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

This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human. This is the meat eater podcast coming at you shirtless severely bugbed and in my case underwear list. You can't predict anything. Raw to you by first light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First light builds, no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No short cuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com, that's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Holy smokes, joined today by Bercard Builder, the writer. We're going to talk about Alpha Galson, Drone and Lone Star Tick, we're also going to talk about a bunch more of your work. I've got to tell you flat out right here, this is embarrassing. I've been a fan, I've been a fan of you for over a quarter century. Wow, that's great. I'm not kidding you, in 1999 or whatever that was, 1999 2000, I was a graduate student. I got Harper's Magazine and had your piece on cockfighting and I was split between loving you because it was so perfect and wanting to kill you because I was so jealous. I'm not kidding you, and I've loved your stuff since, man. Oh, thank you. I know you've done books, you have a book noodling for flat heads, and you kind of blew that. You made that whole thing in my mind. You took this esoteric backwards practice and sort of made it to where every social media influence around the planet goes out and has their day noodling flat heads, you know what I mean? You found that. A friend of mine in Oklahoma made a documentary called "Okey noodling" with the flaming Nick blips for the soundtrack and now there's a whole noodling tournament in Oklahoma every year. But you were out of that stuff. You were out of that stuff over 20 years ago? Yeah, there's 25, 30 years ago, yeah. And another favorite thing, one of my favorite passages ever written is you were profiling the sort of like up and coming bull riders, explain to people real quick, and I'll tell you my favorite passage. But how do you explain your piece about bull riding? Well, it's basically about how young bull riders get made, and they get started at five or six on sheep, and then they go to little calves, and then they go to small bulls and steers. And that has happened, that has gotten younger and younger, even as the bulls have gotten more and more fierce and terrifying and destructive, and so it's been a crazy kind of collision of two cultures. And you did most of your reporting for that, am I remember right, was it mostly in Nevada or YouTube? Mostly in Oklahoma. I grew up in Oklahoma, so I knew a lot of, and there were a bunch of bull riding families down there that I met them. But you were always tell people this story, because you're riding a piece about bull riding culture and these young kids bull riding. And at the same time that you're working on this, in your own neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, there's a park where the parents all take their little kids to play. And they came in and installed rocks in the park. I mean flat rocks, like two inches high. Yeah. So you're riding about the parents who are deeply upset about the hazard that these rocks would present to their children, should they get hurt on the rocks, and people being like, hey, I can't believe they're real rocks putting the park, and you're like, you're living in this while also living with these bull rider people. Right. Well, I mean, it was, I think it was the high point or the nature of the kind of helicopter parenting thing. And in Park Slope where I'm in Brooklyn was really intense about that. These parents who wanted to oversee every single thing, create a perfectly safe bubble for their children. And then I go to Western Oklahoma and, you know, some five-year-old, eight-year-old boys getting thrown off, bloody face, might have a bunch of cuts, and his parents are like, get back up boy, get back up all that thing, you know, and it's just, and I have to say those kids that I was with, those bull riding kids, were some of the best kids I've ever been around. Those are incredibly polite, focused, like good natured. You know, I mean, there was a good chance that we're going to get grievously injured before the age of 20, you know, and they could have had, and it was lots of risk in what they're doing. But in terms of how they approached life, there was so much zest and appetite to it, it was kind of, they were kind of great. Yeah. And then now the reason I want to do you here now is, you just wrote a big piece. All your stuff is so well reported. You do a great job. I feel like you usually, you, you, you seem to really win the trust of people you're talking to. You paint things very fairly, and now you've done a piece on something that I've been paying a ton of attention to, which is this, what, what seat you can clarify, what seems to be this explosion in alpha gal syndrome to where now I've got bodies that have had it. I've got bodies that got us so long ago, they got over it. It seems like there's more and more of it. I went through, I recently was reading the writer, Nellie Bowles, I recently read a piece she had where she called, she said that Lyme disease is a chic disease, like people are proud to have had, I don't know about that, I had, I've had it tick-borne, I had it tick-borne illness from Lyme that I was treated for and got better. And ticks are part of the conversation in this country, especially in the outdoor community, like ticks are a bigger part of the conversation now than they've ever been, and it seems like they're only going to become more and more and more of the conversation, and there's more and more things to worry about. And I didn't realize it. I haven't explained it, but I recently picked a loan, I had a loan start tick right here on my clavicle. I called my friend of mine who's a doctor, because I thought it was like the kind of thing you take an antibiotic for, this is just, I mean, this is a couple weeks ago. Right. And she's like, no, man, this is a whole ball game, and this is not, nothing to, like, that's not this. Right. A little, I knew about this, which we're going to cover, but to start, like, why did you get into this idea? What drew you to this idea of alpha-gal syndrome and loan start ticks? Well, it's like a lot of stories. I kind of zeroed in on it gradually. My first thought was, Dan, we've had these waves of infestations over the last 30 years, you know, Lyme disease and superlice and bedbugs, and then there was a huge scabies outbreak in Europe that might be coming to this country and so we're worms. And, you know, it's just been like one after the other, and I thought there's got to be a pattern here. What's going on? And so I started calling, first I call pest control people in New Jersey, and then they sent me to a bunch of extension folks in Nebraska and Kentucky. And they said, well, yeah, you know, a bunch of those things are, we're worried about to screw worm, but they haven't come, really come across the Texas border yet, but everybody here is freaked out about alpha-gal. And I had heard about alpha-gal maybe 12, 15 years ago, but as a kind of a novelty disease, there was a piece on radio lab about a woman who'd gotten it, and it felt very much like what Lyme disease was in the early days, like maybe something that in a small pockets like the Hamptons or Martha's Vineyard, which by the way are two of the biggest hot spots for it. Maybe people get it there, but it's not that widespread. And then I started to realize, no, it's actually those ticks have moved all the way west to the Rockies. They're like, and they're spreading and multiplying. So it's becoming a much huger thing than it was. You just said that the ticks are spreading. Is it that the ticks are spreading or that the pathogen or the diseases are spreading? It's both, really. I mean, in this country, I mean, if you look worldwide, alpha-gal is all over the world now. More than 30 countries, six continents, and in all these countries, all these continents is carried by different ticks, like the Bont tick and South Africa, the Casterbean tick in Europe. In this country, it's carried by a lone star tick almost exclusively. And the lone star tick used to be pretty much contained in the southeast, like up until 1950, they didn't really go past North of Virginia. Okay. And now you look at the CDC map of lone star ticks, and they're all the way to the Oklahoma Panhandle. They're all the way to Maine. They're all the way to Northern Michigan. So they, with climate change, and especially with the kind of wetter conditions that often come with climate change, they've kind of followed those and spread all across the country. And they're so aggressive and so bold and resilient that they've done really well wherever they've gone. Yeah. I want to tell listeners about a thing real quick, then I want you to explain how this alpha-gal thing works. But people are very familiar with Lyme, we've been talking about Lyme disease for decades. Lyme disease is you have a tick that carries like a bacterial pathogen. The tick latch is on to you, and the longer it's on you, the more it can transmit, and it transmits a back to bacterial infection into your body, right? It's passing an infection along into your body. You can have the ticks that carry it. You have areas where there's a very low prevalence, right? There's a small percentage of the ticks are infected. There's areas where, like, when I got it and doing my research after getting it, I learned that about three quarters of the ticks at that time in Hudson Valley, about three quarters of the ticks carried the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. - Yeah. - So, you know, if you got a tick latched on, you had a 75% chance that that thing had the capability of bringing it to you. - Right. - This alpha gal deal, which we'll jump to the kind of punchline here, is it causes like a meat and dairy allergy, it's hope people become aware of they had it. It has a totally different way it functions. Can you explain to people what is going on when you get bit by these things? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's true. I mean, Lyme disease, Babesiosis, Anaplasmosis, or Lychiosis, all the major tick-borne disease are their bacteria or their parasites. Alpha gal is different, and it's different in two ways. Like, every lone start tick has alpha gal in its saliva, right? So, it's not a question of if you have the bacteria or not. They all have it. They're just born with it. - You're born with it, they're born with it. And when you get bitten, if they latch on and they stay latch on, that alpha gal goes into your system. Now, the catch is that like not that larger percentage of people who get the alpha gal into their system from a bite will develop the syndrome, right? You might even have alpha gal antibodies in your body and still not get the syndrome. The syndrome means you're getting a allergic reaction to it. But if you get bitten by a lone start tick and it stays on, you will get alpha gal in your system. - And what is that, like explain that bit about that all me, besides like people meet, monkey meet, all mammal meet, contain something, right? - Yeah, all non-primate bodies contain alpha gal. And the most of it, if you look at the ones that have the highest consciousness, the organ meet, it's the sinews, it's the fibers, but it's also in the meat. And dairy often has, it almost always has alpha gal in it. - And what is it, like it's a carbohydrate? - It's a type of sugar, it's a type of sugar. Which is another, unusual thing, most allergies are caused by proteins, our two proteins. But this case is the sugar, which is one of the reasons it took so long for it to get identified. But it's in this, and so we eat alpha gal all the time. We're eating meat all the time and mostly we don't react to it. So the question was, why do we? And that still hasn't been totally figured out. There's clearly something in the Tix saliva, some kind of co-factor that's not only, we're not only getting the alpha gal, but it's triggering the immune reaction to the alpha gal and the people who get it. - And then they get it, like the tick gets it in them, to some degree where the body, now the human body now reacts to it. - Has immune reaction to that sugar, that foreign sugar that's in your blood. So then you go eat a burger, you go eat a beef burger and also in your body lights up. - Yeah, I mean, and the crazy thing is that, most dollars is a quick, right? You get bitten by, you get stung by a bee and you react right away, but alpha gal it can take two to six hours to manifest. And it seems to be because the alpha gal itself is bound up in lipids and fats, or it's bound up in these connective tissues. And both of them is kind of gluey connective tissues. And both of them take a long time to digest. And so you're eating this stuff and no reaction at all. And then suddenly at three in the morning, you're starting to get terrible stomach cramps or you might get shortness of breath, your throat's closing up, you're getting rashes or hives. And people don't make the connection, right? I mean, there was a study in 2017 that looked at a hundred doctors visits of people that had alpha gal syndrome and only one in 10 doctors identified it correctly. - Oh. - And the people who in that study, the median length to diagnosis was seven years. So you think about people having these serious allergic reactions to the point of some of them are going into anaphylactic shock, you know, and they don't know. And they go to the doctor and the doctor says, well, that might be a gluten allergy or, I don't know, maybe you have some heart palpitations. We didn't need to do some heart things. I talked to one guy who had three heart surgeries because they missed diagnosed alpha gal syndrome. - Really? - Yeah, this is a guy in Springfield, Missouri. So that's the scary part of it. If you don't identify, you start to think, oh, you have irritable bowel syndrome. You have all any number of things that it could be that you could think is causing it. - Huh. - So when, what does it mean when people say, I got one buddy, I don't want to say his name, say his first name, his name's Evan. He got it and then he got better, right? - And again, when I first heard, I should clarify this, when I first heard about this, I thought it was like, I had this feeling, how many years ago I was there, I had this feeling that that can't be true, right? - Yeah, it sounds like. - I mean, I thought it was another and I don't in any way want to say there's not such a thing, but I don't want to go down to being like, there's no such thing as gluten allergies, whatever. When I first heard it, what went off in my head is it's like a thing that people are becoming aware of and they're self-diagnosing at a higher rate than people are actually getting it. - Right, right, 'cause yeah. - But then, I've got friends. - By the way, allergists and epidemiologists was the same way for like 10 years, they said, this is not a thing, you're lying. - That's the feeling I had is like, I don't know what you got going on, you ate a bad burger, what do you mean you're allergic to burger? - Right, right, right, right. - But then my buddy who I know and know him well, he went through it, I can't remember what it was, it was some, I don't know, five, six, seven years. And he said that it started to dissipate. What's that all about? - Well, I mean, that's the, I guess the bright side of it is that your antibody levels start to drop. And sometimes three, four years even, you can go back to getting meat. People have all kinds of different reactions. The trick is though, and here's the problem, is that the more tick bites you get, the higher antibody levels go, right? So if you really want to have it dissipate and go away, you can't be outdoors very often, you have to be incredibly careful, you have to wear, you know, about- - It's not just watch. - You're diet, but it's watching your activities. - Yeah, you can eat meat or dairy, and you can't get bitten again. - Huh. - Explain a little bit about what's this tick's kind of groove? Like, what is his life cycle? What is he doing with his time? - Well, every spring season, they come out and they want to blood meal, right? They want to- - Yeah. - And before that, they're spending most of the time in semi-habit, hibernation, right there, and belief lit or somewhere, not bothering anybody. But then they come out in the spring, and they're looking to suck blood. And they do this even as larvae. One of the big things that people worry about is what they call tick bombs. - Yeah. - Which are these clusters of 200 tiny seed, like, lo and start ticks that people walk into, and you look, and you think you have some dirt on your pants and on your leg, and you brush it off, and you've had 25 bites. - And those little larvae sons of bitches too? - Each of them can bite. Each of them can give you alpha-gal syndrome. - So, you know what, I haven't seen that, but you know what I've gotten tangled up with, that comes in those clusters? Have you had a chick problem with chiggers ever? - That's what I grew up with in Oklahoma. That's right, you're from a heartland of that shit, man. - Yeah, yeah. - No, that's what we hate about that. - 'Cause they gave you like a bunch. - Right, and they burned your skin. I mean, it's an awful thing. - Yeah, you know what's funny about those chiggers too, is there's so much, what I first got my first bad chigger infestation, where I was in, I think I was in Missouri one. Yeah, I was in Missouri, first time I ever got it bad. And the number of remedies that were suggested to me, bathing in bleach, putting nail polish on them, putting epoxy on them, rubbing mortar oil into them. And there's so much misinformation that I even went, so I got so bad I was having like, I was going into, like I was having a allergic reaction to them. It was getting feverish. I mean, I was coated. And people are telling me, oh, it will, it laid its eggs in you and now they're living in you. - Right. - And I quickly, like on my phone, I quickly learned that that's not what this is. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - But I go to a med stop, I go to see a doctor. I'm like, here's the deal. I'm so covered in these chiggers, like I need like a steroid. - Is that the thing that lays the eggs in you? I'm like, no, it doesn't lay eggs in you. (laughing) - Oh my God, but anyhow, so that, so when that tick comes out and he's got the little guys. - Yeah. - Those will bite you. - But the big one will bite you too. - Big ones will bite you. I think basically there's three seasons in every tick if I have right, to bite you. And it's pretty restricted to the spring and summer. - Okay. - The thing about the Lone Star tick is they're incredibly aggressive. I mean, the funny thing is talking to an anemologists. Usually they love their beasties and they like to talk to you. about the things they study. But with Lone Star, every single animal just I taught you said, I hate that tick. I hate that thing. But like one woman said to me, Holly Gaff, she worked at Old Dominion in Virginia. And she was like, they're like the bullies of the insect world. They'll beat you up and take your lunch money. They just, they actually pursue people, you know, unlike most ticks, like the dog tick or the deer tick, they'll hang around on a blade of grass and wait for you to go by and then they'll hitch a ride and bite you. But the Lone Star will actually come down and, and follow your heat and your and your carbon dioxide and, and track you down and crawl on on foot on foot. I mean, this guy I talked to this entomologist in, or the public health biologist in Martha's Vineyard was saying, he talked to lots of people who had said that the Lone Star ticks were coming down from the dune grasses cross the burning sand and onto the beach blankets and beat biting people as they were sunbathing. So these things are just so aggressive, like they're detecting people's presence. Oh, yeah, yeah. And they're, and they're going after them. And they're really, they're really hearty. They're so they can handle some heat, you know, a lot of ticks will dry up too quickly to do that. But no, they're really, they're, they're problematic little animals. Hey, everyone, big, huge announcement, meat eater live, the Christmas tour is kicking off again this year for the Christmas season of 2026. This time, we're hitting the Midwest, meat eater live, the Christmas tour kicks off in December across six Midwestern cities. We've got Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Madison, Des Moines, Minneapolis, and Fargo. Join myself. Yannis, who tell us clay, new, congruent Reeves and Randall Williams, for a night of laughs, trivia, free prizes, news and opinions from across the worlds of hunting, fishing, wildlife conservation, and wild foods, also, we're already stacking up some great special guests. I got my buddy, bubbly dug, making the appearance in Madison, meat eater live is the best Christmas gift for any outdoorsman or woman in your life. Tickets go on sale September 25th, but sign up at the meat eater.com slash tour, and you'll get pre sale access to buy tickets on September 14th days before they go on sale to the public. We can't wait to see you there. And I'm telling you, go ask anyone who has ever come to one of the meat eater live events, and they will tell you, we laugh our asses off. We give away great prizes. We put on a solid show that I'm proud to be part of. Explain the relationship between, because the tick that carries lime has the same deal where they have a tight little friendship with deer. Right. The deer doesn't look at it that way. They have a relationship with deer. Yeah, I mean, that the Lone Star, I mean, the same biologists on Mars have been told me like a typical deer in a season can carry 500 to a thousand ticks. Yeah, that's probably deer tick and Lone Star ticks. But yeah, I mean, they're like the perfect vessel for carrying these. There's so much blood in them they can't get them off. And so in areas like Georgia and all across the country, where they have high deer populations, they're just breeding factories for for Lone Star ticks. Yeah, you even see now, there's all. There's always these different depending on who you ask, there's always these different motivations to reduce deer numbers. Yeah, and something, especially along the urban suburban interface, particularly in the Eastern US, there's always these different motivations, the lower deer numbers, where a traditional one would be agriculture. Okay. Sure. You know, just deer come out and destroy cornfields, eat alfalfa, whatever. Right. And so at agricultural interest, we like, we need to suppress deer numbers. Eating people's ranges. There's a thing that gets talked about probably more, it gets discussed probably in a way that's disproportionate to how impactful it is. But car insurers will now and then point out that it would be advantageous to us if deer numbers were lowered. Right. That's people debate whether that's true, but I've seen like documented evidence where car insurers have advocated to lower deer numbers. I've seen lately with with wildlife managers being under some level of political pressure. To lower deer numbers because of ticks. Yeah, like like that's entered the conversation. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel like, I mean, I started working for science magazines almost 40 years ago. And even then at the very beginning, there were this debate about what do we do about deer populations. My first magazine was an environmental magazine. And the question I think was fire island in New York. Oh, yeah. And they were saying, what are we going to do with the deer? And and back then, the big fight was between really an interesting way between ecologists who are saying these deer are disastrous for the ecosystem. They're eating all the native plants. They're like just you know, changing the whole environment and animal rights activists, you know, and people who just had who just loved animals and I necessarily pita people, but just people who didn't want to see these beautiful animals killed. And it's and it's amazing to me that it's that 40 years later, it's still the same debate because it felt like it was pretty clear 40 years ago that we have too many deer that they're bad for the environment and that there's an easy solution to this, which is, you know, relaxing hunting laws in some cases. There's also some ways of, you know, there's there's vaccines and other things you can do, but it's but it's felt like that's been a kind of a natural ecologically sound response. Yeah, you've had for many decades, for many different reasons pointing out that some of these areas have too many deer and then you just kind of tack on what I heard. Yeah, now that she would just you're right. Right. Right. Right. Right. This problem though, I do think the ticks might be the thing that finally does it. I mean, I mean, talking to these folks in Missouri, but also in Martha's Vineyard, they're, you know, they were for a long time against killing these deer and now they're just launching this huge killing campaign campaign on that island. And I think it's that people finally said, look, we can't live with this kind of threat. It's direct. It's like, yeah, it's direct human health. Right. Because people can look at these people can look at these ideas of sort of like long term negative impact on native plant species and they they just kind of tune out. Right. But when you're paranoid to have your kid out in your yard playing on the grass, it just hits people different. Well, the funny thing is any of it hits people different when it's Lyme disease. And they say, well, you may get you may have to take an antibiotic or you might get some you know, fatigue syndrome. And and when you say, you're not going to be able to eat meat anymore or drink milk anymore. Somehow that it's all freaks people. Yeah, I want to I do want I want to spend more time on that tick life history. Well, let's do that first. I eventually want to ask you about a little bit about Lyme because I'm assuming you've read a lot about Lyme and your work and talk about you about Lyme. But um, so this tick like he he he hatches out. They got these little bombs, these little clusters. And eventually they mature and then they they latch on to a deer. Yeah. Why do they ever want to leave the deer? Or don't they? Oh, that's interesting. I mean, not just deer. I mean, essentially they're they're pretty indiscriminate. Okay. I'm nervous. I mean, in terms of they they want blood. But they'll a lot of you get white footed mice to get short tailed trues. You get possums raccoons. I mean, you know, people in Georgia wildlife biologists that talk to you said, look, anything that has that moves and has blood is is fair game. Got it. So that tick, he's not drawn to deerness. No, no, no. Okay. So that part of its life stage, if he gets on your dog, a possum, a person, he that that's all great by him. Absolutely. And that's one of the reasons when they talk about how do you get rid of these things? He can't get rid of them, right? But what you could do is drop the population dramatically. And that's where deer coming because deer are both so overpopulated in such incredible hosts, right? There's just they're just so large and he carries so many deep ticks because they had 500 to 1000 in a season, you know, a mouse you have four or five, maybe four or five ticks on them, but a deer you have a hundred times that number. So got it. You know, I always saw about what and read about that how they kind of hang out, weight percent to pass by. You wonder if, um, if the if finding that host and latching on to something is successful is is is essential to reproductive success. Absolutely. And then they'll get their blood meal and then they'll drop off. You imagine like the failure rate. Right. The failure race got to be enormous. I mean, for every one that that happens to have a thing brush against it and it gets on it. Yeah, he's got to have 99 siblings. Right. No, I never were like, I'm never in the right spot. I mean, dragging we were dragging these these sheets through these meadows on Martha's vineyard. And you know, within an hour and a half, we had 81 ticks on it. You know, and then and it's a little stretch that we were doing. Explain that to me. It's about he goes tick dragging basically. So he just has a big pole with a piece of white cotton on it, like a meter by meter square. And he just, but it's not warm. It's not no, but the it just the the the ticks just latch on. You know, they're just stretching out for something. And it's moving and they just get caught. And so suddenly and you pull it up and it just crawling all over the sheet. And you know, he's catching 81 in an hour and a in a 100 square feet, 100 square meters. I mean, if you went for an hour stroll. Oh, yeah. You're you're surrounded by ticks. And and of course, there are trillions across the planet. So it's like, you know, there's plenty of food for them. No, let me get to the my lime question. I was deep into the whole lime world 13 years ago. Okay, I always talk. It was a very, it was like a formative experience for me. I like my boy got, he got, he had bells, paulsies, terrible. I was sick, like six sick and got better. And while that was going on and while I was very like into the sort of like the culture of lime disease, there was this raging debate. And I even got to where I couldn't engage in it, you know, of like, what do they call it? The sort of perpetual lime or long lime or whatever, yeah. Like untreatable or long haul lime, or I came here with what it's called now. - Right, right. - But this idea that there were people out there that had it, knew they had it, but it was untreatable. - Right. - And they just lived with it. - Yeah, but then people at that time, people in the medical establishment that I encountered, infectious disease, people, CDC, people, whatever, they were dismissive of this idea. They're dismissive of that there's like an untreatable lime. When I was treated, I did the orals, I did the intravenous, right. I got sick in June. I got better in November after doing intravenous. And then do you know though, because you still live in the area, in the hotbed tick area, yeah. Is there still this idea that there's a strain of lime or there's people that have lime that cannot be cured, even with intravenous antibiotic? So there's nothing that can be done and they're gonna live the whole life with lime. - Right. I think it's a little bit like long COVID. I think it's something that's kind of half accepted, but we haven't pinned down exactly if it how long it lasts, if it can really last forever. I mean, I've always heard that if you really go all out with the full rounds of multiple antibiotics, you can even get long-term lime out. But you know, he's just talking this morning to my brother who's a doctor and he was saying, "Yeah, but you can get neurological damage. "There's things that can happen from not treating lime "that will stick with you." I do think it's, that's a scary thing about lime is it's as opposed to alpha gal is, you know, it's curable, but then often people don't know to cure it. And then by the time they cure it, they've already had some deleterious effects. So it's a different kind of problem. - Yeah, you know, when you, if you go way back in time, you'd be like, there's certain species like apostles, raccoons, was just throughout the last, couple centuries. These things have poured north and poured west, right? And it's some, there's definitely a climate component to it. There's a component to that these things tend to be animals that do well around people, right? That human activity opens up range conditions or opens up habitat conditions. So in the absence of, like if Europeans had never come to the new world and altered everything the way we altered them, raccoons and possums might still have gone north and west, but they might not have gone north and west as much as they've gone north and west. Meaning there's all these factors that lead to it, like probably milder winners probably. - They better have more predators. - Yeah, like predator reductions, probably agriculture, probably like all these things going into it. Suburban homes and trash practices and leaving dog bulls out on your porch. And you get this whole soup of things. And it's just undeniable that these animals have had a great, very successful run and have dramatically expanded the range. When we keep, when we hear about that these ticks are moving around, why now? I mean, it's exactly, I mean, and it's the same combination of factors, right? It's not just climate change. Certainly climate change I think is allowed ticks to move north and in some cases, west, if it happens to have made some area more human where they can handle better. But the bigger thing I think is land use. - Okay, so. - If you look at the Eastern United States, it's been reforested dramatically in the last 50 years. And not just that, you've had people do that at the same time you have suburbanization. You have these subdevelopments out in the woods. You have this kind of sense of what used to be, you know, inner city became suburb. And now you have kind of a kind of sprawl that's sending its tendrils out and deeper into the forest. You get all these edge habitats that dear love, that all the animals you're talking about love and that ticks then can ride on those hosts and proliferate. So we've kind of created the perfect patchy, woody, brushy, tick habitat over the years along a lot of the Eastern United States. - Oh, you know, when I first heard Loan Star Tick, all the, whatever the hell years ago, however long ago I know that we were doing this show. Like this podcast existed at the time I first heard of the Loan Star Tick. Well, in fact, let me ask you, when would I probably first heard the word Loan Star Tick? Do you have to guess? I mean, if you're on the South, it's been the dominant tick for a long time. Like 90% of tick bites are from Loan Star Tick. They've been used to the Loan Star Tick. - For more than a decade. - Yeah, for decades. - Also, people were talking about Loan Star Ticks in the South for a long time. - Yeah, for them, it was just, but you know, the interesting thing is, like there was a study done, where we get our AlphaGal statistics. It's based on the study of blood samples from military recruits, three thousand of them all over the country. They were taken between 2001 and 2007, and they looked at the AlphaGal antibodies in those blood samples. - Okay. - And then they kind of showed where there were most prevalence based on where the recruits came from. - Oh, it was fascinating, man. - And it's amazing if you look at the epicenter, which is really like Southeastern Oklahoma, up through Northeastern, Northwestern Arkansas, into South Central Missouri. It's like 47% of those recruits had AlphaGal antibodies. - What? 47% and that was, you know, that was 15, that was almost 20 years ago. - Oh, so I was late for the party on this one. - You were like, I mean, we all were. But in the South, the interesting thing is in the southeast where they were endemic, you know, the Loan Star Ticks, much more so than, I mean, Arkansas, Southern Arkansas, Oklahoma, they said that they would have had it. But, you know, in places like Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons, they had just as high rates. And they didn't have endemic Loan Star Ticks, but in the southeast, it was only 10% of the recruits on average had AlphaGal. So something, it makes you think that people who grew up with this, or it's been for decades or centuries even, there's probably some natural immunity or some kind of built-in, you would think, yeah. - Yeah, that, what that was leading me to, it doesn't really matter, but when I heard it, I thought it meant that it was a tick that lived in Texas. - All right, I didn't know what that was. - Just like that click, and then it realized, oh no, 'cause it's got like a Loan Star. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's got like a star out it, you know? - I thought it was like some Texas tick, and oh, so it's just phoning to think back of like, when you, the first heard it, what clicked in my head is like, there's this thing in Texas, and I don't really believe it. - No, no, no, that was my first thought, too. And it's just that white dot on the back, that's the only thing. - So, so, do you know how with Lyme, there's a question of where it ever came from. Like, you know, there's an honest debate about where it came from. There's a wildlife disease, you probably have heard of chronic washing disease, right? The chronic washing disease was identified, I can't remember if it was 68 or 72, or it was identified in Colorado. What's not known is, where did it come from? Was that just when we identified it? Did they, no one thinks that they identified the first case? - Right, but then it seems to be in many more places than it used to be, but prior to that, they weren't looking for it. So, this whole thing of like, what is it? Where did it come from? Was it always here? And we just found out about something that's always been here, or did it somehow emerge? And we freakishly found it right when it emerged. Like, you know, we don't know. Maybe someday we will know as sort of the genetic things and, you know, improve, maybe we'll get better clarity into it. But with alpha-gal syndrome, since it's a thing that's innately in the tick, why weren't dudes, why weren't you reading about the Civil War? Okay, and they're dealing with malaria. They're, why weren't people back then saying, oh, did you hear, um, you know, little Johnny down the road has developed the mysterious me allergy. - Right, right, right. - What, why wasn't that a conversation? - You know, I asked that question of every epidemiologist I talk to. And they all said, at some level, it's a mystery. I mean, you can explain it a way to some degree with the fact that it's laid on set. And so people just didn't notice it. And they missed diagnosed it. - Yeah. - You could say it's just, you know, people didn't, didn't take it seriously. Somehow meet allergy didn't, but the truth is that it didn't just suddenly appear here. It appeared in South Africa. There's huge cases in South Africa. There's a bunch of stuff in Peru. There's people in the Black Forest in Germany you're starting to get out of again. And all these places, is no one noticed it and it emerged around the same time. So yeah, I mean, it started to get identified between 1997 and 2007. You know, the first woman who really is woman, Sheryl Van Nune, sorry, Sheryl. Sheryl Van Nune in Australia. She accepts your apologies. Yeah. She was the first person who really noticed the pattern in Australia. And she had local people on the North Coast to Sydney who were getting and where they have these crazy paralysis ticks. This was she had her first cases, I think in the late 80s. And then she published a poster in 2003 and presented it at a conference in 2007. Okay. And she didn't know why it was causing it, but she knew that the tick bite was causing a mead allergy. And in Australia, it was crazy tick, all the paralysis tick, which can kill small children. I mean, it has this neurotoxin. And that's what it spreads. And it's it's a scary. And it's the one that spreads alpha gal. So she first noticed it. But then pretty soon, you had German researchers, you know, people in Southeast and Korea. I mean, it's really all over the globe. Yeah, I want to hit you with the thing that I need to make it know what to myself. I need to ask you about it. I don't want to call it a conspiracy theory, a theory. You know what I'm going with this? Sure. Okay. We'll get to it. Let me hit you with something though. A way I think about this kind of thing. Like why we're in dudes a long time ago, developing mead allergies. So my little boy, my younger boy, developed this condition called osteocondritis dicecans. They call OCD. Well, as funny as he's around on when he's going through this, he's around on crutches. Like I'm ever getting on a plane with him and the pilot is greeting people and he's like, what happened to you? My boy says, I have OCD. So I had to follow behind him being like, it's his whole office. It was osteocondritis dicecans. Okay. It's seen what it is is little bits of the cartilage, little bits of the cartilage and your joint dying fall off. Yeah. Okay. He got it weirdly, not weirdly. It's weird to get it in one leg. It's, it's, it's, it's weirder, but not twice as weird to get it in two legs. It apologies to any people that specialize this and I'm screwing parts of this up, but there is a genetic predisposition aspect to it. And there's also a, a use aspect to it. So he likes soccer and basketball and all that kind of stuff. So that probably complicates. And he has this thing happen. We dismissed him because he'd be like, something's wrong. My knee, my knee hurts all the time. Um, he's always talking about his knees or he's laying on the floor. My leg won't work. Why would he mean your leg won't work? And he'd be like, Oh, there it goes. Okay. Not hurting, but just observing this. And we're so like, what are you talking about? All right. All right. You get a max rate. Doesn't do any good because the X rate doesn't show. Right. Doesn't reveal this. You got to do an MRI to find out that you have it. So a lone bull, he has, he gets these couple surgeries. My wife brings him to a specialist. He's all fine now. But, but check this out. My mom's dad. Okay. Grandpa Glenn just had bad knees. Do you know what I mean? It was a fact of grandpa Glenn's life. They didn't know him. It was just, you know, grandpa Glenn. He's always had bad knees. Yeah. And I don't have any reason to think, but I'm like, I wonder if that dude. Yeah. Just had this thing that our little boy has going on. But it was just that he has bad knees. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. No one's good doing anything about it. They're not going to MRI grandpa Glenn, you know, 70 years ago. No. It was just like, it was just the deal. You know, his knees hurt all the time. Yeah. I mean, that was a question I asked. Is it, could it be that we just have always had this and we used to ignore it? And everybody said, no, it's really, it's just, there's just, it's too severe and it's too, and it's been this too big a surge. You know, I think the other thing you can say that speaks to what you're talking about, though, is that you know, there's been an allergy epidemic in this country in the last 50 years. I mean, food allergies have doubled and doubled again, right? And some of it is because allergies gave us the wrong advice. You know, like stay away from allergenic foods. Yeah. Like don't give kids honey and shit or peanuts and all that kind of stuff. So we're absolutely more prone to allergies than we used to be. So that's probably a big part of this. And there are all kinds of theories is that we're, you know, hygiene, hygiene hypothesis that we're living too cleanly. We're not developing, you know, we're not, not developing anybody's when we're young enough or are, are, are gut biome isn't good enough? Kids are not very, yeah. Yeah. All those things. There's this idea that they're not looking enough rocks at the park. Right, right. There's this one epithelial barrier hypothesis, which says that, that the chemicals we use and that are in the air are making are kind of making us more porous to allergens, you know, they're like weakening the things that protect us in our skin and in our lungs. And so where it's more easy for allergens to get into our bodies. So there's all kinds of hypotheses, but we do know. I hit you with some more. Sure. I thought people about this and like people in the know in the know-ish who are like, like, I don't know. What we like, I just, okay, a couple of years ago we had a couple of years ago when he was, when he was running for present, we had RFK junior on, he's talking about allergens and things. And he's talking about when these allergens exploded. And he's different areas where he's, he's like, we don't, I don't know. When people look at the timeline, like what are big shifts that happened societally, right? And he wasn't pointing to anyone, but he's like, you go and be like, well, what, what things really happened in humanity? And you'd be the explosion of corn syrup, um, cellular and cellular networks. All these other things, like, like, like, like medical practices, just kind of things you're talking about, like, like what could have, what sort of thing could have happened? Right. It would be in my lifetime where things just got different. And out of it came a lot of where we see like, why did childhood obesity do whatever? Why has autism done whatever? Why are the allergy rates done whatever? And, um, is there some thing we missed? Well, I mean, I talked to, this guy Jeff Wilson at the University of Virginia, he's done a lot of really good alpha-dale research. And, and one thing he talks about is look, tick bites of all kinds just boost antibody levels across the board, right? And, and the interesting thing is that you can have really high antibody levels and not have any allergies and weird things can trigger it, like stress can trigger. Okay. You can get this call chronic, you carryitis or something that got the rename wrong, but it works where you have these sudden flare ups of, of, of hives or rashes, you know, and you've had this kind of baseline of antibodies in your blood the whole time and something is triggering it, you know, it could be exercised, it can be alcohol, though we know those things can trigger allergic reactions faster. Exercise. Exercise and alcohol, you know, like in one German study for AlphaGal, they, um, they know that people had AlphaGal antibodies and they wanted to feed a meat to see if it would trigger it. But they weren't getting it to go into the reaction. So they gave them some beer to drink and, uh, and put them on treadmills and then they got a higher reaction. And my body that I was talking about, big exercise guy, big beer guy. Yeah, yeah. No, those two things together, you're more likely to get triggered. So, you know, so he was saying, you know, we can't necessarily like pin, you know, it's not a pure cause and effect. You know, sometimes we have all the working materials, but it doesn't happen unless some other outside factor comes in. Hey, everyone, big huge announcement. Me either live, the Christmas tour is kicking off again this year for the Christmas season of 2026. This time, we're hitting the Midwest. Me either live, the Christmas tour kicks off in December across six Midwestern cities. We got Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Madison, Des Moines, Minneapolis, and Fargo. Join myself, Yannis Putellis Claynew, Combrant Reeves and Randall Williams for a night of laughs, trivia, free prizes, news and opinions from across the worlds of hunting, fishing, wildlife, conservation, and wild foods. Also, we're already stacking up some great special guests. I got my buddy, bubbly Doug, making the appearance in Madison. Me either live is the best Christmas gift for any outdoorsman or woman in your life. Tickets go on sale September 25th, but sign up at the me either dot com slash tour and you'll get pre sale access to buy tickets on September 14th, days before they go on sale to the public. And I'm telling you, go ask anyone who has ever come to one of the me either live events and they will tell you, we laugh our asses off. I hesitated to go there, but let's go there on this area. So I'm going to treat this. I'm going to treat this with all due respect. Yeah. Okay. I'm not going to lead the witness. I'm not going to do an eye roll. It is it has been thrown out there. Yeah. Even by people within my social circle, it has been thrown out there. What would they look at as they say, how did, why did these big, the emergence of these big VC backed meat alternative companies beyond meat, whatever all that shit, you know, fake burgers. Right. - Right. - The emergence of all these like high-power VC-backed meatless products coincided with the explosion and alpha-gal, right? And they're like, they're trying to create customers in the dirtiest way possible. Did you run into this, did you have people share this idea with you? - Oh, absolutely. And in fact, what I was- - Like, how was it explained to you? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, Bill Gates was a bad guy in that story, right? It was like he's invested, I think, in alternatives to meat. And the Gates Foundation has paid for or funded genetically engineering ticks and genetically engineering vaccines for cattle to, you know, to defend off ticks. And so there was this idea that, well, maybe something got out of the lab, you know. The problem is, one, you know, Gates Foundation didn't work with loan stars, you know. But two of the timelines don't match up, right? Like, we started to see alpha-gal, I mean, it's been around, but we know it's been around since at least the '90s, you know, that people have been getting it. - And no one was making those fake burgers. And we started to get the real explosion before the fake burger industry came around. - Yeah. - The thing is, it struck me as an imprecise, expensive, extremely risky, right? - Marketing, right. - Strategy. - Yeah, yeah. - Like, like really risky. - Yeah. - Like you thought, like when Coke changed their recipe, they made new Coke, right? You thought that was caught, it's consumer backlash. - Imagine when the word gets out, you've created a disease and spread it all around the country. - No, no, no. - That's gonna be hard on your soy burger business. - No, I have to say, like to me, I don't think it holds water either, but I think the Lyme disease conspiracy theory is much more convincing. - Hit me with that one. - Well, that was the idea was-- - I wanted to ask you about this, but-- - Because Willie Bergdorfer, the guy, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, called Barrelia Bergdorfer. And that is named after Willie Bergdorfer, discovered in 1981, I think. And he worked for the military doing what you call it, bioengineering ticks and infecting-- - But bio-weaponry yourself. - Bio-weaponry, it was an idea that you could airdrop infected ticks onto enemy populations. And they actually looked at infecting ticks and using them as a weapon. So that work was actually done. - I'm not questioning that, it's true, but what does that then do for when your forces are occupying that area? - Yeah. - It's like-- - Like, yeah. - Some of us stuff is insane. But I'm not taking that. I mean, it's serious. Like, it's a real-- - No, it's true. It's like, how do they not go, but hold on a minute? 'Cause after we win, we're gonna kind of need to go there. - All right. - Well, and then when you-- - Power on God. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - No, it makes-- (laughing) - It's like insanity. - No, no, no, it makes no. I mean, and you know, and so that narrative made a certain kind of crack logic, you know, but the truth is that, again, that the idea was there that the adgenetic engineer, the bacterium that causes limonies. But the truth is, you know, limed is he predated that discovery and predated his work. And the earliest examples of that bacterium we find are in museum collections of mice from 1894. - Is that right? - That already had that bacterium. So it's-- - Oh, you kid me, I didn't know that. - It was a more than a century before this thing came around. You know, so it's, again, it doesn't hold water, but you can see why people would be into it on the internet. It sounds like a kind of logic, you know? - Oh, yeah. It's like, we used to joke where we talk about friends of ours. You know, we'd be sitting on top of stuff like this. And we'd have friends where we felt that most of the information that they traffic in would be information you'd get if you typed into Google, the truth, if you prefaced your searches with the truth about-- - Right, right. If you guys say the truth about blank, it'd be like that information. - Right, right. Well, the problem is it's always most convincing and effective when it's 80% right. - Sure. - When the science behind is actually kind of true, they're just missing some crucial piece of it that invalidates the whole thing. - Yeah. Are they able to go in, I didn't know that about like, finding those old mice and museum collections and stuff. Is there a marker where you could go in and you could find, I don't know, a man like you go back and find in historic, loan-star tick country that you could take some remains from someone. - And look for out of the out there. - Yeah, I don't know. Maybe out of the sky without soft tissue. You know what I mean? And go in and sort of get some idea, but maybe you can't do that. That'd be interesting, forensic work. I mean, the guy that did that work with the lime disease is Professor Telfer at Tufts. But I don't know if they've looked into ancient alpha-gal yet. - Yeah, what, when you were working on this, what are there, are there other, you know, we talk so much about lime, we talk about alpha-gal. When you look at this, are there other tick-borne pathogens that we're gonna be hearing about like in 10 years? That they're just talking about knowledge. What's on the horizon? - Well, the big thing that a lot of the veterinarians and livestock folks were talking about was screw arm certainly, but also the Asian longhorn tick carries a deadly disease. I forget the name of it, but it's sparring to spread. It's in I think 24 states now. - Well, that's not even a tick from this continent. - No, no, no. It's, I think it was first identified in New Jersey about 20 years ago or 15 years ago. And it's already spreading all across the country. So that's a thing people are really worried about. You know, the interesting thing is like, if you look at the statistics for the number of people catching these things, you know, Babesiosis can kill you. Elurkeosin can kill you. - What are those two, I'm not familiar with. - I think Babesiosis is, I'm like, I wanna get this wrong. I think that's a parasite born one, but I'm not sure, but it causes terrible chills. But those are such small percentages compared to lime and alpha-gal. I mean, lime is 10 times as prevalent as they are. And alpha-gal, I mean, the most recent tracking data from Virginia this year. The number of people who are reporting alpha-gal, the blood tests that are reporting alpha-gal positive is 10 times as high as people with lime disease. So it's really spreading at a huge rate. So it's a different scale that we're talking about with those two diseases. - Are they closing in on any, are they closing in on any treatment? Like if it's like, if it's some like allergen, you know, I don't know, I don't know the first thing about any of this. I just wanna be surprised to hear to someone's like, oh, you know, we've come up with some, I don't know, treatment that makes it that your body doesn't trip out about alpha-gal anymore. - Well, it's three or four things. One is what you talked about. We just go off meat and dairy and gradually drops. Another one is, there's a drug called Zola, X-O-L-A-I-R, that was approved for asthma originally. And it's since been approved for food allergies in a broad way. And it's been pretty effective. I mean, it's expensive, but your insurance can pay for it. But people who have had an anaphylactic shock from who are really in danger of alpha-gal reactions often get prescribed this. This professor Scott Cummins at the University of North Carolina that I spoke to, he's really one of the guys who was one of the earliest discoverers and has really spearheaded, he prescribes out a lot to people. And people have found, you're not really supposed to take it regularly, it's supposed to be, but it seems to be safe. And people have found they can really eat meat on it in some case. - Oh, really? - So that's one possibility. Cummins is looking at a potential drug that might attack, you know, he has some good leads for drug development. - Tell me who that is. - Scott Cummins is the guy at the University of North Carolina. And then I know there's some work being done in I think University Arizona on vaccines that could maybe the idea is there's some common denominator of all these tick-borne illness is something, some co-factor that's making people react. And if we can somehow neutralize that, you know, maybe we can prevent, we can prevent some of these diseases. So there's lots of ways things people are looking at. The other thing that's non-pharmaceutical, that a lot of people told me is effective, is what's called auricular acupuncture. An auricular AU/RICU/LAR. And that means around the ear. And it's when, you know, and it sounds woo-woo, but it's-- - Yeah, I've already dismissed it, but tell me anyway. - You know, the thing about acupuncture is that it's actually one of those alternative medicines that has, they've had double blind trials that have shown its effect of nursing. And when I talk to Commons about it, he said, look, I mean, allergies, this is not my thing, but in some ways it makes a lot of sense to me, because there's the vagus nerves, nerve goes up there around your ear and it goes down into your gut. - Good. - And the mastels that are reacting to alpha-gal, they're down in your gut. And so if you have something that you can somehow modulate the reaction of those nerves to that, to that allergen, that could explain a lot. I mean, he was telling me, "Look, my son is allergic to water." on it. If he eats a walnut, within seconds, he's got a reaction. He said, nothing else in the body moves that fast, except for nerves. That has to have a neural connection, you know? Yeah, it's not like going through your digestive tract. No, it's like signals are shooting instantly. So he said faster than booze. Right, right. It makes sense to me that that there will be something that's modulating your nervous mind that's doing it. And I talked to a few people who had had, you know, that kind of treatment or giving it to their children and it had good effects, you know, that it actually were able to eat meat again. So I'll say, well, my, like, I don't want to get it, but I thought about it. And I thought, like, if I got it, I would hunt turkeys and fish like a mad man. It would be a real, like, I wouldn't really change my general way of going about life. I would just really shift. I mean, I would use it. I would just be like, okay, all the energy I normally spend and getting dear meat and all that. Right. Let's go and get turkeys and I'm a fish. Right. And I kind of, I used to live for the first couple of years. I live in this fear of it. Right. So I'm like, oh, I'd be like, so ironic. Like, I got it, you know, um, here's a problem with that. It's not just, you're not totally protected, right? Because one, you're still getting tick bites, probably, right? So your, your sensitivity might still go higher. And if your sensitivity goes higher, even if you're eating fish and birds, right? Suddenly, you might become sensitive to things like the gelton capsules around ibuprofen, which is made with collagen from beef. Or, you know, the lanolin in a, in a synth skin cream or the, or the, the, the lactase and lactate products and toothpaste. You get, oh, really, they get that bad. People get it. And then, and then the worst ones are you going to get surgery and they give you heparin, which is a blood thinner. And it's made with that with, with animal products. Or you get insulin or you get anti-vanon if you get bitten by a snake. It's made with, I think, horse's blood, you know, just, it's kind of, if you get sensitive enough, if you're out there hunting your, well, turkeys, like, like, yeah, they can, turkeys carry ticks, right? Well, turkey hunting is the most tick, there's the most tick bitten thing you could do on the planet. Right. I mean, you're doing everything a tick wants you to do. Right. Crawling into the grass and just sitting there for a long time. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You're where the ticks want to be. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. You know, it's funny. You mentioned that about all of our stuff that has animal protein in it. We, we got a, we got a dear friend and her daughter was, her daughter's vegetarian. You know, she's over my house eating a marshmallow and we're camping it. And I said, I said, I understand your vegetarian, but, you know, that marshmallow's got, um, uh, what, what do they call it? What's the stuff in there? It's a challenge. Yeah. Yeah. So that marshmallow's got animal gelatin in it. So what, what's, what do you make of that? She's, I guess, I'm a vegetarian that eats marshmallows. Oh, yeah, it worked. Yeah. I mean, they were telling me, I mean, there are people, and again, this gets into the kind of psychosomatic stuff, but there are people who tell me, look, I can't even drink bottled water because it's made with bone charts purified with bone chart. No. Well, how is that going to leave any alpha gal in the water? I mean, it feels like a step too far, but you start to get these psychosomatic reactions. Yeah. Other stuff. Yeah. Other stuff legitimate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, like, how, how do you spend, like, how do you spend your life now with you? I mean, you do these big, well reported pieces. Do you have days when, I mean, is that the main, is that the main thing you do? Do you have other kind of annoying stuff you got to do throughout the day, or you just, you just write, like, you just work on your writing and you write. No, I just, I'm, I write full time, but that means, you know, like right now, I'm in a, in a phase when I'm gathering my next story idea. So I'm sending emails to researchers around the world, and I'm, and I'm reading scientific papers, and I'm, you know, calling friends who have, have leads for things, and, you know, that takes several weeks. And then I'm in the reporting phase, and the writing phase is actually probably, you know, just the last third of it. Yeah. So tell me how much time you spent, like, take the, take the, the alpha gal paper or particle. How much time did you spend on that? Well, I went out to Missouri to start the reporting in late March, like the 20th of March. And this, and I was done with the thing, the 20th of June. So what is that? Three months. So three months. And that was fairly compressed, but yeah. And that was the one thing you were working on. The only thing I was working on. Yeah. You know, but I went, I went to Missouri, went to Arkansas, I went to North Carolina, went to Virginia, went to Martha's Vineyard, I, um, talked to people all over the country. So, you know, it becomes like a big, I mean, part of the thing I felt about alpha gal was that there'd been lots of stories about it, little piecemeal stories. Sure. But no one had done the kind of the whole thing. And that's what I love to do with the New Yorkers. They, they give me 9,000 words. And I can talk about the history of it. And I can talk about the epidemiology of it. And I can talk about the allergy epidemic. And I can talk about all these dimensions. And the great thing about alpha gal is that really, it touches on all that stuff. Like the ecology, the history of our country's landscape, you know, all that stuff ties into this story. Yeah. For listeners, you, Berkhard just said a 9,000 word article. Yeah. That is, that's a doozy. Yeah. That's like, that's long form reporting. And most people, if you're, if you're sitting there reading, you know, a newspaper, whatever, and you're reading what you probably think of as a long story, you're probably reading like 1200 words. Right. Right. You know, you think of like a classic glossy magazine magazine feature. Those usually run like, like I used to write for outside. And like a big, a big one, a doozy and outside was 4,000. Right. Right. 4,000 words. Yeah. So 9,000 is, well, I put it in perspective this way. There's a hell of a lot of books. There's a hell of a lot of books that are 70,000 words. Right. You know, a lot of books come in around 100,000 words. You can get away with 70,000 words. So when you're doing this piece, you're writing like a 7th or a 10th. Yeah. Yeah. Your, your piece on these ticks is the 7th or 10th of a book. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a hefty chunk. It's a heavy chunk. And you know, and it's a, I mean, not to dig too much into into the craft, but it's kind of, it's a, it's a challenge, which I love. You know, like how do you keep all these threads going? How do you, how do you keep the reader interested? And, and is there are there enough dimensions to any given topic to really merit that kind of things? I don't want to, I mean, back in the day in New Yorker had, there was once a famous, I think in the 70s or early 80s, there was a pro, it was just 4,000, 10,000 word pieces on each one was on a different kind of grain. You know, and, you know, this week, wheat, you know, and, and you know, and I don't think Americans readers have that kind of patience anymore. No, but that's where the good stuff is, man. Yeah. I do love those kind of deep dives. I mean, you know, Joseph Mitchell, my favorite New York writer from the 30s, 40s, 50s, he, you know, he sometimes wouldn't get to the, to the nut graph to the main point of the article for three or 4,000 words, you know, he would be like set in the scene, introducing you and it wouldn't be till pretty deep in before you really knew what you're going to write read about. I knew a guy, he passed away. He's a writer here in Montana, Brian DeSalvatore. He did a little work for the New Yorker. I remember it was, it was phenomenal. He did a 10,000 word piece on the history of dynamite called beam fire. Man, I would tell him to read that. Everything you'd ever want to know about dynamite, right? Right. Right. And what Nobel invented it, right? Yeah. Oh, that's the whole story. Like picking up pigeon shit and getting guano. It's the whole history of explosive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But, but I don't know. I don't want to say I miss it because it still exists, but it's not as prevalent American culture as like these like very informative deep dive pieces. This time we're hitting the Midwest. We've got Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Madison, Des Moines, Minneapolis and Fargo. Join myself. Yannis Putellis Claynew, Combrant Reeves and Randall Williams for a night of laughs, trivia, free prizes, news and opinions from across the worlds of hunting, fishing, wildlife conservation and wild foods. Tickets go on sale September 25th, but sign up at the me either dot com slash tour and you'll get pre sale access to buy tickets on September 14th days before they go on sale to the public. And I'm telling you, go ask anyone who has ever come to one of the me either live events and they will tell you we laugh our asses off. I want to ask you about one of the one of the pieces you wrote. It was the one I brought up earlier than when I first discovered you, you know, 26 years ago, 27 years ago. As your piece on cock fighting, right? Do you feel that you would be able to do that? Do you feel that you would be that you would be able to write that piece today. Why not? Because of what's constrained. Just so because it would be like, it would just get such a reaction. Yeah. Regardless of what you said about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It would get such a reaction. Yeah. Yeah. About, you know, like, like, don't even talk about that. That's so mean. Right. Right. Right. Do you mean like, no, no matter what your take on it is, it would just be like, not a thing people want to talk about. Yeah. I think the New Yorker would still publish that piece. I think part of the reason was, you know, as you remember that part of the point that was piece was, you know, we have, we have this aversion to coqfying this revulsion. As a culture, we've decided this is not okay. You know, where did that come from? I mean, I think it came from early, I mean, you know, there was, there was some real terrible things at that 19th century, like women wearing whole birds on their heads, you know, whole species of beautiful birds were decimated and the animal rights movement came out of that or the conservation. I mean, there was a lot of really important work that got done to kind of stop the cruelty. But what, but, you know, what we got instead was, you know, industrial meat production, you know, and, and you look at part of what I was trying to say was, look, we have these urban values now where we are revolted by coqfiding, you know, and we think of it as cruel. But when you look at the life of a chicken, right, would you rather be a fighting coq that has its own beautiful cage. It gets literally massaged every day that gets the best feed that gets exercise equipment in his cage and that lives a year or two years and goes out fighting. Or would you rather be a factory chicken that gets six weeks and then gets bundled onto a conveyor belt hung from a running chain zapped with a bolt of lightning and had its throat cut by a rotary saw. I mean, which life is a better life. And yet, and as urbanites as as modern Americans, we've gotten used to being blind to the, you know, shrink wrap chicken looks abstract sitting in our supermarket. But oh boy, you show someone killing a chicken or you think about someone watching a chicken fighting and that's appalling. You know, which is more appalling. So that was kind of the point in a way. It was to kind of flip all that insight out a bit. And you, when you worked on that, you went to some coq fights in the South went a bunch of them. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and honestly, there were coq fights that I almost kind of admired and their coq fights that I did find appalling. I mean, was it common in the ones you went to, I can't remember. Were they putting the blades on them? They're putting blades on them. Yeah. I mean, mine is the wrong word, but, but I went to some local small, what they call brush pits, cockpit, but brush pits are small pits in Louisiana. And you know, you go there at midnight or at one in the morning and you're thinking, because you've been told by all the anti-coq fighting folks that these, these places are dens of iniquity, drinking and drugs and gambling, you know. And then you, and you go there at one in the morning, you think, shit, you know, I'm an out of town or I don't, what's going to happen. And you walk in and it's a, it's a little cage with some bleachers seats around it. And they're, first night I went, they're two nursing mothers sitting on the front row with their babies. They're their kids running around up and down the aisles, you know, you had whole families. It was like Friday or Saturday night in the country and this is what they did, you know. And yeah, it's bloody and that, but the chickens are also at some level. Those chickens weren't, you know, you get some bad stuff, you know, you get chickens that are injected with drugs, you get, you know, poisons put on their, on their blades, you get some bad stuff. But in those, in those cases, it was, it was kind of an old tradition. Abraham Lincoln was a cock fighting referee. George Washington went to cock fights. I don't know. Honestly, it was into it. Oh yeah, they were, you know, Andrew Jackson supposedly had cock fights in the Oval Office, you know, in the White House. I don't know with the Oval Office that I have my period wrong, but he, you know, so it's, it's, it was an old tradition. And then it's, and then now it's knowing the cockpits that I, the cockpits that I thought were kind of awful were the really big ones where you go, like, I was one on the border, on the Arkansas border, Oklahoma border. And the weekend I went, there were 900 chickens fighting. And, you know, and those birds, and that was just a pure bedding scene, you know, and their birds are getting, they're getting these big blades on them. They're going in, they're tearing each other apart. People are bedding on them. And, and they're getting, and you walked around backstage at those places. And they were just trash cans filled with these dead. This is clandestine. You know, in Louisiana, it wasn't. When I went in 2000, it was still legal. Okay. Now in 2008, it became illegal in the whole country. And in 2018, even the territories, even Puerto Rico and Guam, it's illegal. So it's become, so it was still legal in a couple places when I went. One of the most brilliant, accidental things that I ever had to be traveling, I was in the Southern Philippines. It was actually, it was actually, after the 9/11 attacks, it was kind of like dicey down in the South and the Southern Philippines. But I was down there and locked into the cock fight. It's been hours there just, I was just blown away by. What kind of a place was it? It looked like a, like a, if you, if you didn't know where you were and you drive them by, you'd think it was a small, like a county fairground. Right. With overhead, open, open walls, overhead covered bleachers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they had this, the thing I remember most, man, is like, and this is the difference between like a place like the Philippines and a place like America, probably that is big cauldron, big boiling cauldron. And every guy, everybody, when they're cock lost in a fight, they'd go over to that cauldron and pluck it. So they don't get, pluck it, dress it, and it's just all day. Right. Watching guys walk off down the road, carrying plough. And they're going to eat that. Yeah, like carrying plucked roosters. Right. Right. Right. Right. Home to eat. It was just like, it was just brilliant to see it, man. Like it was just amazing to see it, you know, well, that was the waste in that big pit was like, all those birds are so injected with weird stuff. You can't eat them, right. And it was a big tradition in Louisiana. You'd make it so stably pecan't, you know, like the spicy sauce. And you would, and you would eat your rooster, the died after it was part of the ceremony, part of the tradition. You know. And I think once all these things happen with drugs, it that kind of fell away. So that's, that's part of what's what was lost. Is, is, is the world you covered back then? Okay. When you do that, when you do your cock fight piece, that world's gone. That, I mean, I think there's still lots of clandestine cock fights. Yeah, I think there still are. But I think it's definitely gone on. I mean, even when I was reporting, you know, in New York, it's been illegal for decades. Yeah. But there was a big bust in Harlem, while I was right in that piece. And there was an old theater that had been turned into a cockpit, you know, and I know it in Brooklyn. There's, you know, there's Centauria. There's a lot of Caribbean cultures. And so for this, there's cock fights going on. Yeah. You see fighting cocks in New Mexico. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not lots of people. Yeah. We just keep those. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I used to have this, I used to have this driver. I would use a lot. He was Dominican. And we, I was going to go to DR with him. Hmm. He had like, weirdly, this dude had a family, meaning he had a wife and kids in DR. Uh, he had a wife and kids in the US. And they knew about each other. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Anyways, he'd bounce back and forth. I had this whole plan where I was going to go with him to DR. And he was going to take me to a cock fight. I never went my wife's like, that sounds like just the worst idea you've ever had. But I never, I never actually did it. But I haven't seen one since all that time ago. Yeah. You know, it's funny because I haven't, I haven't been to any either, but it was interesting. Like when that piece came out in Harper's, I read at least one or two sermons that were written based on the piece that were talked about the blood of the, of the cock. And you know, it is like, it's a deep old cultural thread, you know, in American culture and certainly Southeast Asian and Caribbean culture. Up top, I mentioned to your work on, and you know, you had, you had a book where you explored, I liked you to tell people some more of the chapters, but you had a book, New, it came out as Newtling, Newtling for Flatheads. And it was about Southern culture. Yeah. Lay out some of the chapters. I've already had the cock fighting one in Flatheads. It had a thing on Newtling. There was a piece where I hung out with, um, modern immune shiners and with ATF folks who were hunting them down. I kind of went back and forth between the two groups. I did a piece on, uh, on frog farming. I did a piece on koon hunting. I, the whole way I got into the book was I was living in, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, kind of missing Oklahoma a bit. And I, and I wanted to get a koon out. And so I went and I, I found an ad for a blu-tick koon out in Western mass. And I went out there and, but I really wanted a red bone because I think they're beautiful dogs. And so I went there and I talked to the guy and I said, well, do you know I could get a red bone? Are there any red bone readers around here? Well, sure. And he went to the back and he came back out with American Kooner magazine. You know, and it was fat, big ole full of ads. And it had all these ads for like, Koon Hunters shipping sperm across the country to each other for their champion nighthand. and all this kind of stuff and it was and all the different big hunts that were going all around the country and I ended up finding a woman who fought who took her dogs at 350 nights a year. I mean she every night she would go out at midnight and have a coon hunting contest with three other dogs and you're not killing the raccoons. You're basically just sitting standing in the woods for three or five hours in the dark, listening to your dog's bark and then you're getting points for the first dog that trees a trail first one that trees it. So anyway, so I wrote a whole thing about coon hunting. I wrote a thing about this old marble tradition in the South. You know kind of all these obscure little subcultures that are still around. They still have a lot of people doing them. How did you hit on um I brought myself early on like how did you hit on what when did you first hear like oh this thing noodling for flats is because you grew up in Oklahoma like you grow up knowing about it. You know, I didn't which is funny. I mean okay, it's not funny actually because it's it's it's typical for my family. My my parents are both German. They moved over in 1962 from Germany and we spoke German at home and my my dad was a physicist and my mom was a historian. So we had a very weird little academic bubble. Yeah, we were not and and uh and I love Oklahoma, but it wasn't really till I started going back at right after college. I started writing for Oklahoma today magazine. They sent me on these assignments and I'd write about Buffalo or tall grass prayer here. I wrote about the Tulsa race massacre back with 1990. But I was so when I started doing that, you know, I really started to think why there's a whole side of the South that I just never got to know. In the middle of that two things happened. One, I was at the Environmental Magazine in Cambridge where I was working. An intern came in from Southern Mississippi and he told me about noodling. And I thought, and then I was talking to my brother-in-law in Oklahoma and he said, well, you know, the plumber here, noodles, and this guy, Lee McFarlane, was my classmate. Oh, high school. I mean, I did been in school for them for like 15 years. You know, Birkhar, I'll take you noodling. And he was just a genius at it. I mean, I went out with him the first day. I went out with him. I caught a 23 pound catfish on my arm, you know. So anyway, and he was perfect for me because when I knew him in high school, he was kind of a layabout. He was a guy who just didn't care, made, probably made season Ds, you know, smart, funny guy. No one ever calls him, but he'll lay about anymore. Yeah, right. I like that. But then when I met him again in this context, he was on fire. He was on fire and he knew his shit and he was funny and he was capable and he was a great plumber and he was also this guy, you know, so he, anyways, it was great. Yeah. When you're working on all that, did you ever, because a thing you don't do is you don't do, there's a predictable way that a guy would go about that. A predictable way, because you said you had like, you had like, you know, your dad was a physicist, right? There's a predictable way where you would go about it like you're, you're, you're slumming it with these people. Right. They're not in on the joke. Right. Right. You know, yeah, you look at like everything's kind of ironic. Yeah. You know, you're, you're showing them off, not you, but a writer, yeah, yeah, might be showing them off to his friends. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Having a laugh at them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's what you don't do that game. I mean, it's not even like I'm, it's not a game. I'm trying not to do that. Where your mind goes. Yeah. It's not, I mean, I find these people that I've written about fascinating and impressive in a lot of cases, you know, and, and, and refreshing in a way that, you know, like, I've spent the last almost 50 years, 45 years of my life on these coasts, you know, and, and in cities and, and almost everybody I know of you for, for most stories is kind of media ready. They've kind of prepared their spiel, right? And they kind of know how to narrate their life. And they, they, they think they're going to be the next person on survivor or whatever, you know, they, we kind of all packaged ourselves for ourselves. And, and, you know, when I'm talking to the coon hunters or cockfighters, those guys, they had never been interviewed by people before. You know, you know, and they were, and that was exciting to them to be, to have someone be truly interested in what they're doing. And truly interested at the level of not just like, how many chickens died, you know, it's like, what do you feed them? Well, how do you exercise them? What's the history of this thing? How did you get into it? You know, how, you know, I really want to know the whole dimension of it. And that to them is then, it's, so it becomes a real exchange. It's not just me looking for the lured bits and trying to play those up. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Does it take you a long time to win people's trust? When all of a sudden, here's his dude, he's coming from this big fancy magazine, you know, and, and I'm going to show you some things that I can't tell if you're here to laugh at me or expose my secrets. Is it hard to win people over? You know, I find like there's usually, there's usually the same kind of transition happens where it starts out with, they're kind of tickled that a New York guy came down from New York to talk to me. They usually don't know the New Yorker, you know, or they don't care about it. Maybe they've heard about they don't care about it. But the fact that I'm just, I've flown down from New York to come talk to them, that's impressive. So they're willing to give me the time. And they kind of think of it, they're kind of, it's a joke to them a little bit, right? And then pretty soon, I'm with them for a week sitting in their cab or their truck, typing everything they're saying, you know, wanting, going through the muck with them. And then at a certain point, they're like, oh, this guy really wants to know everything, you know? And part of the way is, the way I report is, I mean, nowadays I do more recording, but in the day, I always had little keyboards and I always typed everything as they said. And at a certain point, they'd be like, damn, everything I say is interesting. He's taken everything down. So they kind of get excited about it. So yeah, it's, anyway, I love the process. So what are you going to work on next? Well, I have a bunch of leads. I don't have anything for me. You got a book. Are you working on a new book? Well, I'm trying to put, I mean, one thought I've had is like, my last bunch of pieces have been all, I realized I've written about a lot of the phobias. At least the top 10 phobias I've written pieces about. I mean, Arachnophobia, claustrophobia, I wrote a big piece on Deep Cave Diaries, I wrote a piece about a woman who collects venomous spiders. And, you know, I've written about turbulence. I've written about infestations. I've written about snakes and Florida snakes. So anyway, I've been thinking about putting the other collection called the like the, you know, the sum of alphobias or the big book of discomforts or something like that. Sure, man. That'd be a good one. Because I kind of feel like it's something we're more and more in touch with like all these, these fears that we have. I think that people go to therapy or CBT therapy or all these kinds of stuff to address them. So it's become more about anyway. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah. And then what magazine pieces are like tickling your fans, you right now. Like you said, you got a lot of ideas. Yeah, I'm just kind of think they're good or not him. He's one way. I'll tell you if it's worth your time. Here's a problem. I don't want to tell you because this is, you get, you have way too many listeners and because they'll jump on it. So that's how long for a magazine writers. I don't, I'm joking. I don't know what you're saying. There's certain things that are floating around my head. I don't want to say them. Yeah. Yeah. Like, for instance, I have the world's greatest name for a business, but I can't say it. I don't think it's all you actually the one. The story told me before we started taping that one. That's too easy as I'm ready for that. Yeah. Okay. Dig into that because I pass along to another writer and I don't think you bought. Yeah. Yeah. Well, man, I want, I want to thank you again for coming on the show and talking about all this, man. That's total pleasure. Yeah. I think people should really like, I think that I'm saying this very particular to the people that listen to the show. People listen to the show. You're going to love when you go find, you'll have to conquer paywalls and all that. But when you go find the, tell me the name of the piece. I can't remember the name of your alpha gal piece. Well, you can look under the great infestation. The great infestation. Or the tick that hunts down its host. Yeah. That's okay. Yeah. Take the hunts down its host. Yeah. And it's Burkhard, Bilger. So B-U-R-K-H-A-R-D-B-I-L-G-E-R. And then Newly for Flatheads has probably the most. Well, that's what I was going to do. That's what I was going to do the mega plug-on. If you're interested in American culture, if you're interested in Southern culture and like kind of the underground, sort of the underground world of people who live ascentrics who live these kind of old traditional lifeways and Newly for Flatheads is a great book, man. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. That was a fun one. Yeah. My kids were small when I, when I did, when I reported that. So they kind of went around in my, in our motor home. Yeah. And I have great memories of being in Northern Georgia and a hunting cabin, like talking to moonshiners and I come back every night. Anyway, we're drinking a lot of moonshine back then. You know, I actually went to a moonshine reunion in South Carolina. And I spent two or three days asking people, "Hey, do you make moonshine?" I'd love to taste some moonshine. They're like, "No, I don't know. They looked at me and I had this kind of East Coast accent." That was a place where they really didn't trust me. I want you to take a sniff of this. All right. Well, dude, don't get too close. It's not bad, but don't get in there, get in there, but just get in there and take a whiff of that. Isn't that something? That's the weirdest. I took a sip of that one time. You couldn't get it out of your mouth. It's beaver casters. So this is the way that you used to save them. It's beaver casters preserved in moonshine. That's crazy. Yeah, don't sip that. Wow. I took a sip of that and I was tasting that taste bird again. The ones in South Carolina, they had these. A moonshine, dude, made that for me. I didn't tell what I did with it. He made it. But they took these native, heart-led Indian peaches and they would soak it in moonshine. It would make this blood-red, incredibly tasty moonshine. I love that stuff. Actually, I should probably shouldn't say this because it's a felony, but for. I made some moonshine in Brooklyn for one year because in my neighborhood, there are all these apple trees planted in the 19th century, early 20th century, and nobody picked those apples. They're all rotten. So I went around and my friend Kevin and I, Kevin Bergen and I mapped all the apple trees that we could find in our neighborhood and then we bought a press and we went around and asked everybody if we could get the apples. And we ended up just pressing carboy after carboy. These giant glass jugs full of. Where were you doing today? But we were doing it in the basement of my house and out on the sidewalk and then eventually that fermented into apple cider and hard cider and then I bought a still from Portugal and my son and I made a batch of apple jack disco and it was actually amazingly good. I could not believe it. We just had a writer on Isaac Fitzgerald who wrote that book about Johnny Apples. Yeah, yeah, right. So we got into this whole apples into this and into that and into this and into that. We had a guy right in explaining what you're just talking about. This from apples makes this kind of thing. Right. The next step and I forgot all what it is now, but. Yeah, yeah. No, it was distilled drinks. That was crazy. I assumed it would be indigestible but it was actually pretty good. It tastes like apples. It was good. That's good hard work and journalism right there. Yeah, exactly. Well, man, I want to thank you again for coming down the show. It was great. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. And now, like I said, I was kind of not looking forward to getting now for gal, but I had a plan and now you made me think my plan's off. Yeah, the plan's got some problems, I think. Got some problems. The other big thing is I don't like to admit this about myself, but I'm a big half and half guy in my coffee. Oh, yeah. That's done with. Half and half cheese, all the good things. Yeah. All right. I'm going to avoid it. Thanks again. This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.