Thanksgiving Special: Talkin' Turkey

Daniel and Kelly give our US-based listeners some things to gobble about over Thanksgiving dinner other than politics. 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.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 1:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Happy Thanksgiving, friends. Or Happy Thanksgiving to our US-based friends, at least. And Happy November 28th to the rest of you. On today's episode, we're going to give you some things to gobble about at the Thanksgiving dinner table, other than politics. You're welcome. First up, we have an expert on to talk about whether or not the tryptophan in turkey actually makes you sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner. Then, we're moving on to talking about a vegetable that comes in a variety of forms, all of which are improved by lots and lots of cheese. And finally, we're talking about why it takes so stinking long to cook a turkey, and some probably bad ideas for how you could speed this process up.

• 1:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

• 2:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.

• 2:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I'm a parasitologist and I really like Thanksgiving. I don't know if it's my favorite holiday, but I do love the food.

• 2:21Daniel Whiteson?

  It's food, it's family, and crucially for me, it's not commercialized. It's not all about shopping and expensive presents. It's really just about spending time with your family, eating good food and like, hey, what's better than that, right? That's pure.

• 2:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is, that's beautiful. I love that. So has the commercialization of Halloween ruined Halloween for you? Cause that's a top contender for me.

• 2:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's crazy. We all just go out and buy a bunch of candy and give it to each other. It's hilarious. Although I do like the community aspect that everybody comes out, my neighborhood goes crazy for Halloween. We get hundreds and hundreds of trick or treaters. We give away like a full garbage can full of candy. It's incredible.

• 3:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow, that is incredible.

• 3:03Daniel Whiteson?

  This Halloween, we ran out of candy. We started giving away stuff from our pantry and people were excited. They were like, ooh, canned corn, sweet potatoes.

• 3:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are you serious?

• 3:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, absolutely. We gave away dried beans. We gave away summer sausage. People were very excited to get anything but candy, actually. Maybe next year, we're just gonna give away sweet potatoes.

• 3:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's amazing. I love that. I remember there were like, you know, some neighbors who would do the king size candy bars and some who would give you a dollar. And then we had a neighbor who gave a penny and we were all like, what? No, it's not okay. You fail.

• 3:37Daniel Whiteson?

  My Thanksgiving questions for you are what are your most and least favorite items on the Thanksgiving table?

• 3:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man. So, you know, I often have Thanksgiving at my parents' house and like literally everything my father makes is amazing. Everything is like my favorite thing and every year he tries a new pie or cake, which is incredible. He makes these fantastic like almond cookies for me every year and then sends me home with so many that I put on like 50 pounds. So I have no least favorite. Anything with mushrooms I don't really like. And sometimes when I don't have Thanksgiving with my dad, mushrooms sneak into the meal and that's disappointing. But all right. So what about you?

• 4:16Daniel Whiteson?

  My favorite thing on the table is probably turkey wings. Not a big fan of turkey, but the wings, love the wings. So crunchy, so good. Though I gross out my daughter by like audibly crunching them at the table. And she's a vegetarian, so that's not so fun for her. And my least favorite are people who put marshmallows on sweet potatoes. I just don't get it. Like, to me, that combination makes no sense. It's like Snickers bars on a hamburger or something. Like, what is going on here?

• 4:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Not sure I have a problem with Snickers bar on a hamburger either, but that would be a little weird. I can't say I'm bothered by the marshmallows on the sweet potatoes, but it's not one of the first things I go to. But I think I'm with your daughter. I'd probably sit on the other side of the table. I'm not a big fan of the sounds of crunching on bones, personally.

• 5:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Audible carnivores.

• 5:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I feel like if I were a better person, I would be more at peace with what it takes to put the food on my table. But I like to bury my head a little bit when I can.

• 5:13Daniel Whiteson?

  But you live on a farm, right? You're very connected to where your food comes from.

• 5:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, but they're all friends on my farm. They don't end up on the table. Their eggs do, but, uh, but not them. Yeah.

• 5:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Just their children.

• 5:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, they're not children yet. Just their proto children. I mean, even our nasty roosters didn't end up on the table, even though that was tempting sometimes.

• 5:35Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, well, we're not just here to debate when life begins for chickens. We're here to talk about the science of Thanksgiving, what it means, how it works. As you all sit there and enjoy your Thanksgiving meal, we want to inject a little bit of science into your sleepy afternoon.

• 5:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  We do. And one of the scientific factoids that I feel like I hear every year is that tryptophan in the turkey makes you sleepy. And I believe the history of the word factoid is that it used to be a little piece of information that's wrong.

• 6:06Daniel Whiteson?

  It's an anti fact, I see.

• 6:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Exactly. Yeah, these days it means a tiny fact, but I think it used to mean this is not correct. And that is the story with tryptophan making you sleepy. And we got lucky because your wife knew an expert that we could talk to about this topic.

• 6:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Katrina knows a lot of fun, smart people, so I often ask her for help in finding an expert. So we were very lucky to get to talk to Dr. Mark Mapstone here at UC Irvine about whether or not tryptophan actually makes you sleepy or if it's all just a huge nationwide placebo effect.

• 6:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  And he was a fun guy to talk to, so none of us are going to have trouble staying awake, even if we ate a lot of turkey.

• 6:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Here's our chat with Mark.

• 6:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so the first topic we're tackling for the Thanksgiving episode is whether or not the tryptophan in turkey actually makes you sleepy. And we have an expert on the show today to help us with that. We invited Dr. Mark Mapstone. He's chief of the neuropsychology division in the Department of Neurology at UC Irvine. Welcome to the show, Mark.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

• 7:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're excited to have you to debunk this. So when I was an undergrad, I remember sitting in an anatomy and physiology class and having my professor say, okay, Thanksgiving is coming. You're going to eat turkey. You're going to be tired. And that's because of the tryptophan. Is that true? Is that how it works?

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Well, probably not. This is a myth that's been going around for decades, if not centuries. This idea that this essential amino acid called tryptophan that's present in turkey, which it is, causes you to become sleepy. And there's a background for that. There's a nugget of truth. Specifically, tryptophan is an amino acid that we need. It's an essential amino acid that we need for protein construction in our bodies. And we don't get it. We can't make it ourselves. We can't make all that we need by ourselves. So we have to get it from our diets. And there are nine essential amino acids that we get from our diet. And tryptophan is one of them. However, it turns out that Turkey isn't the only place you can

• 8:10Speaker 03

  find tryptophan. And as a matter of fact, Turkey isn't the highest density of tryptophan as far as other foods as well. So it's found in dairy, eggs, other poultry, meat, even beef. There's nothing special about the amount of tryptophan in Turkey. However, tryptophan is very important in the synthesis of a number of other chemicals that affect the brain and behavior, which might lead you to feel sleepy. And those chemicals are serotonin and melatonin. So there's a nugget of truth, but probably you'd have to eat like 10 pounds of turkey to get enough tryptophan to really make that direct effect to make you sleepy.

• 8:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm up for that challenge on Thanksgiving.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  I've done it before.

• 8:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Anything for the science.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 8:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  I have a lot of friends and kids who take melatonin to sleep. How good is the science showing that? Orally consuming melatonin actually results in better sleep or more sleep?

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Probably not so strong. A lot of it is metabolized in the gut before it even gets out to get to the brain. So it turns out that most of the serotonin that's produced in our bodies is produced in the gut. The epithelial lining of the gut produces the serotonin, probably 90%. Although serotonin is widely used throughout the body, we think of it mostly in the brain. And serotonin is the feel-good drug. It's the chemical that, similar to dopamine, kind of can make you feel it's a mood-altering or mood-regulating neurochemical that our bodies produce in states that we require for making our mood good. So serotonin is produced in the gut and it's also produced in the brain.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  So most of the brain-relevant serotonin is produced in the Raphaen nucleus. So this is a chemical that's produced within the brain, but it's also very important and produced largely in the gut. 90% of it comes from the gut.

• 10:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Can I step in with totally naive skepticism about how much we understand any of this stuff? I mean, can we identify an individual chemical and say, this one makes you feel good? This one makes you feel X? Like, isn't it a whole symphony of complex chemistry that few people understand maybe a little bit?

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. When people start saying, this particular neurochemical does this, you have to realize that all of this is happening in this complex milieu. You know, the brain is more than just a big bag of chemicals. There are specificity for certain networks and certain areas of the brain for each of these chemicals. They don't just all float around. But you're absolutely right. You can't really just take one neurochemical in isolation and say, this gives you this. It's really a combination of many things.

• 10:48Daniel Whiteson?

  And do we understand the sort of microphysical process? Like, this chemical leads to this, which does this? Or is it all just sort of like correlational studies where like, hey, we gave rats a bunch of serotonin and they looked happy?

• 10:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you know, it's kind of how science goes. We can only start with reductionist sort of questions and we can test those and then we have to extrapolate to bigger issues and bigger concepts and make bigger inferences. So we do have to start with very tightly controlled sorts of things like that. Like, you move one neurochemical a little bit, you feed them some tryptophan and they get sleepy. Although the evidence isn't really strong for that, there's lots of foods that do that. There's probably bigger contributions to feeling sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner than tryptophan. And we can review those if you'd like, but.

• 11:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Let's review those. So I think a lot of people out there are probably thinking, but after I eat turkey dinner, I do feel sleepy. So what is happening there?

• 11:40Speaker 03

  So you're also doing a lot of other things. So Thanksgiving dinner traditionally, at least at my house, I mean, we've got mashed potatoes, you've got stuffing, you've got pumpkin pie. I mean, all of the carbs that you're eating is going to make you feel sleepy to begin with. This postprandial effect, and we know this every day after you eat lunch, right about an hour to an hour and a half after you eat lunch, you tend to get sleepy. It's that why you need that cup of coffee in the early afternoon. Same thing happens at Thanksgiving, but we tend to do it like crazy 10 times even more than eating. So we do tend to overindulge in Thanksgiving dinner and it's usually on carbs that are going to make you very sleepy.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  These are things that divert your blood flow from brain, from muscles to the gut so that you can deal with all of the stuff that you just smacked in your gob. So it's all part of like overeating. It's what you're overeating is carbs and sugars and things like this. Maybe very minor effects of the tryptophan in the turkey is probably what's going on. And you're probably having a glass of wine with that or more, who knows? Or even, you know, while you're watching the football game before Thanksgiving dinner. So there's the potential effects of alcohol, which of course is a depressant in the CNS. It tends to make you sleepy. It tends to make you groggy and dopey. So alcohol, carbs, overeating. So I think if you put all those in a line, tryptophan is like all the way down at the bottom.

• 13:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Relatives, football, political conversations.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Politics. I mean, that could make you want to go take a nap, right?

• 13:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amen. Absolutely. So when we were talking about tryptophan, you mentioned that it comes from turkey and chicken and eggs. And it all sounded like it came from meat products. Do vegans never get sleepy? Does it also come from plants?

• 13:26Speaker 03

  So we have what we call protein denser, perfect foods that have all nine essential amino acids. And those tend to be meats. So I think the protein dense foods, vegetables, beans, that sort of thing does not contain all nine. Many of them do contain tryptophan. So do vegans get post Thanksgiving sleepiness? That sounds like a study right there. We should be doing that work.

• 13:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  We need money first.

• 13:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Katrina tells me about the three sisters, like if you have squash and beans and maybe is it corn together, then you get all the amino acids?

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are combinations, obviously, of the vegetables that you can pull together to make sure you get all nine. And then obviously, there's supplements, which are not as good, but I mean, you'd rather get them directly through the diet rather than take supplements. But people supplement with these as well.

• 14:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, but we don't want people to get the impression that you can't get a complete diet as a vegan.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Right, right, right. Oh, yeah, I didn't mean to say that at all. You can definitely take vegetarianism and veganism very seriously and get everything you need.

• 14:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  So you had said that this idea that tryptophan is what makes us sleepy after Thanksgiving meal has been around for maybe centuries? Do you happen to know what's the earliest evidence we have of this sort of meme taking flight?

• 14:37Speaker 03

  Oh, good question. I wish I had a source for you. It may be when I was in elementary school or high school biology or something and first heard this myth.

• 14:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Was that centuries ago?

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Not quite centuries ago. But yeah, again, nothing, we can talk decades. I may be attributing this to my high school biology teacher who gave that evidence, but did not quote a source. So don't quote me on that.

• 15:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, got it.

• 15:00Daniel Whiteson?

  How much do we understand about what makes you feel sleepy? I mean, I know neurobiology is really complicated, but this is a very subjective thing, like to feel sleepy. Do we understand the mechanism for that at all? I mean, do you feel sleepy because you need sleep? Is it really just diverting the blood from the brain to the gut?

• 15:17Speaker 03

  We know that there are certain processes that are involved in regulation of sleep and wake. We refer to these as circadian rhythms. And these are ways that organisms kind of move through the sleep and wake states. And then there are in-between states as well. Sleep plays a really important role. We need to sleep. I mean, it's very clear that if you deprive animals or humans of sleep, things go wrong really quickly. You can go for a couple of days, perhaps at the most, without sleep, but you start getting beyond that and you start having derangement of thinking and eventually it can be fatal. This is something that's really critical and for the brain processes, sleep, it turns out, there's been a new system described, it's called the glymphatic system. And this is a network.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  That allows for the metabolic and cellular detritus that's produced during waking hours to be removed from the brain. You kind of want the garbage trucks to come around and clean up after you've had a hard day working as a brain cell. So we do this at sleep and it's really critical to get good sleep because it allows for these clearance mechanisms to proceed and your brain is able to clean up after itself and it kind of shuts down a little bit and allows for these things to happen. So sleep is really important and we've got to do this in a cyclical way. We go through sleep and wake cycles and one of the main neurochemicals, more neurohormones, frankly, is melatonin, which is produced by the pineal gland in the brain. And this is a

• 16:43Speaker 03

  hormone that regulates the movement between wake and sleep. So this is a very complex system and most organisms, you know, from multicellular organisms to humans have to go through these cycles to produce meaningful activity, to feed, to reproduce, to do the things that an organism needs. And then you need the downtime.

• 17:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Why do you need to be asleep for the garbage trucks to come in and clean up the mess? What is it that they're doing that you can't be awake for?

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a good question. I'm not sure that I know the answer to that. I can say that the brain goes into a state, an electrical state, where there's oscillations that promote the movement and that's not compatible with being awake. So it kind of means that when your brain is in this state, it's drowsy and that allows for these metabolic byproducts to be taken away as garbage.

• 17:34Daniel Whiteson?

  On the topic of understanding sleep, what do you think are things we will understand about sleep in the next 10 or 50 or 100 years that we don't understand today?

• 17:42Speaker 03

  One thing that I'd love to have us get to, or the point of it, is really understanding how these clearance mechanisms work because there are a number of diseases and disorders of particularly older adulthood that are probably strongly related to failure of clearance of this cellular stuff. And I'm speaking specifically of Alzheimer's disease where the buildup of proteins in the brain that are normal, they should be there, but they're allowed to build up to a much higher level. And people who eventually develop Alzheimer's disease. And the current thinking is is that this may be a failure of clearance in the sense that if you're not getting good sleep, then your brain is not taking out the garbage and it's allowed to build up in a bad way. So a normal, healthy brain and

• 18:27Speaker 03

  aging brain would allow for that to get out, the garbage to be taken out. But in an Alzheimer's brain, it's not being allowed to. We don't clearly understand the mechanisms behind that, but certainly sleep is playing a role. There's a strong correlation between impaired sleep and risk for Alzheimer's disease as we get older. And unfortunately, that's probably starting in midlife, probably in our 50s and 60s, when we start having problems with sleep. That's when this is probably happening. So I'd love for us as a scientific field to be able to understand more about that so that we can promote good sleep and promote clearance of these abnormal proteins.

• 19:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sometimes when I'm having trouble sleeping at night, I panic because I feel like I should be sleeping more and that keeps me up more. And I feel like you've just exacerbated that problem for me. Now I'm gonna be like, oh, here comes Alzheimer's.

• 19:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, you know, a lot of people listen to the podcast to fall asleep. So would you say, Mark, as a medical doctor, that you're prescribing listening to the podcast, that this podcast is actually good for your body?

• 19:29Speaker 03

  It could be. However, I am not a physician. I'm a PhD clinical psychologist. So I can't write scripts anyways. I give recommendations. And yeah, this sounds like a great thing to fall asleep to.

• 19:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I'm gonna go ahead and prescribe our podcast to our listeners. I medically shouldn't do that either, but I'm doing it. All right. Thanks so much, Mark, for being on the show.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for having me.

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• 23:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we're back and we're ready to tackle topic number two. All right, so let's move on to another staple of the Thanksgiving dinner table, which are veggies. And for Daniel's sake, we're not going to put any marshmallows on them.

• 23:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Thank you. I know. Veggies don't need marshmallows. They're delicious by themselves.

• 23:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think they could use cheese most of the time, but we can agree to disagree there. So a few years ago, I was surprised to learn that a bunch of the veggies that I smother with cheese are all from exactly the same species of plant.

• 24:11Daniel Whiteson?

  What?

• 24:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so just like dogs, whose scientific name is Canis lupus familiaris, we've used artificial selection to sort of change the way that they look so that they can have different traits that we appreciate for different reasons. So you have everything from tiny little chihuahuas that you could fit in your bag, and they're super cute, all the way up to Great Danes, which my husband is afraid of.

• 24:32Daniel Whiteson?

  But you don't have dogs in your Thanksgiving table. That's not where this is going, right?

• 24:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's not where this is going. No, no, no, no. But another species that we have artificially selected to produce very varied forms that Humans like for different reasons is a plant called brassica uloracea. And this is the plant that produces kale, corrobie, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts.

• 24:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Brussels sprouts too. This is like a monopoly on the Thanksgiving table.

• 25:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know. They're all the same species and that kind of blew my mind. They look really different.

• 25:08Daniel Whiteson?

  So you're saying Brussels sprouts are to cauliflower like chihuahuas are to cocker spaniels?

• 25:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Exactly. And I think that if podcasting doesn't work out for us, you have a future writing SAT questions.

• 25:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which I hated taking when I was younger.

• 25:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Then I'm not taking that as a compliment, Kelly. That was a backhanded insult.

• 25:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  It wasn't meant to be. I would have enjoyed taking the SAT much more if you had written the questions.

• 25:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, nice save. Nice save. All right.

• 25:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  I am smooth.

• 25:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I'm a fan of all those vegetables you suggested, but they all seem so different. I mean, there's a green sort of leafiness, like a crunchiness to them all, but you know, like cabbage, you can eat totally raw and kale, you definitely shouldn't. How can all of these really be the same kind of vegetable?

• 25:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so there was this wild plant that we think came from the Mediterranean. And it was domesticated and this happened a really long time ago, right? So a lot of this information has been lost to history, but here's what we think happened. So initially people found versions of this plant that looked different and some of them had bigger leaves. And so we like preferentially planted the ones that had bigger leaves and over time by picking the ones that have the biggest leaves and then helping those have plant babies over and over again, we ended up getting big leafed plants like kale. And so that's where kale came from. That's when you get a lot of leaves.

• 26:31Daniel Whiteson?

  And so this is just artificial selection. It's like breeding your dogs to have certain traits by setting up the matches.

• 26:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 26:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Or the way that we like took corn from having these tiny little kernels to this enormous monstrous deliciousness. It's the same sort of effect, right? But it takes a long time, right? This is not something you can do in a lab in 10 years. It's like hundreds of years or thousands of years of work.

• 26:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  So a lot of the answers to this stuff have been lost. To history. So like, we know there were Greeks around 300 years BCE who would write about kale kinds of plants. And so we think that, you know, thousands of years ago, this was like starting to happen. But, you know, over time, like when someone uses whatever the Greek word was for like cabbage or kale, it's possible they were referring to a different plant. But we think they were referring to this one. And so we don't know exactly when all of these different forms popped out. But we think that we started with big leafy things like kale. And that was maybe a few thousand years ago.

• 27:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Incredible that we don't know the history of our own foods. It's fascinating.

• 27:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know.

• 27:32Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, whenever there's a gap in our knowledge, you always find some corner of the internet where there's conspiracy theories about it. You know, like, how did the Egyptians build the pyramids? So I wonder if there's some corner of the internet where people like have some conspiracy about how like, kohlrabi is actually an alien plant that came on an asteroid or something.

• 27:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, that would be really fun.

• 27:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Let's start it. Let's start it.

• 27:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, yes. So kohlrabi was brought to us by the Enceladissians. And we should thank them every Thanksgiving for this contribution.

• 28:02Daniel Whiteson?

  No, no, we're not going to join the ranks of other quote unquote, natural science podcasts that just deal in speculation and nonsense. We are hard hitting science here. So no, this is fascinating actual science. So you're telling us that all of these things have what the same common ancestor, or they're still technically the same species? Like, I know that Great Dane and a chihuahua can mix. I know, for example, because my dog is a mixture of German shepherd and chihuahua, which is a fascinating combination. Could you today take like Brussels sprouts and mate them with kohlrabi?

• 28:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 28:33Daniel Whiteson?

  What?

• 28:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think.

• 28:34Daniel Whiteson?

  I was sure you were gonna say no.

• 28:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can get like, broccolini, which is a mix between broccoli and Chinese broccoli. And it's just like, it's a leafier sort of thing. And so, yes, you can cross these different brassica uloracea species. They still are fertile together. So they are still the same species. And there's some closely related species that also make some other foodie things that we eat. So this is like a genus of plants that we're, you know, really happy about, I guess, depending on how much you like your vegetables. A difficult question that scientists were trying to answer is like, where did this originally come from?

• 29:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 29:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  And it was more difficult to solve than you might expect. So like, if you go to lots of different places, like the UK, you find what looks like the original version of this plant. So like, you know, it doesn't look like a cabbage. It like, looks like the original wild version that we then did all the selection on. And what they think happened was that actually, it started from the Mediterranean, and then we domesticated it. And then, we had it in gardens like, throughout the world. And then it escaped from our gardens. And so there's a bunch of lineages that they say, went feral, which was like, a thing I only thought happened to animals. But apparently, plants can also go feral. And when you're not regularly doing this selection, and trying to pick the ones that make the best

• 29:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  cabbages every single time, I guess over time, it goes back to looking like the wild version did.

• 29:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Because now, natural selection is applying its own influence. Yeah, fascinating.

• 30:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, exactly. And so, it goes back to looking like the wild version. And so, through like, a number of different genetic things, and also by trying to look at like, historical records for when we were first talking about things that were called cabbages. The current theory is that it's probably from the Mediterranean initially, and then it went feral everywhere else.

• 30:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Do we have examples of that in animals, where we domesticated them, and then they went feral again, and sort of returned to their natural shape? I always wondered that about like, coyotes. You know, are coyotes like, domesticated dogs that escaped and became wild again?

• 30:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's a good question. I don't think coyotes are domesticated dogs that went wild again. Pigeons were really popular animals for artificial selection for a really long time. There were like, all these fancy pigeons. And anyone who's interested in that should read Rosemary Moscow's book about pigeons, because she's amazing. Maybe we should have her on the show to talk about pigeons at some point.

• 30:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Definitely should.

• 30:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of pigeons that were domesticated, went feral subsequently. Oh, what about boars? Aren't there like, pigs that were domesticated, and then got released, and now they're like, in Texas?

• 31:11Daniel Whiteson?

  There's like, 30 to 50 wild hogs rampaging around Texas somewhere.

• 31:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think that actually, boars that were domesticated and then got out are a problem in some areas. I could Wrong about that.

• 31:20Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, and I think it's dingoes. I think it was not coyotes, but I think dingoes in Australia might have once been domesticated.

• 31:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Really?

• 31:27Daniel Whiteson?

  We'll dig into that and look into it. But back to the topic of the Thanksgiving table. Were these things selected to be eaten with cheese? Or were people enjoying these things even pre cheese? I mean, cheese is pretty ancient as well, right?

• 31:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Man, you are asking all the questions I didn't prepare for. So you said that your family is all about fermenting and stuff. So maybe you know, when was the first instance of cheese coming on the scene for humanity?

• 31:51Daniel Whiteson?

  I think they have records of cheese from like Mesopotamia, you know, people have been eating cheese basically since cattle had been domesticated because, you know, you take that milk and you gotta make it last a little longer. So yeah, cheese has been with us for a long, long time. I think maybe 10,000 years. But tell us a little bit more about how you take this plant and make the different varieties. Like, how do you take this crazy chewy kale-like small leaf thing and make cabbage?

• 32:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I was interested in this question, and to be honest, plant parts, I kind of fell asleep during a lot of the plant physiology stuff. And I've got some plant friends who are just like, we're taking your ecologist's card away. And that's totally reasonable.

• 32:32Daniel Whiteson?

  I just remember stamen. That's the only thing I learned in ninth grade biology. And that was the last biology class I took.

• 32:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, there's also pistols and that's exciting. But I found this website called Botanist in the Kitchen. And it's botanists who are also interested about like telling you about how to cook all these cool plants. And so they were saying that the way you get from kale to cabbage, so kale is like leafy. And so if you take the leaves that are like growing along the stem and you lessen the distance between them. So now you've got lots of leaves that are very close to each other. And you start getting like the stem a little bit thicker. And what's called like the meristem at the top also gets a little bit thicker. Then now you've got something that looks like cabbage. So now you've got those leaves, you got more of them, the closer together and a bigger stem. And now you've got cabbage.

• 33:17Daniel Whiteson?

  That's fascinating because the way you describe it, you sort of have to have cabbage in your mind to understand where you're going. It's like this is somebody's target. But was somebody just like, I wonder what happens if you do this to this plant? Like, this is just random. Exploration of like changing this plant and other stuff and seeing if it gets crunchy and delicious. It's incredible.

• 33:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't think we know. I can imagine someone being like, oh, man, this one has a lot more stems with leaves on it that I can eat. That's great. And they just happen to be like shorter distances between the stems. I don't know that the goal was we want cabbage. I think the goal was just like more leaves closer together. That's great. And then it kind of became cabbage.

• 33:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Or maybe some of these things were accidental, right? You had a weird mutation and weird mixture of two things accidentally and created something like, ooh, this is good. Let's call it cabbage.

• 34:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, could be.

• 34:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, fascinating.

• 34:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  So broccoli and cauliflower are about sort of modifying what's happening with the inflorescences, which are flowers that grow together. And so if you've ever left broccoli or cauliflower in your refrigerator for too long, you might see these like yellow flowers opening up. So what you try to do is like, you get a lot of these flowering parts, you get them to grow really close together. And then you cut it before it starts to actually flower. And that's broccoli and cauliflower, as far as I know. This one, I think, started in Italy around the 16th century. It's like a little bit newer. And it required some complicated genetic mutations. Maybe we have a little bit of a better handle on what happened here with broccoli. But I think broccoli is probably my favorite of all of these.

• 34:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  I just feel like that's an important thing to mention. What about you?

• 34:54Daniel Whiteson?

  How much cheese does it take before you enjoy broccoli? Will you eat broccoli pure without cheese?

• 35:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  I will eat broccoli with some soy sauce and without cheese. And the same for Brussels sprouts with some spices. But you know, everything is better with cheese. Let's be honest. What about you? What's your favorite of these?

• 35:13Daniel Whiteson?

  I will eat broccoli raw. You know, chopped broccoli is delicious in a salad. It's crunchy. It's got a little bit of a bite to it. As long as the chunks aren't too big, it's really fantastic raw. Kale, I'm still learning to love. You know, my wife's a big fan of kale. I know kale is supposed to be really good for you. But there's just no way in which kale becomes delicious. Actually, no, I take that back. Somebody once made kale chips. Put them in the oven, roast them at high temperature. They get really crunchy, but not very oily. Kale chips. Are good, but I'm a fan of all these things. Brussels sprouts, I think, are probably my favorite. Which is funny because I remember my dad cooking Brussels sprouts when I was a kid. And my memory is that it was the most disgusting aroma I could imagine. Like when he cooked Brussels sprouts, I had to leave the house. It was revolting.

• 35:58Daniel Whiteson?

  And now I totally love them. And so it's bizarre how you develop these tastes. Like, why did it take decades to learn to love Brussels sprouts?

• 36:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Actually, I was talking to Zach about this this morning, and I didn't go and verify this by finding a scientific paper. But he was saying that part of why people our age like Brussels sprouts now, but we hated it when we're kids, is that actually there has been some artificial selection for flavor. And it has gotten like less bitter and stuff over time. And so part of it maybe is that we're adults or we're cooking it better, blah, blah, blah. But it might actually just taste better, which I feel like also happened to apples in our lifetime.

• 36:31Daniel Whiteson?

  But that's terrible because I've been congratulating myself for learning to love my dad's Brussels sprouts for a long time. And now you're saying I haven't even accomplished that. I'm just eating like baby version of Brussels sprouts, like candy version.

• 36:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm sorry I took that away from you, but you know, I feel like in general, you know, maybe you should give your dad some more credit. Like call him and be like, I'm sorry, your Brussels sprouts were probably as good as they could have been.

• 36:52Daniel Whiteson?

  No, actually, he's British and he cooked them the British way of like boiling them to death. And so that probably also contributed to their disgustingness.

• 36:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no, yeah, you should have emancipated yourself at age 17. That's unacceptable.

• 37:06Daniel Whiteson?

  But I agree, almost all of these are better with cheese. Cauliflower, incredible with cheese, absolutely. Broccoli. It's all delicious. And I hope everybody out there had a really good helping of healthy vegetables to go along with all their pie.

• 37:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think that's important. And now I think we should return to turkey. But now take a physics turn on things. And so we're going to take a break. And then I'm kicking the control of the conversation over to you.

• 37:33Daniel Whiteson?

  All right.

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• 41:28Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, we are back and I hope that you've had a good, full meal. You're done crunching on your turkey wings and slathering your broccoli with cheese. Because we're going to take this conversation away from the biology of Thanksgiving and talk about the physics of turkey.

• 41:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hope you haven't had too much tryptophan.

• 41:49Daniel Whiteson?

  A big part of the Thanksgiving experience is cooking a turkey and most people don't cook turkeys throughout the year. And so when Thanksgiving comes along, you look up that turkey recipe and you invariably do it around two in the afternoon. You're like, okay, what do I need to do to this turkey? And then you look at the recipe and it says, cook for six hours. And you're like, oh, no, I started too late. Or my turkey is still frozen.

• 42:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think I've had three or four instances in my life where the plan was to eat at four and then we ate at like nine because it was like, oh, the turkey, the center was still frozen. Shoot.

• 42:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And you can blame that on people's planning skills, but really the problem is physics. Physics is the reason that turkeys take so long to cook.

• 42:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  And what are the electrons doing wrong?

• 42:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Blame the electrons. They're so negative.

• 42:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  They are.

• 42:36Daniel Whiteson?

  So to think about cooking a turkey from a physics point of view, of course, first thing we do is we assume the turkey is just a sphere, right? So naturally we simplify the problem, assume a spherical turkey.

• 42:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is the go to joke with ecologists was that physicals will like assume a spherical cow. Anyway, so all right, we're assuming a spherical turkey.

• 42:54Daniel Whiteson?

  But here is actually useful because you can't think about all the wiggles and weird shapes of a turkey. Because the crucial thing to think about when you think about the physics of cooking a turkey is how to get the core of the turkey above a certain temperature. Because that's what cooked means. Like, you don't want to eat the turkey when the core temperature is below about 165 Fahrenheit. Because, and this is a little bit of biology, what happens when you cook is you're raising the temperature, you're denaturing the proteins, you're also killing all the microbes, etc. But really, what's happening is a transformation of those proteins. That's why it goes from like gooey and translucent to like white and opaque, because you've transformed these molecules, you've broken them down. Did I get the biology right there, Kelly?

• 43:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that sounds good and delicious.

• 43:36Daniel Whiteson?

  And delicious. So you have this object, the whole thing is cold. It starts at like 50 degrees Fahrenheit or whatever the temperature is of your fridge, and you have to raise the whole thing up to 165 degrees Fahrenheit. But the problem is, you can't inject heat into the center of it. I mean, you could microwave your turkey, but I don't recommend it. If you're roasting it in oven, you apply heat only to the outside. Right? Your oven is like a big bath of hot air. You put the turkey in the oven, the oven heats the outside of the turkey. It doesn't directly heat the inside of the turkey. So from a physics point of view, the reason that it takes so long to cook your turkey is that it takes a while for the heat to propagate from the outside of the turkey to the center of the turkey.

• 44:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  So this is where we reveal to our listeners that I don't go in the kitchen, except to eat the food that Zach has been cooking. And you can't speed that process up by turning the heat up too much because then you're going to burn the outside. Is that right?

• 44:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's right. What you want is an evenly cooked turkey. You want the center to be 165, you want the outside to be 165. Now, the oven temperature is like 350 or so. And so when the core is 165, the surface is going to be hotter. And so if you make the temperature of the oven hotter, 900 degrees or whatever, then you're going to cook the outside faster. The inside will get to 165 and it will get there faster. But when it does, the outside is going to be even hotter. It's going to be totally burned. And so the best way to cook a turkey slowly, this is why like a sous vide, you put the thing in a water bath at like whatever the target temperature is, and you just wait forever until the whole thing comes up to that temperature. And so what's happening here is diffusion of heat.

• 45:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Like the energy is spreading out from the oven to the turkey or from the water bath, in the case of a sous vide, into the object. And that's physics. It's really basic, simple core physics that we see actually in lots of places in the universe.

• 45:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  So does a turducken take longer to cook? Because it's more packed in the center and there's more you need to heat through?

• 45:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, you're violating my spherical turkey assumption here, Kelly. But yes, it's helpful when you cook a turkey not to stuff it, either with stuffing or other birds or even cauliflower or cheese, because you're creating more mass that needs to cook and you're making it more of a sphere. If the air can get into the inside, into the chest cavity, then it can directly heat the inside of the turkey and it goes faster.

• 45:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so if you've got that like chest cavity, that's how the air gets in. You can start heating from the inside. Could you make the like chest cavity even bigger? Or like cut the turkey in half? Why do I have to wait? So long.

• 46:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. So if we understand the details of the physics here, that'll help us think about how to organize our turkey to make it cook faster. And so the way I think about the physics is you have this layer of hot air that's touching the surface of the turkey. And microscopically, what's happening is that the air particles are hitting the turkey, right? The air particles are moving fast. That's what it means for air to be hot, right? Those particles have a lot of energy. They bounce off the turkey and they deposit some of that energy. They hit the turkey at high speed, they come off with less speed, and that speed is now gone to like the vibration energy of the molecules of turkey. So you have this layer of hot air that's heating the outside layer of the turkey. So then how does the inside of the turkey get hot? Well, that now hot layer,

• 46:54Daniel Whiteson?

  the outside of the turkey is heating up the next layer, and that warms up, and that layer heats up the next layer. So the air actually only cooks the most outside layer of the turkey. The rest of the turkey is cooked by the rest of the turkey. So you have like layer N is cooked by layer N minus one. Like imagine your turkey is a series of layers. Each layer is heated up by the layer outside of it that's a little bit hotter than it.

• 47:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Unless you have nothing in the center of the turkey, and then you're getting a little heating from the inside going out.

• 47:26Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. In the case of a spherical turkey, it's simplest because all these layers are just spheres, and you're only cooked by the one outside of it. But even in a non-spherical turkey, still you have a layer of the turkey in the outside that's touching the air, and then inner layer and another layer and another layer. It's just that each of these layers is no longer a sphere. And that takes time. Like, you can't instantly take energy from the air and put it into your turkey, or from the turkey into the next layer of turkey. There's a mathematical equation that describes this. It's called the heat equation. And it's fascinating because you see this equation everywhere in physics. This is one of the things I love about physics, is that there are only a few equations, and they describe so many different things. We talk on this podcast a lot about waves, how waves describe the motion of the ocean, and ripples

• 48:11Daniel Whiteson?

  in the electromagnetic field, and quantum field theory, like wave equation is everywhere. That's because it's very mathematically simple. It's a second time Derivative related to a second spatial derivative. And that's it. Any condition you have where those two things are coupled, the time derivative and the spatial derivative, meaning how fast things are changing over time and how fast things are changing over space, then you're going to get a wave equation and you're going to get wave-like behavior. The heat equation is very similar to the wave equation. It's just a different derivative. It's one time derivative instead of two. And so you see this everywhere. The heat equation describes how heat flows through a turkey. It also describes how water will soak through cloth.

• 48:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Or any time you have diffusion or osmosis, it describes like how salt will spread through something or how your cream will spread through your coffee. The heat equation describes any time something is spreading through something else. The physics of turkeys is actually like the physics of the universe. It's really kind of incredible.

• 49:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I think that you should definitely push the conversation at the family dinner table away from politics and towards more philosophical topics like this.

• 49:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And so the reason a turkey takes so much longer to cook than a chicken, sort of surprisingly longer, is also because of the dimensionality of space itself, right? Like, we live in three-dimensional space. And that means that as your turkey or your bird gets larger, the volume of the bird goes up by the radius cubed, right? The area for the volume of a sphere has an r cubed in it. But the surface area, the way you get heat into it, only goes up by r squared. So as your turkey gets bigger and bigger and bigger, the ratio of surface area to volume gets smaller. And so it's harder to heat that turkey. This is why, for example, elephants get so hot because they're huge, have a lot of volume and relatively little surface area.

• 50:03Daniel Whiteson?

  And I don't know if it's a myth or a factoid, and that's why elephants have such big ears to increase their surface area. I had to dig into that. But it's definitely true that as something gets larger, its volume increases faster than its surface area. And so it's harder to cool or harder to heat. That's core physics.

• 50:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  So if you have a bigger family, you've got to get up earlier in the day to start your turkey.

• 50:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And that's why a turkey takes much longer to cook than like the equivalent mass of chickens. If you took like five chickens and you cooked them, you could cook them a lot faster because there's a lot more surface area for the same amount of meat. And that's why people invented techniques like spatchcocking your turkey. This is where you basically break your turkey in half and flatten it. You remove the backbone and you break the chest cavity because this just allows the air more access. It increases the surface area of your turkey, which cooks it faster.

• 50:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  So why doesn't everybody do that? Is it because it doesn't look as nice in the pictures?

• 50:58Daniel Whiteson?

  It doesn't look as nice. Yeah.

• 51:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 51:00Daniel Whiteson?

  When it comes out, it doesn't have that like holiday turkey kind of sheen to it. I think it's much tastier. It cooks faster and it keeps the breast, the thigh and the ring all at good temperatures. So I'm a big fan of spatchcocking. We do it every year.

• 51:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think every family needs either a sewer or a surgeon so that after you spatchcock it, you can like stitch it back together for the photos and then it's faster and it looks nice.

• 51:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. Plastic turkey surgery, huh? You'd think we would do that in Orange County. We're big fans of appearance down here.

• 51:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, well, maybe that's where it'll start. So sometimes people put turkeys in oil and that is a big cause of fires around Thanksgiving, I believe. So do that carefully.

• 51:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Very dangerous.

• 51:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  And that makes it faster, right? Why is that faster?

• 51:43Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. If you deep fry your turkey, it takes like five minutes per pound as opposed to like 15 minutes per pound. And the reason is just that oil transmits heat better than air. And so heat flows faster into the turkey and the oil gets in all the crevices and stuff like that.

• 52:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ooh. And so as an efficient person, I should start deep frying everything.

• 52:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I suppose so. If you really want to gain some weight on Thanksgiving and you want to do it fast, that's the way to do it. Yes.

• 52:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, maybe we'll spatchcock instead.

• 52:14Daniel Whiteson?

  But to double down on the physics of Thanksgiving, I was thinking about whether there is a nuclear connection here. Nuclear power is physics and you know, we use a lot of energy on Thanksgiving. We're cooking our turkey. It's in the oven for hours. I was thinking about like, where does that energy come from? And what is the physics that provides the energy we use to cook our turkey?

• 52:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So usually when you get excited about an idea, it means my kids are probably in some sort of trouble. How are you going to be cooking the turkey this time?

• 52:43Daniel Whiteson?

  So I wanted to start from a fairly safe direction, which is nuclear reactors. And I was thinking, how many turkeys could you cook with a nuclear reactor? So I did a little calculation here and your oven, it's on for like three and a half hours, but your oven pretty much uses around 240 watts. That's like how much energy it takes to heat up that air to keep it hot. And that doesn't actually depend on like what you put in it. You just turn your oven on, it's going to use around 240 watts. I mean, you put like an ice sculpture in there. It's going to take a little bit more energy. But in general, you just have it on. That's how much energy it costs. So then you can think about how many ovens a nuclear reactor could run simultaneously.

• 53:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 53:24Daniel Whiteson?

  And a modern nuclear reactor runs at about a gigawatt. So a billion watts, a watt is joules per second. So this is a rate of energy, which means that you can calculate fairly easily that a single nuclear power plant can run around 420,000 ovens simultaneously.

• 53:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 53:42Daniel Whiteson?

  So if you took a nuclear power plant and you wired it directly to people's ovens, that's all you did with it for three and a half hours on Thanksgiving afternoon, you could cook almost a half million turkeys with a single power plant, which is kind of incredible.

• 53:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sorry, turkey population.

• 53:59Daniel Whiteson?

  That's true. We're probably really turning off our turkey listeners, huh?

• 54:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 54:03Daniel Whiteson?

  But you know, we're sacrificing some turkeys, but you know, one turkey feeds like 12 people or so. Overall, this is like 5 million people can have turkey cooked by a single nuclear power plant. It's incredible how productive these plants are.

• 54:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, I am pro nuclear power. And so I'm feeling good about this. Are you going to amp things up to something I'm less excited about?

• 54:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, then I was thinking, nuclear power plants. Okay, that's kind of vanilla. What if we tried to cook our turkeys with nuclear bombs instead?

• 54:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  There you go.

• 54:34Daniel Whiteson?

  And this is actually a homework problem I assigned in one of my thermal physics class to think about like the energy required to cook a turkey and the energy released by a nuclear bomb. So I did another calculation, which was to think not just how much energy does it require to run an oven? But what about the actual energy it takes to raise the temperature of the turkey? So you can think about the turkey as a combination of water and protein. And I found some measurements online that said that the specific heat of a turkey, that's how much energy it takes to raise a gram of turkey by one degree is about 2.8 joules per gram centigrade. And so from that, you can calculate like how much energy it takes to take a whole turkey and raise it about 100 degrees. And that's like 1.6 gigajoules.

• 55:19Daniel Whiteson?

  So if you could take that energy and just sort of like inject it into your turkey somehow, you would raise it up about 100 degrees, which is what you need to do to cook it.

• 55:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  How big is this turkey?

• 55:30Daniel Whiteson?

  This is a 15 pounder. So yeah, you're making a meal for the neighborhood.

• 55:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, all right. Well, I don't know. It depends on your family. I think my daughter and I could put down a 15 pounder. My husband's a vegetarian. My son doesn't eat meat.

• 55:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Wait, so Zach's a vegetarian, but he makes the turkey on Thanksgiving?

• 55:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, heck, no. No, no, no. He cooked meat once and turned green. This is when I was pregnant and I was like, oh, can you please make me a gyro? And I've never asked him since in our like almost 20 years together now. But no, my sister in law is amazing and makes the turkey. Or my dad.

• 55:59Daniel Whiteson?

  So 1.6 gigajoules is not like a number we think about a lot. So I tried to translate it into something more practical. If you had like 150 D cell batteries and you ran them for an hour, that's about 1.6 gigajoules. So you could like cook a turkey with about 150 D cell batteries, which I don't know, maybe that'd be useful information for somebody in the end times when they're trying to have a Thanksgiving of yesteryear.

• 56:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  If you raid the Amazon warehouse and find a big store of D batteries, like we're on for Thanksgiving.

• 56:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, you made your turkey like a resistor in some crazy circuit or whatever. But the other alternative, if you're in the end times and there are nuclear bombs going off, is you could try to use the energy released by those nuclear bomb drops to cook your turkey. And so a nuclear blast has a few million gigajoules of energy released.

• 56:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 56:49Daniel Whiteson?

  So that means that there's enough energy in one nuclear bomb dropping to cook about a million turkeys.

• 56:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  That would feed millions of people, right? So then you could be like president of like a community with all of these turkeys that you're passing out. You can be the queen of the end times or the king of the end times.

• 57:07Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. Now, one thing we have factored in here is like how you get the energy from the nuclear blast into your turkey. We talked earlier about like slowly cooking your turkey, you know, put your turkey on a stick and hold it up to the nuclear bomb drop and it's going to get fried. Like it's going to get blasted. Probably you're going to end up with like a cold core and a totally crisp outside. So there's a challenge there and finding the right distance. And, you know, to really be efficient and to cook like all those millions of turkeys, you really need to like build a spherical shell of turkeys that surround the bomb blast. So they all capture that energy. Imagine like a Dyson sphere around the sun, but now you have like a turkey sphere around the nuclear bomb instead.

• 57:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm starting to feel like maybe even during the apocalypse, there's better things you could do with your time. Also, I feel like your strategy of holding it on a stick and it fries the front, but doesn't cook. That's probably not good for the people either. I think maybe you shouldn't be king in the end times.

• 58:02Daniel Whiteson?

  I've never claimed to have any useful skills for the end times. You know, particle physicists, they're the kind of thing you see in society when times are good, you know, not in the lean times. We don't spend energy on particle physics in the lean times. So I'm hoping the civilization crashes after I pass off from this mortal coil.

• 58:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I'm hoping none of your kids decide to take on the family profession. I mean, I guess if they're microbiologists, they might be okay, but.

• 58:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, you know, when my dad retired from the lab, he took up blacksmithing. He got an anvil and a forge in the garage and he like made his own tools and weapons. And so he would definitely be a useful guy to know in the end times, but not me.

• 58:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I mean, maybe when you retire, he can teach you some of that stuff. That would be good.

• 58:45Daniel Whiteson?

  He'll probably force me to choke down his disgusting Brussels sprouts first.

• 58:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yep. No, no good. Forget it. It's not worth it. It's not worth it. Just call it quits.

• 58:54Daniel Whiteson?

  No amount of cheese.

• 58:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  No. All right. Well, we have conveyed lots of not useful information today that would hopefully be fun to talk about.

• 59:03Daniel Whiteson?

  But there's science everywhere and science in everyday life. There's even science in Thanksgiving. So thanks very much, everybody for sharing your Thanksgiving with us.

• 59:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we appreciate you and we appreciate the questions and the input that we get from all of you. So please feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]. We are very thankful for all of you.

• 59:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone.

• 59:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 59:37Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 59:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 59:49Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 59:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms you can find us at D and K Universe.

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