Ep. 908: The Lone Star Tick and Alpha Gal Syndrome

Steven Rinella talks with journalist and author Burkhard Bilger about: the lone star tick; alpha gal syndrome; Lyme disease; treatments; cockfighting; and more! Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:52Steven Rinella?

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• 2:19Steven Rinella?

  Holy smokes, joined today by Burkhart Bilger, the writer. We're gonna talk about Alpha-Gal Syndrome and Lone Star Tick, but we're also gonna talk about a bunch more of your work. And I gotta tell you flat out, right here, this is embarrassing.

• 2:31Steven Rinella?

  I've been a fan, I've been a fan of you for, for over a quarter century.

• 2:39Speaker 06

  Wow, that's great.

• 2:42Steven Rinella?

  I, like, dude, I'm not kidding you. I, in 1999, or whatever that was, 1999, 2000, I was a graduate student.

• 2:51Steven Rinella?

  And I got the, the, the Harper's Magazine. And it had your piece on cockfighting. And I, I was split between, I was split between loving you because it was so perfect, and wanting to kill you because I was so jealous.

• 3:13Steven Rinella?

  I'm not kidding you. And I've, I've loved your stuff since, man.

• 3:16Speaker 06

  Oh, thank you.

• 3:17Steven Rinella?

  Like, you're, you know, I know, I know you've done books. Like, you have a book, Noodling for Flatheads. And you kind of blew that, I mean, you like, made that whole thing in my mind. You took this, like, esoteric, you know, backwoods practice, and sort of made it to where every social media influencer around the planet goes out and has their day noodling flatheads. You know what I mean? Like, you like, found that.

• 3:40Speaker 06

  A friend of mine in Oklahoma made a documentary called Oki Noodling, with the Flaming Nick lips for the soundtrack. And, and he, and now there's a whole noodling tournament in Oklahoma every year.

• 3:50Steven Rinella?

  But you were onto that stuff.

• 3:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:52Steven Rinella?

  You were onto that stuff 20 years, like, over 20 years ago.

• 3:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, there's, uh, yeah, 25, 30 years ago, yeah.

• 3:59Steven Rinella?

  And another favorite thing, like, one of my favorite passages ever written is you were, you were profiling the, the sort of like, up and coming bull riders. Can you explain this to people real quick? And I'll tell you my favorite passage, but like, how do you explain your piece about bull riding?

• 4:16Speaker 06

  Well, it's basically about how young bull riders get made. And they, you know, they get started at five or six on sheep, and then they go to little calves, and then they go to small bulls and steers. And, um, and that has happened, that has gotten younger and younger, even as the bulls have gotten more and more fierce and terrifying and destructive. And so it's been a crazy

• 4:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 4:38Speaker 06

  kind of collision of, of two cultures.

• 4:41Steven Rinella?

  And you did most of your reporting for that, am I remembering right, was it mostly in Nevada or Utah?

• 4:45Speaker 06

  It's mostly in Oklahoma, actually. I grew up in Oklahoma, so I knew a lot of, and there were, um, there were a bunch of bull riding families down there that I knew, so I met them.

• 4:54Steven Rinella?

  But you were, I always tell people this story, because you're writing a piece about bull riding culture, and these young kids bull riding. And at the same time that you're working on this, in your own neighborhood in Brooklyn,

• 5:05Speaker 06

  Right.

• 5:06Steven Rinella?

  New York, there's a park where the parents all take their little kids to play, and they came in and installed rocks in the park.

• 5:15Speaker 06

  I mean, flat rocks, like, two inches high.

• 5:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so you're writing about the parents who are deeply upset about the hazard that these rocks would present to their children, should they get hurt on the rocks.

• 5:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 5:30Steven Rinella?

  And people being like, hey, I can't believe they're real rocks put in the park. And you're like, you're living in this while also living with these bull rider people.

• 5:38Speaker 06

  Right. No, I mean, it was, I think it was the, the, the, the high point or the nadir of, of the kind of helicopter parenting thing. And, and in Park Slope, where I'm in Brooklyn, was really intense about that. These parents who wanted to oversee every single thing, create a perfectly safe bubble for their children. And then I go to Western Oklahoma, and, and, you know, some five-year-old, eight-year-old boy's getting thrown off, bloody face, might have a bunch of cuts, and his parents are like, get back up, boy, get back up on that thing, you know? And it's just, and I have to say, those kids that I was with, those bull riding kids, were some of the, the best kids I've ever been around.

• 6:19Steven Rinella?

  That's right.

• 6:20Speaker 06

  Incredibly polite, focused, like, good-natured, you know?

• 6:27Speaker 06

  I mean, you know, there was a good chance they were gonna get grievously injured before the age of 20, you know? And they could have had, and it was lots of risk in what they were doing. But in terms of how they approached life, there was so much zest and appetite to it. It was kind of, they were kind of great.

• 6:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And then now, the reason, the reason I want you here now is, um, you just wrote a big piece. All your stuff is so well-reported. You do a great job. I feel like you usually, you, you, you seem to really win the trust of people you're talking to.

• 6:58Steven Rinella?

  You paint things very fairly. And now you've done a piece on something that I've been paying a ton of attention to,

• 7:04Steven Rinella?

  which is this, what, what, you can clarify, what seems to be this explosion in Alpha-Gal Syndrome, to where now I've got buddies that have had it, I've got buddies that got it so long ago, they got over it. It seems like there's more and more of it. I went through, I recently was reading the writer Nellie Bowles. I recently read a piece she had where she called, she said that Lyme disease is a chic disease. Like, people are proud to have had, um, I don't know about that. I had, I've had a tick-borne, I had a tick-borne illness from Lyme that I was treated for and got better. And ticks are part of the conversation in this country, especially in the outdoor community. Like, ticks are a bigger part of the conversation now than they've ever been.

• 7:47Steven Rinella?

  And it seems like they're only gonna become more and more and more of the conversation. And there's more and more things to worry about. And, and I didn't realize, and I'll have you explain it, but I, I recently picked a lone, I had a Lone Star Tick right here on my clavicle.

• 8:03Steven Rinella?

  I called my friend of mine who's a doctor, because I thought it was like the kind of thing you take an antibiotic for.

• 8:10Steven Rinella?

  This is just, I mean, this is a couple of weeks ago.

• 8:11Speaker 06

  Right.

• 8:12Steven Rinella?

  And she's like, no, man, this is a whole other ballgame. This is not, nothing to, like, that's not this.

• 8:18Speaker 06

  Right.

• 8:18Steven Rinella?

  And I realized, like, how little I knew about this.

• 8:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:23Steven Rinella?

  But to, which we're gonna cover, but to start, like, what was it, like, why did you get into this idea? Like, what, what drew you to this, this idea of Alpha-Gal Syndrome and Lone Star Ticks?

• 8:34Speaker 06

  Well, it's like a lot of stories, I kind of zeroed in on it gradually. My first thought was, damn, we've had this, these waves of infestations over the last 30 years. You know, Lyme disease, and super lice, and, and bedbugs. And then there was this huge scabies outbreak in Europe that might be coming to this country, and screw worms. And, you know, it's just been like, one after the other. And I thought, there's gotta be a pattern here, what, what's going on? And so I started calling, first I called pest control people in, in, in New Jersey. And then they sent me to a bunch of extension folks in Nebraska and Kentucky.

• 9:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 9:08Speaker 06

  And, and they said, well, yeah, you know, a bunch of those things are, we're worried about the screw worm, but they haven't come, really come across the Texas border yet. But, but everybody here is freaked out about Alpha-Gal. And I had heard about Alpha-Gal maybe 12, 15 years ago, but as a kind of a novelty disease. There was a, a piece on Radiolab about a woman who'd gotten it. And, and it, and it, and it felt very much like what Lyme disease was in the early days. Like, maybe something that, in a small pockets like the Hamptons or, or Martha's Vineyard, which by the way, are two of the biggest hotspots for it. Maybe people get it there, but it's not that widespread. And then I started to realize, no, it's actually, those ticks have moved all the way west to, to the Rockies.

• 9:52Speaker 06

  They're like, and, and, and they're spreading and multiplying, so it's becoming a much huger thing than it was.

• 10:00Steven Rinella?

  You just said that the ticks are spreading. When is it that, is it that the ticks are spreading or that the, the pathogen or the diseases are spreading?

• 10:09Speaker 06

  Well, it's both really. I mean, in this country, I mean, if you look worldwide, alpha gals all over the world now.

• 10:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 10:15Speaker 06

  More than 30 countries, six continents.

• 10:17Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 10:18Speaker 06

  And in all these countries, all these continents is carried by different ticks. Like the, the bond tick in South Africa, the castor bean tick in Europe. In this country, it's carried by lone star ticks, almost exclusively. And the lone star tick used to be pretty much contained in the southeast. Like up until 1950, they didn't really go past north of Virginia.

• 10:43Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 10:44Speaker 06

  And now you look at the CDC map of lone star ticks and they're all the way to the Oklahoma panhandle. They're all the way to Maine. They're all the way to, you know, northern Michigan. So they, with climate change, and especially with the kind of wetter conditions that often come with climate change. They've kind of followed those and spread all across the country. And they're so aggressive and so bold and resilient that they've done really well wherever they've gone.

• 11:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I want to tell, tell listeners about a thing real quick. Then I want you to explain Alf, like how this alpha gal thing works. But like, people are very familiar with Lyme. We've been talking about Lyme disease for decades. Lyme disease is you have a tick that carries like a bacterial pathogen.

• 11:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:26Steven Rinella?

  The tick latches on to you and the longer it's on you, the more it can transmit. And it transmits a bacterial infection into your body.

• 11:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 11:35Steven Rinella?

  It's, it's passing an infection along into your body. You can have the ticks that carry it. You have areas where there's a very low prevalence. Right? There's a, there, there, a, a small percentage of the ticks are infected. There's areas where like, when I got it and doing my research after getting it, I learned that about three quarters of the ticks. At that time in Hudson Valley, about three quarters of the ticks carried the, the, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease.

• 12:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:05Steven Rinella?

  So, you know, if you got a tick latched on, you had a 75% chance that that thing was, had the capability of bringing it to you.

• 12:12Speaker 06

  Right.

• 12:13Steven Rinella?

  Um, this alpha gal deal, which we'll, we'll jump to the kind of punchline here is it causes like a meat and dairy allergy. It's how people become aware of they had it, has a totally different way it functions.

• 12:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:25Steven Rinella?

  Can you explain to people what's like, what is going on when you get bit by these things?

• 12:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's true. I mean, Lyme disease, babesiosis, anaplasmosis, the orliciosis, all the major tick borne diseases are, you know, they're bacteria or they're parasites. Alpha gal is different and it, and it's different in two ways. Like every lone star tick has alpha gal in its saliva, right? So it's not a question of if you have the bacteria or not. They all have it.

• 12:55Steven Rinella?

  Like they're just born with it?

• 12:56Speaker 06

  You're born with, they're born with it. And when you get bitten, if they latch on and they stay latch on, that, that alpha gal goes into your system. Now, the, the catch is that like not that large a percentage of people who get the alpha gal in their system from a bite will be, will develop the syndrome, right? You might even have alpha gal antibodies in your body and still not get the syndrome. The syndrome means you're getting a little allergic reaction to it. But if you get bitten by a, by a lone star tick and it stays on you, you will get alpha gal in your system.

• 13:29Steven Rinella?

  And what, what is that? Like, like explain that bit about that all, all meat besides like people meat, monkey meat, all mammal meat.

• 13:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:41Steven Rinella?

  Contains something, right?

• 13:42Speaker 06

  Yeah. All non-primate bodies contain alpha gal. And the most of it, if you look at the ones that have the highest concentration, it's the organ meat, it's the sinews, it's the, it's the, it's the fibers. But it's also in the meat and dairy often has, it almost always has alpha gal in it.

• 13:59Steven Rinella?

  And what is it? Like it's a carb?

• 14:01Speaker 06

  It's a type of sugar.

• 14:02Steven Rinella?

  Oh, it's a type of sugar.

• 14:03Speaker 06

  Which is another unusual thing. Most, most allergies are caused by proteins, our two proteins. But this case is the sugar, which is one of the reasons it took so long for it to get identified. But it's, it's in this, you know, and so, you know, we eat alpha gal all the time. We're eating meat all the time. And mostly we don't react to it. So the question is, why do we? And, and that still hasn't been totally figured out. There's clearly something in the tick saliva, some kind of co-factor. That's not only, we're not only getting the alpha gal, but it's triggering the immune, immune reaction to the alpha gal in the people who get it.

• 14:38Steven Rinella?

  And then they get it, like the tick gets it in them.

• 14:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:41Steven Rinella?

  To some degree where the body.

• 14:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:44Steven Rinella?

  Now the human body now reacts to it.

• 14:47Speaker 06

  Has immune reaction to that sugar, that foreign sugar that's in your blood.

• 14:51Steven Rinella?

  So then you go eat a burger.

• 14:53Speaker 06

  Right.

• 14:53Steven Rinella?

  You go eat a beef burger and all of a sudden your body lights up.

• 14:57Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, and the crazy thing is that most allergies are quick, right? You get bitten by, by, you get stung by a bee and you react right away, you know? But alpha gal, it can take two to six hours to manifest. And it seems to be because the alpha gal itself is bound up in lipids and fats. Or it's bound up in these connective tissues and both of them, these kind of gluey connective tissues. And both of them take a long time to digest. And so, you know, you're eating this stuff and no reaction at all. And then suddenly at three in the morning, you're starting to get terrible stomach cramps or you might get shortness of breath. Your throat's closing up. You're getting rashes or hives. And people don't make the connection.

• 15:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 06

  Right? I mean, there was a study in 2007, 17 that looked at a hundred doctors' visits of people who had alpha gal syndrome and only one in 10 doctors identified it correctly.

• 15:56Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 15:57Speaker 06

  You know, and the people in that study, the median length for, to diagnosis was seven years. So you think about people having these serious allergic reactions to the point of some of them are going into anaphylactic shock, you know? And they, and they don't know. And they go to the doctor and the doctor says, well, that might be a gluten allergy. Or I don't know, maybe you have some heart palpitations. We need to do some heart things. I talked to one guy who had three heart surgeries because they misdiagnosed alpha gals.

• 16:24Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 16:25Speaker 06

  Yeah. This is a guy in Springfield, Missouri. So that's the, that's the scary part of it. If you don't identify, you start to think, oh, you have irritable bowel syndrome. You have all, any number of things that it could be, that you could think is, is causing it.

• 16:40Steven Rinella?

  Huh. So when, what do you, what does it mean when people say? I, I got one buddy, I don't want to say his name, say his first name. His name's Evan. He got it and then he got better.

• 16:54Speaker 06

  Right.

• 16:56Steven Rinella?

  And, and again, when I first heard, I should clarify this. When I first heard about this, I thought it was like, I had this, I had this feeling. How many ever years ago was there? I had this feeling that that can't be true.

• 17:04Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah, it sounds, I mean.

• 17:07Steven Rinella?

  I, I thought it was another, and, and I don't in any way want to say there's not such a thing. Like I don't want to go down and be like, there's no such thing as gluten allergies, whatever. When I first heard it, what went off in my head is it's like a thing that people are becoming aware of. And they're self-diagnosing at a, at a higher rate than people are actually getting it.

• 17:30Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 17:31Steven Rinella?

  Cause.

• 17:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:32Steven Rinella?

  But then I've got friends.

• 17:34Speaker 06

  By the way, allergists and epidemiologists were the same way for, for like 10 years. They said, this, this is not a thing.

• 17:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 17:42Speaker 06

  You're lying.

• 17:43Steven Rinella?

  That's the feeling I had is like, I don't know what you got going on. You ate a bad burger. What do you mean you're allergic to burgers?

• 17:48Speaker 06

  Right, right, right, right, right, right.

• 17:49Steven Rinella?

  But what, so, but then my buddy who I know and know him well, you know? He went through it and I can't remember what it was. It was some, I don't know, five, six, seven years. And he said that it started to dissipate. Uh, what's that all about?

• 18:03Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, that's the, I guess the bright side of it is that your antibody levels start to drop. And sometimes three, four years even, you can go back to eating meat. You know, people have all kinds of different reactions. The, the trick is though, and here's the problem, is that the more tick bites you get, the higher antibody levels go.

• 18:23Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 18:23Speaker 06

  Right? So if you really want to have it dissipate and go away, you can't be outdoors very often. You have to be incredibly careful. You have to wear, you know, so about, about avoiding.

• 18:33Steven Rinella?

  Diet, but it's watching your activities.

• 18:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. You can't eat meat or dairy and you can't get bitten again.

• 18:39Steven Rinella?

  Huh. Explain a little bit about like, what, what's this tick's kind of groove? Like what, what is his life cycle? What is he doing with his time?

• 18:47Speaker 06

  Um, well, every sea, every spring season, they, they, they, they come out and they want a blood meal, right? They want, and, and before that they're spending most of the time in semi-hibernation, right? They're in leaf litter somewhere, not bothering anybody. But then they come out in the spring and they're looking to, to, to suck blood. And they do this even as, as larvae. And one of the, the big things that people worry about is what they call tick bombs.

• 19:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 19:12Speaker 06

  Which are these clusters of 200 tiny seed-like lone star ticks that people walk into and you look and you think you have some dirt on your pants and, or on your leg and you brush it off and you've, you've had 25 bites.

• 19:27Steven Rinella?

  Well, and those, those little larva sons of bitches.

• 19:29Speaker 06

  Each of them can bite, each of them can give you alpha gal syndrome. So.

• 19:32Steven Rinella?

  You know, you know what I've, I haven't seen that, but you know what I've gotten tangled up with that, that comes in those clusters? Have you had a chick, problem with chiggers ever?

• 19:40Speaker 06

  That's what I grew up with in Oklahoma.

• 19:41Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's right. You're from the heartland of that shit, man.

• 19:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. No, that, that's what we hate.

• 19:46Steven Rinella?

  Cause they get you like a bunch.

• 19:48Speaker 06

  Right. And they burrow under your, I mean, it's, it's an awful.

• 19:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know what's funny about those chiggers too is uh, there's so much, there's, when I first got my first bad chigger infestation. Where I was in, I think I was in Missouri one, yeah, I was in Missouri, first time I ever got it bad. And the number of remedies that were suggested to me. Bathing in bleach, putting nail polish on them, putting epoxy on them.

• 20:15Speaker 06

  Right.

• 20:15Steven Rinella?

  Rubbing motor oil into them.

• 20:17Speaker 06

  Right.

• 20:17Steven Rinella?

  And there's so much misinformation that I even went, so I, I got so bad, I was having like, I was going into, like I was having an allergic reaction to them. I was getting feverish. I mean, I was coated. And people are telling me, oh, well it laid its eggs in you and now they're living in you, right? And I, and I quickly like on my phone, I quickly learned that that's, that's not what this is.

• 20:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:41Steven Rinella?

  But I go to a med stop, I go to see a doctor. I'm like, here's the deal. I'm, I'm so covered in these chiggers. Like I need like a, a steroid. She goes, is that the thing that lays the eggs in you? I'm like, no. It doesn't lay eggs in you.

• 20:58Speaker 06

  Oh my God.

• 20:59Steven Rinella?

  But uh, anyhow, so that, so when that tick comes out and he's got those, the little guys.

• 21:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:06Steven Rinella?

  Those will bite you.

• 21:08Speaker 06

  Those will bite you.

• 21:09Steven Rinella?

  But the big one will bite you too.

• 21:10Speaker 06

  Big ones will bite you. I think basically there's three seasons in every tick, if I have it right, um, to, to, to bite you. And, and it's pretty, pretty restricted to the spring and summer.

• 21:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 21:21Speaker 06

  The thing about the Lone Star tick is it's, they're incredibly aggressive. I mean, the funny thing is talking to entomologists, you know, usually they love their, their beasties and they like to talk about the things they study. But with Lone Star, every single entomologist I talked to said, I hate that tick.

• 21:37Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 21:38Speaker 06

  I hate that thing. Like one woman said to me, Holly Gaff, she worked at Old Dominion in Virginia and she was like, they're like the bullies of the, of the insect world. They'll beat you up and take your lunch money. They just, they, they actually pursue people. You know, unlike most ticks, like the dog tick or the deer tick, uh, they'll hang around on a blade of grass and wait for you to go by. And then they'll hitch, hitch a ride and bite you. But the Lone Star will actually come down and, and follow your heat and your, and your carbon dioxide and, and track you down and crawl on.

• 22:09Steven Rinella?

  On foot?

• 22:10Speaker 06

  On foot. I mean, this guy I talked to, this entomologist in, or the public health biologist in Martha's Vineyard was saying, he'd talked to lots of people who'd said that the Lone Star ticks were coming down from the dune grasses, cross the burning sand and onto the beet blankets and be biting people as they were sunbathing. So these things are just so aggressive.

• 22:30Steven Rinella?

  They're detecting people's presence.

• 22:32Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah. And they're, and they're going after them and they're really, they're really hardy. They're, so they can handle some heat, you know? A lot of ticks will dry up too quickly to do that. But no, they're really, they're, they're problematic little animals.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  911, what's your emergency?

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Please help us. They're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets.

• 22:53Steven Rinella?

  911 Nashville returns.

• 22:56Speaker 07

  What's the homicide detective doing here?

• 22:58Speaker 03

  Three bodies on the ground.

• 22:59Steven Rinella?

  With emergencies of biblical proportions.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Oh, since swarms upon you and upon your people.

• 23:05Speaker 07

  That's one of the places to buy them off.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville.

• 23:09Steven Rinella?

  Brian Phillippe, 2911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

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• 24:14Steven Rinella?

  Explain the relationship between, because the, the, the tick that carries Lyme has the same deal where they have a tight little friendship with deer.

• 24:23Speaker 06

  Right.

• 24:23Steven Rinella?

  The deer doesn't look at it that way. They have a relationship with deer.

• 24:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, the, the Lone Star, I mean, the same biologist on Martha's Vineyard told me like a typical deer in a season can carry 500 to a thousand ticks.

• 24:38Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 24:39Speaker 06

  Now, that's probably deer tick and Lone Star, and Lone Star ticks. But, um, yeah, I mean, they're like the perfect vessel for carrying these. There's so much blood in them, they, they can't get them off. Um, and so in areas like Georgia and all across the country where they have high deer populations, they're just breeding factories for, for Lone Star ticks.

• 24:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You even see now, there's, there's always these different, depending on who you ask, there's always these different motivations to reduce deer numbers.

• 25:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:10Steven Rinella?

  In some, especially along the urban suburban interface, particularly in the eastern U.S. There's always these different motivations to lower deer numbers where a traditional one would be, um,

• 25:23Steven Rinella?

  agriculture. Okay?

• 25:25Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 25:25Steven Rinella?

  You know, just deer come out and destroy cornfields, eat alfalfa, whatever.

• 25:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 25:30Steven Rinella?

  And so agricultural interests be like, we need to suppress deer numbers.

• 25:33Speaker 06

  Right. Eating people's dranges.

• 25:35Steven Rinella?

  There's a thing that gets talked about probably more, it gets discussed probably in, in a way that's disproportionate to how impactful it is. But car insurers will now and then point out that it would be advantageous to us if deer numbers were lowered.

• 25:51Speaker 06

  Right.

• 25:52Steven Rinella?

  That's, people debate whether that's true, but I've seen like documented evidence where car insurers have advocated to lower deer numbers. Um, I've seen lately with, with wildlife managers being under some level of political pressure to lower deer numbers because of ticks.

• 26:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:13Steven Rinella?

  Like, like that's entered the conversation.

• 26:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel like, I mean, I started working for science magazines almost 40 years ago and, and even then, at the very beginning, there were this debate about what do we do about deer populations? My first magazine was an environmental magazine. And the question I think was Fire Island in New York.

• 26:34Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, I've been there.

• 26:34Speaker 06

  And they were saying, what are we going to do with the deer? And, and back then the big fight was between, really in an interesting way, between ecologists who are saying, these deer are disastrous for the ecosystem. They're eating all the native plants. They're like just, you know, changing the whole environment. And animal rights activists, you know, and people who just had, who just loved animals, you know, not necessarily PETA people, but just people who didn't want to see these beautiful animals killed.

• 26:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 06

  And it's, and it's amazing to me that it's, that 40 years later, it's still the same debate because it felt like it was pretty clear 40 years ago that we have too many deer, that they're bad for the environment and that there's an easy solution to this, which is, you know, relaxing hunting laws in some cases. There's also some ways of, you know, there's, there's vaccines and other things you can do. But it's, but it's felt like that's been a kind of a, a natural ecologically sound response.

• 27:26Steven Rinella?

  You've had for, for many decades, for many different reasons, pointing out that some of these areas have too many deer. And then you just kind of tack on whatever the like.

• 27:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, now that.

• 27:34Steven Rinella?

  Issue de jour.

• 27:35Speaker 06

  Right, right, right, right.

• 27:36Steven Rinella?

  Under this problem.

• 27:37Speaker 06

  Though I do think that ticks might be the thing that finally does it. I mean, I mean, talking to these folks in, in Missouri, but also in, in Martha's Vineyard, they're, you know, they were for a long time against killing these deer. And now they're just launching this huge killing campaign on that island. And I think it's, the people finally said, look, we, we can't live with this kind of threat of disease.

• 27:58Steven Rinella?

  Direct, it's like.

• 28:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:00Steven Rinella?

  It's direct human health.

• 28:02Speaker 06

  Right.

• 28:02Steven Rinella?

  Cause, cause people can look at these, people could look at these ideas of sort of like long-term negative impact on native plant species. And they, they just kind of tune out.

• 28:11Speaker 06

  Right.

• 28:11Steven Rinella?

  But when you're paranoid to have your kid out in your yard, playing on the grass, it just hits people different.

• 28:17Speaker 06

  Well, the funny thing is it even hits people different when it's Lyme disease. And they say, well, you may get, you may have to take an antibiotic or you might get some, you know, fatigue syndrome. And, and when you say, you're not going to be able, able to eat meat anymore or drink milk anymore, somehow that.

• 28:32Steven Rinella?

  That hits home.

• 28:33Speaker 06

  Freaks people out. Yeah.

• 28:35Steven Rinella?

  I want to, I, I do, I want to spend more time on that tick life history. Well, let's do that first. I eventually want to ask you about, a little bit about Lyme, because I'm assuming you've read a lot about Lyme in your work and talked a lot about Lyme. But, um, so this tick, like he, he, he hatches out and they got these little bombs, these little clusters. And eventually they mature and then they, they latch onto a deer.

• 28:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:57Steven Rinella?

  Why do they ever want to leave the deer? Or don't they?

• 29:00Speaker 06

  Oh, that's interesting. I mean, and not just deer. I mean, essentially they're, they're pretty indiscriminate.

• 29:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 29:06Speaker 06

  Omnivorous. I mean, in terms of they, they want blood, but they'll, a lot of, um, you get white-footed mice, you get short-tailed shrews, you get opossums, raccoons. I mean, you know, people in Georgia, wildlife biologists I talked to said, look, anything that has, that moves and has blood is, is fair game.

• 29:23Steven Rinella?

  Got it. So that tick, he's not drawn to deer-ness.

• 29:27Speaker 06

  No, no, no, no.

• 29:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So that part of his life stage, if he gets on your dog, a possum, a person, he, that, that's all great by him.

• 29:37Speaker 06

  Absolutely. And that's one of the reasons when they talk about how do you get rid of these things? You can't get rid of them, right? But what you could do is drop the population dramatically. And that's where deer come in. Cause deer are both so overpopulated and such incredible hosts, right? There's just, they're just so large and could carry so many ticks. Like I said, 500 to a thousand in a season. You know, a mouse, you have four or five, maybe four or five ticks on them. But a deer, you have a hundred times that number. So.

• 30:05Steven Rinella?

  Got it. You know, I always thought about, in reading about that, how they kind of hang out, wait for something to pass by.

• 30:13Steven Rinella?

  You wonder if um if the if finding that host and latching on to something is successful is is is essential to reproductive success.

• 30:25Speaker 06

  Absolutely. And then they'll get their blood meal and then they'll drop off.

• 30:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but you imagine like the failure rate.

• 30:31Speaker 06

  Right.

• 30:32Steven Rinella?

  The failure rate's gotta be enormous. I mean, for everyone that that happens to have a thing brush against it and it gets on it.

• 30:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:40Steven Rinella?

  He's got to have 99 siblings.

• 30:42Speaker 06

  Right.

• 30:43Steven Rinella?

  Who never were like, who never were in the right spot.

• 30:47Speaker 06

  I mean, dragging, we were dragging these these sheets through these meadows on Martha's Vineyard. And, you know, within an hour and a half, we had 81 ticks on it, you know, and it's a little stretch that we were doing.

• 30:58Steven Rinella?

  Explain that to me?

• 31:00Speaker 06

  It's about, he goes tick dragging, basically. So he just has a big pole with a piece of white cotton on it, like a meter by meter square. And he just.

• 31:08Steven Rinella?

  But it's not warm.

• 31:10Speaker 06

  It's not, no, but the it just the the the ticks just latch on, you know, they're just stretching out for something and it's moving and they just get caught. And so suddenly, and you pull it up and it just crawling all over the the sheet. And, you know, and he's catching 81 in an hour and in a in a hundred square feet, 100 square meters.

• 31:28Steven Rinella?

  Meaning if you went for an hour stroll.

• 31:30Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. You're you're surrounded by ticks. And and of course, there are trillions across the planet. So it's like, you know, there's plenty of food for them.

• 31:40Steven Rinella?

  Now, let me get to the my lime question. I was deep into the whole lime world 13 years ago. Okay. I always talk, it was a very, it was like a formative experience for me, man. Like my boy got, he got, he had Bell's palsy, he was terrible. I was sick, like sick, sick, and got better. And while that was going on, and while I was very like into sort of like the culture of Lyme, Lyme disease, there was this raging debate. And I even got to where I couldn't engage in it, you know, of like, what do they call it? The sort of perpetual Lyme or.

• 32:18Speaker 06

  Long lime or whatever. Yeah.

• 32:20Steven Rinella?

  That like untreatable or long haul lime or I can't remember what it's called now.

• 32:25Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 32:26Steven Rinella?

  But this idea that there were people out there that that had it, knew they had it, but was untreatable.

• 32:35Speaker 06

  Right.

• 32:35Steven Rinella?

  And they just lived with it.

• 32:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:37Steven Rinella?

  But then people at that time, people in the medical establishment that I encountered, infectious disease people, CDC people, whatever, they were dismissive of this idea.

• 32:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:48Steven Rinella?

  They're dismissive of that. There's like an untreatable lime. Um, when I was treated, I did the orals, I did the intravenous.

• 32:58Speaker 06

  Right.

• 32:58Steven Rinella?

  I got sick in June, I got better in November, after doing intravenous. And then, do you know, though, because you still live in the area in the the hotbed tick area?

• 33:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 33:10Steven Rinella?

  Is there still this idea that that there that there's a strain of Lyme or there's people that have Lyme that cannot be cured, even with intravenous antibiotics? Like, there's nothing that can be done and they're gonna live the whole life with Lyme?

• 33:22Speaker 06

  Right. I think it's a little bit like like long COVID. I think it's something that's kind of half accepted, but we haven't pinned down exactly if it, how long it lasts, if it can really last forever. I mean, I've always heard that if you really go all out with the full rounds of multiple antibiotics, you can even get long term Lyme out. But, you know, I was just talking this morning to my my brother in law, who's a doctor, and he was saying, yeah, but you can get neurological damage. There's things that can happen from not treating Lyme that will stick with you. I do think it's, that's the scary thing about Lyme is it's it's as opposed to alpha gal is, you know, it's curable, but then often people don't know to cure it. And then by the time they cure it, they've already had

• 34:07Speaker 06

  some deleterious effects. So it's it's it's a it's a different kind of problem.

• 34:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know, when you, if you go way back in time, you'd be like, there's certain species like opossums, raccoons, was just throughout the last couple centuries. These things have poured north and poured west.

• 34:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 34:30Steven Rinella?

  And it's some

• 34:35Steven Rinella?

  there's definitely a climate component to it. There's a component to that these things tend to be animals that that do well around people. Right?

• 34:45Speaker 06

  Right.

• 34:46Steven Rinella?

  That that human activity opens up range conditions or opens up habitat conditions. So so in the absence of like, like if Europeans have never come to the New World and altered everything the way we altered them, raccoons and possums might still have gone north and west, but they might not have gone north and west as much as they've gone north and west.

• 35:11Speaker 06

  Right.

• 35:11Steven Rinella?

  Meaning there's all these factors that lead to it, like probably mild, like milder winters, probably.

• 35:17Speaker 06

  They probably have more predators.

• 35:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like predator reductions.

• 35:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:22Steven Rinella?

  Probably agriculture, probably like all these things going into it. Suburban homes and trash practices and leaving dog bowls out on your porch. And you get this whole soup of things.

• 35:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 35:35Steven Rinella?

  And it's just undeniable that these animals have had a great, very successful run.

• 35:42Speaker 06

  Right.

• 35:43Steven Rinella?

  And have dramatically expanded their range.

• 35:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 35:46Steven Rinella?

  When when we keep, when we hear about that these ticks are moving around,

• 35:52Steven Rinella?

  why now?

• 35:54Speaker 06

  I mean, it's, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's and it's the same combination of factors, right? It's it's not just climate change. Certainly, climate change, I think, has allowed ticks to move north. And in some cases, west, when if if it happens to have made some area more humid, you know, where they can handle better. But the bigger thing, I think, is land use. If you look at the east, you know, eastern United States, it's been reforested dramatically in the last 50 years, you know. And not just that, you've you've had people do that. At the same time, you have suburbanization, you have these subdevelopments out in out in the woods, you have this kind of sense of what used to be, you know, inner city became suburb. And now you have kind of a kind of sprawl that's sending its tendrils

• 36:38Speaker 06

  out and deeper into the forest. You get all these edge habitats that deer love, that all the animals you're talking about love, and that ticks then can ride on those hosts and proliferate. So we're we've kind of created the perfect patchy, woody, brushy tick habitat over the years, along a lot of the eastern United States.

• 37:01Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you know, when I when I first heard Lone Star Tick, all the whatever the hell years ago, however long ago, I know that we were doing this show, like this podcast existed at the time I first heard of the Lone Star Tick. Well, in fact, let me ask you, when would I probably first heard the word Lone Star Tick? Do you have to guess?

• 37:19Speaker 06

  I mean, if you're from the South, it's been the dominant tick for a long time, like 90% of tick bites are from Lone Star Ticks. They've been used to the Lone Star Tick.

• 37:26Steven Rinella?

  For more than a decade.

• 37:27Speaker 06

  For, yeah, for decades.

• 37:28Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so people were talking about Lone Star Ticks in the South a long time.

• 37:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, for them, it was just, but you know, the interesting thing is, like, there was a study done, where we get our our alpha gal statistics is based on the study of blood samples from military recruits, 3,000 of them all over the country. They were taken between 2001, 2007. And they looked at the alpha gal antibodies in those blood samples.

• 37:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 37:54Speaker 06

  And then they kind of showed where they were most prevalent, based on where the recruits came from.

• 37:59Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's fascinating, man.

• 38:00Speaker 06

  And it's and it's amazing, if you look at the epicenter, which is really like southeastern Oklahoma, up through northeastern, northwestern Arkansas into south central Missouri, it's like 47% of those recruits had alpha gal antibodies.

• 38:15Steven Rinella?

  What?

• 38:16Speaker 06

  47%. And that was, you know, that was 15, that was almost 20 years ago.

• 38:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so I was late to the party on this one.

• 38:22Speaker 06

  You're like, I mean, we all were. But in the South, the interesting thing is, in the southeast, where they were endemic, you know, the Lone Star Ticks, much more so than, I mean, Arkansas, southern Arkansas, Oklahoma, they so that they would have had it. But, you know, in places like Martha's Vineyard, the Hamptons, they had just as high rates. And they didn't have endemic Lone Star Ticks. But in the southeast, it was only 10% of the recruits, on average, had alpha gal. So something, it it makes you think that people who grew up with this, or where it's been for decades or centuries even, there's probably some natural immunity built in, you would think. Yeah.

• 39:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that what that was leading me to, and it doesn't really matter. But when I heard it, I thought it meant that it was a tick that lived in Texas.

• 39:11Speaker 06

  Oh, right, right, right.

• 39:13Steven Rinella?

  I didn't know. That's just like, that clicked. And then I realized, oh, no, because it's got like a lone star.

• 39:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:18Steven Rinella?

  It's got a star on it.

• 39:19Speaker 06

  Right, right, right, right.

• 39:20Steven Rinella?

  I thought it was like some Texas tick. And oh, so it's just funny to think back of like, when you the first heard it, what clicked in my head is like, there's this thing in Texas, and I don't really believe.

• 39:30Speaker 06

  No, no, no, that was my first thought, too. And it's and it's just that white dot on the on the back. That's the only thing.

• 39:35Steven Rinella?

  So so do you know how with Lyme?

• 39:40Steven Rinella?

  There's a question of where it ever came from. Like, you know, there's an honest debate about where it came from. There's a wildlife disease you probably have heard of, chronic wasting disease, right?

• 39:48Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 39:48Steven Rinella?

  So chronic wasting disease was identified, I can't remember if it was 68 or 72, or it was identified in Colorado. What's not known is where did it come from? Was that just when we identified it? Did they, what, you know, no one thinks that they identified the first case?

• 40:09Speaker 06

  Right.

• 40:10Steven Rinella?

  But then it seems to be in many more places than it used to be. But prior to that, they weren't looking for it. So there's this whole thing of like, what is it? Where did it come from? Was it always here? And we just found out about something that's always been here? Or did it somehow emerge? And we freakishly found it right when it emerged? Like, you know, we don't know. Maybe someday we will know as, as, as sort of the, the genetic things and, you know, improve, maybe we'll get better clarity into it. But with alpha gal syndrome, since it's a thing that's innately in the tick, why weren't dudes, why, when you're reading about the Civil War, okay, and they're, they're dealing with malaria,

• 40:49Steven Rinella?

  why weren't people back then saying, oh, did you hear, um, you know, little Johnny down the road has developed a mysterious meat allergy and can't eat meat anymore? Why wasn't that a conversation?

• 41:03Speaker 06

  You know, I ask that question of every epidemiologist, allergist I talk to, and they all said, at some level, it's a mystery. I mean, you can explain it away to some degree with the fact that it's late onset, and so people just didn't notice it, and they misdiagnosed it.

• 41:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 41:20Speaker 06

  You could say it's just, you know, people didn't, didn't take it seriously. Somehow meat allergy didn't. But, but the truth is that it didn't just suddenly appear here. It appeared in South Africa. There's huge cases in South Africa. There's a bunch of stuff in Peru. There's people in, in, in the Black Forest in Germany, you're starting to get alpha gal. In all these places, no one noticed it, and it emerged around the same time.

• 41:44Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 41:44Speaker 06

  So, yeah, I mean, it, it started to get identified between 1997 and 2007. You know, the first woman who really is woman Cheryl Van, Van Nunnan, sorry Cheryl, Cheryl Van Nunnan in Australia.

• 42:00Steven Rinella?

  She accepts your apology.

• 42:01Speaker 06

  Yeah. She was the first person who, who really noticed the pattern in Australia. And she had local people on the North Coast of Sydney who were getting, and where they have these crazy paralysis tics.

• 42:13Steven Rinella?

  This is when?

• 42:13Speaker 06

  This was, she had her first cases, I think, in the late 80s, and then she published a poster in 2003 and presented it at a conference in 2007.

• 42:25Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 42:26Speaker 06

  And she didn't know why it was causing it, but she knew that the tick bite was causing a meat allergy. And in Australia, there's this crazy tick called the paralysis tick, which can kill small children. I mean, it's, it has this neurotoxin, and that's what spreads.

• 42:40Steven Rinella?

  I never heard that one.

• 42:41Speaker 06

  It's, it's, it's a scary, and it, and it's the one that spreads alpha gal. So she first noticed it, but then pretty soon, you had German researchers, you had, you know, people in, in Southeast, even Korea. I mean, it's really all over the globe.

• 42:56Steven Rinella?

  You know, I want to hit you with a thing that, I need to make a note to myself, because I need to ask you about a, I don't want to call it a conspiracy theory, a theory. You know what I'm going with this?

• 43:05Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 43:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay, we'll get to it. Let me hit you with something, though, a way I think about this kind of thing. Like, why weren't dudes a long time ago developing meat allergies? So my little boy, my younger boy, developed this condition called osteochondritis dicans. They call OCD. Well, what's funny is, he's around on, when he was going through this, he's around on crutches. Like, I remember getting on a plane with him, the pilot is greeting people, and he's like, what happened to you? My boy says, I have OCD. So I had to follow behind him, being like, it's his whole, it was osteochondritis dicans.

• 43:46Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 43:47Steven Rinella?

  It seemed, what it is, is little bits of the cartilage, little bits of the cartilage in your joint die and fall off.

• 43:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 43:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay, he got, weirdly, well, not weirdly. It's weird to get it in one leg. It's, it's, it's weirder, but not twice as weird to get it in two legs.

• 44:03Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 44:05Steven Rinella?

  Apologies to any people that specialize this, and I'm screwing parts of this up. But there is a genetic predisposition aspect to it, and there's also a, a use aspect to it. So he likes soccer and basketball and all that kind of stuff. So that probably complicates. And he, he has this thing happen. We dismissed him, because he'd be like, something's wrong with my knee.

• 44:26Speaker 06

  Right.

• 44:27Steven Rinella?

  My knee hurts all the time. Um, he's always talking about his knees, or he's laying on the floor being, my leg won't work. Why, what do you mean, your leg won't work? And he'd be like, oh, there it goes. Okay. Not hurting, but just observing. Just, I'm just like, what are you talking about?

• 44:40Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 44:41Steven Rinella?

  You get a max ray, doesn't do any good, because the x-ray doesn't show.

• 44:44Speaker 06

  Right.

• 44:45Steven Rinella?

  Doesn't reveal this. You got to do an MRI to find out that you have it. So Lumbold, he has, he gets these couple surgeries. My wife brings him to a specialist, and he's all fine now.

• 44:55Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 44:56Steven Rinella?

  But, but check this out. My mom's dad, okay, Grandpa Glenn, just had bad knees. Do you know what I mean?

• 45:04Speaker 06

  Right, right, right.

• 45:05Steven Rinella?

  It was a fact of Grandpa Glenn's life. It didn't, no one, it was this, you know Grandpa Glenn, he's always had bad knees.

• 45:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:13Steven Rinella?

  And I don't have any reason to think, but I'm like, I wonder if that dude.

• 45:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:17Steven Rinella?

  Just had this thing that, that our little boy has going on, but it was just that he has bad knees.

• 45:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right.

• 45:24Steven Rinella?

  No one's gonna do anything about it. They're not gonna MRI Grandpa Glenn, you know, 70 years ago. And it was just like, it was just the deal. You know, his knees hurt all the time.

• 45:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, that was a question I asked. Is it, could it be that we just have always had this, and we used to ignore it? And everybody said, no.

• 45:40Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 45:41Speaker 06

  It's just, there's just, it's too severe, and it's too, and it's been this too big a surge, you know? I think, the other thing you can say that speaks to what you're talking about, though, is that, you know, there's been an allergy epidemic in this country in the last 50 years. I mean, food allergies have doubled and doubled again, right? And some of it is because allergists gave us the wrong advice, you know, like, stay away from allergenic foods.

• 46:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like, don't give your kids honey and shit like that.

• 46:06Speaker 06

  Or peanuts and all that kind of stuff. So we're absolutely more prone to allergies than we used to be. So that's probably a big part of this. And there are all kinds of theories, is that we're, you know, hygiene, the hygiene hypothesis, that we're living too cleanly, we're not developing, you know, we're like, not allowing, developing antibodies when we're young enough, or our, our gut biome isn't good enough to fend off these things.

• 46:28Steven Rinella?

  Kids aren't eating enough dirt, yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, all those things. There's this idea that-

• 46:30Steven Rinella?

  They're not licking enough rocks at the park.

• 46:31Speaker 06

  Right, right, right. There's this one epithelial barrier hypothesis, which says that, that, that the chemicals we use, and the, and that are in the air are making, are kind of making us more porous to allergens, you know? They're like weakening the things that protect us in our skin and in our lungs. And so where it's more easy for allergens to get into our bodies. So there's all kinds of hypotheses, but we do know.

• 46:56Steven Rinella?

  Can I hit you with some more?

• 46:57Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 46:58Steven Rinella?

  I've talked to people about this. And, like, people in the know, in the know-ish, who are like, like, I don't know. What, we, I'll just, okay. A couple of years ago, we had, a couple of years ago, when he was, when he was running for president, we had RFK Jr. on. He was talking about allergens and things, and he was talking about when these allergens exploded, and these different areas where he's, he's like, we don't, I don't know. When people look at the timeline, like, what are big shifts that happened societally, right? And, and he wasn't pointing to anyone, but he's like, you go and be like, well, what, what things really happened in humanity? And you'd be, the explosion of corn syrup,

• 47:42Steven Rinella?

  cellular and cellular networks. All these are things, like, like, medical practices, just kind of things you're talking about, like, like, what could have, what sort of thing could have happened?

• 47:53Speaker 06

  Right.

• 47:53Steven Rinella?

  It would be in my lifetime, where things just got different. And out of it came a lot of, where we see, like, why did childhood obesity do whatever? Why is autism done, whatever? Why are the allergy rates done, whatever? And, um, is there something we missed?

• 48:09Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, I talked to this guy, Jeff Wilson, at the University of Virginia. He's done a lot of really good alpha gal research. And, and one thing he talks about is, look, tick bites of all kinds just boost antibody levels across the board, right? And, and the interesting thing is that you can have really high antibody levels and not have any allergies, and weird things can trigger it, like, stress can trigger it.

• 48:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 48:35Speaker 06

  You can get this called, called chronic ucaritis or something. I got the name wrong, but it works where you have these sudden flare ups of, of hives or rashes, you know? And you've had this kind of baseline of antibodies in your blood the whole time, and something is triggering it. You know, it could be exercise, it can be alcohol, though we know those things can trigger allergic reactions faster.

• 48:59Steven Rinella?

  Exercise?

• 48:59Speaker 06

  Exercise and alcohol. You know, like, in one German study for alpha gal, they, they know that people had alpha gal antibodies, and they wanted to feed them meat to see if it would trigger it. But they weren't getting a good enough reaction, so they gave them some beer to drink, and, and put them on treadmills, and then they got a higher reaction.

• 49:20Steven Rinella?

  Man, my buddy that I was talking about, big exercise guy, big beer guy.

• 49:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. No, those two things together, you're more likely to get triggered. So, you know, so he was saying, you know, we can't necessarily, like, it's not a, a pure cause and effect. You know, sometimes we have all the working materials, but it doesn't happen unless some other outside factor comes in.

• 50:31Speaker 02

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• 51:13Steven Rinella?

  I hesitated to go there, but let's go there on this area. So I'm going to treat this, I'm going to treat this with all due respect.

• 51:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I'm not going to lead the witness. I'm not going to do an eye roll. It is, it has been thrown out there.

• 51:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:28Steven Rinella?

  Even by people within my social circle. It has been thrown out there where what they look at is they say, how did, why did these big?

• 51:38Steven Rinella?

  The emergence of these big VC backed meat alternative. Companies beyond meat, whatever, all that shit, you know, fake burgers.

• 51:48Speaker 06

  Right, right, right.

• 51:49Steven Rinella?

  The emergence of all these like high power VC backed.

• 51:54Steven Rinella?

  Meatless products coincided with the explosion in Alpha Gal.

• 52:01Speaker 06

  Right.

• 52:01Steven Rinella?

  And they're like, they're trying to create customers in the dirtiest.

• 52:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, right, right.

• 52:08Steven Rinella?

  Dirtiest way possible. Did you run into this? Did you have people share this idea with you?

• 52:13Speaker 06

  Oh, absolutely. And in fact, when I was.

• 52:15Steven Rinella?

  Like, how was it explained to you?

• 52:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, Bill Gates was a bad guy in that story, right? It was like, he's invested, I think, in, in, in alternatives to meat. And he, the Gates Foundation has, has paid for or funded genetically engineering ticks. And genetically engineering vaccines for cattle with, you know, to fend off ticks. And so there was this idea that, well, maybe something got out of the lab, you know? The problem is, one, you know, the Gates Foundation didn't work with Lone Stars. But two, the timelines don't match up.

• 52:52Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 52:53Speaker 06

  Right, like, like, we started to see Alpha Gal. I mean, it's been around, but we know it's been around since at least the 90s, you know, that people have been getting it.

• 53:01Steven Rinella?

  And no one was making those fake burgers.

• 53:02Speaker 06

  And no one was making those fake burgers. And we started to get the real explosion before the, the fake burger industry came around.

• 53:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What struck me is it struck me as an imprecise. Expensive, extremely risky.

• 53:18Speaker 06

  Right.

• 53:19Steven Rinella?

  Marketing.

• 53:20Speaker 06

  Right.

• 53:20Steven Rinella?

  Strategy.

• 53:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:22Steven Rinella?

  Like, like really risky.

• 53:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:25Steven Rinella?

  Like you thought, like when Coke changed their recipe. They made new Coke.

• 53:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:30Steven Rinella?

  Right? You thought that was called its consumer backlash. Imagine when the word gets out, you've created disease, a disease and spread it all around the country.

• 53:41Speaker 06

  No, no, no.

• 53:42Steven Rinella?

  That's gonna be hard on your soy burger.

• 53:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:45Steven Rinella?

  Business.

• 53:45Speaker 06

  No, I have to say, like, to me, I don't think it, it holds water either, but I think the Lyme disease conspiracy theory is much more convincing.

• 53:53Steven Rinella?

  Hit me with that one.

• 53:54Speaker 06

  Well, that was, the idea was.

• 53:55Steven Rinella?

  I wanted to ask you about this.

• 53:57Speaker 06

  Because Willie Bergdorfer, the guy that, the, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease called Borrelia burgdorphy. And that is named after Willie Bergdorfer, discovered in 1981, I think. And he, you know, he worked for the military doing, you know.

• 54:15Speaker 06

  What do you call it? Bioengineering ticks and infecting.

• 54:19Steven Rinella?

  Like bio weaponry or something.

• 54:20Speaker 06

  Bio weaponry. There was an idea that you could airdrop infected ticks onto enemy populations. And they actually looked at, you know, infecting ticks and using them as a weapon, you know? So that work was actually done.

• 54:33Steven Rinella?

  I'm not, I'm not questioning that it's true, but what does that then do for when your forces are occupying that area?

• 54:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:39Steven Rinella?

  It is, it's like, it's, some of that stuff is insane.

• 54:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:44Steven Rinella?

  But I'm not taking, I mean, it's serious. Like, it's a real.

• 54:46Speaker 06

  No, it's true. It's like.

• 54:48Steven Rinella?

  How do they not go, but hold on a minute? Cause after we win, we're going to kind of need to go there.

• 54:52Speaker 06

  Right. Well, and then when you formulate.

• 54:54Steven Rinella?

  How are our guys?

• 54:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it makes.

• 54:58Steven Rinella?

  It's like insanity.

• 54:59Speaker 06

  No, no, no, it makes no, I mean, any, you know, and, and so that narrative made a certain kind of cracked logic, you know?

• 55:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Speaker 06

  But the truth is that, again, that, the idea was there that they had genetically engineered the, the bacterium that, that causes Lyme disease. But the truth is, you know, Lyme disease predated that discovery and, and predated his work. And, and the earliest examples of that bacterium we find are in museum collections of mice from 1894.

• 55:27Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 55:28Speaker 06

  That already had that bacterium. So it's.

• 55:29Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you're kidding me? I didn't know that.

• 55:30Speaker 06

  It was a more than a century before this thing came around, you know? So it's, again, it doesn't hold water, but it's, it's a, you can see why people would be into it on the internet. It sounds like that kind of logic.

• 55:41Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. It's like, um, we used to joke where we'd talk about friends of ours, you know, we'd be sitting around talking about stuff like this. And we'd have friends where we felt that most of the information that they traffic in would be information you'd get if you typed into Google. The true, if you prefaced your searches with the truth about.

• 56:04Steven Rinella?

  If you always said, the truth about blank, it'd be like that information.

• 56:07Speaker 06

  Right, right. Well, the problem is it's always most convincing and effective when it's 80% right.

• 56:13Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 56:13Speaker 06

  When the science behind is actually kind of true, they're just missing some crucial piece of it that, that invalidates the whole thing.

• 56:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Are they able to go in that? I didn't know that about like finding those old, like mice and museum collections and stuff. Is there a, is there a marker where you could go in and you could find, um, I don't know, man, like, like you go back and find. In, in, in, in historic Lone Star tick country. That you could take some remains from someone.

• 56:46Speaker 06

  And look for, and look for Alpha Gal in there.

• 56:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I don't know, maybe, maybe out of the scouter, without soft tissue.

• 56:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 56:52Steven Rinella?

  You know what I mean? And go and, and sort of get some idea, but maybe you can't do that.

• 56:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't know. That'd be interesting forensic work. I, I mean, the guy that did that work with the, with the, with Lyme disease is Professor Telford at Tufts. And I don't, but I don't know if they've looked into, into ancient Alpha Gal yet, but.

• 57:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What, when you were working on this, what other, are there other, you know, we talked so much about Lyme, we talk about Alpha Gal. When you looked at this, are there other tick born pathogens that, that we're going to be hearing about like in 10 years? That they're just talking about now, like what's on the horizon?

• 57:25Speaker 06

  Well, the, the big thing that a lot of the veterinarians and, and livestock folks were talking about was screw arm, certainly. But also the Asian longhorn tick.

• 57:36Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 57:36Speaker 06

  Carries a deadly disease. I forget the name of it, but it's, but it's starting to spread and it's in, I think, 24 states now.

• 57:43Steven Rinella?

  Well, that's not even a tick from this continent.

• 57:45Speaker 06

  No, no, no. It, it's, I think it was first identified in, in New Jersey about 20 years ago or 15 years ago. And it's already spreading all across the country. So that's, that's a thing people are really worried about.

• 57:58Speaker 06

  You know, the interesting thing is like, if you look at the statistics for the number of people catching these things, you know, babesiosis is, can kill you. Ehrlichiosis can kill you.

• 58:07Steven Rinella?

  What are those two? I'm not familiar.

• 58:08Speaker 06

  I think babesiosis is a, I'm like, I want to, I don't want to get this wrong. I think that's a parasite born one, but I'm not sure. But it's, it causes terrible chills and it can, um, but those are such small percentages compared to Lyme and Alpha Gal. I mean, Lyme is 10 times as, as prevalent as they are. And Alpha Gal, I mean, the most recent tracking data from Virginia this year.

• 58:33Speaker 06

  The number of people who are reporting Alpha Gal, um, the blood tests that are, that are reporting Alpha Gal positive is 10 times as high as of people with Lyme disease. So it's really spreading at a huge rate. So it's a different scale that we're talking about with those two diseases.

• 58:48Steven Rinella?

  Are they, are they closing in on any, um, are they closing in on any treatment? Like, if it's like, if it's some like allergen, you know, I don't know, I don't know for this thing about any of this. I just wouldn't be surprised to hear that someone's like, oh, you know, we've come up with some, I don't know, treatment.

• 59:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 59:06Steven Rinella?

  That makes it that your body doesn't trip out about Alpha Gal anymore.

• 59:09Speaker 06

  Well, there are three or four things. One is what you talked about, we just go off meat and dairy and it gradually drops. Another one is, um, there's a, there's a, a drug called Zolaire, X O L A I R. That was approved for asthma originally. And it's since been approved for food allergies in a broad way. And it's been pretty effective. I mean, it's expensive, but your insurance can pay for it. But people who have had an anaphylactic shock from, who are really in danger of Alpha Gal reactions. Often get prescribed this. This, this professor, Scott Commons at the University of North Carolina that I spoke to, he's really one of the guys who was one of the earliest discoverers and has really spearheaded. He's, he prescribes out a lot to people.

• 59:54Speaker 06

  And it, and people have found, you're not really supposed to take it regularly. It's supposed to be, but, and, but it seems to be safe and people have found they can really eat meat on it in some cases.

• 1:00:04Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:00:04Speaker 06

  So it's, it's, that's, that's one possibility. Commons is looking at, at a potential drug that might attack, you know, he, he has some, some good leads for, for drug development.

• 1:00:17Steven Rinella?

  Tell me who that is.

• 1:00:18Speaker 06

  Scott Commons is the guy at the University of North Carolina. And then I've, I know there's some work being done in, I think, University of Arizona on, on, on vaccines that, that, that could maybe, maybe the idea is there's some common denominator of all these tick-borne illnesses, something, some cofactor that's making people react. And if we can somehow neutralize that, you know, maybe we can prevent,

• 1:00:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:42Speaker 06

  we can prevent some of these diseases. So there's lots of ways, things people are looking at. The other thing that's non-pharmaceutical, that a lot of people told me is effective, is what's called auricular acupuncture, auricular, A U R I C U L A R. And that means around the ear. And it's when, you know, and it sounds woo-woo, but it's-

• 1:01:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I've already dismissed it, but tell me anyway.

• 1:01:07Speaker 06

  You know, the thing about acupuncture is that it's actually one of those alternative medicines that has, they've had double-blind, they've had trials that have shown its effectiveness. And when I talked to Commons about it, he said, look, I'm an allergist, this is not my thing. But in some ways, it makes a lot of sense to me.

• 1:01:24Steven Rinella?

  Tell me.

• 1:01:24Speaker 06

  Because the vagus nerves, nerve goes up there around your ear and it goes down into your gut.

• 1:01:30Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:01:31Speaker 06

  And, and the mastals that are reacting to AlphaGal, they're down in your gut. And so if you have something that you can somehow modulate the reaction of those nerves to that, to that allergen, that could explain a lot. I mean, he was telling me, look, my son is allergic to walnuts. If he eats a walnut, within seconds, he's got a reaction.

• 1:01:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:01:53Speaker 06

  He said, nothing else in the body moves that fast, except for nerves. That has to have a neural connection, you know?

• 1:02:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I got you. Yeah, it's not like going through your digestive tract and like it's absorbed out of your colon or something.

• 1:02:06Speaker 06

  Signals are shooting instantly. So he said-

• 1:02:08Steven Rinella?

  It's faster than booze.

• 1:02:10Speaker 06

  Right, right. It makes sense to me that that, there will be something that's modulating your nerve response.

• 1:02:15Steven Rinella?

  That's an interesting point, man.

• 1:02:16Speaker 06

  That's doing it. And, and I talked to a few people who'd had, you know, that kind of treatment or given it to their children and it had good effects. You know, that it actually were able to eat meat again, so.

• 1:02:25Steven Rinella?

  I'll tell you what my, like, I don't want to get it, but I've thought about it. And I thought like, if I got it,

• 1:02:35Steven Rinella?

  I would hunt turkeys and fish like a madman. It would be a real, like, I wouldn't really change my general way of going about life. I would just really shift. Do you know what I mean? I would use it, I would just be like, okay, all the energy I normally spend and getting deer meat and all that.

• 1:02:51Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:02:52Steven Rinella?

  I was gonna get turkeys and I'm gonna fish.

• 1:02:55Speaker 06

  Right, right, right.

• 1:02:55Steven Rinella?

  And I kind of, I used to live in, for the first couple of years, I lived in this fear of it.

• 1:02:59Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:03:00Steven Rinella?

  Cause I'm like, oh, it'd be like so ironic, like, I got it, you know?

• 1:03:03Speaker 06

  Um, here's the problem with that.

• 1:03:06Steven Rinella?

  Tell me.

• 1:03:08Speaker 06

  It's not just, you're not totally protected, right? Cause one, you're still getting tick bites probably, right? So your, your sensitivity might still go higher. And, and if your sensitivity goes higher, even if you're eating fish and, and birds, right? Suddenly, you might become sensitive to things like the gelatin capsules around ibuprofen, which is made with collagen from beef, or, you know, the lanolin in a, in a skin cream, or, or the, or the, the lactase in lactate products and toothpaste. You get-

• 1:03:41Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really? They get that bad?

• 1:03:43Speaker 06

  People get it. And then, and then the worst ones are you go in to get surgery and they give you heparin, which is a, a blood thinner, and it's made with, with, with animal products. Or you get insulin, or you get antivenin if you get bitten by a snake. It's made with, I think, horse's blood, you know? Just, it's kind of, if you get sensitive enough, if you're out there hunting your-

• 1:04:05Steven Rinella?

  Well, turkeys, like, the, like, yeah.

• 1:04:09Speaker 06

  They can, turkeys can carry ticks too, right?

• 1:04:10Steven Rinella?

  Well, turkey hunting is the most tick, is the most tick-bitten thing you could do on the planet.

• 1:04:15Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:04:15Steven Rinella?

  I mean, you're doing everything a tick wants you to do.

• 1:04:17Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:04:17Steven Rinella?

  Crawling into the grass and just sitting there for a long time.

• 1:04:21Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah, you're where the ticks want to be. Yeah.

• 1:04:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, it's funny you mention that about all the other stuff that has animal protein in it. We, we got a, we got a dear friend, her daughter, her daughter's vegetarian, you know? She's over at my house eating the marshmallow. We were camping. And I said, I said, I understand you're vegetarian, but you know, that marshmallow's got,

• 1:04:44Steven Rinella?

  uh, what do they call it? What's the stuff in there?

• 1:04:47Speaker 06

  Gelatin.

• 1:04:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48Steven Rinella?

  So that marshmallow's got animal gelatin in it. So what, what's, what do you make of that? She says, I guess I'm a vegetarian that eats marshmallows.

• 1:04:56Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that'll work.

• 1:04:58Speaker 06

  I mean, they were telling me, I mean, there are people, and again, this gets into the kind of psychosomatic stuff. But there are people who tell me, look, I can't even drink bottled water because it's made with bone char. It's purified with bone char.

• 1:05:09Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:05:10Speaker 06

  Well, how is that gonna leave any AlphaGal on the water? I mean, it feels like a step too far, but you start to get these psychosomatic reactions.

• 1:05:17Steven Rinella?

  That other stuff, yeah, that other stuff's legitimate.

• 1:05:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:20Steven Rinella?

  So, uh, like, how, how do you spend, like, how do you spend your life now? I mean,

• 1:05:27Steven Rinella?

  you do these big, well-reported pieces. Do you have days when, I mean, is that the main, is that the main thing you do? Do you have other kind of annoying stuff you gotta do throughout the day? Or you just, you just write? Like, you just work on your writing and you write?

• 1:05:41Speaker 06

  No, I just, I'm, I, I write full-time. But that means, you know, like, right now, I'm in a, in a, in a phase when I'm gathering my next story ideas. So I'm sending emails to researchers around the world and I'm, and I'm reading scientific papers. And I'm, you know, calling friends who have, have leads for things and, you know, and that takes several weeks. And then I'm in the reporting phase and the writing phase is actually probably, you know, just the last third of it.

• 1:06:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So tell me how much time you spend, like, take the, take the, the AlphaGal

• 1:06:12Steven Rinella?

  paper or article. How much time did you spend on that?

• 1:06:15Speaker 06

  Well, I went out to Missouri to start the reporting in late March, like the 20th of March. And this, and I was done with the thing, the 20th of June. So what is that? Three months. So three months. And that was fairly compressed, but yeah.

• 1:06:32Steven Rinella?

  And that was the one thing you were working on?

• 1:06:33Speaker 06

  The only thing I was working on, yeah. You know, but I went, I went to Missouri, went to Arkansas, went to North Carolina, went to Virginia, went to Martha's Vineyard. I, um, talked to people all over the country. So, you know, it becomes like a big, I mean, part of the thing I felt about AlphaGal was that there'd been lots of stories about it, little piecemeal stories.

• 1:06:53Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:06:54Speaker 06

  But no one had done the, kind of the whole thing. And that's what I love to do at The New Yorker is they, they give me 9,000 words and I can talk about the history of it and I can talk about the epidemiology of it. I can talk about the allergy epidemic and I can talk about all these dimensions.

• 1:07:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Speaker 06

  And the great thing about AlphaGal is it really, it touches on all that stuff. Like the ecology, the history of our country's landscape, you know, all that stuff ties into this story.

• 1:07:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. For, for listeners, Burkhart just said a 9,000-word article.

• 1:07:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Steven Rinella?

  That is, that's a doozy.

• 1:07:26Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:07:26Steven Rinella?

  That, that, that's like, that's long-form reporting. And, and most people, if you're, if you're sitting there reading, you know, a newspaper or whatever, and you're reading what you probably think of as a long story, you're probably reading like 1,200 words.

• 1:07:42Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 1:07:43Steven Rinella?

  You know, you think of like a classic glossy magazine, magazine feature, those usually run like, like, I used to write for Outside and like a big, a big one, a doozy in Outside was 4,000.

• 1:07:55Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 1:07:55Steven Rinella?

  4,000 words.

• 1:07:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:57Steven Rinella?

  So 9,000 is, well, I'll put it in perspective this way. There's a hell of a lot of books, there's a hell of a lot of books that are 70,000 words.

• 1:08:06Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:08:07Steven Rinella?

  You know, a lot of books come in around 100,000 words. You can get away with 70,000 words. So when you're doing this piece, you're writing like a seventh or a tenth.

• 1:08:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:16Steven Rinella?

  Your, your piece on these ticks is a seventh or a tenth of a book.

• 1:08:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is-

• 1:08:21Steven Rinella?

  That's a hefty chunk.

• 1:08:22Speaker 06

  It's a heavy chunk. And it, you know, and it's a, I mean, not to dig too much into, into the craft, but it's kind of, it's, it's a challenge, which I love. You know, like, how do you keep all these threads going? How do you, how do you keep the reader interested? And, and is there enough, are there enough dimensions to any given topic to really merit that kind of thing? Cause I don't want to, I mean, back in the day, New Yorker had, there was once a famous, I think in the seventies or, or early eighties, there was a, it was just four 10,000-word pieces on, each one was on a different kind of grain. You know, and, you know, this week, wheat, you know? And, and, you know, and I don't think Americans, readers have that kind of patience anymore.

• 1:09:05Steven Rinella?

  No, but that's where the good stuff is, man.

• 1:09:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I do love those kind of deep dives. I mean, you know, Joseph Mitchell, my favorite New Yorker writer from the 30s, 40s, 50s, he, um, you know, he sometimes wouldn't get to the, to the nut graph, to the main point of the article for three or 4,000 words. You know, he would be like setting the scene, introducing you, and it, and it wouldn't be till pretty deep in before you really knew what you were gonna write, read about.

• 1:09:31Steven Rinella?

  I knew a guy, he passed away, he was a writer here in Montana, Brian DeSalvatore. He did a little work for The New Yorker. I remember, it was, it was phenomenal. He did a 10,000-word piece on the history of dynamite called Beam in Fire.

• 1:09:47Speaker 06

  Man, I would totally read that.

• 1:09:49Steven Rinella?

  Everything you'd ever want to know about dynamite.

• 1:09:52Speaker 06

  Right, right. And wasn't Nobel invented it? Right, yeah. Oh, that's, that's a-

• 1:09:56Steven Rinella?

  It was the whole story, like picking up pigeon shit and getting guano. It's just the whole history of explosives.

• 1:10:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right.

• 1:10:01Steven Rinella?

  But, I don't know. I, not, I don't want to say I miss it because it still exists, but it's not as prevalent in American culture as like these, like, very informative, deep-dive pieces.

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• 1:11:43Steven Rinella?

  I want to ask you about one of the pieces you wrote. It was the one I brought up earlier, the one I first discovered you, you know, 26 years ago, 27 years ago.

• 1:11:53Steven Rinella?

  It was your piece on cockfighting, right?

• 1:11:56Steven Rinella?

  Do you feel that you'd be able to do that? Do you feel that you would be, that you'd be able to write that piece today?

• 1:12:03Speaker 06

  Why not? Because of what constraints?

• 1:12:05Steven Rinella?

  Just so, because it would be like, it would just get such a reaction.

• 1:12:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Steven Rinella?

  Regardless of what you said about it.

• 1:12:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:13Steven Rinella?

  It would get such a reaction.

• 1:12:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:16Steven Rinella?

  About, you know, like, don't even talk about that, that's so mean.

• 1:12:22Speaker 06

  Right, right, right.

• 1:12:23Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? Like, no matter what your take on it is, it would just be like, not a thing people want to talk about.

• 1:12:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. I think The New Yorker would still publish that piece. I think part of the reason was, you know, as you remember, that part of the point of that piece was, you know, we have, we have this aversion to cockfighting, this revulsion. We, as a culture, we've decided this is not okay, you know?

• 1:12:47Steven Rinella?

  Where did that come from?

• 1:12:48Speaker 06

  I mean, I think it came from early, I mean, you know, there was, there was some real terrible things that happened in 19th century, like women wearing whole birds on their heads, you know? The whole species of beautiful birds were decimated, and then the animal rights movement came out of that, or the conservation. I mean, there was a lot of really important work that got done to, to kind of stop the cruelty. But, but, you know, what we got instead was, you know, industrial meat production, you know? And, and you look at, part of what I was trying to say was, look, we have these urban values now, where we are revolted by cockfighting, you know? And we think of it as cruel. But when you look at the life of a chicken, right?

• 1:13:30Speaker 06

  Would you rather be a fighting cock that has its own beautiful cage that gets literally massaged every day, that gets the best feed, that gets exercise equipment in his cage, and that lives a year or two years and goes out fighting? Or would you rather be a factory chicken that gets six weeks and then gets bundled onto a conveyor belt, hung from a running chain, zapped with a bolt of lightning, and had its throat cut by a rotary saw? I mean, which life is a better life?

• 1:14:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:00Speaker 06

  And yet, and as urbanites, as, as modern Americans, we've gotten used to being blind to the, you know, shrink-wrapped chicken, looks abstract, sitting in our supermarket. But, oh boy, you show someone killing a chicken, or you think about someone watching a chicken fighting, and that's appalling to us. You know, which is more appalling? So that was kind of the point in a way, was to kind of flip all that inside out a bit.

• 1:14:25Steven Rinella?

  And you, when you worked on that, you went to some cockfights in the South.

• 1:14:27Speaker 06

  Went to a bunch of them, yeah, yeah. I mean, and honestly, there were cockfights that I almost kind of admired, and there were cockfights that I did find appalling.

• 1:14:38Steven Rinella?

  Was it common in the ones you went to? I can't remember. Were they putting the blades on them?

• 1:14:42Speaker 06

  They were putting blades on them.

• 1:14:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:46Speaker 06

  I mean, admire is the wrong word, but, but I went to some local, small, what they call brush pits, cockpit, but brush pits are small pits in Louisiana. And, you know, you go there at midnight or at 1:00 in the morning, and you're thinking,

• 1:14:59Speaker 06

  because you've been told by all the anti-cockfighting folks that these, these places are dens of iniquity, drinking, and drugs, and gambling, you know? And then, and you go there at 1:00 in the morning, you think, shit, you know, I'm gonna out of town, or I don't, what's gonna happen? And you walk in, and it's a, it's a little cage with some bleacher seats around it. And the first night I went, there were two nursing mothers sitting on the front row with their babies. There are their kids running around up and down the aisles, you know? You had whole families. It was like Friday or Saturday night in the country, and this is what they did, you know? And yeah, it's bloody, and that, but the chickens are also, at some level, those chickens weren't, you know, you get some bad stuff.

• 1:15:43Speaker 06

  You know, you get chickens that are injected with drugs, you get, you know, poisons put on their, on their blades. You get some bad stuff, but in those, in those cases, it was, it was kind of an old tradition. Abraham Lincoln was a cockfighting referee. George Washington went to cockfights.

• 1:15:59Steven Rinella?

  I didn't know Honest Abe was into it.

• 1:16:01Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, they were, you know, Andrew Jackson supposedly had cockfights in the Oval Office, you know, in the White House.

• 1:16:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Speaker 06

  I don't know if the Oval Office, I might have my period wrong, but he, you know, so it's, it's, it was an old tradition. And then it's, and then now it's no longer. The cockfights that I, the cockpits that I thought were kind of awful were the really big ones, where you go, like, I was one on the border, on the Arkansas border, Oklahoma border. And the weekend I went, there were 900 chickens fighting. And, you know, and those birds, and that was just a pure betting scene, you know? And their birds are getting, they're getting these big blades on them, they're going in, they're tearing each other apart, people are betting on them, and they're getting, and you walked around backstage at those places, and there were just trashcans filled with these dead birds.

• 1:16:50Steven Rinella?

  This is clandestine.

• 1:16:52Speaker 06

  You know, in Louisiana, it wasn't. When I went in 2000, it was still legal.

• 1:16:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:16:58Speaker 06

  Now, in 2008, it became illegal in the whole country. And in 2018, even the territories, even Puerto Rico and Guam, it's illegal. So it's become.

• 1:17:07Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:17:08Speaker 06

  So it was still legal in a couple places when I went.

• 1:17:11Steven Rinella?

  One of the most brilliant accidental things that ever had to me traveling, I was in the southern Philippines. It was actually, it was actually, it was right after the 9/11 attacks, it was kind of like dicey down in the South, in the southern Philippines. But I was down there and locked into a cockfight. And spent hours there, just, I was just blown away by it.

• 1:17:36Speaker 06

  What kind of a place was it?

• 1:17:40Steven Rinella?

  It looked like a, like a, if you, if you didn't know where you were, and you're driving by, you'd think it was a small, like a county fairground.

• 1:17:47Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:17:48Steven Rinella?

  Right? With overhead, open, open walls, overhead cover, bleachers.

• 1:17:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:54Steven Rinella?

  But they had this, the thing I remember most, man, is like, and this is the difference between like a place like the Philippines and a place like America, probably, that is big cauldron, big boiling cauldron.

• 1:18:05Steven Rinella?

  And every guy, everybody, when their cock lost in a fight, they'd go over to that cauldron and pluck it.

• 1:18:13Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:18:13Steven Rinella?

  So they dunk it, pluck it, dress it, and just all day.

• 1:18:17Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:18:18Steven Rinella?

  Watching guys walk off down the road, carrying, pluck.

• 1:18:22Speaker 06

  And they're gonna eat that chicken?

• 1:18:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like carrying plucked roosters.

• 1:18:25Speaker 06

  Right, right, right.

• 1:18:26Steven Rinella?

  Home to eat. It was like, it was just brilliant to see it, man. Like, it was just amazing to see it, you know?

• 1:18:32Speaker 06

  Well, that was the waste in, in, in that big pit, was like, all those birds are so injected with weird stuff that you can't eat them, right?

• 1:18:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42Speaker 06

  And it was a big tradition in Louisiana, you'd make a sauce de brie picante, you know, like this spicy sauce, and you would, and you would eat your rooster that died after, it was part of the ceremony, part of the tradition, you know? And I think, once all these things happened with drugs, that kind of fell away. So that's, that's part of what's, what was lost.

• 1:19:00Steven Rinella?

  Is, is, is the world you covered back then, okay, when you did that, when you did your cockfight piece, that world's gone?

• 1:19:09Speaker 06

  That, I mean, I think there's still lots of clandestine cockpits. Yeah, I think there still are. But I think it's definitely gone. I mean, even when I was reporting, you know, in New York, it's been illegal for decades.

• 1:19:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:20Speaker 06

  But there, there was a big bust in Harlem while I was writing that piece, and they, there was an old theater that had been turned into a cockpit, you know?

• 1:19:27Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:19:28Speaker 06

  And I know it in Brooklyn, there's, you know, there's Santeria, there's a lot of Caribbean cultures, and so, there's, there's cockfights going on in Brooklyn.

• 1:19:35Steven Rinella?

  You see fighting cocks in New Mexico.

• 1:19:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39Speaker 06

  Lots in Mexico.

• 1:19:40Steven Rinella?

  People are like, oh, we just keep those for, to look at. I used to have this, I used to have this driver I would use a lot, he was Dominican. And we, I was gonna go to DR with him.

• 1:19:53Steven Rinella?

  He had like weirdly, this dude had a family, meaning he had a wife and kids in DR. He had a wife and kids in the US and they knew about each other.

• 1:20:04Speaker 06

  Wow, okay.

• 1:20:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, anyways, he'd bounce back and forth. I had this whole plan where I was gonna go with him to DR and he was gonna take me to a cockfight. I never went, my wife's like, that sounds like just the worst idea you've ever had. But I never, I never actually did it, but I haven't seen one since all that time ago.

• 1:20:20Speaker 06

  Yeah. You know, it's funny because I haven't, I haven't been to one either, but it was interesting. Like when that piece came out in Harper's, I read at least one or two sermons that were written based on the piece. They were talked about the blood of the, of the cock and you know, it is like, it's a deep old cultural thread, you know, in American culture and certainly Southeast Asian and Caribbean culture.

• 1:20:42Steven Rinella?

  Up top, I mentioned too, your work on, um, and you know, you, you had, you, you had a book where you explored, I, I, I'd like you to tell people some more of the chapters, but you had a book noodle, it came out as noodling, noodling for flatheads. And it was about Southern culture.

• 1:20:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:59Steven Rinella?

  Lay out some of the chapters. I remember I had the cockfighting one, flatheads.

• 1:21:03Speaker 06

  I had a thing on noodling. There was a, a piece where I hung out with, um, modern day moonshiners and with ATF folks who were hunting them down. I kind of went back and forth between the two groups. I did a piece on, uh, on frog farming. I did a piece on coon hunting. I, the whole way I got into the book was I was living in, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, kind of missing Oklahoma a bit. And I, and I wanted to get a coon hound. And so I went and I, I found an ad for a blue tick coon hound in Western Mass. And I went out there and, but I really wanted a red bone because I think they're beautiful dogs. And so I went there and I talked to the guy and I said, well, do you know where I could get a red bone? Are there any red bone breeders around here? He goes, well, sure. And he went to the back and he came back out with American coon or magazine.

• 1:21:48Speaker 06

  You know, and it was fat, big, full of ads. And it had all these ads for like, coon hunters shipping sperm across the country to each other for their champion night hounds and all this kind of stuff. And it was, and, and all the different big hunts that were going all around the country. And I ended up finding a woman who fought, who took her dogs at 350 nights a year. I mean, she, every night she would go out at midnight and have a coon hunting contest with three other dogs. And you're not killing the raccoons. You're basically just sitting, standing in the woods for three or four hours in the dark, listening to your dogs bark. And then you're getting points for the first dog that trees,

• 1:22:33Speaker 06

  hits a trail, first one that trees. So anyway, so I wrote a whole thing about coon hunting. I wrote a thing about this old marble tradition in the South, you know, kind of all these obscure little subcultures that are still around that still have a lot of people doing them.

• 1:22:46Steven Rinella?

  How did you hit on, um, I brought this up early on, like, how did you hit on, when, when did you first hear like, oh, there's a thing noodling for flatheads? Is it because you grew up in Oklahoma? Like, did you grow up knowing about it?

• 1:22:58Speaker 06

  You know, I didn't, which is funny. I mean, okay, it's not funny actually, because it's, it's, it's typical for my family. My, my parents are both German. They moved over in 1962 from Germany and we spoke German at home. And my, my dad was a physicist and my mom was a historian. So we had a very weird little academic bubble of the household.

• 1:23:18Steven Rinella?

  Hard hitting rednecks.

• 1:23:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, we were not. And, and, uh, and I loved Oklahoma, but it wasn't really till I started going back. At right after college, I started writing for Oklahoma Today Magazine and they'd send me all these assignments. And I'd write about buffalo or tall grass prayer here. I wrote about the Tulsa Race Massacre back with 1990. But I was, so when I started doing that, you know, I really started to think, wow, there's a whole side of the South that I just never got to know. Um, in the middle of that, two things happened. One, I was at the environmental magazine in Cambridge where I was working. An intern came in from Southern Mississippi and he told me about noodling.

• 1:23:59Speaker 06

  And I thought, what? And then I was talking to my brother-in-law in Oklahoma and he said, well, you know, the plumber here noodles. And it's this guy, Lee McFarlane, was my classmate from high school. I mean, I'd been in school for them for like 15 years. You know, Burke, I'll take you noodling and then, you know, and, and he was just a genius at it. I mean, and I went out with him, the first day I went out with him, I caught a 23 pound cat, pound catfish on my arm, you know? So, um, so anyway, that was, and he was perfect for me. Cause when I knew him in high school, he was kind of a, a layabout. He was a guy who just didn't care. Made, probably made Cs and Ds, you know? Smart, funny guy, but.

• 1:24:42Steven Rinella?

  No one ever calls anybody a layabout anymore.

• 1:24:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, right.

• 1:24:45Steven Rinella?

  I like that.

• 1:24:47Speaker 06

  But then when I met him again in this context.

• 1:24:51Steven Rinella?

  He was on fire.

• 1:24:52Speaker 06

  He was on fire and he knew his shit and he was funny and he was capable and he was a great plumber. And he was also this guy, you know, so he, anyways, it was great.

• 1:25:01Steven Rinella?

  When you're, when you're working on all that, did you ever, um, because a thing you don't do is you don't do,

• 1:25:11Steven Rinella?

  there's a predictable way that a guy would go about that. A predictable way, because you said you had like, you had like, you know, your dad was a physicist, right? There's a predictable way where you would go about it like you're, you're, you're slumming it with these people.

• 1:25:25Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:25:26Steven Rinella?

  They're not in on the joke.

• 1:25:28Speaker 06

  Right, right, right.

• 1:25:29Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:25:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:31Steven Rinella?

  You look at, like, like everything's kind of ironic.

• 1:25:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:25:34Steven Rinella?

  You know, you're, you're, you're showing them off, not you, but a writer.

• 1:25:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:39Steven Rinella?

  Might be showing them off to his friends.

• 1:25:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:44Steven Rinella?

  Having a laugh at them.

• 1:25:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:45Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:25:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's.

• 1:25:47Steven Rinella?

  But you don't do that game.

• 1:25:49Speaker 06

  I mean, it's not even like I'm.

• 1:25:51Steven Rinella?

  It's not a game, but it's not, it's not where your mind goes.

• 1:25:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's not, I mean, I mean, I find these people that I've written about fascinating and impressive in a lot of cases, you know, and,

• 1:26:05Speaker 06

  and, and refreshing in a way that, you know, like,

• 1:26:09Speaker 06

  I've spent the last almost 50 years, 45 years of my life on the East Coast, you know, and, and in cities. And, and almost everybody I interview for, for most stories is kind of media ready. They're kind of prepared their spiel, right? And they kind of know how to narrate their life and they, they, they think they're going to be the next person on Survivor or whatever, you know, they, we kind of all package ourselves for ourselves. And, and you know, when I'm talking to the, the coon hunters or the cockfighters, those guys, they had never been interviewed by people before. You know, and they were, and that was exciting to them to be, to have someone be truly interested in what they're doing.

• 1:26:51Speaker 06

  And truly interested at the level of not just like, how many chickens died? You know, it's like, what do you feed them? Well, how do you exercise them? What's the history of this thing? How did you get into it? You know, how, you know, I really want to know the whole dimension of it. And that to them is then, and so it becomes a real exchange. It's not just me looking for the lurid bits and trying to play those up.

• 1:27:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Does it take you a long time to win people's trust? When all of a sudden here's this dude, he's coming from this big fancy magazine, you know, and, and, um,

• 1:27:21Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:27:22Steven Rinella?

  And now I'm going to show you some things that I can't tell if you're here to laugh at me or expose my secrets. Is it hard to win people over?

• 1:27:29Speaker 06

  You know, I find like there's usually,

• 1:27:33Speaker 06

  there's usually the same kind of transition happens where it starts out with, they're kind of tickled that a New York, a guy came down from New York to talk to me. They usually don't know the New Yorker. You know, or they don't care about it. Maybe they've heard of it, they don't care about it. But the fact that I'm just, I've flown down from New York to come talk to them, that's impressive. So they're willing to give me the time and they kind of think of it, they're kind of, it's a joke to them a little bit, right? And then pretty soon, I'm with them for a week, sitting in their cab or their truck, typing everything they're saying. You know, wanting, going through the muck with them. And then at a certain point, they're like, oh, this guy really wants to know everything, you know?

• 1:28:18Speaker 06

  And part of the way is, the way I report is I, I mean, nowadays I do more recording, but in the day I always had little keyboards and I always typed everything as they said. And, and at a certain point they'd be like, damn, everything I say is interesting. He's taken everything down. So they kind of get excited about it. You know, so, yeah, it's, it's, anyway, I love the process.

• 1:28:39Steven Rinella?

  So what are you, what are you gonna work on next?

• 1:28:43Speaker 06

  Well, I have a bunch of leads. I don't have anything firm yet.

• 1:28:45Steven Rinella?

  You got a book, are you working on a new book?

• 1:28:47Speaker 06

  Well, I'm trying to put, I mean, one thought I've, I've had is like, my last bunch of pieces have been all, I realized I've written about a lot of the phobias. There's a top 10 phobias I've written pieces about.

• 1:28:59Steven Rinella?

  Tell me what they are.

• 1:29:00Speaker 06

  I mean, arachnophobia, claustrophobia. I wrote a big piece on deep cave divers. I wrote a piece about a woman who collects venomous spiders and, you know, I've written about turbulence. I've written about infestations. I've written about snakes in Florida, snakes. So anyway, I've been thinking about putting together a collection called like the, you know, the sum of all phobias or the big book of discomforts or something like that.

• 1:29:26Steven Rinella?

  Sure, man. That'd be a good one.

• 1:29:28Speaker 06

  Because I kind of feel like, uh, It's something we're more and more in touch with, like all these, these fears that we have. I think people go to therapy or CBT therapy or all these kinds of stuff to address them. So it's become more of a, anyway.

• 1:29:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I can see that.

• 1:29:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:44Steven Rinella?

  And what, what magazine pieces are like tickling your fancy right now? Like you said, you got a lot of ideas.

• 1:29:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:50Steven Rinella?

  I'll tell you if they're good or not. Hit me with one.

• 1:29:52Speaker 06

  What?

• 1:29:53Steven Rinella?

  I'll tell you. I'll tell you if it's worth your time.

• 1:29:56Speaker 06

  Here's a problem, man. I don't want to tell you because this is, you have way too many listeners and

• 1:30:00Steven Rinella?

  Cause they'll jump on it.

• 1:30:00Speaker 06

  They'll jump on it. So that's, I have to have a certain

• 1:30:03Steven Rinella?

  Long form magazine writers. I don't, I'm joking. I don't know what you're saying. There's certain things that are floating around my head. I don't want to say them.

• 1:30:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:09Steven Rinella?

  Like for instance, I have the world's greatest name for a business, but I can't say it. I don't think I can tell you.

• 1:30:14Speaker 06

  Actually, the one, the story you told me before we started taping, that one sounds like an interesting, I'm ready for that.

• 1:30:19Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Dig into that. Cause I passed it along to another writer and I don't think he bought.

• 1:30:25Steven Rinella?

  Well, man, I want, I want to thank you again for coming on the show and talking about all this, man.

• 1:30:29Speaker 06

  That's total pleasure.

• 1:30:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I think people should really like, I think that, I'm saying this very particular to the people that listen to the show.

• 1:30:38Steven Rinella?

  People listen to the show, you're gonna, you're gonna love when you, when you go find, you'll, you'll have to conquer paywalls and all that. But when you go find the, um, tell me the name of the, the piece. I can't remember the name of your Alpha Gal piece.

• 1:30:52Speaker 06

  Well, you can look under the great infestation.

• 1:30:54Steven Rinella?

  The great infestation.

• 1:30:56Speaker 06

  Um, or the tick that hunts down its host.

• 1:30:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's okay. The tick that hunts down its host.

• 1:31:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:31:00Steven Rinella?

  And, um, it's Burkhard Builder. So B U R K H A R D.

• 1:31:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:31:05Steven Rinella?

  B I L G E R.

• 1:31:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. And Nudeling for Flatheads has probably the most.

• 1:31:10Steven Rinella?

  Well, that's what I was gonna, that's what I was gonna do the mega plug on is that, um, is if you're into, I mean, if you're interested in American culture, if you're interested in southern culture and like,

• 1:31:22Steven Rinella?

  kind of the, the under, like the underground, sort of the underground world of people who live eccentrics, who live these kind of old, traditional life ways and, um, Nudeling for Flatheads is a great book, man. Yeah.

• 1:31:37Speaker 06

  Thank you. Yeah. That was a fun one.

• 1:31:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Thanks so much.

• 1:31:40Speaker 06

  My kids were small when I, when I did, when I reported that. So they kind of went around in my, in our motor home.

• 1:31:46Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:31:47Speaker 06

  And I have great memories of being in Northern Georgia in a hunting cabin, like talking to moonshiners and I'd come back every night and anyway.

• 1:31:54Steven Rinella?

  Were you, were you drinking a lot of moonshine back then?

• 1:31:57Speaker 06

  You know, I actually went to a moonshiners reunion in South Carolina. And, and I spent two or three days asking people, hey, are you, do you moon, do you make moonshine? I'd love to taste some of your moonshine. And they were like, no, I don't know. You know, they looked at me and I had this kind of East Coast accent and you know, there were, that was a place where they really didn't trust me. So.

• 1:32:19Steven Rinella?

  I want you to take a sniff of this.

• 1:32:20Speaker 06

  All right.

• 1:32:23Steven Rinella?

  Dude, don't get too close. It's not bad, but don't, don't get in there, get in there, but just get in there and take a whiff of that.

• 1:32:32Steven Rinella?

  Isn't that something? That's the weirdest. I took a sip of that one time. You couldn't get it out of your mouth. It's beaver casters.

• 1:32:42Steven Rinella?

  So this, this is the way they used to save them. It's beaver casters preserved in moonshine.

• 1:32:47Speaker 06

  That's crazy.

• 1:32:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Don't sip that. I took a sip of that and I was tasting that taste for a day.

• 1:32:54Speaker 06

  The ones in South Carolina, they had these

• 1:32:56Steven Rinella?

  A moonshine dude made that for me, you know? I didn't tell him what I did with it.

• 1:32:59Speaker 06

  He made it. But they took, um, these native hard old Indian peaches and they would soak it in moonshine. And it would make this blood red, incredibly tasty moonshine.

• 1:33:11Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:33:12Speaker 06

  Yeah. I love that stuff. And I actually, I mean, I probably shouldn't say this because it's a felony, but for,

• 1:33:18Speaker 06

  I made some moonshine in, in Brooklyn for one year.

• 1:33:21Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you did?

• 1:33:21Speaker 06

  Because in my neighborhood, there are all these apple trees planted in the 19th century, early 20th century, and nobody picked those apples. They're all rotten. So I went around and I, my friend Kevin and I, Kevin Bergen and I, mapped all the apple trees that we could find in our neighborhood. And then we bought a press and we went around and asked everybody if we could

• 1:33:43Steven Rinella?

  Get the apples.

• 1:33:43Speaker 06

  Get the apples. And we ended up just pressing carboy after carboy, these giant glass jugs full of

• 1:33:50Steven Rinella?

  Where were you doing it at?

• 1:33:51Speaker 06

  Apples. We were doing it in the basement of my house. And out on the sidewalk. And then eventually that, you know, fermented into, into apple cider and hard cider. And then, and then I, I bought a still from Portugal and my son and I made a batch of apple, apple jack. Just still, and it was actually amazingly good. I could not believe it.

• 1:34:13Steven Rinella?

  Huh. We, we just had, we just had a writer on Isaac Fitzgerald who wrote, um, he wrote that book about Johnny Appleseed.

• 1:34:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, right.

• 1:34:20Steven Rinella?

  So we got into this whole like apples into this and into that and into this and into that. And then we had a guy write in explaining like you were just talking about, this is, like this from apples makes this kind of thing.

• 1:34:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:34:34Steven Rinella?

  The next step and get, I forgot all what it is now, but

• 1:34:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. No, it was

• 1:34:38Steven Rinella?

  Distilled drinks.

• 1:34:40Speaker 06

  It was crazy. I did not, I assumed it would be indigestible, but it was actually pretty good. It was, it tastes like apples. It was good.

• 1:34:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. That's good hard work and journalism right there.

• 1:34:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:34:50Steven Rinella?

  Well, man, I want to thank you again for coming on the show. It was great.

• 1:34:54Speaker 06

  I appreciate it. Thanks.

• 1:34:54Steven Rinella?

  And now, like I said, I was kind of not looking forward to getting Alpha Gal, but I had a plan, but now you make me think my plan's off.

• 1:35:02Speaker 06

  The plan's got some problems, I think.

• 1:35:03Steven Rinella?

  It's got some problems. The other big thing is I don't like to admit this about myself, but, um, I'm a big half and half guy in my coffee.

• 1:35:09Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:11Steven Rinella?

  That's done with.

• 1:35:11Speaker 06

  Half and half cheese, all, all, all the good things. Yeah.

• 1:35:16Steven Rinella?

  All right. I'm going to avoid it. All right. Thanks again.

• 1:35:45Speaker 07

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