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Our Ruined Lives with Lana Ruck - Ep 16
499 Plays6 years ago
Today’s podcast hostage is Lana...Lana...Lanaaaaaaa Ruck. Lana is a dual Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. She works at Olduvai Gorge as a student researcher at the Stone Age Institute, and she is an avid science communicator through IU's science blog, ScIU (@sciublog).
Lana is a proud Texan, and got her B.A. in Anthropology at Texas Tech University and her M.A. at Florida Atlantic University. She has worked in Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Tanzania, focusing on stone tool technologies and toolmaking techniques. Lana is an interdisciplinary scientist and self-described "stone age neuroscientist."
Her research combines brain imaging techniques with experimental archaeology to explore how our uniquely-human system of technology, language, and cognition evolved. Unfortunately, Lana allowed Carlton to be one of her participants for her dissertation research, and we are very excited to spill the tea on how that disaster went.
Links
- Lana Ruck
- Twitter: @lanaruck
- Instagram: @lanalately
- ScIU Instagram: @sciublog
Contact
- Email: alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com
- Instagram: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Facebook: @alifeinruinspodcast
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Episode Setup
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the archaeology podcast network. Fuck me. I'm drinking. Welcome to episode 16 of a life in ruins podcast. We are back with another edition of our ruin lives. I'm your host, Carl Tugover, and I'm joined by my co-hosts Candy John and David Howe.
Introducing Lana Ruck and Her Archaeological Work
00:00:24
Speaker
Today's podcast hostage is Lana. Lana. Lana. Rock.
00:00:29
Speaker
Lana is a dual PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Cognitive Science program at Indiana University Bloomington. She works at Olduvai Gorge as a student researcher at the Stone Age Institute, and she's an avid science communicator through IU Science blog, SciU. Their Instagram handle is at SciUblog.
00:00:49
Speaker
Lana is a proud Texan and got her BA in anthropology at Texas Tech University and her MA at Florida Atlantic University. She has worked in Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Tanzania, focusing on stone tool technologies and tool making techniques. Lana is an interdisciplinary scientist and a self-described stone age neuroscientist.
Lana's Research and Educational Journey
00:01:10
Speaker
Her research combines brain imaging techniques with experimental archaeology to explore how our uniquely human system of technology, language, and cognition evolved. Unfortunately, Lana allowed Carlton to be one of her participants for her dissertation research. And we are very excited to spill the tea on how that disaster went. Spill the tea, really? Well, thank you, Lana, for being on. If you don't mind starting out by introducing who you are and what you do. We got like a brief intro at the beginning,
00:01:40
Speaker
Sure. So yeah, I'm in my fifth year of getting two PhDs, I guess, at IU in Indiana. Yeah, I'm in two departments, the Department of Anthropology and Cognitive Science, and I'm generally interested in how and why human cognition evolved and whether or not archaeology can tell us anything about that. That's cool. Is getting two PhDs twice as hard as getting one PhD?
00:02:07
Speaker
I would say yes. So I had to do like twice the amount of coursework in the US. A PhD involves coursework in other countries. That's not true, but I had a full set of coursework in Anthro and a full set of coursework in cognitive science. I had to take two qualifying exams and some PhD programs don't have any qualifying exam procedure. So that was pretty difficult, but I only have to write one dissertation. So that's really, that's the winner here.
00:02:33
Speaker
That makes it a little better. Were you always interested in anthropology and archaeology and neuroscience behind that?
00:02:42
Speaker
No, so yeah, I showed up to college not even knowing what anthropology was other than the clothing store. Yeah, so I started off as a marine biology major and I took a biological anthropology class as an arts credit for my science major and I just really liked it and that was my freshman year in college.
00:03:07
Speaker
I just kept taking anthropology classes as I went and if they fit into my semester and like fit a gen ed requirement and then I was like in my second semester my junior year when I realized like I want to keep taking anthro classes but that's not my major maybe I should switch that um so yeah I didn't change my major until basically my senior year in college and I would say
00:03:33
Speaker
Even still today, I think I'm evenly split between archaeology and like biological anthropology.
Shift to Anthropology and Early Research Experiences
00:03:39
Speaker
But yeah, and all the brain sciences stuff came later after I graduated from undergrad and started doing my master's and stuff. What was like your aha moment in anthropology class that you were like, okay, this is what I want to do. So aside from loving everything that I did in courses and just being really into the topic and how it was like,
00:03:59
Speaker
It was more applicable to me, I feel like, to real world things in all my other science classes. But my aha moment, I was taking a human evolution class my junior year and we had to write like a term paper. And on a whim, I decided to write a term paper and like, when did we all evolve to be right-handed? And I didn't really realize, but we don't have an answer to that question. And then it just became fascinating to me. And
00:04:23
Speaker
I've been kind of trying to pursue that topic ever since. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. That's, that's, that's really interesting. So did you end up, you saying you got, you finally changed your major to anthropology your senior year. Did you end up doing a field school as part of that?
00:04:39
Speaker
Yeah, so in between my junior and senior year, I did a field school in Salongo in Ecuador. It's along the coast. And it was a joint field school run through my undergraduate university, which was Texas Tech, and through Florida Atlantic University, which is where I ended up getting my master's after I graduated.
00:04:58
Speaker
So my field school is in Ecuador. I turned 21 there. That was super fun. And I was trying to decide at that point if I really liked archaeology or biological anthropology more, and then realized that I could really make the two work together. That's called a bioarchaeology, right? The conjunction between archaeology and biological anthropology?
00:05:18
Speaker
So I would say yes in most cases, except when you do human evolution research. So if you do paleoanthropology, which is research into our ancestors, our extinct ancestors, you can do like bioarchaeological things like trauma or aging and sexing an individual. But since there are so few fossils, it's not really the same type of thing as like a
00:05:40
Speaker
classic bio-archeology type career, if that's making sense. But like, I'm just as interested in the biological process of evolution as I am in like the cultural process involved in archaeology, if that makes any sense. Yes, it does. It does.
Fieldwork Challenges in Africa
00:05:56
Speaker
So how did you transfer from working in South America to then working at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania? Carlton, open up a map. Where the fuck is Ecuador?
00:06:08
Speaker
South America. Oh my God. Right? Yeah. No, you're right. You're right. Everyone. Everyone. Everyone. I was like, I think it's like next to Bully. I don't know.
00:06:27
Speaker
Okay, let me save y'all's lives here because I worked in South America and in Central America, you lucky little ducks. So yeah, Nicaragua being in Central America, Ecuador being in South America. So yeah, I didn't start going to Olduvai until I was in my PhD program.
00:06:44
Speaker
So I didn't really have access to Africa. If you don't do a field school, there's, I would say a little bit more difficult. You have to become part of a team that works there and get invited and stuff.
00:06:59
Speaker
It's not, it's not unlike a mafia. Can we say that? It's not entirely unlike a mafia, but there are lots of things that are like, anyways, yeah. So I was basically invited, invited by my advisors to start field work in Africa, but it helped that I had been doing field work before. So could like the three of us who've all have years of work in archeology in the United States just show up to Tanzania saying what up bitches, we're here to dig.
00:07:28
Speaker
If you want to pay the $4,000 in flights and then the $1,000 for the permit and then the $4,000 to stay at camp, sure, go ahead and show up. Big. Yeah. So that's some big. Yeah, right. That's tempting, just nothing. Hard to change. Yeah, and so African-based field programs are often a little bit prohibitive to some, prohibitive being a big word, but they're hard to go to for a lot of students just because it is quite expensive.
00:07:56
Speaker
by students, you mean plebes. And why is it so expensive if the camp is leaky? Okay, one. God damn it. Oh my God.
00:08:09
Speaker
We're off to a good start. That's the best joke. That is the best joke I've ever heard, and that's why this is going well. Okay.
00:08:27
Speaker
Nobody's ever made that. What? Oh, you guys are great. I'm so proud of you. Everybody's just, oh my God. All right, Lana, continue, continue. We will be professional and we will listen. So it's cost prohibitive to not only transport your body to Africa, but then also to get the permit to work there as well, because they have some pretty stringent cultural laws. And then on top of that, you have to pay an extra couple grand
00:08:57
Speaker
just to live there in a bunch of leaky tents.
00:09:03
Speaker
Right. And so the important thing about like where that money goes to, it essentially pays for the maintenance of the camp and the wages for the people that we work with. So it's well-spent money. Olduvai is in a protected area. It's called the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority. And it's like a wildlife and cultural protection area. So our fees essentially cover us using this protected government space.
00:09:33
Speaker
So it's worth it. And the camp is amazing. We have wifi, we have flush toilets, we have showers. We're pretty bougie out there. I personally, now that I'm not a plebe, I have a tent that I can stand up in so I can like stand up while I put on my pants. Like it's a big deal. That makes all the difference. Yeah. It's a huge save my life. Yeah. So it's a great camp.
00:09:55
Speaker
Do you end up in, uh, so you said you employ, do you employ people from local, local folks in the areas or, um, cause I know in a previous episode, Dr. Anderson said that they actually work with. Yeah. Local, local communities and try to input that cash they are spending there into the local communities to make them, to help them out for their hard work. Is that something that
Collaborations with Local Communities in Tanzania
00:10:19
Speaker
you guys do there?
00:10:19
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So we employ local Maasai, which are the herders that are endemic to that area or that they're the ones who have lived there for a long time. So we employ very local locals in that sense. But we also bring in other Tanzanians from the nearby city, which is called Karatu.
00:10:39
Speaker
and then the nearby bigger city, which is our kind of academic home base, which is called Arusha. So we kind of bring a crew and pick them up along the way as we drive from the big city into the gorge itself. And Dr. Anderson, actually, he mentioned there's still one Maasai there who worked with the Leakeys in the 70s and 60s. And his name is Matimba. Just real quick, that was not Dr. Anderson, that was Chris Webster. I'm fired.
00:11:09
Speaker
Good job, though. No. But yeah, Matimba's still around. It's really cool. And he just like goes around helping out however he can, even though he's, you know, up in years. But yeah, we work with locals all the time and it's really beneficial. They also work on multiple teams. So I'm on one team at Olduvai, but there are four other teams that work there. And our staff will essentially rotate between different research teams, which all work in the gorge at different points in the year. Have you ever found the Natulian hand axe?
00:11:37
Speaker
That's the amazing thing about Olduvai is there are fossilized bones and just amazing stone tools everywhere. So you can be walking around and there's a hand axe on the surface that has just eroded out from last year or something like that.
00:11:50
Speaker
The site that I've worked at every year since I've been there, which is four years in a row, we specifically chose it because the leakies found a lot of hand axes there in the 60s. So we were targeting hand axes. And yeah, it's entirely different to hold something that you know somebody manufactured 800,000 to a million years ago. It blows my mind. But yeah.
00:12:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's pretty cool. So for our listeners, the Shulian hand axes were the stone tool technology that Homo erectus produced, which is quite currently the second oldest tool technology with the first being old one from Australopithecus. I'm totally fucked
Discussion on Ancient Tool Technologies
00:12:33
Speaker
up. I'm still wrong. No, what did Homo habilis produce?
00:12:37
Speaker
I think that was that. Yeah, Homo habilis was the older one. What was Australpithicus? They just walked in, Tuffy. I don't think they have any evidence for maybe stone tool manufacturing. So if you talk to, her name is Sonia Harmand and she's out of, like she does work originally in Kubifore in Kenya, but she found these old tools in Malawi, which is
00:13:02
Speaker
south of Tanzania, and she calls it the Lomequi technology. That made the cover of Nature maybe three years ago because they think it's three million years old, which is way older than the old one, which is 2.5 million years old.
00:13:17
Speaker
But it's a single, it's like two or three napped cores where it's like only a few pieces, right? It's not an entire site. I know they've been working in those deposits to try and find more examples of the Lomequi, but if that technology industry is true and it's dated that old, then that would be associated with Australia at the seams.
00:13:36
Speaker
Wow. Hot topic. Nature seems to like publishing things with a few little stone tools in it. Well, yeah, that and, uh, you know, mammoths that were hunted and 120,000 years ago, but 120 in California, it's a whole fucking deal. Bob Kelly protested it.
00:13:56
Speaker
rightly so. But Steve Holland, he's my boy. I work in Lynch, that's where he's from. Anyways, well, since we only have like a couple minutes left of this segment, does anyone have any more further questions regarding like working in Africa or the Central America or South America? Oh, wait, Lana, you have something?
00:14:14
Speaker
I just wanted to go back. I totally agree that the things that nature and science publish often are very high sexiness, not necessarily reproducible or well regarded sometimes by scientists, but the Lomechwe tools are definitely, they are manufactured tools. The question about that one is more about the date, whether or not it's that old, but I've seen casts of the pieces and you know,
00:14:41
Speaker
classic everything you want in a stone tool, non-local materials at the site. It's an interesting thing. It's just like one of those things where when somebody makes this big discovery, you're just going to have to wait. In the case of archaeology, sometimes a decade before we either collect more data or end up not having enough to stand by it.
00:15:02
Speaker
Sure. I thought that was going to be my comment. It just takes time, especially because the actual preservation of that stuff is, you know, we only have a few skeletons of folks living back in that, that time, let alone stone tool technology. So I'm super interested to see how that goes, you know, in the future and see if that's going to be like a really super hot topic in archeology. These look legit.
00:15:29
Speaker
Yeah, we teach it. We teach it at our intro to archaeology class. Like not as it's verified, but like we tell our students like, hey, there is this possible other stone tool tech that's older. And then like also, you know, stone preserves, but you know, it's possible that there might have been wood tools being produced, you know, kind of like similar to chimpanzees, maybe more intricate or compound, but we'll never see those in the archaeological record because you know, they deteriorate and definitely over, you know, millions of years. Yeah. Yeah.
00:15:58
Speaker
One last thing I'll say on that, when I teach about the Lumetri, I like to teach it as like somebody really, really clever, maybe 3 million years ago, bang these rocks together and turn them into tools. And for whatever reason, there wasn't enough of a like cultural or like collaborative structure to make that pass on to a whole population. And you do see this a lot in primates where individuals will invent something and then fail to pass it on to other
00:16:26
Speaker
individuals in the group. So it's like something that failed to go viral, like a one single event type thing, which is cool to think about. Like this podcast? Maybe if they were vegetarian, they would have been more intelligent to pass it on.
00:16:44
Speaker
Oh, you're, you're quoting that dude from my comments. Yeah. Okay. I thought you were okay. Yeah. This guy tried to tell us that my ethno account that people couldn't have done. I don't remember what it was. Carlton, you remember what it was like? How do we know people killed?
00:17:02
Speaker
Uh, you know, stuff like killed things because like, where's the water? And like, there's blood everywhere, which is blood and throats. It was like the craziest argument. There was just like, what? Like people need to be around water. And we know that people ate meat and it was just the funniest goddamn conversation. Bones. Cut mark bones. Done. Conversation over.
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah, that's all, that's literally all we had to say, but I was aggravated when I was replying to him. Cause every now and then David would be like, look at this idiot. And then I just get, for some reason I get defensive over David and I just have to go like shut down people. I'm too nice. I just sick my bulldog. I remember the Carlton's like, yeah, explain that with some data bitch. It's just, it's great.
00:17:51
Speaker
All right, well, I think that wraps up the first section. We're going to, you know, we'll be back with Lana Ruck from University of Indiana Bloomington here in Segment 2. So, enjoy these amazing commercials by some of our colleagues, and especially our good producer, Tristan Boyle. All right, welcome back. This is session two of episode 16 of the Life and Earns podcast, and we're here with Lana Ruck. So, Lana, real quick,
00:18:20
Speaker
You've talked about some pretty interesting concepts in terms of thinking about when did humans first become right-hand dominant. For your dissertation research, what sort of data could you collect? Just give us the elevator pitch for what you do and why you do it, and maybe some funny stories that go along with some of the participants you've seen.
Research on Handedness and Tool-Making
00:18:39
Speaker
Okay, so yeah, I'm interested in right-handedness and I'll get into why that is in a minute. But what I'm doing for my dissertation is I'm taking right-handed people and left-handed people and I'm training them to make really simple stone tools. They watch a really short video and then they spend about an hour just napping cores, just banging rock and trying to get pieces off. And after they learn a little bit about how difficult it is to make stone tools, I put them in an MRI brain scanner.
00:19:09
Speaker
So this is like a 3.5 million dollar machine that's used really really often in psychological research. As far as people who study things like stone tool making in the context of brain imaging, there are maybe like seven of us in the world. So yeah, so I put them in a brain scanner.
00:19:27
Speaker
and I show them videos of tools being made and I have them do some language tasks and some other tasks in the scanner and basically see what parts of the brain are they using in order to process that kind of information and is there overlap between what they're doing when they're doing language and what's going on in their brain when they're watching tool making and the handedness thing. It's difficult to explain because there's so many little components to it.
00:19:52
Speaker
But basically your brain is organized into two hemispheres and right-handers have language centers in the left hemisphere of their brain and they also have tools like tools and tool making that's also on the left half of their brain. And so people think that that whole system evolved as one thing instead of as separate components because evolution doesn't start from now where it works on pre-existing things.
00:20:19
Speaker
So there's lots of hypotheses about how tool making and language could have co-evolved. Yeah. So I basically teach people to make stone tools and then see what it looks like in their brain. What, what's going on when they process tool making information? Does it have anything to do with language networks and how does that relate to their handedness? Yeah. So just to clarify, you put people in a $3.5 million machine.
00:20:44
Speaker
Yes, it is a giant magnet and it works by essentially tracking molecules in blood.
00:20:51
Speaker
It tracks like magnetic molecules, hemoglobin. And so when your brain is being particularly active and neurons are firing, it consumes blood in a localized area, in a very small area of the brain, and the machine can pick that up. So you like play videos or, you know, actually it might actually be a good idea to get Carlton to describe what he did in the scanner when he wasn't sleeping, of course, because
00:21:18
Speaker
He was my worst participant I have ever run for the whole study. And I've met like 35 people so far. I was going to ask why you let Carlton within a mile of a $3.5 million machine.
00:21:40
Speaker
Remind me to tell the story of when he was at my experiment. So three things happened. Lana asked me to participate and I of course said yes and she paid me for it, which was cool, which I feel really bad for because I was the worst participant.
00:21:55
Speaker
Step one is she had me do these tests. It looked like a pegboard with different activities on it and to track how quickly I could do it with one hand versus the other hand. This was all recorded. Then the next thing I had to do, she put me at the station. I was being video recorded and audio recorded. And she basically had a bunch of Lego blocks out and she had like designs of Lego. She's like, I need you to build this. And I was like, okay. And I fucking love Lego. So I was all about it. And I was putting them together.
00:22:24
Speaker
And just to see how quick I could do it and all this other stuff, and it was fine. And I couldn't manipulate the pieces before I placed them. I had to have one hand on the table, so I had to tape one at a time and put it on, which was fucking infuriating, because after being a Lego connoisseur all my life until I became an adult when I was 20,
00:22:42
Speaker
I have my own system. Anyways, that's irrelevant. And then I had to do a puzzle, and I vividly remember this puzzle, and I know she does, and here's some audio recording of that puzzle. So yeah, I was pretty obnoxious during that whole thing, and I kind of figured out the experiment, because there was a little, there was, I could tell there, it took me a while, but she had divided these things equally, I realized later on, and that there was different spaces that technically, if they were from the left side, I should have been using my left hand.
00:23:09
Speaker
And if they're from right side, but because I'm an idiot and Lana's behind me, I go, oh, I get it now. And she's like, shut the fuck up. Stop. Just keep doing what you were doing. Don't change anything. And I was like, oh, I kind of figured out the experiment. I was like, oh, this is got you. And then the entire time I wouldn't shut up. And then she's like, you need to be silent during this thing. But I'm like sitting there complaining.
00:23:30
Speaker
about why is the spinosaurus aegypticus in the wrong setup? And why are some of the dinosaurs of this puzzle have skin and some are fossilized? And I'm like, where's Mr. Cardigan's shoes? So that was all one day. And then we came back. And to be fair, the night before, she had company over. And as adults do, we drank. But the MRI was at 8 o'clock in the morning.
00:23:59
Speaker
It was at nine 30. It was at nine 30 in the morning and we didn't go to bed.
00:24:08
Speaker
It was a late night. I walk in there. I'm wearing my dinosaur space pants, which many of you are familiar with. I'm just comfortable. Lana is one of the guys that works the MRI. He was there. And what is his name again? His name is Isaiah. Isaiah. Isaiah, yeah. He had a very terrible first impression of you with your bleary eyes and your space pants. And then you get in the machine and you fell asleep.
00:24:39
Speaker
This machine, the way it works is like by making these radio frequency pulses. Have any of you ever had an MRI? The point is it's fucking loud.
00:24:52
Speaker
And so it's a loud machine and there are rocks banging and videos playing in front of this guy's eyes and he's falling asleep. And I'm like, oh my God, like this is the MRI technician's holiday because it was Thanksgiving break. He came in special to run this scan and he's just like, what the fuck?
00:25:12
Speaker
So we've talked about it after the fact and Carlton has grown on this man over time, but he wanted me to say something specifically about this. He said when Carlton walked in, he looked like he came out of the eye of terror, which is some nerdy joke that I guess they share now.
00:25:33
Speaker
But the other thing I wanted to say is this co-host of yours is literally so stupid that he still doesn't get the point of the puzzle because he described it wrong.
00:25:47
Speaker
God damn it. If I could maybe explain that for a second, how do we feel about that? Yes. Yes. Yeah, please do. Okay. Remind me, I have a question about science. Okay. Okay. Oh my God. Fuck me.
00:26:10
Speaker
Okay, okay, okay, okay. So one thing about my research is there's this idea that you can use the evolution of handedness
00:26:19
Speaker
as a proxy behavior to study the evolution of this system division in the brain. If you're right-handed, we know how your brain is organized, and presumably if you're left-handed, your brain should be oppositely organized. That's the idea. It turns out that a lot of recent studies in neuroscience, they are not finding that to be the case. They're finding that left-handed people have brain organization really similar to right-handers.
00:26:49
Speaker
Does that make sense? Okay, so then it throws the whole evolutionary track, like the anthropological perspective way out of whack. But me coming from anthropology and realizing like, how do we measure handedness in humans versus how do we measure it in other animals? I realized that like billions of dollars of psychological research, the way that they assess handedness is by giving people a 10 question survey and that's it.
00:27:15
Speaker
That's the only measure. So I would put people in a $3.5 million brain scanner, or I would sequence their DNA for thousands of dollars. But my actual measure of whether they were right or left handed would be one single 10 question survey. So no actual physical use. Exactly. Of the left. Exactly. Oh my gosh.
00:27:35
Speaker
Right. So realizing this, I was like, well, what if it's actually the case that left-handers are really right-handed in their behaviors too? And then it makes sense for them to have like a right-hander looking brain because they're actually using their right hand a lot more often than they acknowledge.
00:27:51
Speaker
So before I even train people to do the stone tool making or put them in the scanner, they come in and do all these tasks in my lab and their hand performance skill measures and hand preference skill measures. So what I'm actually measuring when people are picking up Legos or playing with the puzzle, I'm measuring which hand they're choosing. And like so left handers who will score as very left handed on this 10 question survey, they then come in the lab and they use their right hand almost 90 percent of the time.
00:28:20
Speaker
And that's regardless of whether they're reaching for a puzzle piece or a Lego piece on the right side of their body or on the left side. So they're reaching across the table with their right hand when they should actually be reaching with their left hand. And right-handers do not do that. Right-handers almost solely use their right hand. Like Carlton noticed. He was like, wow, I haven't touched a single piece with my left hand. And I'm like, you're perfectly on brand right now, but now that you've realized it, you're fucking up my data,
00:28:49
Speaker
Can you just go back to being a normal right hander, please? We really want that. So yeah, so from the evolutionary side, I have a lot of things on my dissertation. But from the psychological side, what I'm essentially doing is a critique of a methodology that is so pervasive that pretty much any study on handedness might be based on a flawed measure of handedness. And that's really concerning from that field's perspective.
00:29:18
Speaker
So you're walking in as an anthropologist walking into psychology, which is a soft science, be like, what up, bitches? Y'all are wrong. That's the goal. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, most people are really, yeah. Um, most people get scared by that because so one really good example, there's this data bank and it's called the UK biobank and it has 30,000 participants.
00:29:44
Speaker
all of whom have had their entire genome sequenced, all of whom have been scanned with these fancy brain imaging techniques, and they've done like every psychological assessment that you can do. These people were paid thousands of dollars to do basically every psychological assessment ever made, but their handedness measure is a 10-question survey.
00:30:02
Speaker
And these are the things that you see in like IFL science or discover whatever like left handed people are schizophrenic or left handed people are really creative or things like that. And it's like actually how y'all are defining left handers is a little scary.
00:30:17
Speaker
So some anthropologists is just coming in here and changing the game on this. I'm trying to, but I want to do it very empirically. I have an idea that they're doing things wrong, and there are a couple studies that are coming out with these naturalistic measures of handedness that are calling into question this survey. But the psychologists use it for a really good reason, and it's expedient. It's really quick and easy to do, and most of them actually use it just to exclude left-handers from their studies.
00:30:44
Speaker
because there's this idea that left-handers have weird brains. You don't really want them in your sample because they add variation. So they use the 10-question survey, realize you're left-handed, and then they never talk to you again. The real problem is people who are actually researching handedness and then measuring it wrong.
00:31:00
Speaker
But it's like time will tell if I can convince the field that we should be a little bit skeptical. But this is what I like about being an interdisciplinary researcher. I think if I hadn't come from like the ape handedness literature where people have to watch apes interact with objects and with each other in order to find out if they're left or right hand dominant, I wouldn't have ever thought of it. I would have thought a survey is totally adequate.
00:31:25
Speaker
but we can't give surveys to infants. We can't give surveys to apes. We can't give them to other animals. And it's like, maybe we should be watching human behaviors too. So yeah.
00:31:39
Speaker
I didn't do that. That's amazing. Wow. Can you give us an example of, or if you can remember, like one of the questions on the survey for handedness, like, is it like, do you wake up in the morning and use your right foot first after you get out of bed or?
00:32:03
Speaker
Yeah, no, solid question. And I'm such a nerd that I know all of the questions pretty much by heart, but it's basically a rank scale. So you have the choice for all of these questions you have. I always use my right hand. I sometimes use my right hand. I equally use both hands. I always use my, or I sometimes use my left hand. I always use my left hand. So it goes from very right hand bias to very left hand bias. Does that make sense? Oh yeah.
00:32:28
Speaker
Okay. And then the questions are, it literally just says the word writing. And so for me, I would say writing, I always use my right hand.
00:32:38
Speaker
And then the next question is fork. When you're using a fork, what hand do you use? I always use my right hand. Another one is opening the lid of a box. Like which hand is on the lid? Another one is dealing a deck of cards. Which hand is the dealing hand? They have a question about, this one's actually really funny now because we all have like Roombas and shit and we don't clean our houses because we're too busy. But one of them is which hand is on top when you use a broom?
00:33:07
Speaker
And they've found that that one, if you give the same person the survey over and over again, they just keep switching back and forth their answer. So even within somebody, they're not self-aware enough to know the correct answer for them, what hand they have on the top for a broom. What is a broom? So it's questions like that. Exactly. Right. Precisely. So yeah, it's questions like that. So from a primate or a psychological or an anthropological standpoint,
00:33:34
Speaker
and speaking to a clearly very intelligent person, what do you think the function of handedness is evolutionarily?
00:33:44
Speaker
Oh, that's such a good question. I think it facilitates social learning to match your person that you're learning from, but it's a lot more complicated than that. Handedness is probably actually a consequence of genes that code for hemispheric specialization in the brain. So it's not actually about handedness in the beginning.
00:34:06
Speaker
It's more about, we need to make a brain with two hemispheres and we need to divide tasks between those hemispheres in order for the brain to be able to do so much at the same time. And this is way before our human lineage, this is before primates, like this goes back all the way to mammals, especially as a brain.
00:34:27
Speaker
My mouth is like wide the fuck open. It's a fascinating topic. And so the thing is, is like, what's really unique about humans is this like 85% right handed, 15% left handed split. That is super unique in our species. Like individual apes will have a right or left hand preference, but it's randomly distributed between left and right. There's some tantalizing evidence that you might inherit handedness from your parents.
00:34:55
Speaker
Um, even in apes, but it's like something somewhere after we split from our other ape ancestors drove this population to go towards one direction. And we don't really understand what it is. I think it's learning really complicated by manual skills, skills that you required task differentiation between the hands.
00:35:16
Speaker
And stone tool making is the perfect example of that. It's a really difficult task. You have to practice at it. You have to have good task division between your hands. And that's something that would really easily, because it's such an adaptive behavior, could be part of this whole going from a 50-50 population for right-handers and left-handers to something like 90-10 really quickly, because you're all trying to learn these skills in a social sense.
00:35:43
Speaker
it benefits you to all be on kind of the same page. But the whole handedness literature, like why do left-handers still exist? Good question, we don't know yet. Was this like a fast evolution or a slow one? We don't know yet. How would we even assess handedness evolution in the archaeological record? You could do it with paired long bones of an individual. So is everyone here right-handed? Me, you, Carlton. What up? You know I'm right-handed. I took your goddamn test.
00:36:13
Speaker
I don't know, you really fucked up, so you're throwing up. But so right-handers and left-handers, like the hand that you prefer, you end up with more robust and stronger bones when you die. So if you have paired long bones, you could do that. But in the hominins or in our ancestors, there were like 10 people with paired bones. So anyways, I'm going on a really long tangent. But my original research, my master's was
00:36:41
Speaker
Stone tools are the most available evidence for assessing handedness, because if you can tell the handedness of an individual tool maker using either the tools they make or the debitage, which is their byproducts of manufacture, if you can tell in that whether somebody was right or left handed, then you could make like a site-wise population estimate, then a regional estimate, and you could do this through time and see when we went from something like 50-50 to something like 90-10.
00:37:07
Speaker
And then that would also tell you a general timeline for when this very specialized hemisphere task division of labor happened in the brain. That's the big idea. Well, that's absolutely amazing, Lana. But the big hand on the clock is telling us tickety-tock, time to stop. And so we'll be right back after the rest of our listeners sit there in an existential crisis, look, trying to reveal and think back on all the
00:37:34
Speaker
how handy they are. So yeah, we'll be right back with a segment three of a life and ruins podcast episode 16. And we're back with the last segment of episode 16 with Lana Ruck. So one of the coolest things about this study was when Miss Ruck had me producing old one stone technology, she recorded it and made a bunch of gifts out of it, which you guys saw in our life and ruins podcast back in
00:37:59
Speaker
November. Would you like to tell us what inspired you to do that and some of the other things that go along with your social media presence?
00:38:08
Speaker
So I'll start by saying that I'm actually quite bad at social media, but one of the things that I'm really passionate about, aside from my actual research, is science communication or PSYCOM, which you guys have talked about before on this podcast. So I think making things accessible, like this is how we collect our data and today Carlton's like banging rocks together isn't that cool?
00:38:31
Speaker
That's part of science. I'm super passionate about that. As you guys intro'd me, I write and editor at large, so I'm technically like the boss of a science blog at IU that's run through the College of Arts and Sciences. So I do a lot of science writing. I've also written for psychology newsletters, and I'm starting to pitch to bigger outlets like Sapiens and Brain Facts.
00:39:00
Speaker
I'm trying to get a fellowship to work with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. So on top of all the things that I do in my like, I don't know, professional life in the strict sense, I also do a lot of psych-com. I leave workshops.
00:39:15
Speaker
So yeah, making gifts of you guys and giving them to you so that you can post on social media. Like today I was part of a science experiment where I learned to make stone tools. Like people love that. And I think they should, because I think we should be getting people out in the real world excited about what we're doing. I think it should be a really valued part of our job. Yeah, absolutely. And especially if you can make a incriminating gifts of Carlton, that would, that would be great. I have those. Like what? I don't know. Just something incriminating.
00:39:47
Speaker
I'll work on it. I'm sure I've got some content in there. Yeah. I mean, with the way he generated data, just woof, there was a lot going on, man. Can we get a picture of his MRI? Yeah, you can actually. He would have to consent to it because, you know, like I have to follow ethics. Is it just a big black hole? There's nothing. Yeah, it's just liquid. There's nothing there. I don't know how he's doing everything he's doing, which is just fucking up my data collection. So it's really not that much.
00:40:17
Speaker
So, okay. Kind of segueing. So how do you find it doing Sci-Com within an academic context? Is that particularly difficult?
00:40:32
Speaker
I would say yes. So one thing that I want to mention, essentially, the blog I run and all the science communication that I do is technically part of my university. The College of Arts and Sciences wanted to start a science blog, and that was four years ago. And we did. And I lead a lot of my workshops through that. But so the way our blog works is we publish once a week, and we're written by graduate students and postdocs. So every week on the blog is somebody else's content.
00:41:02
Speaker
We have regular writers and we have guest writers, but one thing that's really difficult about producing content 52 weeks a year when you're writers or grad students is that we're really, really busy. The market for academics right now means that basically PhD students and postdocs are bending over backwards and killing themselves to try and produce a good enough CV to get a job in a market where there are not enough jobs.
00:41:30
Speaker
And like a science blog doesn't necessarily like add to your CV enough to almost justify the time a little bit.
00:41:40
Speaker
Yeah, so there's this pervasive idea that things like Psycom or even teaching or basically anything you do that isn't getting you towards a peer-reviewed publication is a waste of your time. And so we've had bloggers who have actively fought with their advisors to try and write for the blog. We've had people have to quit because their advisor told them, if you keep doing this, you're going to have to leave my lab.
00:42:05
Speaker
And it's really unfortunate because we, people who write for the blog and stay on and work with us tend to find it one of the more rewarding things that they do in their academic life. And I think this is a huge topic that needs to be discussed more in academia because I think, like, things like Psycom have a way higher impact on the real world than, in my view, a peer-reviewed publication does.
00:42:31
Speaker
So yeah, exactly. Right. So like I have published a decent amount of articles cause I'm on the grind, but like I maybe have 10 or 15 citations to my name. Every blog post I write gets 400 or 500 viewers.
00:42:47
Speaker
I can say like I feel very fortunate having the advisor that I do who I mean this podcast as David and in concrete can attest to takes up a considerable amount of time.
00:43:03
Speaker
And my advisors never once asked me to stop. There was mention of it, but it wasn't from him. He supported it. And I know, like, our friend, one of my colleagues, Devin Pettigrew, Instagram at ar.attolatal, is just starting his public outreach via Instagram because he basically saw David's ethnocynology and said,
00:43:30
Speaker
Huh, that'd be cool. And I was like, dude, you do some cool ballistics research with ancient weapons like people would eat that shit up. Yeah, he's off to like a fantastic start. It looks like he's been doing it for a while.
00:43:40
Speaker
It's basically because I tell him what you've told us to do with our podcast on Instagram and what you do. I basically was like, this is the model that you follow. And we featured Devin, both as my first instant minute archaeology. And then like, we've done a couple of things with him. And I mean, I was, he was, he's older. He's like 35, 36. And he was like, I don't understand this. And we were in the lab talking about it. And my, our advisor came in and was like, what are you guys? He's like, what the fuck are you talking about?
00:44:08
Speaker
And we were explaining it to him. And then our advisor was like, no, that's very important. Keep doing that. And, uh,
00:44:16
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of, it's like really nice to get that because like, you know, a lot of my colleagues, especially, you know, since I'm still in academia, they're like, I don't know how you do what you do and do what you're supposed to do. And it's, you know, it's a, it's a balancing act, but like if, if, you know, doing this podcast has made me realize what's most important in my life. I thought for a while it was academia and like teaching at a university and through this,
00:44:43
Speaker
And through the work that I do at the Pawnee Nation, I realized like, you know what, what matters most to me is making sure that the Pawnee Nation knows their history and that the American public knows their science. Like this is what I look forward to every week. And this is like, I think this is more important. Like, you know, people talk about my thesis, maybe like 20 people have read my thesis, but
00:45:07
Speaker
more than a couple hundred have seen my YouTube video on my thesis and like hear the podcast especially. Like I love my research, don't get me wrong, but my research is for the academic community to show that I'm valid. Whereas this podcast and the Instagram and like, I don't have many publications, but I have a lot of presentations trying to talk to the public like this is what I'm doing and this is what matters. And it's, you know,
00:45:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's also probably, you know, why I get defensive over David's ethnosynology when people ask fucking stupid things or no, they don't ask stupid things when they say stupid shit. That's not like a question. That's very much like, well, and it's like, no, this is this is why. Anyways, that's I'll get off my soapbox. Yeah, that was a big old soapbox. And I like had to totally agree with you 100 percent.
The Role of Science Communication in Academia
00:46:00
Speaker
I think the reason I'm allowed to keep doing this icon stuff that I do
00:46:04
Speaker
is because I'm still also doing all the other stuff, right? I'm publishing, I'm doing research, I'm writing my dissertation, I'm teaching, and it's exhausting, but my perspective of it is everything I've learned from going to sci-com conferences or speaking to a public audience, especially as an interdisciplinary researcher,
00:46:28
Speaker
It has helped me in my development as a professional. So like when I had to write my two qualifying exams, because I'm in two programs, everybody on my committee was like, these were some of the clearest qualifying exams papers we've read from students. And it's like, because I know how to pick an audience and write to them, not from academic training, but from thinking about it from a psych-con perspective.
00:46:53
Speaker
I really love teaching. Next year, I'm taking a teaching fellowship and my teaching is way better because of the work I did in Sycom and the work that I still do in Sycom. For me, it's really good to get support from other academics.
00:47:09
Speaker
It's a little bit frustrating that it comes under the lens of, wow, you're really good at publishing and you're really good at teaching. We see that you also do the Sycom stuff, keep it up. Whereas I'm like, the Sycom stuff is what's making me good at teaching and publishing. I wish you guys would understand that.
00:47:28
Speaker
I think it's going to become a really, really, really big conversation in the field in the next few years. You know, people are starting to have like Cycom conferences specifically in anthropology and people are starting to realize that Cycom and service and things like that aren't
00:47:47
Speaker
like lesser than what we do as a community. And one thing that I really did want to bring up, like I am a decently well-accomplished early career researcher because I have a lot of institutional support.
00:48:00
Speaker
Like I'm well-funded, I thank my advisors for that. They tolerate my passion for SciComm and teaching and things like that. But like these are conversations that need to happen writ large across academia. Because essentially what we're doing right now is we're taking public money to do a bunch of research to publish it in journals that are like accessible only by paid users, which are universities. So the public who pays taxes to fund our research can't even read what we write.
00:48:29
Speaker
let alone can they read it once they buy it because we're writing it in such a way that doesn't make any fucking sense.
00:48:36
Speaker
And so I think like thinking about what's most impactful as an academic is like working on our access and values models. Like we need to make access more open and that includes like de-emphasizing publishing and peer reviewed articles that are only accessible by us and increasing the way we talk and the way we care about audiences who don't know the words we want to use.
00:49:01
Speaker
I think it's going to have us question our values as an academic society. Do we want to keep valuing these peer-reviewed publications as the biggest part of a CV? Or do we want more holistic individuals that maybe don't publish as much, but are doing other things that have a broader impact outside the university? All you said was absolutely brilliant.
00:49:26
Speaker
I think that's a good cry and a good, or not a good cry, but a good rallying kind of idea that we need to all work on. Because at this point, as Dr. Anderson has said, we're being beat on the social media front. We're getting absolutely tore apart by these ancient aliens, these Graham Hancock's. They're more famous than the actual researchers who are doing
00:49:54
Speaker
the good research and figuring out the super interesting things that have happened in the human past. It almost seems like that should be valued, like you had mentioned, that should be valued more because we are losing this battle right now. There's no doubting that. There are three things that really, really keep me up at night. One is the climate crisis. The climate crisis slash capitalism.
00:50:24
Speaker
Two is the academic job market being the way that it is. And three is the rise of like science skepticism, which is like the rise of science skepticism. And I think all of these things are related. And it's like, if we know that we're producing too many PhDs trying to get traditional academic jobs,
00:50:49
Speaker
And we also know that we're losing the battle for science skeptics and pseudoscience because we're not communicating to those people that those other people are getting in touch with. We're not accurately choosing our audience. We're choosing other academics who aren't going to get jobs, probably, as an academic. If we keep making these bad choices,
00:51:13
Speaker
Like, what right do we have to complain when people don't believe that indigenous societies could have built amazing structures and had complicated societies, right? Or like, what right do we have to complain about the job market when we're really doing nothing to train people for other jobs, when it's clear that they're in demand and they would be valued?
00:51:36
Speaker
in broader society. And so I get really frustrated by it, and it really upsets me. But at the same time, I'm like, I'm on the grind. I'm in it.
Challenges in Academia and Vision for the Future
00:51:46
Speaker
I'm partaking in a system that I really wish was different. And I currently don't know if the better way to fix things is from the inside or the outside. And I think that's how a lot of people probably feel right now.
00:52:00
Speaker
And it's just another one of those things where we're just going to have to wait and see what happens. But we're going to need brave individuals. I love that you guys talked to Dr. Anderson about his career. Another person that I really, really enjoy is his colleague at Forbes. Her name is Dr. Christina Kilgrove. She left a 10-year job to be a freelance science writer.
00:52:23
Speaker
That's a bold move. That's a really bold move. Some people who are just like, I'm thinking about getting my PhD and maybe not even pursuing a tenure-tramp job at a research institution, which is exactly what I'm being trained to do. And that would be a scary move, but it's like, do we need to make those scary moves? Do we need to make the scarier move of getting a job at an R1 university and then from the inside dismantling it?
00:52:47
Speaker
Who knows? But I think that's something that our generation is really pushing the field on. And it makes me really fucking excited that everybody is on the same page trying to make things better. I'd like to add just to kind of like piggyback onto that.
00:53:05
Speaker
When I first saw your CV, I mentioned to you how impressive it is. And for our listeners, we ask all of our guests to send us their CV. So we know what content to ask and cool things. And once again, we find someone else who's associated with Wyoming archaeology, because Lana did some time at Hell Gap. Can't get away from Wyoming, apparently. It was only one week, and I only spent one day at Hell Gap. I was actually in the broader Guernsey area. Thank you.
00:53:31
Speaker
I still met Marcel Kornfeld. Anyways, do you remember what you said when I complimented you on your CV? Probably not the exact words, but I know it was probably something self-deprecating because as much as I do, I still feel terribly anxious and behind all the time. That's another huge problem that you guys have talked about on this podcast.
00:53:54
Speaker
With the paleontologist. What was her name? That was Yeah, you guys talked about like and this is a huge topic that younger generations are bringing up to imposter syndrome is real you can work hard and concerted and be really accomplished and be really impressive and the way things are for better or worse you still feel like you need to be doing more and
00:54:18
Speaker
And I feel like a lot of us are so good at what we do. And it's also a problem that we passionate about it, right? My work is my passion. So I'm capable of blurring lines between the two and overworking and everybody else is doing the same thing. And I feel like we're all just like upping the ante on each other and it pushes the science forward, but it's like, I have done quite a lot of things and I still sometimes feel like I'm not doing enough.
00:54:46
Speaker
And I think that's just a really unfortunate consequence of the labor landscape of higher education right now. So we're like, we're pushing the discipline forward on the backs of people who might be suffering from extreme mental health problems. Absolutely, absolutely. And it's like, at what cost if you're not making the impact you need to with the audiences you need to, and if you're not good for the people within your discipline,
00:55:13
Speaker
And if everybody's aware of this, but we can't really solve the problem because we're in this broader neoliberal train wreck that's going on in higher education.
00:55:23
Speaker
I'm not saying there are any easy solutions. Another thing that I want to circle back to is, I have a really impressive CV because I was well-funded. When I got rejected the first time I applied to PhD programs, I was like, I'm never going to get rejected again. How do I do that? That's a ridiculous perspective.
00:55:44
Speaker
We need to think about these things and try to collaborate on them more than we need to be producing the peer-reviewed research that's getting us the jobs that end up being toxic towards the end. It's like a loop that we can't get out of.
00:56:01
Speaker
One more thing I want to mention. There's a wonderful, wonderful article. I don't assign it when I teach classes, but I offer it to kids to read. It's called The Neoliberal Arts, How College Sold Its Soul to the Market. It's from Harper's Magazine. It's from 2012. It is wonderfully written. It is about this topic. I really think if you're into this, the last 10 minutes of our conversation, read this article.
00:56:29
Speaker
And then start thinking about how you can make moves to make things better. Well, I definitely, uh, I'm a huge proponent of that. Yeah. I hope to Christ, whoever's trying to hire me at the end of my PhD. And if I sit there and be like,
00:56:43
Speaker
Mr. Gover, how come you haven't published much? Do you see my podcast? I have over 20,000 downloads on my podcast. Don't listen to episode seven about me being in Ukraine. Don't listen to that one. That one never happened, but you can listen to the other. So, yeah, there's going to be a day of reckoning for me, but, you know, in a couple of years. That's the thing that I was applying or like fixing my resume, like recently, I'll say that much. And like, I was like, what, how do I like,
00:57:12
Speaker
qualify what I've been doing. Like I've written like a couple publications worth of words on my Instagram, but like, is that professional to put like professional Instagram on, you know, on my, my CV, but like it is something that has research and like is cited and like, you know, it's not peer reviewed, but I just feel weird about that.
00:57:34
Speaker
Right. And I think that that's one of the issues is that we don't yet know how, you know, academics are obsessed with metrics. And because it makes like calling the herd or it's sending applications easier.
00:57:50
Speaker
We don't yet know as a discipline how to evaluate science communication or outreach or service type work. And at the very least, our generation is game to go ahead and try. Right. And that's where this whole like maybe.
00:58:07
Speaker
Taking the system over from the inside would be a good thing like what if hiring committees did value service and i know some of them are and like what if hiring committees. Did see what you do on your instagram and who you reach and the like content that you're creating it is exactly the same quality as a peer review publication.
00:58:26
Speaker
in my perspective, and in some other people's as well. We need those people on hiring committees. Yeah, absolutely. And that's, it's like how to get from where we are now, knowing all the problems and knowing potential ways forward. What are the brass tacks? How do we get to that? In addition to like actually posting stuff and communicating on blogs, it's the conversation that you have on those
00:58:53
Speaker
Those things that are super important because you are engaging with active with the public who is obviously like you mentioned funds finding our work so we really hope that you can you can tear it down from the inside lana and and keep doing the good work you're doing because
00:59:11
Speaker
I'm gonna try. I'm gonna try. Well, we'll be here supporting you through it all. Because this is a life in ruins, we asked this weird question about like why you would choose to live this life in ruins. I don't know. It's like a weird thing. Given the option, if you could do it again, would you live your life in ruins all over? 100%. I would absolutely do it again. Awesome. That's what we like to hear.
00:59:39
Speaker
Well, everyone, we just interviewed Lana Ruck, who is a dual PhD student, editor-at-large for Sayu blog, and all-around cool cat. You can follow her on Twitter at Lana Ruck and Instagram at Lana Lately. So once again, everyone, thank you for bearing with us through episode 16. We will see you on the flip side.
01:00:04
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. Hey, gentlemen and ladies. Hello, Connor. I have a question for you. Wake up. So why did the hunter gather predominantly use her right hand to chop, slice and cut?
01:00:39
Speaker
She didn't want anything left to chance. Cheers. Okay. Thank you, Connor. As always.
01:00:57
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com. I got to tell that story before I break. So I'm doing my thesis experiment. It was a ballistics experiment. I had like
01:01:27
Speaker
bow and arrow thing rigged up to this machine that shot arrows into ballistics gel. It was awesome. And I did it at this like archery range and they were nice enough to let me do it. And I just like prayed to God that like no one came in to shoot bows that day while I was in there with all these like equipment and stuff. And of course this like local pastor
01:01:45
Speaker
comes in to shoot his bow and he's wearing his like pastor collar. I don't know whatever that stuff is, but he's sitting there with that. And then like, we're having a nice conversation with him and he's like so supportive and he's the nicest man. And then Carlton, I had texted, be like, Hey, come on, check out my experiment. Carlton busts in in his frat pink shirt with the collar. You're in a green, green sweater vest with the pink shirt.
01:02:12
Speaker
dream polo okay with the something like the collar sticking out and you walk in take a look and i'm like this man is so nice what is carlton gonna say and you walk up you're like this is scientific as fuck i was like oh god what's up this is carlton i'd say that's like 10 out of 10 sycom right there that's it rich and they already getting what you need to come across it's perfect
01:02:39
Speaker
Didn't someone say what was it was the God? Oh, what is her name? Anyways, you know, it's it's one of the that's the individual that offered to transcribe all of our episodes. Paris. No, not Amelia.
01:03:00
Speaker
I remember we posted something when I was like talking about my cousin who works at NMAI and she just goes, why is it always Carlton with these stories? So I just, I don't know. I think it's me because I, I don't know. I attracted. Also, thanks for listening, Paris. She's a big fan. Thank you, Paris. All right. That's it.