(upbeat electronic music) – Welcome to Ear Biscuits. I’m Link. – And I’m Rhett. This week at the round table of dim lighting, we’re going to be exploring the question do changing seasons affect your brain? – Let’s get into some season change. I mean, we’re gonna filter this through, of course, so many years. I mean we’re so old. Some of us older than others, as of recently. – By the time you’re listening to this, I’m 41. – Oh man. I’m not that old. But we both lived through many a season change, Rhett, and even out here in LA, things are different. I don’t know how seasons work out here. I think maybe we can talk about that too. – That’s actually what got me interested in talking about this. – What got me interested is that it finally got a little cooler here, so I’m like, is it a season? – Yes and no I think is the answer to the question. So yeah, we’re gonna talk about that, about what it was like in North Carolina, what it’s like here. And also get into some of the science around what the seasons do to your brain, because they do things to your brain. For real, they do. – You’ve got stacks of notes based on– – I love notes. – Reams of reading that you’ve done. – I love stacks. I love notes. – I searched my own psyche for my experience with fall. Fall is upon us. Some of you listening are deep in the depths of fall. Some of you are in parts of the world where it’s, I don’t know, it could be spring. That could happen. – Well that would be all the people in the southern hemisphere. – Right. – Yeah. – And we’re not gonna leave you out, because we’re gonna talk about seasons changing in general– – We’re actually gonna talk about the tilt of the earth, which is the reason for the season. You wanna be technical about it, the reason for the season– – Okay, Rhett. – Is the tilt of the earth. – Calm down, buddy. – It’s fascinating. – Calm down. You’re getting tilted. – (chuckles) But before we do that, I wanna talk to you about something that happened yesterday while we were on a short trip. We had a meeting. (chuckles) – You can tell them what the meeting is. Give them a little window into our professional lives, man. – All right. – Don’t be shy. I don’t like that thing where it’s like, oh, we’re working on a secret project. First of all, it’s not a secret, it is– – Well hold on. You know what, this is why you can’t go solo. Just so you know, because you would totally crash and burn. You would say something, you would say something that would be, I wouldn’t be here to keep you from saying it. And maybe it would be provocative, maybe it would be like a Howard Stern thing and then you’d take off and have this incredible career where it’s, you never know what he’s gonna say next! Link Neal. – What we’re doing professionally is not provocative. I mean it’s just– – But it is secret. What I’m saying is that, you can say that we went to a meeting at a place that makes decisions about what they want on their particular channel. We went to a TV meeting, yes. This is not the first or the last time (chuckling) that we’ve done it. – Right. – And on the way to the meeting– – TV network meetings, man, they’re fun. – And on the way to the meeting– – Hey get to know us, look at us. Maybe we can work together on something. – We pull, well, now you’re making it sound like a general meeting. No, it was a pitch meeting. – Well, don’t tell them that. – (chuckling) Hold on, but now you’re just making stuff up. – It’s a pitch meeting. – It wasn’t a general, it was a pitch meeting. We had a specific idea that we’re trying to get people excited about. – That’s all I was gonna say. – Okay, well you just said maybe we’ll work together. That’s not what happened. It was, hey, do you like this idea? – I was trying to back off of it after you made me nervous that for some reason I can’t say– – So you started lying? – That we went, we have a show idea and we’re having meetings. – There’s an art to withholding pieces of the truth without being dishonest. – We have a show idea. – You almost went too far and then you started lying. – If you have a network that’s right, we have a show idea that might be right for you. – Okay, there you go. That’s innocuous enough. – Here’s the pitch. I’m not gonna tell ’em– – So on the way to this meeting, we pull up to a stop light, it’s Link and I and Stevie, all three of us together in my car and we pull up at a stop light and I see a guy get out of his car next to us at a stop light and go to the back of his hatch back and open up the back. – And the light was red. – Immediately, Link gets out of the car and goes to the man and he was right next to us, and the first thing that I thought was, this man is having a problem that Link can see, like Link is the one on that side of the car, he can see that this man needs help. And without even saying, hold on I’m gonna help this guy– – I sprung into action. – You sprung into action. You got out and you– – I was gonna save the day, like– – But then I see you going directly toward the man’s door. He’s in the back of his car and Link is going towards the open driver’s door. – He left his driver door open. – And then looks like he’s about to get in the car. I’m like oh no, Link’s doing a Link joke. He’s gonna get shot. (Link chuckles softly) Like that’s what I started thinking. – Yeah I walked towards the open driver door and then, I was like what am I going for here? – This is the streets of LA. – I realize– – You don’t just see a man get out of his car and then go get in his car. (Link chuckles) – I thought it would, I don’t know, I can’t tell you what I was thinking except that– – Oh I know exactly what you were thinking ’cause you told me after. – I thought it would be funny. – Well here’s what happened. So I hear, our door’s open so I can hear what’s happening and Link’s like, “I was gonna get in your car.” (laughs) That’s what he tells the guy. And then the guy looks at Link and he’s like, such an LA response, he’s like, “Funny guy.” – I didn’t say I was gonna get in your car, did I? – You said, I was gonna get in your car but I decided not to or something like that. – Yeah, yeah, that’s the truth. – And he was like, “Funny guy.” He wasn’t worried, he wasn’t scared, he wasn’t panicking. – Well he looked at me. – He knew exactly what you were trying to do. – How can you look at me and be worried or scared? – And then you got back in the car and I said– – And he got back in his car. – I said, “Couldn’t have said it better myself.” (chuckling) That’s exactly what I was thinking. Funny guy, mm. But then you said you did it to get your mojo up for the meeting. – Oh yes. That was right. Yeah, I– – Explain that to me. – Well you know, as I’ve, without any misgivings have shared freely with you that we had a pitch meeting at a television network. And I mean it was the first of its kind for us in many years. And I just wanted to get my mojo up. I just wanted to have like a shot of adrenaline. I just wanted to feel like– – You wanted to feel alive. – I wanted to feel alive, I wanted to feel like– – You wanted to put a ripple in the universe. – I wanted to rip the universe open and to pass through it. – And so by potentially getting in someone else’s car, you thought that that was a way to get into a different part of the universe. – (laughs) I was never gonna sit down in his car. Well I can’t say that. I did but I can’t say what I was gonna do because I didn’t plan what I was gonna do. He got out of his car, he went around to the trunk, I was like wow. And before I knew it, I was getting out of the car. I was like, you know what, just be instinctive, just go with it– – Smart, smart. – Engage your instincts for a moment and see what happens and I found myself standing in the middle of a couple of lanes of traffic. – Did you size him up? Was what he looked like, did it have any impact on your willingness to get out of the car and act like you’re getting– – He seemed like a nice guy that I’d like to have a traffic-centric engagement with. – ‘Cause he was an older guy, he was probably in his 50s and he was shorter than you. – Well I didn’t profile him if that’s what you’re asking. – I’m asking the question because I can’t believe how many things you’ve done in your life and still have not gotten punched by a stranger. I mean, it’s gonna happen at some point. I keep waiting for the day for it to happen. I need to be rolling. – I’m not proud of what I did because I do feel like it was stupid. And I did have this overwhelming sense of– – What if you had have died? – When I got back in the car– – How would I have explained that? I would have made up a story. Just for your own legacy, I would have made up a story. I would have said– – Then Stevie would have had to– – This guy looked like he needed help, Link got out of the car and then the guy killed him. (Rhett laughs) – You would have sent the guy away to prison? – (laughs) Yeah. – Just for my legacy? – No, no, I would have said, it would have been obvious that he killed you. He would be guilty of killing you either way. – That’s true. – And he may later confess in prison and be like, he just got out of the car. I think he was trying to be funny, he’s a funny guy. And I’d be like no, no, he was trying to help you. And I’d have to get Stevie to go in on it with me. – Man, and that’s why I’m sorry that I would, I mean, that I would have put you in that position. – ‘Cause think about the alternative. I’m at your funeral and I’m like, well, I know a lot of you have questions about what happened to Link and I’m just gonna tell you the story. We were at a stoplight, a guy got out of his car and then Link tried to get to his front seat. (Link chuckling) I think he thought it would be funny. (both chuckling) (Link sighs) (Rhett sighs) – Incidentally, this is the pitch. This is the show that we then went in. I was like, all right, a guy stops at a stop light. – It’s a reality show. It’s a prank show where you wait for people to get out of their cars and then you get into their cars. – I just, I wanna grab life by the ball sack, man! And I just wanna see where it swings. – Yeah, he didn’t have one of those hanging from the back of his truck. It was just a hatch back. – Grab life by the ball sack, see where it swings. And sometimes you get hung out to dry. And that’s what happened, you know what, and I regret it. – Yeah but the thing is is, you go around– – I got back in the car and I was like I’m 40 years old. What am I doing? – To take your analogy all the way, going around grabbing things by the ball sack is a great way to get punched, that’s all I gotta say. You go up to just a bull and grab it by the ball sack, you’re gonna get bucked man, that’s what happens. – Bucked, I’m not riding it. – No you’re gonna get kicked. – Kicked. – You know what I’m saying? You gotta be careful about grabbing the universe’s ball sack. – I just wanted to get pumped up, man. I mean some people, they do some calisthenics backstage before they burst out through that curtain of life. Honest, it was so impulsive. I just wanted, I thought that being impulsive would be something good for the meeting. – Mm, mm, mm. But you didn’t carry that into the meeting. You didn’t do anything spontaneous. – Yeah because you were like, what if you die? I mean you buzzkilled it, man. (Rhett chuckles) You could have at least waited until after the, you could have been like, yeah Link, you’re doing it, man. – Yeah but if you would have done something equivalent to that during the meeting, it may have compromised the pitch. – What I really wanna know is, is there something I could have said or done when standing out there to redeem it? ‘Cause that was the point where I was just like floating in the ether of a commitment to nothing. I was like a standing question mark at the stop light. – You could have said, “You need some help?” And then he’d have been like, “No, thanks.” – Yeah I felt like something funny could have happened, but that also wasn’t, what’s the funniest thing that could have happened? – I think what happened. I think you achieved it, man. – Okay well there you go. – I think that was as funny as that could be. Some guy to be like, “Funny guy.” – Did talking about it here redeem it? – Yeah, it made it totally worth it. I’m glad you did it. It gave us an opening for this episode of Ear Biscuits. – I woke up this morning and I took Jade out. Hello Jade. Here she is. Look, little visual aid here if you’re watching the video. – She doesn’t seem comfortable with that. – I’m holding Jade up. Jade’ll sit in my lap forever, man. She’s the perfect, she’s the perfect thing for my lap. – Perfect thing for my lap. (both chuckle) – I love her to death. I think about her dying all the time because I love her so much and I know that I will outlive her. – She will die. She will die before you, unless you die prematurely– – Which could happen– – For doing something stupid. – But I plan to outlive her. So I try to prepare my heart for when she’s gone and I appreciate every moment I have with her. Like right now. – Why don’t you just get her cloned, man? – I took her out to, I will. That’s a good idea. – It’s getting cheaper and cheaper by the day. I mean seriously you can get the same exact dog. – DogClone.com/ear. – The soul actually transfers to the clone. That’s the cool thing about it. – That is cool. – Yeah, the soul of the dog will actually be transmuted. – That was gonna be my first question so I’m glad you preemptively answered it. I was talking her out to use the bathroom and I was like man (inhales sharply), woo! It’s a little bit, woo! A little bit nipply out here. – Yep. – It’s like what, 66 degrees. – Whoa! I might need a sweater. – It was like 60 degrees when I took her out this morning to pee pee. I’m like man, fall is finally descended upon me. – Right. – And I just got, I mean, I got emotional shivers down my spine. I just started to get excited, man. I mean it’s, we talked in an Ear Biscuit weeks and weeks ago about back-to-school as a feeling and I felt a lot of those same thing and knowing that I know many of you, you’re in the depth of fall already. – The depth of your fall. – Or you’re on the opposite side of the hemisphere and you’re waiting for it, but, I got this excitement bug, man. Woo I got bit by it, I’m like, yes! I started immediately thinking about my sweaters and my jackets. You know I love a good jacket. – Yeah, that doesn’t, you also wear sweaters and jackets like the entire summer. – But now I don’t look crazy. – Yeah, right. The other night we were going somewhere with our wives. (Link chuckles) We were going to a concert, First Aid Kit concert. – Check ’em out, y’all, First Aid Kit. – Love that band. Sisters from Stockholm, Sweden. And– – Sounded great in person too. – Got their start on YouTube, you know. Anyway, they’re great. But we’re going to a concert and I had looked at the weather and the weather said that it would be like 68 degrees as a minimum while we’re at the concert. So I was like (clicks tongue), that’s light jacket weather. Just to give you an idea what happens to your body when you move to Los Angeles. It’s 68 degrees, you’re like hm, I don’t know about 68 y’all, I might need a light jacket. But keep in mind, light jacket. Link– – I’m at my house having the same conversation with Christy about– – Yeah Christy tells us at the concert that Link– (chuckles) Link is ready to walk out the door and he’s got his like down, he’s got his down jacket on, like the collapsible, like North Face style, quilted down jacket. – Yeah the one I got at Melbourne, Australia. – That typically you wear– – It’s freezing down there. It’s like winter down there. – While like skiing. If you don’t see like active ice in your vision, your field of vision, you’re not really supposed to have one of those on. – Oh. – It was gonna be 68, so– – Well hold on, I was not wearing it. – And why not? Again, because you– – ‘Cause I was walking out the door and Christy busted out laughing at me. – You have people in your life that keep you from doing dumb stuff. It’s good, you should be thankful. – Child locks, that’s what you need to put on your car. – Child locks on the passenger seat. I don’t think that exists, man. It’s only the back seat. – Oh really? – Yeah. – I’ll start riding back there. – Okay, good. – I’ll own it. – Exactly. – Chauffer me around to my pitch meetings. – Seatbelt locks in there. – She started busting out laughing, I’m like what? I was like, we just looked up the weather. It’s gonna be like, it didn’t start with a seven. It started with a six. – Right. And like I said, I mean, I did have a light jacket on, which I already think that to the majority of the people listening, to hear that it’s gonna be 68 degrees and say that you need a jacket is already crazy town, because 68 is like a setting that some people have their home on, you know what I’m saying? – Yeah. – My mom probably has it on 68 during the summer, in the house. She’s not wearing a jacket. – Well after Christy busted out laughing I was like, okay I guess you’re right and I took it off. And I didn’t bring a jacket at all. – Yeah, but then you bought a sweatshirt at the concert. – And I put it on immediately. Like a super fan. – My wife bought the sweatshirt and now you guys can’t be together anymore because you might end up wearing both First Aid Kit sweatshirts which would be weird ’cause people think it’s like, means you’re like a med person. – Like we’re the two medics. Me and Jessie are the two medics. – Oh that guy’s got a first aid kit in his sweater. – So does she. – Oh they’re a team. – They’re together. – Where’s the ambulance? – They hold both ends of the cot. What’s the cot called? – The stretcher. – The stretcher. – But they sleep on cots. – They sleep on cots. – It’s a mobile thing. – Why don’t they just sleep on the stretcher? – But I think the point is is that, when you’re in Los Angeles, you have, now we’re gonna talk about whether or not there are seasons or not and what constitutes a season. But we have much less pronounced seasons than we did in North Carolina. – What do you remember from back when we experienced like, oh, the colors of leaves changing? What stands out for you? – To me the most– – It’s your favorite season, right? – Yeah fall’s my favorite season. Which is interesting based on what the research says about how the fall and the winter make you feel for most people which we’ll get into but I’ve always gotten this very nostalgic, sort of almost excitement when I feel the weather getting colder again. Now I also feel like I get that again as it gets warmer. I feel like the transition is what I’m excited about because I like change. – You like newness. – But there was always something about it getting cold at a time when it was like, oh, it’s my birthday and then it’s Thanksgiving and Christmas and I’m in school, and again, I liked school. I didn’t like the schooling part but I liked the whole idea of school and friends and everything. Even if I wasn’t even willing to admit it to myself. But for me sort of the definitive sign was that first frost, which is something that we do not get out here so all of a sudden, one morning you’d be up, you’d be going outside to get in the car to go to school and then my parents’ entire lawn, and of course the neighbors’ lawn and the grass across the street would all be covered in ice. A layer of like frost. – Yeah. – That would be gone as soon as the sun hits it. It like melts within minutes. But it kinda like crunches a little bit as you walk to the car on that centipede grass that was in my front yard. And there were those very specific physical signs. I mean the changing of the leaves is one thing. I’m excited about, we will have already been there when you’re listening to this but we haven’t yet left for North Carolina to do the concert, but I am excited about hopefully seeing some leaves, changing colors. – I think I might pick up a handful of leaves and just like crunch ’em up and deeply breathe. – Mm, don’t bring ’em back to California though. That’s like a violation of some sort of interstate cut thing. – That sounds like a customs thing, not happen state to state. – Yeah yeah nope, California customs, man. They don’t like you to bring in vegetation. – I might eat it. – They’ll stop you at the border if you have a cactus. – I might eat a leaf. Just to feel the crunch in my mouth. – Better be careful, some are poisonous. – I’ll spit it out. I’ll spit it out. – Just chew it like tobacco. – I mean leaf piles, man. Of course you know I was avid in the lawn care in my high school days. – Yeah, yeah. – And man, there would be the three week period I think where the leaves would just dump. And I got this, my papa got this thing behind his lawn mower which is the lawn mower I used, and it was like a trailer with a big leaf catcher on it and it had a big rotating thing that like brushed all the leaves up inside of it. And I could make huge piles of leaves on the side of the road for like the town to come pick up. You just run, I mean, as a youngster I’d run and jump in those things, man. There’d always be dog, in there. I distinctly remember that. I would jump in a leaf pile– – But when did it get in there? Before or after the pile was formed? – I don’t know. A little bit of both I think. – I’ve been in a lot of leaf piles and never seen any. – Really? Oh without fail I’d find it. – I think it was the neighborhood you were in. – Dog log. Yeah, Nana, Papa’s neighbor Kelly had a dog named Pepper and Pepper would pepper the leaf piles. (chuckles) You know what I mean. – So he would go into the leaf pile after? – I actually had a fear of jumping into leaf piles after a lot of that. I’m just realizing that now. – That’s interesting, man. I’ve never heard anybody talk about that specific concern. – You know, it might have been one of those things that just happened once– – One time and then it– – Now I can’t jump in a leaf pile without thinking about sinking into some steaming hot Pepper log. – Yeah it’s permeated all of your leaf memories. – But I still love it. – Yeah we don’t get a lot of that. – I’ll tell you something else. Remember the exhilaration of going to the high school football games? – Oh yeah. – And it was getting cold and you’d sit on those bleachers and it was like okay, you know, that was the moment, man. You’re walking through and you see, everybody’s there and like, you like this girl but you don’t wanna talk to her so you’re talking to your friends about her, and it’s all the drama. And no one watches the football game because our football team was absolutely horrible. I mean I never once made sense of anything that was happening on the football field. – Well we actually got a little bit better while we were there and then they got good after we left. – That’s right. They got really good after that. – Our high school football team was in Sports Illustrated for the longest losing streak of any high school team in like, I think the 80s. 80s and maybe the early 90s and we were absolutely awful. But yeah and again, I think for me it has to do with my association with school and sort of, like the social, I was really into just, what is it gonna be this year? What are me and my friends gonna do and– – But it’s different than the back-to-school hope because by that point– – You were already in it. – You were in it and it was, you were in drama mode. It was like, oh what’s going on? Who’s mad at who and this, that and the other. – So I been talking with Locke about him being back in school and being in high school. And we were talking about it last night and I was like, just asking him about different aspects of the day and I remember asking him about eighth grade and like the way that the kids ate lunch. He would talk to me about well, lunch today I did this and then we played a little basketball and I was like, none of this is really computing, based on the understanding that I have of how lunch went. – Mm-hm. – And all of the lunch eating in California schools or at least in Southern California schools is done outside. Okay, so, like the food is served out of windows that are outside, they’re up under some awnings so there’s some shelter just in case there’s like the one in 100 chance it might be raining. But then the seats are outside. – Yeah. – And they’re, and then, a lot of lockers are outside and then the classrooms, you enter in from the outside in a lot of classrooms and then even if you don’t, the buildings are separate and so you have to go outside. And I was telling Locke, I was like, you know the funny thing is like, he’s like, you guys ate inside? I was like, of course. In fact, in North Carolina, at Harnett Central High School, we would go into school at eight o’clock and I would not go outside again until three o’clock. Why did I need to go outside? There was no reason to go outside. – No. – And it blew his mind that I was inside all day and I was like, well, the reason we were inside all day is because it’s either really, really hot or really really cold. There’s bugs. All these things don’t really happen here. It does get really, really hot here. – But that’s why fall was such a special time because– – Yeah that’s what got me thinking about this– – It was that transition period where it’s like, oh the mosquitoes are gone, you might wanna do a little camping. – Right. – Go out to Jordan Lake, do a little camping. – And it just made me think, what has it done to us? We’ve been out here eight years now. What has it done to us psychologically, being in a place that doesn’t really have seasons? – ‘Cause we certainly pine for it. – Yeah. – And are we being damaged by it? – Okay well, what I found is pretty interesting. – Hit me, hit me with it. – This is what typically happens in the fall, winter shift. The change of the seasons into fall and into winter. Most people experience, or there’s a mood shift that takes place. – Mood shift, we’re talking emotions here? – Yeah yeah, okay so HuffPo interview Kathryn Roecklein, I may not be saying her last name right, from the University of Pittsburgh. – Who cares, you did your best. – That’s right and mood shift– – Well she might care. – During the fall and winter often includes less energy, feeling less social, losing interest in favorite activities, craving carbs and changes in sleep. – Mm-hm. – And there’s, I know that they probably have done more thorough research on this but I don’t know the necessarily the adaptive reasons for why these things happen but the reason that it happens is the changes in the amount of light, the amount of sunlight that you are experiencing, the length of the day. Your body is responding to the length of the day. So that got me thinking, so it’s not just the temperature change, it’s about the length of the day. Now, Los Angeles and Fuquay-Varina are within one and a half degrees in latitude, so they’re very close, we’re pretty close. So from a length of day shift, we’re actually experiencing about the same length of day that we did when we were in North Carolina. So we may not be feeling and seeing all these indications of seasons changing but in reality, the days are getting shorter and so we are susceptible to the same things that can kinda send you into these places in terms of your mood. And there’s another study, one study was done that kinda zeroed in on serotonin. Showed that people produce less serotonin which is one of the hormones that regulates mood and contributes to your feelings of well-being and happiness in the winter months, so the shorter days can actually bring that down so there’s hormonal things that are happening in your body that can literally make you feel worse, make you feel, it’s called seasonal depression. It’s something that happens to a lot of people. – I would think there’d be more associated with winter than with fall, I mean, once you’ve made it through the transition. – Well it’s all constantly changing. I mean fall is just a little bit less light than winter and winter is the peak of less light and then as you start coming out of that, it all starts reversing in the spring. – Can’t trick or treat until it gets dark though. So count your blessings. – It’s all for that. But so I thought that LA doesn’t have seasons. Yeah of course, like you said, you went out this morning and it felt a little cooler. And it does and it has been really, really hot. So there is a fluctuations of temperature. But there’s not all those indications, well, Adrian Kudler wrote for Curbed, said that LA actually has five seasons. – What? LA has a extra season? – Yeah and they are: the winter rainy season. – Okay. – So pretty much the only time that it rains in Los Angeles is during the winter. Like, I honestly cannot remember the last time it rained. – It sprinkled this morning for a second. I saw it happen. – Okay but up until then– – But I wouldn’t even call that rain. – But up until then, it’s been since before summer started that I have seen a drop of rain in Los Angeles. – Actual rain, yeah. – So there’s a winter rainy season. – Specifically. – There’s the spring. There is a spring and that’s sort of what people who aren’t from Los Angeles think of when they think of Los Angeles which is like 72 and sunny. That’s spring. That’s classic LA weather. But then there’s that weird thing, that gloomy early summer, like the June gloom. – Yeah. – Which we experienced, I remember the first year I experienced that and I was like, it never rains. But it’s always cloudy. Is that smog? And no it’s like the marine layer and there’s some weird thing that happens with the weather systems where there’s just cloud cover that is– – I thought the smog was trapped because of the heat and that’s what June gloom was. I didn’t know it was a marine layer. – Well it’s a combination of both, but smog doesn’t get to a place where it blocks out the sun. – Right. – We’re not in Beijing. I mean, this is– – They have five seasons in China too by the way. They have summer and then they have late summer. – Oh. Is this knowledge that you have from being there? Or are you just making a joke now? – No I read it, I read stuff too. I just don’t print it out and make a stack like you do. – And then there is, again– – I don’t have anything to prove. – This is one of those things that was a shock. The miserably hot late summer. This is what we’re just coming out of. I remember the first year we were here, I was like, why is it so hot in September? I remember it was a hundred and– – That’s the fourth season. – I’m not to the fifth one yet. It was 117 degrees in Burbank– – Yeah. – The first year that we were here. I was like what have we done? – Yeah. – And it was in September. – Yeah you forget it’s the freaking desert, man. – And that has happened many, many times. LA has gotten very, very hot, especially when you’re in the valley, you’re on this side of the hills that block you from the ocean breeze. But then the fifth season, which is actually the longest, technically from October to April. – Let me guess what it’s called. – You’ve already looked at my notes. – No I haven’t. Fall. – No. – You haven’t said fall. – It’s the Santa Ana season. – So there is no fall? There’s no fall, that makes sense. – Yeah. – Okay. Wow. – Basically Santa Ana season. – We have five seasons and fall isn’t even one of ’em. – Right. – We could have six seasons if we just wedge fall in there. A Santa Ana? – Yeah so Santa Ana, this is something that, so I lived in California when I was four, five and six. We were in Thousand Oaks which is west of LA, and I remember my mom talking about the Santa Ana winds. “Oh the Santa Ana winds are comin’ again.” And it was like this iconic thing and it actually is this, if you just do a little Googling around Santa Ana winds, there are all these pop culture references to it. It’s been in songs, it’s been in movies. There’s a lot of folklore around it. Over 100 years, people have been sort of observing these things, calling it that. – Leprechauns? – There’s all (chuckles), no leprechauns. There’s all this… People believe things about the Santa Ana winds and what they bring. – But let’s say what they are before we say what– – Okay so I’m gonna give you, again, this is, Adrian wrote this in this Curbed article and this is exactly how he described it. This is technically what is happening. – Okay. – And from a practical standpoint, in the next couple of weeks, we will be at home in the middle of the night and there will be a howling wind– – Yes. – That makes you think that your roof is going to come off, in the middle of the night. And crap gets blown all over the place. Things get ruined. – Well, I’ve got an umbrella like a patio umbrella that– – I’ve lost two of those. – And you put it down in one of those square weighted things, it’s really heavy, and then you screw it in at the base. Yeah I remember, it’s like the winds are picking up. The weather, the only reason you start to watch the weather is when they say it’s really gonna kick in. – Right. – And then I’ll go outside and I’ll secure patio furniture pillows. And I put the umbrella down. Well– – That doesn’t always work. – That’s not good enough. – No. – The winds are so strong that the umbrella that was down was still blown over and kinda picked up. The wind didn’t go underneath it and like Mary Poppins it, it just pushed it over on the side, but still had so much force that it picked up the entire– – The concrete base. – Entire concrete base– – Dangerous. – Took it over top of a chair and the outdoor coffee table we had and then burst a palm tree in a huge ceramic thing that we have and just obliterated it. – I’ve lost two of those. – I have a hard time picking this thing up. I mean look at these guns. – Yeah it’s incredible. So this is the technical description. Pleasant summer winds form over the Pacific Ocean. – Okay. – But Santa Anas start in the Great Basin, beyond the Sierra Nevadas in the winter. So this is northeast of Los Angeles. A long ways away, up in the Sierra Nevadas. They form up there in the winter when the air is cold and the jet stream leaves behind high pressure systems which spin clockwise, cold and dense, until the heavy air starts to slide down the mountains towards the coast. Lower pressure at the coast helps suck that cold air through the mountains towards Southern California. So you got this dual action thing happening with high pressure and low pressure. And as it cascades down toward the Los Angeles Basin, the air heats up, dries out, and it speeds up as it snakes it way through narrow passes and canyons, barreling out finally in the flats, blowing 110 miles per hour and sometimes on 110 degrees. Some days 110 degrees. So you’ve got wind that’s hot and fast. And it is mind-blowing to experience. I remember as a kid my brother and I– – Sounds like wolves howling. – Would put on our biggest jackets and like hold our jackets open and lean against the wind. – Squirrel suit it? – Yeah and just full weight, just (blowing air), like leaning into the Santa Ana winds. And it’s just like cultural… It defines Los Angeles in a lot of ways for an extended period of time. – It’ll blow the water out of your pool, man. – Well maybe, a little bit. – I mean the top of it. It’ll blow the top off your pool. Topless pool! – So we do have seasons. But– – We have five. – But they’re not the same. But we are experiencing, so have you ever, do you experience this? – We’ve been talking about experiencing fall and you just said we don’t even have it. – Well– – I’m gonna call it fall and we have six. – What we do have is we do have the shortening of the days. Now, let us know, #EarBiscuits, is this something that you experience? Tell us about your experience of like, do you feel a mood shift when the days get shorter? Is this something that you have experienced? – I definitely start to feel a little sadness when I’m driving home from work and it’s like, okay I try to get home by 6:30 which means I get home at seven. – But at least you tried. – After a– – That’s what I tell my wife. – Yeah that works. – I get home and she’s like, “Why aren’t you here?” I was like, “I tried to be. “I tried to get here on time.” And that never works. (Link chuckles) But my intentions, my intentions were pure. – Well and when it’s dark, it makes me more disappointed. It’s like, I get home at the same time I would get home in the summer but it would be light then and I would just feel like, you know, I could take Jade for a walk, or– – You don’t, but you could. – Yeah, I won’t– – But you could. There’s all kinds of things you could do. – Right. – You don’t do anything different. – Right, I don’t. – But there’s an– – There’s an idea. – There’s a feeling that you could do things that were different. – Well there’s a visibility. – Yeah yeah. You can, watching the sunset. I love watching the sunset from my house. – Yeah. – And then, the sun starts setting while I’m still here working, then I get home and it’s just dark. – Yeah when I leave the office and it’s already dark– – It is a little depressing. – There’s a sinking feeling. And especially after Halloween. ‘Cause I can’t rationalize the trick-or-treating thing anymore. (Rhett chuckles) – (chuckles) You know, it’s like until then, I’m like, yeah, well, you can’t trick-or-treat ’til it gets dark. – How do you think you would respond if you lived up in the Arctic Circle, and once winter came, the sun was bye bye for months. How do you think you would do in that situation? – Total darkness. Totality of the times. – There’s no sun. – Yeah that’s… I mean, yeah, that’s horrible. I mean, yeah, I could definitely see that that would be depressing. – Okay so, interestingly– – And by the way, they also have the opposite where they’ll have like full 24 hour light. – Yeah yeah yeah. – And that can also– – That could drive you a little nuts. – I think that drives you, like, makes you feel nutty and then when it’s dark, it makes you feel sad. That’s my theory. – Okay so yes. Typically, I mean there are high concentrations of depression in places that experience these very, very long winters with no sun, but a woman named Kari Leibowitz, Stanford PhD student spent a winter in Norway in a town called, I’m going to mispronounce this, Tromso, is what it looks like to me but I’m sure it’s– – Who cares. – Yeah. – You’ve tried your best. – Tromso with an O that has like a line through it at the end of it. – Oh. – You know what that says? – That’s a zed. That’s Canadian for zero. – Mm, Tromzero. I don’t think that works. But she spent a year there studying people’s mental health. Specifically like okay what is it like to live up here in this cold place that’s dark for long periods of time? She wrote a very long, extensive article in The Atlantic. I’m gonna give you the basics here. So you would expect them to be depressed at a higher rate, right? But, the people in this town do not seem to be affected by seasonal depression, even though the sun does not rise in their winter and she found out that the secret, she theorizes based on being with them– – Tanning beds. – Ha, how did you know? – Is it? – No. – Aw, dang it man! (Rhett laughs) – No, it’s– – Seriously? – You thought it was gonna be tanning beds? – I thought it was gonna be some sort of like a light bulb simulated sun situation. – Uh, no. – Like everyone’s got a tanning bed closet. – No, the secret is their mindset. I’m sorry that it’s not tanning beds. So anyway, they have a word, koselig, which means cozy. And they think about– – I’ve heard of this. – Winter in terms of koselig and I’m probably saying it wrong. The coziness that you can experience when it gets cold, when you need to be inside, when you need to be with other people, when you need to be next to a fire, when you need to put on these winter clothes, when you can ski and do, I mean, it’s dark, but they’re doing all these things. And so she observed that they looked forward to winter with a sense of anticipation to experience this coziness in relationship with their community and other people and they actually had mood enhancement and didn’t suffer. On the other hand, Americans tend to– – Isolate. – They tend to complain about the winter and they actually, they tend to bond with other Americans by complaining about the weather in general. But complaining about winter specifically. And so, we have a disposition towards winter in our country where it’s like, aw, it’s bad, it’s cold. We’ve done this. We perpetuate this, I don’t know wanna say it’s a myth because I have believed it, that like, we go to these cold places. We went to Minneapolis for our show– – Right. – And we went in November. It was late October or November and we were in Minneapolis and we had to go and they have the tunnels that connect the buildings so you don’t ever have to go outside. – And the sealed bridges. Can’t remember what they’re called. – But the way we talked about it was like we had to go into hell for a limited period of time until we get back to the wonderful, perfectly warm Los Angeles. But it’s all about mindset. You can go through something that is very, this applies with anything but super extreme experience if you take this mindset and they take this anticipation of koselig into the winter and it has this effect where they’re happy. – They’ve created… They’ve created an experience of coziness that then as a community, they look forward to it. Because I mean, again, even the translation of the word cozy is something, oh that’s so inviting. – Oh cozy. I wanna wrap up with that. – It’s marketing. I mean it’s like, it’s social marketing, right? To say, hey it’s getting to be cozy time. These are the activities and the mindsets that we have at this time, and it becomes, it seems to me you’re describing an elongated holiday. I mean you may be still working, I’m sure, but, I mean I’m picturing blankets and special hats. – Special hats. – Special hats. I get so excited if I can do, if I can put a scarf with my jacket, or like, when we would go to Sundance Film Festival, every couple of years we’ll head up there. I bought those huge freakin’ boots. – Yeah. – And I wanna go back– – Just to wear the boots. – Just to wear the boots. – ‘Cause you don’t have an opportunity wear those here. – Because it’s so cozy. Like I can’t do it here. – And I mean honestly– – I might try to wear ’em to a concert in a couple weeks but, it’d be a bit ridiculous. – And skiing. I mean I absolutely love skiing. – Yeah but they can ski at any time. It’s not, they don’t– – I don’t think so, they don’t have snow during the middle of the summer. – On their big ol’ mountain? – Uh, I don’t know, maybe way up there. – I picture ’em like– – But I’m talking about for you. – Oh for me. – I actually have found myself really looking forward to being able to ski. Now, it’s gonna be a little bit complicated– – Oh I agree with that. – Kids’ schedules and stuff like that, but like– – Creating things that are, you’re saying skiing, but creating special things that only happen– – Are enabled by this horrible weather. – Enabled by it, yeah, and that may just mean sitting outside with some coffee– – Fires! – By a fire with a big ol’ blanket around you. – Well that’s another thing. – Invest in a really cozy blanket. – Having a fire in the house is something that, really, there’s maybe a day or two that it’s actually justified in Los Angeles. – Oh yeah. It’s a magical thing. – But you’ll be going home when it’s, again, when it’s like, it was 62 today. And as you’re going home you’ll see, oh, that person’s started, they’re having a fire in the fire place. – Yeah you see the chimney. – Right. Because people are, and again, we noticed this in Australia too, we noticed it in Melbourne because it was beginning to be, when we went in the end of the summer, it’s becoming, it was still, it was the peak of winter for them. In July. – Which was not cold at all, it wasn’t colder than it gets in LA. – It wasn’t even cold to us Angelenos and they had on all, that’s why you bought the jacket while you were there. – Yeah. – And already had one. – And they were enjoying themselves. They were getting cozy. – Because you naturally want to experience the seasons so you exaggerate the differences that are available. People at the equator, man. They don’t, they can’t do this. They could never put a jacket on. I’m sure there’s been studies of them. Unfortunately I don’t have any of those in my stacks. – What else do you have? – Well– – I see something about space. – Yeah well I wanna talk about that. But one– – You’re gonna talk about seasons in space? – I do, but one of the really interesting things that I found is that people actually experience cognitive decline in the winter. There was a study of like 3500 seniors, not high school seniors but older people. And they experienced a improvement in cognition during the summer and autumn, and then in the winter and spring, there was a significant decline. They were studying people and like when the Alzheimer’s sets in and the different parameters for studying people. So you have to assume that this translates to people, so– – Is that related to– – You should be doing your best, your best thinking is gonna be done in the summer. – I don’t know if that’s related to light. My theory would be that, with more activity, I think you’re getting more– – You’re pumping around blood. – Yeah, getting that brain spryer. When you’re more active. – Another interesting thing, again, it’s not necessarily related. – More babies are made in the fall and winter. – Well speaking of babies, speaking of babies. Your season of birth is etched into your brain. This is a Wire article. So spring babies are more likely to develop schizophrenia. Summer babies tend to grow up to be more sensation seeking. – Hey, that’s me! June one. – And scientists theorize this is due to infant’s exposure to viruses over the winter period as well as the amount of daylight they’re exposed to, which might influence genetic expression during early development. And it’s interesting ’cause– – So what about fall babies? – Well… What they observed in men, only in men, is that if you were born in the fall up until like December, the closer you got to December, the more gray matter you had in one particular part of your brain. And then, if you’re on the opposite end of that, going all the way up to June (chuckles), which is when you were born, you had less gray matter. But it wasn’t like a cognitive thing. It wasn’t like oh one’s smarter. It actually contributed to something else that express– – Sounds like your brain is mushier. – But that was only in men. In didn’t apply to women. There was some interesting findings. They don’t know exactly what to do with them, but basically, you may have seen this stuff about when you’re born and how it places you into the school system and what age you are. – Mm-hm. – Determines a lot about your future, especially in sports. I think it was a documentary I watched that was about like every kid who, all the hockey players in the NHL, most of them were born in like, I don’t know what the month is, but it’s based on when they got into rec league hockey in Canada based on their age. And so– – But what does that have to do with seasons? – No I’m saying, you know that, but I’m saying it isn’t just, that’s not a very practical thing. I’m saying biologically you’re affected by the month that you were born. The season that you were born in– (Link sneezes) Oh gosh, now you’re sneezing. Now you’re sneezing, you’re allergic to these facts. So I’m just saying it was an interesting thing to find out that the season that you’re born in actually is etched into your brain in ways that they’re discovering more and more about. But, probably the most interesting thing that I found is this Space.com, which first of all, Space.com is a website. Which is something I was very, I mean, it seems obvious that it is a website but I was very happy to discover it and actually sad that I had to be 41 now to find Space.com. – Is it a good website though, ’cause I picture like a black website with white writing. – You’re picturing like a 1998 website. No, it is black and white writing. (laughs) – It is? – Of course it is, it’s Space.com. (Link chuckles) But it seems like a good website. But there was an article in there that talked about the tilt of the earth, the tilt of planets and how this is a good predictor for whether or not there might be alien life. And we actually have the tilt of our earth to thank for being here. Let me explain why. So, there are certain things that happen in the history of a planet that end up causing a tilt and it’s usually, it’s something about the way it was formed or some sort of event or something crashed into it or whatever and basically at some point (clicks tongue), a planet becomes tilted in reference to the star that it’s rotating around, that it’s in orbit around. And slowly over time, the gravity of the sun is taking the tilt out of the planet, these terrestrial planets, trying to get it back to normal. – And just to clarify, so normal would be, tilt is just defined by the planet itself spinning and so it’s spinning on an axis that is not perpendicular to the sun that it’s orbiting around? – Yeah well, I don’t wanna get into like the fact that it’s orbiting and it’s not flat. Let’s just simplify it and say this is the sun and this is the planet right here. Or this is my mug. So– – I know it’s your mug. – This would be no tilt, and this is tilt as it goes around. And the tilt creates the seasons, right? Because if you have no tilt at all, what you have is, you have absolute maximum sun exposure in the equator. And then you have– – It’s the constant– – Absolute very little sun exposure in the poles. It’s completely indirect light, right? – And it never alters. – Right and what happens is is over time– – You have day and night but you don’t have seasons. – These initial events that cause tilt. Once the tilt goes away, scientists theorize that what happens is the atmosphere is completely annihilated because you have extreme heat. – It settles, so to speak. – And then you have extreme cold and it can actually annihilate the atmosphere and basically you don’t have a covering that allows for life. And so– – It’s not dynamic enough to– – Yeah, so the nature of the star, like the gravitational characteristics of the star, different types of stars, determine how quickly that tilt (clicks tongue) is taken out of a terrestrial body. And so our sun is the kind of star that has allowed for an extremely long period of tilt to exist which the seasons and the atmosphere create the conditions for life to develop, and then, but a red dwarf star. So basically, what they’re doing is they’re looking out there and they make these observations about planets that are in the Goldilocks zone, habitable zone, and they’re like, oh this is a rocky planet that is about this distance from this star. We can surmise that there is the possibility that there’s life there. But what they’re finding now is that, if that planet isn’t tilted in a certain way, even if the other conditions seem right, probably isn’t life there and it’s related to how long it’s been in the system but also the nature of the star. – That’s just fascinating to me. That was like this tilt, this whole reason that we have these seasons and we feel things and we’ve adapted and we’ve basically adapted in the context of experiencing these seasons, it might even be the reason that we’re here to begin with. Space.com! – Dang, that was loud. (Rhett laughs) Kiko, you’re gonna have to regulate that moment. Scared the crap out of me. I hate to do that to listeners. – Yeah but you know what, they’ll go to Space.com now. – Until you shocked me out of it, I was on the board of being inspired by the tilt of the earth to embrace the seasons as a form of change, a push and a pull. A pendulum swing that makes life viable. And allows me to embrace change, not just because it’s different and I got tired of what I was experiencing. Ooh it’s cooler. I can wear my jacket unapologetically, with a scarf. – Mm. – But I was toying with the, this is an opportunity to go even deeper and say, I’m being serious here. – No, I see where you’re going. – As the seasons change, that it’s a moment to pause and I don’t know, in a hokey way, maybe just to be grateful for something on a planetary level what you just shared. It’s like… Thank you for bringing that connection. To me it’s like, oh yeah, it’s not just my own experience but our entire planet is viable because of these changes and I can apply that analogy to any change in my life, perhaps. That would be a stretch but I’ll try. – Well I mean, another way to say it is that– – What do you hear me saying? – This tilt. This tilt that creates the change, it makes change a fundamental part of life, is what creates life. So life is change, right? And getting, even if you’re on the equator, obviously it’s very static down there. But because of the tilt, even though it may be a static situation, but it’s not in… You can live there. It’s not burning up. But I think it’s just, change is something that is a, it is a part of life that you can’t avoid. But it’s also the thing that drives and kinda creates the energy of life. – And then how do you– – But comes in ways that, change happens, it never happens on your terms. It never happens in the way that you want it to happen. – But how you interpret it, to go back to the cozy, I think is a great point of inspiration for me to say, okay, if I find I’m experiencing change, and maybe this is an opportunity for me to find my cozy. Like where is the cozy in the change, because I can’t fight it? – And to welcome it. – To wrap yourself up in it. – To anticipate it and to welcome it. Again, I talk, the reason I talk about this, I’ve talked about it a few times is because I read this book a couple years ago called The Guide to the Good Life which was a professor who basically took Stoic philosophy and applied it to his life, like practically. He was teaching it and then he was like, I’m actually gonna try to do this and it’s an incredible book, and I think there’s a lot that we can learn from the Stoics. But one of the key things that they sort of, they embraced is when you experience a trial, you see it as a blessing. You see it as something you can be grateful for. ‘Cause you’re like oh, this is going, this is a part of the process that is going to continue to refine me and to make me into who I’m supposed to be. And I can just get completely overwhelmed with the fact that this change that I did not anticipate, that I didn’t want, that’s a complete inconvenience, maybe even a tragedy, is horrible! And everything’s horrible, that’s one approach. And the other approach is to say, in fact there’s a book called The Obstacle Is the Way. That was sent to us. Is that Ryan? Ryan Holiday. Who sent us a bunch of his books. I haven’t gotten to that one yet. My wife has read it. But basically it just says that, that trial, that’s actually you should be anticipating those things and welcoming those things as they happen. – Grab life by the balls and give it a swing. – The ball sack. That’s what you said. – Grab life by the ball sack and give it a swing! And when the winds of change blow, find the cozy. – Mm. And get a special hat. – Get a special hat. – Everybody should have a special hat. Mythical.store. That’s probably bad timing. – Space.com, yeah. – Space.com, a partner of Mythical.store (laughing). – Gave us a turn for the philosophical today. – Yeah. – And thanks to, I’d like to thank the season of fall, which apparently doesn’t exist in this Southern California area. – I would like to thank the Santa Ana winds that are gonna blow in at extremely high temperatures, extremely high velocity. – Blow my ball sack off. (Rhett laughs) Don’t go outside nude, man. – I’m gonna have my jock strap on. – You’ll lose that thing. – I’m gonna be out there in the front yard just– – It’s like a sail. – Leaning into the wind with a jock strap on. And you know what, that’s me just embracing the obstacles. – #EarBiscuits (laughing). I’m sorry. I apologize for so much scrotal humor. – Yeah, you’re still going, huh? – But let us know what you think. Continue the conversation, not only with us, but with other listeners. All you gotta do is search #EarBiscuits. – That simple. – And then start communicating with each other and with us. And of course, we’ll speak at you again next week. – Yes we will. – You know, we didn’t even mention corn mazes. (Rhett sighs) – Next episode’s all about corn mazes. – We didn’t even talk about corn mazes. We talked about, have you ever been to the corn maze? – I’m still in one. To hear this Ear Biscuit in its entirety and make sure you don’t miss an episode, follow the links in the description to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are available. – [Link] To watch more Ear Biscuits, click on the playlist on the right. – [Rhett] To watch more of our daily show Good Mythical Morning, click the playlist on the left. – [Link] And don’t forget to click the circular icon to subscribe. – [Rhett] Thanks for being your Mythical best.