Making Better 10 Transcript: SciBabe
Intro:
Chris: I’m Chris Hofstader.
Francis: I’m Francis DiDonato.
Chris: And this is Episode 10 of the Making Better Podcast, featuring Yvette D’Entremont, known to the general public as “SciBabe”
Francis: Yeah, I had a lot of fund talking to her. I think as a scientist, I love when people are as diverse in their interests as she is, not just science but other things as well.
Chris: Yeah, you don’t find too many science communicators who also talk a lot about pornography.
Francis: She’s definitely one of the sexiest guests we’ve had on—it’s unusual for me as a scientist to expect someone to be quite as fetching as this guest.
Chris: So, with that said, let’s get on with the episode.
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Chris: Yvette D’Entremont, welcome to Making Better!
Yvette: Thank you for having me.
Francis: Yeah, very exciting to have you today, welcome.
Chris: You’re known as the Science Babe, but you also do a podcast about porn…
Yvette: SciBabe, there is another woman, Debbie Berebichez, she is a physicist and she is a science babe, so there are two for the price of one.
Chris: Oh, so you are the Sci Babe..
Yvette: SciBabe indeed.
Chris: How did you get started in science?
Yvette: Well, I needed to choose a major, and I actually double-majored in Chemistry and Theater, and Chemistry was because I wanted a career, and theater was because my father didn’t hug me enough–could have been worse, he could have hugged me too much–look, it’s my childhood, I will cope with it how I want. … The awkward silence on that joke is always great, people don’t know whether to laugh or to go “awww…” So after I got my degree in Chemistry, worked for a year in sales—hated sales! Of all th things that got me to go into forensics for my masters, we’d had a talk from a chemist from the Boston Crime Lab when I was in P-Chem, my most hated course I had in undergrad, and I was like, “oh you can use chemistry for forensics? that sounds like a lot of fun!” Because apparently I had missed every show on CSI ever—so, I got my masters in Forensics and concentrated on toxicology and biological criminalistics, really enjoyed that, and ended up working mainly in toxicology. I did explosives analysis for Department of Homeland Security contractor, worked in a toxicology and drug analysis lab for a couple years, and then most recently, before doing SciBabe full time, worked in a pesticide analysis lab as an analytical chemist, mainly doing method development for analyzing new formulations of pesticides. So that’s been that, and then one day I decided that I liked telling people they were full of shit, and that has been a pretty fun career path for me. Oh yeah, and now I analyze porn for The Plot—for fun.
Francis: When I was told you were going to be on this show, I saw the work you had done regarding Roundup, and I was really surprised to hear you kind of be an advocate for its safety, because there’s very few people that are in the media at the moment who are doing that. So, I told the guys from our show that I was going to do a literature search on it, and I was going to confront you with the data and see if your analysis could hold up to scrutiny. Well, I did the literature search, and….I got nothing. (laugh)
Yvette: So this is our big confrontation—is that you’re like, oh shit, I have nothing to say.
Francis: There’s almost no evidence to suggest it’s a carcinogen—that was just so surprising. Do you find other people are surprised?
Yvette: Yeah. It would have been so much easier if Monsanto was just 100% evil, it would have been easier if all the documentaries were right, right? I wish that everything we saw on Netflix was real—I wish that there wasn’t all this misinformation and mixed-information going out to consumers about the safety of their food, but I mean the truth is I don’t want to let this go unsaid, there are still problems with safety in the food chain and the food supply, let’s not cover that up. But we do have the safest food system and the safest way of growing food that we’ve ever had in history now, and Roundup is a part of that. We left much more toxic pesticides when we moved over to pesticides like Roundup—and I just want to clarify one thing before you get emails about this—pesticide is the blanket term for all of the other “-icides”. So an herbicide is a pesticide, “pests” is not to denote insects. Insecticide is also a pesticide, herbicide is a pesticide, fungicide is a pesticide. So, there you go, before you get emails.
Francis: I must add though that it’s not that there’s conclusive data that it’s absolutely safe, it’s just that there’s very little data to suggest that it’s not.
Yvette: Basically the data does not show that it’s carcinogenic or that it builds up in the system or that there’s long-term toxicity. The LD-50, the TD-50, the measurements that show that it’s going to cause you the types of things that proponents of organic agriculture or the people that are very scared of it—the things that in the scientific studies would would show the type of harm that they’re indicating, are just not there. It’s not the danger that people are making it out to be. Technically, it’s not as bad for you as table salt, on just a plain old measurement of toxicity. It’s less dangerous to you than caffeine and salt,, and aspirin. I think those measurements jar people, and then people always come back with, but what about long-term carcinogenicity? And same thing, there really isn’t evidence for it—and if I see evidence for it, I will change my goddamn mind, because I eat the food too. Just to give an example, Aspartame, of all things, that I have defended because it’s been studied so thoroughly, there came an announcement from—I believe the European Food Safety Administration—that aspartame needs to go through some more thorough testing, because some of the tests don’t hold up to scrutiny, and I was horrified. I want to look more into this report, but the fact that this even came out bothers me, that there might be some validity to this this, and that I might have been wrong, or I might have…said bad information, or that these tests were not held up to enough scrutiny. And I looked at the scientist that put out this report—they don’t seem to be alarmists. I’m always willing to re-look at something that I thought I had known for a fact before, but man, do I like my aspartame and am I going to be disappointed if it’s not safe.
Chris: When we do hear about problems in the food supply, in the United States at least, it’s usually e-coli and it’s usually coming from organic farms. I mean the whole Chipotle disaster…
Yvette: It was precisely because of how they sourced their food. I do not want to bash on organic here, because I think organic farmers, they do a lot of care into the food just like conventional farmers. But part of the way, of how they fertilize their crops, is still through older means, a lot of times it’s through…fertilizer that comes from a cow’s butt, or from other—you know, it’s poop. Where do we get microbes that aren’t always conducive to human life? Yeah, it’s poop, that’s where e-coli comes from. Please, just wash your produce carefully.
——
Yvette: I literally do talk about the plot-lines in porn, so we could talk about that if you want…we’ve done a few nerdy ones. We did the Avengers, and you would be surprised at what makes a parody porn good or bad, and we really like doing the parody ones. Because, you know, they’re something that the audience can kind of sink their teeth into, because they’re familiar with it—and you would be amazed at what makes a bad parody porn. Part of it is, you have to enjoy the sex you’re watching, but there has to be a thread through the movie that takes something that was in the original and kind of turns it into a sex thing throughout the whole thing, and that’s kind of how you make a good parody. There are a couple ingredients to it that makes it work. We got Tom Arnold on the show—this is what I get for having an occasional celebrity who follows my writing—and when Tom Arnold was on, Arnold Schwartzenegger FaceTimed him, so we accidentally had a guest appearance from “the governator”—[*] podcast. That’s my closest to a claim to real fame.
Francis: I was wondering if in that industry, it was sort of taking advantage of women who were, either doing it because they’re addicted to drugs, or they had mental illness, that kind of thing, and that in contrast to how many can actually do that and not be negatively affected by it, given our patriarchal society where men are so predatory a lot of the time?
Yvette: That is a really good and deep question, and here’s the thing—I know that we have a sampling bias in the people that we have on our podcast. We don’t end up having people who come in for three months and leave after they’ve grabbed some cash. We end up having people who have been on for a while, we’ve had Ella Darling, who—she has a masters in library science, and she’s gone on to have this long career where’s she started off in VR porn, started a VR porn company, and now she runs a company that’s just VR for people to interact with each other without a porn element. So we’ve had people who have gone on to have really empowering careers, and it was because porn gave them the money to have a career that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. No matter what, it’s going to be a little predatory, because you’re—there’s more money if you do more extreme scenes, to a point—but women are, because they’re able to do a lot of things to monetize on their own now, which they couldn’t back in the day when all of the money was through DVD sales, which admittedly did make more money, from what I understood—now, women are able to kind of run their own empires. This is something that we’ve heard from a lot of women who have come on the show. They can run their own fan site where people can buy clips exclusively. Fans can request—and the porn stars don’t have to say yes to it—but fans can request a specific clip from a specific porn star. They can ask, can you make a clip in which you masturbate with x-thing, and the porn star, for a price, will say yeah, they’ll do it. We’re living in a golden age of porn, women are in charge of what they’re doing with their body more. They’ll mix up a few nights of featured dancing with a day of doing a scene, they’ll do a trade for scene with someone, there’s a lot more autonomy now than there was years ago. One of the downsides, though, is that the straight-up pay for scenes, because of pirating now, because of digitization, pay has gone down quite a bit. It’s actually much lower for men in the industry, i’t about half, depending on the type of scene and whatnot, but yea, women get paid much more than men in the industry, it’s very strange. It’s one place where the pay inequality benefits women. But it is gonna be a little predatory, in a way, but I think much less so than people think. There’s weekly STD testing in the industry, mandatory. You are safer having unprotected sex with someone in porn than you are almost anyone else on the planet, and it really does take much better care of its people than I think a, “civilian” would think.
Chris: Are you familiar with Jon Ronson’s work, The Butterfly Effect?
Yvette: To a point, yeah.
Francis: I think one of the things that alarms me is that…I have 14-year-old son, and if he goes on Pornhub, something like that, the kind of things that’ll come up are not representative of what I would like him to think good sex is like—at least as a starting point.
Yvette: Kids should not learn sex from porn. Porn is—it’s kind of like trying to learn quantum physics from the Avengers, or learning Tai Kwon Do from an action movie. That’s not where you should learn about sex—teenagers should learn about sex the way that the rest of us did, from fumbling in the dark in the back seat of a car, trying to figure out where the clitoris is and failing miserably for about ten years—that’s how the rest of us did it, right?
Francis: I think it was seven years for me..[laughter]
Yvette: I…like it took me a while to locate my own, and I have one…
Francis: But what I think is encouraging is that there are some sites, mostly run by women, that feature actual couples having sex, and it’s not edited and it’s not always like those nasty ways that they end in normal porn and things like that, that just seem very un-respectful to women in general, things like t hat.
Yvette: Here’s the thing that I think people don’t understand, because I think that a lot of people think no matter what, if there’s a degrading scene, you know, with cum in the hair, there are women that are into that, too. This is not just for the man’s benefit. A lot of sex is about consent, and that’s the thing that gets left out of the conversation is, don’t teach the teenage boys it’s OK to do this. Teach the teenage boys to have a talk with the woman that they’re going to have sex with. Teach everyone about communication skills, because—and not to be pushy, and to talk out what you want in sexual experience, because yeah, it’s OK to do something ridiculous within a sexual scenario that you wouldn’t do with anyone else, but you have to talk that shit out every time. Because what you did last time with the same partner might not be what they want this time. What you did with another girl definitely might not be what you want or what this new girl wants, but the things that you see in porn are never going to automatically be what somebody wants. I mean, the angles they fuck at so that it looks good for the camera, the putting it in one hole and then the other hole and then back to the first…oh my god. There are things that just happen in porn that don’t happen in normal sex, and it’s not where you should be getting your cues. Everyone that I know in porn will say the same thing.
Chris: Ronson suggests that one of the reasons younger people are having less sex is because sex in real life doesn’t live up to the porn.
Yvette: I don’t know how true that is…but it also wouldn’t surprise me. I think one of the reasons why people might be having less sex, with the advent of freely-available porn—and I kind of liked this, admittedly, in my 20s—I would decide, I’m not going to go on a date with a guy if he’s gonna be more likely to be a hassle and less likely to be an orgasm than my Hitachi. [laughter] You know, if I think this guy is gonna be a—not likely to lead to boyfriend or great love or good sex, and my Hitachi and a couple hours of watching re-runs of Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit”—that’s gonna be a good night. This guy—not so sure. You know, which one are you gonna go with? I can see that. Porn is always sex with someone you love, it’s never gonna lead to an STD—there are good things to teenagers watching porn instead of going out and having sex with someone who they’re not interested in. Which would you rather your kid do, watch porn or knock somebody up? And I know those are not binary choices—but, think about it. It’s OK for your teenager to watch porn, but you need to talk them through it. And that’s an awkward conversation, and why I’m glad I only have cats and dogs.
Francis: I’m just trying to leave a couple of windows open on the computer of porn that I think is…good to learn from.
Yvette: Well, first start with Ryan Creamer and wholesome porn—it’s completely clothed, just go to Pornhub and check out Ryan Creamer, it’s hilarious. It’s like, “honey, I washed the dishes without you asking me. Honey, I know you need to go to Ikea today, here’s my credit card, buy what you need.” Like it’s stuff that’s completely not sexual and it’s like, oh, porn for women!
Francis: I think some women would consider that foreplay…
Yvette: I mean, that’s stuff that will get the guy laid later…my partner and I were already starting product development on the first stage of this, but eventually we want to have a whole “wash your junk” kit. We already have a website for it, and it’s in development stages, but we’re starting a product called “fuckwipes,” because you need to wash your junk before you expect anyone to touch it. That area needs to be clean, I want it to pass the white glove test.
Francis. Nice. Well, that kind of brings us to one of the things that I think is the purpose of this podcast, which is to talk about the future, and utopia…
Yvette: You know, enemas do lead to utopia…literally, that was what Gandhi believed. Look this shit up, I am not kidding. People who are listening right now are like, what? He used to give enemas to people.
Francis: What about the future of sex? How is all this technology, if you also consider the potential for AI and robotics to weigh in, and all this other stuff, what is this doing for the future of sexuality and humanity? What are the pros, what are the dangers?
Yvette: There are a lot of both, and I’m glad you brought that up. So, I think future of it—I hope this helps us facilitate communication, because a lot of things that have fucked up people’s sex lives is just not being able to talk about it. I’m sure that you three have all been perfect lovers, a hundred percent of the time, to all of your partners, right? As have I, we’ve never screwed up a thing by not discussing it—huh? Huh? uhh. So I hope that this new digital age will kind of help us realize, and give us the tools to be more open with the people that we’re mashin’ genitals with. There are even apps now—I downloaded one a while ago and then deleted it, ‘cause I realized my husband and I discuss everything already—but you know, there are tools to help you discuss which fetishes you’re into, help you walk your way through what you want and what you don’t want. And people are getting more open with it.
Chris: What’s on the back end of that? I mean, is somebody building an expert system or an AI based on all the data you put in, and they’re going to have the privacy problem that exists on Facebook becomes like a really explicit privacy problem?
Yvette: That is a terrifying possibility. Like, how safe are your porn preferences? If they’re anywhere online.
Chris: How does your life as a porn podcast host dovetail with your interest in science and science communication?
Yvette: It’s a very interesting dichotomy, because I—well, I try to write about science with a big ol’ heaping dose of humor. I’ve wanted something to add some levity to what I do. I was kind of at a point with SciBabe where part of me wanted to pack it in, really. I was deeply depressed at the time, the week that we launched—it was, I don’t know if you guys remember this happening, I’d just been sexually harassed/assaulted at a conference, and that kind of blew up my life for a while, and it was like, I need something to focus on that’s not this. It was like, how do we find a way that’s funny and informative to just kind of get some comedy out, and do something that’s completely off the map. I had—and here was how it kind of came from a Science thing, I was giving a talk at a local science museum when I lived back in San Francisco, and it was a talk on bad science in the movies. And this is why I make this joke about Neal DeGrasse Tyson all the time—I was riffing on his whole, you know, ripping apart bad science in movies and I’m like, Neal, they’re science fiction movies! Nobody goes to Avengers to learn about quantum physics! They go to see Tony Stark punch a robot spaceship alien! But I just joked, I’m like, it’s ripping apart the bad science in a sci-fi movie, hey, it’s like ripping apart the plot in a porno—you still get out of that what you went in there for. And then I was like, wait—if there’s a market for ripping apart the science in a sci-fi movie, maybe there’s a market for ripping apart the plot in a porno. Hmmm. And so the podcast was born. There’s such a loose tie-in, but I think one of the things we enjoy about it, both my podcast partner, Alice, and I, is it’s a chance to tap some comedy out of something that’s ripe for it, because we sit there are look for continuity in our porn. We really do, and I mean I think this throws people. It’s like, no no, we are looking for the plot. We’ve had comedians, we’ve had scientists, we’ve had of course porn stars on, to review a porn with us. And we tell them, and this is what throws them the most, we’re like, yeah, you can skip the sex scenes if you want. We literally watch the plot. So does it tie in to the Sci-Comm? I don’t know, but we try to have fun with it. There was one episode we did with Riley Reyes, who if I recall correctly is president of the Adult Performer Advocacy Group—I’m probably screwing up the name on that [note: Adult Performer Advocacy Committee]—but after we recorded, she shot me a DM, she’s like, “oh my god, I just realized I follow you on Facebook. I’m a huge fan.” This is something that people forget: porn stars are, you know, after they get off the stage, they have interests and they have lives. It’s been nice to kind of de-mystify this entire field and get people to see, kind of like I always try to tell people, scientists are people too! We’ve gotten to become friends with a lot of these people, and we’ve seen a lot of them do stand up comedy—Kate Kennedy, we saw her performing this last Saturday at the Comedy Store, she was amazing. It’s been interesting to see people react to this, and be shocked that, oh, you know, “oh my god, porn performers are human beings—what?” It’s like, yeah, they don’t go back and be hung up on the shelf with the rest of the sex at the end of the day. So, it’s been a multi-faceted thing that I’m not sure exactly if it ties in to Sci-Comm or not, but we’re enjoying it.
Francis: I imagine one of the difficulties you would have, though, is, based on the statistic I had read once, which is that they measured how long people watch porn for in hotels, and they found that the average was something like 11 minutes.
Yvette: Wow, that’s longer than I expected.
Francis: Yeah. I don’t know, maybe they’re nervous, ‘cause they’re in a hotel or something. But that doesn’t leave much time for plot development, and characters, and …
Yvette: We watched, yesterday, a two-hour and forty-nine minute parody of the show “Cheers,” and it was amazing.
Francis: Who makes…?
Yvette: WoodRocket Studios…and they’re almost all directed by Lee Roy Myers. We really love the Big Lebowski XXX, you should watch that for the cinematography values…
Francis: Can you give an example of that? It’s hard for me to…I love Big Lebowski, so…
Yvette: So, you know the dream sequence where he’s like flying through the bowling alley? That happens. The beginning sequence where everyone is like, you know, it’s just this kind of dreamy, well-lit sequence of people bowling—instead it’s topless women at, they rented out a local bowling alley in Hollywood, in the middle of the night, to have a scene full of recording topless women at this delightfully lit bowling alley. The acting is so good in this that they have—and this is something people don’t understand—they have non-porn roles in movies like this. And the guy playing the John Goodman character was so good that we’re like, man, he could have just stepped into that role! If you see a porn with either Tommy Pistol or Evan Stone in it, guaranteed to be hilarious. They’re funny! I wish I was kidding, but they’re better than people expect, every time.
Francis: Well, sex in general has to be really great source material for comedy.
Yvette: Oh—one last one. Horat, the parody of Borat.
Chris: What do you think about film makers like John Waters, who don’t exactly do porn but push every other limit possible.
Yvette: I think he’s great. I think that ’s part of art and cinema is finding edge and making people think with it. That and I love that John Waters just kind of tries to tap dance around an NC-17 rating with pretty much everything he does.
Chris: Yeah, he got one the last film he did, and that’s the last film he did. He can’t get financing anymore. His latest book, by the way, is really terrific. It’s brand new, it’s the last two, three months, and the opening sentence to the book is,”Somehow I became respectable.”
Yvette: Wait, John Waters, really—are you sure about that statement?
Chris: He goes down the list of the awards he’s won and his installations at museums and all this—the fact that the art world woke up and sort of embraced him.
Francis: Well, we have a President that a lot of people are very offended by…
Yvette: Doesn’t feel like we have a President right now.
Francis: And here’s my question—you know, like we’ve been talking a lot about sex and porn and stuff like that, but given the state of this country right now, what do you find obscene?
Yvette: I find sexual assault to be obscene. I find the language that the President uses to describe immigrants to be obscene…
Francis: How about when he talks about grabbing…
Yvette: Yeah, well that’s sexual assault, so I find that to be quite obscene. I find the disrespect towards anyone that disagrees with you, and I mean, I get it—that’s something that’s coming from, I hate to say this term, but that’s something that’s coming from both sides. In general, I find the complete lack of concern for people that don’t look exactly like you to be kind of obscene, given that he’s orange, that’s pretty much everyone.
Francis: One of the things that’s come out of this show, in discussing concepts of utopia, is a recurring thought that respecting diversity is fundamental.
Yvette: So, I went out to dinner the other night with a handful of atheist-y, sceptic-y people, and I had a Star of David necklace on. And of course everyone’s like “but you’re an atheist!” and I’m like, “I’m also Jewish.” And they’re like, “Wait, wut? How does that work.” I’m like, on a molecular level, when you throw my DNA into a tester, I cannot not be Jewish, it’s the only thing I am. So, on my mom’s side I am Acadian, and we are a people without a land mass. We were deported from Canada by the British—basically I’m genetically indistinguishable from the cajuns, give or take, and we are a people without a country. And on my dad’s side, Jewish, and once again, all the little towns that my people were from, destroyed—and that [cost de hollow]. And so I am, on both sides, a people without a country. So I don’t wear the Star of David to say “I’m Jewish,” I use it because this is my family. I don’t know what else to be. And so when I hear people who have complaints wish diversity and don’t want immigrants, and I’m like, you know, you’re basically advocating for me not being alive. I’m not OK with it, and I really wish that people were not so offended by different strains of DNA.
Chris: What do you think are the most important recent discoveries in science? We’ve had pictures of a black hole, we’ve discovered gravitational waves, there’s all kinds of amazing stuff going on—what excites you the most?
Yvette: I’ve focussed more on nutrition and health than I do on the cosmos, but I think in my field, at least, there’s a lot of research that’s coming out on obesity more and more lately, to figure out what’s the thing that’s gonna kill us. And that’s a lot of where I try to focus, because that’s what got me into skepticism, was falling for everything and then un-falling for it. There’s a ton of research going into not necessarily how do we get people to lose weight—because, you know, we kind of know how to do that, it’s just hard. But now we know that there are people who get the “fat diseases”—the ones that are associated with obesity, at a very low weight. And there’s a wonderful article in the New York Times talking about a woman who weighs 119 lbs and has fatty liver disease. So they’re trying to study what causes people at different weights to get these diseases “of obesity,” and from that they can look at what medications can be used to stave this off, or to see what gives people a genetic predisposition to these diseases that we commonly associate with being overweight. So, it’s like, is it a genetic quirk? Is there a way to fight this, is there a way that we can manage this, along with managing weight? But if there is a way to keep the diseases that come with this at bay for people who are at a manageable weight, obviously get the—you know, keep weight into a healthy range, but there have to be other ways to fight these while we’re trying to keep calorie control and exercise as a part of a solution. And I think the fact that they are looking at these answers is pretty wonderful right now, because it’s something that really hadn’t been explored for a long time.
Chris: Where do people go to learn realistic things about diet and health? Because every tabloid at the grocery store has “he beef and beer diet or whatever the fad diet of the week is…
Yvette: Everyone wants to lose weight on bacon, right? Thus the basis of the keto diet’s appeal—and here’s the thing, keto will make you lose weight. Even me, who wrote an article ripping keto to shreds, will tell you—if it makes you lose weight, if it makes all your numbers healthier and your doctor and a registered dietitian say, yeah, this is a healthy option for you, go for it. But I’ve recently lost 50 lbs and I didn’t do it by following any set diet, I just counted my calories. I kept track of what I was eating. I had ice cream on a regular basis, I had tacos a few times a week—from my taco truck, not that I measured out—and I just kept track and lost weight, and that’s the thing. Calorie counting is hard, it’s a pain in the ass. People are—even registered dietitians—are bad at it. People underestimate what they eat, and that’s a big part of why we gain weight. And people want an easy solution, and that’s why they grab a diet book. They’re like, if I just cut out this macronutrient or this food, if I cut dairy, if I cut meat, if I cut the rice, then it’ll all go away. And all of these types of things, they’re cutting calories, each thing you do is just a way to cut calories. So you don’t have to be afraid of certain types of food, you just have to figure out how to make it manageable. If you’re a person who can’t put the ice cream down, don’t buy the ice cream. Leave it for special occasions. I mean, if you want good information about how to lose weight, ask your doctor for a referral to a registered dietitian—not a nutritionist, that is not a protected title, I could call myself a nutritionist tomorrow and no one could stop me legally, which is why you shouldn’t come to me to ask me how to lose weight. I’m not a medical professional, go to a registered dietitian—that is the best advice I can give you on this. It’s partially because a diet book, a website, they don’t know your health, they do not know your numbers, they don’t know your history, they can’t ask you for a food diary; diet is largely personal, the way that you get to a diet that you can manage long term—and I don’t mean “diet” in terms of calorie restriction, I mean the way that you eat, long-term. It has to be sustainable, it has to be something that works for you. So Pleeaase a registered dietitian.
Francis: One of my favorite science terms is “elegance,” used to describe when an experiment is done or there’s a finding and it just has this simplicity, and this harmony and perfection to it that is almost, it’s just very inspiring, almost sublime. I was wondering if you’ve had experiences of that.
Yvette: So, I have worked mainly as a chemical analyst. So you hand me a thing, I have to put it through a series of extractions and put it into a machine and see if that machine doesn’t break—both doesn’t break with the way that I extracted it, and analyses it really well. And I don’t know, it’s hard to describe that as an elegant process. But there is something that I find very beautiful about the fact that we can manipulate the chemical processes of these various polarities, of all the solvents we’re using—I’m told, hey, we have about 20% of the target molecule in this vial, and there are a bunch of binders and a bunch of other things that we’ve used in there, and you have to get all those other things out without losing a single percentage of this, and tell us exactly, down to the hundredth of a percent, how much is in there. I think there’s something beautiful about the fact that we can make a method that, you know, just from scratch, from what we know about all the different items that we’re using to extract this, we can make a method that can consistently will tell us, to the hundredth of a percent, from solvent to, you know, minutes of extraction we need to shake this thing out, to filtering, to which column we’re using, to runtime, to ramp temperatures; and we’re eventually going to get a readout that tells us, consistently, what’s in our mystery liquid, and that was what I really loved about what I was doing—was that process of making that, and at the end having my organic chemist and my formulations chemist being able to give them that readout that said, here’s your thing, and they trusted my results. There was something beautiful about that to me, and that’s what—I miss that about the lab. So I like my writing, but I really did love the beauty of analytical chemistry.
Francis: Beauty is one of our favorite topics here, and you are such an open person, I’d be curious to hear you elaborate on other things in other areas that you find beautiful.
Yvette: My masters is in forensics—I know forensics is a messy, gross, horrible field, where we always think about dead bodies and things like that. This is not beautiful thing by virtue of looking at it, but I find something elegant, I think, about the fact that we can measure the stage of maggots in a human body, the stage of maggot development, and determine when someone died. And now, there’s also entomotoxicology, where you can measure the amount of drugs in a bug and get a rough measure of what the drugs were in someone’s system around when they died. Please don’t quote me on that, please check with an expert, I have been out of the lab for a while, you should check with an entomotoxicologist for the exact on that. The fact that we have all these tools now—that’s something scientifically wonderful and beautiful to me, that I look and and go, these tools are something that we could have had, that I wished we’d had for much longer, that there’s not enough of.
Francis: Well, that’s a [first?*] time on our show…
Chris: …that maggots have come up, yes.
Yvette: I do what I can to bring up gross beautiful things…
Chris: We had M.E. Thomas, the author of Confessions of a Sociopath, on as a guest. She’s an actual sociopath who’s trying to work to make life for livable for people like herself, and she was telling us that there’s some Instagram page that has all this really weird medical stuff that she’s just obsessed with, and …
Yvette: Nice.
Chris: It’s all really gross stuff.
Yvette: It doesn’t surprise me. Sociopathy is a…like, I read a decent amount about it….and it’s like….I think it’s something like 4% of the population have a degree of sociopathy. It’s interesting to think that there are, within that group, there are a lot of CEOs, there are a lot of surgeons—the percent that become criminals and serial killers is much lower, but if you go into jail and you meet serial killers and other types of criminals, good chance you’re talking to a sociopath in a lot of those situations.
Francis: Or in politics…
Yvette: Oh yeah. Anyone who’s a professional liar, or like there are a lot of symptoms—lack of empathy, inability to connect—lying about things that are completely unnecessary to lie about…But then there are sociopaths who have kinda gone, oh, I have to fit into society, and even though I don’t feel like there’s a reason to be honest here, I probably should. So there is learned empathy in some cases. Have you ever met a friend who you suspect is a sociopath?
Chris: Francis and I used to hang out at CBGB all the time, and there was one guy there we were absolutely certain, and he was violent and…I mean, he was the only person I was actually, I can remember being actually scared of.
Francis: Well, the punk scene, given its nihilism, was sort of a…attractive environment for people who were that type of sociopathy, I guess.
Yvette: Like, I hate throwing a clinical diagnosis on someone, that is not my expertise, but just going by behaviors, I think I have known at least two that I could just be like, yeah, if these guys aren’t sociopaths, I am not capable of understanding human behaviors. You know, people who just lie all the time and rile up shit amongst their friends, and can’t hold a steady job—I’ve known a few of those. And I’m like, either a narcissist or a sociopath, they’re really close.
Francis: But you have to know them for a while for that to be true. In my experience, the people who were probably the sociopaths that you came to know in your life, were amongst some of the most charming, charismatic people you’ve ever known. I mean, I had dinner recently with two friends who—they’re both diagnosed. So it was me and them having dinner together, and honestly, I had to struggle at times to even notice, because it’s strange how invisible and maybe it’s sometimes, in some situations, unimportant it is.
Yvette: With one of the friends that we figured it out with, it took years, because you felt good in their presence. They were so nice to everyone, and you…this person, for so long, you thought that all of the problems in your friend-group was because of everyone else, then you realize this person was just lying about everyone. And you felt so good around them, but years later the person who had been her best friend for a decade up and, like, friend-dumped her. And I’m like, hmmm, this is interesting. So when I moved to the west coast, had a phone call with her, and we talked out everything and she’s like, yeah, she said all these things about you. We went through everything, figured out all the lies, all the completely unnecessary lying, all the behaviors lined up with sociopathy, and that’s the thing—is that charming, really manipulative, lied about unnecessary things that just made no sense, unless there was an underlying pathology there. And it was just, some of them were just grandiose lies that made no sense, like I said, unless either a narcissist or a sociopath, and so many of the things are interchangeable. But it was so strange to look at it and go, wow, we think there was a sociopath, you know, in our dorm for all these years, one of our best friends, living with us for all these years—collecting our secrets for all these years.
Chris: But now Facebook will do that for you.
Yvette: [laughs] Yeah. Cambridge Analytica is our new sociopathic friend.
Chris: I mean, an AI that, even if we can, you know, jump 20 years into the future, or 50 years into the future, whatever, an AI that became self-aware is probably going to be a sociopath.
Yvette: There is a new documentary on Netflix on Cambridge Analytica. It’s terrifying. People that worked for it that kind of left and, should we say, told on the company—they’re, in retrospect, they’re like “what did we do?” Because they’re looking at Facebook telling lies at the Congressional hearings, they’re like, “no, they definitely still had our data, they knew what they were doing, Mark Zuckerberg’s lying”—it’s just…whoof
Chris: There’s a book called Zucked that was written by one of the early advisors to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, and Jim Fruchterman discussed that on the podcast, and it’s a pretty scary book.
Yvette: Doesn’t surprise me. Like, I remember when Facebook started, I was a senior in college and everyone’s like, hey, our school finally got access to Facebook! ‘Cause we were like, Boston area, all the schools were getting access first, and it still took till the end of grad school for me, until Facebook was starting to become a thing—and then it was, you know, a few years of Myspace-Facebook-Myspace-Facebook. I feel like we should just all go back to Myspace.
Chris: After Friendster went out of business, they released their database, and with 95% certainty—there’s been a lot of progress since—and just using the Friendster database, you could determine the sexual preference of somebody who didn’t have a Friendster account, but was in the contact list of somebody who did. That study was published four or five years ago. I mean, Facebook and Amazon and Apple and Google, what I call the G-MAFIA (stands for Google Microsoft Apple Facebook IBM Amazon), their level of intelligence power right now is greater than any nation.
Yvette: This doesn’t surprise me at all. Just check out, I think it was called “The Hack,” [The Great Hack (2019), Netflix] was the one that I watched yesterday—they said basically they had 5,000 data points from every person that signed up, and from that, from everyone that they scraped, that was connected to everyone that they took the survey from—and it’s just knowing how much data they have on all us—it’s terrifying. Part of me goes, you know, makes me want to shut down my Facebook account, and then part of me goes, wait, what would happen to SciBabe? Like that’s the thing, they know that they have us already, and it almost feels like it’s pointless to un-sign up.
Chris: I haven’t killed my Facebook account, and I know what it’s doing, but all I use it for is to promote this podcast.
Yvette: Yeah, like because I’m so online, I know how public I am. How would it help me to get off the internet, the way I am right now? I don’t feel like it would help me at all. If I wasn’t doing what I did, I would shut things down.
Chris: We could try to encourage people to use things like GNU Social and Mastadon, which are ethically-run social medias, but unfortunately they have fairly few users. And those are entirely community-driven, so you can inspect the source code and everything like that to make sure it’s not spying on you…
Francis: There’s so much room for improvement, which gives me hope, because you know there was a time when everyone thought AOL was invincible, and then poof! And if I watch my son with his gaming things and how like, one day Minecraft, they’re all playing that, and next day they’re all playing Fortnite, it can come and go before you can even imagine—it just happens. And I think Facebook is that vulnerable, and you know, it’s gonna be figured out.
Yvette: I would be surprised if Facebook was—and I say this knowing I could be completely wrong, but—if Facebook still looks the same way it does by 2025, either in power or in design, and I know it will be redesigned 15 times, but I would be surprised if there wasn’t a major restructure or a major exodus by, within the next five years.
Chris: And the other problem is, Facebook is so rich and powerful that any sort of competitor other than one that’s community-driven comes along, they’ll just buy it, like they did with Instagram and all the others.
Yvette: I mean, and as much as people in Congress have been saying it needs to be, there’s a monopoly that needs to be broken up, can you see these people…they’re not exactly regulate-business type folks in charge of the country right now, and this really does need to…how is it not a monopoly when it owns Whatsapp, Instagram, and god knows how many other apps? Does it own Snapchat, too? I don’t even remember.
Chris: They don’t actually own Snapchat, they just sort of drove them out of business by putting all the Snapchat features into Instagram…
Yvette: They own every platform you’re on, basically. Like, at one point I was like, yeah, I’m gonna use Whatsapp to avoid..oh. There’s no point. I mean, even if you get off Facebook now, don’t they pretty much still own your data?
Chris: They say they’ll delete your data if you ask them to, but I don’t believe that.
Yvette: How many times have you—and this is the one place where I sound kind of conspiracy-theory-ist. Part of me knows that it’s just they drag your material from everyplace you’ve ever looked on the internet. But how many times have you just thought something, or said something to someone else in the room and discussed it, and suddenly there’s an ad for it on your Facebook, or somewhere online?
Francis: tons.
Yvette: Yeah. And it freaks you out, right?
Chris: Your Amazon Echo might be listening to you all day long…
Francis: That happened to me this week, and I still have no idea how those ads got up there.
Yvette: Yeah. There will always be something online saying you’re imagining it, it just…like, your computer knows so much about you because it grabs from 15 different places. Because I tell people, don’t believe in conspiracies—so much of me wants to say, naaah, it’s just so ridiculously good at grabbing information….and then there’s the other part of me, that’s like, you know, they lied to us about Cambridge Analytica, so they’re fucking lying about this too! I don’t believe in any other conspiracy thing, and this one makes me go…what the fuck? Like—sometimes it just doesn’t feel like there’s another explanation for some of the ads that show up, other than—I never typed it in. I’ll look through my google searches, I’ll look through things that I typed online earlier, and I’m like, why is there an ad for something I just discussed with my husband a minute ago, and never typed in? Then there’s the thing that we say in forensics, that there’s no such thing as coincidence.
Francis: It’s too bad that there’s such a bias against regulation these days.
Yvette: I don’t know, I was about to say fear of it. But there is so much fighting against it, because the argument is always, you regulate an industry, it’s gonna make it harder to do business—but is it really? Is making it harder to screw over consumers really gonna make it harder to do business? I mean, I worked in two highly-regulated industries before, in pesticide analysis and in a biotech lab, and you know, we were still pretty able to work. I worked in producing pesticides—I want that industry heavily regulated, I eat the food, so throwing on extra regulations to things has never really destroyed an industry. Like, I’m sure someone out there is gonna be like, “but what about…?” and they’re gonna pull up one example, but a little regulation has never killed off an industry.
Chris: Well, if we go back to the late 70s, when the United States was much more favorable towards regulation and taxes were much higher, people say that stifles innovation, but a couple of guys named Steve Jobs and Bill Gates went out and created two absolutely, monstrously innovative companies.
Yvette: How dare you bring up facts, Chris! How dare you!
Chris: [laughs] Why do people, it seems to me, do you think—and this is kind of, from out of left field—but people on the left and people on the right, everyone just seems really angry right now.
Yvette: It’s probably because the country seems to be in a bit of a perpetual dumpster fire?
Chris: But it seems to be even outside the US—I mean, you have Brexit, you have Italy’s economy falling apart, you know, we have all kinds of—Venezuela’s a disaster, Brazil, one of the wealthiest countries in the Americas, is in a state of collapse…
Yvette: Well, let’s see. A handful of years ago—and this is just from listening to too many podcasts on history, economics and rising authoritarianism—in the 2008 economic crisis that really did affect us globally, not just in the US, ‘cause the US economy will, really is a trigger on the rest of the economy; we saw economic collapse everywhere, at least to a point. In countries in Europe that we’ve seen rising authoritarianism, it’s not that they’re like, yeah, we want fascism! It’s that what the have there right now, or what they’ve had in the last five, ten years, they don’t see the good economic impact that they want. So it’s not that they suddenly hate Macron or the policies that he’s had, it’s that “it’s the economy, stupid.” Bolsonaro down in Brazil, it’s not that they’re like, “authoritarianism, yummy!” it’s that it’s the economy, stupid. Their economy has not been doing well under the last guy, and Venezuela—the sad thing is that even though they have to know that Maduro is a bad guy on some level, but there are still people who are loyal to Chavez who did help the economy quite a bit. He didn’t help it as effectively as he could have, because there was a lot of money coming in from the oil boom, but he also needed to put more of that money into infrastructure and into the people, and there was money squandered, and there wasn’t a structure set up for it to be continued to work for the people in the country. And it’s kind of, and this is why people are mad down there, because all these oil fields are just rotting. Their entire financial system has kind of crumbled. I am clearly not an expert on Venezuelan economy, so…ask an expert to clarify all the things I just fucked up…but like, that’s the thing. When the economy crashes, and it crashes under one system, people are gonna go hard to the other side. So right now, in Poland, in Hungary, in Italy, in France even and England, anywhere that there’s been an ability to convince people that the economic unrest is due to the other side, you can force in an authoritarian regime, whether it looks like an authoritarian regime at first or not. And that’s kind of what’s happened in a lot of these countries, is that people are upset about one thing or another, or they’ve been convinced to be upset about one thing or another. And you saw it here with Trump, starting off with Mexicans are sending rapists and murderers, and that rhetoric has continued on. Because the economy was getting better, it was steadily progressing under Obama, so it wasn’t economic distress. He’s caused more of it since he’s got in, but he managed to stoke fears—and that’s what’s happened across Europe. In Germany, at first, they were like, bring in the Syrians, and a couple of small incidents were used to stoke fears, not just about Syrian immigrants, but there were people—I want to say it’s the ADL was the name of it? But there was a group in Germany that, when they were having riots because of an alleged incident with Syrian refugees, were going to Jewish-owned businesses and throwing bricks through windows. So a lot of old prejudices are coming back with these new authoritarian regimes. It’s kind of terrifying.
Francis: I’ve always had this metaphor in my head that I’d like to run by and get your opinion on, and it’s an economic kind of metaphor where, when I think of cancer, I think of how you have these cells, and these cells are in your body and they’re part of you. But then they decide, fuck everyone man, I’m just gonna get big and take everything and bubble off and try to like, pretend that it’s all about them. So I think in society we all live so interconnectedly, and with all of our wealth and what makes the world so beautiful in a lot of ways has to do with things that our ancestors built, our grandparents, our great-grandparents and all the work they put into—New York city, this city was built by people who are mostly dead now. So, I was thinking, you know with capitalism we have this idea that, of rugged individualism, and how everybody can just sort of like really focus on themselves and then somehow magically, it’s gonna be good for everyone. But what happens with cancer is, if it keeps growing, the body dies, and I feel like that kind of concept in terms of how, with multinationals and corporations just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, is kind of like happening on an economic level.
Yvette: Yeah. I’m trying to think of which direction to go with an answer to this—at one point it felt more like corporations understood they had a responsibility to make sure that their employees were paid enough so that they could put money back into society, and now it seems like the only responsibilities that they have are to their investors, and to make money for themselves. And it’s like, you know, if you don’t pay people enough, they can’t keep the economy moving.
Chris: Way back at the turn of the 19th to 20th century, we had in Germany the Krupp corporation, the munitions manufacturers, recognized that and started all kinds of great programs for their employees, and that’s where Henry Ford got the idea, he went over to study there. He came back to start Ford motors, he was going to make a car that his employees could afford to buy, so he’d sell more cars.
Yvette: I want to say, “good on ya, Henry Ford,” but he was also a virulent anti-Semite. Hitler loves the guy.
Chris: Oh, he was a horrible person.
Yvette: Him and Charles Lindberg were kind of like the biggest Nazis in America, and I’m not being hyperbolic.
Chris: The reason the Krupp corporation and Ford did it was to stop unions. It wasn’t benevolent, it was to keep from unionizing.
Yvette: This is why I drive Toyotas, because they’re not Fords and they actually work well.
Chris: We’re running really long, so I’ll just ask you the same last question we ask everybody, and what would you like to promote or plug or…?
Yvette: Oh! Let’s see, so if you want to find my podcasts, you can check us out over on Twitter @TGOMpodcast
Chris: What is the name of your podcast?
Yvette: Oh, it’s the Two Girls, One Mic podcast, because we’re classy and we talk about all things porn. I like to say we talk about the holes and the plot-holes in your favorite porn—and indeed, we’re the porn podcast that your grandmother would love! It is far less tawdry than you expect, and it really is just a comedy podcast. You can also, for my “day job,” find me over at the SciBabe on Twitter and Instagram, and at Facebook.com/SciBabe where I talk about science with a heaping dose of snark. Thank you guys for having me on, I’ve had a great time.
Chris: Well, thank you so much coming on, we really appreciate it.
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