June 8, 2021 • 48 mins
If you’ve ever wandered past what looked like a pile of dog barf on a log during a hike in the woods, you’d just seen slime mold - one of the most perplexing organisms on Earth.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know. A production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck, Wayne Bryant, and this is stuff
you should know. No producer editions, right, it's just just us, buddy,
(00:25):
We're gonna do it. We're gonna be just fine. Jerry
took an early vacation for Memorial Day. I know she's
always doing stuff like that. She knows how to live,
and we're stuck with slime mold in her absence. I
like slime mold. I knew you would love slime mold.
Uh yeah, I think it's pretty interesting stuff. It's very
(00:46):
Josh Clarkey. It is kind of Josh clarky so much
so that, um, as I was researching this, like I mean,
I just kind of generally knew about slime mold that
it exhibited, you know, some weird level of intelligence here there,
but I didn't know much about it. And then as
I was researching, I was like, I'm kind of into
slime mold now, like all the different kinds of it.
I like regressed into like, you know, the nerdy eight
(01:09):
year old I never was. And then you're like, let
me Clark this over to Chuck and see what he thinks. Yes,
uh yeah, I like slime old too. I think it's
kind of cool. Uh, let's do it, okay, Chuck, I'm
ready al right, everybody stand back because we are doing it. Yeah,
and I think you could file this. I mean, it's
not an animal, slime mold. I guess we should just
(01:29):
tell you right away. It's not an animal. It's not
a fungus, even though you would think it's a fungus
if you saw it on the forest floor. And we'll
get to all this stuff, but it feels like an
animal one of our animal episodes anyway, sort of. Yeah,
I was gonna save the fact that it's not an
animal or fungus or at the very end, but sure
(01:50):
we could do it at the beginning. I get like,
literally in the last minute, they were like, I still
don't know what this is. An animal is it's a
dog in disguise. You know everything we just told you about.
It's not an animal, it's not even a fungus. And
then we just go to listener maw. Uh So what
is it though, besides super ancient as in like maybe
one of the very first living things. Well, it's a
(02:11):
protest actually, they figured out and protests seems to be, well,
it's one of the five main kingdoms animal bacteria, plants,
fun guy and then protests and protests are typically single
celled organisms like amba um or protozoans, things like that,
and they have I don't I couldn't find out exactly
(02:32):
when they did it, but they fairly recently, I guess
in the history of biology, fairly recently reclassified slime molds
from the Kingdom fun Guy over to the Kingdom Protista. Yeah,
which is interesting because for years they have been studied
by mycologists who are fun fun guys. And they found
(02:52):
out later they were like, you know what, sorry, they
should really go over to the protestologists, and they said,
we kind of like these guys. Can we keep studying
them since we have been And they said sure. In
the protastologists were superbissed. They were they were. They're still
actually not over it. They're frequently t peeing the academic
(03:14):
halls of the my collogists whenever they get the chance.
It's very bitter battle. So um, that is pretty cute
that they that the fun guy people are are still
studying slime molds even though they're not Fun Guy. But um,
there's you know, some good reasons why they were originally
considered to be fun Guy. Mostly that they're like these
big kind of clumps, and there's all sorts of different
(03:36):
ways that they take shape and form depending on the species.
They're different colors. Some of them form kind of net
like honeycomb structures. So the look like dog barf one
of the main ones we'll talk about today looks a
lot like dog barf. Um. They look like the fungus though,
Like if you're walking in the woods and you saw
this nine out it's in, people would say, well, it's
got to be some kind of fungus. Yeah, especially because
(03:58):
if you're staring at them, you would have to stare
at them for about five, six, ten hours to see that.
They have a huge difference between them and fun Guy.
And they move. They just move so slowly it's not
apparent to the to the naked eye. But if you
if you film these things with time lapse cameras, uh
(04:19):
and speed it up, you can see, oh, they very
clearly move about from place to place. So, um, that's
a big differentiator between them and fun Guy. But one
of the reasons they thought they were like funger, that
they were funkers because they produced spores to reproduce, right,
and I mentioned their ancient origins. Uh, they are about
a billion years old, and like I said, could be
(04:42):
like as soon as there was stuff, it seems like
there was slime mold eating basically eating the bacteria that
breaks down other stuff that dies, and that's what they
feed on. Bacteria, mold, yeast, basically anything that decomposes dead things.
Slime molds in gulf. I think it's it's not called photography.
(05:02):
It's called phigot trophy. Oh yeah, it's a little It's
not how I was going to say it, But what
are we gonna trophy? Yeah, but I think you're absolutely right. Well,
you know us, it wouldn't be as if we didn't.
Probably both get it wrong, right, But that's when you
basically surround something and then gulf it and just sort
(05:23):
of like move it into your body just like sort
of absorb it basically. Yeah, which is another difference between
slime molds and fungi, because funk i actually break the
food down and then absorb the broken down nutrients. But
the fact is, if you have things that are decomposing
other things like bacteria, molds, yeast, the things that that
(05:43):
crawl onto or grow on dead people, dead trees, all
that stuff to break them back down into their constituents.
So the fact that those the slime mold feeds on
other things, it makes it a really important part of
the food web, part of the nutrient cycle, because other
things them along and eat the slime molds. Um. There's
(06:03):
apparently a kind of beetle that has a specialized jaw
that allows it to slurp up slime molds. I think
some kinds of insect larva eat them and then so
it just kind of keeps going. But they're a really
important part where you just have these microbes that like
the beetle couldn't get to that they're able to basically
get that energy from you know, the bacteria by eating
(06:24):
the slime mold. Right, and even though other protests can
carry disease, slime mold is quite human friendly. Actually, uh,
you can eat the stuff if you want. There's a
dish in Mexico and some parts of Mexico called Coca
de Luna, which is exactly what you think it is.
Poop poop of the moon, moon poop, and uh, they
(06:46):
eat this stuff. I even looked online to try and
get a good recipe, but um, it's not on like
the pages of Martha Stewart Living like it's you got
to dive deep into Reddit and stuff like that to
get some good recipes. It seems like almost almost smacks
of urban legend. But I'm seeing it in different enough
forms that I think it's probable that it actually is
(07:08):
a thing. The thing that scares me is that people say,
like in some regions of Mexico, it's like, that's not
super specific, you know. True. Uh, and and we pointed
out they weren't animals or plants, but we definitely need
to point out that slime old is also not mold
as a protest. That's right. So um. One of the
(07:29):
one of the really amazing things about slime mold is, um,
there's a couple of different kinds, as we'll talk about
in a second, but one a whole bunch of different
kinds of species. One type of slime mold can get
really big. I mean, some of them can get up
to the size of like a medium or pizza large pizza,
I guess, depending on whether you're getting ripped off by
(07:49):
your pizza guy. But like twelve inches in diameter. That's enormous, right,
So you're like, well, that's pretty cool. It's a big
blob of mold. Well, put your sock carters on, because
I'm about blow your socks right off your feet. Some
of those types of slime mold that are as big
as a pizza are one giant cell. Yeah, I mean,
this is truly amazing. The plasmodial slime mold, which is
(08:12):
I guess you could call it one of the true
slime mold. Is it has all the stuff like as
if it were undergoing cellular division, and all the all
the different nuclei, like millions of nuclei, organelles, cytoplasm, all
that stuff. But it's just not it doesn't have cell walls.
It's not individual little cells. It's just it splits and
(08:32):
lives inside this giant fortress wall. Yeah. It's almost like
if you took all the cells that should have made
this giant blob um up as a multicellular organism and
just kind of broke them open and dumped all the
contents into this blob and then through the cell walls away.
That's what you would have it's it's interesting, it is,
and it's it's really kind of straightforward if you if
(08:54):
you just hear it. But it's also really easy to
to just keep going like wait, wait, why why is
it like dead? And how is it like this? What's
going on here? Which is one of those things that
it just it makes slime old. It's its own thing.
And we're still learning about this stuff, you know, every day. Yeah,
and it I mean it gets there's quite a few
times in here where we're gonna say, and here's where
(09:15):
it gets even crazier. Uh, this isn't super crazy. But
the the other kind of slime mold um or the
other big broad categories a cellular slime mold, and these
are lots of individual, single celled organisms. But the kind
of knockout fact about them is when they're stressed out,
if they don't have a lot of food around, they
(09:37):
can join up together and sort of look like one
of those plasmodial slime molds. But it's not. It's called
I guess pseudo plasmodial yeah, because it's not a real one.
But it basically says, all right, we're gonna all come
together to try and find food together. And then when
they do have food, they can be like, all right,
(09:58):
we'll just go along our merryway and split up again, yeah,
which is pretty nuts. They also will come together, um
Apparently it makes it harder for predators like those specialized
beetles to eat them, because those individual slime molds can
be you know, a millimeter in size or smaller. Um,
So it's pretty easy for a beetle to eat that.
(10:18):
It's much harder for a beetle to eat something the
size of like, you know, a quarter. Right, So they
actually do come together. They come together to move. They
also come together to reproduce and produce spores. But the
characteristic of this that what makes it a pseudoplasmodium rather
than actual true slime mold, is that they retain their
cell walls, their individual cells when they come together. They
(10:41):
just kind of loosely formed together. In a really good
way of understanding what this the cellular slime molds created,
it's kind of like a swarm. Yeah, that's a good
way to put it, I think. Or what's the god
that my favorite thing when the birds do that, what's
that called? Uh flock of seagulls haircut? That's it? Uh
(11:05):
uh boy, you threw me there. So these the plasmodium
is covered by a layer of slime, and you're gonna
want to put a pin in this because when they
do move around, they leave behind a little these little
collapse tubules and it looks basically like not exactly like
a snail trail, but sort of like a layer of slime.
And you're gonna want to remember that for later on,
(11:26):
because he's actually kind of served as important little markers.
As a matter of fact, write, write it down. Everybody
will wait until you get a pen, a piece of paper.
Go inside the CBS closest to you. Yeah, yeah, put
on your mask by pen, yep, by a piece of paper.
Pay ten twelve times what you should have paid for
that pen. Really, oh my god. Pin mark up as
(11:49):
big as CDs. I think the general mark up as
CVS fairly high. They're like, we get him in here
for the aspirin, then we really juice them with this
ballpoint pen. I hope there's no CBS ads in this episode,
but we'll find out. What is what's a good deal
at a drug store? Is there like a zero? They
all mark it up? Yeah, everything's marked up because it's
(12:11):
like it's like convenience kind of thing. You sound like
a lot of sound like a grandfather. It's all marked up.
Back in my day, you just go to a regular
grocery store and buy your pens from the ben factory,
straight from the man who made It's right. Uh. You know,
when I was little, we would uh for a short time.
I'm not sure why we did this, because it's not
(12:32):
like we lived out in the country and this is
a very old timey country thing to do. We bought
our milk direct from a farm and we would pull
up and and uh, I would get to walk inside
this huge walk in cooler, like next to a loading dock,
and I just thought it was like the coolest thing
in the world. Somehow to get that fresh milk. Sure
didn't they. They back the cow up and it makes
(12:52):
a beeping sound, and they just scored the milk right
into the back of your station Wagon's right, they mark
it up first, wash your way home. Uh so where
were we? Okay? If you do see this stuff in
the woods, if you ever hiking along and you see
a big or medium size pizza like yellow blob or
orange blob, they can be red. They can be white.
(13:15):
They can be maroon very rarely, they can be black, blue,
or green, but usually it's sort of yellow or an orange.
And you see that in the forest, you're probably looking
at a slime mold. Yeah, especially if it's really hot
out and it just rained. Yeah, the the worst thing
in the world for me. You can also see them
(13:35):
like on your grass too. Apparently if it gets really
rainy and hot, slime molds will actually come out of
the woods into your grass and be like, oh, this
is pretty nice, and um, they aren't gonna do any harm.
That's not a problem for your grass. It just looks
kind of gross. It's certainly not gonna hurt you or
your pets. And then eventually it'll dry up and turn
to kind of a gray or tamp powder and blow away,
(13:57):
and that means that it just turned into spores and
it just reproduced all over your place. Yeah. I think
maybe we should take a break because right now people
are probably like, dudes, you promised greatness here and so
far it's a little hum drum what So put those
soft garters back on, because when we come back, we're
(14:18):
really going to start knocking them off with some of
these amazing facts Okay, Chuck, we set them up. Let's
(14:48):
knock him back down. So here's one cool fact is
that slime molds basically can do the equivalent and do
the equivalent of throwing themselves the grenade. Uh. They will
sacrifice themselves to save others. And these are things without
a brain or a central nervous system. Like, it's not
like they think, I'm feeling empathy today for my fellow
(15:11):
mold and so I'm gonna save everybody because I've come
across some infectious bacteria. But what they do is they
come across it, they engulf it, and then they say,
let me go, and they cut themselves off from the pack,
from the swarm and detach themselves and die of that infection,
but save the rest of the group. And um, my
(15:34):
heart will go on place in the background as they
get further and further away, exactly. That's that's altruism, Yeah,
which is pretty amazing considering, like you said, they don't
have a brain or anything like that. So how how
are they doing this? We'll get to that later. So
what about tell everyone about the uh dicti stelli um
(15:55):
disc discoitus disc discoides. Okay, that's one of my favorite
words now disco Whiteyscau's disco in it. So that this
was this is a kind of um cellular um slime mold, right,
So it's made up of a bunch of different individual
organisms that come together. And when they come together they
(16:17):
practice altruism to some degree as well, because some of
them will basically be like, Okay, I'm dead, now I'm dead.
I'm gonna turn into a bundle of cellulose fibers, and
that cellulose is going to connect with other slime mold
cells that have died and turned into cellulose and come
together and form a stalk. And then the top of
(16:37):
the stalk, a bunch of different um slime mold cells
they're called slugs when they're individual like that, will climb
up the stalk and then they'll turn into spores. And
then in that way they're sticking up out of the
ground and a passing animal will come and they'll stick
to it and it'll get a ride to greener pastures.
But to do that, some of them have to die
(16:58):
to form this talked to to let the spores grow
on top of which is pretty amazing itself. It is
uh And you know we mentioned that they move. You know,
they're not. They don't just sit around and wait for
someone to drop a pepperoni near their pizza shape and
the woods so they can eat it. They gotta go
where the food is. And they either moved by these
(17:19):
little appendages that like little feet like appendages. Those are
the cellular slime olds, the individual single celled organisms that
can come together, or and this is crazy, the the
other kind. They move as one big mass because you know,
there's no cell wall going on, so they just sort
of expand and contract the cytoplasm to kind of gush
(17:39):
their way along the ground very slowly. Yeah, which is
really neat to see because when they're especially when they're
searching for food, which is basically all they're ever doing.
Everything that they do is either to get away from
some noxious stimuli or to go toward food. Usually to
go toward food. It sounds like us it basically I
(18:00):
don't like that, but I like that smell. I'm gonna
go toward that. So um. They make these amazing kind
of they look almost like sea fans, you know what
I'm talking about That they look very fractally and they
just kind of they fan out. Is the best way
to put it, when they start to go look for food,
and when they do find food, they start moving toward it.
(18:23):
It's the cell walls contract and that cytoplasm goes that way,
and next thing, you know, over a very long period
of time, five days later, the the slime mold has moved.
And actually slime molds um if you don't they like
they they're totally fine living in peatree dishes for as
long as you want them to um, as long as
(18:44):
you feed them. If you stop feeding them, they'll just
get out of the peatree dish and start looking for
food elsewhere, so they'll they'll escape. Yeah, but I mean again,
it's not like you're just sitting there watching this thing
crawl out of it's petrie dishes. You leave overnight and
you forget to feed the thing and you come back
and it's half of it is out onto the table
or something like. It's something like a bread out of
(19:06):
gremlins kind of you. And I think you said they
moved about a millimeter an hour, but some of them actually,
if they're really cooking, can go about an inch and
a half in an hour, which that's really fast. I mean,
it doesn't sound fast. But when you're talking about what
we're talking about, it is pretty fast. Yeah, um, and
I saw that a couple of places. Most people cite
(19:26):
something like a millimeter an hour. I can't remember which
one goes that fast, but yeah, I mean, you can't
see it moving when you're staring at it, but over
time you can for sure. You know, if you're just
really patient and you can lock in on something, you
might be able to see that. So when they started
figuring out in the early two thousands, of Japanese researchers
(19:47):
were some of the first to like really study slime
molds as as showing some sort of intelligence. They figured
this out from you know, from watching these things actually
move about and when you when you film them and
um that like high speed and then replay it, you
can see their movements are deliberate in a lot of ways.
They're they're not just blind dumb movements where they happen
(20:09):
on to um food. They clearly consense food somehow or
some way, and they spread out um and they seemed
to spread out and again in a really deliberate way.
And so some some researchers started to um test slime
molds to see what they were capable of. One of
the first one one of the first researchers was a
(20:32):
Japanese scientist named toshi Yuki Nakagaki, and UM, I think
so too, and Dr Nakagaki, which is even better. Um
built a maze, like a pretty simple maze, but in
actual three dimensional maze and a good sized peach tree
dish put um what what has come to be known
as probably the smartest size slime mold, Farium polycephalum, which
(20:57):
is kind of like the rock star of the slime
mold world these days, put a psarium in it and said,
go to town, go find your little favorite oat flake treat,
which is their their favorite food. Yeah, And the key
here is is there were four different routes to two
different endpoints where this food was. It wasn't just like
there's only one way to solve this maze. And so
(21:19):
they put the little oat flake at these endpoints, and uh,
the microorganisms that grow on the oat flakes is what
they're after. That's not like they love oatmeal or anything
like that. And so he put them there and studied them,
and over the course of hours, these things basically learned
to get to that food in the quickest fastest way
(21:41):
every single time. Yeah, like it could, it could conceivably
get to it, like you said, four different ways, but
that fast way was the way that it would. Just like,
that's impressive. That that's definitely not worthy. You can write
multiple papers on that kind of study. And so another
Japanese researcher came along and said, hold my sack, a
researcher name at Sushi Taro from Okkaido University. Did you
(22:06):
like that? Yeah, that's good? And um Dr Tiro said,
all right, what about this? What if we take some
oat flakes and basically make a general map of the
neighborhoods in Tokyo and see what the slime old does
with that? Put a little slime old in a petrie
dish with these oat flakes that kind of mimic the
neighborhoods of Tokyo, and watched to go I think over
(22:28):
the course of like four or five days. Right, yeah,
and you might think cool. It does what it does
and it goes after that food in the most direct
way possible, which is what it did. But here's where
it gets genuinely amazing is they went back and they
overlaid a map of the current Tokyo Railway commuter system,
(22:51):
the subway system, and they laid it over this grid
the slime and it was almost a perfect match. That nuts,
that's I mean, I had to reread that like five
times to even believe that that's what happened. That this
line basically figured out the most efficient route to get
(23:12):
around essentially Tokyo. Yes, which I mean humans had figured
out too, but it took teams of human engineers and
a very long time for them to figure this out. Right,
So the slime mold was just like, this is this
is nothing. What else you got? You got any more
cities that are more densely populated with more neighborhoods, because
I'll just make your subway maps all day long basically,
(23:34):
and they're like, Tokyo is probably one of the most debts, right, Okay.
I saw another um another similar kind of a bit
of research chuck, where they actually used oat flakes to
signify ancient Roman cities in the Balkans. This is this
is crazy. It's like an archaeological study, um. And they
(23:56):
put some they six some fiserium on it and fis
um on it, and it mimicked ancient Roman roads that
had been lost, were very obscure, had largely been forgotten,
and ones that were well known in the Balkans. It
mimics these these Roman roads like things that people have
(24:16):
been like, Okay, this is the best route from this
city to this city. The slime mold did basically the
same thing and and apparently revealed some lost stuff. Yeah,
I mean, I guess it could. Also It's interesting like
if it doesn't match up, if they do an experiment
like this, does that mean like the humans get it wrong?
Like can they use this as a test and be like, sorry,
(24:37):
the slime old is spoken. I guess so. I kind
of like the octopus picking the World Cup. You know,
they always take the World Cup away if the other
team that the octopus didn't. Yeah, well, I wonder if
you I mean, and we'll get to the real applications
of this, but I wonder if they could do something
like that where they let's say they look at the
Tokyo system in a couple of places that didn't match,
(24:59):
They're like, we totally should have gone this way. Yes,
I feel like that that is the direction that people
are kind of going in that they could conceivably use
this for planning new stuff. You know. Wow, So every
city planner we'll have a slime mold researcher at their best. Yeah,
(25:19):
I mean, like, this is crazy. Why not? You know,
all you have to do is have some oat flakes
and a Petri dish and you're good. So I think
we should take another break. What do you think? Quite frankly,
we want to eat some oat flakes right about now.
I'm kinda in the move for that too. We'll be
right back. Okay, did you just see some moat flakes?
(26:05):
I did not. All right, we'll get you something, because
here's the secret, everybody, when we take a break, we
don't really go take a break. No, we should have
had some crusty old oat flakes on your desk and
just eating them real quick. I I don't know, I
can't see. So all right, we've said that these things
don't have brains. They don't have and I don't think
(26:25):
we mentioned that. It's not like they have like it's
not like their jellyfish and they have some sort of
weird neural net. They got nothing like that at all,
nothing like they have no way of of generating consciousness
in any form that we recognize. And yet slime old
is teaching us to open and open our horizons um
(26:47):
in hearts to sure two new ideas of what constitutes
consciousness and intelligence. You know what I'm saying, Like it
makes sense as a swarm, as a bunch of cellular
as cellular slime mold makes sense. We're already familiar with
the hive mind, and you know, the emergent property of
a bunch of different things, you know, operating together. The
real puzzler, though, is the the single cell plasmodial slime
(27:12):
mold that's one big giant cell and the fact that
it behaves in ways that seemed conscious to some degree. Yeah.
So if you want to kind of go back in
time to where a lot of this rearch research started,
it wasn't actually in Japan, but it was in the
nineties sixties physicist named Evelyn Fox. Keller was curious if
(27:35):
she could use math to model biological systems because they
had had success using math to explain and expand our
understanding of physics. So she was like, let me see
if we can do this with biology, and someone said, well,
you gotta meet Lead Siegel. Siegel, is you got a
little surprise for you? And Lee Siegel got together and said, oh,
(27:57):
Dr Keller, you need to meet our end slime mold.
And Dr Kell is like, this is the nineteen sixties.
I don't know what slime mold is yet. And Keller
and sorry Siegel said oh, we'll just take a seat
and let me tell you about this, uh, which is
dicto dictio still stellium, dicta stellium, right, dictio stellium disc goidium.
(28:24):
I think the discoids discoidium Yeah, okay, but it's the
one we were talking about earlier that that creates the stems.
They sacrifice themselves to create stems for the sports, right.
And I think this was just significant because it was
kind of like the first time anyone had observed and
you know, fell off of their lab stool and could
explain it to others, these pseudo plasmodiums. But what they
(28:47):
were missing was they were like, all right, we see
this happening, and it's amazing and how are they doing this? Though?
And the very first thing they thought of is like,
maybe it's like an ant colony or something, and maybe
there's like a leader or a pacemaker cell or maybe
a few of them. They get together and they just
sort of send out chemical signals to everyone else and
(29:08):
say go this way, and the rest are just sort
of the worker ants that follow along. Yeah, And they
knew in particular that there was a chemical called cyclical
a MP, which is related to a t P, the
dino cine triphosphate um, and that that was how they
were signaling. But they thought that that like you're saying,
(29:29):
that there are just a few signaling, everybody else was responding.
And what they figured out is that that they had
that totally wrong. That there weren't leaders, There weren't pacemakers
who were in charge of like you know, signaling and
an effect making decisions for the group. That it was
actually like a group effort, and that the the whatever
um whatever cell or slug that they're called in this
(29:50):
cellular slime mold swarm was closest to food. It would
signal with a MP that hey, there's some food over here,
let's all go over this way, and that signal would
just kind of be passed along through the swarm, through
the cellular slime mold, and the slime mold would move
toward the food and start eating. Yeah, and this was
you know, I mean, you can see why they went
(30:11):
in that initial direction because it made sense, and a
lot of nature is organized with the top down principle.
In mind, humans often organized with the top down principle
big business, government. It's just a it's a system that
we're used to seeing in in nature and in people,
and so it made sense that they went that way,
and they never they never really thought about the fact
(30:34):
that it could be like, no, there, Uh, it's a
total bottom up system and whatever is closest can sig
send out these signals. Yeah, so instead of like a hierarchy,
it's more like, um, it's like it's like how a
flock of birds operate. So a flock of seagulls haircut
operates where they run so far away. Yeah, but it's
(30:55):
the hair that's closest to whatever it's running from is
the first to run and everybody else follows. Is kind
of like how a flock of birds will turn depending
on you know, which way they need to turn based
on that bird making that decision, and the rest of
the flock flock basically following it to bottom up, bottom
up decision making kind of thing. And so we started
(31:15):
to learn a lot and we know a lot about
bottom up decision making now as opposed to when these
guys were working back in the sixties, I think UM.
But in the twenty one century, that whole idea of
bottom up decision making or decentralized UM decision making UM
has become a real component in in UH artificial intelligence
(31:37):
design because if you've listened to the End of the
World with Josh Clark, you know that one of the
hardest things in the world to do is program something
to understand everything, because you have to input all the
stuff it needs to know. Whereas if you can just
kind of set up some sort of simple algorithm to
let the machine think for itself, you you finally got something. Yeah,
(32:00):
and I would imagine I didn't see this anywhere, but
it seems like this might could have some applications in
nanotechnology as well, like the idea that we could program,
you know, billions of tiny little nanobot bugs to clean
the windows of your house every day, like a lot
of things collectively doing one bigger thing. Uh am I
(32:21):
base there or could that potentially be a thing? Not
at all. I think it totally could be a thing.
It's it's anytime you have a huge amount of things
that you're trying to all get to do roughly the
same thing, but they need to not you know, uh,
redouble their efforts or um replicate their efforts. So you
don't want one cleaning one part of the window and
(32:43):
the other one coming over and cleaning the the same
part of the window that's already clean. Um. All you
have to do is figure out how to teach them
if if this happens, do this, and if you can
figure out how to strip it down to a basic
enough algorithm that could conceiveable be used for just about
(33:03):
any situation. Um, you've got the key to the universe
in your hand. Like there's actually we'll have to do
a um An episode on it one day. But I
read an article about a guy who was I think
he was a physicist back in the eighties who was like,
I think the universe is basically an operating system. That
is that is that it goes down to two. There's
(33:24):
two bits. You could say it's black and white, one
or zero, it doesn't matter, but there are two kinds
of bits, and depending on the combinations that these things form,
everything else in the universe arises from that, including consciousness, planets, slime, mold,
everything comes out of these two types of bits that
basically make up the fabric of space and time, interacting
(33:47):
with one another and increasingly sophisticated patterns. And that is
exactly what you're talking about. So if we can figure
out what that that computation is, what those algorithms are
that give rise to larger and larger stuff, you can
you can do anything. It's it's weird you can do
increasingly sophisticated stuff. The more basic your algorithm is. It's
(34:10):
almost a paradox. Yeah, this is like Dr Octagon stuff.
Dr Octagon. I don't know, is that right from? Yeah?
He was Alfallina? You mean sure? All right? I like
Alpha Malina. I think he makes some really weird choices
for parts. I'm sure somebody's like, hey, we'll give you
(34:34):
ten million dollars to play Doctor Octagon. I'd be like, sure,
you got it. Where do I sign up? Yeah? I
need to get him a movie crush because he actually
is friends of the network. He's a friend of the network.
I think he's been on The Daily's Eye Guist a
few times, and like they booked him on some other
comedy shows. I'm like, guys, they're a little Malina My
way for real, Malina spread all over Movie Crush. You've
(34:55):
been on daily s Eite guys twice. I've never have.
I've been on movie Crush too. Ad Miles on the
movie Crush the other day and I was giving my
hard time because they haven't asked me on and twice.
It's hilarious. Keep it up, chuck. Yeah, he was like,
uh no, man, I was like, Miles, did he really
you flustered him? I feel like he was on skates
(35:17):
for a second here, but I let him off the hook.
I'm having Jack on next week, so I'm really like
going full court press here. Yeah. Miles is like man
beat beyond guard, chucked his not pull punches. It's funny
because Miles, you know, as you know, is such a smart,
smart guy and uh just like having a conversation with
him is always amazing. And then he comes on and
(35:39):
he picks Mall Rats. What's his favorite movie? Was it? Really?
That's his favorite movie of all time? Huh? I mean
that's what he picked. And he was like, hey, man,
I never said I had good tastes. It's pretty fun.
Do you have any hints of what Jack's is going
to be? Well? I know it's pulp fiction because he
he had me save it like two years ago, and
I just you know, he kept slipping through the crack.
(35:59):
So he's gonna come on next week for pulpiction. All right,
So let's get back to I mean, we talked about
how the uh, the d D as we're gonna call it,
moves around with yeah, without a the pacemaker cells. But
that original true slime mold, the big single celled one
that's just made up of all the goopy cytoplasm. We
(36:20):
didn't really talk about what they do. And because if
you don't have cell walls, you're like, well, how's this
stuff moving around? It's actually made up of what's called
oscillating units. And so these units oscillated different frequencies depending
what's going on, like where they are, and then what
the their little neighbor oscillating units are doing. And so
(36:42):
when they go close to food, they start oscillating and
shaking like hey, hey, hey, I'm near some food, and
then that just sort of gets that flow. Everyone else
starts oscillating in a similar manner, and that gets that
flow of cytoplasm going in that food direction. Yeah, and
so the slime mold effectively moves to the food because
of that that oscillating unit that looks again like a
(37:04):
fan spreading out going to find food and then finding it,
the slime mold moves toward it or like you said,
away from something that they don't like. Ye yes, um,
which is pretty neat. So so those are the two things.
It's moving towards food and moving away from something and um.
One of the things that they found is that slime
old can actually um learn and not only learn to
(37:28):
like stay away from something, it can actually teach other
slime mold um to stay away from it, even slime
mold that's never been introduced to it. Or alternately, it
can teach this is the really the thought garter. Uh.
In fact, it can teach other slime mold that something
that seems harmful is actually harmless. This is a pretty
(37:51):
cool experiment. Yeah, So these researchers put slime molds, uh.
They built a little tiny bridge, was very cute, and
they coded this bridge and a noxious substance. It wasn't
harmful to them, it was harmless. It was like salt
or something, let's say. And then they put the little
those little oat flakes on the other side as their
(38:12):
ultimate temptation. And so these first slime olds start creeping
up to it and sort of dip in their little
toe in the water and saying, uh, this stuff is
pretty notious. But then they learned, right, like, okay, so
it's not actually harmful. I can go across this stuff.
And what they found was that it learned to cross
(38:33):
this little bridge just as fast as slime molds that
were placed on bridges that didn't have any coating going on. Right,
So it said, Okay, this stuff's fine. It's he's gross,
is way too salty, but it's not gonna hurt me.
So I'm gonna get to food just as fast. Right.
That's pretty amazing in enough self, but gets crazy, yes, right,
they we need like a banner matter nole to come
(38:55):
in and say that. Um. So they they take the
slime mold and break it apart and fuse it together
with other slime molds that have never been exposed to
this noxious stuff before. They're called naive and the other
ones are called habituated. And those naive ones when they
encounter this noxious stuff like a salt bridge for the
first time, they don't approach it with trepidation. They go
(39:19):
right across it as fast as the habituated ones that
it's fused to. This is really weird because this is
the first time the stuff is encountering it, and they
think that somehow the habituated slime molds are passing on
the information like no, no, we know it's gross, but
it's actually fine to the naive slime molds. And they
figured out, Chuck, that it doesn't matter if you take
(39:42):
three habituated slime molds infuse them with one naive slime mold,
or take three naive slime molds and one just one
habituated slime mold. It's going to approach us and move
across it just as fast as as either in either situation. Yeah,
and then they also sort of figured out how long
this took. So the naive slime molds they separated after
(40:05):
an hour of fusion with those uh habituated I'm gonna
call them in the no molds, and it forgot. It
forgot that the coding was harmless and it sort of
had to approach it with a little more trepidation. But
if they had been fused for three hours or more
and then separated it, it remembered. I mean it technically
(40:27):
can't remember, but they do have this weird sort of
memory uh that works. And I think they even figured
out some of this snail trail stuff that they leave
behind access sort of like a spatial memory, because they
come across this snail trail and say, oh, someone's already
been here before me, right, so there's no reason to
(40:47):
go research this area because clearly wasn't food there. Yeah,
and again here's your ten minute reminder that slime mold
don't have brains or neuron So all of this is
just just astounding stuff that we're still trying to get
to the bottom up, like that habituation thing. They're like,
we don't know, we have no idea, but we're gonna
go find out and maybe in ten years we'll be
(41:08):
able to explain it. Right, So eventually, um, you know,
the people that are people that are hipped to the
slime mold mold thing are like trying to spread them that.
They're trying to spread the word and me, like, this
stuff is really amazing. They're doing Ted talks on it. It
It was a really good Ted talk on it, in fact,
and some coders said, hey, wait a minute, you know
(41:32):
they're doing all this amazing stuff like the overlay of
the Tokyo subway and it's lining up perfectly. What if
we actually generated code of the slime mold and kind
of reverse engineered it and and we could see what
that look like and how we could use it. So yeah,
this one artist named Sage Jensen basically figured out um
(41:55):
or took. I don't know exactly who figured out exactly
what the the slime mole old um algorithms were, but
somebody wrote them down and Sage Jensen came along and
turned them into a C plus plus code and basically
ran these things it's like algorithms, and found that these
fractals started forming that look essentially just like slime mold,
(42:18):
moving across the peat tradition search of food, which is
pretty cool in and of itself. It was art art
project basically, but some someone on a team of astrophysicists
heard about Sage Jensen's work and they used it when
they were stumped trying to figure out how to map
them the invisible matter that makes up basically the structure
(42:42):
of our universe, that that if we can just crack
that nut, will understand the universe exponentially better than we
do now, but we cannot figure out how to do it.
And so, just like with the ancient roads between the
Roman cities or the Tokyo subway map, someone figured it
out to use slime mold to basically try to try
(43:04):
to create the structure of the universe that's invisible. These
invisible filaments. Yeah, these filaments that came out of the
Big Bang. So I guess they went back to Sage
Jensen and said, uh, first of all, stage U C
plus plus code, isn't there really just be minus code?
For being honest? And he said, that's not how it works.
Get out of most great coding joke. Uh, thank you.
(43:27):
It's my only coding joke. And I just made it
the only coding joke I think. No, I think it's
not a bug. It's a feature, isn't that one's? Um?
So yeah, they went to Sage and they said, you're
an artist, but this is pretty amazing. I think we
can apply it here, and they modified it and what
(43:49):
they did was and of course there's always oats involved. Um,
they put a model in place with virtual slime mold cells,
and they put it on a map with thirty seven
thousand real galaxy and they used I guess virtual piles
of food to represent the galaxies, and the bigger the galaxy,
the bigger the pile of food. And so they did
(44:11):
this modeling through the coating and had the virtual slime
olds seek out the most efficient way to reach this,
and I guess in theory they're hoping that they get
a sort of map of the universe out of it. Yeah.
So so when the slime hold was finished, they all
stood background, that's amazing, How accurate is it? And they
(44:31):
all just realized that they had no idea how but no, surely,
Like I think what they're doing is they're taking this
as an initial, you know, guide, and then they'll go
back and try to figure out how to verify it.
And maybe the slime old did figure out the most
efficient way to link together these galaxies, but that would
be I can't even put a word on that of
(44:54):
what that would how impressive that would be if the
slime mold recreated how the universe is invisibly linked together,
the structure of it. You know, what if slim old
does God? What if we your sleep right now and
this is all just one dream? Chuck? Uh? The other
cool thing they figured out with the slim old moving
around is when they were researching them, they found that
(45:16):
they those mazes that they were running them through, they
went even faster through the maze when they had some
sort of noise like a bright light or something like
we said. They like to go away from things they
don't like, and that negative input of that light basically
made them say, all right, let's let's pick up the
pace and make make these decisions quicker and get to
that food and stop fussing around. I don't like this
(45:38):
light staring at me. I think we kind of blew
some minds today. I think so. My mind's definitely been blown.
Did you want to cover the Amazon thing? Nope? Okay, good.
Uh that's it for slim unless you've got anything else
right now? Do you? I got nothing else. We'll have
to revisit this in ten years. And thanks to Dave
Ruse for helping us with this one. Um. And since
(45:59):
I to Dave Rouse, I think chuck it means it's
time for a listener mail. Hey guys, I'm gonna call
this night trap response. I just laugh every time I
hear those words together. Now, No night trap. This is
from Aaron, Hey, guys, just finish the Night Trap video
Game show. Thanks for bringing it to everyone. I own
(46:19):
the twenty five anniversary edition. Like you said, it's not
a good game, but has its moments. One other game
worth noting is called Double Switch. It said the same
style and video camera control quality, and it started Corey Hame.
Perhaps arguably a little better game, but still had the
same thing going on. Really, I'm sure your research and
its lots of things that don't quite make it into
(46:40):
the final show. Uh, Aaron, we did not know about
Double Switch, So nice work there. And Aaron says, I've
listened to so many shows it feel bit Chuck and
I are some sort of long lost brothers separated at birth.
Generally agree with just about everything he says, and I'm
always fully entertained. It would be nice to meet you
guys if you ever get another tour started and make
it back to Michigan. Keep up the good work. I
(47:01):
finish your book, and I have the pre order poster
in my office and I've converted friends and family. So
that is from Aaron in Michigan. And we're definitely gonna
start touring again. I would say probably next year, although
we haven't really talked much about it, no, but we
need to. It's definitely starting to get to be time
to to get talking, I guess, although I gotta admit
(47:24):
I have not missed the traveling. I've missed being on stage,
but not the traveling part. Well, you know that's what
they say, that's what rock stars say. It's not the heat,
it's the humidity. Now they say that. You know, you
get paid to travel, you don't get paid to play shows.
I've never heard that before, but it really makes sense. Yeah,
if you can figure out how to get paid for both,
(47:45):
then you're really really doing something right. Good stuff. Yeah,
and if we get back to Michigan, we've already done Detroit.
We've had a lot of calls over here for ann Arbor,
so maybe that's where we go. Yes, um, well who
is that again? Aaron? Aaron? That's what I was gonna guess.
Thanks a lot, Aaron. That was a great email. Thanks
for the Corey Hame reference and all that stuff. And
(48:07):
if you want to get in touch with us, like
Aaron did, you can send us an email to Stuff
Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you should Know
is a production of I Heart Radio For more podcasts
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know. A production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck, Wayne Bryant, and this is stuff
you should know. No producer editions, right, it's just just us, buddy,
(00:25):
We're gonna do it. We're gonna be just fine. Jerry
took an early vacation for Memorial Day. I know she's
always doing stuff like that. She knows how to live,
and we're stuck with slime mold in her absence. I
like slime mold. I knew you would love slime mold.
Uh yeah, I think it's pretty interesting stuff. It's very
(00:46):
Josh Clarkey. It is kind of Josh clarky so much
so that, um, as I was researching this, like I mean,
I just kind of generally knew about slime mold that
it exhibited, you know, some weird level of intelligence here there,
but I didn't know much about it. And then as
I was researching, I was like, I'm kind of into
slime mold now, like all the different kinds of it.
I like regressed into like, you know, the nerdy eight
(01:09):
year old I never was. And then you're like, let
me Clark this over to Chuck and see what he thinks. Yes,
uh yeah, I like slime old too. I think it's
kind of cool. Uh, let's do it, okay, Chuck, I'm
ready al right, everybody stand back because we are doing it. Yeah,
and I think you could file this. I mean, it's
not an animal, slime mold. I guess we should just
(01:29):
tell you right away. It's not an animal. It's not
a fungus, even though you would think it's a fungus
if you saw it on the forest floor. And we'll
get to all this stuff, but it feels like an
animal one of our animal episodes anyway, sort of. Yeah,
I was gonna save the fact that it's not an
animal or fungus or at the very end, but sure
(01:50):
we could do it at the beginning. I get like,
literally in the last minute, they were like, I still
don't know what this is. An animal is it's a
dog in disguise. You know everything we just told you about.
It's not an animal, it's not even a fungus. And
then we just go to listener maw. Uh So what
is it though, besides super ancient as in like maybe
one of the very first living things. Well, it's a
(02:11):
protest actually, they figured out and protests seems to be, well,
it's one of the five main kingdoms animal bacteria, plants,
fun guy and then protests and protests are typically single
celled organisms like amba um or protozoans, things like that,
and they have I don't I couldn't find out exactly
(02:32):
when they did it, but they fairly recently, I guess
in the history of biology, fairly recently reclassified slime molds
from the Kingdom fun Guy over to the Kingdom Protista. Yeah,
which is interesting because for years they have been studied
by mycologists who are fun fun guys. And they found
(02:52):
out later they were like, you know what, sorry, they
should really go over to the protestologists, and they said,
we kind of like these guys. Can we keep studying
them since we have been And they said sure. In
the protastologists were superbissed. They were they were. They're still
actually not over it. They're frequently t peeing the academic
(03:14):
halls of the my collogists whenever they get the chance.
It's very bitter battle. So um, that is pretty cute
that they that the fun guy people are are still
studying slime molds even though they're not Fun Guy. But um,
there's you know, some good reasons why they were originally
considered to be fun Guy. Mostly that they're like these
big kind of clumps, and there's all sorts of different
(03:36):
ways that they take shape and form depending on the species.
They're different colors. Some of them form kind of net
like honeycomb structures. So the look like dog barf one
of the main ones we'll talk about today looks a
lot like dog barf. Um. They look like the fungus though,
Like if you're walking in the woods and you saw
this nine out it's in, people would say, well, it's
got to be some kind of fungus. Yeah, especially because
(03:58):
if you're staring at them, you would have to stare
at them for about five, six, ten hours to see that.
They have a huge difference between them and fun Guy.
And they move. They just move so slowly it's not
apparent to the to the naked eye. But if you
if you film these things with time lapse cameras, uh
(04:19):
and speed it up, you can see, oh, they very
clearly move about from place to place. So, um, that's
a big differentiator between them and fun Guy. But one
of the reasons they thought they were like funger, that
they were funkers because they produced spores to reproduce, right,
and I mentioned their ancient origins. Uh, they are about
a billion years old, and like I said, could be
(04:42):
like as soon as there was stuff, it seems like
there was slime mold eating basically eating the bacteria that
breaks down other stuff that dies, and that's what they
feed on. Bacteria, mold, yeast, basically anything that decomposes dead things.
Slime molds in gulf. I think it's it's not called photography.
(05:02):
It's called phigot trophy. Oh yeah, it's a little It's
not how I was going to say it, But what
are we gonna trophy? Yeah, but I think you're absolutely right. Well,
you know us, it wouldn't be as if we didn't.
Probably both get it wrong, right, But that's when you
basically surround something and then gulf it and just sort
(05:23):
of like move it into your body just like sort
of absorb it basically. Yeah, which is another difference between
slime molds and fungi, because funk i actually break the
food down and then absorb the broken down nutrients. But
the fact is, if you have things that are decomposing
other things like bacteria, molds, yeast, the things that that
(05:43):
crawl onto or grow on dead people, dead trees, all
that stuff to break them back down into their constituents.
So the fact that those the slime mold feeds on
other things, it makes it a really important part of
the food web, part of the nutrient cycle, because other
things them along and eat the slime molds. Um. There's
(06:03):
apparently a kind of beetle that has a specialized jaw
that allows it to slurp up slime molds. I think
some kinds of insect larva eat them and then so
it just kind of keeps going. But they're a really
important part where you just have these microbes that like
the beetle couldn't get to that they're able to basically
get that energy from you know, the bacteria by eating
(06:24):
the slime mold. Right, and even though other protests can
carry disease, slime mold is quite human friendly. Actually, uh,
you can eat the stuff if you want. There's a
dish in Mexico and some parts of Mexico called Coca
de Luna, which is exactly what you think it is.
Poop poop of the moon, moon poop, and uh, they
(06:46):
eat this stuff. I even looked online to try and
get a good recipe, but um, it's not on like
the pages of Martha Stewart Living like it's you got
to dive deep into Reddit and stuff like that to
get some good recipes. It seems like almost almost smacks
of urban legend. But I'm seeing it in different enough
forms that I think it's probable that it actually is
(07:08):
a thing. The thing that scares me is that people say,
like in some regions of Mexico, it's like, that's not
super specific, you know. True. Uh, and and we pointed
out they weren't animals or plants, but we definitely need
to point out that slime old is also not mold
as a protest. That's right. So um. One of the
(07:29):
one of the really amazing things about slime mold is, um,
there's a couple of different kinds, as we'll talk about
in a second, but one a whole bunch of different
kinds of species. One type of slime mold can get
really big. I mean, some of them can get up
to the size of like a medium or pizza large pizza,
I guess, depending on whether you're getting ripped off by
(07:49):
your pizza guy. But like twelve inches in diameter. That's enormous, right,
So you're like, well, that's pretty cool. It's a big
blob of mold. Well, put your sock carters on, because
I'm about blow your socks right off your feet. Some
of those types of slime mold that are as big
as a pizza are one giant cell. Yeah, I mean,
this is truly amazing. The plasmodial slime mold, which is
(08:12):
I guess you could call it one of the true
slime mold. Is it has all the stuff like as
if it were undergoing cellular division, and all the all
the different nuclei, like millions of nuclei, organelles, cytoplasm, all
that stuff. But it's just not it doesn't have cell walls.
It's not individual little cells. It's just it splits and
(08:32):
lives inside this giant fortress wall. Yeah. It's almost like
if you took all the cells that should have made
this giant blob um up as a multicellular organism and
just kind of broke them open and dumped all the
contents into this blob and then through the cell walls away.
That's what you would have it's it's interesting, it is,
and it's it's really kind of straightforward if you if
(08:54):
you just hear it. But it's also really easy to
to just keep going like wait, wait, why why is
it like dead? And how is it like this? What's
going on here? Which is one of those things that
it just it makes slime old. It's its own thing.
And we're still learning about this stuff, you know, every day. Yeah,
and it I mean it gets there's quite a few
times in here where we're gonna say, and here's where
(09:15):
it gets even crazier. Uh, this isn't super crazy. But
the the other kind of slime mold um or the
other big broad categories a cellular slime mold, and these
are lots of individual, single celled organisms. But the kind
of knockout fact about them is when they're stressed out,
if they don't have a lot of food around, they
(09:37):
can join up together and sort of look like one
of those plasmodial slime molds. But it's not. It's called
I guess pseudo plasmodial yeah, because it's not a real one.
But it basically says, all right, we're gonna all come
together to try and find food together. And then when
they do have food, they can be like, all right,
(09:58):
we'll just go along our merryway and split up again, yeah,
which is pretty nuts. They also will come together, um
Apparently it makes it harder for predators like those specialized
beetles to eat them, because those individual slime molds can
be you know, a millimeter in size or smaller. Um,
So it's pretty easy for a beetle to eat that.
(10:18):
It's much harder for a beetle to eat something the
size of like, you know, a quarter. Right, So they
actually do come together. They come together to move. They
also come together to reproduce and produce spores. But the
characteristic of this that what makes it a pseudoplasmodium rather
than actual true slime mold, is that they retain their
cell walls, their individual cells when they come together. They
(10:41):
just kind of loosely formed together. In a really good
way of understanding what this the cellular slime molds created,
it's kind of like a swarm. Yeah, that's a good
way to put it, I think. Or what's the god
that my favorite thing when the birds do that, what's
that called? Uh flock of seagulls haircut? That's it? Uh
(11:05):
uh boy, you threw me there. So these the plasmodium
is covered by a layer of slime, and you're gonna
want to put a pin in this because when they
do move around, they leave behind a little these little
collapse tubules and it looks basically like not exactly like
a snail trail, but sort of like a layer of slime.
And you're gonna want to remember that for later on,
(11:26):
because he's actually kind of served as important little markers.
As a matter of fact, write, write it down. Everybody
will wait until you get a pen, a piece of paper.
Go inside the CBS closest to you. Yeah, yeah, put
on your mask by pen, yep, by a piece of paper.
Pay ten twelve times what you should have paid for
that pen. Really, oh my god. Pin mark up as
(11:49):
big as CDs. I think the general mark up as
CVS fairly high. They're like, we get him in here
for the aspirin, then we really juice them with this
ballpoint pen. I hope there's no CBS ads in this episode,
but we'll find out. What is what's a good deal
at a drug store? Is there like a zero? They
all mark it up? Yeah, everything's marked up because it's
(12:11):
like it's like convenience kind of thing. You sound like
a lot of sound like a grandfather. It's all marked up.
Back in my day, you just go to a regular
grocery store and buy your pens from the ben factory,
straight from the man who made It's right. Uh. You know,
when I was little, we would uh for a short time.
I'm not sure why we did this, because it's not
(12:32):
like we lived out in the country and this is
a very old timey country thing to do. We bought
our milk direct from a farm and we would pull
up and and uh, I would get to walk inside
this huge walk in cooler, like next to a loading dock,
and I just thought it was like the coolest thing
in the world. Somehow to get that fresh milk. Sure
didn't they. They back the cow up and it makes
(12:52):
a beeping sound, and they just scored the milk right
into the back of your station Wagon's right, they mark
it up first, wash your way home. Uh so where
were we? Okay? If you do see this stuff in
the woods, if you ever hiking along and you see
a big or medium size pizza like yellow blob or
orange blob, they can be red. They can be white.
(13:15):
They can be maroon very rarely, they can be black, blue,
or green, but usually it's sort of yellow or an orange.
And you see that in the forest, you're probably looking
at a slime mold. Yeah, especially if it's really hot
out and it just rained. Yeah, the the worst thing
in the world for me. You can also see them
(13:35):
like on your grass too. Apparently if it gets really
rainy and hot, slime molds will actually come out of
the woods into your grass and be like, oh, this
is pretty nice, and um, they aren't gonna do any harm.
That's not a problem for your grass. It just looks
kind of gross. It's certainly not gonna hurt you or
your pets. And then eventually it'll dry up and turn
to kind of a gray or tamp powder and blow away,
(13:57):
and that means that it just turned into spores and
it just reproduced all over your place. Yeah. I think
maybe we should take a break because right now people
are probably like, dudes, you promised greatness here and so
far it's a little hum drum what So put those
soft garters back on, because when we come back, we're
(14:18):
really going to start knocking them off with some of
these amazing facts Okay, Chuck, we set them up. Let's
(14:48):
knock him back down. So here's one cool fact is
that slime molds basically can do the equivalent and do
the equivalent of throwing themselves the grenade. Uh. They will
sacrifice themselves to save others. And these are things without
a brain or a central nervous system. Like, it's not
like they think, I'm feeling empathy today for my fellow
(15:11):
mold and so I'm gonna save everybody because I've come
across some infectious bacteria. But what they do is they
come across it, they engulf it, and then they say,
let me go, and they cut themselves off from the pack,
from the swarm and detach themselves and die of that infection,
but save the rest of the group. And um, my
(15:34):
heart will go on place in the background as they
get further and further away, exactly. That's that's altruism, Yeah,
which is pretty amazing considering, like you said, they don't
have a brain or anything like that. So how how
are they doing this? We'll get to that later. So
what about tell everyone about the uh dicti stelli um
(15:55):
disc discoitus disc discoides. Okay, that's one of my favorite
words now disco Whiteyscau's disco in it. So that this
was this is a kind of um cellular um slime mold, right,
So it's made up of a bunch of different individual
organisms that come together. And when they come together they
(16:17):
practice altruism to some degree as well, because some of
them will basically be like, Okay, I'm dead, now I'm dead.
I'm gonna turn into a bundle of cellulose fibers, and
that cellulose is going to connect with other slime mold
cells that have died and turned into cellulose and come
together and form a stalk. And then the top of
(16:37):
the stalk, a bunch of different um slime mold cells
they're called slugs when they're individual like that, will climb
up the stalk and then they'll turn into spores. And
then in that way they're sticking up out of the
ground and a passing animal will come and they'll stick
to it and it'll get a ride to greener pastures.
But to do that, some of them have to die
(16:58):
to form this talked to to let the spores grow
on top of which is pretty amazing itself. It is
uh And you know we mentioned that they move. You know,
they're not. They don't just sit around and wait for
someone to drop a pepperoni near their pizza shape and
the woods so they can eat it. They gotta go
where the food is. And they either moved by these
(17:19):
little appendages that like little feet like appendages. Those are
the cellular slime olds, the individual single celled organisms that
can come together, or and this is crazy, the the
other kind. They move as one big mass because you know,
there's no cell wall going on, so they just sort
of expand and contract the cytoplasm to kind of gush
(17:39):
their way along the ground very slowly. Yeah, which is
really neat to see because when they're especially when they're
searching for food, which is basically all they're ever doing.
Everything that they do is either to get away from
some noxious stimuli or to go toward food. Usually to
go toward food. It sounds like us it basically I
(18:00):
don't like that, but I like that smell. I'm gonna
go toward that. So um. They make these amazing kind
of they look almost like sea fans, you know what
I'm talking about That they look very fractally and they
just kind of they fan out. Is the best way
to put it, when they start to go look for food,
and when they do find food, they start moving toward it.
(18:23):
It's the cell walls contract and that cytoplasm goes that way,
and next thing, you know, over a very long period
of time, five days later, the the slime mold has moved.
And actually slime molds um if you don't they like
they they're totally fine living in peatree dishes for as
long as you want them to um, as long as
(18:44):
you feed them. If you stop feeding them, they'll just
get out of the peatree dish and start looking for
food elsewhere, so they'll they'll escape. Yeah, but I mean again,
it's not like you're just sitting there watching this thing
crawl out of it's petrie dishes. You leave overnight and
you forget to feed the thing and you come back
and it's half of it is out onto the table
or something like. It's something like a bread out of
(19:06):
gremlins kind of you. And I think you said they
moved about a millimeter an hour, but some of them actually,
if they're really cooking, can go about an inch and
a half in an hour, which that's really fast. I mean,
it doesn't sound fast. But when you're talking about what
we're talking about, it is pretty fast. Yeah, um, and
I saw that a couple of places. Most people cite
(19:26):
something like a millimeter an hour. I can't remember which
one goes that fast, but yeah, I mean, you can't
see it moving when you're staring at it, but over
time you can for sure. You know, if you're just
really patient and you can lock in on something, you
might be able to see that. So when they started
figuring out in the early two thousands, of Japanese researchers
(19:47):
were some of the first to like really study slime
molds as as showing some sort of intelligence. They figured
this out from you know, from watching these things actually
move about and when you when you film them and
um that like high speed and then replay it, you
can see their movements are deliberate in a lot of ways.
They're they're not just blind dumb movements where they happen
(20:09):
on to um food. They clearly consense food somehow or
some way, and they spread out um and they seemed
to spread out and again in a really deliberate way.
And so some some researchers started to um test slime
molds to see what they were capable of. One of
the first one one of the first researchers was a
(20:32):
Japanese scientist named toshi Yuki Nakagaki, and UM, I think
so too, and Dr Nakagaki, which is even better. Um
built a maze, like a pretty simple maze, but in
actual three dimensional maze and a good sized peach tree
dish put um what what has come to be known
as probably the smartest size slime mold, Farium polycephalum, which
(20:57):
is kind of like the rock star of the slime
mold world these days, put a psarium in it and said,
go to town, go find your little favorite oat flake treat,
which is their their favorite food. Yeah, And the key
here is is there were four different routes to two
different endpoints where this food was. It wasn't just like
there's only one way to solve this maze. And so
(21:19):
they put the little oat flake at these endpoints, and uh,
the microorganisms that grow on the oat flakes is what
they're after. That's not like they love oatmeal or anything
like that. And so he put them there and studied them,
and over the course of hours, these things basically learned
to get to that food in the quickest fastest way
(21:41):
every single time. Yeah, like it could, it could conceivably
get to it, like you said, four different ways, but
that fast way was the way that it would. Just like,
that's impressive. That that's definitely not worthy. You can write
multiple papers on that kind of study. And so another
Japanese researcher came along and said, hold my sack, a
researcher name at Sushi Taro from Okkaido University. Did you
(22:06):
like that? Yeah, that's good? And um Dr Tiro said,
all right, what about this? What if we take some
oat flakes and basically make a general map of the
neighborhoods in Tokyo and see what the slime old does
with that? Put a little slime old in a petrie
dish with these oat flakes that kind of mimic the
neighborhoods of Tokyo, and watched to go I think over
(22:28):
the course of like four or five days. Right, yeah,
and you might think cool. It does what it does
and it goes after that food in the most direct
way possible, which is what it did. But here's where
it gets genuinely amazing is they went back and they
overlaid a map of the current Tokyo Railway commuter system,
(22:51):
the subway system, and they laid it over this grid
the slime and it was almost a perfect match. That nuts,
that's I mean, I had to reread that like five
times to even believe that that's what happened. That this
line basically figured out the most efficient route to get
(23:12):
around essentially Tokyo. Yes, which I mean humans had figured
out too, but it took teams of human engineers and
a very long time for them to figure this out. Right,
So the slime mold was just like, this is this
is nothing. What else you got? You got any more
cities that are more densely populated with more neighborhoods, because
I'll just make your subway maps all day long basically,
(23:34):
and they're like, Tokyo is probably one of the most debts, right, Okay.
I saw another um another similar kind of a bit
of research chuck, where they actually used oat flakes to
signify ancient Roman cities in the Balkans. This is this
is crazy. It's like an archaeological study, um. And they
(23:56):
put some they six some fiserium on it and fis
um on it, and it mimicked ancient Roman roads that
had been lost, were very obscure, had largely been forgotten,
and ones that were well known in the Balkans. It
mimics these these Roman roads like things that people have
(24:16):
been like, Okay, this is the best route from this
city to this city. The slime mold did basically the
same thing and and apparently revealed some lost stuff. Yeah,
I mean, I guess it could. Also It's interesting like
if it doesn't match up, if they do an experiment
like this, does that mean like the humans get it wrong?
Like can they use this as a test and be like, sorry,
(24:37):
the slime old is spoken. I guess so. I kind
of like the octopus picking the World Cup. You know,
they always take the World Cup away if the other
team that the octopus didn't. Yeah, well, I wonder if
you I mean, and we'll get to the real applications
of this, but I wonder if they could do something
like that where they let's say they look at the
Tokyo system in a couple of places that didn't match,
(24:59):
They're like, we totally should have gone this way. Yes,
I feel like that that is the direction that people
are kind of going in that they could conceivably use
this for planning new stuff. You know. Wow, So every
city planner we'll have a slime mold researcher at their best. Yeah,
(25:19):
I mean, like, this is crazy. Why not? You know,
all you have to do is have some oat flakes
and a Petri dish and you're good. So I think
we should take another break. What do you think? Quite frankly,
we want to eat some oat flakes right about now.
I'm kinda in the move for that too. We'll be
right back. Okay, did you just see some moat flakes?
(26:05):
I did not. All right, we'll get you something, because
here's the secret, everybody, when we take a break, we
don't really go take a break. No, we should have
had some crusty old oat flakes on your desk and
just eating them real quick. I I don't know, I
can't see. So all right, we've said that these things
don't have brains. They don't have and I don't think
(26:25):
we mentioned that. It's not like they have like it's
not like their jellyfish and they have some sort of
weird neural net. They got nothing like that at all,
nothing like they have no way of of generating consciousness
in any form that we recognize. And yet slime old
is teaching us to open and open our horizons um
(26:47):
in hearts to sure two new ideas of what constitutes
consciousness and intelligence. You know what I'm saying, Like it
makes sense as a swarm, as a bunch of cellular
as cellular slime mold makes sense. We're already familiar with
the hive mind, and you know, the emergent property of
a bunch of different things, you know, operating together. The
real puzzler, though, is the the single cell plasmodial slime
(27:12):
mold that's one big giant cell and the fact that
it behaves in ways that seemed conscious to some degree. Yeah.
So if you want to kind of go back in
time to where a lot of this rearch research started,
it wasn't actually in Japan, but it was in the
nineties sixties physicist named Evelyn Fox. Keller was curious if
(27:35):
she could use math to model biological systems because they
had had success using math to explain and expand our
understanding of physics. So she was like, let me see
if we can do this with biology, and someone said, well,
you gotta meet Lead Siegel. Siegel, is you got a
little surprise for you? And Lee Siegel got together and said, oh,
(27:57):
Dr Keller, you need to meet our end slime mold.
And Dr Kell is like, this is the nineteen sixties.
I don't know what slime mold is yet. And Keller
and sorry Siegel said oh, we'll just take a seat
and let me tell you about this, uh, which is
dicto dictio still stellium, dicta stellium, right, dictio stellium disc goidium.
(28:24):
I think the discoids discoidium Yeah, okay, but it's the
one we were talking about earlier that that creates the stems.
They sacrifice themselves to create stems for the sports, right.
And I think this was just significant because it was
kind of like the first time anyone had observed and
you know, fell off of their lab stool and could
explain it to others, these pseudo plasmodiums. But what they
(28:47):
were missing was they were like, all right, we see
this happening, and it's amazing and how are they doing this? Though?
And the very first thing they thought of is like,
maybe it's like an ant colony or something, and maybe
there's like a leader or a pacemaker cell or maybe
a few of them. They get together and they just
sort of send out chemical signals to everyone else and
(29:08):
say go this way, and the rest are just sort
of the worker ants that follow along. Yeah, And they
knew in particular that there was a chemical called cyclical
a MP, which is related to a t P, the
dino cine triphosphate um, and that that was how they
were signaling. But they thought that that like you're saying,
(29:29):
that there are just a few signaling, everybody else was responding.
And what they figured out is that that they had
that totally wrong. That there weren't leaders, There weren't pacemakers
who were in charge of like you know, signaling and
an effect making decisions for the group. That it was
actually like a group effort, and that the the whatever
um whatever cell or slug that they're called in this
(29:50):
cellular slime mold swarm was closest to food. It would
signal with a MP that hey, there's some food over here,
let's all go over this way, and that signal would
just kind of be passed along through the swarm, through
the cellular slime mold, and the slime mold would move
toward the food and start eating. Yeah, and this was
you know, I mean, you can see why they went
(30:11):
in that initial direction because it made sense, and a
lot of nature is organized with the top down principle.
In mind, humans often organized with the top down principle
big business, government. It's just a it's a system that
we're used to seeing in in nature and in people,
and so it made sense that they went that way,
and they never they never really thought about the fact
(30:34):
that it could be like, no, there, Uh, it's a
total bottom up system and whatever is closest can sig
send out these signals. Yeah, so instead of like a hierarchy,
it's more like, um, it's like it's like how a
flock of birds operate. So a flock of seagulls haircut
operates where they run so far away. Yeah, but it's
(30:55):
the hair that's closest to whatever it's running from is
the first to run and everybody else follows. Is kind
of like how a flock of birds will turn depending
on you know, which way they need to turn based
on that bird making that decision, and the rest of
the flock flock basically following it to bottom up, bottom
up decision making kind of thing. And so we started
(31:15):
to learn a lot and we know a lot about
bottom up decision making now as opposed to when these
guys were working back in the sixties, I think UM.
But in the twenty one century, that whole idea of
bottom up decision making or decentralized UM decision making UM
has become a real component in in UH artificial intelligence
(31:37):
design because if you've listened to the End of the
World with Josh Clark, you know that one of the
hardest things in the world to do is program something
to understand everything, because you have to input all the
stuff it needs to know. Whereas if you can just
kind of set up some sort of simple algorithm to
let the machine think for itself, you you finally got something. Yeah,
(32:00):
and I would imagine I didn't see this anywhere, but
it seems like this might could have some applications in
nanotechnology as well, like the idea that we could program,
you know, billions of tiny little nanobot bugs to clean
the windows of your house every day, like a lot
of things collectively doing one bigger thing. Uh am I
(32:21):
base there or could that potentially be a thing? Not
at all. I think it totally could be a thing.
It's it's anytime you have a huge amount of things
that you're trying to all get to do roughly the
same thing, but they need to not you know, uh,
redouble their efforts or um replicate their efforts. So you
don't want one cleaning one part of the window and
(32:43):
the other one coming over and cleaning the the same
part of the window that's already clean. Um. All you
have to do is figure out how to teach them
if if this happens, do this, and if you can
figure out how to strip it down to a basic
enough algorithm that could conceiveable be used for just about
(33:03):
any situation. Um, you've got the key to the universe
in your hand. Like there's actually we'll have to do
a um An episode on it one day. But I
read an article about a guy who was I think
he was a physicist back in the eighties who was like,
I think the universe is basically an operating system. That
is that is that it goes down to two. There's
(33:24):
two bits. You could say it's black and white, one
or zero, it doesn't matter, but there are two kinds
of bits, and depending on the combinations that these things form,
everything else in the universe arises from that, including consciousness, planets, slime, mold,
everything comes out of these two types of bits that
basically make up the fabric of space and time, interacting
(33:47):
with one another and increasingly sophisticated patterns. And that is
exactly what you're talking about. So if we can figure
out what that that computation is, what those algorithms are
that give rise to larger and larger stuff, you can
you can do anything. It's it's weird you can do
increasingly sophisticated stuff. The more basic your algorithm is. It's
(34:10):
almost a paradox. Yeah, this is like Dr Octagon stuff.
Dr Octagon. I don't know, is that right from? Yeah?
He was Alfallina? You mean sure? All right? I like
Alpha Malina. I think he makes some really weird choices
for parts. I'm sure somebody's like, hey, we'll give you
(34:34):
ten million dollars to play Doctor Octagon. I'd be like, sure,
you got it. Where do I sign up? Yeah? I
need to get him a movie crush because he actually
is friends of the network. He's a friend of the network.
I think he's been on The Daily's Eye Guist a
few times, and like they booked him on some other
comedy shows. I'm like, guys, they're a little Malina My
way for real, Malina spread all over Movie Crush. You've
(34:55):
been on daily s Eite guys twice. I've never have.
I've been on movie Crush too. Ad Miles on the
movie Crush the other day and I was giving my
hard time because they haven't asked me on and twice.
It's hilarious. Keep it up, chuck. Yeah, he was like,
uh no, man, I was like, Miles, did he really
you flustered him? I feel like he was on skates
(35:17):
for a second here, but I let him off the hook.
I'm having Jack on next week, so I'm really like
going full court press here. Yeah. Miles is like man
beat beyond guard, chucked his not pull punches. It's funny
because Miles, you know, as you know, is such a smart,
smart guy and uh just like having a conversation with
him is always amazing. And then he comes on and
(35:39):
he picks Mall Rats. What's his favorite movie? Was it? Really?
That's his favorite movie of all time? Huh? I mean
that's what he picked. And he was like, hey, man,
I never said I had good tastes. It's pretty fun.
Do you have any hints of what Jack's is going
to be? Well? I know it's pulp fiction because he
he had me save it like two years ago, and
I just you know, he kept slipping through the crack.
(35:59):
So he's gonna come on next week for pulpiction. All right,
So let's get back to I mean, we talked about
how the uh, the d D as we're gonna call it,
moves around with yeah, without a the pacemaker cells. But
that original true slime mold, the big single celled one
that's just made up of all the goopy cytoplasm. We
(36:20):
didn't really talk about what they do. And because if
you don't have cell walls, you're like, well, how's this
stuff moving around? It's actually made up of what's called
oscillating units. And so these units oscillated different frequencies depending
what's going on, like where they are, and then what
the their little neighbor oscillating units are doing. And so
(36:42):
when they go close to food, they start oscillating and
shaking like hey, hey, hey, I'm near some food, and
then that just sort of gets that flow. Everyone else
starts oscillating in a similar manner, and that gets that
flow of cytoplasm going in that food direction. Yeah, and
so the slime mold effectively moves to the food because
of that that oscillating unit that looks again like a
(37:04):
fan spreading out going to find food and then finding it,
the slime mold moves toward it or like you said,
away from something that they don't like. Ye yes, um,
which is pretty neat. So so those are the two things.
It's moving towards food and moving away from something and um.
One of the things that they found is that slime
old can actually um learn and not only learn to
(37:28):
like stay away from something, it can actually teach other
slime mold um to stay away from it, even slime
mold that's never been introduced to it. Or alternately, it
can teach this is the really the thought garter. Uh.
In fact, it can teach other slime mold that something
that seems harmful is actually harmless. This is a pretty
(37:51):
cool experiment. Yeah, So these researchers put slime molds, uh.
They built a little tiny bridge, was very cute, and
they coded this bridge and a noxious substance. It wasn't
harmful to them, it was harmless. It was like salt
or something, let's say. And then they put the little
those little oat flakes on the other side as their
(38:12):
ultimate temptation. And so these first slime olds start creeping
up to it and sort of dip in their little
toe in the water and saying, uh, this stuff is
pretty notious. But then they learned, right, like, okay, so
it's not actually harmful. I can go across this stuff.
And what they found was that it learned to cross
(38:33):
this little bridge just as fast as slime molds that
were placed on bridges that didn't have any coating going on. Right,
So it said, Okay, this stuff's fine. It's he's gross,
is way too salty, but it's not gonna hurt me.
So I'm gonna get to food just as fast. Right.
That's pretty amazing in enough self, but gets crazy, yes, right,
they we need like a banner matter nole to come
(38:55):
in and say that. Um. So they they take the
slime mold and break it apart and fuse it together
with other slime molds that have never been exposed to
this noxious stuff before. They're called naive and the other
ones are called habituated. And those naive ones when they
encounter this noxious stuff like a salt bridge for the
first time, they don't approach it with trepidation. They go
(39:19):
right across it as fast as the habituated ones that
it's fused to. This is really weird because this is
the first time the stuff is encountering it, and they
think that somehow the habituated slime molds are passing on
the information like no, no, we know it's gross, but
it's actually fine to the naive slime molds. And they
figured out, Chuck, that it doesn't matter if you take
(39:42):
three habituated slime molds infuse them with one naive slime mold,
or take three naive slime molds and one just one
habituated slime mold. It's going to approach us and move
across it just as fast as as either in either situation. Yeah,
and then they also sort of figured out how long
this took. So the naive slime molds they separated after
(40:05):
an hour of fusion with those uh habituated I'm gonna
call them in the no molds, and it forgot. It
forgot that the coding was harmless and it sort of
had to approach it with a little more trepidation. But
if they had been fused for three hours or more
and then separated it, it remembered. I mean it technically
(40:27):
can't remember, but they do have this weird sort of
memory uh that works. And I think they even figured
out some of this snail trail stuff that they leave
behind access sort of like a spatial memory, because they
come across this snail trail and say, oh, someone's already
been here before me, right, so there's no reason to
(40:47):
go research this area because clearly wasn't food there. Yeah,
and again here's your ten minute reminder that slime mold
don't have brains or neuron So all of this is
just just astounding stuff that we're still trying to get
to the bottom up, like that habituation thing. They're like,
we don't know, we have no idea, but we're gonna
go find out and maybe in ten years we'll be
(41:08):
able to explain it. Right, So eventually, um, you know,
the people that are people that are hipped to the
slime mold mold thing are like trying to spread them that.
They're trying to spread the word and me, like, this
stuff is really amazing. They're doing Ted talks on it. It
It was a really good Ted talk on it, in fact,
and some coders said, hey, wait a minute, you know
(41:32):
they're doing all this amazing stuff like the overlay of
the Tokyo subway and it's lining up perfectly. What if
we actually generated code of the slime mold and kind
of reverse engineered it and and we could see what
that look like and how we could use it. So yeah,
this one artist named Sage Jensen basically figured out um
(41:55):
or took. I don't know exactly who figured out exactly
what the the slime mole old um algorithms were, but
somebody wrote them down and Sage Jensen came along and
turned them into a C plus plus code and basically
ran these things it's like algorithms, and found that these
fractals started forming that look essentially just like slime mold,
(42:18):
moving across the peat tradition search of food, which is
pretty cool in and of itself. It was art art
project basically, but some someone on a team of astrophysicists
heard about Sage Jensen's work and they used it when
they were stumped trying to figure out how to map
them the invisible matter that makes up basically the structure
(42:42):
of our universe, that that if we can just crack
that nut, will understand the universe exponentially better than we
do now, but we cannot figure out how to do it.
And so, just like with the ancient roads between the
Roman cities or the Tokyo subway map, someone figured it
out to use slime mold to basically try to try
(43:04):
to create the structure of the universe that's invisible. These
invisible filaments. Yeah, these filaments that came out of the
Big Bang. So I guess they went back to Sage
Jensen and said, uh, first of all, stage U C
plus plus code, isn't there really just be minus code?
For being honest? And he said, that's not how it works.
Get out of most great coding joke. Uh, thank you.
(43:27):
It's my only coding joke. And I just made it
the only coding joke I think. No, I think it's
not a bug. It's a feature, isn't that one's? Um?
So yeah, they went to Sage and they said, you're
an artist, but this is pretty amazing. I think we
can apply it here, and they modified it and what
(43:49):
they did was and of course there's always oats involved. Um,
they put a model in place with virtual slime mold cells,
and they put it on a map with thirty seven
thousand real galaxy and they used I guess virtual piles
of food to represent the galaxies, and the bigger the galaxy,
the bigger the pile of food. And so they did
(44:11):
this modeling through the coating and had the virtual slime
olds seek out the most efficient way to reach this,
and I guess in theory they're hoping that they get
a sort of map of the universe out of it. Yeah.
So so when the slime hold was finished, they all
stood background, that's amazing, How accurate is it? And they
(44:31):
all just realized that they had no idea how but no, surely,
Like I think what they're doing is they're taking this
as an initial, you know, guide, and then they'll go
back and try to figure out how to verify it.
And maybe the slime old did figure out the most
efficient way to link together these galaxies, but that would
be I can't even put a word on that of
(44:54):
what that would how impressive that would be if the
slime mold recreated how the universe is invisibly linked together,
the structure of it. You know, what if slim old
does God? What if we your sleep right now and
this is all just one dream? Chuck? Uh? The other
cool thing they figured out with the slim old moving
around is when they were researching them, they found that
(45:16):
they those mazes that they were running them through, they
went even faster through the maze when they had some
sort of noise like a bright light or something like
we said. They like to go away from things they
don't like, and that negative input of that light basically
made them say, all right, let's let's pick up the
pace and make make these decisions quicker and get to
that food and stop fussing around. I don't like this
(45:38):
light staring at me. I think we kind of blew
some minds today. I think so. My mind's definitely been blown.
Did you want to cover the Amazon thing? Nope? Okay, good.
Uh that's it for slim unless you've got anything else
right now? Do you? I got nothing else. We'll have
to revisit this in ten years. And thanks to Dave
Ruse for helping us with this one. Um. And since
(45:59):
I to Dave Rouse, I think chuck it means it's
time for a listener mail. Hey guys, I'm gonna call
this night trap response. I just laugh every time I
hear those words together. Now, No night trap. This is
from Aaron, Hey, guys, just finish the Night Trap video
Game show. Thanks for bringing it to everyone. I own
(46:19):
the twenty five anniversary edition. Like you said, it's not
a good game, but has its moments. One other game
worth noting is called Double Switch. It said the same
style and video camera control quality, and it started Corey Hame.
Perhaps arguably a little better game, but still had the
same thing going on. Really, I'm sure your research and
its lots of things that don't quite make it into
(46:40):
the final show. Uh, Aaron, we did not know about
Double Switch, So nice work there. And Aaron says, I've
listened to so many shows it feel bit Chuck and
I are some sort of long lost brothers separated at birth.
Generally agree with just about everything he says, and I'm
always fully entertained. It would be nice to meet you
guys if you ever get another tour started and make
it back to Michigan. Keep up the good work. I
(47:01):
finish your book, and I have the pre order poster
in my office and I've converted friends and family. So
that is from Aaron in Michigan. And we're definitely gonna
start touring again. I would say probably next year, although
we haven't really talked much about it, no, but we
need to. It's definitely starting to get to be time
to to get talking, I guess, although I gotta admit
(47:24):
I have not missed the traveling. I've missed being on stage,
but not the traveling part. Well, you know that's what
they say, that's what rock stars say. It's not the heat,
it's the humidity. Now they say that. You know, you
get paid to travel, you don't get paid to play shows.
I've never heard that before, but it really makes sense. Yeah,
if you can figure out how to get paid for both,
(47:45):
then you're really really doing something right. Good stuff. Yeah,
and if we get back to Michigan, we've already done Detroit.
We've had a lot of calls over here for ann Arbor,
so maybe that's where we go. Yes, um, well who
is that again? Aaron? Aaron? That's what I was gonna guess.
Thanks a lot, Aaron. That was a great email. Thanks
for the Corey Hame reference and all that stuff. And
(48:07):
if you want to get in touch with us, like
Aaron did, you can send us an email to Stuff
Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you should Know
is a production of I Heart Radio For more podcasts
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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