, first of all, I really liked what I
saw when I look into your soul. I wrote, You're
a good egg. But no, that's that's a really interesting
because it is kind of unusual for a science show
to have that click, and it's a click you here
whenever we go from like an expert interview to me
kind of talking and breaking down a subject, and it's
important to have that kind of audio cue to take
(04:50):
you back and forth. And it's not really something you
see in a lot of shows, but it actually kind
of happened organically. So when I was developing this show,
when I was doing like a test pilot, uh, that's
what I would do, you know. I would record these
interviews with experts and then I would bring it to
somebody and presented to them and I would be like, here,
this is what this person said about going to Mars,
(05:12):
and then I would click the button to play the
clip for them, and that would end up that ended
up in the final recording, and I thought, oh, that's
really good. That like works really well to kind of
get your head to shift gears. And so it stays. Yeah,
it does.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
It reattracts the attention of the listener, which is so
valuable to radio as well as podcasting.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Now, one of the things I love it that you
admit that you yourself you are shocked by some of the
information that you receive, and I love it that you've
got the transparency to say that that that it's like,
oh my god, I did not know that.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah. Yeah, it happens every week. You know. That's one
of my favorite things about working on this show is
every week, not only do you do it get to
take people on a deep dive on a fascinating question,
but it's like I'm learning at the same time, you know,
I'm figuring out, oh wait a minute, that's not really
what's happening. This is what's happening, and that's amazing. That's fascinating,
and for me, that's part of the joy sharing those
(06:08):
unexpected surprises you get whenever you deep dive into something.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Yeah were you were you really shocked when you learned
that a coke can can explode inside a freezer? But
but water does different things, and the human body does
even more different things.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah. Absolutely. So this is for that episode that I
think you mentioned maybe about can you survive being cryogenically frozen?
And so I always thought that, you know, if you
freeze your steak or if you freeze your chicken breast
and your freezer, what really just kind of gives it
freezer burn? Is this idea that ice when it freezes,
(06:43):
it expands and then maybe ruptures, kind of like it
happens if you stick a coke can or a soda
can in the freezer. But the first thing right off
the top of the episode that we learn from a
scientist who studies is it's like, no, that's not really
what's going on. What's really what really kind of destroys
things or what would basically kill you if you get frozen,
is the cication or your body drying out. Yeah, so
(07:06):
it's really this totally different phenomenon that ice forms between
the cells, and so that kind of expels all of
the salts and sugars from the water between your cells,
which makes your cells be surrounded by all the salt
and sugar, which basically sucks the water out of him.
And so really that's really you should be your main
concern if you're worried about getting frozen.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Are your guests on zoom or are you packing up
the equipment and visiting them?
Speaker 2 (07:33):
The mission is get the interviews any way you can. Yeah. Yeah.
So sometimes for example, for the quantum computer episode where
we ask what is a quantum computer, I actually went
to cal Tech and I recorded scientists called Oscar Painter
who's also the head of quantum computers for Amazon, and
(07:54):
he kind of took us in a tour of his
quantum computers. And you, as a listener, get to join
in and listen to these things, feel what it's like
to be in the room with them. But sometimes it's
just a phone call and talking to people over not Zoom,
but something called Riverside, which is one of the things
people used to interview online. Sometimes the expert is sometimes
(08:14):
the expert is an Oslo for example, And so I'm
not gonna fly there.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Yeah, just have my Heart Radio sends you over there.
They'll take care of you.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Yeah. Yeah, they're a big company. Sure, I'll just think
they're private jet.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Hey there's more Hoe chom coming up next. Thanks for
coming back to my conversation with ort Chom'. There's a
big commercial campaign right now on the radio here in
the South that's based on the word probably it's an
overused word and it's usually a misunderstood word well and
one of the things that they do in there, Oh,
I ate something about twenty minutes ago. I'm probably gonna
be okay, my god. And then I get into your
(08:47):
podcast and you talk about swimming thirty minutes after eating.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
That is so improbable, But that happened. Is it really is?
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Is it just urban legend or it should we actually
we wait that thirty minutes?
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Yeah, that's a fascinating question. Do we have to wait
thirty minutes after eating before swimming? And I loved this
episode that we had because it was very personal to me.
You know, I grew up in Panama swimming a lot.
I went to pools, the beach and my aunt, my
mom's sister, was a doctor, you know, she's actually a pediatrician,
and she would always say, you have to wait thirty
minutes after eating before you can go swimming. And so
(09:25):
we take a deep dive into this question, kind of
going all the way back to history. So the earliest
that anyone can find this advice being posh out there
isn't the Boy Scout Manual from nineteen oh eight. Wow,
And that's the earliest anyone can find a mention of
this And it's just this random advice in between you know,
how to start a campfire, how to survive a stink bite,
(09:47):
and by the way, you shouldn't go swimming at least
a half hour after eating. And so nobody sort of
knows where this came from, but it definitely kind of
seeped into the popular culture. Parents give that advice to
their kids the time. And so in the episode, we
talked to a doctor who was a competitive swimmer, and
we talked to this physiologist some when we studies kind
of exercise and digestion and what happens to your body
(10:11):
when you eat, So we take a deep dive into digestion,
we take a big bite out of the.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Yeah, because I mean, all the way through that episode,
I kept thinking about my own neighborhood where we all
get together for our pool parties and we're eating while
we're swimming, and I kept thinking, I think I better
take up a CPR class, get all you know fresh
en up on that, because we're screwing around with fate here.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Basically was my aunt lyne to me
my whole entire childhood. That was what I really wanted
to know. But it turns out that it's not something
you have to do. You don't have to eat thirty
minutes after eating before going swimming, but you probably should.
So you kind of dig into the details of how
(10:52):
your body digesting. It's not going to cause cramps. In fact,
sort of not eating is kind of what causes cramps.
And it's not going to suck all the blood out
of your muscles because your body is built to basically
give your muscles whatever they need spoil. And also your
heart is pumping faster, so you don't have to worry
about that. It's really more about your body doesn't like
(11:15):
having all this food in the stomach, and so swimming
actually kind of delays that digestion, and especially because you're
swimming horizontally, it kind of revents you from getting that
food down. And so it's really more like you probably
should wait, otherwise you're not going to feel good.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
From one podcaster to another podcaster, what do you do
when you hit those walls? You come up with something
that sounds like a great idea but nothing is coming together.
How do you stay true to the course.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Oh, well, you just got to dig deeper. You know.
Sometimes sometimes I'll interview an expert and I think, oh
my goodness, that was the best interview ever that totally
answers all the questions, and then you sit down and
edit and you're like, oh m, actually it's not going
to do. So you just got to dig deeper until
you find those those amazing moments of revelation, you know,
(12:08):
asking these questions.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Well, do you think there's a science to what we do?
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Oh? There's definitely a craft in an art and there
are rules you can follow. I don't know if I
would call it a science, like if unless podcasters start,
you know, writing academic papers, making reviewed and running experiments
on listeners, I'm not sure we call it a science.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
I'll give you my daily writing, I'll let you let
you determine if I'm a scientist or not.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
You you go in an area that I'm not afraid of,
but I was afraid for you, and that is near
death experiences because you know that can that can be
a dark area for people who really don't understand that transition.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Yeah. Absolutely, And that's funny. You were afraid for me.
I was a little afraid going into I was thinking,
you know it's dark is you know it's because the
people who go through these experiences. So, first of all,
near death experiences, when people come close to dying, about
ten to twenty percent, they say have these experiences where
they feel they're coming out of their bodies, or they
(13:14):
feel like they meet someone from their past, or they
see their life flash before their eyes, and so it's
a real personal experience for a lot of people. You
think about it, that's a lot of people having these experiences,
and so I didn't want to, you know, be dismissive
about it. In the end, what I did was I
try to stick to the signs of it. You know,
(13:34):
what can we say about these experiences? Well, it turns
out that there's a psychiatrist who's been studying these for
fifty years. I reached out to him and I got
him to tell me about it, and he's been cataloging
these experiences for years and years and years. So there's
things we can say about you know, what percentage of
people have this kind of experience or that percentage people
(13:56):
have that kind of experience. And then I talked to
a new scientists who is an expert on the brain,
and he it basically talks to us about all the
different ways that you can get your brain to give
you the same experiences as people who have near death experiences,
and they're usually triggered by, you know, sort of intense
(14:18):
moments where your brain is maybe dying or you have
a sudden close brush with death. And so it turns
out that a lot of these experiences that people have
can be sort of replicated in the brain with like
technology that can disrupt your brain waves or drugs like
the ones you see in magic mushrooms or in ayahuasca,
(14:39):
and so it's like explainable, but it's still not a
definitive answer, and in the end you sort of have
to come down to the answer that these things are
real to the people that have them. You know, the
people who have them, they are meaningful experiences. That's what
they experience, that's what they saw, that's what they heard,
(15:00):
and in many cases it changes their lives, so it's
super real to them.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Well, it was that episode that really got me to
do some serious deep digging and I'd love to do research.
And what I dug up was that this thing that's
called memories. And one researcher said, memories are you grieving
your life you're dying, and those memories are what's keeping
you alive in this moment, And I went, holy crap,
that I never even thought of it that way.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Oh my god. Yeah, that's pretty deep. You know. The
neuroscientist I talked to, basically, his point of view was
that it's sort of like this gift that evolution and
your brain is maybe giving you in your last moments.
It's stead of giving you this way to have everything
(15:46):
perspective right before you go out the door.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Yeah, which I could relate with because when I had
my heart attack in two thousand and nine, when that
doctor told me I was having a heart attack, I
went into instant meditation. In other words, I didn't want
to be worried about anything but the moment that I
was in. And everybody keeps saying that that meditation is
what kept me alive.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yeah, yeah, so maybe that could be maybe an argument
for you know, evolution kind of favoring these experiences because
then your brain is more active, it's more it's starbard,
it's it's thinking more clearly, and that might maybe help
you survive the experience.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Where can people go to find out more about you?
But because there's more to you than just doing this podcast,
I mean you're a cartoonist, you're an author, you are
involved with everything, dude.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Yeah, thank you. I do have several books out as
books for adults, books for kids. Then there are all
sort of signs related and I also have a television
show on PBS Kids called Eleanor Wonder's LUs. Yeah. So
just google Horhead Cham or google PhD Comics and you'll
see there's a Wikipedia page about me, which you can
(16:51):
only trust about eighty percent, as you shoot with Wikipedia.
But there is a website call Horheadcham dot com and
that and I do make sure it is accurate. Wow.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Well, please come back to this show anytime in the future.
The door is always going to be open for you.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Yeah. Thanks for the invite and thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Okay, yeah, you too,
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