Health & Hype - Lab 109

I got to DCA, one of my local airports the other morning, and I immediately text you, Zakia, because it was nasty in there. Everybody was coughing, everybody was sneezing, everybody's noses were running. I saw a few people wipe their nose on their sleeve, and I said, hey, girl, bring a mask. You need to wear a mask in the airport because it was like this in DC. I

know it's like that in Atlanta. I had just traveled a week before and I always keep a mask in my bag, and I'm like, yeah, it's time to put my mask back on. I don't know what was going on. I can't explain it, but falls here and along with fall comes the ick. Okay. I can't remember who I was talking to, but I was saying, are you getting your flu shot in your COVID shot? And they were like, are we allowed to get a COVID shot? And I get it. Because the vaccine landscape is mountainous, it is

difficult terrain. Oh my gosh. Yes, because of all these recent shakeups at the federal level. Because of RFK, junior access to vaccines has changed, and it is varying from state to state. So it's not even like, oh, me in Maryland talking to you in Atlanta. We probably don't have the same rules and regulations in place. Well at the federal level, here's that's what happened last year twenty

twenty four to twenty twenty five for COVID boosters. The recommendation was that anybody the six months are older should get a booster shot. Okay, at the end of August, and this is on the heels of RFK firing the director of the CDC and wiping out that board that

makes the recommendations for immunization. On the heels of those two events, at the end of August, they said, hey, we're changing who we're recommending COVID vaccine boosters for so instead of it being people six months are older regardless of health status or risk factors, it was changed in the recommendation now is people who are sixty five and older or those with high risk conditions, and those high risk conditions are like asthma, obesity, pregnancy, and like physical inactivity.

But it's tricky. In response to that, the states are like, nah, okay, that might be the federal regulation, but we're gonna do something different. And so there are some states like outwell, there is a block of states I think it's Oregon, Washington, California,

and Hawaii that have been proactive. They built up this West Coast Health Alliance the West Coast they're gonna ride Okay, They're sharing data, reviews and issue in joint recommendation, so pharmacy and clinics there can keep vaccinating people that are younger than sixty five without a federal green light. Then to other states like Florida going the completely opposite direction.

I know you saw that man. There was a lot in my timeline about that man from Florida giving vaccine advice, and I said, they eating you up on the internet, brothers. I mean we all see those things. That's always like, it always starts off with man from Florida, and it's always gonna be something crazy. I don't know. You know, I'm not gonna say it's just all people in Florida,

but it seems to be a trend. But with all this talk about COVID vaccines, it makes me think about the flu shot, like, are they still available for everyone? Is it gonna be the same. The flu shots are free, you know, but I don't now, I'm not really sure. So the good news is that flu shots, on the other hand, are still available for every one age six months and up, and the CDC still recommends getting one every year, and this season the flu shot covers like

three main flu strains. Now there is something exciting, or at least exciting to meet about the flu. Being a nerd and that I don't care. That makes me feel good. Thank you. The nasal spray flu vaccine flu MISTED is now proved for self administration if you're eighteen to forty one. Oh, so you can literally vaccinate yourself. Now I want to know, TT, would you try this? Would you try the nasal flu spray? Yes? I think I would. Why not if they said that

there's efficacy there. You know, I'm using all of my bio words. Yes, that's right, Like then my friends are right only in this moment. But yeah, I think if they're if they're saying that it's safe and that it works, absolutely, I don't see why not. So here we have not only our traditional flu vaccine, but expanded access that allows us to do the flu vaccine by nasal spray and you can get that ordered directly to your door. I am not sponsored by flu mists. I have not taken

flu miss. I'm just excited about expanded access. You have a fan fan flu mist, yes, And so here we see expansion here and a narrowing of the label for who should get vaccination on the covid side. And it also it just feels like this term I learned when we had doctor Barbara Hoefer and her colleague come on to our show and talk about science denial, and they talked about the cafeteria style like kind of picking parts of science you want to put on your tray. Yeah,

picking and choosing. It's not that you don't believe vaccines work because you're saying, hey, have a flu shot, but don't have a COVID booster, right, And so the bottom line is not to let political drama or the who knows what kind of patience you would need at the pharmacy, you know for access there. Right, So what should people do? They should not let it stop them from protecting themselves

or their loved ones. Because over the holidays, I plan on seeing all the older people in my family, and I don't want to be the person that gets them sick. And so I think reaching out to your primary care physician, figuring out what's happening in your state, that's the best way. I have seen people sharing great information on threads of all places, they're like Walgreens on this street has the COVID booster, like wow, word of wow, meet people where

they are. If they don't threads, go there. Isn't it sad though, that our governance has put us in this spot, like governance is at an all time low, right, And it's hard because you want to turn away, but it also feels like we need to be involved, you know what I mean? You saying that is like the you know how sometimes you hear a thing that you hear it somewhere else in a different topic, like we need

to be involved? Is this theme hearing everywhere. I was listening to this book by Karen Howe called Empire of Ai, and so she's a journalist who's been covering AI over the past few years. And then this book she talks about open AI and she's like, open AI is just what's on the plate, that's just the flavor of the moment. We need to be looking at how we're whipping this stuff up in the kitchen. And so she likens it to Facebook. Facebook just used to be a social media

platform but without regulation and governance. Look at it now, Look at Mark Zuckerberg. Okay, And so she talks about she talks about AI and this ecosystem of web technologies and she talks about it beyond like the large language modelers like chat, GPT, and she was saying, we need to be thinking about what it looks like to be involved in governing what's happening. Because I know a lot of people are saying opt out, don't be involved, and I'm like, no, we need to be even more involved

in guiding. That's the only way you can protect is if you are involved in God exactly because when you think about it, when you think of like deep fakes, all these scams I'm getting We were talking about this recently. I'm getting ten scam text messages a day, I'm getting scam calls. And when an AI starts to be a part of the scam, people are going to really be vulnerable.

Like and I really think about our aging population who are really vulnerable to this, Like they can receive a phone call from someone that sounds exactly like their partner or exactly like their grandchild and say, hey, I need your help, can you send me this or that? Then what if we've all opted out, then we don't know how to fight this, and we don't know what to ask regulators and our governments for in order to protect us.

So we really have to know what's going on in the AI space so that we can arm ourselves with knowledge. And that knowledge is power and it helps us to guard ourselves against these the people that are trying to pray on us to you know, scam us out of our money, scam us out of our identities, and all these things like that. So I think it's really important. And I mean, even on the heels of that, I've

been watching a lot of documentaries. They got some good documentaries out there right now, and speaking of like deep fakes and pretending to be other people. Have you seen that Netflix show Unknown Number Listen, Brittany just told me to watch this a couple of days ago. I started that documentary at like one am the other and we'll talk about my sleep layers. But I still need your

ordering data and I'm afraid to upload it. I started that documentary and it was wild tt you know, I had heard a similar story before, and so when it came to the end and there was that great reveal, I was like, I knew it, you know, like I don't want to spoil, but if you haven't seen it, you should see it. Stop right now and go see it and you can finish it episode. Absolutely, go see it. I think it's been enough time. We can talk about it. Oh,

we can talk Okay. Then, So there was a young teenage girl, probably like thirteen years old, who was going to a school in a very small town in Michigan. She was dating this boy. Her name was Lauren. She's dating this boy named Owen. Lauren and Owen, you know, I kind of grew up together. This is a very very small town. They said they have one stoplight two bars. There's only like one major school where it goes from kindergarten all the way up to twelfth grade. So everybody

knows everybody. Everybody knows everybody, and so they begin to date. And then after dating for a little bit, they start getting text messages from a number that they don't know.

None of them have that number in their phones. They don't know who it is, and it's saying these really vile things about Lauren, very very vile, vulgar things about Lauren, and they're all maliciously targeted at Lauren, and some very sexually inappropriate things about Owen and saying like, oh, he doesn't want you and he wants to be with me. It was just so awful, saying really awful things about

Lauren's body and things like that. So as the story's progressing, we're going it's been over like a year and a half at this point, and they have suspected other people at the school, but they haven't been able to figure out who it was. The case gets turned over to the FBI. The FBI is able to do like their crypto forensics, and they trace IP addresses and it turns out it was Lauren's mom the whole time, you like your jaw hits the floor because then you think about

all the messages that were sent. She was telling her daughter to die by suicide. She was saying the most awful things about her. But then like she's saying, I love my daughter so much, I love her, I love her, I love her, And it's just like how do you

reconcile these things? One theory that they had in the show is that she has like some form of Munchausen's, which is a medical disorder where someone will go to great lengths to either make them all seems sick and in some cases they will do that with their kids in order to gain attention and sympathy and things like that. So some people are accusing her of having that disorder. But it was just like a digital version exactly exactly. And so I mean, if that's happening, imagine laying AI

on top of that. Who knows if they would ever found out and like what the end of this story would have been. That is so wild. It also reminds me of that movie Run that had Sarah Paulson in it. Not to give it away, but that was a good movie. I'm gonna have to watch that, and Sad, I'm definitely gonna have to watch that. You should watch it. As we move more and more digital, I think about there are places where you can create community. Everything is just

a tool, it's how you use it. In this case, Lauren's mom was using digital tools to totally isolate her daughter to cause mayhem, madness. I don't even know what else to call it, because I was like, how can she even show her face? She should be a shame. Bring back shame, I'm sorry, bring it backly the fact that she agreed to be a part of the documentary, I was like, clearly, you don't feel like you did something. What did she say? She said, we've all broken the law. Yeah.

I was like, baby, this is We're not talking about legal or illegal. We're talking about the destruction, the destructive behavior, the way you're tearing down your daughter. And that little girl is young, but when she hits twenty twenty two, twenty three, like that stuff is going to surface later in life, and baby, I hate it for But also we see people using digital tools to create these great communities,

to realize previously unrealized or unactualized potential. One of the things I've been seeing and I just asked you about this earlier, The Great Life. Yeah, I've been seeing that shit. I first saw it on TikTok where people were saying, oh, we're locking in starting on August first, and I was like, why August first? You know what I mean? I saw it on TikTok first, folks were saying, oh, we're gonna start locking in August first. I was like, what's happening

August first? I don't understand, Like what fiscal year are y'all on. I don't I don't understand why August first. But then I was like, okay, let me not get too hung up on that. And then I was like, okay, what is this great lock in? And so the great what a great lock in is just people saying, Okay, starting now, I'm locking in to make sure I achieve

my twenty twenty five goals before twenty twenty six. So August to December is for time for me to get in shape, like really stay with my workout regimen, or really lock into this business plan that I had, or gain one hundred thousand followers on whatever social media platform to start daily vlogging like I want to do like anything that you have been putting off. They're saying, okay,

now of time to lock in and do it. Why are we always locking in and never locking out, Like, let's lay down, right, let's relax, and if we're really being real, the great lock in to me just feels like another remix of hustle culture. Remember seventy five hards. They're still doing that. Remember I told you those people try to put me in that seventy five hard group. I said, baby, take me out, and they cannot trick me.

It's wow, It's just like these things, you know. I don't know if I want to say survivor bias, but it's some mechanism of that right where there are these trends where if you work hard, you promises this like transformation, or if you just grind enough for a set number of days. There are people that grind for many, many days okay, and nothing happens. And so now you adding TikTok hype and hashtags and filters on top of that, and it's like every few months there's a new font

exactly for like the same old productivity exactly. And what that all leads to is burnout and We have done an episode on burnout with Ann Helen Peterson, and it is something that you know from our generation Millennials or generation why whatever you want to call us, that we are heavy engagers with like I'll sleep when I'm dead and grind so hard blah blah blah blah blah blah, and it doesn't lead to anything productive, and like it doesn't work out well for us because we aren't even

set up economically in a way where that can work out for us well. Like financially speaking, we are not making as much as our parents, and we have far less money saved, we have way more debt, there's way

less stability. It's just not the same. And so we really we talk about locking in and everything like that, and I just worry about folks because I'm just like, you really gonna lock in and burn out and then you're good to no one, especially yourself, Because if we're talking about locking in and it comes to the detriment of your rest, that's not the type of locking and you should do because sleep is so essential for physical recovery,

overall health, hormone regulation, immune system support, stress reduction, improved mood enhance, cognitive functions so that you can do all that stuff that you claiming you want to do, locking in barely making any progress because your cognitive function isn't

exactly that's not even increase creativity. So, really, all you folks within the sound of my voice thinking about locking in, and you've already been locked in for what a month or something, Now take time to rest because it will help you not just lock in for August through December.

It'll help you with creating an environment and ecosystem for you to be overall locked in, locked into your mental health, locked into your emotional health, locked into having the life that you deserve, which is a life that has balance with productivity and rest. Yeah, I think that's a lesson I have really had to learn and relearn. Maybe that means I've been feeling it's hard. It feels important to reset the locking out for me, like I have had

to be like, Okay, I'm owning my own calendar. I don't need it to be the first of August or the twenty first night of September whatever earth Wind and Fire said, Like I start when it's time for me. I am claiming the timeline that actually fits my bandwidth. You know, like, do I have the energy for this right now? I think the other thing I've had to do is decide what success looks like for me up front. You know. I think for a long time I really wanted things to be perfect, and I was like, hey,

it doesn't have to be perfect. Sometimes it just needs to be done. You know, just last night, you sent me a yup screenshot of something I see in you in twenty sixteen. Right, I'm gonna pull it up. Pull it up. Yeah'm gonna pull it up. She sent me something on Snapchat. Now that I know people have gone chat Snapchat, so enough shay, okay, but I've not been on Snapchat since probably twenty sixteen, and so she sent this to me and says, we all have a blinking line.

Your blinking line is whatever sits in front of you waiting to be brought into existence. It's the book or day or job or business or family or mission or class or plan or cause or meeting or task or project or challenge or phone call or life that is

waiting for you to bring it into being. That was so timely when you shared it with me again, because I was like, hey, you get to choose, you get to choose what you're putting your energy towards, and it doesn't have to be all those things in that list all at the same time, right, And so I've been doing a better job of honoring time for recovery. You know, before I would pack my schedule, there was no time that I was having whiplash, baby, and I'm like, Okay,

slow down, take a break. These things can wait. And I think I've just found that to be incredibly rewarding. One of the things I will say, I mentioned it a little earlier, getting that sleep is key. Absolutely. Now I admire you in that way because you're somebody to go to sleep fast. I can go to sleep right now. Literally in the middle of this sentence, I could close my eyes and be almost right at sleep store. That's how quickly it happens. Now, Do I always lay down

and do that? No, because I also struggle too sometimes. Yeah, but we both have to prioritize sleep. There's a recent study that just came out of Neurology. It was published Neurology, which is the journal for the American Academy for Neurology, and it says people with chronic insomnia had a forty percent higher risk of developing mild cognitive impairment or dementia. So I was, like, chronic insomnia do I have that? Chronic insomnia is defined as having trouble sleeping at least

three days a week for three months or more. Wow, ur ring was it was saying girl, you close. You used to say girl, you're close. And so in this study, they tracked people that were around seventy years old. They looked at like twenty eight hundred almost twenty eight hundred people, and they monitored them for an average of five and a half years. Of the people who had chronic insomnia, fourteen percent of them went on to have cognitive issues compared to ten percent of the people who didn't have

chronic insomnia. So that's the forty percent difference they're talking about. Now, that's one thing, But the other thing is there was just a study from another study that came out from the scientists that you see Berkeley, some scientists that you see Berkeley, and they were looking at mice and they dissected the brains and said that we finally figured out the neural circuits or the pathways that happen when you're

asleep that allow you to release growth hormone. That's you know when they say kids need a lot of rest and grow, Yes, it's true, but you also need it for adult metabolism. So the sleep is important for the kids, but parents and big kids like me, it's important for you too. I don't want to grow up. I'm a toy us kid. Okay. We have to find productive ways to get that recovery and wellness because you know, it wasn't right. But when things got tough and I felt stressed,

I used to turn to oysters. And hey man, they've taken that away, taken it away from us. Now they are so they are finding bacteria in the oysters, like deadly bacteria. It's always been bacteria there. But right, I need to get my terms right. You see that quickly. I'm no longer biologists. There's always bacteria that fast. I'm recovering.

I'm recovering and recovering. There's always bacteria. But this is deadly backteria, bad bacteria, you know, And so that really hurts because me and my friend we bond over oysters. We love to go to a restaurant and just bring us two dozen and my friend will fill out the little car and be like two of this, two of this, two of this. We'll just get two of everything and we just enjoy ourselves laughing. You know, a little cocktail

on the side. And now I'm now I'm nervous if I need to pour a cocktail on the on the oyster try and kill something in it. No, No, I'm just waiting for it to cool down, okay, where that bacteria can't grow as well. And some of this is just part of our food systems, Like who is no one testing the oysters? We need to bring back Oyster South.

The folks from that group from the Virginia Marine Science Institute that we're doing all these studies on oysters, fund them because I need my oysters and I need them to be safe. Yes, we need them very badly. I think, you know, we could go on and on because there's still so much news we haven't talked about. Yes, but I'd hope people are feeling like there's a little science behind all of you. I want to hear from people. What have they been seeing on their timeline? Yeah, I mean,

because we were just talking about this too. Everybody's internet is so different. Somebody looks like this viral body suit I said, viral body suit. I have never seen this ever, heard of her, never seen this. Hey you look good, girl, but this is not viral. But then I realized, Hey, viral for you, it's not the same thing as viral for me. Like I'm you know what's viral for me? Baryl jeans? Okay, I wore some viral jeans the other day. YACKI clippings. Hey, don't sleep on a good clipping, all right,

change your whole mood. Change your mood, change life, change your shoes. Change remember, Yes, my for you page is all arts and crafts. It's about to be holiday season. I can't wait to make Remember I made those a Valentine's Day cards that was so sweet. Are you doing Christmas cards? I'm ready to make cards, y'all. I'm doing holiday cards. Yes, I am ready. Hit me up if

y'all on a car now. We touched on a little bit of neurology this week, but t T tellum what's coming up next with Yes, I am so excited because in our science communication episode, we had a very phenomenal neuroscience PhD student named Lindsey Edgoe, and she is coming back to the show to talk about all the work she does in the neuro science space and what her research focuses on is pain and how our brains process pain and things like that. So I am very very

excited for y'all to listen to this. Yes, it's gonna be fun. All right, We're gonna see 'all this week. You can find us on X and Instagram at Dope Labs podcast, tt is on X and Instagram at dr Underscore TSA, and you can find Zakiya at Ze said so. Dope Labs is a production of Lamanada Media. Our supervising producer is Keegan Zimma and our producer is Issara Acevez. Dope Labs is sound designed, edited and mixed by James Farber.

Limanada Media's Vice President of Partnerships and Production is Jackie Danziger. Executive producer from iHeart podcast is Katrina Norvil. Marketing lead is Alison Canter. Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura, with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs is executive produced by us T T show Dia and Zakiah Wattleia