Take Care Of Yourself 45:46

This is the Jan Arden Podcast and Show! Oh, wow, I just feel so energetic. Welcome to the weekend. Lots of snow here in Calgary, and I think I've seen snow in Ontario. I've seen everybody's social media. Zaya Tong is with us today. And she is one of our favorite guests here at the Jan Arden Podcast. Adam Karsh is with us in his respective home in Toronto. Zaya is also in Toronto. Hello?

Zaya, welcome. Thank you so much. And for the introductory song, I love that. Way to get us all into the mode. Yeah, well, it's because it's our new podcast and show and Variety Hour. So we are a whole bunch of different things. We're trying to market ourselves as a lot of stuff, Zaya, because we still don't have a sponsor.

Oh, I didn't know that. No one has stepped in to sponsor us. We thought my doll might be interested, you know. Yeah.

To come in, we thought Trojan might step up to the plate. Oh, interesting. Interesting. We just, you know, we're not fussy. But you have a lot more freedom this way, right? You don't have to cater, you know, too many PMS jokes or anything like that if you're not sponsored. And, you know, we're not taking like maple leaf foods or anything like that. We're not like going into like meat-centric people. So they need not apply. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

So we're just like, if you have a carrot farm somewhere and you're making like, I'm quotation doing air quotes right now, salmon locks out of carrots. I just saw that on Instagram. These brilliant vegan chefs making locks out of carrot locks.

You know who I think would like to sponsor you? Perhaps. I have no idea, actually. But, you know, there's that great company called Wild Type, and they're making salmon out of cellular agriculture right now, right? It's fantastic what they're doing. It looks and tastes exactly like salmon because it is salmon, but it isn't made, you know, with factory farming or fish farm.

Can we talk about this a bit? Zaya, talk about this a bit because you introduced me to them on a kind of a Twitter forum, new platform chat that we did about six weeks ago. And I met some amazing people. But tell everybody about making cellular salmon.

I'm not, you go, go. I mean, I I'm still learning about it. It's just such a new field, but it's fantastic because basically what you're doing is you're decoupling the animal from the meat. So, you know, one of the best examples is, is what they did at just foods. And there's a video online that I fell in love with. I think I may have talked about it a little bit before on your podcast, but what they did was they took the feather and,

of a chicken named Ian. And that feather fell on the ground, perfect white little feather. They took some stem cells from Ian and then they replicated the cells, just like we've been replicating cells for decades now for all different kinds of research.

And they put it in a bioreactor and they made chicken meat. And so you can see them all sitting around this table, this picnic table, and they're all eating chicken. They're eating Ian for lunch. But then you see Ian walking around clucking perfectly unharmed because Ian wasn't harmed in the making of the meat. And so the same thing can apply with beef, with salmon, with all these different kinds of ingredients.

animals that we traditionally have farmed, but it's, it's instead of calling it, I guess, farmed meat. Now they're calling it cultivated meat. So you can still grow meat. You can have your chicken and eat it too, as is the case. And in this case with wild type foods, have your salmon and eat it too. And you can still have all the flavor and it's just so cool. What's happening with the future there right now. It just gives me like a lot of hope. Absolutely. So

So obviously our salmon friend doesn't have a feather to fall out. So what do you think the take is on how would, I mean, maybe they'd have to like actually kill a salmon to get the cells to replicate it or. I think a lot of the times what they do is they just get a biopsy, you know, just a little. Oh.

Yeah, like a little tag. Yeah, that's all you need, right? Your DNA is in every single cell of your body. So all you need to do is get a cell from the salmon and kaboom, kabam, you're set. The future of manmade proteins really is exciting. And I think it's exciting for farmers that have had a history, you know, the province that I'm in, for instance, that

It's 150 years of cattle ranching. And you know, every year, year after year after year, farmers, ranchers, pig farms, chicken farms, dairy farms are subsidized by the government. They're subsidized by your taxpayers' money. And there is billions of dollars that are funneled into that kind of food. And I think the government is kind of waking up going,

Well, this isn't obviously working because year after year we're doing this and we're propping up industries that are changing, just like standing on a sandbar. Hey, guys, it's like, you know, I remember I used to go looking for oat milk when oat milk first kind of started. Yeah. I'm like, where's the GD oat milk? Well, now you see the dairy fridge and right beside it now is all these alternate milks, your soy, your cashews, your coconut milk.

almond, and of course oat. And they're almost like a quarter and three quarters now. In some stores, it's like half and half. But it's exciting to see where this is going. So the consumer is negotiating this. Hey, Uzziah, the consumer is negotiating this pact.

I think we're really pushing it forward. And when you talk about milk, there's another company called Perfect Day that's doing this. What they've done is they've taken the cow out of the equation, essentially, because a lot of what takes place in the process of making the milk and whatever is happening, you know, in terms of the digestive tract of the cow itself is actually done by bacteria, right?

So you can actually manufacture, you can skip the cow entirely, go to, you know, the microbes and get the microbes to do the hard work for you in terms of, you know, turning, turning, you know, grass into proteins that you actually need. So it's, it's really fascinating to see what's happening. And you're right. There's, it's a 50, 50 push. People are like, you know, should it just be a consumer push or should it be the government? It needs to be both.

Yeah.

Think of if we had these bioreactors up north where it's so expensive to get food and you'd have a bioreactor that be creating milk protein and fish protein and all those different sorts of things. I think we're on the right path, though. I think we're getting there. I hope that the Canadian government just gets on board with the future. I'm so glad to hear you say that. And it is exciting. And once again, folks, 2021, I've been saying this, you know, for months with my friends, science.

Science is coming to the rescue of humanity, which I'm going to kind of just talk about this for a bit. And I know it's touchy and I don't want to engage any, the three of us certainly in yes vaccines or no vaccines because it is touchy and it's dividing families. But when you talk about science and these four or five or six vaccines that they have sort of put out to the world to help us get through this pandemic, right?

And my question to you is, and it's not what you think it's going to be. It's not like, are you going to vaccinate or aren't you not going to vaccinate? What is herd immunity? That's what I get asked all the time. And I thought, Zaya's coming on the show. I just want to ask her like in layman's terms, what does it mean? Because you see these guys throwing it around like,

It drives me crazy. Like, I don't know what you're, if you're looking at a cartoon, but. Well, I have a pretty simple way I think of explaining it. First of all, I do want to say that getting vaccinated is incredibly important. I absolutely have a position. Okay, great. Good. Yeah. So I, you know, I think everybody should do it. And here's the reason why it does have something to do with herd immunity. I think that when people first heard the term, they didn't realize that herd immunity works when you have vaccines, not when you have vaccines. So let's give a

a parallel example, which would be, let's say you have a viral video. Okay. And let's say you want to send it all over the internet viral being just like the virus, right? What happens if you've got four out of five people, 80% of the population that's blocked you on Twitter, right? It doesn't matter what you do. If you try to send out that video, that virus, it's not going to get anywhere because four out of those five people,

have already been vaccinated. So it just doesn't have that chance to spread. Now, when people a year ago were talking about herd immunity and they were assuming, okay, you don't even have the vaccination. What that means is the virus just spreads to everybody and a lot of people will get sick and die. And eventually those that survive will develop some sort of immunity, which is not the right approach at all.

So what we want right now is for most of us to get vaccinated, four out of five, about 80%. And then we'll be able to start blocking the virus. It's just not going to have as many channels to spread in. But there is no magic number, right? It isn't 70% or 80%. We have to keep in mind that there are variants, right, that have various levels of effectiveness with the vaccines. So those are things we need to keep in mind. We still need to socially distance for quite some time. We still need to mask regularly.

And it's going to have some pretty far-reaching effects.

You know, we've all seen in the last four years that we have been very divided politically. The political body has been divided. And I think now we're going to start to see the social body divided, right? Because politics actually does seep into our bodies. Think of the differences that are going to start to happen when some people are vaccinated and some people aren't. Like, how are you going to invite people to your wedding when some people refuse to get vaccinated? And you have to worry about them.

Because of course the vaccinated people can still give you COVID. You don't want to be responsible for that. Think of all the bar mitzvahs, the birthday parties. Live music events. Live music events. Theater. Traveling, all those sorts of things. So I think that people will be somewhat divided between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. And given that the risks are so low and the benefits are so high, like not dying and not passing this on to anybody else,

It seems to be a really good, it's definitely win-win to get the vaccine. And this is from science, right? Like you were just privileging science and we love to say how great science is in so many different arenas. And we should listen to the science when it comes to our bodies as well.

I'm going to just, I guess, well, this is a perfect place to break. Adam is twirling his hands around, which indicates we're at the end of this first. It goes by so fast. You're listening to the Jan Arden Podcast Show and Variety Hour. I'm with Zaya Tong. We'll be right back. Give me some vaccine. Give me, give me.

Give me some vaccine. One of these days. Welcome back to the Jen Arden Podcast show. Variety Hour, Zaya Tongs with us. And I want to finish up this conversation briefly because there's some really interesting, very positive things that we are seeing in countries that have

vaccinated a great majority of their population. Zaya, Israel being one of those. Yeah, Israel's already vaccinated a lot of the population. And they only had, I was just looking at some stats yesterday, I think one death.

So a huge drop when you've got populations of millions. And the same thing, the lowest numbers that we've seen in the UK, it's like the all of a sudden that bell curve, all of a sudden you see another steep cliff drop again as people are getting vaccinated. So it works. It works.

Yeah, and we just don't want to see these graphs climbing into the stratosphere. You know, Canada's once again dealing with closures from coast to coast. And even in the Maritimes, we're seeing, you know, not huge numbers, but the alarms are going off and the provincial governments are going, no, we're shutting down the borders. I was supposed to drive to Vancouver, I think May the 1st to do work. It wasn't a leisure trip, but I'm not going to go now just because they are closed.

Going to randomly kind of be checking people. And I've got the old Alberta license plate. So I don't think. Yeah. I'm going to be heading through there. But thanks for that. Yeah, there is, it does work. And also just as a little sidebar on a personal note, I'm involved in something called take the shot and Haley Wickenheiser, our beloved hockey coach,

Star darling and and a talented physician, you know, Haley put herself through university. And anyway, she's done a lot with COVID. She had a T-shirt that raised a lot of money for frontline workers and stuff like that. But anyway, they they're doing something called Take the Shot. And there's I think it launches on the 28th of April.

And it's just encouraging people, like you said, Zaya, to get vaccinated, to kind of just, regardless of what your belief system is, you know, maybe just set it aside for science. I don't think anything's going to happen to anybody.

My guitar player had a bit of a sniffles and stuff, him and his wife, they got inoculated a couple of days ago and he's like, I'm so happy to be sick or whatever. Like he had a bit of a headache and you know, they just felt kind of rough, but they're just, anyhow.

Well, you know, the payoff, the long-term gain on that is huge, right? For a couple of days of sniffles and then going out and being able to play. And of course, once people start getting vaccinated, they're going to be able to hang out with other vaccinated people. They're going to be able to hug and sit down and not just watch Netflix alone in their own place anymore. You know, it's going to be great. We'll be able to lick people again, folks. Yes. Go up.

To random strangers in Superstore and Superstore, if you'd like to sponsor us, please feel free to, you know, give us a call. Favorite meals this past week. I'm just going to put it out there. Zaya, like what did you eat? That was deliciously wonderful. I wasn't expecting that, you know, I'm doing okay. So I think.

being indoors and especially with the pandemic, I think all of us kind of got, maybe, maybe I'm, I'm just going to speak for myself. I think we all kind of, I don't know, got a little bit of chub. I did. And so I started on a vegan keto diet. And yeah. So, I mean, many people have heard of keto, right? Yeah. But it's a ketogenic diet and basically you eat a lot of fat and you eat primarily fat.

fat so that your body starts actually digesting its own fat and, and, and eats up its own fat stores. And, uh, yeah, that's one, one way of, but here's the thing, right? I don't eat meat. And so typically ketogenic diets are meat, like, you know, you eat a lot of meat, you eat a lot of fish and, um, and that's where you get some of your proteins and your fats from.

But I'm doing it slightly differently. And I'm just really lucky. I'm working with a woman who has a company called Leaf and Bone, and she's been making special, special keto vegan meals for me. So yesterday I had a really delicious, delicious stuffed red pepper with impossible burger. You know, she's got lots of like, you know, she uses coconut oils and stuff like that. So basically just one stuffed pepper.

pepper, and I was completely full. That sounds so delicious to me. I was going to say, are you wandering around with bags of avocados and just like, wow, like, no, no, I've been having like, you know, I've been having a lot of those here, a chicken stir fries, I've been eating like a normal person or what you would see a normal person eating a traditional keto diet, but I've been able to veganize it or, you know, Anushka has been able to veganize it for me. So that's just been really wonderful. So that's what I've been doing lately.

That just sounds, I have some favorites in my head. What did you have? One of my favorite meals that I had this week, I had, it's called Favuzzi pasta, F-A-V-Z-Z-I.

I just looked in my pantry. It is the best pasta in the world. And I made mushrooms. I made beyond meat, Italian sausage, olive oil, salt and pepper. Nice. And I, and then I had this vegan parm, uh, via life. It makes the most incredible cheeses, uh, vegan cheeses, plant-based cheeses, uh,

And it was so good. Like I would eat it every day with the exception of like, I'm not going to eat it every day because believe it or not folks, you know, vegan plant-based food, there's a lot of plant-based junk food out there and you can absolutely go over the top with it.

Well, right now what I'm doing is I'm actually growing my own peppers just over to the left here. Like I've always wondered, what is it, you know, what is it about Europe and the flavor of, I don't know if you've ever, you know, noticed that when you go to Europe and they have super delicious tomatoes and, and in, I'm half Macedonian and in Yugoslavia, peppers are a huge part of our culture, stuffed peppers. Yeah.

And so I've been obsessed with Macedonian peppers. So early on in the middle of the pandemic, of course, right? What are you going to do? I started sourcing out pepper seeds from the motherland. And so I have these very special peppers. I'm going to bring you when you're here after we're all vaccinated. So the pepper is about the, you know, the pepper plant is about the size of my hand now in height.

And I've got tomatoes from Italy. Are you growing them in your house right now? I'm growing them right now on my desk. So right now we're all set up. I've got a microphone. I've got the computer here to talk to you. And just to my left is a setup with lights and a little grow mat and growing the seedlings. And so-

It's going to be, you know, I know so many people are proficient. I'm so wonderful gardeners. I'm sure you've got so many people who are, you know, know so much more about this than I do. I'm not, you gotta jump off somewhere, but it is so much fun to watch the little plant babies grow.

It is one of the most satisfying things that I do. You guys is my garden. So because of where I live in the world in Ontario, Toronto, especially you guys are so much further South than us. So Calgary sits much further North and we are a mile above sea level.

where I am. So it's a completely, we're in a completely different growing zone. You know, when you live in a country this size, even within a province, you can have so many different growing zones where, where you could grow peppers somewhere outside your neighbor, a hundred K away could go, Nope, can't grow them here. It doesn't work.

But anyway, I have a 10 foot fence around my garden because I have so many deer and they would annihilate anything I had. But on my desk in my basement right now, I have about 20 kohlrabi plants. Oh, nice. 20 squash growing and I have...

it's by the time May the 15th rolls around where I can plan everything, I'll have things that are maybe two inches high, but it's just that extra time that they don't have to push themselves out of the ground. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I can't wait to see photos of that. And it's,

It is incredible, right? Because I mean, being doing this for the very first time, you have to set up and you have to get a lot of equipment. And I've realized the amount that I've invested in this is probably costs about 3000 times more than going and buying a pig of lettuce at the supermarket.

but I'm sure it's going to be very satisfying as a lifelong sort of hobby. So no, it, it does something to your soul. And I don't know Zaya, if it's just getting older, but I mean, I enjoyed reaping the rewards of a garden that my parents had because my friends and I went out there, raided the peas, pulled the carrots out, ate all the stuff. But now I cannot wait to get up, to go out into the garden to see how much things are grow. Adam, do you have a garden at all?

No, but we're thinking about doing something this spring, summer. So you should. I would. It is really calming. People say that, you know, it's very surprising. I think, Jen, you know, too, that I also got an aquascape.

which is basically an underwater garden. It's a very, very popular in Japan. I don't know what that is. You have one minute in this segment to tell me what that is. Okay. So basically what people do is they create these beautiful, lush underwater gardens. They don't really populate them with a lot of fish, tiny, tiny.

tiny, like, you know, less than a few centimeters long fish and some shrimp, multicolored shrimp, but you prune this beautiful underwater garden. It is so soothing. Definitely look it up on Google, aquascaping. Aquascaping. Okay. Not like manscaping. I don't know why I just pictured shaving my legs in the bathtub, which is not what we're talking about. You're listening to the Jan Arden podcast. I'm here with Zaya Tong. Adam Karsh will be right back.

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Welcome back. I'm Jan. Adam is on the left of my screen. Zaya is below. It looks like a Brady Bunch. We're looking up at each other. We're looking sideways. Zaya, do you think it's easier for people to be in already established relationships during this time?

Or is it easier to be a single person or like younger people that are dating? I think about them a lot, like the millennials, 2030s. I mean, however old you are, I guess it doesn't really matter how old you are in the dating game. But I'm just thinking what a weird time to be putting yourself out there or to be in a relationship. Adam, you're in your house with your two kids and your wife. Yep. All day, every day. And that's got its challenges, right? Yeah.

It's hard for a family, even a high functioning family to be living together 24 seven and no break. It's crazy around. We're fine, but it's crazy. Yeah. I don't think that there's an easier way for anybody, right? Like we're living in a pandemic of loneliness and this has been going on for a long time. There've been a lot of people who are very socially isolated well before COVID came along. So there's that.

But then you have, you know, I am often thinking people, I don't have young children, but knowing that, you know, you've got a wife and a partner or what have you, kids and everybody's at home and here in Toronto, you can't even go to the playgrounds. That's definitely very tricky. So I think both being single and being partnered up right now is tricky in very different ways. Yeah.

So, I mean, I look at my friends that like Adam, I mean, I have lots of friends, obviously they're in there. A lot of my friends are similar of age to me and their kids are out of the house. They've got their own stuff going on. Some of them even have their own children now and they're, you know, they're doing life, but I have actually sat back.

I've been single for several years and I am going, thank you, universe. I have just been kind of quietly like giggling, like just this devilish feeling of exaltation sitting in the corner of my house because I have not had to answer to anybody.

Um, you know, just from a feeding my own self point of view, yeah, cooking for once, not always the most glorious experience ever. But my God, I can eat the same meal for like five days. I sort of do it in different, very different incantations of it. Like it's like tacos turn into soup turn into exactly recycled meals, upcycled meals.

then I have another friend, my friend Rose, I'm not going to say her last name. She's in PEI. So they've had a little bit of a little bit of an easier go than say Ontario or British Columbia. And she met somebody in the dog park three months ago and they're like full on dating. You know, it's, it's just like, I'm, I'm still seeing kind of life

live on through the cracks but if I had my choice right now I'm going to absolutely take where I'm at I can't imagine Adam just being in the house having kids running around homeschooling yeah well it's interesting right challenging

Oh, I, yeah, I have a lot of empathy and sympathy for people who are going through that. But for single people, you know, for a long time, you know, there've been so many different studies looking at whether people are happier, whether they're alone or whether they're partnered up. And we do know that women actually do tend to really savor alone time. And in fact,

when you have single women, they tend to do a little bit better than single men, in particular, older men, like women, women tend to have a lot more sort of hobbies and interests when they live alone. But men tend to have those hobbies and interests when they're partnered up.

Ultimately, it's interesting, right? You always hear that sort of mythology. People are saying the science says you need to be partnered up to be happy. But in fact, there was a review not too long ago of about 18 different studies. And what they found is that in terms of a happiness index anyway, people

were pretty much just as happy when they were single as when they were married. Because if you've got happy people in the beginning, people's disposition doesn't change that much. Maybe there was a little bump of happiness right around the time when they got married, but that was about it. I mean, I just saw Cardi B on being interviewed the other day and people were asking her, is she happier now that she has money? And she paused for a few, really to think about it. And she's like,

no, because there's, you know, there's some things that make her happier and some things that don't. But lastly, in terms of just like sort of the effects of being alone or being coupled up,

it's there's longevity as well, not just happiness. Right. And men do tend to live longer when, when they're partnered up. And there was a Japanese study that actually found that men who have never married before, they're about three times likelier to die from cardiovascular disease. Yeah, this is, this is in Japan. So it's hard to extrapolate. You never know. Women, women and men who are married and

women and men who are single both tend to do okay in terms of longevity. It's the people who get divorced who have a little bit of a trickier time. So again, you know, there's so many different studies on this, many different cross-cultural differences, but

If you're happy, you're happy. That's the main thing. You don't necessarily need a partner to be happy. It's interesting. Once again, in Japan, I found out about this years and years ago when I was having a little bit of my own heart problems. I think we make...

you know, we, we, we talk about dying of a broken heart a lot, like people like dying of a broken heart. Uh, someone who's been married for 60 years, their partner passes away. And a lot of times they go shortly thereafter. I mean, there's lots of studies that have been done that it's sometimes it's within a year. A lot of the times that they'll, they'll pass away. But, uh, in Japan in particular, they studied women and, uh, after they had lost, uh,

a partner, a child gone through a traumatic event and they had something called taco subo syndrome and the ventricle in their hearts would literally expand out, inhibiting how it functioned. And it would, the ventricle in particular would, would, would go at about 30% of what it normally should be doing. And I had something like that happened to me kind of from having a broken heart and

And I actually finally ran into a cardiologist that said, I don't know if you've ever heard of this. And he says, I'm starting to see it more and more with my female patients. And he says, have you been through this and this, this? And I'm like, yes. And I talked to him a little bit about my experience in this relationship ending. And, and he was just like, you might think I'm, you know,

leading you down the garden trail here but he said I'm think you have taco subo I literally wow you have what does taco subo stand for do you know I don't um maybe we can look it up we we will look it up it's I'm not even exactly sure of the uh the I know it's s-t subo maybe uh taco subo let's see if this comes up yeah I've got it right now it's t-a-k-o

T-S-U-B-O. A cardiomyopathy is a weakening of the left ventricle, the heart's main pumping chamber, usually as the result of severe emotional or physical stress. Wow. And does it heal up? Is that the idea? Yeah, it heals up completely. When they did ultrasounds on me three weeks later, my cardiologist said, I would never, ever have been able to tell that you had any kind of thing happen with your heart.

So you just made me think of that when you were talking about divorced people. And I can see where it just sends your immune system into this place of discomfort. And that whole thing goes back to how mental illness has to really be rethought as we move forward because it is a physical thing.

it's something that happens to your body. That's a physical biological thing. And I think people,

socially have always kind of pushed it aside. Like it's, Oh, mental illness, you know, whatever they need to get their shit together. And I'm just like, no, it's a real thing. You're so right though. I mean, I think just about everybody who's had heartache knows that the feeling is actually inside of your body. And we have this, you know, we live in a society where we really divorce the mind from the body and we don't realize that the mind can really have an effect on, on our physicality as well. So yeah.

You know, and just getting back to what you were just saying, I don't know if I mentioned this to you, but I'm narrating a web series called How We Die right now. And it's looking at all the different ways in which Canadians can approach death because it's such a taboo topic. But just related to what we were talking about in terms of elderly folks.

And why, you know, sometimes partnership is really important because at that end of life stage, usually it's your partner who is your primary caregiver. And so it is really important to have that somebody sometimes that can really make a difference, especially at the end of life stage. You're listening to the Jan Arden podcast. We'll be right back. This is ground control to major tongue. You've realized.

Welcome back. I'm Jan Arden. And I'm

At the break, as per usual, I wish we could let you in on it, but we were raging. We were raging against the machine. We were talking about things that we can't share publicly. And you're just going to have to wonder what it is. Okay, Caitlin. No.

Caitlin, we miss you. We miss you. And we are thinking of you. And we can't wait to have you back in the studio or the studio on your bed or on your deck or your kitchen chair. Anyway, that was Freudian, but it gave us a chance to say hi to Caitlin. Exactly. Soon, soon. You have a choice, Adam and Zaya.

You want to talk about Mars or do you want to talk about religion? Oh, wow. Two very different topics, but both very heavenly. I think let's talk about, let's talk about Mars. Why not? I'm glad you said that because it is a heavenly topic. So this past week they from earth, which is,

20 bajillion miles away, and that's science for you. It's 20 bajillion miles away from Mars. They flew a helicopter off of that rover thing that they shot up there, landed through the Martian atmosphere. There's only like 1% oxygen or whatever on Mars. Zaya could speak to this, but they have very little oxygen in Mars. You can't breathe there. And nothing grows there, as you know. But they flew a helicopter. So I'm thinking about

Flying, doesn't that require some kind of atmosphere? Like, anyway, I wanted to ask you, Zaya, how mind boggling it is for you to think about this little craft up there sending pictures back to us. It breaks my heart half the time seeing it there by itself and all the money we're spending.

Yeah, billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars. And here we sit with a population that a great percentage of it is food insecure, marginalized, living in heart, you could hardly call it housing.

Yeah. How does, how do you, it's very conflicting for me. How does it stack up? Right. Well, I think there's a couple things to think about, you know, the, the U S actually just released its budget recently for NASA and it went up about 6%. So it's at about 24 billion, but keep in mind, okay. That that,

The actual budget for defense spending is 733 billion. It is 30 times more than anything that we're doing when we're looking out into space. So I think we have to kind of make things a little bit relative here, right? 'Cause this is really the expanse of the universe. Like these are the biggest questions about our existence.

And, you know, a lot of these incredible feats of engineering are going to feed back into knowledge that we have here on Earth, right? So a lot of the space program, for example, is doing Earth observations. So atmospheric science, climate science, when we're doing all that kind of climate modeling, you need programs, our space programs, to be able to develop that and look into that. And you think Mars is somehow...

contributing to that kind of science here? - I think that there's a lot of science and especially engineering, the building of things that is incredible. It really is a testament to what we human beings can do. I remember I was, we did a show on it for Daily Planet during the first Mars launch. One of the Mars Rover launches, not the first one.

for curiosity and the awe, you know, even when we think of the fact that as human beings, us little primates, together we can, you know, we can create a craft and send it six billion

billion kilometers and have it land perfectly with precision on a comet that is traveling at speed. We can do incredible, incredible things. But I think what's important is perspective. Why are we doing these sorts of things, right? There are some projects that I don't think are super awesome. So an example would be like

some of the satellites, some of the, the, the Starlink satellites, a thousand were launched up by SpaceX for our internet. But what that's doing is like the diffuse light and the scattering of light is actually blocking the ability of astronomers to be able to see the night sky properly. We are surrounded. Our planet is like the pig pen surrounded by space junk. And we're going to need to invest in order to clean some of that up. Right. But, but,

But at the same time, think of the people, like I know that one of the ideas of going back to the moon anyway is to finally send a woman up, to finally send a person of color up. And for them to even have that overview effect. You've probably heard people who get to go into space have this moment of transcendence where they look on our beautiful, beautiful.

blue jewel and realize that all these divides of borders that we have and even like the clocks that we've set up, all our nine to five, like all of that just dissolves almost immediately. So there's like a Carl Sagan level awe and enchantment with the universe that I think we need to preserve.

But at the same time, I think we need to be really quite careful because if we're just doing it so that we can mine the moon for water or things like that, then that's, we need to be really thoughtful about how we do our space. Yeah, my concern always goes exactly there, Zaya. And that's,

the whole monetary aspect of space exploration. I don't even like the word exploration anymore because to me, it's always an indicator of some company somewhere looking for uranium, looking for gold, looking for silver. I mean, there are laws that govern the universe and the same building blocks are in everything that is within buildings

billions of miles of us. Am I correct? I mean, it's made up of... We are made of stars and all the stuff inside of your phone, all the equipment that we have is essentially stardust. So, I mean, there's a couple of ways to think about this too. One, I don't think that, you know, there's the Outer Space Treaty, which basically says that we are all equal in space. We should really be all equal here on Earth. And that nobody should have any province. Nobody should be able to own

the moon or own different parts of the planet. But I'll tell you, if they could mine a meteor over mining the bottom of the ocean right now, I'd rather they mined it in space because what we have here on earth is so precious that I don't want it disrupted. But I think the conversation quite often goes into something that I find still very amusing, right? I'm going to read something to you, actually. There's a website that's been set up called marsucks.com.

And here's a little note from Earth. It's written from Earth and it says Mars sucks. Its weather sucks. Its distance sucks. Its atmosphere sucks. The little water it has sucks. It has sucked for billions of years. It'll suck for billions more. You know what doesn't suck? Me, Earth. I have life. I have vast oceans and lush forests. I have rivers to swim, air to breathe. But the way I'm treated, that part sucks.

You use me and you pollute me, overheat me. You use every resource I have and return very little back from where it came. And then you, you dream of Mars, a hellhole, a barren, desolate wasteland. You can't set foot on fast enough. Why not use some of that creative energy and billions on saving me? You know, the planet that's giving you what you need to live right now. Mars can wait. I can't love Earth.

So, I mean, I do think that perspective again is key. I think we should fund space programs, but I think we should be really careful of, you know, in terms of what we're strategically looking at in order to protect our own planet, just to get there and like plant a flag on another planet is, is not particularly, you know, the best reason to go. Well, what, what are your thoughts about the people that signed up by the thousands to have an opportunity to live there?

It's a one-way trip, one-way trip. Up they go. Then what? Yeah. I mean, that takes a really certain kind of person because I mean, I'm pretty sure you could go to a desert and have the same sort of experience. But yeah,

But humanity, that's the thing that makes us outrageous, beautiful, brilliant creatures is that we are reaching out to the stars all the time, that we are reaching out to the other planets. Eventually, I think this is like basic science. Should we be able to reach out and go to these various places? Yes, absolutely.

Because, you know, our sun will die at a certain point. We are going to need to, you know, spread our proverbial seed across the galaxy at some point. But it's just perspective again. And it's what part of the budget are you using for this? And what part of, you know, our budget are we spending on our own planet?

Well, I am. I wouldn't personally go. I have no desire. I'm I'm with the earth poem completely 100%. I just love being here. I love the constant beauty that just slaps me upside the head every day. Would you ever be a space tourist? Would you like to see earth from space if you could in this lifetime, which you possibly could?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it would be something that I can certainly see if I have the grace to be in my 80s. When I think, you know, 25 years from now, it might well be a very good possibility. Yeah, I wouldn't mind looking down. Anyway, Adam's giving me the spinning fingers. Wrap it up. This is good, though. Zaya Tong is a brilliant journalist. She's an amazing scientist. She's

one of the most engaging guests that we've ever had on this show. She's written a lot of things, but one in particular that is one of my favorite books of the last 10 years easily is The Reality Bubble. And I learned so much from this, The Reality Bubble. You don't, honest to God, folks, don't, it'll excite you about science. It'll excite you about the,

the science that is that literally the tips of your fingers, every single ordinary, seemingly ordinary day. And she brings and sheds a lot of light on our little blue rock here. Zaya, you're going to be back with us. I sure am. Thanks so much for having me, Jen. So thank you. And I have so many things that I want to talk about. Everybody look after yourself, stay positive, get vaccinated. That comes from me and Zaya and Adam. It'll help us go forward. It really, really will. That's science.

And that's our show. Totally do. This podcast is distributed by the Women in Media Podcast Network. Find out more at womeninmedia.network.