STEM-Talk

Dr. Leonard Wong, a research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) of the U.S. Army War College, led an important study titled: “Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession.”  The study, which was published in 2015 generated much discussion as well as some consternation and reflection. www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf In this episode, Host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC’s Director Ken Ford talk with Wong about his study and its implications. Wong also lectured about his study at IHMC in Pensacola last September: http://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160907/. Wong’s research focuses on the human and organizational dimensions of the military and includes topics such as leadership development in the military profession. He is a retired Army Officer and taught leadership at West Point. He is also an analyst for the Chief of Staff in the Army. Wong’s research has led him Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo and Vietnam. He has testified before Congress and has been featured widely in the media, including the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, PBS, NPR, 60 Minutes and CNN. Wong is a professional engineer and holds a Bachelor’s from the U.S. Military Academy. He also has a Master’s and a Ph.D. in business administration from Texas Tech University. 1:43: Ken reads five-star iTunes review from “CC Rider,” which is entitled “Intelligent Podcast: What a Relief:” “What a pleasure to hear intelligent, articulate people discussing worthwhile topics.” 2:17: Dawn describes Wong’s bio. 3:18: Dawn welcomes Wong and Ken. 3:42: Wong describes his role at the U.S. Army War College, as well as the College’s structure. When Army leaders arrive at the War College, they’ve generally been in the Army for twenty years. They’re at the point of thinking strategically about leadership and their roles. 5:27: Wong’s research into this topic started over a decade ago, with the question of how to build more time into the schedule of junior offices to facilitate innovation. Wong and his colleagues discovered an overwhelming amount of requirements, which were stifling Innovation. In the back of his mind, Wong concluded: ‘If we require more than they can possibly do, what are we reporting?’ 6:36: Wong, in conversation with his colleague Steve Gerras, once asked him what he was doing on his computer. He was supposedly doing mandatory training, but not really. He said, ‘I know, I’m just saying I did it.’ Wong realized then ‘how casually we approach lying, but we don’t call it lying.’ 7:15: The theory of Wong’s subsequent study came from a book entitled “Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do About It,” by Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel (http://amzn.to/2gBJtib), along with what David Messick called ethical fading. The methodology was to use focus groups from various ranks throughout the Army, including staff officers at the Pentagon. 8:12: Dawn mentions that Wong’s study had a precedent: In 1970, the U.S. Army War College published a study showing that lying in the Army was pervasive. Digitization, the audit culture, and downsizing have made it worse today. 8:43: Wong says, “The Army is like a compulsive hoarder. It collects requirements, and it never gives any up. We always add more. We keep adding to the pile. Technology has made a huge influence on this.” Now, with email and Internet, we can ask people to provide digital signatures, and do various online trainings. 9:42: Wong characterizes another part of the problem: “The Army has had a giant emphasis on being a profession. It’s a good thing, but it’s made us believe that we are better than we are. We forget that we are humans. We forget that we are talking about people who can fall to the same temptations, go the same route, as an ordinary human.” 10:35: Ken asks about Wong’s description of people in the Army being so overwhelmed that they have to prioritize. 10:50: Wong says, “One of the ways to ethically fade is you take away moral aspects…. So you are void of all the baggage that an ethical dilemma brings.” Euphemisms are a common way around this, and prioritize is one way of saying you lied. “Prioritize means taking a risk: We didn’t do it, but are going to still report that we did it. Prioritize is a convenient way to convince ourselves that we haven’t lied.” 12:00: “What this study isn’t saying is we have an institution full of liars, or a cohort of people with low ethics. We’ve created an institution with a bureaucracy…with a system that is putting an onerous burden on people to do everything and report they’ve done it. Inadvertently it creates a culture in which we have to tell a system what it wants to hear or it won’t get done.” 12:39: Wong recalls the old days and how easy it was to take a leave form (31) for travel. Today there is a complicated trips form, in which you have to specify where you are going, when you are stopping, any medications you’re taking, who is traveling with you, vehicle inspections. 13:51: “We’ve surrounded ourselves with an audit culture where we have to tell a system that something has happened when it really hasn’t.” 14:00: Ken comments these are typically for the benefit of “CYA.” 14:13: Wong cites the good intentions of the people behind these requirements. 14:40: Yet he questions whether this is the best system for the desired outcomes. “It’s well-meaning, yet the system we create encourages people to lie to it.” 15:00: Study’s conclusion was that process and paperwork are replacing leadership. 15:38: “We don’t want to replace leadership with a process because a process will always tell us what we want to hear…A leader might not. We can’t always trust leaders because leaders are human. That’s where we may prefer a process, which gives us a green light. But it may not be telling us the truth.” 16:30: Ken comments that the growth of procedures and lack of discretion left to leaders “almost presumes poor leadership, judgment, and I think is a step in the wrong direction.” 17:10: Wong says, “We grow leaders. We shouldn’t be ashamed to use leaders, but at the same time we can’t expect leaders to be perfect or their people to be perfect.” 17:43: Wong describes an Army storyboard: In the old days, after an event, someone had to brief an intelligence officer on what they saw/happened. Now the storyboard “allows us to create PowerPoint slides, derived from a template, that has pictures, a narrative and a map.” These have become burdensome to create. 18:30: “You stop focusing on what happened and start focusing on making the storyboard look correctly. It encouraged people to copy and paste; or ignore the storyboard. They would either omit it, or they’d duplicate it, and fabricate them.” 20:46: “There are many things that allowed them to think that they did tell the truth, and technology is one of them. The further you move away from the why…from a statement that you know is not truthful, it allows our mind to rest at ease, and technology allows us to do that.” 21:20: One example of this is annual ratings forms to council the rated officers, which is supposed to happen every quarter. “You have to show you counseled them every quarter. The clerk will fill in dates. They’ll agonize over picking the right dates so it doesn’t fall on the weekend. Tens of thousands are turned in every year.” 23:00: Ken observes that, “In many agencies and companies, and most particularly DoD, PowerPoint has become the defacto communication tool. PowerPoint can obscure the paucity of thought underlying a particular slide. In NASA we used to have a saying, ‘This guy is one slide deep.’” 23:53:  Wong notes that PowerPoint is a double edged sword — perfect for briefings when used correctly, but it’s very dangerous when used incorrectly. 25:10: Ken comments that “Jeff Bezos famously banned power point on Amazon as a low information communication medium that often supports the illusion that the presenter actually has a coherent position or argument.” 25:35: Wong says, “PowerPoint when used incorrectly is a lazy man’s tool. But when used correctly, it’s a good stimulus for discussion.” 26:40: Ken talks about the APPP: anti-power point political party in Switzerland. Their stance: “Decreasing professional use of PowerPoint and other presentation software, which the party claims, causes national economic damage, and lowers the quality of the presentation in 95 percent of the cases.” 28:44: Some examples of ridiculous training compliance modules: Every Marine, including those that have never smoked, are required to take a smoking cessation class. This year Wong had to take training on fetal alcohol syndrome. “That’s when you get in the mind, ‘This is a dumb requirement,’ and that helps me breeze through it.” 30:00: “The danger of all these trivial examples is that added up, it creates a culture. Some reports are really important…so many reports people view as dumb. Because of this culture we’ve created, we give them permission to lie about what’s dumb.” 31:08: Dawn asks what is worse: the lying, or the pervasive perception that it’s not lying; and that we’re above lying. 31:20: Wong says, “The lying is a problem but can be corrected. If we don’t admit that we do this, then we’re headed for hypocrisy, for hubris, and that’s more of a problem.” 31:42: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 32:24: Wong describes ethical fading as “removing the glare of the bright colors of moral decisions. You make it so it’s not black and white, right or wrong. You make it so it’s gray. One way to do that is to numb us: We start psychologically disconnecting from the ethical part of it.” One example: Every year to use computer systems in Army, they have to sign a statement that says, ‘I have read, understood and agreed with the procedures …” Preceding that is a 1900-word document. “Every single person initials that, and I haven’t met anyone who has actually read it.” 33:26: Wong mentions that in the U.K. they did an experiment where they offered free Wi-Fi to people and one of the agreements was ‘I promise to give my first born.’ “They had to stop that because every single person signed up for it. We don’t think we’re lying to a person; we think we are lying to a system. That distance allows us to convince ourselves that we don’t lie. 34:20: Wong discusses the potentially more serious implications of the lies. 35:05: “You add up all these Iraqi units that were graded green, and we had a very good Iraqi Army on paper. Then we saw what happened when ISIS came in, and suddenly all these green units didn’t perform the way all our power point slides said they did.” 35:28: Wong reflects on his own experience with compliance measures in the Army: “I remember feeling pressured, but not to the degree that they do today.” 36:32: Ken calls Wong’s study “brave.” He asks about the reaction in the Army, and whether it was rank-dependent. 36:55: Wong says it was “eye-opening.” After some initial anger, “I started getting emails, calls, and notes from people throughout the Army: You’ve just exposed what everyone knows about. Senior leaders had a hard time acknowledging it.” 38:02: “The more senior you go in an organization, the less you have to comply with these trivial requirements.” 38:50: After the anger died down, the leadership came to realize people were not under attack, but rather a culture that had been created. “To see policies change because of a 34-page document…I’m glad to be part of that.” 39:09: Ken comments that the military has a track record of leading the way in cultural changes. The problem is much broader than the military; it reflects the culture of which it’s part. 40:18: Wong says the Army could do three things to improve its situation: First, acknowledge the problem…and that it happens at all levels. Secondly, exercise restraint. “Every level of Army likes to create requirements for those below them, but we need to allow those at the bottom to exercise their own judgment.” Third: We have to lead truthfully. 44:30: Ken notes the tendency to make up words so you aren’t committing a bad act; but rather referring to the word. Prioritize is an example.   In the Navy, we used to call it, “Gun Decking or Pencil Whipping.” 45:10: Ken says it is often seen as a key role of a leader to provide “high cover” for subordinates.  When you unpack that, it often implies that the leader took the hit; that’s who checked the boxes. 46:10: Ken says Wong’s work is not seen as a criticism of the Army or people; rather of the audit culture… “Little by little, it diminishes the integrity of the force.” 46:46: Dawn directs listeners to Wong’s IHMC lecture: http://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160907/ 46:50: Dawn and Ken sign off.      

Mike Gernhardt’s career epitomizes the scientific overlap between the depths of the ocean and space. Prior to his career as a NASA astronaut, Gernhardt was a professional diver and engineer on subsea oil field construction and repair projects around the world. As a child, Gernhardt vacationed in Florida, where he developed a love of the ocean. Like many children, Gernhardt dreamed of becoming an astronaut. However, unlike most kids, he stuck with his dream and began taking steps to pursue it in high school when, in his own words, he “had already put together that working in space and in the sea were similar.” Gernhardt received his undergraduate degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University, followed by his Master’s and Ph.D.—both in Bioengineering—from the University of Pennsylvania. At the University of Pennsylvania, he worked with his life-long mentor C.J. Lambertson, who is considered to be one of the godfathers of diving medicine. Under Lambertson, Gernhardt received unparalleled field work experience, testing real-time the decompression tables that he’d developed and  still constitute the commercial diving standard. In 1992, Gernhardt was selected to be an astronaut at NASA, where he completed four space flights and space walks. He also started a company called Oceaneering Space Systems, where he transferred his subsea robotics experience to NASA. Gernhardt stated, “There’s really a lot of synergy between working underwater and working in space, and the design of the task for human and robot compatibility.” Gernhardt has received numerous awards and honors, including the highly coveted NASA Distinguished Service Medal. To view his bios: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_L._Gernhardt ; http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/gernhard.html In this episode, STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis, an esteemed diver and undersea expert herself, and co-host Tom Jones, a veteran NASA astronaut, engage in a thought-provoking conversation. 1:35: Ken reads a 5-star iTunes review from Paula Olivet: “I wish this podcast aired everyday.” This show takes science as a personal, academic and professional venture, which it entirely is. It’s not all pipettes and mice. It’s ambition, and unquenchable thirst for answers. Even when I think the episode subject matter is not for me, I still find myself completely enthralled.” 2:32: Dawn recounts Gernhardt’s educational and professional background: He hold a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University and a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a professional deep sea diver and engineer on projects around world. He was a manager and Vice President of Special Projects for Oceaneering International, and established Oceaneering Space Systems to transfer subsea technology and operational experience to the international space program. 3:05: Ken adds: “His impact on the agency and how we do human space flight is really extensive.” 4:02: Dawn welcomes Mike and Tom to the episode. 4:31: Gernhardt explains his initial interest in diving: “As a four or five-year old I was always going fishing with my dad in Florida. At nine or ten, I was doing scuba diving on a family vacation. I got certified at age 12 and became a dive instructor at 18.” For the first couple of summers after college, he worked as a scuba instructor and boat captain at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Then he got into commercial diving, where he noted the limitations in decompression tables. 5:38: These limitations inspired him to study the physiology and biophysics of diving. In college, he studied physics and math, and was a pre-med major. When he graduated, he wasn’t ready to commit to graduate or medical school, so he worked as a commercial diver. 6:40: Describing his commercial diving experience, he says: “Unlike the more sheltered college environment, here it was like: What can you do in the water at the end of the hose? That really inspired me.” 7:02: The Medical Director of Ocean Systems was C.J. Lambertson, who took him under his wing. Gernhardt decided to go to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in order to study with Lambertson. “That turned into a 30-year relationship.” 7:43: “We would generate the new decompression tables, and then I would go out and use them…. We tested them real-time.” 8:05: Lambertson said his ultimate goal was to make the field a laboratory. “In this period of three years, we generated tables that became the Oceaneering standard.” Roughly ten million dives have been done on those tables. 9:09: Dawn calls Lambertson one of the godfathers of diving medicine and asks what it was like to work with him. 9:20: Gernhardt answers: “He was an amazing guy. I started reading his books as an undergraduate. When I then met him for the first time, he looked professorial, older, he had a beard…When you shook his hand, he could squeeze your hand off.” Lambertson was also influential during World War II. “He wrote undersea warfare tactics/strategy that influenced everything, on top of the physiological work he did.” 10:24: Gernhardt adds: “He was a personal friend and father figure. When I was there he would just make the time to sit and talk. He was also a great mentor.” Lambertson read “every word” of Gernhardt’s dissertation. “He was hard on me.” 11:10: Gernhardt explains that Lambertson had been an advisor to NASA for decades and sat on all the review committees. “He was reviewing my work. People at headquarters said that was a conflict of interest. I told them, ‘No one’s going to be harder on me than Dr. Lambertson.’ We kind of fought off the bureaucrats on that and produced stuff that has really enabled the assembly and maintenance of space station.” 13:04: Gernhardt started Oceaneering Space Systems in 1987, where he transferred his sub-sea robotics experience to NASA. He invented the Cryopak, which used liquid oxygen for breathing and cooling to handle issues in micro-gravity. They called it the magnetic intake dewar. 15:02: Of the company, Gernhardt says, “We won a large contract to build a sub-critical liquid oxygen storage system, and we beat out major aerospace contractors. That was exciting for our young company at the time. That transitioned us into the space world.” 17:11: Gernhardt says, “There’s really a lot of synergy between working underwater and working in space, and the design of the task for human and robot compatibility.” 17:34: Gernhardt recalls the aerospace contractors who would go to the shop and think that we were selling atmospheric diving suits that weighed about a ton. “I was selling the concepts, the operational knowledge, the design knowledge, and some of these folks thought they were going to buy a suit from us.” 18:15: His company initially included just him and a secretary. “I hired every commercial diver that I knew, that had gone back and gotten an engineering degree. He combined that with going up to the best universities and interviewing top talent. “We put together this magical combination of seasoned commercial divers and smart as heck MIT and JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA] grads and really did an amazing amount of work.” 18:55: Tom asks him how he gave that all up to become a “worker-bee astronaut.” 19:35: Gernhardt explains that becoming an astronaut had been a lifelong goal of his. “In my early teens, I had already put together that working in space and in sea were similar.” Athletic as well, he had “set the distant goal to be an astronaut.” 20:20: Of his first year on the job (as astronaut), he recalls: “There’s a pile of manuals that go up from the floor past your desk, and you’ve got to learn all this, and then you’ve gotta learn to fly a T-38 jet…and then next thing you know you’re flying in space.” 20:45: Gernhardt says he was different from most astronauts in that his area of academic expertise was directly related to EVA (extravehicular activity.) That allowed him to design tools. 21:25: Gernhardt had invented the body-restraint tether (BRT) for undersea diving that became useful in space, as well. 23:20: Tom describes his experience using the BRT: “It was a dream. It enabled you to scramble anyplace on the space station and then grab onto a handrail with your third arm, which you provided, and that left your hands free. And you could turn your body left, right, in and out, and then you could carry it around just by bending it over your shoulder, and it was out of the way of your other tools. It was a very handy device on the space station.” 24:25: Dawn asks about the similarities between diving and EVA. 24:40: Gernhardt replies: “What’s similar is you’re working in a three-dimensional hostile environment: no air in sea or in space.” Furthermore, the way you think about planning the operation is similar, in terms of A, B and C. But the mechanics are very different: “Underwater we’re not in pressurized suits, so you have more mobility and dexterity. You use your hands to feel, but you also have poor visibility…you tend to use all of your body senses. In EVA you’re in a pressurized suit with a similar inflation pressure as a football or basketball; so, every time you move, you’re fighting that inflation pressure.” 26:18: In space, Gernhardt explains, even though you are “weightless,” you actually are not massless. “You and the suit weigh over 500 pounds in space. If you go fast, you could tumble out of control. My motto was: ‘You cannot go too slow’. Never let your hands get ahead of your brain.” 27:24: Another difference between the ocean depths and space: “In space, you have unlimited visibility. You can see literally millions of miles.” 27:40: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 28:00: Tom asks about Gernhardt’s first EVA because a few weeks before launch, Gernhardt sustained an injury that might have prevented him from participating. 28:30: Gernhardt tells the story: the mission was delayed a week, so he went on a date in Galveston. It was pouring rain and, after dropping his date off at the Grand Theater, he slipped and dislocated his shoulder while running through the parking lot in the rain. 30:10: “I had a great attitude,” Gernhardt says about his recovery and prospect of missing the mission. “If I can do it, great,” he though. “If not, it’s not about me—it’s about the mission.” 32:00: Gernhardt shares an anecdote about how the doctors okayed him for the mission after he proved that he could get in and out of the space suit. “I was in about as much pain as a human can stand. It was a huge mental focus, but it all worked out.” 37:00: Gernhardt talks about the oxygen prebreathe protocol he developed with his team. Fifty subjects experienced no bends, and very few bubbles. 38:42: Tom says: You can see Mike doing the prebreathe protocol on an Imax movie called “Space Station 3D.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9X84b9t3Do 39:00: Dawn says she was a research assistant on prebreathe protocol at Duke University with Dr. Vann. She assisted with monitoring of subjects and measuring how much they were bubbling at altitude. 40:42: Gernhardt talks about the in-suit light exercise protocol that saves complexity over other exercise protocols. “We use that routinely on space station, and we’ve never had any bends—we’ve had close to 200 EVAs without any decompression sickness.” 41:28: He is working on developing the details of a Phobos Mission in Mars Orbit planned for the 2030s. 42:20: On those missions, he adds, “We would do excursions in a pressurized excursion vehicle,” another of Gernhardt’s inventions. This is a small cabin with great windows; two people live in it for two weeks at a time. The pressure of that cabin is 8.2 pounds per square inch, with 34 percent oxygen.” It puts us at a much better posture for not having to denitrogenate to avoid decompression sickness.” 43:10: Air-lock operations are not fun, Gernhardt says. Tom compares the compressed feeling to “two hippos in the front seat of a Volkswagen.” 43:45: Gernhardt also invented the work efficiency index: the work time you get outside divided by the overhead it took you to get outside. “On the station we spent about two and a half hours inside for every hour outside, and to me that was crazy.” 44:12: “The whole concept is that we have this cabin that is optimized for viewing and low-overhead EVAs. And we can combine that with different mobility elements.” 45:50: Tom characterizes Phobos as a “low-gravity body; the size of a big city.” He asks Gernhardt: “What advantages do we gain from being around Phobos (or Deimos)?” 46:08: Gernhardt answers that Phobos is “very interesting scientifically. It will tell us about the natural history and evolution of Mars… We can pick up pieces of Mars on the Moon of Mars.” 46:55: “It is so much easier to go to the Moon of Mars than Mars’ surface. Mars it the worst place on solar system to try to land because there’s just enough atmosphere to get you hot, but not enough to slow you down.” 47:19: “By going to Phobos, we develop the infrastructure needed to go to Mars.” 48:29: “Phobos is a stepping stone. Ninety-nine percent of everything we would use to go to Phobos takes us towards Mars’ surface.” 48:50: Gernhardt adds that “Mars is only 9,000 Kilometers from Phobos, so every exploration activity or public outreach event that we do will have Mars looming large over the horizon and keep our focus on where we’re going.” 49:10: “My hope is that we sign up to that [going to Mars sometime in the 2030s] and have a plan that we can close a budget around, and really have a focused exploration effort….” 49:50: Gernhardt’s advice to aspiring astronauts: “Get as much education as you can; do things that you like because, if you like them, you’re going to have a good life; you’re going to be good at them…” Do things, he adds, “that are directed towards being an astronaut, but don’t do things that you don’t like in order to be selected as an astronaut.” 50:23: “Learn to be a team player. It’s not about individual super stars.” 50:47: Dawn thanks Mike. 51:48: Dawn marvels at the overlap in the undersea world and space and Gernhardt’s own seamless transition from undersea to space. 52:02: Ken says: “It’s a smooth transition, and Mike depicted it beautifully. He’s a great guy, and a valued collaborator; in fact, he’s truly a man for all seasons.” 52:20: Dawn and Ken sign off.

For fitness and Paleo Diet aficionados—and perhaps regular STEM-talk listeners—Robb Wolf is the type of esteemed guest who needs no introduction. Many people already know him by his best-selling book, “The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet,” (http://amzn.to/2gB6N4c) or his top-ranked podcast by that same name. (http://robbwolf.com/podcast/) But what some people may not know is that Wolf also started the world’s first cross-fit affiliate gym; that he’s raising his young daughters on a paleo diet—which may account for their mouths having a similar phenotypical expression as hunters and gatherers; and that nicotine—yes, nicotine—can actually be good for you (just not delivered by cigarette) in some contexts. STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC Founder Ken Ford talk to Wolf about these and other fascinating insights in this episode. Wolf hailed from a relatively unhealthy family, which pushed him towards discovering good health on his own terms. A keen interest and aptitude in science (he was a biochemistry major at California State University-Chico) set Wolf on the path of evolutionary medicine. He began thinking seriously about pre-agricultural diets in response to his mother’s poor reaction to her consumption of grains, legumes, and dairy. Since that time, Wolf has become an expert, researcher, and self-experimenter of the Paleo Diet. His expertise has led him to become a review editor for Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism; co-founder of The Performance Menu, a nutrition and athletic training journal; and co-owner of NorCal, one of Men’s Health magazine’s top thirty gyms in America. He is also a consultant for the Naval Special Warfare Resiliency Program. Wolf recently gave a lecture entitled “Darwinian Medicine: Maybe There IS Something to This Evolution Thing” at IHMC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qga4A3vnXmg 2:10: Dawn reads iTunes review entitled “No Bro Science Here” from someone nicknamed “Leafy Sweets:” “Science-based interviews with experts, post-docs and department/lab heads on relevant topics. No Bro Science here!  Interesting discussions relevant to one’s well-being and interests.” 3:46: Dawn welcomes Robb and Ken. 4:10: “I was raised by two well-meaning, but quite ill parents. Both of them smoked, neither of them exercised, both of them developed Type-2 Diabetes pretty early in their lives, and I’m not really sure why…but somewhere along the line I suspected that if I ate better and exercised, that I could maybe have a better outcome.” 5:00: “They really kind of acquiesced all their health to the medical establishment, and I went just as opposite that vector as you can possibly imagine.” 5:30: “I had a pretty good interest in science in general… I got into an organic chemistry class (in high school) and loved it like I had never loved anything before, and actually discovered that I had an aptitude for spinning molecules in my head and thinking about bonding and stuff like that.” 6:55: After his degree in biochemistry, Wolf considered medical school, but he had some personal health problems. That’s when, “The evolutionary approach to health/medicine got on my radar.” 7:28: Plus, he says, “Academia seemed to move at glacial speeds.” “Around 2000-2001, I found this weird thing called Cross-fit. I opened a gym, and it happened to be the first cross-fit affiliate in the world, and I opened a second one (the fourth in the world) … That was kind of the medicine that I wanted to practice. I got to talk to people about sleep, food exercise; and build community.” 9:15: Wolf describes his entry into evolutionary medicine: He was vegan, he was not sleeping and he had moved to Seattle, into a tiny basement where he didn’t see the sun for several months. He had a lot of gastro-intestinal problems, as did his mother, whose rheumatologist told her she was allergic to grains, legumes and dairy. 10:47: Around 1998, Wolf learned about the Paleo Diet through the work of Arthur De Vany and Loren Cordain (who would become Wolf’s mentor). Lauren had written a paper called “Cereal Grains: Humanity’s Double-edged Sword.” (http://www.directms.org/pdf/EvolutionPaleolithic/Cereal%20Sword.pdf) 12:00: Dawn asks about the “contemporary collision between foods we’re wired to eat and what we find on the shelves of local supermarkets.” 12:15: Wolf responds: “We’re set up for failure. I half-jokingly say that if you live in this modern environment and you’re not diabetic and broken, then you are kind of screwing up. You’re not paying attention to your evolutionary history.” 12:45: “We have limitless caloric input. We don’t need to expend effort to obtain these items. We have limitless palate options.” 15:00: Wolf’s short definition of the Paleo Diet: “You’re generally not eating a much in terms of grains, legumes, and dairy. You eat everything else: meat, fruit, roots, shoots, vegetables.” 16:27: He also cautions against the trendy uptake of the diet: “Paleo became this thing where people were asking: ‘Is this Paleo or not?’ instead of ‘Is this a good item for me?’” 17:00: Wolf decries the use of the term “Paleo,” which was used early on in the anthropological literature to describe the diet. 17:25: Wolf says that he has been low-carb for a long time; he currently eats 100-150 grams of carbs a day. “I’ve really enjoyed ketogenic diets in the past. That’s where I get my best cognition from.” 17:35:  “I am playing again with a ketogenic diet again because I am being leaned on by folks like you (Ford) and some other people to see if I can fuel my Brazilian Jujitsu activity.” 17:49: He can eat lentils, beans and corn…but not gluten. “I am highly reactive to gluten and gluten-like grains.” 18:45: Wolf discusses the role of genes in what we ought to eat, and the gut microbiome in modifying those genetics…He cites the studies of the Weizmann group in Israel, in which 800 people were given a sub-cutaneous glucose monitor and then fed a battery of meals. “The glycemic response was all over the map.” 20:00: “One person would eat a banana and have virtually no blood glucose response …Another person would eat a banana and get into nearly diabetic ranges… It’s clear in my mind that there’s massive variation in folks, and that a one size fits all approach is really, really problematic.” 21:00: Ken comments: “It would be surprising to me if Northern Europeans and Kitavans would both be ideally suited to eat exactly the same diet, particularly for genetic reasons, but also for gut microbiome reasons.” 21:50: Dawn asks if anyone has looked at the impact of ancestral diets on people doing manual labor jobs or professional athletes—since our ancestors were more active than we are. 22:00: Robb answers that most of the studies have been done in disease populations, such as people with cardiovascular disease, Type-2 Diabetes, insulin resistance or stage I/II renal disease. 23:43: “Both coaches and elite performers tend to be ahead of academia in empirically figuring out what works well.” 23:55: The Paleo way of eating has reached the Navy’s Special Warfare community. 25:05: “In college, most of us had some sort of horrific diet like pizza and beer for months on end and it didn’t kill us, so my greasy car salesman pitch is why don’t you give it [the Paleo diet] a shot for a month and see how you look, feel and perform; do blood work before and afterwards and see how it works.” 26:30: Dawn asks if an obese individual following a cleaner, healthier diet is enough to shift his/her phenotype to a healthier place. 27:11: “I think for the optimum human experience we need some sort of vigorous physical activity at least occasionally.” 28:00: “Ketogenic diet plus fasting can actually mimic a lot of the physiological processes that we see with exercise, but I’m not sure how much mileage we can get out of that. There’s some indication that a ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting can enhance certain elements of our metabolism, like mitochondrial density [along with] pro-apoptotic and autophagy benefits.” 28:50: “We need periods of relative abundance and some scarcity, and that is then sending signaling that is possibly most consistent with health and longevity.” 29:10: Wolf discusses who food and the metabolic byproducts of food and exercise are often signaling molecules. “There’s an expectation for a certain type of cadence and beat to our physical activity and nutrient intake, and if we get out of step with that, then I think that we’re pre-disposing ourselves to a transcriptome that may be pathogenic at some point.” 30:00: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 31:15: Dawn asks about studies comparing unprocessed, whole-food diets to comparable Paleo diet. 31:46: Robb cites a Lynda Frassetto study comparing the Mediterranean and Paleo diets. (http://jn.nutrition.org/content/early/2016/04/20/jn.115.224048.) The two groups were fed at a level so they would not lose weight. It was hard to get the Paleo group to eat enough food so they would not lose weight. Absent weight loss, they saw dramatically improved blood lipids and systemic inflammatory markers in the Paleo diet group. 34:26: Dawn talks about being vegetarian for 22 years, an emotional decision rooted in growing up on her grandparents’ farm during the summer and being uncomfortable eating what had been killed and that she had helped raise. “When I was seventeen, my grandfather told me who I was eating at the dinner table. So I called it quits…. But a lot of us are interested in the Paleo diet.” She asks about recommendations for vegetarians interested in the Paleo Diet. 36:08: Robb says, “If we’re doing eggs and dairy, it really is pretty easy to make that work. Properly prepared legumes are a great background, primary energy source; lots of coconut, coconut oil; cheese and butter.” 37:38: One possible caveat for those on vegetarian diets is to avoid a monochromatic dietary pattern. We need to be better about rotating foods in and out, like eggs. 39:50: At Wolf’s house, he does 90 percent of the cooking. His wife, who is Italian, was vegan when Wolf met her—and he impressed her with his cooking. She switched to his diet. 41:22: We really don’t eat much in the way of gluten. Many people think it’s just a fad. I’ve spent twenty years studying this from an immunological perspective, and there are a lot of folks that benefit from gluten free. 42:05: The preponderance of what they eat is sweet potatoes, fruit, fish, seafood; both of Wolf’s little girls eat homemade sauerkraut, homemade kimchi; liver. 42:22: His kids’ dentist has noticed that the kids have a lot of space between their teeth—and broad jaws, a notable phenotypic expression. This likely means they won’t have crowding of their teeth. Wolf attributes this to their nutrient-rich diet. On the contrary, lower nutrient-dense foods cause a shortening of the dental arch and crowding of teeth. “That would kill us were it not for modern dentistry.” 45:10: Still, his kids express the same attraction to sweet foods as everyone else. “We have to find some way …so that we aren’t on the losing end of food intake.” 45:48: Ken comments that the neuro-regulation of appetite is currently of huge interest and asks Rob to discuss it. 46:11: In the last fifty years, there have been a lot of macro-nutrient wars such as those between high and low carbs. “At the end of the day, what we want to see is some ability for people to eat an appropriate amount for their energetic needs and not much more/less. [It] boils down to the neuro-regulation of appetites.” 47:10: “The state of ketosis is incredibly satiating, and seems to be disproportionately so relative to caloric intake. 47:22:  “One takeaway that I would love for folks to noodle on is that within medicine and dietetics, there is only one disordered eating that they acknowledge, and that is trying to limit palate options in some way. If you show up eating a big gulp and Twinkies — you are good to go.” 48:00: In every study that’s ever been done comparing the American Dietetics recommended diet with the vegan diet, or the high protein diet, etc. … the diet that fails consistently is the moderate, don’t-exclude-any-food-groups diet. 49:42: Ken asks Robb how he felt in ketosis initially, post-adaptation period. 51:22: Robb says when he first clicked into ketosis, around 1998, “It was amazing. I had incredible mental focus. I could go hours or even days without eating. It just didn’t phase me at all.” He was also very active at the time, doing gymnastics and Brazilian Capoeira. 54:30: Robb says exogenous ketones are “reasonably impressive.” Ketone salts give him GI upset. He is getting ready to play with ketone esters. He mixes MCT oil with soy lecithin and nut butter (as a carrier.) That mitigates his GI problems. 59:30: Robb comments on the cultural tendency to over-train. “We hold elite athletics on a pedestal. We assume their training should be emulated, and I haven’t seen that to be the case. And I see a lot of people break themselves as a consequence of that. Endurance athletes especially are neurotic about training.” 1:01:40: Ken comments: “Marathon running has been a sacred cow, and a symbol of personal virtue…We hear more and more of negative consequences associated with long-term, extreme endurance activities.” 1:04:12: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 1:04:50: Robb used to recommend high dose Omega 3 supplements. Now he recommends getting as much of it from your diet as you can, with deep water fish that are smaller on the food chain such as mackerel and sardines. 1:06:40: He says Omega 3s are “highly reactive poly-unsaturated fats: if we dump that into an already inflamed individual, that could be a disaster.” In certain people, other issues need to be tackled first before using Omega 3s as an adjunctive therapy. 1:08:30: Ken says nicotine gum seems to provide focus and a productivity boost, especially during activities demanding focus such as writing a book. 1:09:09: Robb started researching nicotine when he was giving talks on sleep, nutrition, alcohol and nicotine for the Navy SEALs. He found that nicotine enhances dopamine status; and is beneficial for gastrointestinal issues. The culprit (i.e., cigarettes) is the delivery system. 1:11:03: Robb tried nicotine gum, about which he says: “It was a whole other layer of peeling back the fog, and the focus. Plugging into the matrix for 45 minutes to an hour. I shared this information with the SEAL community. The flight docs just wanted to barbeque me alive.” 1:11:54: He recommends lozenges and gum, not cigarettes. 1:13:55: Dawn says her dad smoked when he did fine-scale modeling. 1:14:27: Ken comments that nicotine is among the most addictive drugs in common use.  Nicotine has a 90 percent addiction liability (90 of 100 people would become addicted). Opiates are 50 percent; and alcohol, about 10 percent. With nicotine, there is not much of a list (unlike for opiates and alcohol) of societal or personal health hazards. 1:16:45: But one should probably be cautious regarding nicotine in cold weather. Robb once did long bow hunting in very cold weather and chewed nicotine gum, and because of the vascular constrictive effects, he went from being completely comfortable to his hands and feet turning into blocks of ice. 1:17:17: If you’re prone to Raynaud’s disease, nicotine would not be a good idea; or in a situation where your extremities need to be warm, it’s not a good idea. 1:18:04: Robb talks about the Lazy Lobo Ranch and the work of Allan Savory, who developed a process to reverse desertification by using smartly controlled grazing animals. 1:19:15: Robb moved to a three-acre ranch in Reno. Comments that Nevada used to be a giant grassland. 1:20:58: He uses a mob grazing technique with electric fencing. Because animals are bunched up tight, they compete to eat everything. The before/after photos of this piece of desert land are just stunning. 1:23:14: Allan Savory makes the point that one third of all the land masses on the planet are grasslands; this is amenable for growing grass/animals, and we’ve shied away from using these areas in these ways. 1:24:15: “I think there’s a real opportunity to produce lots of food, address some soil carbon issues, and heat sinks and water utilization. When you re-establish these grasslands, the water doesn’t just run off; you don’t get flooding. It actually re-fills aquifers.” 1:25:11: Ken says, “Allan Savory is a person that more people should know about and pay attention to.” (http://savory.global) 1:25:49: Robb’s new, upcoming book, “Wired to Eat,” is looking at the evolutionary biology story again. “The thing that seems to pop up again and again is sense of guilt and failure of morality around eating.” He diffuses that in the front of book. 1:28:24: “My hope is that both on a cognitive level and an emotional level people can plug into this and understand: ‘I’m not a failure because this stuff is hard.’” The back part of book contains a 30-day re-set for the neuro-regulation of appetite and getting your insulin in line. The final chapter is titled ‘Hammers, Drills and Ketosis: The Only Tool Your Doctor Will Never Use’. A carpenter wouldn’t argue about whether to use a drill, saw or ax — they each have specific and well-appreciated purposes. Ironically in medicine, the use of ketosis and fasting as tools is a controversial topic. 1:30:20: The book will be out in March or April, 2017. Amazon is taking pre-orders. (http://amzn.to/2hqfJJE) 1:30:46:  Dawn asks about the genesis of Robb’s popular podcast. At first, the podcast was about answering questions from the audience and over time he shifted the podcast to an interview format. Currently, Dobb is thinking about adding a “news round-up” section to the podcast. 1:33:19: Dawn and Ken thank Robb for the interview and his recent IHMC lecture, available for viewing at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qga4A3vnXmg 1:34:38: Dawn and Ken sign off.  

Dr. Richard Moon had an unusual inspiration to practicing medicine: a television show, in black and white, entitled, “Medicine in the ‘60s.” He remembers being blown away by watching live surgeries performed on the show. This eventually led him to a career in the operating room—not as a surgeon, but an anesthesiologist. Like many STEM-Talk guests, Moon wears many hats. In addition to being a physician, he is a renowned researcher in the hyperbaric and diving medicine. He is currently a professor of anesthesiology and medicine at Duke University, and the Medical Director of Duke’s Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology. http://anesthesiology.duke.edu/?page_id=828766 In this episode, Host Dawn Kernagis, herself a rising research scientist in undersea medicine, as well as a highly experienced diver—earlier this year, she was inducted to the Women Divers Hall of Fame—talks with Moon, one of her mentors. Dawn met Moon when she participated in one of his research projects as a diver, and she went to him with research ideas as a potential research intern. She eventually became one of his graduate students at Duke University. In this lively and informative mentor-mentee discussion, Dawn and Moon talk about the history of hyperbaric medicine, including the establishment of Duke’s world-renowned Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology. They talk about medical conditions that can occur in deep sea diving, such as high pressure nervous syndrome and immersion pulmonary edema, as well as high-altitude sickness. Moon shares insights about his experiments in both high altitude and deep sea medicine, as well as his own expedition in climbing Mount Everest. Check out Moon’s home page at Duke: http://anesthesiology.duke.edu/?portfolio=richard-moon-md ; as well as his lecture at IHMC last January: “From the Ocean Depths to the Mountain Tops: How Do Humans Adapt?” http://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160121/ 00:15: Dawn introduces Ken and describes Moon as a world-renowned physician and researcher who works in hyperbaric and diving medicine. 00:40: Dawn says she was “very lucky to have Dr. Moon as a mentor.” She participated in his research projects, as a diver. She then went to him with research ideas, and he accepted her as a graduate student, and he’s been a mentor and colleague ever since. 1:45: Ken reads a five-star iTunes review from “GTG2010” called “Exploding Kid:” “Dear STEM-Talk, I like your show. The super telescope looking at asteroids is cool. I like it so much I’m going to explode. Love, Griffin, age 6.” 2:38: Dawn runs through Moon’s bio. He holds an M.D. and a C.M. from McGill University in Canada, and a Master’s degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Toronto. He is a member of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada, as well as the American Board of Internal Medicine. He has authored hundreds of peer-reviewed publications. 3:48: Dawn welcomes Moon to the podcast. 4:06: Moon describes what sparked his interest in medicine when he was in high school. He watched a television show, in black and white, called “Medicine in the ‘60s.” “It showed operations. It was mind-blowing, so I decided that I had to go into medicine.” 4:49: In medical school, Moon’s first interest was in pulmonary medicine—simply because in the first-year lecture series on organ systems, the one on the pulmonary system was the best. Yet, he felt compelled to do something different and took a couple of years off to study biomedical engineering. 6:20: Moon went to Duke University with a fellowship in pulmonary medicine as well as an opportunity to undergo scientific training in diving physiology. One of his mentors, Enrico Camporesi, encouraged him to go into anesthesiology. 7:20: “Eventually he [Camporesi] won me over. That’s where I am today.” 7:46: Moon’s interest in diving physiology initially came from the television program “Sea Hunt.” He also read the Jacque Cousteau books, which talked about decompression sickness and carbon monoxide poisoning. “When it came time to figure out where I was going to go after internal medicine, since Duke had this mega lab, the best in the world, and some leading lights in diving physiology, I just couldn’t resist.” 8:48: Dawn comments that the F.G. Hall Laboratory, which is now part of the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology “is considered to be one of the best and prestigious environmental physiology labs in the world. Especially back then, there was research being done that wasn’t being done and hasn’t been done anywhere else in the world.” 9:18: Moon talks about the history of the lab. People have always asked, ‘How did this undersea lab get to be in a place that isn’t near the ocean?’ “It was a confluence of interests at Duke at the time. Herb Salzman was a pulmonologist interested in diving; F.G. Hall had been of an earlier generation and interested in altitude physiology; a surgeon named Ivan Brown was interested in cardiac surgery under hyperbaric conditions. This was an era before heart and lung machines were developed. So, the notion of drenching the tissue with oxygen was very appealing – if you could hyperoxygenate tissues in a hyperbaric chamber during surgery, you would have longer available time to perform surgery.” 11:07: One of the chambers at the Duke Hyperbaric Center was built as a hyperbaric operating room. Enough money was put together to create the facility. By the time the chamber was open, heart and lung machines were in place, so the whole concept of surgery in a hyperbaric chamber was out of date; however, the Duke Hyperbaric Center remained a nice facility to treat patients. 12:03: In 1968, after the nuclear submarine disaster, the Navy realized that it didn’t have a facility to do deep diving. So, Saltzman was asked to develop a deep diving program for salvage operations at 1000 feet of seawater. 12:35: In the late ‘60s through mid-70s, there was a perceived expiration of oil. Several labs were created around the world (two labs in the U.S. (University of Pennsylvania, Duke), one lab in Europe, and one lab in Japan) to study the physiology of humans during exposure to relevant depths for oil exploration (1000-2000 feet). Several problems were identified for humans at these extreme depths, including high pressure nervous syndrome (HPNS, where a diver gets tremors, difficulty standing up, nausea, vomiting). 14:08: Part of the Duke endeavor, called the Atlantis Dive Series, was to work out how HPNS could be overcome. One idea: to put a little bit of narcotic gas (nitrogen) in the helium-oxygen breathing mix; it was felt this might offset HPNS. It did work, but it had other effects such as an increase in breathing gas density. 15:00: With an increase in gas density, did lung work to provide enough oxygen to the tissues and remove carbon dioxide?  Duke was the first to measure blood gases, such as oxygen, and pH under those conditions. They found that the lungs actually worked pretty well breathing a denser gas, contrary to common belief. The Duke researchers provided the boundaries on what the lungs could do under those circumstances. 16:15: To get to 2,000 feet, it takes several days: one way to offset HPNS is to add nitrogen to the mix, Decompression is slow – it takes 2-3 weeks to get people to the surface from depth due to decompression issues. 17:10: The Atlantis Dive Series conducted four experiments—each with three male study participants living inside the chamber. “They were stuck inside. If one of them had developed an acute illness, say appendicitis, it would have taken us three weeks to get him out.” They were also in tight quarters and slept in bunks in layers. Food had to be locked in. 18:10: Our part of the experiment was to have each person exercise on an exercise bicycle. The other guys had to place an arterial catheter in the wrist. The blood samples then had to be analyzed in a blood gas machine. “It was an adventure not only in biology, but also in engineering. “ 19:10: Dawn compares it to telemedicine, and asks about the psychological issues of the men in the experiment. 19:40: Moon says there were areas of friction: “Three is worse than two or four because one person is always the fall guy. It was a challenge. They were carefully chosen, and they were up to it, and ultimately did a great job.” 20:00: Dawn mentions linking to Duke University’s F.G. Hall Center: http://anesthesiology.duke.edu/?page_id=1061 20:48: One of the benefits of Duke’s chamber is that it is actually within a hospital. “We can expose people to high or low pressure to simulate altitude and have all the accoutrements of medicine available.” Moon adds they’ve been able to do some very interesting studies. He mentions one, led by Dr. Jake Freiberger, which looks at nitrogen narcosis and any cognitive effects of additional carbon dioxide. 22:21: Another study is looking at immersion pulmonary edema, which is basically “drowning from the inside,” or when divers’ or swimmers’ lungs fill up with fluid. They’ve shown: People who are susceptible to pulmonary edema have higher pressures for a given amount of exercise than others. This issue reached public consciousness because Navy Seals have experienced this malady. “These are young, healthy, exceptionally fit individuals who start coughing up fluid/blood in the middle of what would otherwise be a normal swim.” 24:00: Moon explains that the hearts of people susceptible to pulmonary edema are normal, but just a little bit different. Their left ventricle is a little stiffer than normal when the heart fills up with blood. Therefore, in order to fill it, the pressure is a little bit higher; adding to that is extreme exertion, which raises the pressure even higher. That’s enough to break the barrier between the blood within the lung and the air spaces within the lung, and cause fluid to leak. 25:18: To deal with it, a lot of people (including the Navy) have recommended pushing fluids. Dehydration is a bad thing; overloading with fluid tends to make the problem worse. Some potential drugs could be taken. 26:10: Navy SEALs tend to get it; and triathletes—especially during the swim part of the race – can also experience it. “Triathletes are go-go people; want to win the race. They often see it, not as a health problem so much as something that just slows them down.” 26:54: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 27:40: Problem with altitude boils down to one thing: low levels of oxygen. Because pressure is lower, the partial pressure of oxygen is lower as well…low oxygen has a variety of effects on human physiology. People who go to high altitude often experience acute mountain sickness, which is nausea, vomiting. It can cause high altitude cerebral edema or high altitude pulmonary edema, where lung fill up with fluid. 29:07: If you go to 10,000 feet and then exercise, you realize at altitude you really can’t do it as well as you can at a lower altitude (e.g., you are short of breath). One of the mysteries of altitude is people who have lived there, such as Sherpas…on Moon’s trek to Mount Everest, they were continually surpassed by Sherpas with 80 kilos on their back. They were small guys—150 pounds at most. 30:50: On their way to Mount Everest, their blood oxygen saturation started off in the 70s when their place landed; they were often down in the 60s. If you ask the average physician what would happen if blood oxygen is in the 60s, they would say brain damage. It’s also difficult to do field research. On the other hand, you can do things in the field that you can’t do in a lab-based facility. “It’s always a balance, and you get incremental pieces of information from each type of research.” 32:27: Moon mentions a study that was propelled by John Andrews, a Green Beret before medical school, who had experienced altitude issues. They studied a new drug, called Riociguat (for people for pulmonary hypertension); they are interested in whether this drug would increase exercise performance at altitude. 33:50: They found that pulmonary pressure did go down; the drug worked as advertised; but, unfortunately, it didn’t change exercise performance or improve oxygenation. Had it worked, it could have been a very useful drug for special forces deployed in mountainous areas throughout the world. 34:40: Moon discusses hyperbaric oxygen therapy, calling it “essentially a dive in a hyperbaric chamber breathing 100 percent oxygen at double the atmospheric pressure.” It has therapeutic applications for diving injuries and carbon monoxide poisoning. You can wake people up more quickly, prevent long-term complications, and make people feel better very quickly. It can also be used to treat gas gangrene—an infection of soft tissues that is highly lethal. Hyperbaric oxygen facilitates the killing of those organisms. It is also therapeutic for healing wounds in people with atherosclerosis and diabetes (related foot injuries). 37:14: Moon talks about career paths for people interested in studying diving or high-altitude medicine. He says there are several routes: one is doing expeditionary medicine in the Armed Forces. Another is going into a related field such as surgery, internal medicinal pulmonary medicine or anesthesia, and using altitude medicine as a sideline. 38:25: To do it full-time, Moon suggests programs at Duke or the University of Pennsylvania; or the military. 38:48: Dawn adds there are close ties (and opportunities) between both academic and military research centers. 39:30: Moon says he has read a lot of books written by people (like Jacque Cousteau) and many of the mountaineers. In terms of the medicine of diving, the book that really got him into it was edited by Peter Bennett and David Elliot. It’s a classic called “The Physiology and Medicine of Diving.” Fred Bove also edited a book called “Diving Medicine” for several editions. 40:41: Moon talks about his own expedition to Mount Everest, first noting that during the earliest “Hillary” expeditions, they had to walk from Katmandu. Now people fly into Lukla (in Nepal), “the most dangerous airport in the world. There’s no second chance for the pilot. You’re flying in with wingtips close to mountains…the runway goes cliff, runway, cliff…You have this little landing strip, so there’s no way to turn the aircraft around if you miss the landing.” 42:00: “The first day, you have to go down 1,000 feet, and then up 1,000 feet. At the end of that day, you think: ‘If this continues, I don’t think I’m going to be able to do it.’ But the scenery is spectacular: It starts off tropical. [Then it becomes] almost like a hike in a U.S. National Park. The higher you go, eventually it becomes barren, as trees drop away. Eventually it is snow and ice. By the time you get to base camp, it’s totally snow. But it also has a huge diurnal variation in temperature. When you wake up, you’ve gone through minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. By lunchtime, you’re sitting with very little clothing on. Once the sun goes down behind the mountain, it becomes very cold again.” 43:36: “The Sherpas are delightful people. There is usually one room only that is warm; with a stove in the middle burning yak gum. Food is pretty good. “Despite eating like crazy because you’re hiking, and you’re hungry, we lost weight … It seems to be an altitude effect.” 45:00: Dawn observes that whenever they bring the tools of the trade into the field, whether deep divers or free divers, there’s always always a lot of interest peaked in terms of the research being done. 45:31: A British group had a full-blown lab at 12,000 feet at Namche, and another group had one at base camp: they were doing muscle biopsies, exercise tests…that data is still being crunched. “Climbing community is like the diving community: it’s a very elite group of people. Everyone’s got their own theory on how to do it, how best to prepare for it. There’s a relative lack of science because the experimental conditions are so tough.” 46:25: Dawn thanks Moon. 46:37: Dawn commentates on being able to interview her mentor, and Ken calls Moon “a broad and fascinating fellow.” 46:50: Dawn and Ken sign off.

James Briscione’s stellar cooking career began humbly: As a teenager, he washed dishes at a now defunct restaurant (named Jubilee) on Pensacola Beach. He quickly rose through the ranks, at age 24 becoming the chef de cuisine at the Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham, Alabama, which is considered one of the best restaurants in the South, and later the sous chef at the prestigious New York City restaurant Daniel. Today Briscione, who lives in New York City, is a top-tier chef, author of three books on cooking, director of culinary development at the Institute of Culinary Education, and a three-time champion on the Food Network’s cooking competition series Chopped. So what is he doing on STEM-Talk, you might ask? Briscione is also versed in the science of cooking and flavor. He partnered with IBM in creating the “Chef Watson” project. This computer-based program generates hundreds of novel flavor combinations based on the compatibility of chemical compounds in food. In this episode, Briscione talks with IHMC Director Ken Ford and IHMC Chef Blake Rushing about the art and science of food, and Briscione’s career as a chef. Briscione’s three books include: “Just Married and Cooking” (with his wife Brooke Parkhurst): http://amzn.to/2eDIpJD; “Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson”(http://amzn.to/2g04Kq0); and “The Great Cook: Essential Techniques and Inspired Flavors to Make Every Dish Better.” (http://amzn.to/2elhlDr). He also has his own, new television show on the Food Network called “Cooking with Dad.” Briscione, his ideas on cooking and his own culinary creations have been featured in the New York Times, NPR, the New Yorker, Time Magazine and hundreds of other media outlets throughout the world. Briscione’s recent talk at IHMC, entitled “Who teaches the cooks to cook?” can be viewed at http://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160811/ Dive into this delicious interview—an entertaining and informative conversation between three foodies. 00:32: Ken introduces Blake Rushing as the guest co-host of this episode of STEM-Talk. Rushing is IHMC’s chef, as well as the owner of Union Public House in Pensacola. 1:00: Ken introduces James Briscione as, “Working in the boundary spaces between the science of food, science and taste and even AI systems, such as Chef Watson.” 1:49: Dawn reads 5-Star iTunes review from “Beautronical:” “I am continually enthralled by the variety and depth of ideas presented here. Also, it is rare that one finds great minds matched by great voices. Given the ketogenic bent of certain interviewers, perhaps mellifluous is the wrong term, but I’ll use it nonetheless.” 4:42: Ken introduces himself and Blake Rushing as hosts of the interview; and then welcomes James to the interview. 5:05: James says he remembers the food made by his Italian grandmother. Among them: chicken cacciatore (although the mushy carrots bugged him.) The “greatest mashed potatoes… Sunday red sauce; sausage and meatballs loaded down with pecorino cheese.” 6:55: “True learning doesn’t often happen until you’re in the kitchen every day,” Briscione tells his students. He didn’t go to culinary school, but has been in the kitchen since he was 16. 8:15: At 16, he was a bus boy washing dishes for two restaurants: fine dining upstairs and casual beach dining downstairs. 9:33: As a teenager and at the beginning of college, Briscione thought, ‘There’s no way I am going to spend the rest of my life in a kitchen.’ He was working on a degree in sports medicine in Birmingham, and worked summers at the restaurant [in Pensacola]. After his second summer, something clicked: he changed his course of study from sports medicine to nutrition. 11:00: James knocked on the back door of Bottega Cafe [in Birmingham] http://www.bottegarestaurant.com/cafe/ and said, ‘I want to work here.’ He got a job as pizza maker with a wood-fired oven. He remembers stretching the dough and putting the toppings on it, then handing it off to the next guy. “That and lugging firewood to store underneath giant hearth oven.” 12:54: Briscione talks about working with Frank Stitt, owner and chef at the Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham http://www.highlandsbarandgrill.com , whom Briscione calls “a great leader.” He fosters a great sense of family in all of his restaurants; his cooks go and work in the farms for harvesting veggies. Briscione attributes his success to the fact that, “I showed up everyday. I was there, and I was there early.” 16:08: Briscione won on Chopped three times. “I always just try to do a little bit more than everybody else. I always want to out-hustle the other guy.” 17:05: He recalls one Chopped experience: “It’s insanely hot in that kitchen; four stoves; four ovens. No hoods pulling the heat away. It’s a warehouse essentially. I was mincing an onion as fast as I could. You could hear the judges say, ‘It seems like Chef James already has something’…I heard that; everyone else heard that. I at least gave the impression that I knew what I was doing. I never touched that onion.” 19:30: Another theme of Briscione’s career has been “being in the right place in the right time.” 20:00: Ken discusses fat as a taste receptor, and one of many taste receptors that humans have. Our tongues have receptors for detecting fat; he asks Briscione if he considers fat a taste or an oral sensation, or both. 21:00: Briscione says that he thinks it’s both. 21:36: “The tongue is a detector of nutrients and toxins. All of these different nutrients that are essential—I think we have receptors for all of those.” 22:10: Ken remarks that people make a distinction between having a receptor and taste; sensitivity of the fat receptor is modulated by a protein called CD36. People vary in their ability to sense fat, and it’s related to the level of that protein. 23:55: Ken adds that “The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy,” by Jean Anselme Brillat-Savarin, and translated by M.F.K. Fisher) (http://amzn.to/2f4QkQw) is among the greatest works on food…largely because of the emergence of the wonderful notion of flavor. 24:24: Briscione on taste: When you take a bite of cake, you start to identify it because you smell it. It hits your tongue, which loves the sugar. As you begin to chew, the volatile molecules make their way to the back of the throat and cheeks. 26:00: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 27:00: Chef Watson sifts through data in a way that puts new flavors together. (https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/community) 27:48: Examples include salmon and licorice; pineapple and blue cheese. 29:00: Watson also understands different cultural ingredients. 30:22: Briscione talks about his favorites: gently cooked (sous vide) apples, surrounded by olive oil and fresh sage. Olives and cherries (a jam out of that—the best condiment for a cheese plate.) 31:50: “Mushrooms, strawberries and chicken didn’t make sense. But it works really, really well…. This [Chef Watson] is a great thing: it shows the true collaboration between man and machine.” 33:37: One of Briscione’s favorite compounds: 4-methylpentanoic acid, which is found in pizza. “We have scientific proof that pizza is delicious.” 35:02: A strawberry has 383 compounds that make up the smell of that strawberry; they may not be the ones we recognize right away. The body is still sensing all of those. A lot of matching happens. 35:40: Mesifurane is a key compound in strawberries; on its own, it smells like baked bread. 36:51:  Ken and James discuss Chef Watson as a kind of “cognitive orthotic” enabling increased creativity and efficiency in the kitchen. 37:10: “Creating recipes usually means sitting down with a stack of cookbooks; it’s a long and complicated process, and I liken it to decision fatigue.” 38:48: Chef Watson removes this burden by providing a list of ingredients that will work together, so that chefs can focus on the creative process of putting those ingredients together. 39:40: Briscione talks about using the Golden Ratio in cooking; just as in painting, there are those born with an intuitive understanding of the proportionality in the Golden Ratio, and those that learn it. “[Chef] Watson helps you get to that point: I can find hidden pattern in food that helps me be better at what I do.” 40:40: Ken comments that the Golden Ratio is seen elsewhere, such as in mathematics, with the Fibonacci sequence. 41:56: “One of the strongest pairings is between olives and citrus: they have about 60 percent of compounds in common. Wherever olives grow, so do citrus fruits.” 43:27: In Briscione’s upcoming book, he features a lemon curd dessert with an extra olive oil (not butter) finish. The crumble top is a sort of streusel made with oil-cured olives, a bit of rosemary, brioche crumbs and sweetened almonds. “It’s a beautiful savory-sweet interesting dessert.” 44:37: “Computational creativity can break through the bias/blindness in the cultural underpinnings of cooking.” 45:15: In the Watson method, “We’re looking at ingredients with a complete blank slate.” For example, in looking at a tomato, break free from the basil. “Erasing those pre-conceived notions was key to project.” 47:30: More information on Chef Watson can be found at: www.ibmchefwatson.com. 48:40: Briscione talks about sous vide cooking: ‘under vacuum’ is the literal definition. It is very precise low-temperature cooking held at the exact degree of doneness that we want [whatever food] to be. 52:30: Ken talks about how when he was in the Navy, in the late 70s and 80, he invented a super crude version of sous vide. He vacuum-packed food in the same machine used for electronics. It was “seal-a-meal,” but much better than the green mess-hall food. 54:10: Briscione says the next thing in cooking will be precision temperature control, such as Control Freak (an induction top) from PolyScience Culinary; Combi ovens; and CVap (Controlled Vapor Technology) ovens. 56:15: Briscione talks about hydrocolloids or gums: “People have had them in their kitchens for as long as they’ve lived.” Examples include flour and corn starch, or anything that forms a gel in the presence of water. Xanthan gum is the gateway drug to hydrocolloids. Others are derived from seaweed. 1:00:00: Ken comments on the irony of the public perception that chemicals in food are a bad thing, when food is made up of chemical (compounds.) He shares a funny anecdote about walking in and out of popular restaurant in Atlanta that boasted of no chemicals in their food. 1:01:36: Ken asks Briscione what he eats, and he says, “So far, a muffin and coffee today.” As for Briscione’s favorite foods: “Any piece of the pig is going to make me really, really happy.” 1:02:15: “I can eat a large watermelon by myself in minutes. Vegetables make me really happy.” 1:03:00: A favorite recipe using modernist cooking techniques: Vegan ramen broth, with smoked tofu and dried Shitake mushrooms, ginger, garlic and scallions. With soy sauce and pork. 1:04:15: His own favorite restaurants: The NoMad in NYC: for their “wonderful vegetable entrees. They take a single ingredient and present it to you on the plate in three or four forms.” He’s also a fan of the Gramercy Tavern. 1:06:10: His favorite daddy-daughter date is Dominique Ansel’s bakery in NYC. 1:07:00: When Briscione and his wife Brooke Pankhurst (also a Pensacola native) come home to the South, they enjoy good fried seafood such as fried mullet, snapper throats and mullet backbones — as offered at Chet’s Seafood. 1:09:44: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 1:10:25: Briscione talks about his first cookbook, “Just Married and Cooking” (http://amzn.to/2eDIpJD): “The thing I love about that book is that I can open to any page in that book, and point to a recipe, and tell you a story about the first time we cooked that.” He characterizes the recipes as “everyday meals for ourselves.” 1:11:43: Talking about his book, “The Great Cook,” (http://amzn.to/2elhlDr) which came out last year: “It’s really kind of all these great dishes that all cooks should know.” It reads as if Briscione, a great cooking teacher, is sitting there at the kitchen counter and coaching them through dishes. Plus, it has really beautiful photography. 1:13:34: Also last year, the Chef Watson cookbook came out, “Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson:” http://amzn.to/2g04Kq0. Briscione talks about one recipe: Spanish almond crescent, conceived as a pastry for a breakfast meeting. “I love Spanish food, and Spain. The almond is a seed for Watson to build the flavor pairings off of: saffron, black pepper, cocoa and coconut milk.” 1:16:30: Ken and Briscione talk about their favorite places in Pensacola, including Joe Patti’s fish market, and Chet’s and Jerry’s Drive-In. 1:17:28: Ken says: “When I have people in town, from NYC or San Francisco, food writers or chefs, I don’t take them to our fine dining restaurants. I get an excellent wine and good wine glasses; and we have a whole feast at Chet’s.” Ken’s favorites: marinated flounder or grouper. 1:19:20: Briscione talks about his new television show on the Food Network, “Cooking with Dad:” (http://www.foodnetwork.com/videos/dad-and-daughter-pasta-0251005.html). He describes it as: “What it looks like for a chef to cook at home with his kids…Or what’s it’s like to just put dinner on table every night. Or snack after tap class. Or Sunday morning brunch.” It includes Briscione and Brooke, their 7-year-old daughter Parker, and 14-month-old son. 1:21:31: Ken thanks Briscione for the interview as well as his IHMC lecture, which gathered well over 300 people and can be viewed at: http://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160811/ 1:21:58: Ken says this episode “this episode combined two of my favorite topics:  the science of food spiced with a touch of AI.” 1:22:55: Dawn and Ken sign off.    

One could say that Dr. Doug McGuff is one of the pioneers of BMX motocross bike racing in Texas. He built the state’s first race track, having gotten hooked on the sport as a teenager in the 1970s. The sport also triggered a deeper interest in fitness. As McGuff tried strengthen his core for bike racing, he discovered Arthur Jones’ Nautilus training technique and bartered janitorial services for a Nautilus gym membership. McGuff’s interest and aptitude for studying the body led him to pursue medicine at the University of Texas in San Antonio. He specialized in emergency medicine, was chief resident of emergency medicine at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, and a staff physician at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Hospital in Ohio. McGuff is currently an ER physician with Blue Ridge Emergency Physicians in Seneca, South Carolina. The other side of McGuff’s career is dedicated to fitness, or as he says—helping people never have to go to the ER. Realizing a lifetime dream, he opened up his own fitness facility in 1997 called Ultimate Exercise. The gym is dedicated to the type of high-intensity fitness training using the Super Slow protocol. In this episode of STEM-Talk, McGuff talks about why this type of exercise is better for the body, safer, and able to prevent age-related conditions such as sarcopenia. McGuff is the author of three books: “Body by Science: A Research-Based Program for Strength Training, Body-building and Complete Fitness in 12 Minutes a Week,” http://amzn.to/2fy7vKN (co-authored with John Little), “The Primal Prescription: Surviving the “Sick Care” Sinkhole,” http://amzn.to/2fLTBtl (co-authored with economist Robert Murphy), and “BMX Training: A Scientific Approach.” http://amzn.to/2fUhqPd He is also featured in several YouTube videos on high-intensity training. His recent IHMC lecture, entitled “Strength Training for Health and Longevity,” is available at http://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160929/. 2:03: Dawn reads an an iTunes 5-star review from “Guy who likes Chipotle,” which is entitled “Interesting and just complex enough.” “STEM-Talk does an amazing job of delivering high-level information on a variety of topics, without making it too complex to understand.” 4:21: Dawn introduces Doug and Ken. 4:47: McGuff says that as a young teen, shortly after getting interested in BMX bike racing, he started working out with his brother’s weights, which was transformational. “It is still the closest thing to magic or a miracle that I’ve ever experienced in my life.” 6:44: Also as a teen, Doug McGuff bartered janitorial services for a membership to a Nautilus gym, where he found a copy of a book by Nautilus founder Arthur Jones  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Jones_(inventor)) about training principles. “It was the first book I ever read cover to cover. To say that book changed the course of my life would be a massive understatement.” 8:13: During the summer of 1994, McGuff met Arthur Jones, who greatly influenced his thoughts on exercise resistance training. 12:00: McGuff went into ER medicine because “It was rare to find something that I felt that I had intrinsic talent in. I felt like I functioned very well in that environment.” His career has focused on two things: taking care of people who fall down and get hurt; and trying to prevent it from happening in the first place. 13:00: McGuff talks about being a pioneer of BMX in Texas, as he built the first track there and went back to racing in the late 90s and won the state championship. He also trained some world champion level BMX racers. 14:30: Now he characterizes himself as “a practicing physician so busy with the chronically sick and massively debilitated; the chasm between day to day life and actually thinking about prevention is such a wide chasm that it’s hard to imagine.” 15:00: “I would love to see the day where the commercial says, ‘Ask your doctor if diet and exercise are right for you….’ Instead of whatever pill of the day.” 15:44: McGuff notes the idea of physiologic headroom, which economist Arthur De Vany came up with. “Physiologic headroom is the difference between the least you can do and the most you can do.” See De Vany’s book, “The New Evolution Diet”: http://amzn.to/2ewDOJ8 17:50: “The better part of our lives, in terms of our functional ability, are much less than what they should be.” 18:45: McGuff says that high-intensity interval training is what appears to reverse the biomarkers of aging, according to the literature on the topic. 21:00: In McGuff’s book, “Body by Science,” (http://amzn.to/2fy7vKN), he presents the concept of Super Slow training: lifting and lowering weights very slowly. This protocol emerged out of Nautilus, after Arthur Jones commissioned a University of Florida research study on osteoporosis. Ken Hutchins, an employee of Arthur Jones, was the primary person who defined and popularized the Super Slow form of resistance training exercise. 22:40: The protocol applied to younger subjects resulted in similarly good results. 23:18: More important is the style and intent (of lifting weights). “If your intent is to as intensely and deeply fatigue the muscle as you can…if you start weight-lifting with as gradual a load as possible, and then you just try to lift and lower with high effort, during that initial phase, depriving yourself of initial momentum allows the speed to express itself organically.” In one person, that cadence might be 4 seconds up, 4 down; or 8 up; 8 down. In most people that ends up being 10 seconds up; 10 down. 25:03: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 25:23: Ken talks about the importance of avoiding injury when exercising and posits that Super Slow should be good in this respect. 25:48: McGuff says that he opened his gym, Ultimate Exercise, in 1997. They average 100-120 workouts per week. “We’ve never injured anyone in the facility…. That gives some credit to a slow cadence protocol. You can still get hurt [during a slow cadence protocol] if you don’t observe good biomechanics.” 26:40: The mastermind of “congruent exercise” is Bill DeSimone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_DeSimone), which is based on using biomechanics to prevent injury. 27:45: At his gym, McGuff tells his trainers: “train ‘em hard as hell, don’t injure anyone, give them adequate recovery.” 29:00: “When we talk about sarcopenia, the population has it in their head that it’s a natural consequence of aging. And it’s not. Sarcopenia is a natural consequence of aging with our modern Western lifestyle injected into the equation.” McGuff notes this did not happen in hunter gatherer societies. “That doesn’t mean modern tech cannot be exploited to leverage those evolutionary adaptations.” 30:10: Age-related sarcopenia occurs when there is atrophy in the type II muscle fibers. “When you recruit muscle to do work, that happens in an orderly and sequential function.” You start with lower-order muscles to do work. Finally, you recruit higher-order muscles, which produce a lot of force output, but they fatigue very quickly. The latter are hard to get at, so you have to produce fatigue in a disciplined fashion. 32:54: An elderly person loses balance because if you go off the vertical plane (not on bone and bone tower), the only way to right yourself is by activating very powerful muscles to correct that posture deficit. “They fall because they don’t have the fast-twitch IIB fibers to yank them back into corrective posture. That’s why they go down like a tree in the forest.” 34:00: McGuff defines exercise as protocolized strength training; disciplined and aimed at achieving a deep level of fatigue rapidly. You can’t stand more than 12-15 minutes of that intensity. You want the minimal effective dose. 35:07: “Most people think of exercise as directly causing the adaption. The exercise produces the stimulus; your body receives it and makes a physiologic adaption.” 35:40: “I make a clean distinction between exercise and activity.” 36:41: “Once you create this physiologic headroom, you want to use it. It’s like having a Ferrari and being restricted to the school zone. It just doesn’t work. That’s not a bad thing.” 37:30: McGuff talks about muscular failure, a term coined by Arthur Jones meaning lifting and lowering weight, and getting to a point where you are trying to lift weight, but it won’t go. The problem is that failure in and of itself does not necessarily define an adequate stimulus. The desired stimulus is a meaningful depth of fatigue, or a substantial reduction in one’s starting level of strength. In the gym, one may reach muscular failure in a particular exercise without reaching an adequate depth of fatigue. 41:25: Ken notes that the Super Slow protocol, as described in McGuff’s book, is performed exclusively on machines, and asks whether this training transfers to what are sometimes called “real world” functional movements and basic movement patterns (squat, hinge, push, pull, carry). 41:50: “When people talk about functional movements and movement patterns, I find that they are fairly ill-defined. Human movement in a functional sense is inherent to our physiology and anatomy. What is necessary for those to express themselves in real world applications is that you have to have a motor that is able to drive the movements of that appendage.” 43:00: “The notion that you have to recreate those functional movement patterns in the gym under load for those functional movement patterns to be expressed out of the gym is a little bit of a false construct. Some of those natural movement patterns, when done under load, are very joint incongruent.” 44:47: Ken and Doug note that confusing “sport” and “exercise” can be dangerous. 44:55: Dawn asks Doug about low intensity training as typically prescribed for the elderly. 45:15: Exercise recommendations for the elderly are often off-base. People making them don’t understand how to invoke high-intensity and low force at the same time. Being physically active at a low level of intensity is part of our evolutionary and biological background. If you get at those IIB fibers, that type of activity expresses itself organically. 46:40: What happens is that you carry out a type of long-term, low-intensity activity that says: This animal is carrying out chronic low-level activity. This becomes interpreted as a negative thing—the stimulus to lose type IIB muscle fibers rather than gain them. “In the long term, you’ve jettisoned one of largest glucose reservoirs in your body, and you have therefore undermined insulin sensitivity.” This accelerates sarcopenia. 47:20: Ken notes that one often sees this adaptation in marathon runners. McGuff, says, “That is why marathon and ultra-endurance athletes look cachexic … because they delivered a biological stimulus to their organism that says these type-IIB fibers are unnecessary for this activity and we need to get rid of them.” 48:12: Dawn asks about exercise while traveling and without good access to good equipment. 48:30: Doug, replies that “We’ve gotten the notion that weights are a necessary part of the equation, and they really aren’t. Through infimetrics, I can provide an intensity of workout that exceeds one with weights. It’s hard to describe in a podcast, but Google McGuff’s name and timed static contraction protocol or infimitric YouTube videos. 50:00: Ken notes that Blood flow restriction training, such as Kaatsu, increases localized IGF-1 levels and sensitivity via accumulation of metabolites, particularly lactate and H (+) and asks if McGuff thinks this type of training is useful. 51:53: Doug discusses blood-flow restriction training, which can produce equal hypertrophy and strength adaptions using a much lighter weight. The theory is that you are concentrating the by-products of metabolism that occur during exertion locally within the muscle, for example the entrapment of local IGF production. 52:46:  “I think it is of benefit from several standpoints, one is the fact that it requires less resistance to get an equal result — that increases the safety margin and increases the safety margin for extremely strong people.” 53:37: When you use a slower-cadence protocol, that creates a high degree of sustained muscular tension that produces vascular congestion within musculature that traps metabolites in the same way blood flow restriction does. 54:48: Ken says he’s had good results using blood flow restriction (using the Kaatsu system). He particularly appreciates blood flow restriction training for those with painful or compromised joints given the very light weights.  Also, hotels often have a very limited selection of relatively light weights, which are no problem with blood flow restriction. 55:18: Dawn asks whether electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) training might offer promise as a way to safely hit fast-twitch muscle in all age groups and whether McGuff has experience with EMS? 55:40: Doug discusses his experience with EMS and thinks it does let you hit the fast twitch fibers. 57:07: When you lose motor units, body starts to disconnect enervation of motor units. 57:52: Elderly with sarcopenia also have deconstructed this neuro-motor connection to higher-order motor units. “Where EMS is useful as a therapeutic modality is being able to activate type IIB motor units at the end of the set, so when they reach fatigue, that’s not fatigue like a younger person who still has that connection intact. You could invoke EMS at the end of the set to wake back up those type II motor units. The enervation of those motor units wakes up as well.” He says this is a “stop-gap measure to rehabilitate the enervation of higher-order motor units. 58:55: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.  59:20: Ken mentions that Brian Caulfied at University College Dublin has been doing interesting and important work on EMS in both athletic populations and older cohort groups. 1:00:00: Ken says he’s optimistic about the future of EMS as new companies, such as PowerDot are offering systems that run on smart phones, etc. 1:00:39: Doug notes that people often “conflate athleticism and health.” 1:02:26: Ken notes that myokines have both local actions within the muscle tissue but also hormone like effects that target distant organs.  He asks McGuff to discuss the role of myokines in exercise and the adaptations that occur as a result. 1:03:00: Resistance training is much greater than the sum of its parts. 1:04:30: Skeletal muscle is not just a tissue that produces movement. The muscle is the biggest and most active endocrine organ in our body; there’s a whole host of myokines—probably only of which a handful have been discovered. They are signaling locally and remotely—skin, hair, nervous tissue, cardiovascular system. 1:05:27: “The signals are going everywhere, and very few of them have been delineated thus far…. but the health benefits are becoming more and more obvious.” 1:05:46: The cytokines released by muscles have profound anti-inflammatory effects: they are the antithesis of metabolic syndrome and have anti-neoplastic effects. They are protective and reversive of neoplastic changes. “There’s a treasure trove there.” 1:06:30: Dawn asks about the role of myokines in tumor growth/suppression. 1:08:30: Doug says myokines have been found to arrest tumorigenesis for different types of cancer. 1:09:20: Different myokines are invoked by different forms and intensities of exercise. 1:10:35: Dawn asks how insulin sensitivity influences the production and sensitivity of myokines and Doug discusses their interaction. 1:12:11: Ken observed that recently the ketone body acetoacetate has been shown (in an animal model) to serve as a signaling metabolite in mediating muscle cell function and growth.   Specifically, acetoacetate potentiated the stimulatory effect of IGF1 on muscle cell proliferation and antagonized the inhibitory effect of myostatin. Ken asks McGuff whether he sees a role for endogenous (or exogenous) ketone bodies in augmenting myokine-induced hypertrophy. 1:12:47: “The answer is yeah, I think so.  It is just now becoming evident that those two operate by a similar mechanism.” Myostatin is a myokine that acts as a negative regulator of muscle growth. 1:14:00: With a sedentary lifestyle you can develop an overexpression of myostatin, one of the players in sarcopenia. It is upregulated in HIV, and certain cancer cells involved in cachexia. 1:14:18: “Acetoacetate has been shown to blunt its (myostatin) effect.” 1:15:10: Ketosis is when food supply is dwindling, and you tend to hunt and gather. The highest levels of physical output occur during hunting and gathering; it seems natural that ketosis and high level muscular activity would tend to occur/run in tandem. Those two things are running on parallel tracks biochemically. 1:16:17: Ken comments that both exercise induced myokines and ketone bodies appear to inhibit myostatin … yet pharma has spent decades looking for a safe and effective myostatin inhibitor. 1:17:00: McGuff refers to the Simon Melov paper which he found that 196 genes are expressed differently in youth and the elderly; they found an extensive reversal (back to their youthful levels) of gene expression in the elderly after physical training. Link to paper: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0000465 1:19:42: Dawn asks Doug about his thoughts on nutrition and to what extent does he see nutrition playing a role in skeletal muscle adaptation to exercise? 1:20:10: McGuff is a proponent of the Paleo diet: “You can never exercise your way out of a bad diet.” 1:22:28: Ken and Doug discuss how obesity is a recent phenomenon and that poor nutrition is at the heart of the problem. 1:28:08: Doug talks about his book, “The Primal Prescription: Surviving the Sick Care Sinkhole,” co-authored with economist Robert Murphy (http://amzn.to/2fLTBtl). It talks about the ER as the de facto safety net in the American healthcare system. 1:31:08: “[Writing the book] has given me a front-row seat to decay and collapse of medical system in this country; how it happened; and how recent attempts to address through ACA have put it on steroids, and made the medical system impossible to navigate.” 1:33:10: Dawn closes out the interview. She mentions McGuff’s lecture, entitled “Strength Training for Health and Longevity,” which can be viewed at: http://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160929/. 1:34:20: Dawn and Ken sign off.

On March 11, 2005, President George W. Bush announced his intention to nominate Griffin to serve as the 11th Administrator of NASA. He was confirmed by the Senate on April 13, 2005 and served until January 20, 2009. Griffin knew NASA well. He had been NASA’s associate administrator for exploration in the early 1990s, as well as its chief engineer. Griffin holds seven academic degrees—a BA in physics from Johns Hopkins University, a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland, and a handful of Master’s degrees. He previously served as deputy for technology at the strategic defense initiative organization (SDIO) in the Pentagon.  Griffin’s career has also included academic and corporate positions. He was an eminent scholar and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Alabama-Huntsville and space department head at the Applied Physics Laboratory at John Hopkins. Griffin was also president and chief operating officer at In-Q-Tel, a private, nonprofit enterprise funded by the Central Intelligence Agency to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve national security interests. Griffin held leadership positions in as well as the Orbital Sciences Corp and technical positions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at Computer Sciences Corporation. Time magazine named Griffin one of its 100 most influential people in 2008. In his spare time, Griffin enjoys flying and is a certified flight instructor. He’s also a voracious reader and an avid golfer. On August 14, 2012, the Schafer Corporation announced that Griffin would assume the role of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at the company. Griffin has also been a guest lecturer at IHMC in Pensacola, where in 2009, he delivered a lecture entitled “What the Hubble Space Telescope Teaches Us About Ourselves:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvMdORG8OyU. In this episode, STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis monitors an interview conducted by co-hosts Ken Ford and Tom Jones, both of whom have a long-standing professional relationship with Griffin. 1:09: Ford calls Mike Griffin “a remarkable fellow.” Griffin’s work has spanned academia, government and industry. He holds six graduate degrees and was working on his seventh when President George W. Bush selected him to serve as the eleventh NASA administrator. 2:35: Dawn reads a five-star iTunes review from “Meatballs Mom” entitled “Thumbs up.” “I downloaded this in order to feel intellectually superior to my peers. It’s totally working.” 3:00: Dawn describes Griffin’s career and educational accomplishments. 5:13: Dawn introduces Mike Griffin, along with hosts Ford and Jones. 6:03: Griffin’ interest in science was sparked by the first book, called “A Child’s Book of Stars,” that his mother gave him for Christmas in 1954, when he was five years old. 7:50: “I was already fully committed to a career in math and science and space long before I got to high school,” Griffin recalls, also noting an influential physics teacher in high school who encouraged him on that path. 8:25: “My career has gone back and forth between and among DOD space, civil space, robotic scientific space craft and missions and human space flight.” 8:50: Griffin notes that one of the highlights of his career was being chief engineer for the first space intercept mission accomplished against a booster in powered flight as part of early missile defense program under President Ronald Reagan. 12:08: “Possibly the coolest job that I’ve ever had,” Griffin says, was as President of In-Q-Tel, which he loosely categorizes as the CIA’s venture capital company. “The CIA didn’t have access to the hi-tech of Silicon Valley, so the non-profit was chartered by Congress to allow that access. It was an extraordinarily eye-opening and exciting adventure,” he says, adding that they helped create Google Earth. 14:22: Griffin had an early hunch that he would work for NASA, which he did four different times during his career. “NASA formed in 1958, and I was nine years old. I was already interested in space, and from that time forward, I believed that I would eventually work there.” 15:20: “When I was very young, I thought that being an engineer/scientist was the highest goal anyone could aspire to.” 16:10: Early in his career, Griffin was also spotted for managerial talent, becoming the youngest group supervisor at the jet propulsion laboratory. 17:04: Griffin says that he managed NASA, a 20-billion-dollar organization, just as he would a much smaller organization. “What you are doing is trying very carefully to select a great team of people who can complement your own skills, but who are not the same as you,” he says, adding that managing a large organization is not substantially different than a small one—only there are more layers. 19:50: “Dealing with official Washington” was also challenging during his tenure at NASA; in other words, the organizations that have a stake in what NASA does. And dealing with Congress. 20:20: Space exploration is one area that can elevate a nation’s profile in history. “I contend that a nation that does not explore frontiers of time is consigning itself to the backwaters of history.” 21:15: “I believe the values of Westerners are superior to those which have evolved previously or elsewhere. Space is a human frontier, and some humans somewhere at sometime will open it up and settle it; and we will use the resources of the solar system to our benefit. Decisions will be made by nations that show up. I want my nation to be in the vanguard of those efforts.” 22:25: Griffin explains the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster that occurred in 2003, in which all seven crew members were lost. “It was brought about by the unintended release of a large piece of foam… which impacted a wing at high speed; and broke a hole in the thermal insulation tiles that protect the shuttle on entry, and because of that the vehicle and the crew were lost.” 22:54: “There was never supposed to be any foam release,” Griffins says, adding that there were continual foam release events that were not understood. “When I took over, I chartered a group of people to study that issue.” 24:00: The mentality changed from “always three months from flight” to “We’ll fly when we understand why this is happening and can fix it.” They realized they were never going to completely mitigate foam release, but they could have some control over the size of the pieces and when they came off, as well as the damage statistics to the orbiter. Jim Peters of NASA Johnson Space Center was influential in reading statistical properties of foam release and damage. 26:50: President George W. Bush and Congress supported finishing the space station, but there were “deep divisions of opinion within Washington bureaucracy on whether to do that…. I took it as my most important mission a plan by which we would finish the station.” 28:04: “We went to our European and Russian partners and outlined a plan by which we would finish the station (by minimizing the number of utilization flights—for scientific experiments—and maximizing assembly flights.) The goal was to get the project finished and utilize it later.” 29:49: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 30:46: “In the immediate aftermath of Columbia, only shuttle flights would go to the space station. If there was another Columbia-like incident, you could park the crew at the station until a rescue shuttle could be used to get them off. Other missions were deemed too risky.” 31:32: Griffin disagreed with that pronouncement, arguing that there are only a small percentage of things that can go wrong with an orbiter on ascent for which space station is the answer to the problem. The other thing was that there were ways around having a rescue mission (without having an available space station). 32:40: After joining NASA, Griffin says he “got smart folks from the Johnson Space Center” looking at how we could arrange a safe Hubble repair mission. 34:00: When the Columbia shuttle was lost, any use of another orbiter for a Hubble-type mission put a delay in the space station completion schedule. 34:53: Ford recalls the “STS-125 as the highlight of the shuttle program. The afternoon of launch, looking at two shuttles gleaming in the sun, sitting at the ready on their pads…that was an awesome sight.” 36:10: Jones asks about the inability to launch astronauts to the space station since the shuttles retired in 2011. 36:50: “The plan was to return the shuttle to flight, finish the space station and construct a new system capable of going to the station and to the moon. It was a U.S.-led international effort to develop a lunar base.” 38:56: During the [George W.] Bush administration, we opened up a gap between the last shuttle flight and the first flight of a new system. That gap was supposed to have been two years, and it became four. 39:30: The space station was a 75-billion-dollar endeavor. “I thought we should be doing everything in our power to make sure that it was sustained and used properly. And to do that, you needed to be able to visit the station at least a couple times a year.” 40:45: Griffin talks about the U.S. government’s increased reliance on commercial space companies, which he says was misguided. 43:27: Companies developing these capabilities on government funding are saying 2018 is the earliest successful crew deployment from U.S. shores. 45:18: Griffin calls exploration and science “closely allied enterprises.” “Many explorations in history also yielded important scientific results. But the careful planning of scientific experiments, their conduct, is quite substantially different.” He adds that science is critical to good exploration. 47:37: “Human space flight is replete with opportunities for life science to advance itself. The two enterprises are synergistic.” 48:33: “When I took over NASA, the advisory council seemed to have no really useful end. We had a host of individual advisory committees on specific topics.” 51:40: Griffin organized a NASA advisory council first under Harrison Schmitt and then Ken Ford. All advisory committees reported up through the principals on the NASA Advisory Council who were selected for their expertise in different specialties. “That brought order to discussions/allowed the advisory council to come forward with actionable requests of the NASA career staff; and to shape the budget in ordered/intelligent ways to make better use of the science budget from Congress.” 53:38: “If we have our wits about us, we will be using robots to augment human exploration and humans to augment robotic exploration in every reasonable way that we can do.” 55:04: “No one wants people on Mars more than I do, and I believe the best path to do that is through the Moon, which will in and of itself be fascinating.” 55:45: The vast majority (70 percent) of the U.S. pop supports NASA and its goals. What is missing, Griffin says, is the translation of public approval into coherent policy that can go from one administration to another. 57:15: Griffin calls space exploration “hobby entertainment for newly elected political leaders.” Their stance towards the Marines, or Air Force, for example, is vastly different. 1:00:22: Deep space exploration beyond Mars is very difficult without nuclear propulsion systems. 1:08: Maintaining crew health in closed environments is going to be very difficult. “When we can put a crew on an international space station for 6-7 months and let them de-condition and send them to the moon for a year, back to the space station and then bring them home—then we’ll know we’re ready to go to Mars, and not before.” 1:02:47: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 1:03:30: “We must have a long-term, carefully structured, coherent policy on what the U.S. will do in space, why we will do it, who we will do it with; and how that will be consistent with the funding that we supply.” 1:06:00:  Griffin looks back at Apollo, which “barely succeeded in the political sense.” The White House was cutting the NASA budget during Apollo 11. “’While success was being had, cancellation was occurring,” he says, adding this was “a huge lost opportunity.” 1:07:27: The success of Apollo was partly due to President John F. Kennedy’s succinct declaration of what was to be done: “Land a man on the moon, return him safely to the earth, do it before decade is up.” 1:08:00: The U.S. at that time was also in a battle with the USSR for the hearts and minds of the non-aligning nations of the world, he adds. “We felt it was important to be ahead in space.” 1:08:35: “Apollo probably benefitted from Kennedy’s assassination. It is unlikely we would have been able to go forward had not a martyred president stood behind it.” 1:12:50: One of the problems across the aerospace industry is that people are not entering the profession. The average age of the NASA work force is in fifties. During Apollo the average age was the twenties. “We need a combination.” 1:15:12: Griffin wrote a lengthy paper for the 50th anniversary of Sputnik saying that it would have been better to use the hardware infrastructure they had developed during Apollo and repurpose it for other things. 1:18:12: Griffin paraphrases Wayne Hale, a former shuttle program manager, and space shuttle flight director, in a speech last October in which Hale said that he was tired of the controversy about whether or not we should build a heavy lifter (versus an orbital assembly of smaller pay loads.) “You cannot prove that you would not have been able to do the Berlin airlift with a large number of piper cups, but the logistics would be forbidding… The laws of physics don’t prevent an in-orbit assembly of very large machines to go to Mars by using many smaller launch vehicles. But it is logistically forbidding. It is likely to be much more expensive and time-consuming.” 1:19:28: “To believe otherwise—that we would not want the largest transportation capability that we could put together—is to single space flight out from all other modes of transportation that humans have ever used.” 1:21:10: “If we are serious about space exploration, we need a heavy lifter.” 1:22:22: Griffin says that during the next trip to the moon, we should mine the lunar crust for oxygen. “The lunar surface is a good source of oxygen, and extractable for solar energy. As an industrial process, I believe that’s one of the first things we’ll do.” 1:23:45: Griffin elaborates on his views regarding the possibility of a commercially-developed space transportation system capable of Mars missions. 1:29:56: The U.S. partnership in space with Russia and other European nations has been a really good thing. We’ve learned a lot from Russians in space, and they’ve learned a lot from us. 1:33:38: Ford asks Griffin about his passion for flying. “I’ve been flying for decades, as a general aviation pilot. Flying is consuming. When you’re departing/arriving other concerns don’t weigh on you in that moment. I enjoy that feeling of commitment.” 1:37:06: Griffin is also a voracious reader. During the period in which the interview was conducted, he was reading “The Innovators” (about the development of the computer industry), as well as “Into the Black,” about the development of the space shuttle. He also likes “junk fiction,” science fiction, The Economist and Science News. 1:38:30: Another hobby: “I do love golf. It appeals to people with an analytical mind set.” 1:39:00:  Ken and Tom thank Mike for the terrific interview on STEM-Talk. 1:39:50 Dawn and Ken talk about the interview, direct the listener to the episode’s show-notes, and sign off.

Hurricanes are a leading source of insured losses, and a major cause of human and economics loss in the world. But from an insider’s view, they are also breathtakingly beautiful. Dr. Kerry Emanuel, a leading hurricane expert, compares flying into the eye of a hurricane to being inside a white Coliseum, thirty to forty miles wide, with walls resembling “a cascade of ice crystals.” That’s just one of the fascinating tidbits from this episode of STEM-Talk, with Dr. Emanuel, whom Time Magazine named as one of the 100 most influential people in 2006. The following year, Dr. Emanuel was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is a professor of meteorology at MIT, where he also completed his Ph.D. When he returned to teach there, he taught a course in meteorology of the tropics, and discovered that the existing theory of hurricanes was partly wrong. He’s spent the better part of his career disproving that theory and coming up with better theories of hurricane development and progression. Dr. Emanuel is also a book author of “What We Know About Climate Change,”<http://amzn.to/2cWYQ7O> and “Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes.”<http://amzn.to/2dPXrNb> His recent lecture at IHMC is entitled “Hurricane Risk: Past, Present and Future”:  http://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160324/ STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis interviews Dr. Emanuel about his career, the future of climate change and its impact on hurricane development, and the future of hurricane projection and prediction. 1:11: Ken Ford mentions that he met Kerry in 2005-06 when Ford was on the National Science Board’s Hurricane Task Force, which he co-chaired with Kelvin Droegemeier (also a previous STEM-Talk guest: http://www.ihmc.us/stemtalk/episode-13/). That NSF report was entitled “Hurricane Warning: The Critical Need for a National Hurricane Research Initiative: http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/publications/2007/hurricane/initiative.pdf 2:24: Ken reads a 5-star review from “Wheelsuker”: “I’m not always curious, but when I am, I love STEM-Talk, and the deeply learned folks at IHMC. Subjects range from human physiology to the exploration of space, with thoughtful and probing questions that simultaneously teach and entertain. Highly recommended subscription.” 4:53: Dawn introduces Kerry Emanuel. 5:05: Kerry says his older brother told him that as a toddler, Kerry would get excited about thunder storms at home in Ohio. 6:08: His academic interest in science, and weather, developed in high school: “I started reading more professional meteorology books in high school; I got interested in physics and math. By the time I went to MIT [as an undergraduate], I realized you could put those things together.” 6:33: Kerry describes his academic journey: “I was an undergraduate at MIT, and I also did my Ph.D. there in 1978. Then I went and taught at UCLA and was there for three years. I came back to MIT, and I’ve been there ever since.” 7:00: At MIT, he taught about hurricanes in a course called meteorology of the tropics. “Not only did I not understand the existing theory [about hurricanes], but the existing theory had to be wrong, so I had to go about setting it right.” 7:35: The existing theory didn’t pay any attention to transfer of energy from ocean to the atmosphere. “Ironically, earlier scientists thought that was the guiding principle.” He picked up where they left off. 9:43: “Hurricanes cannot arise out of small fluctuations in atmosphere like a thunderstorm or winter storm. Hurricanes are generated by a pretty big push.” He describes it as a giant engine that takes heat out of the ocean and transfers it to the atmosphere whenever water evaporates. 10:54: “The tropical atmosphere has a different temperature than the tropical ocean. What we don’t understand is how they [hurricanes] get started.” 11:30: In the Atlantic, African-Easterly waves flow from East to West. When they move out over the ocean, they will sometimes trigger hurricanes. 12:49: He describes the feedback loop that propels hurricane intensity: once you get the starter engine going, as the winds accelerate at the surface, the evaporation of sea water occurs faster. The stronger the wind blows the more heat is transferred to atmosphere—until you get up to peak intensity. 14:00: Kerry talks about his roughly 10 flights into the eye of hurricanes. “I think everyone should do it. It’s magnificent,” he says—especially the sight of the eye of the hurricane from the inside. 14:30: “When you’re flying in, it’s just like flying in bad weather in a commercial airline. It’s turbulent, but it’s never been as turbulent as I’ve experienced on commercial airliners. Hurricane pilots really know what they’re doing.” 15:52: The eye of the hurricane is actually calm. He compares it to being inside the Roman Coliseum, except it’s white, and instead of a few hundred feet across, it’s 30 or 40 miles across. Sometimes there’s a cascade of ice crystals on the inside of the eye wall. 16:17: “I have fantasized about starting a hurricane safari operation after I retire.” 16:45: The physics of a hurricane is angular momentum conservation. “If you have a spinning body, when you take some part of the mass and move it towards the axis, the spin increases. The classic illustration for that is a spinning ice skater who draws in her arms; by that mechanism, her speed increases; that’s the conservation of angular momentum.” Likewise, in a hurricane, air spirals towards the center of the hurricane within a few thousand feet of the ocean’s surface; once it has moved in so far, it goes rocketing up, forming the wall of the eye. 19:35: The primary remaining challenge associated with hurricane forecasting is knowing the intensity of the hurricane right now. “For most storms, we don’t have aircraft. Just looking at a satellite image doesn’t show you wind speed.” 22:10: Two things prevent most hurricanes from moving up to potential: wind shear (a dampening force that imports dry air into the core of the hurricane—like throwing water on a fire). And the hurricane’s ability to churn up cold water from deeper in the ocean. 23:24: We don’t know much about temperature of the ocean beneath the surface; that limits our ability to forecast. 24:44: Kerry describes Argo robots that submerge more than a mile into the ocean recording temperature information, and then surface and transmit this newly collected data to satellites. 26:08: Kerry explains the difference between hurricane prediction: whereby you take an existing hurricane and predict where it will go; and hurricane projection, which projects a weak or strong hurricane season based on climate change. 27:00: Prediction of the track of path of hurricanes is a wonderful success story. Predicting intensity has been much less successful. 27:57: In forecasting anything at all, you have to know where you’re starting from. It’s a fine art. 30:32: The atmosphere is chaotic, and getting the initial condition right is the really hard part…we can’t computationally resolve all the things that are physically important in the atmosphere. 31:16: There’s an enormous amount of work that goes into computational modeling; the diversity of models gives you a better forecast/appreciation for how uncertain that forecast is likely to be. 31:46: To analyze the current state of the atmosphere, we start with an old forecast. You update it by incorporating measures in present, which is data assimilation. Every forecast has a little bit of history in it. 33:33: If I didn’t have computers/understanding of physics, I’d say, ‘Let’s look for some close analogies in the past.’  This is called analog forecasting.  We know from theoretical work this is not a promising approach. Chaos will always ensure there are differences. 34:25: Computational weather prediction has pulled far ahead of any analog forecasting. 34:32: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 35:07: “We’ve gotten steadily better by all metrics at predicting the track that hurricanes will take. On the other hand, we haven’t gotten much better at forecasting how strong a hurricane will be.” 36:13: “Hurricanes are creatures of warm, tropical ocean waters, and the Gulf of Mexico is a great example of that.” Hurricanes often form in the tropical Atlantic and the Caribbean and then strengthen as they move into the warm Gulf waters. 37:15: “If we look at geological records … we think actually the region (Gulf Coast) has been pretty lucky over the last century compared to what’s been true over the last few thousand years.” 38:40: Dawn asks if the current trend of planetary warming is likely to have any effect on hurricane formation and intensity over the long run. 39:10:  Effect of planetary warming on hurricane formation and intensity: “It’s not a solved problem, but there is a kind of consensus developing about what we think will happen.  The key points of that consensus are this, we think the frequency of very high-category hurricanes will go up as you warm the climate; but at the same time, there’s a little bit more controversy about the frequency of weaker hurricanes. Most studies suggest that the frequency of these will go down.” 40:00: Eighty percent of the damage in the U.S. has been done by category-3 or greater hurricanes. The consensus is that there will be more of these strong storms in the future. They are associated with strong storm surges. In practice they kill a lot of people. There is also a very strong consensus that fresh water flooding from heavy rains is going to get worse, almost for sure as the climate warms. 42:43: “The theory of chaos is often described as a kind of practical limit on what you can forecast … but it’s much more profound than that, it’s not just a practical limit, it’s a theoretical limit that you cannot go beyond not matter what resources you throw at it.” 44:19: For all practical purposes, the system is not deterministic beyond two weeks.  Thus, we will never be able to make precise forecasts beyond that time horizon. 45:25: Discussing how good a forecast is likely to be: “We can forecast how skillful our forecasts are. That is a very profound thing to be able to do.  What we have not mastered is how to convey that to the public.  We struggle with that everyday.” 47:42: To improve forecasting, we need better measurements, better computer models, and better ways of assimilating improved measurements into the better models. High level research on this is taking place all over the world. 48:30: While this should be a cooperative international enterprise, European governments have monetized weather data. “The bad boys are the Europeans—their governments decided they could make money from selling weather data…. Even at the peak of the Cold War, the US and USSR were freely sharing weather observations.” 49:22: Some of best computer forecasts are generated by the Europeans, from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. “If we want to see them, we have to pay through the nose for them. Everybody else subscribes to the older idea that since the taxpayer has paid for this data, it should be freely available to all.” 50:33: Economists have demonstrated that even if the only thing you are concerned with is how much money the government would make, it’s an inferior model. The freedom of data has led to small enterprises doing specialized forecasting based on the available data. Those companies create jobs and are taxed; the U.S. government gets more money that way, than the Europeans do trying to sell environmental data. Kerry says there are efforts to get Europeans on board with this “more gracious, economic model of sharing environmental data.” 53:19: On quantifying the risk of climate change: If it’s one degree warming by the end of the century, there’s not much difference. If it’s four to five degrees, the world could erupt in a conflict over water and food shortages. 54:03: In thinking about what we should do, if anything, to reduce the rate of warming, it is rational to consider both risk and the possible consequences. 56:10: Look on bright side [of climate change]: “We have an opportunity here to transform our energy systems ahead of the curve.”   If there were no climate change, we would still eventually run out of fossil fuel. 56:45:  Discusses the shortcomings of solar and wind energy.  The wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine … and we are not very good a storing energy. 57:10: Kerry discusses the positive potential of next generation fission energy. Fourth generation fission reactors can consume the waste that’s been stockpiling around the world and turn it into much safer waste that can be safely buried.  These next generation plants cannot meltdown, they are physical incapable of it. 58:12: Discussing why more fourth-generation nuclear plants are not being built in the U.S.: “It’s almost a “no-brainer” and yet the word ‘nuclear’ is such a red flag for environmentalists and others that the political barriers are immense; the technical barriers are not.” 58:50: “In thirty years are we going to be buying clean energy from China and India or selling it to them? That’s our choice now.” 59:07: Once you put carbon monoxide in the atmosphere, it takes thousands of years for it to go away; unless we develop technology to pull it out of the atmosphere. In next decade or two important decisions will be made. 1:00:06: “If I had a large budget, on the practical side, I would come up with much better ways of monitoring and forecasting hurricanes. One of the great tragic limitations … is we do pretty bad job of estimating their initial intensity. I’d field a fleet of solar powered robotic aircraft in the stratosphere launching pods on parachutes … down into the troposphere to measure the intensity of hurricanes to improve their forecasts.” 1:01:25:   Dawn thanks Dr. Emanuel for joining her on STEM-Talk. 1:01:35:   Ford comments on the interview: “Kerry is incredibly engaging and insightful about the future of weather and hurricane forecasting. He’s truly at the forefront of this increasingly important field.” 1:01:49:  Dawn says that she is eager to follow-up with Dr. Emanuel on his retirement plans to give air tours on hurricanes. 1:01:57: Ford says he also flew into a hurricane when he was in the Navy. 1:02:15: Dawn and Ken sign off.        

 In this episode of STEM-Talk, we talk to one of our own senior research scientists, Dr. Yorick Wilks, renowned for his work in natural language processing. Wilks is also a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield in England, and senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at Balliol College. A “war baby” born in London in the midst of the Second World War, Yorick was sent away to school due to the bombings. He excelled and went to Cambridge, where he studied with Margaret Masterman, a protégé of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Yorick first came to America—L.A. in the 1960s—on a one-year Air Force Research Grant. Yeas later, he moved to Stanford University’s AI Lab, where he worked with John McCarthy, one of the founders of Artificial Intelligence. Yorick’s research interests have been vast and rich, including machine translation, translating, understanding and extracting meaning from language, belief representation and human and machine communication. He has authored 14 books and many more papers, and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including, in 2008, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Lifetime Achievement Award. Yorick also speaks several languages, including Swahili and Japanese. Yorick is a senior research scientist at IHMC’s Ocala, Florida facility where he was interviewed for this podcast. STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC Associate Director and senior research scientist Bonnie Dorr—who is also a leading expert in natural language processing—conduct this rich interview, full of both historical insight and wisdom about the future of AI.  Yorick also spends much of his time in Oxford, England, where he lives with his wife and two beloved dogs, an Italian greyhound and a German Sheppard. 1:07: Ken mentions that Yorick was an easy selection by “a unanimous vote by the double secret selection committee.” He calls Yorick a pioneering researcher, mentor and a raconteur of the first order. 1:31: Ken continues: “Yorick was on the ground floor when AI and the Internet were in nascent stages of development.” 2:30: Dawn reads an iTunes 5-star review of STEM-Talk from “Love the ocean”: “I just listened to Joan Vernikos’ STEM-Talk, and I am convinced that I am on my way to living a healthier life from the changes I’ve made incorporating what she said in her talk. What an inspiration she is, and how proud I am to have met her at NASA, where I currently work, and know that even after her NASA days, she continues to research and publish. STEM-Talk truly finds those brilliant and interesting people and encourages in-depth discussions. Continuous five-stars.” 4:30: Dawn welcomes Yorick and Bonnie. 4:58: Yorick describes upbringing: “I was a war baby, from a poor, working class family.” His parents worked in aircraft factories and sent him to school outside of London because of the bombings. 5:48: He got a scholarship to a good school; and another scholarship to attend Cambridge. “In some ways, I escaped my upbringing completely.” 6:00: Yorick won a school prize at age 16, and asked for Aristotle’s Metaphysics. That marked his first interest in philosophy. At Cambridge, he studied math and physics; he changed to philosophy after a year. 6:50: He considers himself in “apostolic succession from Wittgenstein” via Margaret Masterman, his philosophy tutor at college. “She wasn’t good at teaching; but she was a genius, a guru.” 7:56: Wittgenstein didn’t like women in his classes; he didn’t like ugly people, Yorick says. “But she hung in there, and Wittgenstein was the biggest influence in her life.” 8:22: Wittgenstein thought understanding the world meant understanding language…But he wasn’t anti-science at all. He was an engineer by background. He thought how we saw the world was determined by language. 9:10: Masterman thought she was carrying out a Wittgenstein philosophy, but with new technology (computers.) 9:20: Yorick tells about spending the 1960s in L.A., the era of sex, drugs and rock n roll. He had a one-year Air Force Research Grant and was attached to an offshoot of the Rand Corporation, which was Bob Simmons’ group. He worked on an IBM 360, and started programming (in Lisp) his thesis ideas in L.A. 11:15: Yorick moved to Northern California at the end of the 1960s. 12:09: He took a job John McCarthy’s AI lab at Stanford. 12:25: Yorick recalls some the earliest days of the Internet at Stanford. 13:54: “Margaret Masterman had the idea that you could code the meaning of language with a small number of semantic primitives (features).” 15:11: Yorick’s thesis was building a representation of English that was in another language of semantic primitives. It was ahead of its time. Back then, Noam Chomsky was popular: “Syntax and grammar were what mattered…We were dead set against that. We thought it was completely wrong.” 16:30: Yorick created the first semantically-based machine translation system from English to French. “It was no good as a translation; it was just the idea of doing it that way.” 17:13: Yorick coined semantic parsing, which today is commonplace, but back then was novel. 17:49: Yorick discusses his appreciation for the perspective now often referred to as “human-centered computing.” He was influenced by Martin Kay, a computational linguist who thought that translation was too sophisticated for machines alone, but rather that human/machine teamwork was necessary. “For laws, constitutions, poetry, the human must be in the loop. Machine translation is just a tool for the human.” 22:00: Yorick talks about the two broad approaches—symbolic and statistical—to computerized language processing. 23:10: “The biggest shift in language processing in the past fifty years has been the advent of massive hardware—more so than theoretical advances.” 25:06: All the new Google translations are basically statistical now. “Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, but they are easily produced given big-data and they are workhorses that deliver. You can get a decent translation and understand almost anything now.” 25:25:  But, “language cannot be, at base, statistical. We cannot be statistical engines generating English. A novel isn’t just a very long Markov Chain… novels have structure… novels are about stuff.” 25:55:  Currently most people seem to agree that some kind of cooperation between statistical and symbolic methods will be most efficacious in AI. 26:25: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 27:00: Yorick talks about the current popularity of network-based methods such as “deep understanding” and “deep learning.” 28:56: “We all know when we say one thing but mean another. Statistics won’t express that, but linguists have spent decades expressing it.” 29:10: “Deep learning is a bigger matter,” he says, calling it an “absurd misnomer.” Yorick continued that it has “produced good results in facial recognition, speech recognition. It hasn’t yet produced striking results in language understanding…I don’t think it’s that different than what went before. 30:19: “We are living in a world, where funding and hype and real science are mixed up in a strange way; to get somewhere and flush our real funding, you have to sound as if you are the new Messiah.” 31:15: “I inherited machine translation because it was the prime task that Masterman’s research center was set up to do. I parlayed that into a representation for language and meaning.” 32:50: “In the 1970s and 80s, I got very interested in the representation of human beliefs…that connected back to my early work on semantic representation. I began to think we couldn’t understand language unless we could understand what the other person believes about language and the world.” 34:00: Yorick has continued to work in belief representation at IHMC, specifically on work funded by the Office of Naval Research that models dialogue to try to determine who is the main influencer and has the leadership role. 34:30: In a chance happening, Yorick met David Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. Levy got interested in human conversation and wanted to create the best conversational machine. Levy wanted to build a machine to win the Turing Test competition called the Loebner Prize. 35:44: Yorick led the team in 1998 at Sheffield that won for Levy, who funded it. 36:50: Bonnie talks about all the areas of research Yorick has covered: understanding language, translating language, extracting meaning from language, detecting correct word sense from ambiguous words. She asks him about the future of the fields he has worked in. 40:30: “Dialogue systems are very hot. Human-machine cooperation is “the hottest topic in AI right now.”  How we are going to control automated cars?  “They’ve got to talk like us; otherwise it’s hopeless.” 41:20: Yorick talks about working on the EU’s largest project on artificial companions, or conversational companions. “Just as people tell dogs their secrets, people would have computer companions that would live with them. It would be a hand-bag sized type thing. It would be your interface with the web.” 44:12:  Yorick talks about AI systems as “cognitive orthoses.” 44:25: Yorick predicts people will warm to the idea of artificial companions. “A computer program would have photographs and talk to you about them. It would debrief you on your memories and keep your memoires straight; and help to keep you mentally alive. It’s going to be a lot better than no companion at all.” 45:05: “People will have emotional relationships with anything. The bar isn’t that high.” 45:35: Dawn asks Yorick to talk about Ken Ford’s observation that after decades of pundits and philosophers arguing that AI is provably impossible, suddenly that argument has been replaced with the assertion that not only is it possible, but superhuman AI is so inevitable that it is the greatest danger ever faced by the human race.  In only about a decade, the conversation has shifted from you can’t do it … to you shouldn’t do it! 46:42: Yorick says that the media stokes these fears irresponsibly. 46:56: “Stephen Hawking knows no more about AI than anybody who reads the newspapers. His mind is full of cosmology … which is no help.” 47:20: “Automated weapons could do horrible things; but all weapons can do terrible things.”  It’s not what people think the problem is, AI itself is not the problem. 50:14: Yorick enjoys mentoring Ph.D. students; their most common problem is that their writing is so compressed, he says. The only way out of that is to have them write just one paragraph that is completely clear; and to let that grow. 51:38: He describes a different territory for research with respect to fifty years ago, when there was a “virgin territory in research.” His advice to researchers: “If you think you have anything original to say, say it and see where it takes you.” 54:10: Yorick speaks French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Swahili (which has 16 genders, meaning noun clauses, not sex.) 55:05: Knowing languages, you see how badly some are designed. 56:36: “IHMC is quite like John McCarthy’s lab at Stanford. You’re left to do what you want as long as someone is attracted to it; there’s no party line.” 57:58: “I have a very high view of dogs. They remember you. They have a lot of attractive features.” He has an Italian greyhound and a German Sheppard. 1:00:38: Ken muses on the fascinating interview, which covered a broad range of AI topics, Yorick’s rich educational experiences, and his participation in the early days of the Internet. 1:01:20: Ken and Dawn sign off.

When Alessio Fasano entered medical school at the University of Naples (Italy) School of Medicine, his goal was to eliminate childhood diarrhea. Working with a mentor who’d studied the physiology of the gut, Fasano decided to focus on the microorganisms that cause diarrhea. That opened up his world to specialize in overall gut health, and Fasano became a leading expert in celiac disease and gluten-related disorders. Following medical school, Fasano spent three years at the Center for Vaccine Development in Baltimore, and later returned to the U.S. to pursue his career. Today the world-renowned gastroenterologist is chair of pediatric gastroenterology and nutrition at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Celiac Research and Treatment. He is also the director of the Mucosal Immunology and Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. Fasano was the lead researcher of a seminal 2003 study showing that 1 in 133 Americans have celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder characterized by gluten-induced damage to the small intestine. His book Gluten Freedom http://tinyurl.com/zdbcdkk has been hailed as “the groundbreaking roadmap to a gluten-free lifestyle.” He is also the author of “A Clinical Guide to Gluten-Related Disorders.” http://tinyurl.com/zbhme6j His lectures at IHMC “The Gut is Not Like Las Vegas,” (November 2014) http://tinyurl.com/o83y8xz and “People Shall Not Live by Bread Alone: People Shall Not Live by Bread Alone” http://tinyurl.com/pcssk5j have gotten over 70,000 views on YouTube. Fasano has been featured widely in media, such as NPR, CNN and Bloomberg News. In this episode of STEM-Talk, Fasano talks about his early life as a curious boy in Italy, with a scientist grandfather as his first mentor, the impassioned trajectory of his career, and the underlying importance of gut health in determining our overall health. 00:56: Dawn describes Fasano as “a leading light in the study of the microbiome.” Fifteen years ago, Fasano and his colleagues discovered the pathophysiology of celiac disease and role of the protein zonulin in causing it. 1:10: Ford cites growing evidence that the microbiome content of the intestinal tract influences our metabolism, stress tolerance, immune response, memory and cognitive performance. 2:56: Ford reads five-star iTunes review of STEM-Talk entitled “cognitive satiety:” “Never have all the lobes of your brain been so satisfied. Every episode is fascinating and beautifully orchestrated. The content is interesting and diverse. There’s no room for boredom. The double secret selection committee does a superb job of keeping the listeners educated, engaged and more intelligent with every minute. And the hosts have a linguistic seduction that you wish it would never end. I could listen to STEM-Talk for hours. Thank you, and please keep the talks coming.” 3:51: Dawn introduces Fasano as a world-renowned pediatric gastroenterologist and research scientist. He specializes in treating people with celiac disease, wheat and gluten sensitivities, as well as infants and children with difficult to treat gastro-intestinal problems. 5:15: Dawn welcomes Alessio and Ken to the interview. 5:37: Fasano talks about his childhood in Italy. He was raised largely by his grandfather, a retired physicist who had once worked in Enrico Fermi’s lab. During World War II, Fasano’s grandfather refused to move to Germany as Mussolini had requested, so he ended up teaching high school science. 6:26: “I remember vividly being with him in his lab. [That] sparked an interest in physics and science.” 7:03: Fasano’s initial focus in medical school was eliminating childhood diarrhea— “not a glamorous field to get into.” At that time, five million people died annually from diarrhea, 80 percent of them children. 9:08: On his medical school mentor’s suggestion, Fasano went to the Center for Vaccine development in Baltimore to study micro-organisms in the gut. His two-month term became two years. Afterwards, he went back to Italy for a year and a half, returning to the U.S. in 1993, where he has been ever since. 9:47: Ken points out that Fasano has said that, “Twenty-five hundred years ago, Hippocrates posited all disease begins in gut: emerging understanding of the interplay between gut microbiome, intestinal mucosa and immune and nervous systems seems to support this contention.” 10:05: “Hippocrates was so right, without having all the information that we have right now,” Fasano says. 11:14: Fasano says that his thirty years of studying the gut have boiled down to the past five years, with the emergence of “the perfect storm of knowledge” about the microbiome. 11:50: The intestinal mucosa, a 3,000 square feet interface, negotiates cross-talk between us as human beings, the ecosystem, and our interaction with the environment. 12:30: Besides digesting food, the gut is involved in a continuous discussion with our environment, regulating the friends and foes that enter. The gut is the organ with the most immune cells; it’s also considered the body’s second brain, and has even more neuronal cells than brain itself. 13:28: The gut is a 20-foot-long tube. The epithelial cells interact with various types of immune cells. 16:00: The nervous system cells coordinate the interaction between the immune and epithelial cells, sometimes through messenger cells. 17:17: “Imagine all this decision making,” Fasano says. The epithelial cells have sensors that see who is in the lumen: friends, or if it’s foes, “You have to prepare for war.” 17:50: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 18:33: Recent information indicates that the microbiome develops in the womb during the last trimester of pregnancy, but the major imprinting happens in the birth canal. That is why full-term, vaginal births are best for healthy microbiome development. Then other things—breastfeeding, for example—should occur to ensure sustained microbiome health. 22:05: The immune system developed to fight micro-organisms. 22:52: The microbiome teaches the immune system to work in a child’s first 1,000 days. A good, balanced microbiome is one that teaches the immune system to set the bar high for infections. 23:45: An unbalanced microbiome in infancy may be caused by the Western diet, C-section delivery, and infections. These things teach the immune system to have a low threshold for infections, placing infants at risk for chronic inflammatory diseases later in adulthood. 24:50: Fasano comments on the Human Genome Project: As humans, we have 23,000 genes, most of which we share with other animals; 95 percent of our genes are identical to a mouse. Only 400 genes distinguish us from chimpanzees. Other species have many more genes: Worms, for example, have 75,000 genes. 26:07: What are the implications of our relatively shallow gene pool? “We were not supposed to be dominant creatures on earth,” Fasano says. 26:53: Fasano explains his piano player analogy: Our 23,000 genes are like piano keys. There is an infinite combination of notes. The piano player is the microbiome that decides, based on genetic cross-talk, what notes should be played and when—just as genes express or suppress their activities. 28:10: Whereas previously, we were told that having the genes to develop diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease, cancer, and multiple sclerosis determined our fate—that we would get those diseases—we now know that’s not true, Fasano says. “It all depends on our lifestyle; and how that affects our microbiome, which in turn affects which genes are turned on or off…. If I have the genes for Lou Gehrig’s disease, that does not mean I will get it. It depends on how I live my life.” 29:00: Until recently, we thought our disease destiny was determined by our piano player—assumed to be an outside. Now we understand that the piano player—our microbiome—is living inside of us. 29:57: Now the questions that we can ask are: What kind of player is there? What kind of music does he play? What kind of music is playing as we speak? “Doing mathematical modeling, we can predict if playing certain kind of music, you will end up with that kind of clinical outcome.” 30:48: “We cannot manipulate our genes, but we may eventually be able to manipulate our microbiome so we can keep ourselves healthy for a much longer period of time.” This is primary prevention; or precision medicine. 31:34: Ken comments: “This interaction between our genome and the microbiome is the part that I find most interesting and hopeful for the future. It explains the riddle of how a simple genome produces such a highly differentiated and complex animal; and opens up new pathways for medicine and human performance and resilience.” 32:10: “This is the best time to be in science,” Fasano says. “Technology and knowledge are moving so fast.” 33:18: “It’s up to us to keep [our microbiome] in a compatible, friendly discussion with the genome we inherited from our parents.” But the health of our microbiome also boils down to our lifestyle. “The way we live will dictate the destiny we have.” 34:54: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 35:30: Two ingredients of auto-immune disease were once thought to be genes and environmental triggers that create inflammation. The question that no one could explain was: “How can these two worlds physically interact to make this happen?” 38:24: Then they stumbled upon zonulin, a protein modulating the permeability of tight junctures between cells in the digestive tract. 39:20: Now zonulin has been linked to a myriad of auto-immune and GI disease such as Crohn’s Disease, as well as multiple sclerosis, cancer, schizophrenia, and autism. 40:12: Larazotide acetate is a promising peptide that blocks zonulin. It is now in in a phase three clinical trial. 44:40: Zonulin negotiates the interaction with the environment when it’s at the forefront of the gut; it also modulates traffic between body compartments, including the blood brain barrier (BBB). 45:00: German scientists have linked the production of zonulin to more advanced stages of glioma; the more compromised the BBB is, the more zonulin is present. 45:30: The microbiome may have a role in autism, since kids with autism have GI upsets. They are trying to understand what the role of the microbiome is in that. Either the activated immune cells create inflammation in the brain; or the microbiome produces metabolites that have a direct effect on the brain. 46:40: The truth of today is the garbage of tomorrow. Science is refurbished every five years. “You need to put yourself in the discussion all the time,” Fasano says. “If you are not open-minded enough, you will go out of business.” 47:35: Fasano’s grandfather told him, “If you want immediate success, science is not your field.” Another attribute of a scientist is humility: you have to question yourself all the time. “Science is a constellation of failures with very few successes, and we live for those. How bored would we be if every experiment that we did was successful?” 49:38: Dawn relays a personal story about scientists’ dedication: As a post-doc, she had a sign in her office that a mentor had given her, which said: “Brick walls are there for a reason. They make you prove how badly you want something.” 50:06: “Science in Italy is a hobby today,” Fasano says. Italy invests less than three percent of its GDP in science. “There’s no way that Italy can keep apace with countries like the U.S. that consider science an investment. Bright people relocate to unleash their creativity and make a difference.” 51:36: He adds, “Italian science has the resources to be at forefront of the story.” 52:47: Fasano recently opened a research institute in his hometown of Salerno called the European Biomedical Research Institute. It is on the site of the first Western medical school, where the first medical school textbook was written; the first diploma to be a doctor was given; and the first female physician practiced. 55:40: This institute is mainly focused on nutritional health. 56:30: Fasano says his biggest adjustment to living in the U.S. has been lifestyle. “Here people live to work.” And of course, the food. “In the beginning I could not adjust to fast food. I am a strong proponent of slow food. Drive-ins in Italy are inconceivable.” 58:00: What he loves about living in the U.S.: “The sky’s is the limit in terms of realizing your potential.” 59:10: Ken wraps up: “We humans appear to be a kind of super organism. Humans and microbes have developed a co-dependency which affects our wellness, including the expression of our genes.” 59:46: Dawn and Ken sign off.